When I came upon Escha, in the shade of afternoon, he had picked a small pile of flowers from the garden behind the kitchen. As I sat beside him, he was picking tiny violets from near the wall. There were mini-callas, fragile purple roses, marigolds, and one amarylis which had fallen off the pile into the dirt. I picked it up.

"Don't touch them," he said, taking the flower from me.

"They're dying now, Escha," I told him, picking up two late-blooming crocuses. 

He took them from my fingers and put them back in the pile. 

"Why do you pick them?" I asked.

"Beautiful," he murmured. "Love beauty."

"This is your tutor's work. Won't Vasvius be angry that you've picked all of his flowers?"

He didn't say a word, gesturing for me to duck my head. 

"What are you doing, little one?"

"Make you pretty," he said, taking one of the roses, which was already beginning to wilt in the heat, and putting it in my hair.

Though he had been living among the other boys for a year and a half, his Latin still carried the accent which marked him as foreign. His face was blotchy red with the summer heat. I touched his cheeks and he pushed my hands down.

"Stop," he murmured, and carefully dotted violets into my hair beside the little rose. I felt his hot fingers working, radiating heat onto my forehead. 

"What do you think of your new nurse, Escha?"

"Hate him."

"Why?"

He shook his head, face set on putting the flowers in my hair. He picked up one of the mini-callas, green at the base flushed to white at the tip, and tried to force it to sit on my head. 

"It's too big, sweet one."

He continued to force it.

"Try a smaller one."

He nodded and worked on twisting the stem off another rose, head tipped down, all wild blond hair. 

I put my hand out and touched his head, looking for the curls he had come to me with. "Why hasn't Vivacio been brushing your hair? You look unwashed."

He deflected my hand with his, brushing it away like a buzzing bee, still not speaking, distant.

"Puer," I said, little slave. 

"He doesn't like me. When it's time for a bath he says it takes too long to wash my hair. He wanted to shave it but Vasvius stopped him. I hate it. It's ugly." 

"Is that why you're in such a bad mood?"

"No bad mood," he said, reaching up to tuck the rose by the violets. 

"Your tutor is jealous of you, little one."

"Why?"  

"Perhaps because he feels abandoned. Perhaps he is lonely, and finds you very loved."

"What does it mean, abandoned?" he asked, pulling stems off the bigger flowers, snapping them between his little fingers. "What is this thing, 'love', to make him so jealous? There's nothing to do with him."

The smell of earth and plant flesh reached up from his hands to my face, making its way inside my head. My eyebrows pinched together at the aching of my sinuses, overwhelmed by the odor. "Come, put your flowers in the shade," I said. 

He moved to do so as I rose. When he was finished, he came and opened his arms to be picked up, which I did, because even at seven he was small enough to be easily carried. 

As the light faded into evening, I washed his hair carefully in cool water, having agitated soap into a large iron cookpot. He waited on a stool while I went to refill the vessel with clean water from the atrium. And when I came back, Nataniellus was there, stooped, arms at his hips like a chicken, talking to Escha. 

"Are you alright? Are you cold?" he asked the little one, who was dripping soapy water. 

Escha turned his eyes up to me, and it was clear he had no intention of speaking to his new nurse.

"Softer, little one," I said, setting down the vessel. 

"Am alright," he murmured. 

I gestured for Escha to follow me, leaving his nurse behind. Outside, I poured the water over his hair until it ran clear. A little olive oil rubbed on the hands and run through the hair loosened it sufficiently to untangle. When I showed him my wooden comb, with its end carved like a tiger, he wanted to brush it himself. "If you pull too hard, you'll break your hair. Let your Faya do it this time," I said. When I told him that he seemed beautiful, it all came out in a flood.

"Master, I'm angry that you leave me alone so much. All of the others hate me and say bad things about me to the tutors, and they don't give me dib bones to punish me, and Vivacio is mean to me. Sometimes he hits me with a flat hand."

"That hurts."

He was pouting to hide his nearness to tears, shoulders hunched.

Hot day had become warm evening, and when his hair broke in the comb, I picked it from the teeth and let the strand fly away on the breeze. "What is the reason?"

