I passed much of the next year in suspense. We spent a lean, cold winter growing thinner and huddling around the hearth, and I scraped what cash I could out of the villa's upkeep, neglecting the yearly expense of replacing roof tiles and maintaining the mosaics. The master seemed unconcerned with finding new sources of revenue, as he wandered the cold tiles. He did not acknowledge us, and his silence struck me as unnervingly hostile. 

Nonus, thinking himself helpful, began to refuse food, cultivating a habit of neglected eating that would serve him terribly. He could not be intimidated into sharing a meal, manifesting a fanatic asceticism that would persist in him for some time. Like most forms of asceticism, this one, I strongly suspect, was more about control than helping anybody, as his refusal to eat created rather than solved problems. Aggravating this was the master's new insistence that Escha get first share of everything served to us, that to which Escha is blameless. He did not ask for special treatment, and I cannot blame a boy like him, who had been born into a slave's life and beaten into observing its order. I can blame him for not having the good sense to be respectful of his brothers' upset frustration though. Or rather, I wanted to blame him, and couldn't bear that out. It was nobody's fault.

I think that it was Nonus who resented Escha, but it was Aulus who acted that resentment out. It fell to me to dole out discipline. I must admit that at times, hitting Aulus felt good, because it felt right. It felt like what I was supposed to be doing. He could be very funny about it, resenting me one moment, and answering questions in spite of himself the next. Being smart was no source of pride for him, rather, an instinct. "Donkey," I said to him, after having beat him for smashing a plate, "how do I sweep up these little shards? They're hard to sweep. I could stand her sweeping forever but the cold hurts my fingers." 

"Get a bit of bread," he wept. "The bread will pick up the little pieces. Why'd I tell you? I hope your fingers turn black and fall off, because you are a fool."

After beating a child, it is necessary not to comfort him, and I myself understood how an adversarial relationship with my teachers had strengthened the bonds between brothers. But I was not a teacher. I had never been trained to instruct them, and if the master thought I would be terrible at it, he was right. I tried to teach them rhetoric and social grace, but to be honest, Aulus at the age of ten  was already better than me at those things, and better at teaching them, too. I wouldn't stoop now to pretend to be stupid thinking stupidity looks humble. I am not unintelligent, and I feel that I express myself well. It is only that Aulus brought a natural touch to leadership and speaking tactfully, to applying his knowledge without insulting his listener, that regardless of our six year age difference I deferred to him a lot. It was to his credit that he was no more arrogant than he was. However, for all of his awareness of his gifts, he was far less aware of his emotional sensitivity, and often at a loss to discover how he could be master of himself. I don't think he had any idea he was acting out Nonus's desires rather than his own, throwing tantrums as a result of the tension we lived beneath. Or that wasn't all, but it seemed so at the time.

In late winter, Cassius came quietly to dinner and whispered to me, "Iovita, what is it that I may do now for work?" He touched his forehead and nodded to the pantry gods on the table and pushed Aulus aside to sit on the curved bench.

"You have the horses. You have that," I said to him, equally as quietly, thinking myself magnanimous for giving the horseboy horse-work.

His silence told me that I had overlooked something, as he soaked his bread in watered wine. He kept his eyes turned toward the clay serving plate. "Well it is the case that," he muttered.

"All of the horses are dead."

"He finally understands it."

"When the spring comes, Romans will billet their horses with us. You should keep the stable up until then."

"They won't billet with us," he said, picking through the small pile of nuts on the plate, looking for small ones.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because all of the other horses are dead, vappa," idiot, he said. "Ei! Yeah! Let's kill more horses."

"If you had asked me, I could have found money. For whatever you needed."

"Hercle," for God's sake, he gasped, meeting my eyes finally, "it is you who should be beaten, not the children."

"I don't know what you want," I said.

"Where is the little one? And Nerva?" he demanded.

"Escha is with the master. Nataniellus is in town bathing."

"That is funny."

"What's funny about it? It costs barely anything to go to the bath. "

"Nothing," Cassius said, swatting Aulus's hand as it pinched his leg like a sneaky wasp.

We could be kind to each other, that lean year, but they resented me. They resented everything. I had called Nerva by his personal name in front of them. How could I see that the things that were small to me meant so much more to others? That they each were their own worlds? What did I know? It would take a tragic dimension to reveal it. For me it always does. Aye me. O fate. I feel tired over it. What a boast of position to them, of alien relationships outside of our brotherhood, to say "Nataniellus"! I howl wounded, thinking about it. I cringe.

**

I began to meet with the master privately over the course of that year, as I have also begun to meet with him privately these days. 

