It was in this atmosphere that one day, as I was carefully scrubbing the painted wall in the bedroom that our teachers had left behind, that I felt a mouth on my neck, and hands fold around my waist. A warm mouth, lips, sucked upon my skin, kissing me, pushing me against the wall. "Nerva?" I asked, unsure, but that is all I was able to say. I never resisted. 

This intimacy felt in sharp contrast with the other intimacies in my life, which were defined by their silences. Sometimes, often, Escha would come and sit up with me while I practiced my letters at night, sitting in my lap, his head tucked against my shoulder. Still, I think he was aware of how rapidly he had been asked to grow up by our circumstances, and clutched at me as a way to hold onto his babyhood. Sometimes, if he began to weep against my shoulder, I put down my stylus and held him. I held his warm, heaving body, still so small for his age, and from neglecting his diet. Enfolding him in my arms felt almost nothing at all except for the heat of tears. He didn't apologize for biting me. It didn't occur to me to need an apology. For a moment, I had had a glimpse of the creature the master might accept Escha as, and the sorry party was me. 

At that age, it was easy to feel sorry for myself, and for the boys I loved. I felt sad about what I thought of as my fate, that it was no use to try to be a man if what I was meant to be was dead or a beast. The sound in my head of Vivacio mourning his body, the look on Escha's face, my understanding that the master might love both of them, and what that love looked like took away the smokescreen from my eyes of the mundane. Nothing had changed, only my ability to see. I had always wanted to guard my humanity in small ways, cultivating myself as gentle yet strong, conscientious, but open to fun and imagination with the little ones. For a little while, I replaced that drive with various vices. They left me feeling just as good as personal merit, or I thought so.

Immediately following Vivacio and Vasvius's departure, a hush fell over the house. Escha looked for the master, Escha who was still recovering from his immobile three days, and said that the master was present but sleeping. "I think we should keep quiet," he whispered to us, and we listened to him at first because we were all silenced by what the master had done. Escha knew him best. "We'll just keep quiet," he whispered to us. 

But Nonus, who was prone to weakness in the hands, was always dropping things. Aulus, on a hair trigger due to the tension and therefore acting younger than his age, grew easily upset with his friend, throwing things. And we realized that being quiet was not the problem. The problem was that we had been robbed. The real problem was that Vivacio must have been hoarding money a long time, and it quickly became clear that not only the silver from the shrine had been stolen, but the entire foundations of the master's worldly goods. 

We did not plant much, but we did put in a few acres of winter wheat every year. For that, we would send for labor from the camp, for boys with strong backs and the will to work hard. When we sent word for that labor, no runner came back. When we sent word again, we were told that there must be confusion, that there was no labor to be called upon unless we could pay. Vivacio, quietly, slowly, had sold away all of the master's investment in the slave camp, and taken that money, too.

So I started drinking. I would go into Nataniellus's room, the same that my teachers had once slept in, that he had found me cleaning that first day of our intimacy, and we sat on the floor playing Par Impar, or odds and evens. We had some knucklebones to play with, that the children had collected to play dibs, and we lay them on the floor between us. When it was my turn, I picked up an odd or even number of the dib bones, and Nataniellus had to guess which, and if he was wrong, he drank, and if he was right, I did. This game was increasingly entertaining the longer it went on. "Let's try it a little different way," I said, thinking myself subtle and the emperor of wit. He guessed wrongly, and I said, "I win a kiss."

"Well that's silly, that's not what we agreed," he said, a little sloppily, leaning back against the leg of the bed. 

"Come on and do it," I said, aggressively. "You want to do it."

Over two weeks, he had touched me without eye contact, maybe three times. There had been nothing else but that, and nothing acknowledged. He got to his knees now and leaned forward, and with surprising control for the amount he had drunk, he gave me a chaste kiss on the side of the mouth.

"That's not what I meant."

"Say what you mean," he said, sitting back again.

"You like," I started, accusation creeping into my tone.

"I like a man," he told me, fiercely, looking me in the eyes, commanding. "I like a man who tells me what he wants. You are a boy who thinks he must be clever, must trick me into what we both know is between us already. Tell me what you want," he said, and the hint of disgust in his voice shamed me. 

I began to cry. I cried with the dib bones in my hands. To be shamed in that moment, I wept. I still remember it so clearly, how his words made my heart drop into my stomach. Already, he had power over me. I wanted him to respect me, to treat me like he did.

"Oh," he said softly, "veni huc. Come here."

