Crawling Between Heaven and Earth Read online

  “Thirsty,” I said, my voice lethargic and low. “I am thirsty.”

  Adriano moved closer to the couch where I lay. His hair was freshly combed, perfumed, curled. He wore a colorful, loose-fitting, short tunic, as Greek men would wear at home.

  I felt ill and scared. Why was he nursing me personally through my illness? Why not entrust me to a slave? So that he could accuse me of stalling his journey to Rome?

  He set the candle down on a candlestick. I heard water pour from a pitcher to a cup, then the cup was at my lips, rough silver against skin.

  I took one swallow, two. Water, dead and horribly cold in my mouth. Stagnant. Poisonous. I spit it out in his direction, pushed his hand away, that held the cup.

  “Are you trying to poison me?” I asked, angrily.

  He took in breath sharply.

  I realized I could smell him, as I had never smelled another human being. I could smell his life, the pulsing of blood in his body. It was the smell of ground after a rain, the sound of a mountain spring. My throat ached, parched.

  “Hylas,” he said, gravely. “Hylas… have you…. What happened to you? What did you do last night?”

  My head ached. The odor of him was unbearable temptation. “Why would you care?” I asked. “Did you ever tell me where you go when you leave alone?”

  In the silence I heard his breathing, noisy to my sharpened senses. I could hear as I had never heard before. I could hear the house around me, all of the house. Slaves argued in the hallway. The matron discussed poetry with a female friend. Somewhere a baby cried. Above all, over all, through every fissure and crevice in the walls and door, through every pore in the stones, through every opening in the hanging draperies, the smell of people, the smell of life, the smell and sound of warm blood running vital through tireless veins came at me.

  My throat hurt.

  Adriano held my wrist. His skin felt rough and callused against mine. And warm.

  “I don’t want to argue, Hylas,” he said. “You’re very ill.” His fingers tightened on my wrist and moved slowly round and round, searching, “Gods, but you’re cold. And I can’t feel your pulse.” He switched his grip from my hand to my face. His palms squeezed my cheeks between them. In the dim light he looked pale, his eyes intense and alarmed. “You’re dying, do you understand that? And there is nothing I can do for you. All my medical knowledge, all my herbs have been to naught. All I can think is you were given a poison I don’t know. Tell me Hylas, tell me what you did, what you ate, what you drank.” The tone of his voice became sharp and brutal, “Or die. It’s that simple.”

  “I drank wine,” I said. My head pulsed with pain. Something in me writhed and hungered at the scent of life coming from him, at the warmth of his hands on my face, at the guessed taste of his blood. “Someone bought me wine. A man.”

  He nodded, unmoved. “Do you know this man? Was he anyone you’ve seen before? Anyone you knew from Rome? Anyone who might have something against me and have taken his revenge on you?”

  His hands were warm and appetizing, the way warm bread is appetizing when you’re famished and cold. My head pounded more intensely. The nameless animal in me sniffed and lurked scenting prey. “I didn’t know him,” I said. “He was tall and pale, and blue eyed. He told me stories, said he was born before Rome, before… before, he said, the divine twins were kicked out of the wolf’s den.”

  “What?”

  “He said he had been born before the founding of Rome and”

  “You’re telling me this man was eight hundred years old?”

  “I didn’t say that, I said-”

  “You said he was born before the founding”

  Did he need to yell? My head would surely split open. “I didn’t either,” I answered, sullen. “I said he told me he was born before Rome, before the gentes streamed into the seven hills and laid the Sabines to waste. Of course I knew he was lying. I am not that stupid. I met old people in Rome and none of them remembered any of that. Also, he told me,” I said, in a whisper now, embarrassed to admit the enticement that had drawn me forth to that lonely field. I knew it was a lie like the rest. “He told me if I allowed him, if I allowed him to… satiate himself on me, he would make me immortal, and I would never age. I would be forever as I am now. Forever as… as you like me.”

  Adriano whispered something I could not understand. His hands gripped my face tighter. “What did he do to you?” he asked.

