I'm afraid I neglected Escha for a time, in Alexandria. I paid our way across the sea in a merchant long boat. We lived in an unwashed district in the outer ring of the city, an enclave of Egyptians a little south and east of the royal palace, and we slept in the same bed there, above a tallow renderer's, so it was always smelling like melting flesh. When I complained of the light, Escha brought reed mats home from the market and fixed them over the windows, so that it was dark. When he needed a trade, I taught him how to tell fortunes, and he raised up friendships and connections in the city, who thought him a handsome, homeless urchin.
He would come to me at night, and clutch my fingers, and whisper, "Faya, please come out." He would tell me that he was hungry, or frightened, or that someone had harassed him, but I found it hard to do more than whisper. He learned to speak a mixture of Latin and Egyptian, and he tried this pidgin with me, asking me to embrace him, but he ranged widely so as not to be home. The women who worked downstairs took a liking to him, and washed his hair some evenings, so that when he came upstairs he would be happy, and smelling good. I think that he was happiest then, when those women bathed him, as if he was theirs.
In 79, when the sky darkened, I saw Ariel sitting in the corner of my room, in the dark, wordless, eyes shining like a cat's. I have not said that he was blond like Escha, or that his body was long, and that he was as a man, though in no way like men, and that his presence could be punishing, if he exerted himself. But he was there so briefly, between blinks of my eyes in the dark. He smiled his love of death and contentment over my seeing his prophecy for the truth, and of saving us. I do not know what Ariel knows of human life, or feeling. I think that Ariel only knows the pleasure of anguish in others, and the coldness of lacking it. One moment, he was there with his oppressive atmosphere, and the next, disappeared. On that day, the air was thick even in Alexandria, and I covered my face with a cloth to breathe, before the merciful wind blew the poisonous air away.
But Escha told he had seen a man in blond hair, many times, beckoning to him, which raised a chill me unlike any other chill, because he was seeing a spectre which to me was like a reoccuring nightmare, which made Ariel real. I told him, "Don't speak to it. It is a spirit of the earth which feeds upon earthly horrors," and Escha said yes, but I knew that he loved beauty, and Ariel, of death, like madness, was delicious to dream of at a distance. "Keep close," I told him, "Don't range so far that I can't save you." But he ranged far, because though my Escha tried to draw me out, I spent my waking hours in torment. That day I had seen Ariel, Escha came to me, crying like a kicked kitten, and crawled up next to me, sniffling and sighing tears, and asked "Have they survived?" because he knew me to be beyond his knowledge of fleshly understanding. I held him and could say nothing. He begged for knowledge of his brothers, but I was lost to him, and time went through me and drained out so easily that often I did not know if it was day or night.
Escha, when he was very young, told me he dreamed of people drowning in the harbor of Herculaneum, of young men, and women, and babies, pushing each other in the sea in the press of the crowd. He said that he dreamed of young men speaking to him from the bottom of the sea. He would wake up crying and shaking and wet, and look around the room, hungry for the reality of Alexandria, and our escape, and for me. He would go cold in our humid room from the dreams and feel me with his fingers and cry, and I would wash him, and sit up with him until he fell asleep again. While it was visible, he was always going outside to look at the darkness across the sea, but after a year or so, unless he was in real distress, he never spoke of it much.
Escha came to me with his little wonders. He would come with a little frog to show me, or a river flower to put in my hair, or some small trinket or other that a friend had given him, and I was very glad of his friends, though he often smelled of them so strongly I worried that he had been corrupted. Even then, I could not rouse myself to deal with his concerns. He would show me a frog and say, "Look, I've named it 'Alexander'. He is a conquering frog. He is the master of all frogs," and I remember that frog, which he kept for some months until he lost it, and came in tears, inconsolable, until he found another frog, which he called "Eudoxia, queen of the seven islands to the east." You see, even then, his fantasies were royal. He would sit at the table in the room and stroke his frog's back with the side of his finger, and eat spelt bread. When he was a child, he did a very good imitation of a frog croak, which made me smile. He would come into our bed and say, "Faya, what's my frog's name?" and I still remember, because he needed a friend after the loss of his brothers, someone to love and talk to, and his frogs were important to him. He had many frogs, and I still remember all of their names.
But he was prone to melancholy, and asking me why he should live while his brothers were dead, and suffered little crazed rages, where he would pull at his hair, and beat at me with his little fists, and cry until he was so exhausted sleep would catch him by surprise. He said he even missed those two he insisted he hated, our Vasvius and our Vivacio, and begged me, did they live? because we could find them and make a home for ourselves like we'd had, and by then Escha was only nine, and thinking that his glory had passed.
