For those of you who might be confused by my commonly used symbols….

* * * = a small change of time and scene

~ * ~ = a transfer of scene back to the present

I hope that cleared things up!


~*~

It is three in the morning and he is made of cracked porcelain in my arms. "Escha, Escha," I whisper, stroking his hair. Where is Karpae? I thrash and turn and Nataniellus is there and he puts his hand on my head.

"It's ok, don't worry. Don't cry anymore."

"Where is Karpae?"

"He's upstairs. He's there."

Nataniellus leans over the brushed leather chair back, kissing my cheek with his soft pink lips.

"You should let the doctor have your Escha now. Let Dasius have him. You can't do anything for him."

Nataniellus begins to put up my hair with his hands. He runs his hand up the back of my neck. I close my eyes.

Escha's mouth had fallen open. I want to touch the mole beneath, that one on the left side. How many people have kissed it? I let his body fall out of my arms and it hits the parquet like a doll. I shudder in Nataniellus's arms and try to forget. Forget. Forget. It's not real.

"Please, take me upstairs. I want to be in bed with my son."

Nataniellus takes me there. Nataniellus, who is always near.

Karpae's arms embrace me in his sleep, and he's waking up when I get there. He's taking me in like I love him and we love each other; as if I loved him for more than a few minutes in a cold tent in Macedonia.

"Is he alright? Do you want him to sleep?" he asks Nataniellus in the dark.

Nataniellus leaves and does not touch me before he goes. Karpae snuggles close to me and I wonder where his lover is. He begins to hum in my ear and I clutch him with my fingers like a child, pressing them into his skin so that it hurts.

Tomorrow, when Escha dies, I will be asleep in Karpae's smooth arms while Karpae looks out the window and dreams of something I cannot know about.

***

"I take it with a grain of salt," Karpae said, wiggling his toes, sitting on the stone pool edge, "My skin is getting whiter but my lips are also getting redder like yours."

I walked back into the house so as not to look at him.

~*~

The problem with Karpae in the 23 centuries ago that never really went away was his obsession with mirrors. He knew how pretty he was, of course he did. His mother was a spinster in what is now the north of Greece, and his father was a career soldier man who worked in the civil service to avoid persecution for being of the wrong talent and the wrong class. Those sorts of things change so often. Who can remember the details? Karpae followed his father on that path.

He would spend hours sitting on that pool edge, where the light was the best, looking into his mirror and picking at his teeth, preening his hair, pressing his lips-which were not getting redder. He would sit looking like me with his ankles in the water; looking like me and acting like who knows what, some kind of nymphet in somebody else's worldly garden. Certainly not. Certainly not anything like me.

The whole story is that I followed him from my little house all the way marching across lower Europe into what is now Turkey. He began to notice me after awhile, and I noticed him noticing me, and I began sleeping in his tent even though he didn't know who I was, and I took from him what was vulnerable when his whole regiment became so much more vulnerable in that way. News from the top was that the general was dead, and I knew what I had to do if I wanted to keep him. Besides which, he was to me at the time the greatest treasure I had ever known, and I held him in my arms like that. Who could know that to me, so little time later he would become only so much ash and worthless chatter?

It is not a long chapter. He lived with me. He left to find his friends. There were three of them who he was associated with, and until recently there were still three who he associated with. I know hardly anything about them. I have barely met them. They are of no interest to me.

He is related to me through a long line of buried faces through a bastard child I must have had in my youth. I don't remember children, but I knew his face when I saw it was my face, and I knew his blood when I tasted it was my blood, and that is all that is important about that. The cosmic improbability of something like that does not matter.

Sometimes I remember that feeling I had when Karpae whispered to me about how it felt when his body was dying and I know what it was like to feel lost and human and broken again.

We parted; we met again before I went into the woods in Candine, but that was a long time after, and so far away then. I was not yet so tired.

***

It is almost time to begin to think of Escha. Not yet.

***

I sat in the house watching the door after Karpae had left. He had gone quietly, as I would have done. I sat down heavily in the chair by the atrium statue, sitting on my hands, and then folding them in my lap, slowly. I bowed my head. I knew Ariel was around, somewhere, but I had not seen his face for a long while. My heart was playing a beat for me that is familiar to me but has no name; something about desire, but not knowing for what.

I'd always known he would leave, and I hadn't liked him much anyway, but his voice, his lips near my ear, I couldn't forget those, and I think that those kinds of memories heavily influenced what I did next. There was some kind of desire. Some kind of want.