I cannot compare those times to these. What we suffered then, we also suffered physically. When he wants to be with me, we often walk together down by the lake edging his property. We walk in silence. There is nothing for us to talk about. There never has been. More than once, he has taken my hand, but it is unnatural, and usually if he asks me questions, I try to answer briefly, without embellishment. I do not know if he wants to be close to me, or if it is only that I am convenient. I have been living in his house now for seven years, and I miss England, even if I do not consider Brighton home. It is not for him that I stay. 

I have said that these days there is a look in Nataniellus's eyes that I recognize. When I ask him if he's all right he presses my hand and asks me if I'm OK. A funny thing to ask me. I feel awkward. There is a tension in the house that gives me a sense of dread, of anticipation, that having lived this long I know is not necessary for cataclysm. A cataclysm needs no emotional prelude. 

It is the case that when disaster came for us, we had no warning. I say so easily.

I had lived through the great earthquake in 66. I had been around four years old then, living with my mother in Herculaneum's dock district, one of many temporary places we lived. My father had still been alive, though indentured to a great plantation a hundred miles away. While I played with a wooden top in the dirt after an early lunch, the earthquake struck, flattening the buildings along the docks, crushing those caught by surprise. My mother worked in a weaver's cell in the afternoons, and so was not home at that time. I lay flat in the dirt until she came home, not long after, and we spent the night in an emergency encampment. 

I remembered clearly how the houses dockside had pancaked flat, and how the smell of rotting flesh first carried to us only on the wind, and how after a few days, we could not escape it. There had been too many dead to bury. We walked among them stacked in the street. We heard that it was worse south of us. As a child, I listened, goggle-eyed to stories of giants beneath the earth, enraged at having been captured, rattling their cages. I dreamed of them, my belly empty, unable to keep food down in the presence of the sweet smell of dead but familiar faces. Nataniellus, in his twenties then, had been housed in a higher rent district, not yet reduced to the cheaper whoring common to the dockside brothels. "From many blocks back," he told me once, blackly, "for the first time we had a view of the sea," and a view also of weighted corpses floating back into the harbor, when mass sea burials were botched.

Up on our hill thirteen years later, we boys were busy fighting each other. I welcomed meeting with the master, because though I feared him, nearly always Nataniellus was there to mitigate the conversations, and so I felt less stressed to be in my master's presence than I would have. Truthfully, by early spring I was more frustrated than anything, with little fears weighing on me that filled me with unease. I was not used to feeling that way. I was used to the little confidences that had occupied my life, that I would be taken care of, that protocol would be followed, that there was a hierarchy, that certain expectations would be met. The master had been so inert. There were too many grey areas. I had begun to imagine that circumstances had changed, and even if for the better, they terrified me. I had begun to suspect that I could not detect disquiet in the master because he intended to sell my brothers in the summer. Horrified, I found that in quiet moments, I had begun to hope against it. It was not that I did not love them. Di omnes, they were not mine to love.

I met with him irregularly to hear directives, and at all hours. One midnight, I felt a hand touch me, shaking me, and it was Nataniellus saying, "Wake up, funny butt," which made me laugh.

"What do you want, funny ear? Something wrong?" I asked, getting out of bed carefully, so as not to disturb the others. The moon was so bright that night that with our door open, with the light from the atrium's open ceiling, I could see Nataniellus almost clearly. He had tied his hair back with a white cord. 

"I don't know why he wants you," he said, "but he wants you."

"Something serious?"

"Escha's right, you're thick. I just said that I don't know."

"You should have thought about that before you came at me. Now I'm part of your life and you have to deal with me," I said, voice full of sleep and unable to quip.

He didn't have to respond to that. I know how obvious it was that I'd been desperate for him. Try to tell a teenaged boy to hide it, especially one who is so proud of himself. I took his arm as we walked across the moonlit atrium tiles and he said, "Holding me like this is the most erotic thing you've ever done."

"Calm down, Red," I said, wiping my eyes with my other hand. 

"I would really like to eat a pear," he said, wresting himself from me as we crossed the master's threshold.

"Then we must get you one," Leechtin said, rising from the bench at the foot of his bed, clothed in fine, black linen. It was so fine that I might have mistaken it for silk, except that I saw how lightly it touched his skin at the collar and elbows, obeying its own curve. "Come here, puer," boy slave, he said to me, both hands open. 

It no longer shocked me to see Nataniellus disrobe without order, which he did as I moved closer to Leechtin. Nataniellus lay himself quietly on the master's bed, the curve of his back and hip silvered by the light. He rested his head against the crook of his arm, soon to be asleep. Leechtin touched my out stretched arms lightly, tracing patterns on them that had no meaning to me, pressing on certain points. Satisfied, he turned me around and pressed the backs of his hands against me, again mysterious. It always made me tingle, to be as studied as a horse about to take a rider, to feel about to race. "It seems that all is aright," he said to my back, "but you must drink more water."