He shook his head. No reason. Though he sometimes sounded wise to my ears, he knew little about repression and jealousy, that Vivacio acted out to revenge himself on me. It was all very personal to Escha.

"Have you been stealing?"

"Take bread sometimes," he confessed, bending nearly double when I pushed on his neck, so that I could flip his hair over and untangle the snarl underneath. 

"He's not feeding you again."

"Iovita told him you said he can't do that."

"Iovita is right," I said, picking at the stubborn mat. "This I will need to cut out."

Escha yielded to the scissors, a spring pair of inlaid bronze. When the hair came away he made a little sound of loss and unhappiness, the keen of a newborn kitten.

When I looked up, Nataniellus was in the doorway to the house, watching. His eyes were painted with dark kohl underneath, which he had brought from his former home. He met my gaze without confrontation, features soft. He pursed his painted lips and parted them, making a quiet popping sound. He began putting up his hair.

"Yes, Nataniellus."

"I need to talk to you," he said, elbows touching either side of the doorway, arms stretched up. The black linen tunic he wore was slightly sheer in the strong though fading light. The gold belt caught the sun in a way that made me blink my eyes. "You have not given me a chance to talk to you. It has been three days since you brought me here."

"I'm busy, now." Escha was puffing air out as if puffing on a dandelion, upset about his hair. I could feel the suppressed tantrum vibrating up my arm.

"You must talk to that younger steward. He's cruel to the children," Nataniellus said, cooing it. He had come to know how to play my strings over that year I visited with him. 

"Alright, Orpheus. Do not worry your head about it."

"Come inside, it's hot."

And so I talked to him.

***

Even in the evening, the atrium was overwarm, with the breeze blowing in from the open timber ceiling. I had dipped my hands into the warm pool of water, washing them, crouched on my ankles. Vivacio came up on me quietly, standing very close as I stood to meet him. His aggression came off him as if in waves. I stood close, startling him, but since I had drunk from him, the beat of his heart called to me, and my head felt loose on my neck.

He stood back, crossing his arms behind himself, and I inclined my head forward, like a loon intent on a swimming fish. He smelled of nervous sweat. There was the bloom of blood in his cheeks and around his shoulders from the heat of the day. Like Escha, he was so pale that any strain showed on him physically. He broke on the point without any playing around, and it was good, because I was angry at him already, and ready to be angry. When he spoke, he seemed certain of his words. They had been long in coming.

Escha was right that I had spent too much time away. I had left it all in Vasvius's hands to shrink the business and maintain the balance, but he had neglected the work, tying up boys in his room and succumbing to blood madness. I will not talk about it much, because it is not decent. But given free reign over the children, Vivacio had abused his authority and become mean. 

"A cruel man has no dignity. He lowers himself," I said. "A free man, a whore, a slave. There is no dignity in abusing a child."

"You bring a prostitute into this house. Contravene my authority to the child," he hissed. 

"You forget yourself," I said, softly.

"I know very well what I'm saying, sir. That boy is a low-class whore from the dockside bordellos. For all you know, he is crawling with disease. Have more dignity," he spat.

"Vivacio," I warned. Even in his anger, he could not keep himself from saying "sir."

"I won't be scolded."

"You damned well will," the words pulled from me as if he had reached in and dragged them out from a deep, forgotten well.

"So I swatted the boy."

"Swat? You are starving him. You hit him to inflict pain. There is no need to flatten a hand or strike with the back of it. You have gone beyond correction. There is no excuse for refusing the boy the right to wash himself." 

Vivacio crossed his arms and straightened his back at my raised voice, looking at me down his nose. "I won't listen to this from a man who fucks diseased whores from boy bordellos. Do you have the children as well there? What's your preference, master? Is that the song you sing?"

And instantly it was as if I had gone blind, the fury so sudden that it was still quiet in me, nauseating.  "Leave my sight now if you want to live. I won't be accused of this."

"What, that last? Is that the knife that twists? Leave your sight now?" he asked, laughing. "I will."

