I have heard many times, "Tell me how it was." I hear it whispered, "Tell me how it was, please." It is not only me who remembers badly. I sit at night, and close my eyes in the dark, listening for frogs, and in the summer I hear them sometimes, and it is then that I remember best. If I smell a strawberry or pomegrantate, I am back there. If I see a child twist his knife to open an oyster, I go back there. Between this world and that one is only a thin distance. If I close my eyes with you now, and you touch my neck with your gentle fingers, and whisper "Faya", I will think you my lover, who was so changeable and hard for me to understand. Perhaps if you touch me there, very lightly, I will kiss you, and murmur to you, and it will be like we are young lovers, because when you say love, I go all the way back, for just a moment. I feel my body, as it was, as an old man in the sun, with white in my hair, of human flesh, and it is not hard to imagine who I was before this. But when you stop touching me, I will lose him, my old self. Mini, touch me a moment, so that I can tell you the story you want to hear. Pretend to be my Nataniellus, and ask me what you want to know.

I don't know what this word means, "diabetes." Say it to me again. Oh don't tell me that he was sick. I didn't know. We didn't know what that was in those days. Speak no more of it. It disturbs me. Oh kiss me like that again, on the collarbone. This shade of lipstick does not suit you. Be quiet now, the spirit comes. Are they your lips or his? My mind had broken, and that is not a lie. Maybe Escha whispered to you that it was, once, maybe he never told you about this at all, but I was not lucid. Perhaps that is not important. You know that once he attaches himself to someone, Escha will not let go, and you have been in his hold, but it is that I am the same. Yes I am distressed. Do not fear for me, sweet child. I see why he liked you well.

My lover was angry with me, my Nataniellus, after that evening, and he stayed angry awhile, and I was so mad with desire of him, of his body and his love, that I left the house, because I could not stand it. I went into cool water, the quiet water, in the forest some miles away, and Yaksha was there, great silent bird. He sat on a rock and watched me swim into the deep, and I saw him stand up on his rock as I let myself sink below its surface. I saw his strange, kind eyes grow wide, and mouth open, but my body was hot with madness, and the small thread of me who was Leechtin, the one you know, said "Go in the water and grow colder, my darling, and come out no more until the madness leaves us, and the memories go, and it will be alright then," and I listened to him, my true self, unhurt by the many years, who is gentle. And there at the bottom, in the silty, murky water, it was cool enough to close my eyes and pass away to an inner darkness for several days.

There under the water, my body was much soothed, and mind much calmed.

I dreamed of Nataniellus there, and his playing of the lyre, and of him eating tiny clams, and licking his fingers of honey and rosewater. I dreamed myself close to him, and measured my faculties, and thought of Escha, who loved me well. I listened to my whispering self, whose voice came like the current, passing my ears and disturbed by the vibration of fishtails and swimming children. When after those few days I felt a different self, and washed of confusion and anger, I walked home again, dripping, with Yaksha a silent shadow on my trail. I shed my heavy, wet robe, and he picked it up, so that when I walked into my house, I was wearing only a white tunic, which clung to my skin.

And it was deathly silent there, and when I listened, there was the quiet sound of a single voice praying. I walked the atrium, around the shallow pool, and reaching the other side, found dried red blood on the marble cladding, a trail of it smeared full with little footprints, which led to my cubiculum, and Nataniellus was there. 

I did not think about it. There was a bolt of fine red linen tucked away, and I ripped it, and I bound him. You, who are kissing my neck, is it Nataniellus? Yes. I bound you. I'm sorry. Don't worry about my tears. I'm sorry.

And you didn't struggle. You said, "Faya? I thought you'd left us. I couldn't eat. I couldn't go out. I'm sorry. I fell. I hurt my head. I'm cold. I'm dying," and I should have spoken to you, but there was no feeling in me. And when I had your hands bound, behind your back, so you couldn't fight against me, you began to ask me "What?" and then you were gone again, passed away into those vacancies which clawed my heart, and you broke in through my veil of quietness, of tranquility, and I held you. 

I saw that your head was cracked in the back, and that the children had washed your hair of the blood. And when I bit your neck, you came back suddenly from your vacancy, gasping at the pain, but you were so tired, you could not cry out, and you cried softly against me instead, gently. Very gently. 

I'm sorry that I bound you. I know you would have touched me lightly, and told me that you were alright, and said "Faya, I love you, don't worry, I'll stay with you," but forgive me, Iellus, I didn't know how to trust you then, holding you upright while you cried from the pain of my teeth, and whispered "Why?" because it hurt you. When you stopped speaking, I slipped the linen from you, unbound your hands, and let go of you because I was shaking, and oh, you fell then, dropped, and when your back hit the floor it shocked the air out of you, and I will never forget that sound, as if a ghost had passed from between your lips, and your eyes rolled up back into your head. 

