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Authors: Sarah A. Hoyt

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BOOK: Crawling Between Heaven And Earth
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They laugh and vanish through my fingers like smoke. As they did so many centuries ago.

In those moments, I am again a nameless thing, crouching on the muddy banks of the ancient Nile, my mind filled with hatred, my body with thirst, while I stare at the gilded Imperial barge anchored in the dark waters. And I hear again the laughter of Antinous.

Hylas is my name, or was my name, when I was a mortal among mortals, a living, breathing being in the sun's embrace. A Greek name for a Roman boy born in the Suburra, raised in that maze of smelly, noisy streets that was the pulsing heart of Rome.

My father was a Greek freedman, a grammarian who grew prematurely old teaching Greek and writing to uninterested students on the sidewalk, in front of our insula. My mother, suavely rotund, wasted her life bent over the cooking fire. Both of them were mere props in the stage of my life. I can't recall a thing they said, nor anything they taught me.

They lived in two smoky rented rooms in an insula, a vertical slum, where people crowded side by side and on top of each other, crammed together as close as possible, for the wealth of the rich landlords.

My own life was not confined to such a prison. My true teachers, my true instruction, were in the streets. From other boys, my neighbors, I learned all there was to know. Who could be safely robbed, where to buy the best wine, and just the right time to go to the entrance of the Circus and get the seats closest to the arena, from where we could scream encouragement at our favorite gladiators and hoot the cowards.

I will forever remember those afternoons as the best of my childhood: the sun-dappled, bloodstained sand, the certainty that life and death were shows played for my entertainment.

It all came to an abrupt end the Summer I turned fourteen. Late at night my friends and I waited in the darkened portal of an insula for wayward citizens, full of wine and gold, making their way home through unlit streets. That night I tried to cut the wrong purse. We couldn't have guessed who he was. A merchant, we thought him, because of his colorful, expensive clothing. But we didn't think him rich, certainly not noble, since he walked the streets of Rome alone without a single slave for escort. We were wrong. Publius Aelius Hadrianus, as he then was, thought himself invincible and reveled in facing alone the danger of Rome's streets.

He immobilized me quickly. I thought he would call the sebaciara. But he
was
full of wine and mirth, and I amused him more than angered him. Besides, I had dark flowing curls, the face of a girl and the well-muscled body of a young thug. All of which he liked, as I would come to know, when our acquaintance became such that I could call him by the familiar diminutive of Adriano.

For the next two years I followed him. To the end of his stay in Rome, where he was house-guest of his cousin Trajanus, the Emperor, then to the far reaches of the Empire with the legions he commanded. He gave me better food than I was used to, better wine than I'd ever tasted, and a position no one disputed.

Even rude legionaries spoke graciously to me because I was the commander's page . . .or lover, or any other name you might care to call it. All of them meant I held power not to be ignored.Two years I lived with him. He was strong and admired, built like a hero's statue, with reddish hair and beard, and dark gray eyes that could see to the depths of my soul.

He taught me to read, and schooled me in rudimentary Greek, amused that I, the son of a grammarian, had never come by such gifts. And he read aloud from the Odyssey and the odes of Virgil and told me of Alexander and Julius and Augustus.

When I was sixteen or maybe seventeen we set out for Rome. To visit.

I never got there alive.

Of late, he had been growing curt and impatient with me. He found his joys elsewhere. Other boys and women, camp followers, common local whores . . .. Not that he had ever been faithful or that those had ever been altogether absent from his bed. But now their company was preferred to mine, and if he talked to me at all, it was to remind me of my shortcomings, to mumble improbable reproaches at me for my cruelty and crudity.

I knew what caused it. My body was changing as I became, to all eyes, a man, and it wasn't decent to keep our type of relationship once the boy's masculinity asserted itself.

On our way to Rome we stopped in Athens. While he renewed old acquaintances of one type or another, I found the solution to my problem.

It was late at night, in a tavern where I'd strayed foolishly unaccompanied, proudly confident in my street-wise ways years after I had given them up. A tall pale man sat at my table and bought me drink after drink, even though he never touched his. He spoke of his childhood in the times before Rome, and of the joys of immortality. Liquor and his blue eyes intoxicated me. I followed him out of the tavern, to the fields outside the city. There I lay upon the soft, plowed earth. I thought I knew what was coming.

