by AM Kirkby
***
It was Ascanius who had given Daryush to Egerius, back in Rome; Ascanius, a no-account trader who'd wanted Egerius to back some venture or another, but it had come to nothing. Darush was a Persian, at least according to his name; slender, dark, and just grown out of boyhood, which meant his value had been falling as his voice broke and the stubble appeared on his cheeks. Egerius had planned to train him up as a scribe, or perhaps an accountant, but he'd had no time to devote himself to the affairs of his personal household, and Daryush's training had been one of the things that got forgotten, or pushed aside by greater priorities.
Who knew where Daryush had come from? Ascanius didn't; the auctioneer had inquired, but no one seemed to know; the boy had been through several pairs of hands, one noble family, a Greek trader, and a brothel; the slaver who brought him originally had gone out of business, and though his successor was helpful, at the end of his search he knew only that Daryush must have been part of one of three lots that had been bought in, and split up. He might have been already a slave in the crew of a ship that had been taken off the coast near Pyrgi, and sold to Rome some months later; or he might have come off another trading ship, that took passengers, but was rumoured to have rather flexible lines drawn between passengers and slaves, if they couldn't pay their bills; or there was a whole household that had sold up, down in the southern Etruscan confederacy, when the father died and the daughters had all moved to Tarchna with their mother; he might have been one of the slaves of that household. Those were the possibilities, assuming the written records told the truth, or something like it. Perhaps ultimately he'd come from Greece; they had a lot of Oriental slaves there, the auctioneer said.
And the woman he'd been sold with might have been his mother, or an aunt, or elder sister; or she might have been no relation at all, except that, like Daryush, she was Persian. At fifteen years' distance, it was difficult to know; and Daryush had been too young then to know himself.
He'd asked Daryush once what he remembered of Persia. "Nothing," Daryush said, and then his eyes flickered away, and he said, "a door, a door open, and the light beyond it." A light that glared and burned as it never did in Italy; a light that sucked you dry.
Daryush was always quiet, as if he feared to be noticed. His long dark eyes were blank, showing nothing, his face unexpressive. Even when Egerius took him to his bed, Daryush showed no emotion, only a small catch of his breath at one point, almost imperceptible.
In the end Egerius found the boy's silence unnerving; he'd not sent for him after the feast, and not for the week after that. He could have slept with one of the other slaves, but he was too fastidious to want such intimacy with more than a few; he felt, every time, that he was diluting himself, that one day he'd wake and everything that made him Egerius would have been washed away, taken, sucked out. There was too much to think about with a new lover; a new body, new emotions, new preferences, the hundred different ways a lover could sigh or groan or simply exhale; the way bodies fitted or didn't fit, naturally curving into each other or crashing elbows and knees in a tangle of limbs – and then the feeling, always, that he'd revealed too much of himself, that he'd surrendered completely while his partners had always left something of themselves unexposed.
He hadn't the resource to deal with a sulky boy; he'd have to eventually, perhaps, but he had too many other calls on his time, and those were urgent. There was the Ligurian that Gaius had reported for unauthorised building operations.
"He doesn't need authorisation," Egerius had said.
"No, but he's building a hovel bang in the middle of the agora."
"I can see that could be difficult." Still, he'd told the Roman, there was nothing that couldn't be solved by the application of good sense and goodwill.
He'd set out immediately with Gaius. The agora was deserted; no one was working on the stoa, though it was still only half finished. Though the roof frames were all in place, only half of it had been tiled; the sight was vaguely disturbing, like a skeleton with the flesh partly eaten away. A statue of a god lay on its side in front of the building, bound around the waist with rope that trailed on the ground; one arm had been broken off while trying to lift it to the pediment.
In the centre of the agora, the Ligurian had already erected four sides of a small shack. He'd used some of the leftover timber from the work on the stoa to make a rough frame, just one end-piece wedged in some rocks and a long ridge slung on to it, perched at the other end on an unused capital; it was only a couple of feet off the ground, but that would give enough space to lie down, with more height at the front. When they arrived, he was already slinging branches against the ridgepole, building up the sides; he was built like a bull, massive shoulders but thin legs, and he was sweating as he lugged the branches across from the pile where he'd slung them earlier.