You were grey with the breath of the grave, and I was so frightened that for a moment while you shook, as if possessed with jealous spirits, it froze me, and I only gasped to breathe. 

I'm sorry. I should have held you. I should have said anything, to comfort you. I should have taken you to bed and, oh, when I gave you the blood, I should have warned you. When the violent shaking left you, and you looked into my eyes, so tired, you said "Kiss me" and I didn't. To this day, the way that your hands shook and your eyelids trembled and that I slapped you, haunts me. You wept and turned away from me and I forced you to drink it, pressed you to the floor beneath me, and you were gagging on the blood, choking. I said that you were my Orpheus and that you were beautiful to me, and that I loved you, but I could not give you comfort while you died, because I was broken as well, and unable to breathe, but I cannot tell you it now, and it drags upon me until I feel as if I am being buried in the earth. 

And when I pulled back from you, your skin freckled with blood from the struggle, and mouth a shocked, scarlet hole, you were gone. You breathed and your eyes were open, but you were not there, and I held you on the floor, and all sound and light and spirit I had been missing rushed back into my body at once, and brought me to sob over your body, and I stayed there with you until Escha came, and said "Master, what's happened? Master, what's happened? Talk to me, talk to me," and I think I showed my teeth to him.

But Escha, he was never afraid of me, you know that. I let him call Iovita, and together they put you to bed, and closed your eyes so that you seemed peaceful, and Escha put little flowers in your hair, and you seemed to dream. And at night, I whispered to you to come back from the underworld, because I couldn't follow, and you breathed deeply of the autumn air. I stayed with you always, don't think I left you for a single moment. I stayed beside you, and I gave you blood, which when I touched your lips you drank, and I said "Come home to me" and sometimes it was like you heard. I said "Someday when you're strong enough come home to me" and your soft lips drank warm blood from me, and though my skin had warmed from you, I felt serene, and though my mind swam in the warm ether, beside you all was pleasantness, and I whispered "Someday come" and I said "Children, bleed" and their blood fed the spirit inside of you, so that you could come back. I whispered to your body, to your vessel, grow strong, and when it had been a month without you, I wept. 

I tore at you with gentle fingers, and I whispered to you in my native tongue, and I kissed your open mouth, and then it was Escha who started bringing blood, staring and ripped apart, and I didn't have the strength to tell Iovita that I refuse it, my child's blood, and after awhile, Escha was different, and not smiling anymore, and I couldn't move from your side. 

I had no strength. I held my hands up to a god I had forgotten and whispered his name and begged him for your spirit, and I asked my wife and my son to find you and return you to me and promised them a spirit in return, any number, and oh oh oh I've paid it. They licked my child's blood and I fear they liked the taste of him, and you came back to me in time, you whispered against my neck, "Sanguis" in my ear, through tight lips, and bit me with your sharp teeth, the first to bite me savagely in four thousand years, and tore my hair from its pins. And for a few days you were not yourself and I kept you in that room with every ounce of strength I had, so that you would not rip the children apart. 

You didn't remember any of it. You whispered to me, "You came home, I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep," like nothing had happened to you, and you held my face, and touched my neck where you had torn me with your teeth, and kissed it. And you were yourself again, which made me breathe so rapidly from relief that you panicked and tried to rise. I'm sorry. I was tired. I should have comforted you then, too. I should have used my breath to tell you that I had missed you and loved you and that I couldn't speak because I ached, and never felt hurt by you at all, because I fear that you were in anguish then, and I'm sorry that I was not better at reading you, or keeping hold of time, or knowing what to say, or being the lover that you wanted, and I always will be sorry. And I'm sorry, that when the earth shook again, and Ariel whispered in my ear to leave that place and run, I left you.

Oh, don't stop kissing me yet, let me stay there, ignore my tears. Let me stay with him a moment longer. Please. Please. Touch me and whisper. Oh, don't think for a moment I made a choice to take Escha with me. Oh, the thought of not taking him never entered my mind. He has been my weakness always. Speak to me of weakness, oh, Orpheus. Oh, Mini, when you kiss me, it is as if his young spirit is in your lips.

You ask me why, Mini. I left Nataniellus because he had promised to care for me. Do you understand? If I had kept him for myself, he would never have been strong enough. Yes, you are wise to say nothing. You know how much human weakness there stayed in my Escha. There is no forgiveness for that either. They are right to tell me that it is my fault that he is dead, and the more they tell it me, the more I wish for death myself. Yes. Oh my little one, I am sorry that this happened. Forgive me. My child is dead. His body is cold. He was my child. My child is dead. His body. Oh, perhaps I will cross that river. Oh, there must be a way.