by S. U. Pacat
He thought of the day the bell had rung for Kallias, the long embrace as they clung to one another at parting. The bell will ring for you soon, I know it, Kallias had said. I know it, Erasmus. That had been three summers ago.
It had taken so long, but suddenly it was too soon that boys were sent out, and the bolts on the doors were being thrown open.
And that was when the man came into the hallway.
Erasmus did not realise that he had fallen to his knees until he felt the cool marble against his forehead. The obliterating image of the man silhouetted in the doorway had struck him down. It beat inside Erasmus, dark hair framing a commanding face, features indomitable as the eagle. The power of him, the hard curve of a bicep where a leather strap gripped it, the muscles of a bronzed thigh between knee sandal and leather skirt. He wanted to look again, and did not dare lift his gaze from the stone.
Pylaeus addressed the man with the grace of his long-ago palace career, but Erasmus was barely aware of him, his skin hot. He didn’t take in the words that Pylaeus and the man spoke to one another. He didn’t know how much time passed after the man left before Pylaeus was coaxing him to look up.
Pylaeus said, ‘You’re trembling.’
He heard the soft, stunned quality of his voice. ‘That . . . was a master from the palace?’
‘A master?’ Pylaeus’s voice was not unkind. ‘That was a soldier of your retinue, sent to protect your litter. He is to your master as a single droplet to the great storm that comes from the ocean and splits open the sky.’
It was hot in summer.
Under the relentless blue sky, the walls, the steps and the paths heated steadily, so that by the time night fell the marble gave off heat, like a warming brick taken straight from the fire. The ocean, which could be seen from the eastern courtyard, seemed to withdraw from dry rocks each time it rolled back from the cliffs.
Palace slaves-in-training did what they could to keep cool: they kept to the shade; they practiced the art of the fan; they slipped in and out of the refreshing waters of the baths; they lay, sprawled like starfish beside the outdoor pools, the smooth stone hot beneath them, a friend propped up beside them, perhaps, drizzling cool water over their skin.
Erasmus liked it. He liked the extra strain that heat brought to his training, the extra effort of concentration that was required. It was right that training here in the palace should be more arduous than in the gardens of Nereus. It was befitting of the golden ribbon around his neck, a symbol of the golden collar he would earn when his three years as a palace slave-in-training were done. It was befitting of the golden pin he wore, a little weight at his shoulder that made his heart pound every time he thought of it, carved as it was with a tiny lion’s head, the device of his future master.
He took his morning lessons with Tarchon in one of the small marble training rooms filled with accoutrements that he did not use, because from dawn until the sun reached the middle of the sky, it was the three forms, over and over and over again. Tarchon gave impassive corrections that Erasmus struggled to perform. At the end of each sequence, ‘Again.’ Then, when his muscles were aching, when his hair was drenched in the heat and his limbs slippery with sweat from holding a pose, Tarchon would tell him curtly, ‘Again.’
‘So Nereus’s prize flower has finally blossomed,’ Tarchon had said on the day of his arrival. His inspection had been systematic and thorough. Tarchon was First Trainer. He had spoken inflectionlessly.
‘Your looks are exceptional. This is an accident of birth for which you are not entitled to praise. You are training now for the royal household, and looks are not enough to earn you a place there. And you are old. You are older than the oldest I have worked with. Nereus hopes to have one of his slaves chosen to train for a First Night, but in twenty seven years he has produced only one hopeful, the rest bath boys, table attendants.’
He had not known what to do, or say. Arriving in the stifled dark of the litter, Erasmus had tried with each painful heartbeat to hold himself still. A fine sheen of sweat had broken out over him at the terror of being outside. Outside the gardens of Nereus, the calming, comforting gardens that contained all that he knew of life. He had been glad of the litter’s coverings, the thick fabric that was dropped down to snuff out the light. There to protect him from the debasing stares of outside eyes, it had been all that had stood between him and vast, unknown space, the muffled unfamiliar sounds, clatters and shouts, the blinding light as the litter’s coverings were thrown back.
