That evening, after we had finished all of our work and cleaned up after our dinner, I suggested that we go out and sit on the cliffside, so that we could watch the full moon rise together. I thought, it being early fall, that we might also be able to see the last of the fireflies in our orchard. I was not so sentimental as to think we would have a special memory over things like that, but it is the case that most of my memories are of quiet, beautiful moments together. 

After lunch, Escha had abandoned us unceremoniously to go sit in the peristyle garden by himself, so he wasn't with us. I had Nonus on my lap pretending to be a goat, while Aulus and Cassius practiced counting back from one hundred by sevens, eights, and nines. I know that by then I already thought of us as a little family, in spite of myself. I think that one of the reasons I drank too much, before I promised my master not to, was because I could not bear the thought of losing them all even if I myself faced a life of comfort. I did not have words for what I felt, or the ability to express them, and to try to do so would not be a good thing. 

That's all I know to say even now, so I said nothing, sitting with them, and tried not to think of the unwatered wine I always thought of in quiet moments.  "Belo, belo," Nonus said to me, imitating a nervous goat, "Belllllo." I kissed him between the eyes, and he imitated the sound of my kiss happily with his eyes shut. The dark made our chatter quiet, and the air all but swallowed it, as the moon rose over the sea, too big to hold in the hand. 

"What if a wolf comes?" Nonus the goat asked me, quietly. 

"I will hit him with my stick," I told him. 

"Yeah," he said. "What about a wild boar?"

"I will ride him away with both my hands in the air."

"Yeah, that's good. Me, too. I will ride a boar without touching him."

"Let me see your hands."

The week previous, Vivacio had ordered Nonus to cut him a switch for relying on Aulus too much. This evening, while scrubbing the empty triclinium pool, the wounds across his palms had opened again. I had noticed the blood dripping from his fingertip, and scolded him for not alerting me. He rubbed his eyes sleepily and opened his hands for me.

"When we get back to the house I'm going to wrap them up for you."

"I don't want to be a burden," he said, tucking his head under my chin, though I knew he really feared the pain.

"You're not a burden, little brother. If your hands fester, who will take care of me when I'm old?"

He pointed at himself silently, touched his own soft cheek with his fingertip. He nodded.

"You don't have to listen to everything Vivacio says. He's not the master."

"But he is right that I rely on Aulus. Aulus tells me so. I have to answer for myself if he asks me questions."

"You do all right," I said. "How can you know what to say when he makes you so nervous?"

"Aulus says I'll be nervous my whole life, and so I should learn how to speak up even so. I guess," Nonus said, sounding certain.

"What would you do if you were me, little one, and thought that someone was stealing from our house?" I asked him.

"Is it real?" he asked, his feline eyes narrowing. He looked like a little animal. "Is it true?"

"Say it is. What do you do?"

He thought about it and then said, with confidence, "I would find the thief and I would kill him. I would kill him until he is dead, and then I would spit on his body."

"Really?" I asked, surprised at his ferocity. 

"Yes. I would spit on him. You are very big and very strong. You could track him down and hit him, and make him die."

"Remind me not to get on the wrong side of you, fierce goat."

"Stella, stella," he said, pointing at the stars, and at the fireflies that had begun to emerge, blinking on and off behind us, and it was then that the shouting came, hysterical shouting from the direction of the house. Nonus's body stiffened in my arms, and he reached for his brother Aulus, so that I could rise and head back ahead of them, at a run.

For a moment, I felt a hand on the back of my ankle, Cassius, afraid for me. We did not speak much about it by daylight, but for some time there had been a sense that the exotic strangeness we pretended at for guests was coming real in some way. I think that we all waited for a disturbance that might break it open, but that to acknowledge our fear of the uncanny with words made such notions silly, mutable. I did not think of myself as especially intelligent, or important. What did it matter what I worried about the house? Except that the sense of the unknown unsettled me, and as I ran, made me sweat even as a chill met me on the wind. It had not been so long since I had been only a boy, and had not known to hide my fear from myself. But speaking of it at all feels so false to me. I only wanted to sit on the cliffside and kiss my little brother's ears. The truth is that if I saw a boar I would run. That is what a smart man does who is no archer, without a blade in his hand. Run before he can see the bristle hairs of its body, not toward it without a thought in his head beside his desperate desire to drink or disappear. But I ran, and gulped long breaths into myself, as if when I reached the house there would not be time to breathe. I ran the quarter mile as fast I could, glad that I had left on my shoes, and it is only because I ran so fast that I saw what I did. 