He would come home crying, or angry, cursing at Alexandria if he had been beaten or robbed. He would cry to me that the city was hard, and ugly, and I would kiss his scraped knees and quiet his tears, telling him that if it is Alexandria he hates, it is the world. And I told him that I had lived in this place centuries, before there was an Alexandria, when it was called Rhacotis, long before journeying to his homeland, and that beauty is savage, and he heard me in his head, as if in a trance. He said, "Master, teach me this trick, of speaking without speaking," and the more I spoke that way, too tired to take the breath needed to make sound, the more he asked me what else it was to be unworldly, and if he could be like me. I told him to be wary of wanting it, and he said that he wanted to be like me so that he could save the ones he loved, and I said, my child, look what it has done to me.
Because there were no words for what had happened, and how I ached to be touched, and talked to roughly, and to hear "No" and be kissed as a man, as myself, and how I had lost it. Sometimes when I woke, I had forgotten what I had lost, and my ears listened for a humming voice, which was tender of me. Sometimes I would cry to myself, and turn on my side, so that Escha wouldn't see if he was sleeping beside me, but he would see it, and knew not to touch me then. I wanted so badly to hear my Orpheus' voice, and hear "Master, may I touch you?" and feel his careful hands, and hear him ask me, "What songs do you like?" and smell his sweet breath, and feel his soft lips on my neck, or the roughness of his face if he came to embrace me in the morning, unshaven.
I wanted to feel his fingernails scratching my back gently, and his humming Persian songs, because he thought that maybe that is where I had come from. I wanted to hear him ask me in very bad Greek, "Where did you spend your boyhood?" and the same question in bad Egyptian, and Aramaic. I wanted to hear "I hate you, leave off me, don't touch me, don't say that you love me," and I touched the place on the back of my head where he had struck me once, and wept. Escha said, "Come to the amphitheatre to hear music. Come to the Great Library and we'll watch the people from the steps. Come to the harbor and we'll read the smoke from the Lighthouse for fortunes," but his voice so often to me was no more meaningful than the hush of wind against the walls, or the croak of his frogs in their woven basket.
In these recent centuries, Escha would tell me how it was in Alexandria, stroking my hair in the evening, kissing the rim of my ear to comfort me when I needed a touch. He would find me, knowing my silence for sadness, a withdrawl from the world, and take me by the hands. He would say, "Atta," father, "come along," and then he would say, "close your eyes," and kiss my temples, "It's alright, it's alright," and know that I was thinking of him who I had lost. Escha has told me how in Alexandria he would come home, and toss away his sandals, and find me sleeping, and that sometimes when I woke, I would hold onto him in a half-sleep, as if he were my light, my dark, and he would brush my hair back from my face, and say, "It's me, dominus. He's not here," and twine his fingers with mine. And he would push his body near my body, inside of my defenses, and murmur, "It's not him, it's Escha, it's not him, it's Escha," chanting me back to our room, and the reality he knew. He said, "Make me like you, I want to be like you, take me away from this life," and I would turn my face away.
The first time he slept with a man, he was thirteen. I knew because he would not sleep beside me anymore, and demanded his own place, his own bed, and he thought himself a man grown. I smelled this man on his skin, and found bruises on his back and thighs, and did not know what to say to him. And when that man threw him away, and he came home slapped and sobbing, I took him back into my bed and held him, and whispered that he was beautiful, and never to call me dominus ever again, because he was as my own son, and luminous. But from then, if he was very clean, I would know that he had been to the bathhouses in the city center, and if he was melancholy, I knew that he had been having love affairs. As he grew up, he grew beautiful, as I had known he would be, and he stopped coming home at night.
I was not ignorant of the life he was leading. Sometimes he would come home angry and banging the walls, and say "Atta, kill this one" or "kill that one" and I would sit on the floor in the corner of the room, with my embroidery needle, knees up, and listen to him raging. And I would say, "Orange, little orange," and cluck at him, until he would come and sit with me on the floor, and push up against me like a cat, silly in his big emotion, and sorry if he had abused me with his words at all. And more than once he said, "I wish I could fall in love like you did. I want to be in love like that" and ask me to teach him how to sew and embroider, and do hair. So I know that he thought of Nataniellus, too, and his brothers, and that he was searching for something to fill the emptiness they had left in him. And I know that those men gave him money for fine things, and that he was eating well on their silver, and that when he was with them, in pleasure, or in playing at love, he was forgetting.
His favorite things to eat were salty olives from Rome, which he got and chewed, and spat the pits of out our window. Little, sweet, debauched monster, no manners.
And that was how he grew up, and now I will tell you what you ask me, about that dark thing that happened, that he refused to tell anyone, but that I owe you now, so that you will understand him, because I know, Mini, that you loved him much. Care well for this story. Have sympathy for us, who were foreigners in that city, and lost. Have sympathy for my boy, who was your master. Have sympathy, and in the future, if I ask you if I told you this story, deny it.