2nd Act - Tuscany. Anguish.

"Faya, Faya," the soft whispering wind, pushing me. My eyes fluttered open. I sat up. I looked around. I looked at Ariel.

He smiled at me, a secret, pleased smile. His hands were together, as if in prayer.

"How long have you been there?"

"One thousand years."

I blinked at him sleepily. That is a silly amount of years, I thought. It is a fairy tale amount of years.

"How do you feel? Do you need anything?" he asked, quietly.

"I feel strung out," I said, swallowing, brow knitted with the effort.

"Do you want to sleep more?"

I shook my head.

He hugged me, which woke me up fast. Ariel is really very much not human. He looks human from a distance but he's not, more so than all immortals I have ever encountered. It is very strange to be hugged by an apparition. His smell overwhelmed my senses. It smelled like being buried alive.

"I missed you."

We went to the open market together and found oil for my hair, which bleached it. I never questioned why Ariel was allowing himself to be visible, why he was not hiding, until it was much too late. I did not know then, important things, very important things about what exactly Ariel can do.

I did horrible things in Tuscany.

No matter how many times I try to tell it, this story is always the same. It does not want to start at the beginning. The details are many but they are meaningless.

The flesh of the story is that I was responsible for the deaths of many children, and that Eno was right to hate me, and he killed Laurent for it, Escha, and I can't take it back.

It's a slow revolution in my mind, what I remember. So much of it seems to come and go, clear one day and cloudy the next. You will have to forgive me, I think, if it does not want to all come in the correct order.

Eno arrived on my doorstep in the middle of the night with his illegitimate son Carol and a note which explained that he had come to be of service to me and could not speak due to a problem he had encountered on his way in his life. The problem had been a scuffle with a group of merchants, but he never told me what the scuffle was about. They had tried to cut out his tongue, but he'd gotten away. His ability to speak mostly recovered by the time we parted, but he always spoke with an almost unnoticeable halting smokiness because of the trouble.

Carol was young, a year old at the time, and I took Eno into my home in part because of Carol. He was the sort of child who has that certain way about them which brightens the world. His hair was dark brown. Eno's was black. He must have been a Russian. What he was doing in Tuscany I cannot fathom, but his language was close to mine at the time, so there was not a problem.

It was his unfortunate timing that was the worst thing. I was not who I am now when I was master of the defense school then. I was half mad with loneliness and confusion about my condition, which was a lot less sultry 2000 years in. It was the existence part that was the hardest, the living without a purpose, all of the lies and zigzagging that were essential to being a part of living society.

I made money by owning a large house that is so much dust and buried timber now, by renting out rooms to boys from rich families who were doing whatever kinds of training to be better citizen soldiers, and with the money I paid their teachers and their boy servants who in turn had lower boy servants. It was as a lower boy servant that Eno began, but he eventually became my personal under servant, and he submitted to my rages and my eccentricities with patience, surefooted and knowledgeable about my desires before I knew about them.

He was present with a cup of tea as soon as I knew I wanted one, as a well folded, pressed towel after a teaching session on a warm day, as a bowed head washing from my feet the dust of the hard packed duel yard and exercise plaza. I wore long robes then, the same as now, and he swept the outdoor hallways diligently to make sure that the fabric that dragged behind me did not pick up enough detritus to be unsalvageable in his laundry basins. He always kept a clear head and worked full days.

At the end of the day he would go to Carol, all smiles and relief. Eno's room was beside mine, so that he could hear me if I called him, but more often it was me who was listening to him through the thin wall, playing games with Carol and teaching him new words. I am sorry to say that I was jealous of his happiness, of his joy, and that it began when I took Carol away.

***

He never deserved it, and I don't think that any of my torment was meant to break him in any way, but I can't think what it was for. It did not make me feel better to do it.

Carol was four years old when he began sleeping in my room. I was familiar to him, so he was not frightened. Eno was a little frightened of me, because of knowing that I was not quite human. It was impossible for him not to notice, close as he was to me.

He had been standing on the open terrace, holding his son. I stood beside him, and we listened to the familiar calling and scuffling and far away shouting of the boys in the exercise yard behind the low trees, up the long path. I held my arms out for the child.

It confused him, because I had never showed any interest in Carol. His hesitation increased my insistence. Carol did not wake up when Eno handed him to me. The child was not heavy.

Eno pounded on my door all night, sobbing and calling my name while Carol screamed. It did not give me satisfaction to emasculate Carol. I merely did it. I imagine that the expression on my face was dour and without line. I held the sobbing child until he slept, but Eno persisted with pounding at my door until Ariel pulled him off of it, which was the first time Eno ever saw Ariel. After that, silence.