Outside of the steward's quarters, three frightened frogs were crowded around. They looked up as I approached, eyes wide, the three other boys who were training for house duties, between the ages of eight and eleven. They were holding onto each other, a unit, which I noted, and when I looked on them, they quailed together. 

"What happened, children?" 

One stepped forward, untangling himself from the arms of his brothers. He took a deep breath in and crossed his arms behind his back.  "Master, he hit one of the guests. He slapped one with his left hand."

"And then?"

"Our praeceptor, Vasvius, tried to drag him out but he wouldn't go, sir. As soon as Vasvius touched him, he started screaming and throwing things. He dumped wine and garum on the guest who touched him, and the guest jumped up then to punish him, but they fought. We couldn't pull him down, sir. He was as if possessed by spirits. He rages yet."

"Your name, young orator."

"This is Nonus," he said, pointing behind him at a vaguely feline boy, younger than himself, "and Cassius," the oldest, who looked on me with shock and horror, "and I have no name, sir."

"Aulus."

"Oh," he said, eyes widening, "oh." His brothers pulled him back, as the sound of breaking pottery sounded from the steward's room. "Oh, oh, thank you, oh, sir." 

"Barricade yourselves in your room, children."

When I pushed aside the curtain which opened into the stewards' quarters, Vivacio was standing very still with his back to me, but I knew that there was a knife in his hand. I stepped around the sharp shattered ceramics, and put my arms around his waist, squeezing him from behind. He burst into tears, hand with knife shaking, pointed at himself.

"No, no," he moaned, hand tight around the handle. 

"What are you doing, little ship," I whispered, calling him by the name I'd called him when he was young. "Come back to port from your sea, little ship. Come back to the warm, calm water. Calm. Calm. Where it's warm."

His knees unlocked and then I was holding him up. 

"Come back, the water's too rough, little boat," I hummed to him, a song we used to sing when he felt far too overwhelmed as a child, so sensitive, so easily hurt. He began to whimper, keening like a young dog through his tears. "It's alright. It's alright."

"Faya," he gasped, unable to control his breath.

"What happened?"

"He touched me," he wept, "the senator's son. I know what I'm supposed to do. Faya, I couldn't do it. He called me 'lover' and tried to take me to the kitchen. He grabbed my arm. I didn't mean to slap him with my left hand, but he was holding my right. Faya," he swallowed, chin tipped back, cheek against my cheek. "I'll just kill myself. See?"

"Why, Vivacio?" I asked, knowing very well.

"Because then, your honor will be restored, and I won't have to feel like this," he swallowed again, nodding, "and it will all be put right."

I sighed out a breath. "Vivacio, do you know why I do what I do?"

He shook his head, breathing too quickly, trying to stop his tears.

"We are giving those boys a better life. Do you understand? When you teach a boy to use a sword, they let him join a company, rather than using him on the front line, where he will certainly die first. If you teach a boy to read, and recite the words of the muses, they put him in the house, where he will get to keep his soft hands. And sometimes, young masters might want to sleep with him, but that is his price. That is what he pays the Fates, and it is better than his life. Don't give them your life when all they ask for is a little innocence. Their scissors are sharp, and there is no sewing back together what they've cut, little boat."

"I've paid them," he whispered. "Master, I've paid them."

"So have we all," I said.

For a little while, it was so quiet that I could hear a little heartbeat hiding outside the doorway, with its little gasp on every stroke. I closed my eyes, holding onto my shadowy one, the ghostly child who couldn't hold a sword at four, because it was too heavy for him, who was always dropping things at ten, always slipping away to have private tantrums in the garden, hiding beneath the flowers flushed with color. 

"I won't let you die, sweet little thing," I said. "You belong to me. This is not within your power. Do you understand?"

"I," he started, "since I was a child." He stuttered, "Master, love you," shaking his head, shaking his head, "master, since I was a child," empty of tears, outside of his senses, drained.

But I was angry then, because he had tried to take something from me. I felt the emotion rise with puzzlement, a little in wonder of it. "You will be punished," I said, and things began to go quickly then.

"No. Please, sir," he said, beginning to weep again, helplessly, panicking. 

I felt his knife hand stiffen and pushed it off, took him by the hips and tossed him onto his bed, which knocked his breath away. When I climbed on top of him, he was struggling, turning his head from side to side, "Yes, kill me, yes, kill me," touching me at the hips, at the shoulders, driving his fingernails into my back through the thin linen of my tunic, writhing between my thighs. He threw his head back, hot with adrenaline and ecstasy, as I touched him at the throat. He took my hands and made them clasp his neck, but I drew them down his chest.

