I return to the subject of the mirror that Nonus found, the day that Escha arrived. He found it while digging in the dirt beneath the giant fig tree to the front of the villa. He had been doing as children do, digging with a stick in the freshly dried mud. It had stormed the night before, which is the most delicious time to cuddle each other, but after all of that smothering by us, Nonus nearly always went wild in the morning, scuttling about. Dig, dig. It would soon occur to me, years later, that it was the largest piece of polished silver I had ever seen. A boy does not think about such things, does he? When he cannot dream of possessing such things for his own. We looked at the mirror often in the first month, and then put it away among the linens. I did not forget it was there.
On this day, two days since the episode beneath the stars, Nataniellus came into the kitchen and pinched the meat of my hip. "Funny boy, let's go to market," he said.
I was patting a bread loaf in the sunlight, about to slice it up for lunch, about to sneak a piece for my wine. Bread dipped in wine, lovely. There were nuts and some boiled eggs as well. Escha had been enjoying eating edible flowers, and so there were some, with white petals. A little boy with a flower on his tongue, a silly image.
"I'm busy just now. You're free to go on your own," I said.
He took my hand, silent except for the sound of his breath, and pressed it against his cheek. The air in the mornings had taken on the character of a chill, and his flesh was soft and cool beneath my palm, the hard ridge of his cheekbone. The curve of my palm rested against his thin nose.
"The children are talking about rain this evening. We're doing hair-dressing this afternoon. Does your hair curl in the wet?" I asked him. "If it does, that will be good practice for them." While I stroked his face, he closed his heavy-lidded eyes. I stroked the curve of his brow with my thumb. When he had come in, he'd had very clean brows, plucked and shaped. He, like I did, kept himself shaved, nose to toe, but the brows had begun to grow in. They were a burnt orange color, too. This shaving was not a luxury, but a cultivated habit.
"You're so good-looking," he said.
"I don't like that. Don't fawn over me. What do you want in town?"
"Yes, my hair curls in the wet."
I traced the head of coiled serpent ring around his left upper arm. Its eyes were black onix, its scales finely tooled in gold. Its tight coils indented his pale flesh slightly, causing the skin to blush. When I looked up he caught my eyes, gazing through his eyelashes. "Stop trying to be cute," I said. "You're old."
He licked his upper lip with the pink tip of his tongue and looked away.
"If we go quickly into town, I can go, but we can't linger." We had never been to market together before. He had been there with the children a time or two, but it made little sense for two adults to go when the house needed looking after.
"Why should I linger?" he asked. "Is there something for me there? Do not the children need to eat? What will you feed them if you do not go to market?"
"We are provisioned. Are you wearing that?" I asked, mock-disdainfully, referring to the fine white linen tunic he wore. It was far finer than anything I owned, even better than what I had ever worn to entertain dinner guests. "Rags," I said, irritable in the humidity.
Just like now, he briefly pressed his cheek against my bare upper arm instead of answering me, and then took my elbow.
We walked. As we walked together down the road, arm-in-arm, he told me that in his former life, not so long past, he always wore a hood to market, his hair covered and face shadowed like a woman. He was telling me about how the prostitutes painted their faces, and I was telling him how we painted ours, when I heard little sandals slapping the stony dirt behind us. I turned and Escha was running, closing the half mile from the house, his arms pumping away. In the two years since he had come to us, he had never forgotten his affection for me for a moment, so when I knelt to let him get onto my back he said, "Leave me, no. No," jabbing his sharp little chin into the curve of my neck. It hurt but I didn't shout, because my head was already clouded with the pain of a coming headache.
I hoisted him up, his legs hooked over my forearms. When I looked over at Nataniellus, I saw that he walked with his hands crossed behind him, as if bound. He still walks in such a way when thoughtful, eyes squinted towards the far distance. I could see that he did not want to chatter in front of the child.
"What are you supposed to be doing?" I asked.
"No, nothing. Doing nothing. Going to market with you," Escha said, head tipped against my shoulder. "The others, they are mocking me."
"You're sensitive."
"No," he said. "In town, what?"
"I don't know. Something for Nataniellus."
"He goes himself. That is, he could go. For nothing, going together to market."
"Well I'd give you a swat but you're on my back."
For a moment we stood aside to let a donkey cart pass, nodding to the old man behind it. I loved Escha's weight on my back. I loved to sweat in the late summer heat. When we got going again, I hoisted him up a little higher on my back, so that he could lie over my shoulder-blades and drowse. After getting over the awkwardness of having my flirtation with Nataniellus interrupted, I enjoyed having Escha there, as I always did.