A moment later and I would have missed it, and not been able to reassure our Nataniellus years later that it really happened, when he muttered to me that he felt he was going crazy with a false memory. It is not false. Everything I tell you is the truth. I do not mix up facts like some. I am honest because I am not clever enough to lie convincingly.

Entering the house I was struck by how dark it was before anything else, and as my eyes adjusted I became aware of movement in the atrium. And so I went into our atrium, passing the triclinium pool which was full from rain, and I thought the water overcoming my sandals and wetting my toes came from its overflowing. But I quickly judged that the triclinium was not full enough to overflow, and lifted my eyes to the large fountain I most often ignored because I knew it so well I did not often even bother to see it. Big, marble thing that birds came in from the triclinium roof opening to sit upon in the summer, with a sculpted empty vase atop of it. I thought, bewildered, breathing hard, "Big enough for a boy to drown in," though even there, I noticed the water could not overflow. Where had it all come from? My eyes trailing the floor, subservient to my nerves, and finding wet red silk, and trailing upward.

I cannot call him Nerva. That is the name of a whore. And he was only Nataniellus standing there, as my eyes found him, shivering and soaked with water, trying to hold Escha in his arms, whose water-burned throat prevented him from screaming and crying out. But I heard Escha, frozen there with my arms around myself, because I had become aware that the master was there, with all of his silence, and I could not move without looking up and seeing him. I shivered. I shivered. I shivered, as if I were the one soaked.

"Abi, I don't want your help," Escha moaned, half-drowned and voice a sobbing croak, "I don't want your help," struggling against Nataniellus, scratching him, biting him, thrashing weakly. The light of the moon coming through the open roof caught Escha's straining features, stunning me.  "I don't, it wasn't his fault. It wasn't," and "Abi!" the shriek of a child, pure sound like a glass ringing bell, cracking at its height, as he slashed at Nataniellus's face and found himself dropped, and Nataniellus made a cry of surprised pain. He reached for the child but Escha had gotten away, and I did raise my head then, and look upon the master who was not seeing me or Nataniellus at all.

I saw Escha, with his hands now tender, and his voice the softest coo, a rumble and a gentle river, climb into arms offered him. I saw the master close his eyes in pain and tip his head back a little, and roll it on his neck, his lips parted. And Escha took Leechtin's pale face between his little hands and brought it back to himself, so that he could touch his cheek to his master's chin, who he had so longed for. To me, dizzy with the shock of being confronted with such a scene, the dark color of Leechtin's robe against Escha's white seemed to be consuming the child. 

"You are confused a little," I heard Escha say, so quietly. "A little. Not matter. No. I am so happy. I am happy." 

"Me adiuva," Leechtin said to him, in a tone I can only describe as desperate, in his accent that always blurred together the words. Help me. 

"Is good now," Escha said. "With the master. Happy. Not upset. Here together."

"Me adiuva," again, desperate.

The moonlight there was bright, reflecting off the water, and my eyes traced the shape of the master's body through his robe, knobby hips and narrow frame, how the length of his hands made the thinness of his fingers startling, the black river of his hair, half-pinned and half run out of its bonds. My hand crept to my own throat, for I had had a good look of him years ago, and yet he was only as tall as me. An Egyptian, an exotic, and I thought that I too would go to him, and say, "Te amo," I love you, for in my mind was the whisper of a dream I'd had while gazing into his deep green eyes, of the desert. I shuddered, as if to convulse, and those spidery hands had Escha, the hands of an old man made youthful somehow again without the touch of youth at all. I stepped a half step back, my arms around myself, head low, to retreat from the light, and the master's shuddering shoulders, the sound of muffled weeping.