But now the palace paths were as familiar as the palace routines, and when the noon-time bell rang, he touched his forehead to the marble and said the ritual words of thanks, his limbs trembling with exhaustion, then stumbled out to his afternoon lessons: languages, etiquette, ceremonies, massage, recitation, singing and the kithara—
Shock stopped him when he stepped out into the courtyard, and he stood, numb.
A spray of hair, a body limp. Blood on Iphegin’s face where he lay on the shallow marble steps, a trainer supporting his head, two others kneeling in concern. Coloured silk bent over him like exotic feeding birds.
Slaves-in-training were gathering around him, a semi-circle of onlookers.
‘What happened?’
‘Iphegin slipped on the stairs.’ And then, ‘You think Aden pushed him?’
The joke was awful. There were dozens of male slaves-in-training, but only four wore a golden pin, and Aden and Iphegin were the only two who wore the pin of the King. A voice at his elbow.
‘Come away, Erasmus.’
Iphegin was breathing. His chest was rising and falling. Blood down Iphegin’s chin had stained the front of his training silks. He would have been on his way to a kithara lesson.
‘Erasmus, come away.’
Distantly, Erasmus felt a hand on his arm. He looked around blindly and saw Kallias. Trainers were lifting Iphegin and carrying him indoors. In the palace, he would be tended by concerned trainers and palace physicians.
‘He’ll be all right, won’t he?’
‘No,’ said Kallias. ‘It will scar.’
Erasmus would never forget how it had felt to see him again: a slave-in-training rising from a prostration to his trainer, heart-wrenchingly lovely, with a tumble of dark brown curls and wide set blue eyes. There had always been something untouchable about his beauty, his eyes like the unreachable blue sky. Nereus had always said of him, A man only has to look at him to want to possess him.
Aden’s mouth had turned down. ‘Kallias. You can moon over him all you want, everyone does. He won’t look twice at you. He thinks he’s better than everyone else.’
‘Erasmus?’ Kallias had said, stopping as Erasmus had stopped, staring as Erasmus was staring, and in the next moment Kallias was throwing his arms around Erasmus, holding him tight, pressing his cheek to Erasmus’s cheek, the highest intimacy allowed to those who were forbidden to kiss.
Aden was staring at them, open mouthed.
‘You’re here,’ said Kallias. ‘And you’re for the Prince.’
Erasmus saw that Kallias also wore a pin, but that it was plain gold, without a lion’s head.
‘I’m for the other Prince,’ said Kallias. ‘Kastor.’
They were inseparable, close as they had been in the gardens of Nereus, as though the three years of separation had never been. Close as brothers, the trainers said, smiling because this was a charming conceit, young slaves echoing the relationship of their princely masters.
In the evenings, and in the moments snatched around training, they spilled out their words and seemed to talk about everything. Kallias talked in his quiet, serious voice about vast, wide-ranging topics, politics, art, mythology, and he always knew the best of the palace gossip. Erasmus talked hesitatingly and for the first time about his most private feelings, his responsiveness to his training, his eagerness to please.
All of this with a new consciousness of Kallias’s beauty. Of how far beyond him Kallias seemed.
Of course, Kallias was thre
e years ahead of him in training, although they were the same age. That was because the age at which one took training silks differed, and was not marked in years. The body knows when it is ready.
But Kallias was ahead of everyone. The slaves-in-training who weren’t jealous hero-worshipped him. Yet there was a distance between Kallias and the others. He wasn’t conceited. He often offered help to the younger boys, who blushed and grew awkward and flustered. But he never really talked to them, beyond politeness. Erasmus never really knew why Kallias singled him out, glad of it though he was. When Iphegin’s room was cleared out and his kithara given to one of the new boys, all Kallias had said was, ‘He was named for Iphegenia, the most-loyal. But they don’t remember your name if you fall.’ Erasmus had said, meaning it, ‘You won’t fall.’
That afternoon, Kallias flung himself down in the shade, and let his head rest in Erasmus’s lap, his legs tumbled out on the soft grass. His eyes were closed, dark lashes resting against his cheeks. Erasmus barely moved at all, not wanting to disturb him, over-conscious of his heartbeats, of the weight of Kallias’s head against his thigh, unsure of what to do with his hands. Kallias’s unselfconscious ease made Erasmus feel happy and very shy.