Years later, lying beside me in Misenum, in the narrow bed we shared, he held me while I shook with my dying, the taste of his blood on my lips. I felt dying was very cold, and I shivered for a day or so, against him in the dark. He held me, pressed against my back, his hands clasped in mine against my chest. I heard the sound of his heart in my ears. That was tenderness, love. What we did on the floor, on the bed, out back, in corners, that was numbness. It didn't feel like it at the time, and I thought that he was making me a man, and in some senses he was. But I think that some of what made those times so good, and so passionate, and so easy, was that I knew I was avoiding my right path, and my duties for the first time in my life.

And far longer in the future even than that, all those years later, and in a world I could not have imagined, I held Escha while he shivered. He was Laurent then, and insisted on being called that. Even so, when I brushed his hair back with my hand he always turned his head toward my palm in just the same way he had done as a child. He wanted a tender touch, and always had, ever since I had met him that first time. In all his years of dying, as he diminished, and began to shiver from cold, he liked for me to come into his room and to tell me stories about himself. I talked about myself but, me, I don't matter so much. I mean, that's true. While I held him, he told me stories about all of his lovers in the world, as if they were little stars in his universe for me to sit back and look at with him. He said, "I have done a lot of things I am not proud of. But I am not ashamed of lying with men, or any of the other things I have done for love. I am ashamed of the things I have done in anger. I am ashamed for the sacrifices others have made for me, not only of their bodies, but of themselves, Iovita. I want to fade, so that no more loss may come of me," and he wept, and said, "Do you love me, carissime?" his fingers in my hair. I showed him that I did. I held him. That is tenderness, longer than a moment in the dark for pleasure that evaporates as quickly as the heat of a stuttered gasp. It is a tenderness that I denied Cassius in Herculaneum, over and over, though I saw through my drunkenness how it hurt him, and how alone he was. And like Laurent had said to me, the hurt I caused is my deep shame, that overcomes me in the dark. It is only that which I weep over.

Talking with Laurent about his own pleasures, and what he did that pleased his spirit if not his body, has helped me to think about what I did. I have never been much ashamed of what I did with the little master, or not at all. More than anything, I am only ashamed that I left my brothers to fend for themselves, even if I can admit to myself that I was in no condition to care for them. I think it hurt Nonus the most, and not because of me, but because of how perfect his relationship was with Nataniellus from the start. After Vivacio's screaming had stopped, Nonus, without a word, had attached himself to Nataniellus, following him wherever he went for the next few days. And he was not a boy who could trust easily. We betrayed his trust.

During our encounters, Nataniellus and I, however brief, and on our benders, Nataniellus was not thinking about his responsibility to the children, to the house. I reckon he was not thinking about anything. I believed even then that his only business with me was forgetting. What could I possibly imagine he would want with me besides that?

***

The gladius is not a sword for surgeons. It is not a scalpel, built for precision or spilling points of blood from a man until he tires or gives up. The gladius is a blunt instrument for smashing skulls and killing many men very quickly. It has a thick pommel for crushing, and a thick blade for thrusting. When I taught the other boys how to use a gladius, I taught them the way I had been shown to use it in the camp. I used a gladius as a soldier would use it. 

Swordplay was not part of our daily routine, and so when Nataniellus told me the master wanted it taught, I was surprised and petrified. For what purpose does a steward need to defend himself? He is defended by his position and by the master. He does not need a sword. And yet, there seemed an unexplained urgency about the directive. The other boys picked up the training fairly quickly, for they'd had some basic drills in the camp when very young, and the hand does not forget training at that age. Escha, however, had hands softer than any of ours, and though he did not give up, his movements were too small, and because he was so young, he did not have the strength to wield the blade. And they were blades, not wooden swords.

For me it was not irregular for the master not to be around, and Nataniellus kept quiet about the master at all times, but Escha did not. So I had only a little knowledge of strange goings on with the master, which was apparently that he was sleeping all the time. Escha, however, unlike in the previous year when the master was gone in Herculaneum, did not sniffle or sulk much about it. He only seemed lethargic, trying all the time to go to the master's room and sleep there, and sagging in my arms when not allowed to go. This day, therefore, like all other days, he was doing his best at drills. And suddenly I heard a surprised, "Heus!" Whoa! from Nataniellus, who of course then was still Nerva. He had been sitting off to the side on a stone bench, feet bare in the warm grass.

Aulus and Nonus, who had been saying, "Kekk! Kekkek!" at Escha's efforts, two little crows, turned their backs immediately, stiff. Cassius made a sucking sound with his tongue and sat down in the grass, unperturbed. 

I was drunk in the middle of the day. I turned to face the direction Nataniellus indicated.