A cold, damp hand on my wrist, like the hand of the dead, and I shocked back to life to Nataniellus touching me and pulling me away from there. Still out of breath from running, I stumbled, following him and his firm hand.

He led me outside, behind the house where he might wash himself a little in water we others had already washed in. He did not speak, but placed his hand on my back and pushed me firmly when I paused in the doorway. 

"Ignosce mihi," Forgive me, I mumbled, slapping my own face gently, trying to breathe deeply.

"Why are you slapping?" he asked me, heading for the water bucket.

"My face feels cold." Siste siste, siste siste, I was telling myself, stop stop stop stop it. You are not dead. You are not. 

"Hn," he said.

"Why did you tear down the red silk? Why do you not wear something more fitting now? I'll get in trouble on account of you," I whispered, voice shaking, trying to regain a sense of the mundane and dismiss the choked feeling in my throat, the sense I had felt of helpless love.

"If he whips you I will be sure to enjoy it," he said, washing his face.

It brought me back to the present, to standing outside in the dark under the wooden roof, in the dirt. In itself disorienting. "You don't know me." I said, surprised and offended. 

"I know him. That is what I know." 

"Whippings normal for you? I don't like getting thrashed. What're you doing here?"

He finished washing his face before speaking to me again, squatting on the ground and rubbing the dirt from around his nose. He'd been walking in the street with Balbus to come to us, and even after a rain, such walks were dusty. He washed gently the rough ring around each of his wrists where the rope had rubbed him raw. I watched with some urgency, as I knew the sensitivity of such wounds.

His hands shook. 

"How old are you?" I asked. Talking to make things seem as usual. "You look old."

He whipped water off his hand then and stood up. "Does he try to kill the lot of you often? Is that why you don't talk about what you saw? Be a good puer and warn me if I should expect to be murdered."

"I didn't see anything," I whispered. Even in shadow, even after the distress of what had just happened, the way he looked at me in the dark, so fiercely, more confident than anyone who had ever spoken to me as anything close to an equal, lit me on fire. I was glad that he couldn't see me blushing.

"Then sit down and I will tell you what happened," he said, rather tenderly I thought.

 I sat down by him on a stool, and he took my hand, which I didn't mind because I was ravenous for him. He took my hand and placed it on the soft skin of his inner thigh, pushing up the silk, where his skin radiated heat. He rested his hand on top of mine so that I couldn't pull away. I naturally rested my head on his shoulder. Huddled together close enough that his breath tickled the tiny hairs in my ear, he did tell me. There was a rasp in his voice from screaming, not only what I had heard and come running toward, but also the shouting he had done in the street with Balbus.

I have rarely referred to "Nataniellus" by any formal name but "Mr. Porter" for years. It feels good to think of him as he was then, though the circumstances talked about are like this.

"I was talking to your master in the front part, in the atrium. I had just eaten with him, but during the entire meal he did not say a single word to me. When he called me to the table in his room, there was bread and some honey, and I wanted to ask him some questions, but he didn't seem to be paying me much heed. I wanted to touch him, as he likes to be touched sometimes, but he shrank from me. He shrank back from my hand, which was unexpected."

"It seems to me I'm touching you," I whispered, thinking myself subtle and clever. He smelled good. I didn't know what vanilla smelled like then. When I smelled him I was smelling vanilla for the first time. I probably looked like a silly boy gazing amorously at Diana. If he had slapped me on the ass and sent me running ahead of braying hounds I would not have been surprised. 

"Hush," he said, as one would to a child.

"All right."

My head resting upon his bony shoulder, he told me the rest. He said that he knew Leechtin well enough to know his patterns, his rhythms, when to expect the unexpected as it were. That came as a surprise to me, but it was a surprise to me that anyone could know the master in any way, and I said so, earning me another shush. He had thought that he would come to the house and that he and Leechtin would go to bed, except that Leechtin shooed him after dinner. There had been a brief struggle when Nataniellus refused to leave the bedroom.

