one by one, we drop like flies

There is a boy in a room. The room is small and foul-smelling and dark, a little barred window a handsbreadth tall and three times as wide the only source of light. The moon’s glow makes a hazy rectangle on the opposite wall, tracking its way inch by leisurely inch across the old, cracked plaster. Across the face of the boy, whose head is tipped back, eyes closed, each delicate eyelash visible. He has the look of a sketch which, in a few decades, will be called chiaroscuro. A study in contrasts: the light, the darkness.

He isn’t chained up, the boy. There’s no need. He’s too weak to flee—hasn’t kept down food in weeks, not even the thinnest broth, and a fever burns low but insistent in his blood. He’s too weak to put up a fight. The man who owns this house is glad of that, at least, that the boy has no energy left to kick or claw or bite.

“What is his name?” asks a man in red, the man who wants, for some reason, to have him.

The proprietor shrugs his shoulders, a careless sort of motion. He is a barber-surgeon who has made a handy business out of mutually assured destruction by treating the aftermath of vice for the wealthy pederasts of Venice and renting out rooms attended to by sweet-faced slave boys he purchases from the Rialto. “Whatever you should like to call him,” he says. “It’s not as though he’ll answer to anything. Dumb as a beast, this one.”

That isn’t quite true, but the proprietor could be forgiven the assumption. The boy was a wild thing before he became ill, fighting like a cornered animal when faced with the threat of his abasement, and did not speak at all or seem to understand even simple orders. But the man in red can see into the boy’s mind, and it is full of bright colours, of ritual, of foreign and superstitious but unmistakably human faith. In a language he does not speak but understands within the warm embrace of the boy’s thoughts, a prayer: deliver me, o God, deliver me.

“Amadeo,” the man in red decides. He speaks into Amadeo’s fragile mind: I am not the God you know, my child, but I come with my own salvation. He orders: Come into my arms.

The light in the doorway from the oil lamps burn bright behind the man, a halo about him, blindingly, painfully bright to Amadeo’s eyes. He wants to cover them, but he can’t. He must come into the man in red’s arms, which are cool to the touch and hard like stone. He closes his eyes, the brightness still burning through his eyelids in splashes of vivid red and yellow and green, and he crawls, because he must.

 

 

There is a boy in a garden. His name doesn’t matter. The garden is bright—with colourful tiled pathways, with the sunlight streaming through the open roof, with flowers chosen as much for their own beauty as the butterflies and bee-moths they bring. It is in the garden, his father’s garden—his master’s garden—he learns of beauty. Beauty is golden calendula, which takes to wool a lovely yellow and makes a cup of tea just as sunny. Beauty is roses cut and dried in the sun. When the boy picks a petal and rolls it between his fingers, it bleeds on his fingertips, yellow or red or purple or pink. Dragging rose petals down the walls in hidden places, the slaves’s dark, narrow halls, is how he first learns the principles of art.

 

 

The man in red, the buyer, he is called Marius, or at least five hundred years from now that is what textbooks and internet encyclopedias will say his name is, just as the contemporary of his who signs all his work ‘Scarpanzo’ will go down in history as ‘Carpaccio’ instead. ‘Marius’ will do. (For the longest time, his wayward son, who took his name without having the right, wrote it with a second ‘u’, ‘Maurius’, the Moor.)

Marius is cold and hard but not in the way those words usually mean, applied to a man. His voice is like a fur, warm and soft and enveloping; in words that are shaped wrong, the seasick rise and fall of the language of this strange water-logged land, he tells Amadeo sleep until we’re home and Amadeo, miraculously, understands him. He thinks of greenery, vines and flowers and branches; he thinks of knees aching on stone, and Kosmos sitting in the dark, and they are filled, all of them, with the Holy Spirit and begin to talk in different tongues as the Spirit gives them speech. His eyes beginning to flutter closed—he is so tired, tired and cold and dizzy with Marius’ icy lips on his neck—Amadeo utters his first words in he does not know how long, voice raw. “Because the dead will not praise You, o Lord, nor do those in hell have the freedom to offer You thanksgiving, but we the living bless You and implore You on behalf of those souls…”

“Hush,” says Marius, who is his own salvation, “none of that now. Sleep,” he commands, and, helplessly, Amadeo does.