  What had he done to me? I could hardly remember. “Not what you think. He just… he just….” What had he done to me? My head pounded, pounded so loudly with the echo of Adriano’s heartbeats, the scent of his warm blood, the

  My hand held his right arm in a vise grip and pulled, till his wrist was at my mouth. Urgently, my teeth tore the vein, allowed vital, warm liquid to flow onto my cold, cold, tongue, down my parched throat.

  “Mithra’s crown!” he said, or some other legionary oath. His left hand held my wrist and pulled his right hand free. Then he backed two steps. His left hand held his right. Drop after drop of red liquid fell from his wrist. He watched me from the shadows of the room. There was surprise in his eyes and the fear of a man confronted with impossibility. “I have heard of such things,” he said. “I have heard of them, as I have heard of ghosts and witches and gods. I have heard them all, and believed them all in my moments of weakness, and laughed at all of them in the sunlight… but Hylas, sweet Hylas, what could make you crave living blood?”

  I blinked, but could not answer. My eyes were riveted, mesmerized, by the drops falling from his wrist, their odor clear and pungent in the stale air of the room. I moved towards him, towards them. My movements were no longer painful. Those few drops of his blood, of his life, had restored some of my own.

  But he evaded me easily, stepped back around the two low sleeping couches, took hold of the dark red curtains behind him and opened them in a quick tearing gesture.

  Light burned my eyes, my skin. I was naked and every point of my body exposed to this strangely searing light. Pain, unbearable, stinging pain possessed me. I pulled the covers over myself and crouched, trembling, under them, uncomprehending, uncaring, longing for nothing so much as darkness. Darkness and life, to stanch my thirst.

  Adriano’s laughter rang joyless and loud. Gently, slowly, he closed the curtain. “So it is true,” he said, his voice morose and tired. “It is true. There are such creatures. Lamias…. The legends say they’re women with serpent bodies. One of my Germanic mercenaries told me they can also be corpses, dead but living, needing blood to survive and fearing the life-giving sun. And Hylas, always bloodthirsty, has become one of them,” he finished with a sort of ironic gaiety.

  Encouraged by darkness and the lack of threat in his voice, I pushed the covers back, sat up uncertainly, reached a hopeful hand for his wrist, just an arm’s length away, his wrist from which the merry river of life still ran, unheeded. But he was not to be caught unawares. He stepped back, away from my touch. “No, no you won’t, Hylas,” he said. “I will not trade my blood for death in life… nor for life in death.” His eyes were interested but repulsed. Thus had I seen him, once, examine a scorpion. With his left hand he tightened the open brass bracelet he wore on his right arm, tighter, tighter, tighter, till it would serve as a tourniquet. The flow of blood slowed to a mere trickle, then tiny droplets. “What am I to do with you?” he asked, coldly. “What did you think I would do with you? Give you my enemies as fodder?”

  I found my voice. My head still pounded and my throat still felt desiccated but I found a little of my mind, of my humanity, a morsel of my outraged self. I had done this for him, to keep his love that relentless time and growth were plundering away. “I thought…” I said, then stronger, “I thought everything would be as it was… as it always was. I would never change, you wouldn’t worry about people saying you are pathic, or” I stopped as his expression clouded.

  “Oh, no,” he said and smiled, ironically. “Not pathic, just necrophiliac.” Then with sud
den force, “I do not share my bed with cold corpses, much less corpses who seek blood to replace a life they have lost.”

  He stepped back into the shadows. The light of the candle forbore to show his face. “So, what can I do with you? I hear one can kill such monsters as you, Hylas. Light will kill lamias, and water, that sustain normal life. Should I kill you, Hylas?”

  I got up. I clasped the covers about me. He couldn’t be serious. I had given him my love, such as it was. He had the enjoyment of my body while it pleased him. He could not kill me.

  I protested all this in a high whine, but he interrupted me, “No, you’re right. I cannot kill you. Even if you are dead already… even if it is the most merciful thing, I can’t bring myself to do it.” He put the candle down, picked up his cloak from the couch facing mine, threw it haphazardly over his shoulders and said, “I’ll be back tomorrow morning. Be gone when I’m back. I’ll give instructions for you to be left alone till then.” He opened the door, and, framed in the muted light of the central courtyard, the faint light that made my eyes hurt and my skin smart, he turned around and said, “And Hylas, everyone in this house, to the least slave, better be alive and in good health when I return. Or I swear by Mars I’ll search you out, drag you from your den and hold you in midday light till you shrivel and die.”