When met with the reality of Laurent's survival in 1960, about then, I thought to myself in wonder, "How old was he when he was made?" I couldn't tell. He wouldn't meet my eyes. He backed away. I said, "Veni huc," with a crooked finger, "Come along, and I will carry you." He was wearing a white, semi-sheer robe. My understanding is that he was made in his early 20s, around the same age as me. Because he wouldn't meet my eyes, and because of his height, his slight carriage, I thought him younger. At my Latin, he looked up at me with such weariness in his eyes that I knew him for all of his years. "Ignosce mihi," I had whispered, startled, "I don't know why I thought your eyes were brown."
"Ei," ah, as Laurent had grimaced, "you are not wrong to remember a boy with brown eyes. Vah," he had sighed, as if embarrassed, "I lost him somewhere."
But I did not lose him. And I swear that in the years after 1960, I saw him whenever I could. We have lost many things. We have found others again. We have held on when those days of inevitable choices arrive, as it does so often arrive, to succumb. And on the road, in Herculaneum, I did not know it was such a day. I did not know what Nataniellus was planning that day in the market, what he was thinking. How could I have known what he had planned? He gave no sign of desperation or plotting.
Nataniellus always refused to wear fine things. He refused to wear gold, anything shimmering. He refused to update himself, ever watchful but never adopting new languages or patterns of behavior. Culture slipped over him like silk over clean flesh. For centuries, the earth seemed to revolve around him, for he, like the moon, would reveal himself as endless, not subject to the birth and death of ideologies. He wore shapeless clothes, combed his hair with his fingers, sat vigil for gods he never took as his own, yet kept across his hours. He only changed this in recent decades, for Leechtin. But he still says the night prayer with Nonus, and makes sacrifices in January and August. If he is feeling youthful, he sits beneath the sun with his head low, and counts the mercies we have been shown. He weaves baskets out of grass and he plaits my hair. He plaits anything he can get his hands on, as he likes to keep himself occupied. He is a simple person, of few wants. But I did not know this on the road.
To see Nataniellus, that day on the road, wearing eye kohl, wearing a gold arm ring tooled to coil like a snake, so real it seemed to move in the sunlight. To see him wearing a gold belt and his fingers stacked with rings. I did not know him. These were the things of value he could fit on his body without seeming suspicious to ignorant eyes. He wore the little make up that would make him appealing without attracting attention. Escha rode on my back, sleepy in the warmth, asking me funny questions, fresh without being offensive, and I entertained him. I was barely functioning. My blood roared for its poison, for the cup of unwatered wine I had left on the kitchen's counter. My head ached and my joints, my organs, weighed against my flesh like raw bronze.
"What do you need in the market?" I asked Nataniellus again, a man who had insisted to me that he was free. When he had first arrived, he had set me ablaze with his boldness, with what I had read as cocky, brazen posturing. To me then he could have been anything, many fantasies, because his realities were hidden. My gaze made his body into a temple of worshiped pleasures, that could be as easily resented, only a body.
"Linseed oil," he said. Not quite a lie. I knew that the master liked to have his hair oiled. I had not been given the task of dressing the master's hair, as it had fallen to Nataniellus in Vasvius's absence. A relief for me.
"Just that?" I asked, tugging on Escha's foot so he wouldn't completely fall asleep. He twitched and made a single sleepy note of a laugh.
"I will see what else I can find."
"We don't have much to spend. You know we don't," I said.
"What are you doing, speaking to me like this?" he snapped at me. A croak of annoyance entered the timber of his voice, a rasp.
"Oh," I said, a little angered at being reminded of his higher rank, but minding it all the same.
Herculaneum was always thick with people at noontime in the summer, smelling of roasted nuts and sweat. The market was a two story affair, an open-air mall with round arches and wide paving stones. A stall owner, a lady named Albina, beckoned to me and I broke away from Nataniellus a bit to push my way toward her. To my surprise, Nataniellus followed, and I looked over my shoulder to see him following my ankles with his eyes. Let him follow for a moment, I thought, sick of following. Old Albina was quartering a cooked goose, as her poultry stall served up a little lunch around that time, and as we approached she dug a little piece off the bone to offer to Escha.
"Take it with your hand," I scolded the child, as he inclined his head for her to put it in his mouth.