‘I wish we could stay like this forever,’ he said, softly.
And then flushed. A curl of hair lay across Kallias’s smooth forehead. Erasmus wanted to reach out and touch it, but he wasn’t brave enough. Instead this daring had blurted out of his mouth.
The garden was drenched with the heat of summer, the piping of a bird, the slow buzzing of an insect. He watched a dragonfly land on a pepperstalk. The slow movement only made him more conscious of Kallias.
After a moment, ‘I’ve started training for my First Night.’
Kallias didn’t open his eyes. It was Erasmus’s heart that was suddenly beating too fast.
‘When?’
‘I’m to be Kastor’s welcome when he returns from Delpha.’
He said Kastor’s name with its honorific, as all slaves did when they spoke of those above them, Kastor-exalted.
It had never made sense that Kallias was being trained for Kastor. Yet for some reason the Keeper of the Royal Slaves had decreed that his finest slave-in-training should go not to the heir, or the King, but to Kastor.
‘Do you ever wish for a lion pin? You’re the finest slave in the palace. If anyone deserves to be in the retinue of the future King, it’s you.’
‘Damianos doesn’t take male slaves.’
‘Sometimes he—’
‘I don’t have your colouring,’ Kallias said, and he opened his eyes, reaching up to put his finger around a curl of Erasmus’s hair.
His colouring, if truth were told, had been carefully cultivated to the Prince’s taste. His hair was daily rinsed with chamomile, so that it brightened and improved in lustre, and his skin kept from the sun until it changed from the golden cream of his early boyhood in the gardens of Nereus to a milky white.
‘It’s the cheapest way to get noticed,’ Aden said, his eyes displeased as he stared at Erasmus’s hair. ‘A slave with real form doesn’t draw attention to himself.’
Kallias said later, ‘Aden would give his arm for fair hair. He wants a Prince’s pin more than anything.’
‘He doesn’t need a Prince’s pin. He’s training for the King.’
‘But the King is sick,’ said Kallias.
The Prince’s taste was for songs and verses of battle, which were more difficult to remember than the love poetry Erasmus preferred, and longer. A full performance of The Fall of Inachtos was four hours, and the Hypenor was six, so that every spare moment was spent in internal recitation. Cut off from his brothers, he strikes too short at Nisos, and, Held steady in single purpose, twelve thousand men, and, In relentless victory cleaves Lamakos with his sword. He fell asleep murmuring the long heroic genealogies, the lists of weapons and of deeds that Isagoras wrote into his epics.
But that night, he let his mind drift to other poems, In the long night, I wait, Laechthon’s yearning for Arsaces, as he unpinned his silks and felt the evening air against his skin.
Everyone whispered about First Night.
It was rare for boys to wear the pin. The pin meant a permanent place in the retinue of a member of the royal family. The pin meant more than that. Of course, any slave might be called on to serve in private, if the royal eye fell on them. But the pin meant the certainty of a First Night, in which the slave was presented to the royal bed.
Those who wore a pin received the best rooms, the strictest training, and first privileges. Those without dreamed of acquiring one, and worked day and night in the attempt to prove worthy. In the male gardens, Aden said with a flick of his shiny brown hair, that was almost impossible. In the female gardens, of course, pins were more common. The tastes of the King and his two sons ran along predictable lines.
And since the birth of Damianos, there was no Queen to select slaves for her own retinue. The King’s permanent mistress Hypermenestra had full rights and kept slaves as befitted her status, but was too politic to take any but the King into her bed, said Aden. Aden was nineteen and in the last year of his training, and spoke about First Night with sophistication.
Laying himself down on the bedsheets, Erasmus was aware of the lingering responsiveness of his body, which he could not touch himself. Only those with special dispensation were allowed to handle him there, to wash him in the baths. Some days he liked it. He liked the ache of it. He liked the feeling that he was denying himself something to please his Prince. It felt strict, virtuous. Some days he just wanted, beyond reason, and it made the feeling of self denial, of obedience, stronger, wanting it yet wanting to do as he was told, until he was all confusion. The idea of lying untouched on a bed and the Prince entering the room. . . it was an obliterating thought that overwhelmed him.
