Crawling Between Heaven and Earth Read online

  “Don’t faint, please. Don’t. Without you, we’ll both die here.” Pol dragged me forward, stopping only to ask me directions.

  At last, the ugly dimatough door stood straight ahead of us.

  Pol let go of me, leaned me against the wall.

  Now, he’d leave me here, in this dark tunnel and pretend we’d never met. I’d be lucky if he told the people outside that I was still alive, wounded, in here. I would be lucky to get treatment and live.

  I was so sure of what would happen that it took me a while to realize that he hadn’t opened the door, that he was talking.

  “You’re not listening,” he said. “You must listen.” His voice had a high, whining sound—like a child begging something of a reluctant adult. “I’m going to tell them I belong to you. In the state I’m in, Nary’s daughter, her heir, will just have me put down. She doesn’t like me. But if they don’t check registration and I say I’m yours, they will just go ahead and regen my arm. And then she’ll be more likely to sell me than to kill me.”

  He looked earnest and pleading.

  “What? My what?”

  He brought his right hand close to my face. The golden ring was gone from his middle finger. The red ring of an owned artifact shone in its place. “I had to remove the gold ring,” he said. “Otherwise, if I passed out and they found us…” He made a gurgling sound a suppressed sob, a scream of fear and pain. “I don’t want to die.”

  This had to be a bizarre dream. Were he an artifact, he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to conceal it with that gold ring. Not when the penalty for hiding the ring of servitude was death, swiftly administered. And no owner would allow her artifact to conceal his ring. Artifacts were too expensive to squander and the civil penalties befalling the owner of a disguised artifact would have been prohibitive. Even our dear departed Nary couldn’t have been that dumb or that heartless.

  “Please,” he said. His eyes overflowed with tears and I smelled the sharp tang of terror in his sweat. “Please let me tell them I belong to you. Even if they find out afterwards, at most they’ll rebuke me before shipping me to my legal owner. They won’t do anything to you, because you aren’t even fully conscious. I just don’t want you to unmask me too soon. It’s not like hiding the artifact ring.”

  Which brought us to why he’d hidden the ring before. I wondered what would happen if the authorities checked the tour records. His legal owner couldn’t mean to have Pol killed, could she? Healed, he’d be worth a lot.

  My leg hurt and my head felt stuffed with cotton wool. I couldn’t articulate any questions.

  We must get out. We must get help.

  Pol had to open the damn door.

  He stared into my eyes. He waited.

  “Yes,” I managed to say. “Yes. Whatever.”

  While I sank into semi-consciousness, Pol carried me outside, stumbled onto blinding sunlight, straggled across the narrow path to the nymph clearing.

  People surrounded us, swimming in and out of my field of vision, like faces in a nightmare. People screamed.

  Through a fog, I heard Pol say, “This is Doctor Ariadne Knossos. She’s a free citizen and you must get her help.”

  I wanted to tell these people I’d buy him. I wanted to yell that no one should kill him, that he had saved my life, that he was a person, too, artifact or not, citizen or not.

  I’d never even asked his full name.

  Shadows closed in all around and I let myself fall into oblivion.

  * * *

  I woke up to a woman’s heavily accented voice, “…terrorists. Their religion forbids artifacts. Or, at least, that’s how they interpret the rule against graven images. Your tour guide and the one of the tour before yours were members. They thought that if they replaced the Minotaur with a dangerous beast and it killed a few tourists, it would create fear that other artifacts might have been tampered with, cause a fall in tourism and a backlash against artifacts. Funny, though, how you two were the only ones who survived.”

  A touch of edginess grated through Pol’s voice. “I assure you he showed us no favoritism.”

  Pol was alive. Fast on the heels of relief, I remembered what he had said in the tunnel. Pol an artifact? It couldn’t be true. Hallucination, surely.

  I managed to force my eyes open.

  My leg didn’t hurt. I felt no worse than someone with a hangover.

  Pol sat at the end of my bed, his arm encased in the pink bulk of a medsleeve. My leg was encased in one too. I lay in what looked like a hotel bed in a bland but pleasant bedroom with two beds, dresser, wardrobe, all of it white. Framed seascapes hung on the walls.

