"Edepol," by Pollux, shit, "his nose is bleeding again. Iovita, get me a rag," Cassius demanded, signaling me sharply with his finger. 

Nonus hunched over reflexively, covering his nose with both hands over his empty lunch bowl. Aulus swatted him and helped him sit back, tipping his brother's chin up.

Nataniellus, who had sat down to have lunch with us in the kitchen, shrugged from his shoulders the grey mantle he wore to keep the sun off of his face. He passed it quickly around the table to Cassius, who held it to Nonus's gushing nose. Nonus held his bloody hands out in front of himself, frozen.

"This is because he isn't eating enough. I have seen this before," Nataniellus said, his hands folded tightly.

"Shut your mouth. You are diseased," Cassius hissed, a remark that came out uncalled for or not, the cloth beneath his hand beginning to soak through. "Take care of yourself."

"I was born the way that I am," Nataniellus said, speaking of the little seizures we had sometimes witnessed. "It is nothing that I have done."

"Eugape!" Good for you, Cassius snapped. 

"'Stop fighting," I whispered, striking the edge of the table softly with my palm. "Aulus, take Nonus to lie down. How is Nonus?"

"Good," Nonus said, nasally. The two of them went without fuss, sliding around the circular bench in the awkward silence. 

 The three of us remaining continued eating, awkwardness be damned. In the aftermath of the earthquake, there was an awful lot to get done before sunset. Already that morning we had been all around checking and mending fences, clearing fallen tree limbs. If it had been myself and Nataniellus alone, I would have said, "Eat more, Red. You're looking awfully pale today." The truth is that he looked terrible, and had been looking terrible for days. He had grown not only paler but also thinner over the winter. All of us had gone without to an extent, but he had been spending a lot of time by himself, and I wonder if I had been paying more attention if I would have seen him neglecting himself. No one ever asked him to go without for us. He had his own money. What was he doing with it? I looked for all kinds of explanations, when really I could have and should have just asked him. I put it out of my mind, concerned myself with other things, and never did.

It was true that he was ill. I've heard some explanations for what afflicted him, but he didn't name it and I didn't ask. We weren't ignorant then. We could recognize certain patterns, but it would have been unusual for him to have ever seen a doctor, and it would have been part of his job to look after himself. At least, I assume so. I mean, he barely ever spoke to me about his life at the heart of town. I think it entirely likely, though he does not like charity, that as he got older, whatever it was, diabetes, anemia, epilepsy, the effect of repeated concussions, or some combination of them, it was getting worse and the remedies he knew were letting him down. I think it likely that he saw himself getting worse, and unable to fix it, tried to ignore it. He doesn't need my speculation, but there you have it. I don't want to assume that he was feeling any sort of way that would have made him want to feel ill. He was strong enough that day after the earth shook, in broad daylight, to help us clear brush in case of spreading fire, and help the little ones collect clay roof tiles that had shaken off and fallen. He didn't complain a whit or draw any attention to himself except that he looked ghastly by that point and seemed to want to be near the rest of us in a way he hadn't quite before.

All night after the earthquake, we had lain awake, the aftershocks communicated to us through the trembling legs of the bed. We had held onto each other's hands as if we were a trembling collection of telegraph wire, sending messages of silent terror through the tensing and untensing of our muscles. Nataniellus slept among us, not for the first time, barely able to fit. Though he had his own room, the two little ones had taken to him, and they slept curved against him. Only at first light were we able to fall asleep, and then only briefly, as Escha came running in saying, "All of you who will hear," gasping, "all of you, the master is gone. The master is flown."

Escha, when that first hard shaking had calmed, had clawed and cried until I had set him free, running to heel to my protests that I wanted him in my sight. His coming into the room calling out was the first we'd seen of him all night. He looked half-smothered, with his hair crazed from having been rubbed against the master's body, and his face so pale with fright. I briefly recalled the first time I had seen him in that doorway, bow-legged and rosy. It made me feel agitated.

