I woke as I often wake up, afraid, confused, my voice in my throat. My body knew that someone was there but not who. My nerves spooked, I lay still, in a wordless terror. It is a pattern that has followed me from life. Fainting left me vulnerable and defenseless, both to help and to hurt. An expectation of hands upon me, of being restrained, of the fear of drowning by water from well-meaning hands, or other penetration and abuse of my body. I wake not knowing who I am now, or where, or how old. Sleep brings with it so many unknowns.

My familiar body, in familiar sheets, is made a cruel strangeness by waking frightened. Waking so, fear lacquers the familiar in a haunted light. Not real. Not solid. Sometimes, I weep. My skin crawled on my body that morning, wild with the feeling of someone else.

"All right, Red, it's only me. It's America. You're in your fella's bed." 

When I didn't move, Iovita continued to talk, rubbing my side.

"The sky were looking somewhat dowly, but it's nicely now. Had a gander out the window and it's good as summer. Where's the snow? December and all. Your sweet one asked after you, our Nonus, but I said to him leave him he's paggered."

"Quit going on," I said. "It's cold enough."

"Nesh Southerner," he said. "Saw your fella heading down the back lawn. What's he up to?"

I rotated my hips, turning to face him. "Take your boots off and get into bed with me."

"There he looks better," he said, bending to drop his boots in a hurry. "In the bed you share with him?"

"Do what I tell you."

He slipped in, under the sheets, and he pulled me up close, against his body. Dusty farm boy, always working outdoors. In the old days, he smelled like a donkey, like a turned over vegetable patch, Iovita the steward, impressionable, easily won, predictable, but so much more than the sum of those things. He flexed the palms of his rough hands against my stomach.

"Tell me what's on your mind or I'll slap your belly red as a blushing sinner."

"I dreamed of Escha," I told him.

"Saw him just now down the hall. He's fine. He was asking about his goat."

The goat Escha had had as a child in Herculaneum, an elderly milking she-goat saved from slaughter by a child's affection. He had named her "The Little Bee" and could be found whispering to her between his daily tasks, harassing her. She was completely black in color, except for stripes of white inside her ears. She had made indifferent company for a young boy.

"He was asking after the little bee, about what we'd done with her after he left her behind."

"Nothing."

"That's right, nothing. Who would buy anything from us? We didn't have papers. We didn't own anything ourselves. If we'd tried to sell the goat it would have made buyer and seller both thieves. That's a strangling."

"So what did you tell him?"

"Told him she wandered off, which is probably what she did, old dried up she-goat like her. She was as mean as the day is long. She butted Escha whenever she could and she bit whatever she could catch in her teeth. If we'd had more time in the day, I'd have penned her up separately. She brought so much stress to the rest of the pasture. She was so spiteful that I couldn't tie her to a tree or she'd go round and round with the rope until she suffocated herself."

"I remember the tantrum you threw when the master said you couldn't have her slaughtered."

"Was it a tantrum you're calling what I did to you then?"

"A little boy's tantrum."

"Don't know what he wants with asking about that goat. I'd as soon have her well forgotten, but he always has to be talking about this or that. He is looking fine, because I know that's what you'll be asking next. I thought he had a little fever blush but he'd only made up his face."

"There are a lot of fellows here now."

He was quiet then, and I felt the lightest touch of his eyelashes against my neck, as he closed his eyes. He has the large, black eyes characteristic of his people, and the long lashes that some boys are blessed with.

A year earlier I had told him what I had seen and what I had been told by Leechtin. I could not say that he hadn't already suspected something amiss. He is a lion and he had smelled distress on the wind. He knew me for uneasy without any need to confess, and so there had been no feeling of confession, or of the withholding that is married to such a feeling.

Leechtin however, my Faya, by 2002 had been withdrawing from me for some time. He had been spending a lot of his time out of my sight, and he often came back wet and silent, his clothes dripping with water and his hair slick against my hands. He had said to me finally, coming inside at the hottest part of the day, waking me, holding both of my wrists, "My owl, my fingers, I was different then."

I had woken to him, instantly quaking, the little hairs standing up on the back of my neck. He was so close to my face that it caused my senses to raise alarm, sending a twinge of shock up my arms and into my head. I cried out a little from the little pain of the shock, twisting my head away from him. A year on, in bed with Iovita, I still remembered that feeling, of being electrocuted. Ten years on, as I write, I remember it, knowing what he was about to tell me.

"He is here, he is a one who," Leechtin started, but I could not listen, too distressed to be told what he had been withholding for so long.

"I know it," I said, too loudly, choking upon it.

"Listen," he said, shaking me. "It is what has come between us."

"Let go," I moaned to him, so low that my own ears could not hear it.

It is not a surprise to know that Leechtin has lived many lives. It is not a surprise to know that Leechtin has lived with many faces, different enough to seem even other selves. He says that he was different then, eight hundred years before I was born. But can there be another self if there is guilt in this life? Shame in this life? What can I say to judge him who is without peer, when none may sit in judgment of such a one as he is? After he let me go, I lay on the hardwood floor as if he had kicked me. I lay with my arms around my stomach, curled upon my side.

