Christ’s egg-and-limestone eyes are cast downward to the dirt.
Brother Tomas turns his own eyes toward the altar and tries to ignore the pounding of his head. His morning began badly, with Mass bells startling him out of uneasy dreams and a throbbing pain building in his temple. The choir’s voices echo off the high ceilings, and the foreboding harmonies of their chosen hymn do nothing to soothe him in body or in spirit.
Again, he turns his mind to Christ.
This painted altarpiece has always commanded his attention. Christ’s ribs protrude: a result of starvation in the days before his death. The gash in his side is lovingly rendered: the flesh agape, the dark blood spilling down his concave stomach. If Christ were in Tomas’s care, he could treat this side-wound, if not the rest. A dressing of honey, a bandage of linen. It is a deep cut, but a simple one. It would heal. The punctures to Christ’s hands and feet, of course, would be inflamed and susceptible to infection, but if they could be thoroughly cleansed . . .
By the end of Mass the pain in Tomas’s head has eased. As he emerges into the sunlight and sets off across the grounds, the dream that so unsettled him has faded to a few indistinct images of a darkened wood and a sinister presence in the trees.
In the herb garden, Tomas kneels in the dirt and gathers liquorice, pulling the plants up by their stalks and breathing in the rising scent of damp soil. The smell clings to him even in the abbey’s most austere rooms of worship, and he never gets the garden entirely out from under his nails. But no matter: back in the apothecary storeroom these roots will be boiled for medicinal teas. Useful for chest pains, breathing difficulties, disturbances of the bowels.
Tomas stops to focus on an uncooperative plant, the thick root unwilling to be dislodged from its familiar soil. He wraps both hands around its base and pulls with all his strength until a monstrous bramble of entwined roots comes up in his hands, as long as his own arm and as tangled as a thorn bush.
Tomas sits back on the ground and pushes his red-blond hair from his sweaty forehead, marveling at the labyrinthine muddy snarls of his prize.
With all the suddenness of a slap to the face, the morning’s dream returns to him. He is lost in the wood, tree roots thick underfoot, foliage blocking out sky and sunlight alike. He hears movement and stumbles toward it, full of dread but unable to turn away. Rounding the endless trunk of a great fir, he finds two creatures standing in a clearing: a stag, many-antlered and thick with muscle, and a doe, her belly round with young. In one synchronous motion both heads turn towards him, and their long-lashed eyes root him where he stands. He feels they have been expecting him. He feels he has been standing in the clearing for years, pinned by their gaze, awaiting their judgment.
Blinking in the sunlight, Tomas stares at the root in his hand. He shakes the dirt away and plants it in his basket with the rest. He is sitting in the herb garden, sweating in the heat of a summer morning. He has nothing to fear from a dream, or a deer, or a liquorice plant.
***
The apothecary house is blessedly cool. At the long wooden table, Brother Peter sits hunched over a stone and pestle. He looks up when Tomas enters.
“What’s wrong with you, boy? You’re sweating.”
“Hot in the garden, Brother.”
The old man bustles over to examine him, eyes narrowed. “You don’t look yourself.”
“I woke up with a headache,” Tomas admits. “But it’s easing.”
Peter’s bushy dark eyebrows stand out against the whiteness of his hair. His forehead is creased in a perpetual scowl.
He seemed unfathomably old to Tomas at the time of their first meeting, and that was twenty years ago. A passel of novices had been sent to gather baskets of mint in the gardens. Enamored with the scent of the leaves, Tomas asked the older boys what they were for, and was told to be quiet. His legs were the shortest of the group, so he reached the apothecary house last. Inside the dark, strange-smelling hut, a black-haired monk frowned over a mixing bowl.
Tomas plucked up his courage as he edged towards the table. “What are these leaves used for, Brother?”
“To settle the stomach.”
“You eat the leaves?”
“Chew them. Or use them in a tea.”
“What sort of tea?”
Brother Peter sat scowling and mixing as Tomas asked question after question, and answered each in turn without looking up from his work.
