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.”