"Come on, come on, sweet boys, little sweet boys," Nataniellus had said, patting Aulus' and Nonus' cheeks with a cupped hand, "let's get up for breakfast time." It was still dark, but the little light coming in behind Escha spelled morning, and breakfast.

"Won't you listen?" Escha asked, sounding unsure, and out of the corner of my eye I saw his foot tuck up behind his ankle. 

"Surely he has gone for a walk," Nataniellus said, helping the children sit up on the edge of the bed. He took Nonus's hands away from his eyes, to stop the boy from rubbing them too hard. He reached for Cassius and Cassius waved his hands away madly so as not to be touched.

"Amabo te," please, please, Escha said, his voice gone with the huskiness of held-back tears, "he hasn't."

"How do you know?" I asked, fussing with my hair. It felt stiff from not having been washed.

"Amabo te," he whispered, hesitant, "please, because he always, he always gives me a little kiss on the foot before he goes."

"It doesn't mean anything," I told him, distracted by the prominence of Nonus's spine beneath my hand. "He'll be back. Come and eat your breakfast. There will be a lot of work to do. We've enough to deal with without imaginary things."

We ate, we cleared brush, the children collected the tiles and piled them up because we could sell the pieces, and Nataniellus said, in late afternoon, "I'm tired. I'm going to lie down."

"Nerva, there's bread in the kitchen, eat some," Cassius said, slick with sweat, wiping his forehead with the already wet back of his arm. The note of disdain in his voice from earlier at lunch had disappeared. 

It was the kind of remarkably hot day that we usually took off. We usually studied inside on hot days like that. I thought, if it were a normal day, we would be studying maths inside. We would be drinking from the cool well and fanning each other with our hands. Even thinking about it made me smile, as I grabbed Escha's retreating hand. It was soft against mine, as he had put on a little weight.

Escha had been crying off and on since he'd woken us up that morning, and I was occupied with keeping him at his work. He kept trying to run off and sit in the peristyle garden to wait for the master, which was a habit I'd hoped he'd grown out of. In fact he hadn't grown out of it at all. It had only been that he always knew where the master was in the past year. But I thought it was a good sign that he was crying, because I thought it meant he was getting through trauma in a healthy way. He and I were going to restore the chickens to their coop together. I thought that I would just keep everybody at work so we wouldn't be thinking about what was going on down the road in town, and what the smell of burning on the wind meant.

So we were all busy. All afternoon, we kept at getting the land back together, and I kept looking over my back for rovers, for thieves. We located our last goat wandering down the road and brought him back on a rope. As the sun began its march toward evening, I said, "Eia age," come along then, "let's sharpen blades." If there were going to be thieves, we would be ready for them. We settled into the work, others on the ground, Escha and I on a bench so that I could keep an eye on him.

"I don't want to fight without the master here," Escha said, tugging on my tunic quietly and confusing me. "I don't want." He had been, for some time, sitting quietly with his sword between his knees, his chin down. I'd thought him pouting, not thinking, which was unfair to him. I'd never known him not to be a thinker. He let the sword drop to the dirt and rested his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands.

"What difference does it make if he is here or not?" I asked him softly, so as not to interrupt the others' conversation. "Won't you protect your house?"

"Oh," he sighed, "the master is the house."

I wiped dirt off his cheek with the palm of my hand, unsure of what to say. "Come here, little bubble," I whispered, "Let's wash up for dinner. It's been a bit. Do you remember the wash up song?"

He'd been washing up with the master for some time, before dinner. I bent down and brushed his sweaty hair back from his temples with my palms. 

"Oh yes, I know that song, that one I like," he said, trusting me. "But it's early for dinner. The sun is still high up there."

"Can you keep a secret?" I asked him, handing him the gladius he hadn't wanted to sharpen.

He took it by its thick pommel and said, "Aye, yes. A secret."