"He laid hands on me, in a way that I think he thought gentle, but now the bruises on my upper arms are forming. You can see them. He put me out of his cubiculum, and later as I wandered the house looking for a steward to tell me where I could put in for the night, I saw him meeting a blond-haired child and picking the child up. I called to him and I could see that the sound of my voice agitated him. He stiffened. The child tried to get down out of his arms, which agitated him further. I said, 'Lover, let the child down so that I can talk to you,' and he did not like that at all."

"How do you know?" I asked, still not able to understand who Nataniellus was, or how he could know so many things about the great unknown of my life.

"He has many tells. He turned his body. He twisted away by a few degrees. He lowered his head slightly, like a bull ready to charge. I have not been to Rome myself to see the games, or even to any provincial arenas. I have rarely been let out of doors unless for some beggar's errand. But I have heard many tales from men come down from the heart of our empire, and they tell how when a lion seeks to eat a man, it lowers its body," he whispered into my ear.

"I have seen the way a snake flattens its head before it strikes. I've seen how a scorpion grows low."

"You're right. It's similar."

"I have seen also however," I said, as quietly as I could, not wanting to contradict him, "how a spider flattens itself when it is afraid, before it runs away."

"Do you really study such things? Do you like nature?" he asked me, again tenderly.

"I like to study things. But I think that you know more about the world than I do. Please go on with the story, so that I may know."

"All right." 

Nataniellus had advanced on Leechtin, he told me, his hands up, his voice gentle. He had never seen Leechtin in quite such a way, but had known him on the defense, and knew his character when he was not hearing anything and not quite present. "Sometimes," he said, "he is so emotional over a tempest boiling inside of himself, that I feel it as well, in my own body. When I advanced, he moved closer to the fountain by a step, and still, I could not anticipate what he was about to do."

"What did he do?"

"Deliberately, slowly it seemed, he tore the little one's hands from himself, from where the child clung to him, and pushed him under the water. He did it slowly enough that there was no great splash except for how the water overflowed onto the floor as the child struggled underneath the surface."

"It was your shrieking I heard," I said to him.

"It was. I did. I could not help it. And then when I struggled with Leechtin, I could not move him an inch, a millimeter, though I struggled with all of my strength, but then," Nataniellus took in a wondering breath, "For no more reason at all it seemed than he had begun, he let go of the child and retreated without a sound, and that is when you came in. You see, it's really that I'm very shocked, and afraid, and uncertain of what I know about him. I don't think anything he does has much to do with the present at all."

"You talk about him like you love him. Like you have known him, and he has promised you things," I said, thinking of the master only in the ways that I could understand then. 

"No, but I do not love him," he whispered, measured and calm. "But it is true that promises have been made. Except that, if I cannot be certain of him, I cannot be certain of any promise." He drew his hand away from mine gently, so that his knuckles brushed thrillingly against my arm.

I did not know what else to say, and after a little while, he whispered to me.

"Why did the child fight me to get back to him? What has he done to that child to make him do something like that?"

There was nothing I could say, except to shiver in the cold, against his red silk which was still damp from that struggle.

I sat against him for some time in the dark, though we did not say anything else to each other, even when I heard the others arrive and fill the atrium with their whispering. Nataniellus's body fit against mine, and we sat for long enough that my hand on his thigh no longer felt sexual or anything like that, except for warm, and comforting, and good. 

I don't think much about the things I have done, or have not done. I tend to believe that no matter what has happened I did the best I could do at the time, and could not have done otherwise. I am a man who is the sum of his choices, and that night, I chose the comfort of sitting against Nataniellus quietly, except to ask, "What do you smell like?" in a whisper.

"Vanilla," he told me.

"I don't know it," I said.

And he pressed his palm gently to my cheek, which for some unknown reason brought tears to my eyes.