 

 

When he awakes, Amadeo is being baptised, born anew in the hot water of a great bath like nothing he has ever seen. Marius is hardness at his back and under his slender thighs, the cold hardness of a statue. Slowly being warmed by the heat of the water and the boy in his lap, like breathing life into him.

Deep brown skin on palest peach, the veins and capillaries all standing out sharply dressed in their royal purple. The pads of Marius’ fingers chart their courses up the inside of Amadeo’s arm, each and every branching tributary. “When I was your age,” says Marius, in voice rather than mind, “purple was the colour of freedom.” Amadeo cannot understand the words; Marius does not expect him to. Rather, they should wash over him like the warm bathwater, comforting and cleansing, a gentle abrasive to bring up the dirt of the brothel, the stain of cruel words Amadeo understood no more than these.

“Thin bands of purple would be woven into children’s clothes, to show that they were born free. That they were off limits. The tunics men wore beneath their togas, bands of purple. It is a very rare colour. An expensive colour. It comes from inside molluscs, strange little creatures of the sea. Like you, Amadeo. My strange little creature of the sea.”

Marius’ power keeps the boy calm. He doesn't understand. Marius brings Amadeo’s wrist up to shoulder level and past it to his own mouth, first kissing the tender flesh and then biting into that purple vein, the vampire kiss. Softly, Amadeo sighs.

He bleeds onto Marius’ fingerpads like a crushed rose petal, staining Marius’ fingers red. Staining the bathwater pink. High in the back of Amadeo’s head, a sensation not unlike cold, fresh water. It drips down his spine and leaves a pleasant numbness in its wake, like n’tè del papàvo, the sharply bitter tisane the boys in the brothel all drank like water, masking the taste with sour fruits. He doesn’t know the word yet, only the command, bivi!, a cup pressed into his hands and exasperation when he does not, will not, cannot obey—but he’ll become familiar with the drink in the coming years, in the long daylight hours the master locks himself away in his darkened study.

(L’tè dal papà, Amadeo’s friend Bianca will call it in two years’s time, and Amadeo will laugh and reply l’tè de ƚa papàvera. He doesn’t know if it’s where the word comes from, really, but ‘papà’ means father and ‘n’véra’ is a ring; ‘n’papàvera’ is a slap across the face, and it feels fitting to Amadeo. His father’s (master’s) rings paint his cheek red when his poor behaviour earns him the usual brain-jarring blow.)

Amadeo floats as Marius washes him, detangling his matted auburn curls with careful fingers, scrubbing away weeks of dirt and grime and worse. It is easy to float: in the water, in his own head. Peace in Marius’ arms, his salvation. He comes back to himself only when Marius’ dark hands guide him up onto his knees.

He expects to be pinned up against the lip of the bath like a table and used, but instead Marius turns him around, saying, “Here, let me see you,” for the pleasure of hearing his own voice. “Like an angel,” he murmurs, pressing kisses down Amadeo’s sternum, in the space between his lowest ribs, down, and down, and down.

 

 

The rest of this story, you already know.

 

 

His mother was a concubine, but not until his father’s wife passed and he was already old enough to take lessons alongside his freeborn brothers.

That was common enough, in those days: the vernae, houseborn slaves, are brought up and educated alongside their master’s children, studying the same poems and histories, practicing their grammar and letters copying out the same simple narratives, all exemplars of proper conduct, proper roles. While they learned their Latin, they learned their romanitas. They wrote of wives who happily played wetnurse to vernae with their husbands’s eyes; wives who got with child whilst their husbands were away at war, and so watched those children be exposed. They wrote of sons who honoured their fathers and set out at their urns feasts of fine wine and rich cakes; of sons whose disrespect went so far the only recourse their fathers had was in their right to life and death. They wrote of slaves who squandered their meagre savings on a slave of their own and for such incredible laziness were made to remember why the comic writers name the slave ‘whipping-post’. They wrote of slaves who recognised their masters’s great kindness in seeing to their training up for civility and repaid it with the loyalty every man hopes for from his household by standing between him and a blade.