  “The tourism administration will pay for your treatment.” The medical technician was young and female and better suited to a travel poster than to the blue uniform of a med. She sniffed, as if she resented having to treat us like people. “And for your lodging, of course. Both of you should be able to travel on within twenty four hours.”

  She smiled—a tight smile—mumbled something about our getting better, and left me alone with Pol.

  I pulled myself up to a sitting position. “I had the strangest dream”

  I realized the significance of the two beds; of his being in my room.

  He’d told them he belonged to me.

  I looked down at his hand. The red ring of slavery shone on his long, square finger.

  He took a deep breath. “My name is Apollo Doris.”

  “Oh,” I said. He’d concealed the ring. No one concealed the ring. Had he done it of his own accord?

  Sitting on my bed, wearing an institutional white robe, he looked beautiful still, but also more naked than he’d been in his tiny shorts. It was as if a layer had been stripped off his skin, leaving him flushed and hesitant, tongue-tied and vulnerable, like a child who wakes in the night amid strangers.

  He took a deep breath. “Nary made me wear the gold ring. She’d rather be thought an old fool with a young lover, than someone desperate enough to take an artifact on a tour halfway across the world.” He spoke with almost regret. “And she didn’t mind the fines, should we be caught.”

  And she wouldn’t mind his dying? I looked at his golden skin, his dark curls, his oceanic eyes and I felt a great anger against the dead Nary. If she were alive, I’d kill her.

  Words I’d heard from his companion—Owner? Now took on a different meaning. You are not irreplaceable sounded chilling enough when said to a lover, but brutally threatening when said to an artifact. She hadn’t cared. If he had got killed, she could have bought another.

  Nausea made me dizzy.

  He shrugged. “I was hers.” His eyes lost all expression as though invisible shutters had fallen over them. “I was not created for such a reputable job as courier. Mind and body, I was designed as a companion, a lover… a pleasure toy for humans. And for a time I was owned by a brothel. It was… not pleasant. Too many of us, too little room, nothing of my own, no one… no one to belong to. It’s part of my make-up that I need to belong. When Nary bought me, she gave me what I needed most. She also gave me the chance to play human for a time. She could risk my life if she wished. It wasn’t much of a life before her. Now, I’m masterless again…. Listen, I wish…” He looked intent, desperate. “I don’t suppose you could buy me? Her daughter has no use for artifacts.”

  My heart beat fast. I could sense his pain and his fear. He’d thought quickly thinking in the labyrinth. He had feelings, emotions, even wit. But to his new owner, he’d be an object; an unwanted possession.

  To me, he was still a demigod, only now attainable.

  He was so beautiful. And he had a need to belong.

  From the expression in his green eyes, he wanted to belong to me; perhaps belonged to me already through some mysterious imprinting mechanism.

  Warm breezes blew through the open window, filling the curtains like a ship’s sails.

  He looked vulnerable and lost and scared. An intelligent, self-sufficient man, and yet as dependent, as open as a chil
d.

  I touched his finger, where the red ring glowed. I’d been bereft of my own kind for much too long.

  We made love through the night, with the smell of the sea wafting in on the warm breezes. And despite the injuries to my leg and to his arm, it was all the poets have sung about. Perhaps more.

  In the morning, while he slept, I limped out of bed, got on my private link and called up the price of the Doris line of artifacts.

  There had been only a hundred made and each of them had sold for ten million narcs only two years ago. Young as they still were, they would only have appreciated. He’d cost much more than I could afford on my ten thousand a year salary. No bank would finance him for me. He was not an appreciable asset, nor a necessity. And if I stole him, I could never go back to my life, my comfortable life. We’d be fugitives. He’d starve along with me.

  Not for me.

  Artifacts are born alone, without families, and they must learn early to survive alone. I must survive.

  I’d once read that no good comes of an artifact loving another artifact. Sage advice, if you could take it.

  I left him sleeping and, like a despicable feminine version of Theseus, deserted him to be claimed by the gods for whatever fate pleased them.