At first, I saw nothing, as I had turned West in the direction of the sun, and as my eyes adjusted, first I saw black hair, as long as my arm. My face warmed as green, kohl-lined eyes turned on me. I had not seen him, really looked at him, since he had tried to drown Escha. Even when I went to retrieve the child, the night after he took away Vivacio's life, I had averted my eyes from Leechtin's face out of respect.

Now here he was striding toward us up the slight hill, wrapped in grey roughspun though it was warm in the sunlight, chin tucked down into the wool. I studied him. I could not get enough of him. I wondered if there were hairs on the back of his neck. I found to my surprise that at sixteen, I was as tall as my master, and yet still, he seemed larger than his form. The sunlight glowed on his features. Truly, the light loved to stroke him. He seemed to me a creature of sunlight, his sharply drawn features making shadows on his face. His long fingers gestured to Nataniellus, who was not looking. The longer he looked at me, no more than a few seconds, the softer my features relaxed, until my lips parted

"Qui totum vult," he whispered to me, "totum perdit." He who wants everything, loses everything. Then his long fingers gestured for my sword.

My heart in my throat, I gave it to him, noticing that Escha stood a little off, his brown eyes round with desperate interest, clutching his sword like he meant to hit us with it. I took one step back, my hands folded behind my back, my legs weak, certain that Leechtin knew what I had done with his bedslave, with Nerva, and that he meant to hack at me. I accepted that without a quarrel. My stomach untwisted itself, and I found myself surprisingly relieved at the prospect of my own death. My acceptance confused and saddened me at the same time, to the point where I didn't even notice for a minute that I was not yet dead.

All of my life, I suppose that I had been preparing to die in many little ways. I kept barely anything of my own, and kept my space and body clean to spare others the task of washing. I ate well, so that my digestion would be good. I liked to exhaust myself, and never felt more alive than at the end of the day. Mornings, however, whenever I woke up, I felt as if I had not been breathing in the night. It was as if every night I died happy, spent, in the arms of my brothers, and in the morning, a cold dawn, and not quite the same self until I found work to do again. Coming out of my horror, finding myself alive, was like waking up, and I found myself watching the little scene in front of me as if I were half-awake, my eyes moist.

Leechtin folded his sleeves back, baring his thin but well-muscled forearms, and moved Escha into a sword stance I didn't recognize. Escha broke stance and huddled himself against Leechtin's thighs, and for a moment, the master allowed it. They murmured to each other, and I thought I heard Leechtin say, "Quid nunc," playfully, which at the time I heard as "How now?" but which I suspect really was a scold, a "Don't gossip." I felt I was intruding. I turned around.

After that, after the master went back away into the house, and Escha wept for no reason, inconsolably, weeping even while eating, I had Nerva behind the stable so violently that afterward he slapped me and made me lie with him beneath the stars. "What did he say to you?" he demanded of me, rubbing his arms as if they were numb. 

"Why do you have red hair?" I asked him, still breathless.

"You useless beggar. You have stars in your eyes," he spat at me, clutching my hand in the slick grass.

There were many stars in my eyes. So many stars in the dark sky above me. "He knows," I said.

"He does not know," he rejoined.

"I am lost," I told him, sounding hopeless. "I do not know what to do. I am doing everything wrong. It is all so queer and I have nothing to draw upon."

Long years later, after he and I were the same, he told me that he vowed that night never to touch me again. He told me that he feared he was destroying my mind. He worried that I was going insane. And it is true, for me, that abandoning the mundane felt like madness. Departing from the routine made so many things possible. I wanted never to return to the days I had known, before Nerva, before the patterns of my life were disrupted, and yet how soon I would long for the mundane, and how soon numbness would give way and I would realize how much blood had been spilled, and what trouble we were all in.

"Do you like me, Iovita? Am I beautiful?" he asked me.

"Do you like me?" I asked him.

"I like you. You're funny," he said.

"Then I will say that I do not know if you are beautiful, because I like the back of you the most."

He pinched me so hard it left a bruise on my wrist. I think that I did think he was beautiful. I liked so much about him. I liked that he played games, and knew how to make me laugh, and his sly smiles. He was so bold. He was shockingly bold. These days, it is hard to say that I really see him at all when I look at him. He is so familiar to me that there is an impression of him in my spirit. I have studied him and loved him for so long. I hardly can imagine him with Leechtin. We are not rivals, Leechtin and I, for I am no romantic. But for so long, Nataniellus has been at my side, and there is no one else who can fit me so well. I call him "Red" and when he laughs, my heart sings with boyish pride.