Later, he sets his boys to the same exercises, slaves of his house beside the freeborn children whose fathers send them to him to learn to paint, and more besides. Marius is not the most gifted painter in Venice, but he may be the most skillful, and he is well known to be the only man who will have your son working on a cathedral’s ceiling frescoes at twelve whilst another student reads from Xenophon’s Anabasis in the Greek for his enrichment. His boys go on to work in Florence and Rome, to study at the University of Padua, to adorn the main hall of the Doge’s Palace and leave indelible marks upon history. They learn Latin and Greek, philosophy and mathematics and law.

And Venice is in the grip of a great artistic fascination with the East, carpets from Persia and glasswork from Egypt and the much-celebrated return to the Catholic world of the remains of St. Thomas the Apostle, who went to Muciripattanam to bear the good news, whose grand, new fresco in Florence has inscribed beneath the words India yielded to you. Marius’ darker skin than his Venetian peers—his years living in Samarqand before the artistic renaissance of the Timurids was overshadowed by Florence, then Venice, as for all his life he has followed art and culture wherever it leads—makes him a particularly sought-after méstro indeed. Foreign teachers are always respected. When he was a boy in Mauretania, when he still carried the name his Troglodyte slave mother chose rather than either of the names—Latin or Berber—his father gave him, Marius’ own tutor was a Greek freedman.

Not that he is foreign. He has been a Roman since he was nine years old and his father freed and adopted him as a son. He knew only a smattering of his mother’s native tongue even then, and at fifteen, when he became a man, he read and composed Latin as well as anyone in the capital. By twenty, travelling the empire as a polymath, writer of itineraries, and agent of his father’s business, he had suppressed any trace of Tamazight from his accent. At forty, when in Gaul he met the man who would be his first death, he had been wearing a toga for formal affairs for years, and no one had ever questioned it. But these young men, these mortal men, they look at him and think him foreign. A Spaniard, perhaps. Vecchio thinks him Persian, for his familiarity with Timurid miniatures; Carpaccio thinks he is a Mamluk, some Egyptian nobleman.

“How does a Saracen such as yourself come to paint altarpieces for Catholic churches?” Bellini asks him once.

“I am not a Mohammedan,” Marius replies, laughing, and returns to the shadows on the face of Doubting Thomas, tiny, delicate strokes of ocher and yolk.

“Well obviously not anymore,” Bellini agrees, and Marius can see in his mind he will not believe anything else, so he sighs and sets aside his brush.

“I touched the wounds of God,” he says, and it is not even untrue.

 

 

He visits Those Who Must Be Kept as often as he can, the duty he was given so long ago because Mael asked him, “Have you been to Egypt?” and he was fool enough to answer yes. They do not wish to be moved, but Marius does not wish to live in Egypt. He never did. He spent decades there all the same, when he was still young in the blood, surrounded by all manner of backwards practices and superstitions the Roman governor seemed utterly disinterested in stamping out: free men doing the work of slaves for daily wages, girls mutilated by their parents to control their sexual appetites, sons taking daughters to wife, and worse. Egypt was old, and it clung to old ideas, things civilised men had long since done away with. And when change did come, it came with Muslim conquest and the death of all the parts of mortal culture Marius most loved. They hated wine and dicing and art and good music, and still Those Who Must Be Kept refused to be moved out of their tombs.

Now, thankfully, Marius has the cloud gift, and he can see to them without trapping himself in that wretched nation. It is far more tolerable as a brief visitor.

 

 

One year after taking in his beloved Amadeo, who flourishes under Marius’ care, the boy begs and wheedles until Marius agrees to take him to Egypt. Not to meet Those Who Must Be Kept, of course—he is still a hot-headed boy and not ready for the blood—but simply to visit. Everyone knows Marius makes frequent visits there, though not precisely when he has the time to make such a strenuous journey. The palazzo is full up with carpets and glass and metalwork and Arabic treatises on medicine and mathematics, all these things that simply appear, and he says, oh, I bought that on my last trip to Egypt, and oh, some time ago, it was some time ago now. Again and again, and Amadeo, curled up to his master’s chest in bed, tender in body and heart after their coupling, begs him, “Take me with you. When next you go to Egypt. I want to go with you.”

No, Marius says. Amadeo does not let up. He barters with good behaviour, promising to study, promising not to go out drinking with the other boys, promising—and here his voice breaks with uncertainty—to pick up a brush again and paint. “Please,” says Amadeo, “do not leave me alone, master, not even for a day. I love you.”