Since I had first seen him I had known that he was a brave boy, who seemed to understand more than he actually did, yet always keen. He loved a secret, to be given something just between us on pain of death. "Between us?" I asked him, to focus him.

"Yes," he said, and touched the gold ring the master had given him, the gold signet ring he wore on his thumb, "on my ring. I swear," and took my sunburned arm, leaning against me.

"The secret is that before dark, we should go inside. I believe you that the master is gone, but if the master is not here, what is there to stop thieves? Even men we know from coming inside?"

"What will they thief, Iovita? We've nothing," he said, in a tone that seemed naive, though I know he knew very well what men wanted from boys who had nothing else to give.

"You have yourself," I told him, my face near his. "I do not want you to be afraid, but if I must kill a man to protect you, I will. Will you protect me, carissime?"

"But I didn't sharpen my sword," he said, despairing, his eyebrows knitting, his entire face an apology, his lips parted.

"I'll use yours. I'll give you a knife. What did I tell you about crying? Can you be a soldier today?"

"I can be one any time," he whispered.

They were the last words Escha spoke to me until the master returned, and it was Escha who found Nataniellus upon the floor. 

Nataniellus, falling, had cracked the back of his skull upon the edge of the stone fountain in the atrium. He had collapsed in a dead faint, and waking from a seizure, had foggily dragged himself toward the reflecting pool, not far away. He had been thinking, he told me, thinking fleetingly, "I have to wash my head," in terror of the blood he pulled himself through, running upon the adrenaline of fear, "I have to wash my head or he will tear me apart," weeping, fearing the master and what he had seen the master do.

But of course he had not reached the pool, and when I followed Escha, whose rosy features had blanched away to dead paleness, I clearly saw the handprints Nataniellus had printed in his own blood, and I turned him because he was drowning in that blood, and the children helped me drag him into the master's room, because it was the quietest place I knew in the house.

I turned him and I moved him because I did not know what to do, because where I thought training would take over, I found nothing. I think I said, "Lover, lover," to him, like a fool, unable to hear myself, trying to wake him. We sat by him in the master's room. We prayed. We covered his wound with clean linen, afraid to touch the back of his head, propped pillows against his back so that he could not turn onto the wound. 

I paced, unable to hold a thought in my mind, or to think of washing the atrium tiles clean of his blood, to tell the children to eat or to care for the animals. 

Outside, where Escha wandered by twilight, seeking the master, wolves bayed for Herculaneum's corpses. 

**

I had seen a lot of people die. Aulus and Nonus, Cassius, I think they had seen many boys die in the camp, unable to bear up under the heat and the physical demands of our training. Disease bred there and spread quickly. Fire devastated the camp more than once, burning to death children who had been ordered not to leave the tents, never to leave the tents at night. Infection was common. We had seen the bodies of children in various states. I have already said so.

I don't know what sort of familiarity Escha had with death, but his features went stony, set. When he set his face like that, he was all eyes. He brought me small snacks while I sat by his nurse, and whenever spoken to, he only showed me his knife solemnly and left me to myself. 

Whenever Nataniellus woke up that night, I leaned in gently, but he was only saying crazy things to me. "I smell blood. You don't know," he told me, whispering, "what I have seen. Iovita, help me to get out of here."

"Nobody is going to hurt you," I told him, unsure. His tone, that he believed in it, was convincing.

Startled out of a light sleep early the next evening, I found him trying to speak to me, seeming more lucid than before. "In Herculaneum," he begged me, trying to sound reasonable, his gaze surprisingly steady for a man so grievously injured, "don't you see all of the children gone a'begging? All of the poor little children?" 

I sat forward and took his hand gently over the soft coverlet, so that I could hear him, but also so that I could see him better in the waning light. His face had become so welcome to me, and my eyes so needy. I whispered back, "I don't know what you're talking about."

"No," he said, his fingers loose in mine, his red hair mercifully clean of blood from washing by Aulus's gentle hands. "Always, they come to our brothel door, to our windows, they say very softly, 'Just a heel, just a rind.' You have been to other houses. You know what I'm talking about."