"Dominus, I know that you have called me here for your own reason, but I have concerns," I said to him abruptly. Abruptness never bothered him. Nataniellus has tried to tell me that Leechtin does not think of time in the same way that we do, that niceties have little meaning to him, but that is so much nattering to me. The important bit is that he never thought it impertinent to be direct.

"I'll tell you mine first, shall I?" he asked me, drawing my hands behind my back, as if I were his captive, drawing me close. 

"No," I said, emboldened by the press of his body against my back, by the cool smoothness of his linen on the backs of my legs, my arms crossed between us.

"Bold always. What is the matter?"

When I voiced my concern that he would sell my brothers, he let go of me and turned me around. He met my eyes with his. "Lately, I feel such a sense of dread," I told him, refusing to look away, the loose fears I'd been feeling given shape only by my words. "I feel so that something will happen, and I think that if it were, all I ask is to be with the little ones, and not to be separated. It is for them that I am living." Unburdened, the relief felt immediate. I gazed into his eyes levelly, no longer a pre-pubescent boy so easily lost and overwhelmed by a single look from him. 

"You've grown well," he said, unblinking. 

His lack of blinking made my own eyes feel dry, and I found my eyelashes fluttering. I stood firm, though it would have been a pleasure to do as his eyes commanded to me to do, to press my cheek against the planes of his face, to kiss his flushed lips, to kiss the taut artery of his neck, to devote myself to his will. I felt I was beginning to realize I could be devoted to others. To understand that to want to serve him meant I could want other things. To want to serve, there should not be "want" if there is no will to want with. And if there is will, if there was the possibility of gazing upon other paths, I feared it. I feared wanting what I could not have, what I would not be allowed to have. But I wanted it already. I began to shake. 

Without kohl under his eyes, the lamplight reflected off of his skin almost so that in the near dark he seemed to burn from within. The warm orange tones made him look no more human than he had before, and I felt reminded, as I always was, that I was not speaking to either a man or a god, but something else altogether unknown, something that wanted me near, and that wanted me to be above all genuine. To stroke him, to gush, I knew what it looked like to abandon my ground, or I thought that I did. I could not have known, as I now know, that Leechtin had cursed Vivacio with living, and that the same act for Vasvius had been a boon won from hard work, but the same bloody result. It was the hard work that I wanted to do, though it felt no longer clear what reward I worked for. I did not know the trouble I was in, that all roads with him led to the same place. Even though I had seen it, seen it in how he treated Escha, how well I did not see it. All he could give me was what he had given the others. Standing up straight and looking him in the eyes were the only tools I had, to be what he had wanted me to be. Truly, in that moment, I believed that he could give me my family.

He picked at the short sleeve of my tunic idly, as if it were dirty, which it wasn't. "Orpheus," he said.

No response came from the bed, a silent, "No, fuck you." I wouldn't have known that then, but in hindsight, if all I had was obedience, Nataniellus had only silence.

"And when you feel this bad feeling, when you look around you, what do you notice?" he asked me. 

Staring at him, I noticed how deep the indents beside his inner eyes were, shadows, how sharp were the corners of his mouth, and these tightened only more, when he smiled gently at me, touching me just gently behind my right ear, in the attitude of lovers. I did not know we were having separate conversations while we talked to each other, that while I listened to words, for resolutions to quiet my spirit, Leechtin listened for signs, for omens from me, that he already knew things about the earth I couldn't possibly know. "I see that the hearth burns low," I said. "You must give me permission to cut down another tree."

"I must do nothing."

"You must let me cut down another tree."

"And when you are looking around you, what?" he asked me. "Unusual things?"

"Unusual things?"

"This Nataniellus, he is always telling me, Iovita is so funny. He is so funny. He is never giving a straight answer. You will tell me if you saw something strange," he said.

"I don't know what you want me to say," I confessed, trying to keep my voice steady. "I haven't seen anything."

It wasn't true. I had seen something, except that I had been trying to forget it, and I felt my stomach tighten, and the burning of bile in my throat. How could he know? I had been thinking about other things, and suddenly we were talking about what I thought of as separate fears. Disoriented, I tried to calm the beating of my heart, still his captive. He still held me fast by my crossed wrists.

"Eho," he said, suddenly louder, rebuking me, "Do you think that I cannot smell your fear? Do you think I cannot smell your lie? Do you think I do not know already? You do not understand with what you entangle yourself. You think that a wolf can swallow the moon?"

"There was," I started, "it was," stuttering, "What?"

"Lie to me nothing!" he suddenly burst, pushing me back with the flat of his hand.