And Marius is weak. “Very well,” he sighs, and Amadeo kisses his lips again and again, joyous, his warm, soft hands cupping Marius’ face. Pale peach and deep brown. “But—!” Marius interrupts, catching Amadeo’s wrists and pinning them back, “If you are to come with me, it will be for the furtherance of your education, not some sight-seeing holiday.”

“Yes, yes,” Amadeo agrees impatiently, legs straddling his master’s, his father’s lap. He grinds against him, and grins when Marius lets go of his wrists to take hold of his hips. Devilish thing. “We shall visit all manner of boring old temples and I shall copy pictures off the walls and you shall berate me when I cannot turn them into words.”

“And your other education,” Marius agrees. “Cairo is a wretched city, but the one thing they have which we want for here in Venice is boys whose trade is pleasure. Proper courtesans, not simply miserable creatures in cells who know nothing of their craft.”

“Like me,” Amadeo says, dully. He ceases to move against Marius, just perches there, brown eyes owl-like in his pale face.

“These moods of yours!” Marius cries. “And have I not made every effort to teach you?”

“No, master. You have.”

 

 

There is a boy in a room. The room is lit by oil lamps, too few of them, so the corners yawn darkly and the patrons cannot easily see any bruises or sores. A young voice cries out—pain or pleasure, impossible to tell—and Amadeo smells something foul on the air, some dreadful miasma. And sea water. “Calm yourself,” says Marius, and like a blanket the words settle over him. Warm, heavy, safe.

There are bangles on his wrists, the boy’s. A string of bells on a ribbon around one ankle; kohl lining huge, dark eyes. He is not quite a boy, Marius says without speaking. See how tall he is? And they’ve done him up as a girl.

He doesn’t look like a girl to Amadeo. But then, he doesn’t look much like a boy either. He’s wearing loose trousers gathered above his ankles and a sleeveless, nearly sheer tunic wider at the hem than the shoulders with gilt around the neck, and there are silk ribbons in his hair and metal discs that glint in the lamplight as he dances.

Amadeo cannot tear his eyes away. “What is he, then?” he asks. “If not a boy. An angel?”

Marius laughs. “Would you like to find out?”

“Yes,” says Amadeo at once. “Please.” And: “Will… will you leave me here? Like before?” He spent three days, once, at a brothel in the Rialto, learning pleasure from the women there at his master’s behest.

Marius looks at the boy again, the dancer, with his big, empty eyes and long, slender limbs. His face is impassive, and his mind is utterly still, like stagnant water. There is a film of ruin atop his silent mind, and Marius feels dirty having disturbed it, as he sometimes does when he drinks from the evildoer—the drunkard, the gambler, the habitual thief, the worst sorts of slaves. Men hollowed out by their sin.

Half the room is watching him dance, yet the boy whore’s eyes snap to meet Marius’. In his mind, suddenly, a surge of revulsion, a tsunami—then quelled. Auzubillahi min ash-shaitan ir-rajeem. Still water. He smiles.

“No,” Marius decides. “I won’t be leaving.”

 

 

Amadeo has tutors in Latin and Greek (Attic Greek, proper Greek, his master says), and Marius sometimes tests his progress in them by refusing to speak to him in any other tongue. A few years ago, the boy who’d become Amadeo could not have told you what the thing between his legs was called, but now he can beg for more with filth in three languages. Marius hadn’t taught him Venetan—that, he’d learned from the other boys in the palazzo, from the cacophony of the market, from Marius talking more to himself than to Amadeo with his odd, impossible-to-place accent, all round and soft as the skin of a peach.

Marius says he has a gift for languages, when he tries—but that’s the key, trying, and now that he isn’t making a fool of himself in front of the other boys, Amadeo doesn’t really see the point of doing that. Marius pays him more attention when he’s a disappointment than a paragon of studiousness, anyway.

He has lived with Marius one year and three weeks. Three hundred eighty-six days. By the ancient Egyptian calendar, which has a shorter year but longer weeks, three hundred eighty-five. One day lost. Amadeo supposes it goes wherever the days on the boat went. He’s no stranger to losing time.