Soon Tomas’s days were spent following Peter about the grounds, watching his every movement and memorizing each word he spoke.
It was Peter who made inquiries on his behalf when he grew curious about his parentage, and who reported back with frowning bluntness that Tomas’s early years had been marked by a run of simple bad luck. His Irish father had scarcely sired him before he succumbed to a sudden fever, leaving no inheritance but a name. The man’s grief-stricken bride survived only a few days after bringing forth their child and her family, having disapproved of the marriage to begin with, had not wanted the boy underfoot.
Tomas absorbed this information with interest, but no particular grief. The monastery was the location of the herb garden, of the apothecary house with its inventory of dried flowers and medicines, of the unobtrusive back-room where Peter prayed over the grisly work of the local barber-surgeon. Everything he had ever cared for was within the abbey walls, and though by the time he was twenty he could have earned his bread and board as an apothecary or traveling physician, he never truly considered doing other than saying his vows and donning his cowl.
Peter feels Tomas’s forehead first with the back of his hand, then the pads of his knobbled fingers.
“If the pain isn’t gone by evening, come back here for a soothing poultice. Use the lavender.”
“It’s easing, Brother.”
Peter gives a grunt of disbelief and returns to his pestle.
“I hear the abbot departed from Hammond Hall six days ago,” he says after a moment’s silent grinding. “And yet, no sign of him.”
Tomas frowns as he lays out his roots on the table. “It’s a four-day ride.”
“True enough. And what’s between here and Hammond?”
Tomas pours water into a rinsing bowl, sure he’ll learn the answer.
“Whorehouses, boy. I traveled that road myself before I found the calling. Naught but whorehouses, may God forgive him.”
Tomas wets a bundle of roots and runs his fingers over the rough bark, watching the mud dissolve and settle to the bottom of the bowl.
“He’ll need a soothing poultice for his prick by the time he arrives on our doorstep,” Peter mutters.
Tomas smiles and pretends to close his ears.
***
Tomas wakes in utter blackness, hours before the first bells. The pain in his head is gone, and he knows at once he is not alone. A scent of moss and earth hangs in the air. Despite the hour he hears a distant trilling of birds.
As his eyes grow accustomed to the dark, Tomas makes out the shape of his visitor: in the corner of the room stands a man. He is neither short nor tall. Beardless, with curling hair falling over his slim shoulders. But for a white cloth tied around his hips, he is naked.
The stranger crosses to the foot of Tomas’s simple bed and seats himself in a patch of moonlight. He looks at Tomas with large dark eyes, and his soft oval face has a woman’s loveliness.
Across his ribs stretches a thin white scar. And his hands—yes, when Tomas looks, he can make out twin spiderwebs of scar tissue across their backs. The man’s torso is not bloodied, but clean and smooth. His body is not emaciated, merely smaller and softer than Tomas had imagined Christ, with a healthy plumpness about his arms and thighs.
Tomas does not think this is madness. He has spent a lifetime observing, and he trusts his eyes.
As if hearing Tomas’s thoughts, the man smiles. “You know who I am.” His voice is low, inviting, as if whispering a confidence.
“How—“ Tomas’s voice fails him. He clears his throat and tries again. “How have you come to be here?”
“I wanted to see you in the flesh,” says Christ. “To look on you.” He moves closer and lays a hand on Tomas’s cheek. “To touch you.”
His palm is smooth and cool. Tomas cannot resist taking it in his hand and raising it to the light. Beneath the twin scars on each side of the hand, the bones appear perfectly formed, unmarred by trauma. It defies reason. But what are the laws of reason to the resurrected?
Tomas turns his attention to the cut on Christ’s side. A thin, clean line across the skin, unpuckered and unraised. Tomas looks into Christ’s face with wonder, his hand lingering on the length of the scar. He wants to ask how this healing came to be, but perhaps he has already presumed too far. He has put his hands on the body of Christ, examined the scars of his hands as if he were a common injured soldier.