He introduced himself as Ambro, though that might have been his nationality or his family, there was some confusion; from what they could make out, he'd heard there was land for everyone that came to Collatia, so he'd made the journey, slowly and on foot, to take possession of his own steading. He didn't much like Gaius' attitude, a dislike increased by his difficulty understanding what he was being told.
"You must take that down."
"Is my ome."
"Not here."
"I wants a buildit ere."
"Well you can't build it there." Gaius stonewalled with the best, but he was up against it.
"Vynott?" the Ligurian asked.
"You just can't," Egerius said. Then he realised what he'd just said, in the city of the possible, of freedom and choice; "You can't." So he began to explain; how the agora was public space, how the capital would eventually be used, though it hadn't been just now, how the Ligurian could have land out towards the river. It was no use.
"I wants a buildit ere. I buildit ere."
"Look," said Gaius, suddenly stepping in and sounding very reasonable, indeed quite emollient – which for Gaius was a stretch, Egerius knew; "You heard the man. You can have a decent bit of land near the river. Not just enough for a house, enough for a garden. You can keep a cow, or goats, or grow vegetables, so you'll have a trade. It's better land there, too. This is crap. Look, all these stones. You'll never grow anything here."
Sheer bribery, Egerius thought; but if it worked, he'd approve it. The problem was, it would work once, but then other incomers would get to hear of it, and Collatia would be swamped. Still, he could deal with that later; he'd ask Simonides to help devise some systematic way of apportioning land, since much as he disliked compulsion, they would need some way to ensure the city grew as it was intended to. Something that wasn't too much trouble; something simple, a land for labour swap, perhaps.
Then there was the growing rift between Kallirhoe and Melkart, each of whom had gathered a little band of followers; Kallirhoe, for all her espousal of strict anarchy, living a life of restraint and contemplation, while Melkart advocated the exploitation of freedom for the purposes of greater enjoyment. Melkart's followers never stayed longer than a few weeks with him; they burned brightly and noisily, fuelled by wine or drugs, and then one day they were gone. Some Egerius had seen about Collatia, working on the building programme, and one or two had ended up with Karite and Simonides, strangely quiet and withdrawn; others had disappeared totally, and he was never sure quite what had happened to them. That could happen, in a place like Rome or Collatia; people appeared, like the Ligurian (who'd already been nicknamed 'Build-it-ere'), and just as easily disappeared, and you never really knew them.
Tired by his responsibilities, Egerius sometimes found sleep evaded him for a while; he couldn't stop his mind obsessively listing the tasks he had still left undone, running on without him – when he tried to think of something, of anything (a phrase of Homer, a dance tune he'd heard, the burnished curve of a gold earring) to still it, he could hold on to it for only a few moments before the incessant listing resurfaced and swept it away. But when he did eventually sink into slee
p, he slept heavily, unwoken, through to gritty-eyed morning.
One night he had more than the usual trouble sleeping. He'd drunk too much, or perhaps not enough; he was too strung up to sleep, and not awake enough to get up and read (if he did, his eyes would skip down the page, but he knew after half a page, he'd realise he couldn't retain a single word of what he'd thought he'd been reading). The bed was too hot; he shifted to the unslept-in side, which was cooler, and then in a few moments he was too cold, and pulled the warmer part of the cover back over himself. He could look forward to this all night, he thought, and began to feel angry, and realised that he was now even less likely to be able to sleep.
From somewhere in the house he heard a whimper, a sob. He turned over, pulling the cover over his head; but as he did so he knew it wouldn't really shut the noise out. And now he'd heard it, he was listening for every sound, preternaturally alert; the wind-rustled leaves of a tree, a grunt as someone turned over in their sleep, the slow creak of a tree trunk bending. The silence seemed pregnant with the promise or threat of sound to come; it kept him on edge, waiting for the next sob.