He lay a sheet over me and said, "I was older than you are now." He said this in Latin, so that I could not mistake him, so that he could not make the kinds of mistakes that he makes in English. He told it all to me in Latin, leaving nothing out that could continue to lie between us, for it was true that the secret of his former life in Etruria had become the wedge that had driven us apart. For more than forty years, where Lecne lingered, a shadow had come over us, lengthening and deepening as does a wound unattended. A slash across my lover. An absence. A presence.  A silence.

A boy named Lecne had come to Leechtin in Etrutria. Lecne had reached his majority and yet barely, black-eyed, starved. He had come with a babe in arms, his own, and had been able to read and to write. In those days, the cutting out of the tongue was considered an uncommon but fair punishment for trespass, other crimes, and to correct fault in character, and especially for a slave. Lecne could not speak but had come along the road in search of a house in need of his service. A house like that, of buying and selling, of human trading, of records, and Lecne had come from such a system. 

An interesting child, my lover said to me, the babe in arms. More interesting than the boy who held it. An infant son born to a thief or a liar or both, doll-like and without mark of another master's hand. And yet Lecne had proved far worthier than could have been expected from his first impression, and increasingly, Lecne's reliability had led to his being relied upon. Appreciation slowly births ardor, and instability when coupled with passion is violence. And passion when it is one sided, when the passionate is master, so quickly becomes unspeakable abuse.

"What I did, I did it to spite him," he said to me, "ten years had passed since he had come. He told me that he would take his son and go, that he could no longer endure service under me, but I had become so attached to his boy, and dependent upon him. Do not think that love played any role at all. If he had gone, I would have had him dragged back by the thumbs and beaten to death. He knew every letter of my business. Symbolically, I cut him, but castration did not make him obedient. And so I took toes, so that he could not move quickly, and yet he recovered, and continued to defy me, and so I took his boy from him."

I had seen strange footprints. Three-toed, shaped oddly. Wet footprints in the dirt. Wet footprints upon the porch.

I am not naïve. What is true at this moment, that I am what I am and nothing more, will change as I grow older. Finding myself at a particular moment in time, it is possible for me to be connected to a one who I cannot fathom, whose other faces look upon me as he looks, many faces behind familiar eyes, and he sees my own former face, and this one, and the glimmer of ones yet to come. He sees me as a one who is in the process of becoming something other, in both body and in mind, and yet the mind, unlike the body, is not a linear thing that is able to move itself only forward. For "forward" to exist, there must be a moral absolute that does not exist, and so the mind careens through space, moving with a body that confounds it, and with needs that rip it and mold it, not knowing if it is better of if it is worse or what those things any longer are, until an evening can come where a man of his own people, a spiritual man, can murder a child and feel himself satisfied. And he must reckon with it if he can, considering that he is not a creature of chaos who in everything feels justified.

"I took his boy from him, and I made him like me, for long enough to be a horror. I have seen what the blood does to a child, how without conscience, how without pain its body is to caution it from danger, how without senses entirely a child like we are becomes, and yet even after I broke him apart, I did yet think myself too far gone. I lived another half of a year, comfortably, righteous, until one evening, who can say? I woke to the presence of he who shadows me, who I have heard called Ariel though I do not give it name, and on that day, an energy struck me as if I had suddenly become an animal, without thought except to flee, to hide, to eat."

All day and for all of the evening, Lecne had watched his master fearfully, cautious of erratic behavior and just out of reach. And long after the puer, as I know them, the little boy slaves who relied upon their master for fair treatment and training, long after they had gone to bed, an order had come to gather in the hall that served as both mess and place of worship. And Lecne had moved to go there, but had found himself stopped by an unsuspected force. Something new, something horrifying, something involving teeth.

I remember nothing of what it is like to be drunk of nigh to the point of death, and yet there is a vagueness in me that feels it knows the slow panic of fruitless struggle, of weakness overtaking the limbs, of the terror that comes when the limbs will not respond to the will's order to fight, a narrowing of the world, a swimming up of sleep the instincts know is no sleep at all, and that is how my Leechtin left his Lecne, to succumb. And that is where Lecne was when he must have begun to smell burning flesh, and to hear the brief ringing out of boys terrified for their lives, and the awful silence that must have come quickly, in such a dry season. But that is all that I can imagine about Lecne, for I do not want to imagine that he is like me, or thinks as I do, or ever had the same cares.

Did he love his boy? Did he care for anyone else? Did he? How can I know that?

What sort of man is it who summons his limbs to move, and his eyes to open, to walk upon feet deformed to take a sword, to take the blood by force, and to have lived this long for vengeance alone? And for what end is this vengeance? What by him is so keenly felt that he remains so driven after so long? I do not know. I do not know the answer. I do not want to understand.

He had come these decades, over and over, sometimes lingering near his former master for many months, and sometimes for only a few hours, searching for a weakness, for an opening. And yet, Leechtin said, it seemed almost that this communication, for that is what it was, was enough for Lecne, not to find an opening or an end. And then, suddenly, the one that I have called "lover" realized that in fact, Lecne had only seemed contented in order to conceal a new purpose.

