Flash Fiction Friday - Rites

I helped the Mother Superior don her scarlet robes in silence. I had been told not to speak to her, that she was mentally preparing for the rite. Her quarters were cold, even though it was summer.

Then I followed her down into the earth, to the prisoner. Was it fire in her eyes, or merely the torchlight reflected? I held the ink for her as she traced the sigils, and I wondered just who I had become in the darkness.

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No, I can't stop there. I really can't. It's way too short to do justice to this picture, which isn't all that sexy but has plenty of meat on its bones. But I have to stop there, because of the restrictions of the form. It's like saying that I wish I had more syllables in a haiku. There are some things you just can't change.

But I can write something longer that's not a Flash Fiction Friday, can't I? So consider the above my submission for this week, and everything below the line is something else entirely.

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The Rule is all.

It binds us and releases us. I learned to be a servant, not to a man or a God, but simply to the Rule.

I came to the Abbey a young woman of no prospects. I had tried whoring but had no knack for it, or perhaps I had a knack for leaving my clients changed. The men who came to spend themselves in me left as shells, the force pulled from them somehow. In the end, no one wanted to fuck me, and the madam came to beat me, perhaps to kill me. But she too was changed somehow, and it was then that I learned that what power I had was not just over men.

I have seen women burned for less, or for nothing, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had no wish to be burned, and if you have a gift and do not wish to suffer for it, you must trust yourself to the Abbeys. Some say it would be better to burn. They make a persuasive case.

"You think you are powerful," said the nun who examined me. I call it "examined" but really, just just ran an eye over me, muttering. "You have never taken a life. You have never known a man. Acceptable. Now, you will wear this collar. It will remind you."

"Remind me of what?" I began to ask, thinking that perhaps I should think better of a witch's life. The collar rang, a low tone, and then I was on the floor with no memory of falling.

"You will not speak," said the nun, facing away from me. "The Rule is all. You will learn it, and it will be mother and father, husband, children, God. There is nothing else. The Rule is all."

And so it was. Whenever I strayed from this unwritten Rule, even in the darkness, alone, even in my thoughts, I heard the bell of punishment and lost something of myself. First it was my sight for a day, and when my eyes returned to me I saw things differently. Then I forgot my name, for some minor transgression of a Rule I had never been told. I believe that all nuns lose their names, either through punishment or simply because those names no longer fit. I was Novice whenever spoken to, and I couldn't say otherwise.

Memories, places I had seen, people I had known, they vanished with the passing months, each one excised precisely for some infraction. Never the painful memories, but the pleasant ones. The painful ones were heightened, until I believed that they were all I was, that life without the Rule was nothing but pain. I saw my father dying, again and again, of the plague that had taken our village, and while I knew he was important to me, I did not know why, or who he was; those things had been taken from me.

In time, as promised, I learned the Rule, though I could no more explain it in words than I think any nun could, not even the nuns of the highest rank. It did not exist to be explained. And with that learning came a knowledge that my powers, as they had been, were meaningless. They were like a child, flailing in the darkness. There were nuns whose power could have killed me with a thought, and they were considered lowly.

One thing I did know about the Rule was that it forbade the use of power. We did everything by hand, and backbreaking work it was too. Only those who had left the collar behind, who had learned the Rule so well that it no longer needed to collar them, were allowed to practice their powers, and only in pursuit of greater things than simple drudgery. Whether it was for good or ill was difficult to say.

I was given more responsibility as my skill in remembering the Rule grew, and I hoped to one day be able to remove the collar, to take my place among the red-garbed abbesses who studied and ate and slept in silence. But that was a long way off. First I would have to pass through the ranks of the black-robed sisters, who did not wear the collar but were forbidden by the Rule from using any powers they might possess. Some women died as nuns, never having used power at all. Perhaps some never had power to begin with.

A day came when I was ordered to assist the Mother Superior, to bring her food and wash her clothes, to help her in any way she wanted. It was a great honor, and a sign that perhaps, soon, I would be allowed to leave the collar behind. It had been months since I had last heard the bell, and I was hopeful.

Mother Superior was a severe woman of indeterminate age who yelled, not with her mouth, but in thought. Her thoughts could blast through my brain in a way worse than any shouting or beating. Worse, perhaps, than the collar and its ever-present Rule. My life was not so hard, unless I made the slightest mistake, and then it was torture.

"Fetch me water for my bath!" would come her summons as I was washing her clothes, and woe betide me if I was late. "Now, where are my clothes?" she was snap in my brain as I poured the water into her bathtub.

I lost a few more memories, a few more bits of myself, as I learned to cope with Mother's demands. I erred, either in her service or that of the Rule's. And I slowly became better at withstanding her mental tirades.

One day, she ordered me to do something I didn't expect. "Take off your clothes, girl." I couldn't be shy; I had been living in a dormitory with several other women since I first arrived, a space scarcely large enough for us all to stand, let alone have any privacy. I pulled my novice's habit over my head, a simple woolen shift, and stood naked before her. "Yes, yes, you'll do," she muttered, one of the first times I had heard her speak.