  He walked out.

  I sat on my couch, in pain and anger as I heard voices on the other side of the door and smelled the living blood of the household. It did not occur to me to defy Hadrianus’s prohibition. I knew him too well, his prompt and merciless justice.

  I found one of my tunics, dressed in it and waited. Now and then, I peeked through the draperies that encased the window. When evening fell, soothing and calm, I climbed out.

  In the city, I found plenty to satiate my thirst.

  Rich men in search of pleasure found quite something else and were too secure in my embrace by the time they thought of fighting. I learned blood was more than food, life was more than a means of slaking thirst. There was an exquisite pleasure to drinking from the springs of life… something, I suppose, like the contentment of a babe at his mother’s breast. Food and sex and ecstasy were mine when my teeth tore open the vein and life left my victim and streamed into me. I spared no one, didn’t leave any of my victims the tiny spark of life necessary to turn him into one such as I. I gave them nothing, and took all—their life, their gold, their jewels.

  When dawn threatened in the Eastern skies, I rented two rooms in a cheap hostelry, and closed the wooden shutters tightly against the day.

  I lived this way for uncounted years. Athens, then as now, was a seaport, where people came and went, enough of a feeding ground, enough of a hunting preserve.

  My only joy was to stalk the nightly streets, searching for drunken sailors, lost whores, bohemian citizens. That and to listen for any news of Hadrianus. Hatred, hatred flaming clear and pure, had replaced love. Hatred born of resentment for his coldness that pushed me to my death, for his weakness that allowed my dead body to escape for this life, this quasi life I led.

  And when I missed the warmth of the sun, the gentle breeze of daytime on fragrant spring flowers, it wasn’t myself that I blamed. Not myself but my erstwhile master and his ways, and the coldness of his heart, the coldness of Rome. Take a boy out of the streets, would he, and show him love and power he’d always been denied, only to throw him out, when his body changed and he turned into the man he couldn’t help becoming?

  I remembered the smell of his blood, the warmth of it on my tongue, and hungered, and waited.

  I heard the news when he became Emperor, after Trajanus’s death, and ground my teeth, and bode my time. I would wait, I told myself. I would wait until he became old and decrepit and powerless. Until he was ready to beg for immortality. And then… and then I would deny it, I would laugh as he had laughed, I would give him death—slow unforgiving death.

  Then one night, in a tavern, a coin was thrown at me, change for the drink I pretended swallowing while I lingered and heard living men talk of living things, and joke and sing, and discuss women and boys and the happiness of daily life.

  The golden coin was small, bright, freshly minted. And from it Hadrianus’s face smiled at me. Older than I had known him yet unmistakably Hadrianus. I turned the coin over. On the other side, an exquisitely beautiful profile greeted me. A boy, or a woman, with a high bridged nose, delicately drawn features, and a coiffure of elaborate curls pulled up and away from the face. I stared at it, uncomprehending. It looked like me. So much like me. And yet….

  “The Emperor’s boy,” the tavern keeper told me, brightly.

  “His son?” I asked, confused, scared. Not his son, no certainly not his son. A son would be a chance for immortality, a way for him to evade the fate I planned.

  The man laughed, a short, significant laughter. “Oh, no, not his son. His friend, his companion.

  “He is a Bithynian,” the man said, taking my stare for a question. “His name is Antinous. His ancestors, the founders of his city, were from Athens. So we honor him. That, and he is the most beautiful—but there, you can see him for yourself, tonight at the festivals of Dionysus, at the forum.”

  I did see him. I wish I hadn’t. Antinous. Antinous of the dark, dark midnight curls, the white skin, the violet blue eyes, the pomegranate lips. In the middle of the crowd, near the Emperor. The Emperor who had aged and gained weight, but looked contented as I’d never known him. The Emperor who hung suspended from each of the boy’s words and cared not if the boy’s pronunciation of Greek was faulty and provincial.