He opens his mouth to ask forgiveness, but Christ speaks first. “There is nothing to fear, child. Look at me. Touch me. This is why I have come.”
Tomas stares: at Christ’s lovely large eyes, at the parting of his rosy lips, and again at his perfectly healed wound. It satisfies Tomas, though it is not his own work. He knows this feeling: the pleasure of looking on a wound that has healed well. The pleasure of looking on Christ’s beauty is more strange; it twists his stomach into knots.
Christ raises a hand to his cheek. His fingers are soft as flower petals. So unlike the monks, each with the callouses of a different craft. They drift from Tomas’s cheek to his bottom lip.
“See?” says Christ. “Don’t be afraid.”
Tomas raises a wondering hand to Christ’s shoulder, and feels the hard muscle beneath the soft fat. Christ’s hand travels over Tomas’s own back, tracing the curve of his spine through his woolen robe and then slipping under his bottom. Christ squeezes, his fingers digging into the underside of the buttocks, and Tomas gasps in surprise.
Christ laughs, a soundless exhalation against Tomas’s cheek, and brings his perfect lips to Tomas’s ear. “Child, I bring you a gift.”
Tomas cannot seem to take his hands off Christ’s soft, warm skin. His prick is hardening between his thighs, and he shifts uncomfortably in Christ’s embrace. “I need no gift.”
“Don’t defy me,” says Christ, as gently as before.
Tomas shakes his head. “No, I—Of course not.”
Christ kisses his lips. “Sweet child.”
He lays a hand on Tomas’s chest and presses him down onto his back. Tomas goes easily, his skin hot and mind clouded with Christ’s presence.
“I want you bare.” Christ draws Tomas’s robe aside and runs a hand over his belly.
His hand nudges Tomas’s thighs apart, unfazed by his hardness. He cups the testicles in his palm and then moves beneath them, running his fingers over the stretch of skin between testes and anus. A curious sensation flowers under Christ’s touch. The skin begins to tingle and to itch, and then with a flash of shocking heat to part along the line drawn by Christ’s caresses.
Tomas cries out at the strange hot pain, then claps a hand over his mouth. “No need,” murmurs Christ. “No one will hear you.”
His fingers press inside Tomas’s body as he speaks, and muscles that had not existed a moment ago clench against the intrusion. Sweat runs down Tomas’s temple and his thighs tremble with the effort of holding still, but he digs his fingers into the mattress and fixes his gaze on Christ’s face, on the calm focus in his savior’s dark eyes.
He expects to see Christ’s hand bloodied when it withdraws, but instead there is only clear fluid like water running down his fingers. Tomas feels the same wetness on the insides of his thighs, and fights the impulse to draw closed his shaking legs.
He has witnessed many surgeries. A conscious patient is never entirely spared the humiliation of nakedness, of pain. Tomas’s eyes are stinging with it, but his curiosity is stronger. He sits up and puts a hand beneath his testicles.
His fingers find soft folds of flesh running down his perineum, the skin as smooth and delicate as the insides of a human mouth. Slick fluid runs over them, and when he presses deeper his finger slips easily into the new-made passage. Tomas’s hips jerk towards the pressure of his finger, towards the pleasure of it’s fullness. Despite the shivering twinges of pain still running through the center of his pelvis, he wants to slide a second finger alongside the first.
“It is done.” Christ’s voice is warm and pleased. He scoots forwards on his knees and gathers Tomas into his arms. “Now you are perfect. Now you are made in my image.”
Made in his image. Christ’s body was wounded; he has given Tomas a wound. Christ’s lips cover his neck in kisses and his soft arms pull them chest-to-chest. The pain between Tomas’s legs fades to a memory and in its place is only throbbing insistent heat, maddening in its urgency. Perhaps this is a glimpse of Christ’s suffering. Perhaps it was so on the cross.