He went towards my cubiculum, left off the atrium, and grabbed Escha by the hair, who had been listening flattened against the wall. The child did not cry out, because it was happening quickly. Vivacio dragged him, stumbling after, down the hall. 

"Vivacio," I called after him, following.

"I'm leaving now, master. Like you asked."

"Don't make me do this," I said, hiccuping with fear of myself. How he piqued me like no one else. How he knew the things to say, because I loved him as one of my own, and could not stand to give him up, my pale shadow, who had been too weak to hold a sword, but whose attitude had never suited his fate.

But he wasn't speaking to me anymore, going into my chamber and dropping the silk curtain in the doorway behind him. I arrived in time to watch Vivacio slowly and methodically strip the child of his tunic, push him onto my bed, and raise a cruel knife meant to stab him in the belly. Perhaps it was slow to me only because every inch of it was impressing itself on my memory, and even now I remember it more clearly than most things. It swims up to me from the fog, and I remember the feeling of Vivacio's arm in my hand, how weak it was, and how he coughed when he hit the floor.

I remember Escha sitting up, bruises blooming where Vivi had grabbed him, and on his neck, and his mouth open at my face, my anger, as if he were to speak to comfort me. That child. Unafraid of what I was. I was in awe of my rage, shocked by myself, but sitting back from that moment, as if watching it happen. "Go," I said. His lips moved around toneless whimpering. "Escha."

Vivacio was on his feet then, while the silk curtain fluttered behind the child's exit, and I knocked him in the chest onto the bed, lashing out.

"This is familiar," he gasped, trying to cut me with his words. He wheezed and strained to breathe under what I knew to be a collapsed lung and broken ribs. He could not penetrate my anger with simple words. "Will you drink my blood again? Will you?" he demanded, laughing.

I had his knife in my hand. It was a sharp thing, for boning fish. "You've gone mad," I said, despairing. In his eyes there was compassion, seeing me as man, and I couldn't stand it. His hands came for my face, to touch me in love, and there wouldn't be touching, because it was unbearable for him to see me as the man I had been, who could not control what had happened to him. At that time in my life, in Herculaneum, no, I didn't know how to let another man love me, was too hard and hurt by my former lives. A tightly closed bud, no sunlight. It wouldn't be him who opened me up again, but it was him who made me want it. It was Escha who awakened my need of affection, but it was Vivi first who knocked on that door. "Oh, Vivi," I said.

When I put the knife in him, he reached down to feel the blood which rose to meet the blade. He began to shiver between my thighs, and I felt this tremor throughout my entire body, and in the air, and in my head, and it drew a sound from my throat. There was a sound in my head like the trembling of a silver cymbal. Vivacio touched my face with blooded hands. His hand went up into my hair, and he took a tiny violet out, and another tiny violet. A pale pink rose tumbled to his throat. I took the knife out, and put it in him again. 

This time, black blood came from between his lips, choking away the words he wanted to say, but I could hear them in my head, that he was not crazy, and not sorry, that he had loved me since he was a child, and was still loving of me, heard them in the music of his shivering. It spread from him black on the thin mattress, his blood from above and below his stomach, his eyes closed, huffing breaths. 

"You've made me do this," I said, and brought the knife to my throat, shaking my head, shaking it, thrashing in slowed time, a murky memory, eyes hazy with the blood of weary tears. I touched the blade to my skin and pushed, at the hollow between my collarbones, pushed hard until a weak rivulet made egress. "Return to calm water," I said. 

His hands were everywhere, no no no, trying to force away my arms, my face, my throat, new life. The throes of death had addled him, confused his features, made him seem so much younger, innocent and afraid. All color had gone out of him, blood wet under my knees. He was as white as the inside of a lily, eyes wild, breath coming in choked, frightened gasps, begging to be let to die, because Vivi had wanted to die for so long. 

"You have not paid," I breathed to him, softly. "What you've done in this life. I'm sorry."

For days afterward, he screamed and screamed, and for days after that, lay still as if dead. Nataniellus cared for the children and kept them away. And I slept in that bed with Escha, him stroking my staring face, his beautiful hair soaking up with blood.