My heart, the way I shivered then, from the little hairs on my neck to the arches of my feet, I feel it now, when I realized he could smell a lie before it left my lips. But in a world of things to fear, where with my brothers it was a recreation to discuss the ways I would feel honored to die, a pastime, Leechtin was on that well-considered list and not the shadow I had seen. 

Because indeed I had seen a shadow of the moon that was not Leechtin. But I can tell you right now that it was not what Escha whispered to me that he saw, that he would sometimes climb into bed with me and whisper about in these his last years, that same shadow I would find him staring after in the hall in his babyhood, having wet himself in fear and weeping. It was not whatever he continued to see until he died, frail as was. Unafraid of death, fear colored my soul pitch to find him on his hands and knees outdoors as if he had fallen, or in bed struggling as if to breathe, having seen the shadow he had no name for, that made him claw at me and gasp, "Iovita, I am in love with you, don't you believe me? Do you believe me?" so that I would not leave him. Do you see that I can also smell a lie? It was fear that made him say "love" to me, and weep. I think of him and taste cold iron in my mouth. I think of him and it makes me so angry that I cannot speak, this shadow that Leechtin did nothing about, the shadow that made Death seem kind. I have never seen it.

All I had was my own shadow, that I had seen by the kitchen garden late at night on my way to tend the hearth. I had come into the kitchen to pour myself a little drink and look out the window. It had been the first hot day of the spring of that year, that last year in Herculaneum, and the first hot night. I was wiping my face with a cloth, and when I looked up I saw it. It was standing out by the rock the children sometimes sat on while Cassius brought the donkey around for the cart. 

"I thought it was you," I begged my master, "at first I thought that, but it was too tall."

"A tall shadow?" he asked, and suddenly his eyes took on the warmth of humor, of kindness.

"Yes," I confessed, my heart beating itself around my ribcage like a battered moth.

"You cannot cut down a tree every week," he said abruptly, startling me.

"I didn't," I started, "I didn't cut it last week. I cut the last one two months ago. It was," I said.

"No my dear," he said, pushing my hip so that I would know he wanted me to leave. "You've nothing to fear."

"Nothing?" I asked, as if he'd sucked my breath from me.

He ushered me out and I found myself in the hall so abruptly that I only stood there for awhile in the dark. The lamps in the atrium had all burned down, and the bright moon had progressed deeply enough in its setting that it took my eyes overlong to adjust. When my heart steadied enough that I could be sure I was going to live, I went to tend to the hearth, on auto, as I always did around that time.

I squatted by the red coals in the pit. Our hearth was an open one, and its warmth well distributed through the house if need be. We used it for cooking, for heat, but it was the heart of our house, and good also for prayer, and I squatted there murmuring silently, until I heard the padding of little feet, and the moaning, bubbling tears of a child spooked by a nightmare. Normal spookiness. Ordinary spookiness. "Come on, Nonus," I whispered, stunned to find instead to find that it was Aulus, and I held him between my knees.  

"Praying to the goddess?" he asked me, communicating in hitching, keening vowels.

"Yes, want to help me?" 

"I will," he said, hiccoughing and pressing his head against my face.

"Are the others asleep, Aulus?" I asked.

"Escha wet the bed," he said quietly, his crying done with now that he felt safe. "He said he saw something standing over us. A shadow. Cassius told him he was being too scary but it sounded so real."

"Are the others all right?"

"They're all right. Nonus slept through everything. He's sleeping. Cassius spanked Escha and now they're stripping the bed. I am comforted that you are talking with the goddess."

"Help me talk with her," I said, "poor boy."

"No," he whispered, wiping his eyes with the tips of his fingers, "don't say that about me. No never. I am going to be like you. I am never going to cry ever."

"All right," I said, and kissed the top of his head. "What should we say?"

"We want to not be afraid," he said, starting to cry again, "to accept what we, to accept what we have to, to," he stuttered.

"Don't tell her that, Donkey," I whispered.

"You do it and I'll agree. Tell her what you want and I'll agree," he insisted.

All summer, I told myself that I did not feel the near-daily rumbling of the earth. All summer, I told myself I did not feel the unsettling of our foundations. How could I fight back, even if I faced these things? The rules I knew, the skills I had been taught, what were they? 

And then there came the day when I was standing outside waiting for the children to come back from town with Cassius, and the ground beneath me began to shake so violently and for so long that when I rose again I was certain that they were dead, until they came up the road, certain that I was, too, and we thought that it was the worst thing that could have happened to us. We thought that the smell of burning buildings, the sound of wailing voices that carried up to us on the wind, the fear of aftershocks, knowledge of the dead and dying, was the worst that might meet with us.

We thought that for twelve hours.