Christ’s lips close on Tomas’s own and his tongue slips between Tomas’s teeth. As Christ unknots his loincloth Tomas lets his eyes fall closed, memorizing the warm pressure of Christ’s fingers on the insides of his thighs. The backs of his eyelids are illuminated in the darkness: bright with sunlight, bright with blood-red probing roots.
***
In the nights that follow Christ comes again. He comes to show Tomas the nature of his gift.
With Christ’s prick inside him, Tomas’s eyes open to strange sights. The pale skin of Christ’s body appears translucent, the bones and organs beneath visible and pulsing with life: the sacred heart pumping, the lungs swelling. Tomas sees impossible things within the labyrinth of flesh: a womb, a lashing tail, a folded wing. Tomas puts a hand on Christ’s chest and traces the flow of hot blood towards his contracting heart; Christ takes his hand by the wrist and bites into his palm.
Tomas is learning with each night. How the bones and joints slide together within the body as it moves. How the muscles of a man’s thighs and buttocks strain as he thrusts into a lover. And he is learning about Christ’s gift: how it spasms in pleasure without a single touch to his prick. How it drips hot wetness at the mere thought of its maker. How it aches to be filled when Christ is with him, no matter the hour, no matter how many times they have joined already, no matter if he is still sore from the previous night.
Christ has given him the gift of hunger. It is not within his power to refuse.
Even as he goes about his daily work, the nights are never far from his mind. Standing in the apothecary house shelling coriander seeds, he contracts the sensitive muscles within his pelvis, feels the ache of Christ’s prick filling him, taking him, forcing pleasure out of the delicate flesh of his insides until he can stand no more—
“Do you hear me, boy?”
Tomas looks up at Brother Peter, hoping his guilt doesn’t show on his face. A drop of wetness creeps down the inside of his thigh.
Peter frowns. “The surgeon is bringing a man here tomorrow evening. Mangled his hand in a riding accident. It needs to be taken off at the wrist.”
“Will you need me to attend?”
From the way Peter’s face creases, Tomas judges this was the wrong thing to say.
Peter stands, the joints of his back creaking as he straightens.
“Sit.” He points to the stool he has vacated.
Feeling like a scolded child, Tomas abandons his coriander and takes Peter’s place on the stool.
“Do you remember that poor widower, Williams?”
Tomas nods. Of course he remembers. The man’s bindings had failed in the midst of the surgery, and in his delirium he had writhed and thrown himself upward into the surgeon's knife. His intestines had bulged from the wound like a nest of fat pink snakes.
“I told you to look away, but you didn’t hear me.” Peter passes a hand over his face. “You stared and stared. It was no sight for a child.”
Tomas does not remember being told to look away. He remembers the man thrashing like a live fish, blood and guts spilling over the side of the table. He remembers lying in his bed, freshly washed of all evidence, and resting a hand on his own abdomen. Picturing with a thrill his own glistening snakes.
“I should not have let you in that room, boy. I could have spared you that.”
Tomas stares up at Peter. “I wanted to see it. I wanted to do what you do, to pray over the patients.”
“To cut into a human body is an insult to God. I don’t sanction it. I let that poor sinner do his work here because otherwise he would do it in a stinking alley.”
Tomas knows this. Peter tells him each time the barber-surgeon visits.
“Are things well with you, boy?” Peter’s voice is uncharacteristically soft. “You haven’t had trouble with one of the other brothers?”
“Trouble?”
He rarely takes notice of anyone besides Peter, the priest who hears his confession on Sundays, and whoever happens to be ill.
“No one’s pestered you? Tried to lead you into sin?”
Tomas sits in incomprehension for a moment. Then an inappropriate burst of laughter escapes him.
“I’m a grown man, Brother. You needn’t worry over me.”
Peter grimaces. “There are those who will try such things with a grown man, may Christ forgive them.”
Tomas stops smiling with effort. “Not with me, Brother. I promise.”
Peter lets out a long breath. He looks weary and brittle, as if the weight of his flesh drags his aging bones down toward the earth. He’ll go back to his work now, surely? But Peter lowers himself, joints creaking, to kneel on the floor at Tomas’s feet. Beneath his heavy brows his gray eyes burn with urgency.