It came. And again.
In the end, perhaps the sixth or seventh time he'd heard that stifled sound,he swung his legs over the side of the bed and levered his body up. Outside his room, in the atrium, he waited till he heard it again, trying to determine from which direction it had come. It took several repetitions; he'd move a little, towards one side of the court, or one corner, and listen again; the sobs were more closely spaced now, as if whoever was crying had tried to stop, but couldn't – as if the pain, whatever it was, was getting worse. Sound was deceiving; sometimes, he thought he'd followed the echo and not the sound itself. But eventually he found himself standing in a low storeroom, from which three doors led off; waiting again, then standing outside one of those doors, the one from which, he thought, the sound had issued; and when another whimper came, he went in.
He stepped carefully; there was hardly enough light to make out the far wall, and the floor was a pool of blackness, his footing uneven and tentative.
"Who's there?"
"It's Egerius. Is that you, Daryush?"
"Go away." The boy's voice was thick, so soft and small that Egerius could hardly hear it.
"Oh Daryush, Daryush. Hush, hush" – he realised he had sat on the bed, felt for the boy's shoulder, pulled his head to him, as if Daryush was a child who needed comforting – "hush, darling, don't cry, don't cry." But it was no use, the youth was sobbing now, his body lurching against Egerius' with each outrush of breath, each desperate inhalation. Egerius held the thin body in his arms, felt Daryush's head on his shoulder, his face turned away into Egerius' neck as if ashamed, or burrowing like a blind kitten into its mother's fur; he was murmuring "hush, hush", and words he knew were nonsense, were nothing to the point, just to say something, anything, over the senseless sound of Daryush's distress.
Once Daryush had given way to his weeping, he sobbed wildly, sometimes seeming almost to choke himself, so that he had to draw breath hurriedly, like a drowning man surfacing between two waves, trying to snatch breath before the next paroxysm pulled him down again; there was no rhythm to it. It was only after some time that he quietened; his breaths became shallower, his sobs more regular, till at last his tears were silent. He snuffled a little, and wiped his eyes, but he still wouldn't look at Egerius.
"What is it, Daryush? Tell me, what's wrong?"
"Don't send me away; please don't send me away."
"I shan't. You're wanted here. Hush." The youth had obviously thought his dismissal from Egerius' bed was final; he probably thought he'd done something wrong, that Egerius had another favourite; perhaps he'd seen him with Kallirhoe... Egerius lowered his lips to Daryush's neck, just under the downy edge of his curly hair, to kiss him, tightening his embrace. Daryush squirmed in his arms for a moment, and said: "I thought I had done something wrong;" Egerius said nothing, didn't need to say anything, made his hands make his explanation for him.
Daryush was softer and more feminine that night than he had ever been, Egerius thought; more compliant, more yielding. There had always been a certain reserve in Daryush; it was as if his tears had washed it away. Egerius tried to console him, making love to him tenderly, gently, trying to persuade him into pleasure; Daryush curled into him, shivering at last into quiescence and dozing in the warmth of Egerius' embrace.
But half way through the night Egerius was woken again by Daryush's sobbing.
"Do you have a lamp?"
"Yes."
"Light it," Egerius said, and Daryush obeyed, quick as he always was at command.
"Tell me."
The boy looked ugly in the fitful light. It wasn't just that his eyes were puffy, his face smeared with wetness; there was often something arousing about the sight of a graceful boy in tears, but there was a hardness to Daryush's features that aged and disfigured him. Daryush shook his head.
"Tell me."
"You don't understand."
"Tell me."
"This.... What we do. It is evil."
Egerius could hardly speak. He was bemused, he was hurt, he was angry. How could it be evil? There was no law earthly or divine against it in Etruria or in Collatia; and he was a good lover; and besides, he owned Daryush – it was not for Daryush to make moral distinctions.
"Men who lie with men are lovers of The Lie," Daryush was saying. "The Lie and the Darkness. I have chosen the Darkness and the Lie against the Light of Aura Mazd, and I dread the fire, the eternal fire."