It had been a very long time since I had felt anything. Anger. Passion. A terribly long time. When I put my lips near his throat he kissed my temple, murmuring a prayer to the god of the underworld and beginning to laugh, mirthless laughter, which ceased at the bite. The sinking in of teeth, which is not the gentle prick of love, commenced him to screaming, and clawing at my skin which does not rip at the urging of human fingers, And he tried to roll his hips, but my body does not move unless I wish it, nor ever yield until the work is ended. When I pulled back, my eyes rolling in my head, he was breathing short breaths, living though unaware of the world, and I stumbled off, pushing my way out of the room, and of the house, stumbling over little Escha, who went against the wall, barely seen, but who had seen everything.

My body thrummed in and out of the present, and I stumbled, I thought myself somehow in India, which made me cough and thrash, fingers at my throat, trying to breathe. My head lolled on my neck, shoulders stiff, trying to see. In India, there had been another, an old one, who had cared for my young body, and in my confusion, I thought him near. 

Outside, in shallow reality, it was still night and I went to my knees, head pressed to the ground, body low and vibrating, undulating under the blood, fingers digging into the dirt. "Yaksha," I gasped, "Yaksha, Yaksha, Yaksha," whimpering in terror, overwhelmed with feeling. 

Hands touched me, lifting me, a sound, like the rattle of a snake, and so an old friend entered my life again, who had never been far away. My fevered mind wondered if he was real, body fluid with the feeling of youth. The blood was pulling on my insides, pushing and pulsing, whispering about the unspeakable things I have done, which I have wanted so to forget. 

"Yaksha," I said, "take it out of me, take it out of me," hysterical, trying not to scream, felt teeth, crumpled. A hand covered my mouth and my body went sideways, held up by him who smelled of birds, of the water. The blood leaving my body was as a sheer veil being pulled from every reach, from where it had caught at the tips of my fingers, from my toes, from around my heart and tucked behind my liver, from behind my eyes and inside my ears, quieting my shaking, loosening my limbs. I closed my eyes and rocked with the dizziness, the pounding of my heart in my head moving me in his arms. He kissed the place where he had drawn it all out and held my face with his hands, "Stop," he said, in my own language, "stop."

"I am alone," I said, speaking to him in his.

"Foolish," he said.

"I am afraid."

"Stupid."

"Help me."

"Stop talking," he said, rumbling, laughing at me.

Then my belt was gone from my waist, and the hammered gold bangle from my wrist.

In the dark, with the moon behind clouds, I followed the rattling sound coming from his throat, for some time, heading downward toward the water, and when we arrived there, he lifted my tunic over my head, and tumbled my hair down from its bounds, and said, without speaking, "Go into the water." 

I went, though it was black like the blood he had pulled from my body, licking over my skin.

"My youth, my hours," I said, without sound, in thanks, and he heard. 

There are things older than me. There are things so old they are not vampire, who wander the world. But Yaksha is not one of them, old friend, whose name is only "demon", and who haunts me for his amusement and his comfort, laughing at me from a short distance until I dipped my head below the surface. He took my steward's blood away, and when I came up again, he was gone, replaced with something I felt deep inside my body.

I could see far in the distance silhouetted in lamplight from the far houses behind him, an old thing who spoke to me then in the whisper of leaves in the trees. Ariel, who came from the earth. I heard my true name, touching me, like light fingers, probing my body for cuts, bruises, tears. "You? You? You?" I felt him asking.

"No blood," I said, in the water, "go away, Ariel," who is attracted to death, who thrills in destruction, whose presence is portentous of both.

Touching, touching. Rushing in the trees, the lapping of water, a golem who has followed me for thousands of years, for what purpose I don't know. I said, "Ariel, is something going to happen?" 

Yes.

"What?"

But then he was gone, as if a cloud had moved away from the face of the moon, and the leaves were quiet again, and the wind only wind. There was the clear voice again of a boy playing the lyre, distant, as there had been earlier in the evening. The music was something solid, belonging in the world of the moment, and I clung to it to keep me in the present. It soothed. There was a troubled notion, beating in me, that I had become somehow terribly lonely, which made me naked, afraid, and suddenly vulnerable. The blood, too much of it, had lit a dark place in me, of feeling and needfulness.

I had known for some time what young Escha had learned of me, which was that I was losing my faculties slowly, unable to focus my mind well, and often that I was sideways in time, somewhere else, occupying space in memory rather than in the present. It is a dangerous way to be, confused and clouded. But I have lived long, and done horrors, and cannot face them. And so I sat by the water, washing the blood from my tunic, and listened to the strumming of the lyre, which was not meant for my ears, stroked by the gentle wind blowing in from the sea, safe for the moment, because the wind was only wind, and what memories the blood had awakened, slept.