Marius has been trying to teach Amadeo the language of Egypt. Not Arabic, which the Saracens brought with them when they conquered that ancient land, but the language they spoke before even the earliest days of the Greeks, when Egypt was a great kingdom called Ptimuris, beloved land, and the gods lived on their fathers and fed from their mothers. The other boys don’t have to learn medut remetj en Kemet, that all-but-dead-language, whose handful of native speakers cannot even read their own writings, backwards as they are. But Marius is learned, and he makes Amadeo copy down pictographs he says are words and tells him what they mean, reads to him words carved into the walls of burial-chambers nearly four thousand years old, Pharaoh is he who eats men and lives on gods, and Amadeo will never learn that in reading this Marius is all but crowning himself a king.

He will not live long enough to.

In Egypt, the few words Amadeo knows of that ancient language are useless to him. After surviving five, six thousand years, it’s in its death throes now except in tiny, rural villages. The only place in Cairo you’ll hear Egyptian now is at a Christian Mass—and even there a quarter of the words are really Greek, or so says his father. Master. In a place like this, he really shouldn’t be able to forget what Marius is.

It is Arabic that Marius uses to address the man who must own this place, pale as Amadeo in the undersides of his wrists but sun-weathered as Amadeo’s master would never allow him to become. You are growing so fast already, Amadeo! The sun will make you old. Marius almost never goes outside in the daytime, and he calls withered old men ‘children’ when he complains of other painters and businessmen in the privacy of his bedroom, so Amadeo believes him.

The men in power in Egypt are all foreign to it, Turks and Circassians and Rus’ like Amadeo. Mamluks, they call them. It means ‘one who is owned’. Marius says it is not so strange as it sounds to Amadeo to put slaves and libertines in power, that in the Rome of old the slaves of the emperor were wealthier and more powerful than most men who were born free. Perhaps if he were not so sweet-faced, one of the Egyptians would have been Amadeo’s highest bidder, and instead of being left to choke and die on drunkards’s cocks he would have grown up in a military barracks, learning strategy and literature and loyalty, learning to pray to a God almost but not quite his own. Would have, eventually, retired with his freedom and perhaps some establishment like this. Amadeo meets his strange, turban-clad reflection’s sharp eyes and watches another life play out.

The mamluk is one of the very few men in this dark room whose eyes are sharp. In Venice, the men who came to see him were wine-sodden. Here, where drink—to Amadeo’s great dismay—is forbidden, it’s more often hashish dulling their senses, a foul-smelling herb pressed into thin little wafers the size of his thumb. Eating them makes Amadeo feel as though his body is simply a suit of clothes he, a being of purely thought and energy, has shrugged on and can shrug off just as well. It makes him feel like he’s stepped outside of time, but without his master’s magic. He knows Marius disapproves, so Amadeo accepts another piece from a man whose eyes linger on him like fingers. Outside himself, Amadeo doesn’t mind. Distracted, his master doesn’t either.

Amadeo hears, in a stream of words he could not guess at the meaning of, ad-ducateen, again and again. That, he knows. Marius does not really need to haggle—he has his magic, which makes men obey him—but he enjoys meaningless little fights he knows he will win in the end, whether they are in the market or the bedroom, and so he haggles anyway. Eventually, they come to an agreement, and Amadeo watches his master count out twenty-two—twenty-two!—gold ducats into the brothel owner’s palm.

The proprietor snaps his fingers at the boy who isn’t a boy, the angel with the kohl-ringed eyes. “Arun! Ta’ala hena.”

 

 

There is too much gold in Sharaf’s cupped palms, praying—as he always is—to greed, shaitan in his ear. Arun feels cold wash over him, like the water of icy mountain springs he only remembers making wudu in for the shock of it on his fevered skin. He had been very young, then, and very scared to die.

He is being sold off again.

“Hayya,” Sharaf snaps. Get a move on. Arun does not realise he had stopped moving. He stumbles over, graceless, too many eyes on him even though the crowd has already moved on, their hungry gaze devouring some other child. Only one pair of eyes matters. That man is here again, the man in red, the Berber who dresses like a Frank and speaks like a Persian who always used to ask for Hasan, who paid for him handsomely because whatever it is he did with him—and Hasan certainly never said—left no marks but Hasan always fell ill for a day or two after, dizzy and ashen, and Sharaf cares more for Venetian gold than keeping his boys alive, so he just raised the price.