“You know my boy, my Rob?”
Tomas nods. The son who died. The son who no one saved.
“The last few weeks before—before it happened, he was quiet. Out of the house late, keeping to himself when he was home. I knew something was wrong. A father knows. But I said to myself, well, he’s been slighted by a girl in town or some such. He’ll come around with time.”
A tightness rises in Tomas’s throat. He swallows against it, but the ache only resurfaces more choking than before. He doesn’t want to see this pain on Peter’s face.
“They found him by the river with a knife in his belly. Just sixteen years old. Just a boy.”
A child. A boy on the riverbed with no one to dress his wounds or to even hold his hand. There should be a way to fix such a thing. There should be a way to mend the agony that never quite fades from Peter’s eyes.
Peter takes Tomas’s hands in his own and grips them tight. “So tell me, boy, why you’ve been so quiet.”
Tomas can’t meet his eyes. He can’t raise his voice above a whisper. “There’s nothing, Brother. I swear it.”
He never knew he was a liar.
Tomas is on his feet and pulling away from Peter’s hands before Peter can respond. He finds the door by memory and feels the cool air on his face, the scent of grass and dew in his nose. He has crossed half the grounds by the time his vision is clear, and the garden is in sight: a patch of umber and lilac carved out from the emerald expanse of the lawn. Tomas walks faster.
The garden is empty. Tomas sinks to his knees and buries his hands in the dirt. The soil gives way to his fingers, still cool and damp with morning dew. The scent of earth and plant-matter rises up to envelop him. This is the heavy, moist air of the forest, deep and damp and wild, untroubled by the peering eye of the sun. Even in this small domesticated garden the same wildness creeps and burrows. Even here it sees him, it comforts him, it holds him.
Tomas’s forehead is pressed to the cool earth, and still he is not near enough. He withdraws one hand from the garden bed, trailing wisps of root and fragments of earth, and thrusts two fingers into his mouth. Relief floods him. The soil is bitter and his own tongue is soft under his fingertips.
He relaxes into the ground and presses his fingers deeper into his throat. The muscles contract against his will, just as the coils of gut within the body tense and cramp without the owner’s say-so. He gags, feels the strain of nerve and muscle, the smooth delicate flesh of his gullet. He swallows. The spit and soil sting on their way down. Tears dry on his cheeks.
This is my body, murmur the priests in the sanctuary, speaking with wet mouths and ignoring twinging joints. This is my body, this is my blood.
Tomas breathes in the scent of growing, of rotting, and peace descends over him like a heavy fog.
***
Tomas opens his eyes that night already in Christ’s arms. A heavy summer rain thunders outside the bedroom’s gentle darkness.
Christ gives no word of greeting before he begins covering Tomas’s face and chest in kisses. When Tomas’s hardness presses against his belly, Christ turns him on his hands and knees and presses his wet cockhead against the unbreached muscle between his buttocks. Tomas looks over his shoulder with a curiosity that drowns out any shyness. He has heard jokes and rumors about buggery, but knows little practical information. His flesh burns as it yields, but it is not unlike the ache of being taken in the other passage. It is nothing to the pain of being newly split open on Christ’s fingers, and he wakes from dreams of that with his prick swollen and near release. Now his hardness drips fluid down his thighs as the rain batters at the roofing. The hole between his legs throbs in protest at its neglect.
He is stifling moans of pleasure in the crook of his elbow by the time Christ lets out a sigh and empties himself in Tomas’s body. The sounds of their labored breathing echo in the silence, in stillness so complete it seems they are the only living creatures for miles.
The moment passes. And the rain resumes.
As the raindrops begin to thump down on the abbey roof once more, Christ’s hips resume their insistent rolling motion, his hardness unabated. Tomas’s head spins—with the shocking pleasure of the prick in his arse, with the thundering percussion of the rain. He could think clearly if the hole between his legs would stop aching with arousal, dripping wetness down his thighs and bollocks both. He hisses with frustration, and no sooner does the exhalation pass his teeth than a blunt cockhead nudges into the slick opening.