  I don’t know where Pol is—alive or dead, contented or in unbearable servitude. I don’t want to think of what he might have become.

  I remember him in that hotel bed, his hair black against the white pillow, his face serene, trustingly asleep, not yet knowing himself abandoned.

  Thirst

  When I first decided to work towards being a writer, I had this vague idea I wanted my first novel to be set in ancient Rome. With this intent I spent seven glorious years “researching” Rome. In retrospect, I should have decided my novel was going to be set in Hawaii and spent a year or so sunning on a beach. The cost would probably have been similar, considering how many Roman history books I bought. At the end of those seven years, I still didn’t have even a glimmer of an idea for a novel. However, I had got pregnant and gone through a very difficult pregnancy during which I was hospitalized and had blood drawn all too often. So perhaps it is no accident that on the day after coming back home with my brand new baby, I woke up with the entire plot of this story in my mind. I dragged myself out of bed and to the office and wrote it in a single—eight hour long—sitting. It was the only thing I wrote for the coming year, which involved several house moves. The last line was a complete surprise. I “finished” the story and thought “that isn’t right.” Then my fingers typed the last line and I thought, “Wait a minute. That can’t be…. Oh!” It was the first and so far the only time a story surprised me that way. For this reason it remains one of my favorite stories.

  “Sing to me of that odorous green eve when crouching by the marge You heard from Adrian’s gilded barge the laughter of Antinous And lapped the stream and fed your drought and watched with hot and hungry stare The ivory body of that rare young slave with his pomegranate mouth.”

  Oscar Wilde, The Sphynx

  Sometimes I wake up in the evening and think them here, immaterial wisps of dream in the cold twilight air, and yet undeniably themselves: the Emperor and the boy he loved, etched by time into heroic figures without flaw.

  The Emperor wears his purple, and the boy stands in one of those sweet, head-drooping postures immortalized in his countless statues.

  And sometimes, confused by a day of death-sleep and the centuries that have flown heedless by my changeless self, I reach for them, try to clutch them in my long-dead yet immortal hands.

  They laugh and vanish through my fingers like smoke. As they did so many centuries ago.

  In those moments, I am again a nameless thing, crouching on the muddy banks of the ancient Nile, my mind filled with hatred, my body with thirst, while I stare at the gilded Imperial barge anchored in the dark waters. And I hear again the laughter of Antinous.

  Hylas is my name, or was my name, when I was a mortal among mortals, a living, breathing being in the sun’s embrace. A Greek name for a Roman boy born in the Suburra, raised in that maze of smelly, noisy streets that was the pulsing heart of Rome.

  My father was a Greek freedman, a grammarian who grew prematurely old teaching Greek and writing to uninterested students on the sidewalk, in front of our insula. My mother, suavely rotund, wasted her life bent over the cooking fire. Both of them were mere props in the stage of my life. I can’t recall a thing they said, nor anything they taught me.

  They lived in two smoky rented rooms in an insula, a vertical slum, where people crowded side by side and on top of each other, crammed together as close as possible, for the wealth of the rich landlords.

  My own life was not confined to such a prison. My true teachers, my true instruction, were in the streets. From other boys, my neighbors, I learned all there was to know. Who could be safely robbed, where to buy the best wine, and just the right time to go to the entrance of the Circus and get the seats closest to the arena, from where we could scream encouragement at our favorite gladiators and hoot the cowards.

  I will forever remember those afternoons as the best of my childhood: the sun-dappled, bloodstained sand, the certainty that life and death were shows played for my entertainment.

  It all came to an abrupt end the Summer I turned fourteen. Late at night my friends and I waited in the darkened portal of an insula for wayward citizens, full of wine and gold, making their way home through unlit streets. That night I tried to cut the wrong purse. We couldn’t have guessed who he was. A merchant, we thought him, because of his colorful, expensive clothing. But we didn’t think him rich, certainly not noble, since he walked the streets of Rome alone without a single slave for escort. We were wrong. Publius Aelius Hadrianus, as he then was, thought himself invincible and reveled in facing alone the danger of Rome’s streets.