It wasn’t this man who killed Hasan in the end, but Hasan is gone now all the same, and Arun never thought those eyes that burn like fire would land on him. The boy trailing at his side is small and plump, a well-kept pet, and murahiq—somewhere, if Arun had to guess, between twelve and fourteen. Hasan was young, too, only eleven years old when he sang his last song. Arun stands head and shoulders above the other boys, long of limb with no meat on his bones, and he’d be a man already if he hadn’t been cut.

“Ya sidi, have I displeased you somehow?”

Sharaf does not acknowledge the question. He might not hear it. Arun’s throat is dry, the taste of dread bitter on his tongue. More often than not, when he tries to speak, no sound comes out at all.

 

 

There is a boy in a dargah, tying a saffron thread to the latticework as he makes a wish for his mother’s freedom. You are meant to vow some act of charity should Allah grant your wish, but the boy has nothing, and he does not know what to give. He thinks hard as he can. He will pick flowers, he swears, and offer them, wild roses and turmeric blossoms; he will give up his dinner so it can feed the poor; he will become ‘abd Allah, a promise made in sincere ignorance. He does not understand, yet, how he can have two masters at once.

He is six years old. His name is—

His name is—

 

 

The man in red, the man who has bought him, says something to his slave boy in what Arun thinks is Venetan, guessing by the master’s black cap, the boy’s close-fitting hose.

The master leans against the wall and watches his boy step forward with a smile playing at his lips, and Arun thinks, ah, so it is like that. He knows just enough Venetan to get by in a foreigner’s lap, so when the boy is close enough to touch he cups the boy’s pale cheek in his hand and says, “Te vol?” You want?

He also knows how to ask for a mouthful, or inside him, and he knows how to call a cock very big. You don’t need more than that.

The boy hesitates. Looks to his master. “What is his name?”

The man in red’s eyes bore into Arun, searching, searching. “Your name, boy?” he asks finally, in Arabic. There is a sour look on his face.

“They call me Arun.”

“Arun,” the boy repeats. To his master: “The sun god?”

“No, Amadeo,” the man says, and he has used that word several times already, with the cadence of a name. “You are thinking of Amun. Arun comes from myth as well, but not from Egypt—from Hindustan, to the east. The sun’s chariot driver. A servant. He has no light of his own.”

Arun is used to being talked over as if he is an object, in languages he speaks and languages he doesn’t. He ignores the lilt of the foreign tongue, and does what he does best. This is not the first time he has been with a little boy for an audience. He gets down on his knees in a smooth motion, bells around his ankle jangling, and kisses his way down the blue linen blouse uncovered bit by bit with every tug at the laces of Amadeo’s fitted doublet. He watches the master out of the corner of his eye, gauging how they will look to him, adjusting his pose, adjusting Amadeo, give the man a better view. He does not think about anything but his breathing, Allah on the inhale, hold, exhale. He is. He cannot pray, for he is unclean, but he can remember.

“Stragràndo,” Arun says when he uncovers Amadeo’s boyish little cock, the usual lie. He can say it in half a dozen languages. The master, watching, lets out a laugh. Amadeo turns his head away in embarrassment, pale cheeks going pink. He is stiff, almost to the point of shaking, and Arun cannot read the emotion in it. “You want?” he asks again.

(Go on, Amadeo. Say it.)

A moment’s pause. Amadeo gives a jerking nod of his head, says what must mean yes, though he sounds miserable with embarrassment or guilt or his master’s compulsion. Arun swallows down his soft little cock.

It’s clean, though hooded, and tastes of only sweat and skin. Slowly, it grows heavy in Arun’s mouth. He breathes through his nose. Inhale, remember, hold. Exhale, remember. He is.

Arun’s knees ache. Amadeo’s fingers tangle in his hair, catching on beads and braids, and he rocks into his mouth, holding Arun pinned to his crotch. He spends with a high-pitched cry, a pulsing, and there is seed left behind on Arun’s tongue after all. He spits it out.