  Antinous. I hated and I loved him. All in the same instant, the same consuming moment. He was so much like myself, and yet as I had never been. Twin threads, the blind fates had spun for us, and mine had got dirty and frayed, and his remained free, clean, untouched.

  I lingered at the edges of the crowd, with the anonymous peasants. I ignored the free food and wine distributed. And I listened to the talk around me, for anything that might pertain to this dark haired beauty who had replaced me.

  He was from Bithynium, as the tavern keeper had told me. From Bithynium and fourteen, some said twelve. He looked closer to fourteen, but it was hard to tell. Maybe he, himself, didn’t know. And some said he was a slave, and some that he was free, and some that he had lost his family in the earthquake three years ago, and some that his parents had willingly given him to Hadrianus for a suitable fee.

  Whatever he was, whoever he was, his quiet grace entranced. And when, after many jugs of wine, instruments were brought out for music, he played the flute in pure, clean notes. And when, still later, poetry demanded he sang his own poems, of fields and sun and flowers and rivers, in perfect rhythm and images clear that made me want to see it all again and brought bitter salty tears to my eyes for the first time since my death. And when night threatened to slip into dawn and I should long since have immured myself in my darkened lodging, I remained, hypnotized by the dancing that had begun and by Antinous’s body, vigorous and lively and graceful, oh so painfully graceful.

  Once, in the flowing movements of the mad dance, he brushed by the circle of spectators to the imperial feast. He passed a scant hand’s breadth away from me and I could smell him, I could almost taste him: sweat and blood, cinnamon and mint, dark hair falling down his back, heavy and fragrant, like the night that sheltered and hid me.

  It was only the first light of dawn, painful on my eyes and skin, that drove me to my lair.

  The following night I took my treasure, the money and jewels I had collected from my victims over countless years, and settled accounts. I found out where the Emperor and Antinous were going next and followed them. To Sicily, I followed them, where they scaled Mount Etna to watch the sunrise, the sunrise that was anathema to me. Then I followed them to Rome and then back out again, to Africa and Greece and then to the far eastern frontiers, and everywhere where there was an outpost of the legion. And everywhere they were welcomed and feasted and enjoyed themselves and
each other, ignorant of my presence so near, oh, so near them.

  One year, two, three, I followed them. I saw the shadow creep over them. The same shadow that had fallen on me years before. Antinous’s voice deepened and his shoulders broadened, and yet… and yet Hadrianus’s love for him faltered not. He was faithful, faithful as I’d never thought possible. No whores, no stray boys, not even the Empress whose expression soured more and more each passing year. Unmindful of people’s tongues and reproaches, their love continued. And I followed them. For this I braved dawn and twilight, covered myself tightly with a cloak and kept out of the sun only at the noonday hour. Four years, five, six, seven. I followed them along the northern coast of Africa, towards Alexandria. And when they hunted together I tracked them, as they their prey; and when they feasted, I watched the dance and listened to the music; and when, on horseback, they eluded their escort and stole forbidden hours for love amid native forests, I was there hiding, crouching, peering out from the underbrush, burning with jealousy for their love and with hatred for Antinous’s beauty and Hadrianus’s power, burning with love for their life and their warmth and Antinous’s shining clarity.

  Here and there, cracks opened between them and I hoped, I hoped that darkness would creep in. Eagerly I heard them argue, headily I drank in the injuries traded, the insults implied. Hungrily, I absorbed the servants’ gossip about Hadrianus’s bringing a courtesan into their bed Antinous’s refusing her and the bitter argument that followed, with Hadrianus explaining to Antinous that he was growing, that he was changing, that all things must end. Expectantly, I saw Antinous come away from encampments, palaces and villas, in the darkness of night, and brood alone after quarrels. Pleasurably, painfully, I saw his eyes cloud with the despair I knew so well. And I was close by that day in Africa when the boy charged foolishly and then paused before the open throat of a cornered lion. If it weren’t for Hadrianus’s lance, deftly thrown, Antinous’s life would have ended then.