But instead of the familiar grinding of body against body, his weight crushing my squeezed-together thighs, there was the suave caress of a cold hand against my neck, parting my curls like a curtain, and the sharp, painful kiss that tore my skin, that took my blood, that left me drained and half-dead, lying senseless on the still-warm ground.

Little by little, consciousness returned to me. Consciousness and a sense of loss.

I sat up with too much effort, too much pain. I felt heavy and swollen, like the corpse of one who has drowned, turgid with water and death. And yet, to my eyes, my wrists were as thin as ever, my fingers long and delicate, my small feet effortlessly encased by the gold-laced sandals.

I stood up. My throat was dry and gritty. Each of my joints blazed with pain that burst forth anew with every action.

I walked to town. I don't know how. I also don't know how long I wandered, lost, trying to find my way to the home where we were guests. Some memories were forfeited to the death that even then gripped me. I remember my master's voice, seemingly out of nowhere, merry with wine and tender with amusement, saying, "Hello there, Hylas, Hylas of the sweet locks, how much wine have you had? Can't I let you go out on your own?"

And then his arms surrounded me, supported me, and I felt myself fall, let myself fall, into endless darkness.

When I woke up I believed myself back in my the dark rooms of the insula, the wooden shutters closed against the rain, penning in the thick odors of sweat and cooking and frustrated humanity, all of it lit by the wavering light of a single candle.

"Mother?" I called diffidently.

"Hylas?" a tired voice asked out of the shadows, a man's voice that bore no resemblance to my mother's. "Hylas, are you awake?" The accent of Iberia, where he was born, was thick upon my master's tongue as I'd never heard it. The light of the candle moved around in the dark room, heavy curtains parted just a little to let a thin dagger of light pierce my eyes with unbelievable pain.

"Thirsty," I said, my voice lethargic and low. "I am thirsty."

Adriano moved closer to the couch where I lay. His hair was freshly combed, perfumed, curled. He wore a colorful, loose-fitting, short tunic, as Greek men would wear at home.

I felt ill and scared. Why was he nursing me personally through my illness? Why not entrust me to a slave? So that he could accuse me of stalling his journey to Rome?

He set the candle down on a candlestick. I heard water pour from a pitcher to a cup, then the cup was at my lips, rough silver against skin.

I took one swallow, two. Water, dead and horribly cold in my mouth. Stagnant. Poisonous. I spit it out in his direction, pushed his hand away, that held the cup.

"Are you trying to poison me?" I asked, angrily.

He took in breath sharply.

I realized I could smell him, as I had never smelled another human being. I could smell his life, the pulsing of blood in his body. It was the smell of ground after a rain, the sound of a mountain spring. My throat ached, parched.

"Hylas," he said, gravely. "Hylas . . .have you . . .. What happened to you? What did you do last night?"

My head ached. The odor of him was unbearable temptation. "Why would you care?" I asked. "Did you ever tell me where you go when you leave alone?"

In the silence I heard his breathing, noisy to my sharpened senses. I could hear as I had never heard before. I could hear the house around me, all of the house. Slaves argued in the hallway. The matron discussed poetry with a female friend. Somewhere a baby cried. Above all, over all, through every fissure and crevice in the walls and door, through every pore in the stones, through every opening in the hanging draperies, the smell of people, the smell of life, the smell and sound of warm blood running vital through tireless veins came at me.

My throat hurt.

Adriano held my wrist. His skin felt rough and callused against mine. And warm.

"I don't want to argue, Hylas," he said. "You're very ill." His fingers tightened on my wrist and moved slowly round and round, searching, "Gods, but you're cold. And I can't feel your pulse." He switched his grip from my hand to my face. His palms squeezed my cheeks between them. In the dim light he looked pale, his eyes intense and alarmed. "You're dying, do you understand that? And there is nothing I can do for you. All my medical knowledge, all my herbs have been to naught. All I can think is you were given a poison I don't know. Tell me Hylas, tell me what you did, what you ate, what you drank." The tone of his voice became sharp and brutal, "Or die. It's that simple."

"I drank wine," I said. My head pulsed with pain. Something in me writhed and hungered at the scent of life coming from him, at the warmth of his hands on my face, at the guessed taste of his blood. "Someone bought me wine. A man."

