He took a deep breath. “Nary made me wear the gold ring. She’d rather be thought an old fool with a young lover, than someone desperate enough to take an artifact on a tour halfway across the world.” He spoke with almost regret. “And she didn’t mind the fines, should we be caught.”
And she wouldn’t mind his dying? I looked at his golden skin, his dark curls, his oceanic eyes and I felt a great anger against the dead Nary. If she were alive, I’d kill her.
Words I’d heard from his companion—Owner? Now took on a different meaning. You are not irreplaceable sounded chilling enough when said to a lover, but brutally threatening when said to an artifact. She hadn’t cared. If he had got killed, she could have bought another.
Nausea made me dizzy.
He shrugged. “I was hers.” His eyes lost all expression as though invisible shutters had fallen over them. “I was not created for such a reputable job as courier. Mind and body, I was designed as a companion, a lover… a pleasure toy for humans. And for a time I was owned by a brothel. It was… not pleasant. Too many of us, too little room, nothing of my own, no one… no one to belong to. It’s part of my make-up that I need to belong. When Nary bought me, she gave me what I needed most. She also gave me the chance to play human for a time. She could risk my life if she wished. It wasn’t much of a life before her. Now, I’m masterless again…. Listen, I wish…” He looked intent, desperate. “I don’t suppose you could buy me? Her daughter has no use for artifacts.”
My heart beat fast. I could sense his pain and his fear. He’d thought quickly thinking in the labyrinth. He had feelings, emotions, even wit. But to his new owner, he’d be an object; an unwanted possession.
To me, he was still a demigod, only now attainable.
He was so beautiful. And he had a need to belong.
From the expression in his green eyes, he wanted to belong to me; perhaps belonged to me already through some mysterious imprinting mechanism.
Warm breezes blew through the open window, filling the curtains like a ship’s sails.
He looked vulnerable and lost and scared. An intelligent, self-sufficient man, and yet as dependent, as open as a child.
I touched his finger, where the red ring glowed. I’d been bereft of my own kind for much too long.
We made love through the night, with the smell of the sea wafting in on the warm breezes. And despite the injuries to my leg and to his arm, it was all the poets have sung about. Perhaps more.
In the morning, while he slept, I limped out of bed, got on my private link and called up the price of the Doris line of artifacts.
There had been only a hundred made and each of them had sold for ten million narcs only two years ago. Young as they still were, they would only have appreciated. He’d cost much more than I could afford on my ten thousand a year salary. No bank would finance him for me. He was not an appreciable asset, nor a necessity. And if I stole him, I could never go back to my life, my comfortable life. We’d be fugitives. He’d starve along with me.
Not for me.
Artifacts are born alone, without families, and they must learn early to survive alone. I must survive.
I’d once read that no good comes of an artifact loving another artifact. Sage advice, if you could take it.
I left him sleeping and, like a despicable feminine version of Theseus, deserted him to be claimed by the gods for whatever fate pleased them.
I don’t know where Pol is—alive or dead, contented or in unbearable servitude. I don’t want to think of what he might have become.
I remember him in that hotel bed, his hair black against the white pillow, his face serene, trustingly asleep, not yet knowing himself abandoned.
Thirst
When I first decided to work towards being a writer, I had this vague idea I wanted my first novel to be set in ancient Rome. With this intent I spent seven glorious years “researching” Rome. In retrospect, I should have decided my novel was going to be set in Hawaii and spent a year or so sunning on a beach. The cost would probably have been similar, considering how many Roman history books I bought. At the end of those seven years, I still didn’t have even a glimmer of an idea for a novel. However, I had got pregnant and gone through a very difficult pregnancy during which I was hospitalized and had blood drawn all too often. So perhaps it is no accident that on the day after coming back home with my brand new baby, I woke up with the entire plot of this story in my mind. I dragged myself out of bed and to the office and wrote it in a single—eight hour long—sitting. It was the only thing I wrote for the coming year, which involved several house moves. The last line was a complete surprise. I “finished” the story and thought “that isn’t right.” Then my fingers typed the last line and I thought, “Wait a minute. That can’t be…. Oh!” It was the first and so far the only time a story surprised me that way. For this reason it remains one of my favorite stories.
“Sing to me of that odorous green eve when crouching by the marge You heard from Adrian’s gilded barge the laughter of Antinous And lapped the stream and fed your drought and watched with hot and hungry stare The ivory body of that rare young slave with his pomegranate mouth.”
Sometimes I wake up in the evening and think them here, immaterial wisps of dream in the cold twilight air, and yet undeniably themselves: the Emperor and the boy he loved, etched by time into heroic figures without flaw.
The Emperor wears his purple, and the boy stands in one of those sweet, head-drooping postures immortalized in his countless statues.
And sometimes, confused by a day of death-sleep and the centuries that have flown heedless by my changeless self, I reach for them, try to clutch them in my long-dead yet immortal hands.
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.