Albina wiped her fat-greased fingers on a rag, and I felt Escha's jaw working against my shoulder, chewing the goose meat. Meat is most flavorful next to the bone.
"I can't stay long, missus," I told her, glad to see her wizened face, deeply darkened from the years she had spent working in her dead husband's rice field. Always a friend to me.
"Salve, Iovita," she said, taking my shaking hands.
"Salve, excuse me. You look lovely."
We talked market shifts and the weather, about people we knew on sight who had come down from Rome. She asked about Balbus's wife and I told her the truth, that we hadn't been seeing Balbus regularly. Throughout, she held my hand, and I massaged her aching finger joints casually. Without caution, she asked me about the villa's finances, and we talked bare winters, then the practicality of farming the acres. We had circled around again to the price of bread again when I heard Escha go, "Who, who?"
I had let him down by then, but had him by the arm. He would often go charming his way through the entire market mall if left to himself, found cuddled up to orange sellers, metal workers, and laundresses, usually with free items in hand for which further custom was expected. He could be shy at times, but not with strangers. Through the noonday crush I could see a man talking to Nataniellus heatedly, their bodies inclined toward each other.
"Bina," I said, turning, but Albina had already turned back to her work with the customary swiftness of those in service. I set my gaze in the direction of the man Nataniellus was talking to, straining to hear over the noonday crush of people.
"Why are they so angry?" Escha asked me, his fingers twining with mine.
"Stay behind me," I said, placing my hand on his hair and pushing him back.
"The master says do not trust Nataniellus," Escha said to me suddenly, little hands clutching the wrist that pushed him, a little excited, breathless for it was very hot, "that he is deceiving, and he has many cares and desires. He is a bird that wears any plumage. He is not like us. He is seeming bold but he is shattered and so he lies and keeps secrets. We are knowing what we must do, so we are honest. Not he. You must be so careful of him, careful."
"Quit your hooting."
Against the deep blue sky, the market seemed dark to my eyes, as if under the shadow of its own low cloud, and because of my headache, it took my eyes a few moments to adjust to the darkness cast by low buildings, by the columns of the market mall, to pick out features on faces. I opened my mouth to speak but Nataniellus was too far away to hear, a least four horse-lengths. I cupped my hand to gesture to him, but as I did so, I thought I felt the ground shake. The earth unsteady beneath my feet, I looked down, and when I looked up again, the two of them were gone, and behind me Escha had begun wailing as if it were he who had been lost.
"Why are you let it happen?" he wailed, shaking my arm from his hold on my wrist. "Why are you not doing after them? Getting him?"
"I thought you didn't like him," I said, breathless myself, blood evaporating from my veins. "I don't see them. Come on."
"Iovita," he wailed, crying from his upset as I hoisted him up again onto my back, "that man is a bad man. He grab him by the hair. Hitting him. Iovita."
"Quit wailing, you poor wretch," I hissed at him, embarrassed that people were looking at us, noticing us as we pressed through the throng. "Pop your head up and see if you can see your nurse over the crowd. Wipe your eyes." I have to admit that Escha's upset made me laugh a bit, though I felt nervous.
Slick with sweat and dead hungry, I thought of just going home, of giving up. I thought that it was not my job to keep track of free men. Warily, I cast my eye toward the sun's chariot, hazy with high cloud cover. I thought of the late summer rains that had come late in come through that year, how the earth had felt unsteady beneath my feet, as if the earth itself were troubled. I thought, not for the first time that summer, that I had never had a rest in my life, and knew enough about the lives of other men to resent it. It was alien thinking to me, but I so often felt angry, so often felt distracted, and saw how neglecting my work fractured the lives of those who depended upon me. I resented that as well, to not be able to crack up with impunity, and my body rebelled, aching and failing me as I grew older. I thought of the soft life I had wanted, that the condition of Vasvius's body had seemed to promise me, and guilt reigned a havoc over me, that I had indeed been given a softer life than I might have had, and yet still found myself unsatisfied with it. "Iovita," Escha moaned, "you are going the wrong way," but no sooner had he said it than I felt a hand slip into mine, and a body fit against me, and Nataniellus whispered, "Do not hurry. Do not hurry. Behave naturally."