Then she did something else rather surprising; she pulled her own red gown over her head and stood, naked as well. Her body was older, but I couldn't tell her age; she might have been my mother or my ancient ancestor. It was whispered that nuns had the power to slow aging or even time if they chose. "Come closer, my child," said Mother. "Don't be frightened."

She simply stood there while I moved closer, until I was within arm's reach, then she took my shoulders and pushed me to my knees gently, almost kindly. "I need you to do this," she thought into my brain. "I will show you what to do." And I felt my brain flooded with images, images of tongues and cunts and fluids, and I knew then that she wanted me to do something I was sure were contrary to the Rule. I wasn't disgusted by the idea, simply unwilling to breach the Rule. The Rule was all.

"Don't worry, child," she said. "Do this for me and I shall see to it that you are rewarded."

So I put my lips on her gray-hair-covered opening, and I moved my tongue, feeling as I did the heat of her. Then I heard the bell, and my skin numbed, but somehow nothing happened. I was able to continue to do as she asked, darting my tongue in and out of her, until she sighed, seeming satisfied, and backed away. And then, suddenly, the last pleasant memory I had, of my mother's embrace, vanished, and I wept.

"The Rule is all, child," said the Mother, sounding a little sad. "Everything must be paid for."

My work became easier; the Mother Superior seemed more lenient or perhaps just less demanding. Or maybe I became less likely to fail. The moment of connection was never repeated, but I saw her, sometimes, looking at me from the corner of my eye. I couldn't acknowledge it or think too much about it, or the bell might ring again. But I saw it.

One day, a messenger came from the royal court in the far-off capital, and I heard her mention a prisoner before the door slammed shut on me. Clearly I wasn't to be allowed to see everything just because I was Mother's favored servant. And the next day, a party of men arrived outside the gate; they weren't allowed in, of course, but it wasn't every day that a man got up the courage to come close, let alone a party of them. I'm sure a number of my novice sisters lost some of themselves for their thoughts that day. I no longer had much to lose, and my remembrances of the outside world were universally painful, so I only had a mild curiosity about what mission brought these men to the gate.

I saw the prisoner as she was led in, golden hair shining like the sun, but a black mask over her features. She moved differently than most, with a grace that could not be denied even by the chains binding her. She did not stumble as she was shoved, and she seemed to float over the ground even with the weight of iron on her wrists and ankles. I stopped myself before my thoughts violated the Rule, but I left a small fire of curiosity burning.

The next night, I was summoned to the Mother Superior's chamber. I helped her don her scarlet robes in silence, paying no attention to her naked form beneath them. I had never seen her put them on; they were reserved for truly important matters. I did not speak to her, as I had been told; she was mentally preparing for the rite. What rite I did not know, but it certainly was a serious one.

"Come, child," she said into my mind, and I followed her down a secret stair, down to a place of which I had no knowledge, holding a torch to light her way. There was shadow ahead and shadow behind.

And there in the dimness, lay the prisoner, bound and naked, face down on a bier as if waiting execution. She seemed to be singing; her form exuded a music that sounded dissonant in these cruel surroundings, a love song, or perhaps a song of worship. "Do not listen!" came an insistent voice in my mind. "The Rule is all." But I couldn't help but listen, even as I feared that the collar would steal something else from me.

The Mother Superior handed me a bowl of reddish ink, bloodlike and cruel in the flickering light of the torch, and I sat beside the prisoner, holding the ink and wondering just who I had become in the darkness, in this Abbey, under the service of the Rule. Snatches of the prisoner's song seemed to return pieces of me, and I remembered life before the Rule, before the pain and restriction. I sat and held the ink as Mother traced the mystic sigils into the prisoner's skin, each one imbuing itself with power as it was laid down, becoming part of the flesh and glowing with a black light. I sat and I wondered.

"You are condemned," said Mother Superior, her voice sounding old and hollow compared with the singing of the prisoner. "You will be punished. The Rule is all."

The Mother stood, her robe blood-carnelian in the firelight, and I stood too, only to be arrested by the touch of the prisoner's hand on mine. "Awake," she said softly.

"Do not listen! The Rule is all!" The shout came in my brain, but it was a pale shadow. The prisoner's hand went slack, and the sigils grew to cover her, blotting out her light, silencing her song. But the song was in my brain now, and it shone a light into the darkness and showed me what I was, not a shadow but a light, a fire. The Rule was just a chain. It could be broken.

"No," I said, the first word I had spoken since entering the Abbey. My voice crackled, unused to anything but screams. "No."

And I pulled the collar from my neck and hurled it at the Mother Superior, where it rang sourly like a broken bell, drowning out her words in my brain, leaving nothing but the song. I did not wait to see what I had done; I put words to my desires and movements to the words, and drawing an anchor I had not known existed, I stepped out of the world and found myself among the trees in the summer twilight, grass between my toes, naked as the day I was born. And I laughed for the first time, as the golden-haired people came out to greet me.