Christ’s prick is still driving in his arse, and Christ’s prick is sliding into his wet and ready cunt. The relief of fullness is so great that he sobs with it. The two pricks move in him as one and he gasps into the mattress. “God,” he hears himself say. “Oh, God.” He feels the pulse of oncoming orgasm and in his head is the thought he can no longer keep away: this is not Christ.
The dread of Tomas’s dream swells within him. He cannot stop. He cannot turn away.
He looks over his shoulder.
What moves behind him contains no shadow of a beautiful young man. What moves in him is the proud antlered stag and the pregnant doe and the fawn curled in her belly. It is the root probing and pushing in the muck, and it is the rot and worms and feces that envelop the root. It is soft with fur, hard with bone and claw. Its twin cocks drive harder in Tomas’s sore and clenching holes. This creature will have him climax and climax again; he sees its hunger in a dozen black and slow-blinking eyes.
“Do you love me now?” it says.
“Yes.” He is rigid with terror. He is unable to lie. “I love you.”
“Yes. You love me.”
Pleasure seizes him, violent in its insistence. His eyes roll back and vision fails him.
“I love you,” he says. “I love you.”
***
The rain falls. A sweet-faced young man sits on his bed, with brown hair curling around his shoulders.
“Who are you?” says Tomas.
“You know.”
“Why did you disguise yourself? Why appear as Christ?”
The creature smiles as if it does not understand. “The god of love. Of pain. Of ecstasy.”
“Christ’s love is not . . . Not this.”
Brother Peter’s troubled face flashes before his eyes, and heat rises to Tomas’s cheeks. How could he have believed this presence to be a Christian one? How had he deceived himself for so many nights and days?
The answer is simple: he had not wanted the visits to end.
“What does it matter?” says the creature. “You are not his. You are mine.”
“No,” says Tomas. “No. Everything I have, I owe to God. I’ve sworn my life to his service.” It is what he ought to say. It is what Peter would say if he were here.
“Liar,” says the creature, and for the first time a shadow of displeasure crosses its lovely face. “You love only flesh and dirt. All your love belongs to me.”
The creature slides towards him until its thigh—as soft as a woman’s, as strong as a man’s—presses against his own. Its very nearness brings heat to his skin.
“I am here in your bed, child, and Christ is not. Christ will not hold you. Christ will not bear you a son or put a daughter in your belly. Christ has never made you sweat or weep or come.”
It winds its soft arms about his waist and kisses his mouth.
“You are mine.”
Tomas’s eyes fall closed, and a gray stillness rises inside him. He sees into the days and weeks ahead: how Peter will berate and entreat him for the truth and finally draw away. How Peter will sink into his own corner of the apothecary house and there bend over his work in a silent storm of rage and fear. He will know there is a secret, but he will not know what it is. And years will pass. And he will lie on his deathbed and still Tomas will refuse him the truth. His second son, just like the first, gone beyond his following. Gone beyond his help.
Tomas never thought he was a liar. He never thought himself cruel.
If the creature notices Tomas’s tears, it is unmoved by them. Its hardness presses against his side; its skin burns like an iron fresh from the fire.
“Mine,” it murmurs.
Its tongue is between his lips. Its teeth catch at his own tongue.
“Say yes.” A deluge of kisses falls on his cheeks, his throat, his mouth. “Tell the truth.”
“I love you,” says Tomas. “I’m yours.”
The creature draws back, and an un-Christlike smile spreads across its angel mask. The rosy lips recede as the smile widens, revealing tooth after sharp yellow tooth.
A long-nailed finger presses between Tomas’s teeth and he tastes bitter soil on his tongue.
“Sweet child,” says his god. “Fall on your knees and pray.”
[This story first appeared in The Ana Issue #16.]