Escha's hand struck out and stroked his nurse's hair, urgently, but I kept quiet. I chose not look at him. Unused to betrayal, to feeling foreign to myself, and not yet understanding that I resented Nataniellus for disrupting my relationships. All I wanted then was to be thrilled, it had seemed. How much I think to myself now, what it would be like to feel so much the glory of first times again, and yet there is far the more safety in routine. How much tragedy we hold in our hands now, and how much more we may yet encounter, as the winds are tempted toward change. And yet. And yet, even now I have so many unspoken desires.
At the city gate we waited for traffic to thicken, so that we might blend in with the crowd until we were well away from Nataniellus's pursuer, and I wanted very much to shake him off, to spit in his face, but I couldn't do so, for I did not understand the origin of my upset. Escha, so good at cues, so much better than the rest of us at reading the wind, kept quiet, kept touching his nurse, silent.
I want to find Cassius. I wish I could find him. It is not only Nonus who wants him. I want him, and his arms. To hum in my ear, to call me a fool, to fight me, to write my name in the dirt and weep secretly. I want those moments back that I did not spend with him, after the rape that made him feel he was no longer one of us, when we could have been brothers beyond childhood. We were not innocent then, but we did not know that it is within the power of the soul to isolate us, to make us feel the cold wind that keeps us apart. I wish I had been able to quiet his mind against himself, and that I could have served him better. Nonus says, "Find him," now that Aulus is gone, "for we are too few." If only he knew how deeply I have felt it, have wanted to find him and say, "Hello, come along, Petal." And I think of how our Escha accepted our deaths so long before. What must it have been for him? To be so accustomed to loneliness that he could no longer recognize its absence? How could he have lived with it, when it is only one of us who I have lost, and I cannot bear it? I cannot accuse Escha of any weakness. I could not comfort him at all. We were to him only noisy ghosts from a different age, and I have some myself. I think of them over and over, my bugbears, what have made me myself. How I mourned Escha after he disappeared with the master, and could not share in any anger over deception for so many years. I digress. I am only thinking of the past the way that the past is, all happening at once in my mind.
So Escha kept touching Nataniellus, from his place on my aching back, and I kept my head down the entirety of the walk home, empty-handed. By the time we arrived back at the villa, it was already the highest point of the afternoon, and despite the salve on my skin I prickled with sunburn. I spanked Escha once to send him on his way, not caring where he went. I took my cup of wine, that had been sitting on the counter where I'd left it, and I went outside to sit in the discarded curule seat.
Under the awning, I sat in deep shadow, filling my empty stomach with wine and brooding darkly. After some time, Nataniellus came outside to wash. I did not speak to him, and him not to me. I glanced over him and saw that all of the gold he had worn had gone, and evidence of his having been roughly handled, that clearly he'd had hair torn out of his head, and his face had begun to swell. I wanted to say something then, feeling sorry more for myself than for him, but he went inside. He is old enough let him handle himself, I thought, discarding responsibility with contempt in a way that only a boy who thinks he is a man can do.
I only learned some time later what he had done that day. I learned that he had written a letter that promised his former master gold for the upkeep of the children he had left behind in the bordello. He had promised the gold he wore on his body and more. In later years when I questioned him regarding why he had wanted me to come with him, he did not evade the question. He told me, "If they had wanted to take you, I would have let them. I did not bring you as protection. I brought you as leverage. What do you think of it?" But by then I knew how far he would go to protect the people whom he loved, and so it did not shock me. I asked him, "And did you want to go back to the bordello?" and he told me, "I only wanted it until my master touched me. I only realized how mad I was when I felt his hand upon my flesh again," looking at me with his eyes that hated charity, that hated sympathy. "And then for that, for rejecting his kind offer to take my wretched life again upon his good grace, he made his demands," Nataniellus told me.
And so that silver mirror Nonus had found, I quickly learned, was part of a larger secret. The master woke me dead early the next morning with thin gasps that were not words, the rattling only of breath, touching me with the tips of his fingernails as I slept among my brothers. I helped the master dig for the cache of silver that the mirror had washed up from, disturbed by the rain. In the morning wet, in the thin light, I saw him drop to his knees and dig with his bare hands for the money that would keep the man he loved, his hair unbound. Chilled, I found that though he exerted himself, I did not hear from him a single breath as we turned the earth.
As I have said, and must say again, in the coming year would come the choice to succumb or to continue on, to despair or to face fate. It is so often that in the latter choice a man becomes himself, when he refuses to back from the horrors that discover him, and that feast upon his mind. Flesh is only flesh. Why does it sound so hollow to me? Flesh is only flesh. I never slept with Nataniellus again.