"Of course I know."

"Iovita," he told me, his eyes wet. "What do you think. Tell me what," he whispered.

"You're saying they stay away because of the master."

"No, Iovita," he said, his hand tight in mine.

"You are saying he is hurting them but you have not seen that. You don't know what you're talking about. Of course I know that the master is strange, but you can't say that sort of thing, that somebody is killing children," I babbled. "You just want me to wash you because you've hit your head and lost your mind. I don't smell anything. It's fine. We'll take care of you."

"Iovita," he whispered. 

"Yes, dear," I said.

"Kiss me on the ear."

I stopped talking for a moment, swallowing. "You're joking. You really liked that?" I asked him softly.

"Come along," he whispered, managing one of his mischievous looks.

I got up and gently moved in on him, trying not to depress the bed too much. Beneath my hands his skin felt warm to me, feverish from infection, his thin tunic sweat through. He had been living for eighteen hours with a skull held together by flesh, with his head open. His skin had taken on a waxy cast, but with my eyes closed, the little gasp he gave when I put my tongue in his ear was like every other time, when an inexperienced boy had tried his best, and when I heard him say, "Come away," the sound of tears in his voice made mine run, because we both knew that he was going to die, but not when. 

"I can carry you home," I wept to him. "I'll carry you."

"I can't believe I hit my head, after all of that," he said, more aspirating than speaking, instead of calling me foolish. We both knew what had happened to the dockside brothels the last time there'd been so much shaking, twelve years before. We both knew what was happening down the hill, what I would be taking him into, and for what? To no one. Soon the problem would be disease down there, spreading through dirty water, killing whatever of his beloved children who might have escaped all of the rest.

"Yeah you're pretty dumb, Red."

"Stop crying, you little wet puppy."

"I'll stay with you until the end comes, shall I?" I asked him, wiping my nose on the back of my hand.

"I liked it when you looked in my eyes, too," he breathed. 

"I'll stay, will I?" I asked quietly.

"Expect you will, yeah," he said.

I stroked his wrist and asked him if he wanted water, but he said no, because he knew that thirst could kill him faster than infection could. After awhile, I fell asleep.

I must have slept for hours, and at first I couldn't be certain what had woken me up. Until I turned, to see Escha standing in the doorway, in the dark.

"Escha," I said, intending to scold him playfully for scaring me.

"Carissime," he whispered, "There is someone standing outside in the dark. He's been there all night, but something is different now."

"What is it?" I asked, cold from his words, stock still in my chair, my eyes traveling over Nataniellus's body. 

"There are more of them." He told me they were standing in a line, too far away to see well. "I'm going to go back, but can I have my sword?"

"Take it." 

I waited for any sound, to hear a boy cry out, but instead it was with great relief that the next touch I knew was the master's hand. 

**

The master's door was only silk. When Nonus whispers to me in the dark that he remembers every sound it is surely the truth, and what I try to forget, he cannot. That we knelt on our knees in the atrium, how I tried to get them to play games with me, how I tried to make them go back into our room, into the kitchen, outside with the wolves, but that we weren't allowed to leave that room, because outside there were other things. Nonus whispers to me that he vowed never to make trouble again, and that when we began to hear struggling, in addition to the quiet weeping we had been hearing for awhile, Cassius told the little ones to cover their ears, but they didn't. Nonus whispers that when we heard the unmistakable sound of a body hitting the floor, heavy and thick, that Cassius grabbed my arm to keep me from rising. My legs would not have supported me if I had tried. We stayed there until we realized that no one was coming to relieve us. Even when we rose, Nonus says, I kept Escha close to my body, almost between my knees so that he couldn't get away. But Escha was not trying to get away either.

We slept on the tiles, under the cool breeze from the open ceiling. 