As yet untutored, he had no idea how it would be. He knew what the Prince liked, of course. He knew his favourite foods, those that might be selected for him at table. He knew his morning routine, the way that he liked to have his hair brushed, his preferred style of massage.
He knew . . . he knew the Prince had many slaves. The attendants spoke of this with approval. The Prince had healthy appetites, and took lovers frequently, slaves and nobles too, when the need was on him. That was good. He was liberal with his affections, and a King should always have a large retinue.
He knew the Prince’s eye tended to roam, that he was always pleased by something new, that his slaves were looked after, kept in permanent style, while his eye, roaming, frequently fell on new conquests.
He knew that when he wanted men, the Prince rarely took slaves. He was more likely to come from the arena with his blood up and pick out some display fighter. There was a gladiator from Isthima who had lasted in the arena for twelve minutes against the Prince before he’d fallen to him, and had spent six hours in the Prince’s chambers, after. He was told those stories too.
And of course he only had to choose a fighter and they would yield to him as any slave, for he was the son of the King. Erasmus remembered the soldier he had seen in the gardens of Nereus, and the idea of the Prince mounting him was stunning image in his mind. He could not imagine that power, and then he thought, but he will take me like that, and the deep shiver went all the way through his body.
He shifted his legs together. What it would be like, to be the receptacle for the Prince’s pleasure? He lifted a hand to his own cheek and it felt hot, flushed as he lay back on the bed, exposed. The air felt like silk, his curls trailing like fronds across his forehead. He drew his hand to his forehead and pushed the curls back and even that gesture felt over-sensual, the slow motion of one underwater. He raised his wrists above his head and imagined the ribbon binding them, his body the Prince’s to touch. His eyes closed. He thought of weight, dipping the mattress, an unformed image of the soldier he had seen silhouetted above him, the words of a poem, Arsaces, undone.
The night of the fire festival, Kallias sang the balla
d of Iphegenia, who had loved her master so much that she waited for him though she knew what it meant to do so, and Erasmus felt the tears well up in his throat. He left the recital and walked out into the dark gardens, where the breeze was cool in the scented trees. He did not care that the music was growing distant behind him, needing suddenly to see the ocean.
In the moonlight it was different, dark and unknowable, but he felt it before him nonetheless, felt its vast openness. He looked out from the stone balustrade in the eastern courtyard and felt the reckless wind against his face, the ocean like a part of himself. He could hear the waves, imagined them splashing his body, filling his sandals, the foaming water swirling around him.
He’d never felt it before that yearning, tossed feeling, and he became aware that the familiar shape of Kallias was coming up behind him. He spoke the words swelling up inside him for the first time.
‘I want to be taken across the ocean. I want to see other lands. I want to see Isthima, and Cortoza, I want to see the place where Iphegenia waited, the great palace where Arsaces gave himself to a lover,’ he said, recklessly. The yearning inside him crested. ‘I want—to feel what it is to—’
‘Live in the world,’ said Kallias.
It wasn’t what he had meant to say, and he stared at Kallias, and felt himself flush. And he was aware of something different in Kallias, too, as Kallias drew alongside him, and leaned on the stone balustrade, his eyes on the ocean.
‘What is it?’
‘Kastor has returned from Delpha early. Tomorrow will be my First Night.’
He looked at Kallias, saw that distant expression on his face as he gazed out at the water, looking out to a world Erasmus couldn’t imagine.
‘I’ll work hard,’ Erasmus heard himself saying, the words a tumble. ‘I’ll work so hard to catch up with you. You promised me in the gardens of Nereus that we’d see each other again, and I promise you now. I’ll come to the palace, and you’ll be a fêted slave, you’ll perform on the kithara at the King’s table every night, and Kastor will never be without you. You’ll be magnificent. Nisos will write songs about you, and every man in the palace will look at you and envy Kastor.’