Amadeo is wrapped in his master’s embrace when Arun looks up again, cheek tucked against his arm. Arun sits on his heels, wary. “Ya sidi,” he says when the master’s fire-bright eyes linger on him too long, “you want?”

More speaking over his head. The master ushers Amadeo back over, the boy’s cheeks burning, but this time he follows, shrugging off his open-front black mantle and crimson doublet and settling on the divan in blouse and hose. Amadeo tugs at Arun’s arm until he stands, then tries and fails to pull Arun’s tunic over his head, too small. Arun finishes the job.

Amadeo’s soft hands brush down his chest, thumbing over the raised flesh of his nipples, a little boy no longer. His fingers chart the shape of Arun’s ribcage, skin shifting over bone when he breathes. The depression of his belly, the muscles beneath. Arun’s strength is all in his thighs and core.

Amadeo lets out the tie of Arun’s sirwal, and Arun steps out of them, feeling nothing under Amadeo’s curious gaze, his curious hands. His cock is touched, enveloped in Amadeo’s little palm, and there are words again, the lilt of their foreign tongue, and Arun can guess well enough what they must be. Amadeo’s thumb on the head of his cock, down and back up over the jut of the glans looking for a hood that isn’t there, and then beneath, looking for more that isn’t there, finding only the pucker of scar tissue with the pads of his fingers.

Words and words and words, and Arun is a doll passed from Amadeo’s hands to his master’s, settled in his lap with the hard press of a cock behind him but no warmth of a body, not at his back, not in the hands opening him up, and there is no hot breath at his ear and Arun is consumed all at once by terror, twisting like a hooked fish in the shaitan’s hands, crying out, “I seek refuge with Allah from the shaitan, the outcast. I seek refuge with Allah from the evil of what He has created. My Lord, I seek refuge with you from—”

—and he cannot move, he cannot speak, he is breathing with a will that is not his own, slow and calm, and it is like being smothered by nothing at all, and all he can do is weep in perfect silence as the shaitan enters him, whispering, “Hush now, hush. You do not need to be afraid.”

There is something at his throat, sharp, then wet, and the boy, Amadeo, he is speaking, high and urgent, and Arun is so cold and he is dizzy, colours swimming before his eyes, red and yellow and green, and the shaitan presses into Arun’s mind and says to him, Rest.

 

 

A long time ago, a druid got to speaking to a Roman man he met in a tavern, speaking the druid’s own tongue—poorly, and the druid knew Latin rather better, but the Roman insisted. He was a traveller, said the Roman, whose tunic was long-sleeved and dyed red with madder root, and he wanted to learn all there was to learn.

“You must have travelled far indeed already,” the druid said, for the Roman was tall and dark like he had only ever seen a handful of times, a man from the other end of the world. A man like the druid’s god, who had given him a mission.

And the Roman said, “I have travelled to every corner of the Empire, docked in every port of our sea, walked or ridden upon every road. One day, I will have travelled to the very ends of the Earth.” He was boastful and proud, and he did not yet know it, but he spoke true.

They spoke the whole night of Egypt and of the lost empires which made that ancient land seem young, and with every word and every cup of honeyed wine the druid grew more convinced that this was he, the man his god desired, this blood-drenched god who lives on his fathers and feeds on his mothers. “You said you wish to learn all there is to learn,” said the druid.

“I do.”

“The gods will teach you,” the druid promised, and the Roman did not believe in the gods, but he would soon learn. He was taken, and broken as he was doomed by birth to be broken yet never had, and once broken he was brought before an ancient and terrible thing, this creature he knew by the name of Attis, the Great Mother’s unmanned love, who had lived so long and now was dying, and could not die unless there was another, and this monstrous thing that was Attis killed him so he might live forever.

 

 

Arun awakes in the dark, on a bed, in a ship, and the boy Amadeo is there, and Arun begs and pleads and fights until Amadeo puts a knife to his throat and then Arun does not fight anymore. “Please,” he begs, “what are you? Where am I being taken? Please, I’ll be good, I swear,” and Amadeo shouts for his master, for help, and the shaitan comes into the room and he tells Arun again, “Rest.”

Arun awakes in the dark, on a bed, in a ship, in shackles, and the boy Amadeo says in a language Arun does not know, “I’m sorry.”

 

 

(to be continued)