"I heard the sound of foreign prayer," Nonus tells me, sitting by the window now in my room. He is wearing an oversized, plaid wool cardigan, like a wrap. He looks cozy. His skin looks cool. His voice is husky from lack of use. He comes in to see me writing and has sat on the padded bench by my window. He has come in to sleep beside me. I want to talk to him about something else, but he knows, and instead he talks to me sadly of all of this. 

"I woke to that sound often, to the names of foreign gods. You do not know this, but I heard it most nights. You would not think it, but he cared nothing for us little ones, did the master, and behaved as if we were not there. We little ones, not his flavor, were nothing but little flies he did not care to swat. For you, for Escha, for our Mr. Porter, even for Cassius, he behaved himself. We, myself and our Aulus, heard him pray to foreign idols all the time. We did not think him worthy of you, your admiration. I think so still, and yet here we speak of what he did as if it were special, rare. Do not whisper," he rasps quietly. "Be frank. Do you think our Porter needs your pity? A story like the one you mean to tell? A story you can enjoy? A pretty one?"

"No."

"Then do your worst. Escha was sweet to you because he admired you, but he was harsh to the two of us closer to his age. He could be brutally dismissive, little shit. We were afraid, but he had a raw desire for the master's regard, and pushed us aside. Don't think it the silly games of children. Escha's need for the master's love was ugly. He dreaded his being abandoned. Attention fed him as much as it starved him. The more he felt liked, the more he feared the loss of it. Loved him? Sure, he loved the master. He would tell you all of this himself. The more you give of yourself, the more someone gives you, all the more you have to lose for both of you. He said that to me. When our boy died, our Aulus, he tried to tell me which way was up and I cracked him nice, did I? He was always like that."

"I didn't know you hated him so much, little cat."

"Aye why not. A man's got to keep himself occupied," he says, pushing up the window to let in the cool evening breeze.

"You feel that way even after what's happened?" 

"What continues to happen, you mean," he says, and he gestures me over. "He and yourself, you bled. I for you, for Aulus, for our Porter, our Nataniellus. Certainly we did. Aye we are very strong. Weeping, wailing. Now you tell me this," he says, as I come to him and points out the window. "Now I tell you what's the point. Now see here."

I look, I duck under the windowframe and lean out. 

"What in God's name is that?" he asks.

At first, I see nothing. The pale half-moon in its milky halo, the dark all the more dark for it. Transparent cloud-cover. Then it is there, and I see it, and it is as if I am touched by the teeth of Charybdis, my insides run cold with the water of my death. Outside, below, a wandering figure dressed in white. Outside, below, blond hair. I duck back in, whipping myself away from the window. 

"Don't call out," Nonus whispers, "I beg you don't."

"Cat," I breathe.

"At first we saw it and we thought, praise the foreign gods, praise a foreign heaven, for the master's prayers have borne sweetest fruit, but do not speak to it, I warn you. You see because Nataniellus called out to it, and when it turned to us," he licks his lips and draws his wrap tighter, "no. We saw. No. What is it? Now it comes every early morning. Iovita. The same hour. What is happening? Abandon your order, the writing. You cannot ignore this."

"What can I possibly do, Nonus? What do you want me to do?"

I can only do this. I will tell you all I know, but please tell me if you know what is happening now. You, who have known so many of us, what is happening now? Mini? With my own eyes, I have seen all manner of dying. I have seen all manner of bleeding. I have. I have written it.

But I promise you, who have been too afraid to come and see Laurent's body -- it does not bleed. It cannot bleed. Where there was a heart to beat blood through it, there is nothing. He is a ripped open corpse, without any possibility of life. What is there to understand? 

What I have started I will finish. You have my word. But, if blood is what we need to live, what is it? What are the shadows that have been walking behind us? What are the things that we have seen? What have we done to the gods? We wanted no part of this poor life the master has made.

Tonight I sleep beside my brother, but in the night I hear it, the clicking of fingernails on glass downstairs. And I amend this to say, that every night since, I swear to you, the same sound. And it is no one that I know at all.