  He immobilized me quickly. I thought he would call the sebaciara. But he was full of wine and mirth, and I amused him more than angered him. Besides, I had dark flowing curls, the face of a girl and the well-muscled body of a young thug. All of which he liked, as I would come to know, when our acquaintance became such that I could call him by the familiar diminutive of Adriano.

  For the next two years I followed him. To the end of his stay in Rome, where he was house-guest of his cousin Trajanus, the Emperor, then to the far reaches of the Empire with the legions he commanded. He gave me better food than I was used to, better wine than I’d ever tasted, and a position no one disputed.

  Even rude legionaries spoke graciously to me because I was the commander’s page… or lover, or any other name you might care to call it. All of them meant I held power not to be ignored.Two years I lived with him. He was strong and admired, built like a hero’s statue, with reddish hair and beard, and dark gray eyes that could see to the depths of my soul.

  He taught me to read, and schooled me in rudimentary Greek, amused that I, the son of a grammarian, had never come by such gifts. And he read aloud from the Odyssey and the odes of Virgil and told me of Alexander and Julius and Augustus.

  When I was sixteen or maybe seventeen we set out for Rome. To visit.

  I never got there alive.

  Of late, he had been growing curt and impatient with me. He found his joys elsewhere. Other boys and women, camp followers, common local whores…. Not that he had ever been faithful or that those had ever been altogether absent from his bed. But now their company was preferred to mine, and if he talked to me at all, it was to remind me of my shortcomings, to mumble improbable reproaches at me for my cruelty and crudity.

  I knew what caused it. My body was changing as I became, to all eyes, a man, and it wasn’t decent to keep our type of relationship once the boy’s masculinity asserted itself.

  On our way to Rome we stopped in Athens. While he renewed old acquaintances of one type or another, I found the solution to my problem.

  It was late at night, in a tavern where I’d strayed foolishly unaccompanied, proudly confident in my stre
et-wise ways years after I had given them up. A tall pale man sat at my table and bought me drink after drink, even though he never touched his. He spoke of his childhood in the times before Rome, and of the joys of immortality. Liquor and his blue eyes intoxicated me. I followed him out of the tavern, to the fields outside the city. There I lay upon the soft, plowed earth. I thought I knew what was coming.

  But instead of the familiar grinding of body against body, his weight crushing my squeezed-together thighs, there was the suave caress of a cold hand against my neck, parting my curls like a curtain, and the sharp, painful kiss that tore my skin, that took my blood, that left me drained and half-dead, lying senseless on the still-warm ground.

  Little by little, consciousness returned to me. Consciousness and a sense of loss.

  I sat up with too much effort, too much pain. I felt heavy and swollen, like the corpse of one who has drowned, turgid with water and death. And yet, to my eyes, my wrists were as thin as ever, my fingers long and delicate, my small feet effortlessly encased by the gold-laced sandals.

  I stood up. My throat was dry and gritty. Each of my joints blazed with pain that burst forth anew with every action.

  I walked to town. I don’t know how. I also don’t know how long I wandered, lost, trying to find my way to the home where we were guests. Some memories were forfeited to the death that even then gripped me. I remember my master’s voice, seemingly out of nowhere, merry with wine and tender with amusement, saying, “Hello there, Hylas, Hylas of the sweet locks, how much wine have you had? Can’t I let you go out on your own?”

  And then his arms surrounded me, supported me, and I felt myself fall, let myself fall, into endless darkness.

  When I woke up I believed myself back in my the dark rooms of the insula, the wooden shutters closed against the rain, penning in the thick odors of sweat and cooking and frustrated humanity, all of it lit by the wavering light of a single candle.

  “Mother?” I called diffidently.

  “Hylas?” a tired voice asked out of the shadows, a man’s voice that bore no resemblance to my mother’s. “Hylas, are you awake?” The accent of Iberia, where he was born, was thick upon my master’s tongue as I’d never heard it. The light of the candle moved around in the dark room, heavy curtains parted just a little to let a thin dagger of light pierce my eyes with unbelievable pain.