"He had let loose a winding snake into the nest, a spy. And for some time, I observed this snake, and for a long time, it did not bite, and I began to wonder if the snake had poison in its head, this Alois, or if this were only a stalemate too, so that it would be known what Lecne could do, that he could enter my house when he willed it, but then. Lover, he had been poisoning my Escha's mind. He had been doing it all along. Lover, I could not bear it, that Alois had been whispering of sweet death to my own flesh."

"What have you done?" I demanded, curled and not wanting to hear at all.

He did not hesitate. "I did not know that there were twins. I did not know that Alois had a twin. I did not think that something might happen. I only wanted to take this boy and make him confess to me. I could not let this boy escape me. He had to confess. He had to speak to me of himself. I would have let him away without harm of his body, back into Lecne's influence, but now the twin is dead and suddenly there is energy in the air. Lover," he whispered, "it has not been long that I have begun to fear that blood begs for blood."

If it had not happened, if the twin had not existed, the conflict might have remained violent between them only. And yet even then, were we only suspicious that something unspeakable might happen? Surely, there had always been the capacity for loss. We know what losses feel like, and have been familiar with them, and yet how to think of what it really meant that something beyond ordinary violence might occur? That a violence of both body and mind might bring about a death that has done so much damage to us all? And yet how can I speak of what it has done to us, when I know what it has done to that one who I love?

And so I had told Iovita all of it, and he had easily said, "You must tell Laurent, and you must tell him how serious these things are, and what could become of it."

Some may tell you that the timeline was shorter, that between Alois's capture and Escha's death there was only weeks. That is false. We had nearly a year. I do not know if this falsehood is error, that to the long-lived it does not matter how long it was, but for those younger who lived in fear of their lives, it matters more. For my part, I did not tell Escha for nearly the whole of that year. What could become of it? I begged of myself caution, with Escha so fragile. 

What could become of it? For Laurent, for one like him who had been a boy like Escha, it meant closing ranks. He acted quickly once told. It meant a mad panic, a fear, that he must have his eyes upon all that he could not bear to lose, and yet the more that he could gather, the more he seemed to fear.

His eyes, over those months, took on a character of largeness in his face, and unlike himself, he had not been sleeping much if at all. Every arrival underscored the missing, and he had gaze only for them who were beyond his reach, the more pressure for the danger he imagined loomed over them. And this I watched with some anxiety, knowing how erratic he had become, encouraged toward his worst by the poisonous Alois, who had continuously whispered to him what it might be to disappear, to die.

In my bed, in 2003, Iovita kissed my ear. "I don't know why you stay here in the dark, in bed, all of the time," he said, "but is there anything to be done for you?"

"I don't appreciate the formality of your tone."

He held the rim of my ear between his soft lips, lingering there. "It's exhausting to be so serious all of the time, isn't it?" he asked. "Where do you think Leechtin was going?"

"Whatever it is, he will be back soon."

And that is when suddenly, there came the sound of shouting in the kitchen, an argument turning physical, and Iovita said, "Di omnes, that's Escha. Is it our affair? Are we meant to intervene?" He turned in the sheets, towards the door, as if something might appear.

"He is so brittle, these days," I said to him, urgently. "Tell him it's to bed, Iovita, to quiet down and to sleep."

"You don't have to say so much," he said, already on his way out.

I followed him. A choice I made, to follow him. In the hallway, the smell of blood, and when I looked through the open bathroom door, a blond, but with no time or interest in speaking with him, and as I descended the stairs, I only heard Iovita shout, "Don't dare! Escha, noli ire!"

The slamming shut of a screen door. The next moment, my lover beside me, my Faya saying, "I was asleep below the stairs, tell me what now is happening?" sweet with the cloud of sleep in his voice still, but I did not have time to respond to him, and D, the child that Escha loved the best, stood crying out in the kitchen, wailing insensibly, bleeding the terrible amount of blood that face and nose trauma bleeds. Instinctively, I put hands on my Leechtin, beyond thought. I had got a feeling in me that I should hold onto him, not fear, not dread, all gut.

I saw nothing.

I heard nothing.

Of Lecne, descending upon Escha with his sword, slashing him across the belly hard enough to change Escha's direction, I knew nothing. Seconds. Seconds.

His head was facing the door when I came out. He was lying just beyond the last white step of the porch, enough to be half lit by porch light, and half shadowed.

A white button up tucked in. Nice slacks, tailored to hit above the ankle. His arm, curved unnaturally. His hair, beginning to soak up with blood already, as he had struck his head upon the bottom step. Overwhelmingly, the smell of blood, more than we had imagined he might have in him, who had refused it for so long.

Escha, noli ire. I thought. Don't go. Escha, noli ire. Noli ire.

I could not hold Leechtin and so I faded back, out of the light so that the others, summoned by the noise, would not look at me. And why? 

Leechtin crouched by the body on his heels. It was like a little boy's crouch. And then, without a word, he lay himself over the body, covering the head with his arms.

They say, what was he doing? He was in shock. No.

From that moment, he was begging.

From that moment, he was breathing upon the veil that separates the living and the dead.

He was saying, "Noli ire."