He nodded, unmoved. "Do you know this man? Was he anyone you've seen before? Anyone you knew from Rome? Anyone who might have something against me and have taken his revenge on you?"

His hands were warm and appetizing, the way warm bread is appetizing when you're famished and cold. My head pounded more intensely. The nameless animal in me sniffed and lurked scenting prey. "I didn't know him," I said. "He was tall and pale, and blue eyed. He told me stories, said he was born before Rome, before . . .before, he said,
the divine twins were kicked out of the wolf's den
."

"What?"

"He said he had been born before the founding of Rome and"

"You're telling me this man was eight hundred years old?"

"I didn't say that, I said-"

"You said he was born before the founding"

Did he need to yell? My head would surely split open. "I didn't either," I answered, sullen. "I said
he told
me he was born before Rome, before the gentes streamed into the seven hills and laid the Sabines to waste. Of course I knew he was lying. I am not that stupid. I met old people in Rome and none of them remembered any of that. Also, he told me," I said, in a whisper now, embarrassed to admit the enticement that had drawn me forth to that lonely field. I knew it was a lie like the rest. "He told me if I allowed him, if I allowed him to . . .satiate himself on me, he would make me immortal, and I would never age. I would be forever as I am now. Forever as . . .as you like me."

Adriano whispered something I could not understand. His hands gripped my face tighter. "What did he do to you?" he asked.

What had he done to me? I could hardly remember. "Not what you think. He just . . .he just . . .." What had he done to me? My head pounded, pounded so loudly with the echo of Adriano's heartbeats, the scent of his warm blood, the

My hand held his right arm in a vise grip and pulled, till his wrist was at my mouth. Urgently, my teeth tore the vein, allowed vital, warm liquid to flow onto my cold, cold, tongue, down my parched throat.

"Mithra's crown!" he said, or some other legionary oath. His left hand held my wrist and pulled his right hand free. Then he backed two steps. His left hand held his right. Drop after drop of red liquid fell from his wrist. He watched me from the shadows of the room. There was surprise in his eyes and the fear of a man confronted with impossibility. "I have heard of such things," he said. "I have heard of them, as I have heard of ghosts and witches and gods. I have heard them all, and believed them all in my moments of weakness, and laughed at all of them in the sunlight . . .but Hylas, sweet Hylas, what could make you crave living blood?"

I blinked, but could not answer. My eyes were riveted, mesmerized, by the drops falling from his wrist, their odor clear and pungent in the stale air of the room. I moved towards him, towards them. My movements were no longer painful. Those few drops of his blood, of his life, had restored some of my own.

But he evaded me easily, stepped back around the two low sleeping couches, took hold of the dark red curtains behind him and opened them in a quick tearing gesture.

Light burned my eyes, my skin. I was naked and every point of my body exposed to this strangely searing light. Pain, unbearable, stinging pain possessed me. I pulled the covers over myself and crouched, trembling, under them, uncomprehending, uncaring, longing for nothing so much as darkness. Darkness and life, to stanch my thirst.

Adriano's laughter rang joyless and loud. Gently, slowly, he closed the curtain. "So it is true," he said, his voice morose and tired. "It is true. There are such creatures. Lamias . . .. The legends say they're women with serpent bodies. One of my Germanic mercenaries told me they can also be corpses, dead but living, needing blood to survive and fearing the life-giving sun. And Hylas, always bloodthirsty, has become one of them," he finished with a sort of ironic gaiety.

Encouraged by darkness and the lack of threat in his voice, I pushed the covers back, sat up uncertainly, reached a hopeful hand for his wrist, just an arm's length away, his wrist from which the merry river of life still ran, unheeded. But he was not to be caught unawares. He stepped back, away from my touch. "No, no you won't, Hylas," he said. "I will not trade my blood for death in life . . .nor for life in death." His eyes were interested but repulsed. Thus had I seen him, once, examine a scorpion. With his left hand he tightened the open brass bracelet he wore on his right arm, tighter, tighter, tighter, till it would serve as a tourniquet. The flow of blood slowed to a mere trickle, then tiny droplets. "What am I to do with you?" he asked, coldly. "What did you think I would do with you? Give you my enemies as fodder?"

BOOK: Crawling Between Heaven And Earth
3.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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