Surpassingly

The Egyptians have long been known for their love of beautiful mirrors and beautiful glasswork; after dinner he sits before the polished disc of his own reflection, and it’s like peering through a window. What he sees is unavoidably warped by the metal’s manufacture, but he recognizes his own mouth and his own long hair and his own cheeks, though not his eyes. His dressing-table holds the mirror on its base and a dozen assorted slim bottles (their contents, he cares not what) and the smallest silver shears he’s ever held, for nipping away a stray hair or an errant thread. His pretty toy dagger is tucked into his belt in an aesthetically pleasing way. It’s sharp enough to pare fruit or to cut meat, but not enough to kill a man with a thrust of it, he’d wager. Not enough to prevail against a sword.

Antinous takes the dagger up, presses it to his cheek, cool and keen. It’s a comfortable feeling. He was good with blades once, his hand was steady for the setting of snares and he’d skinned hares with a knife just like this, without the delectable stones set into its pommel and the fluted gold to make up its handle.

He’d liked hunting like that, hunting simply, with snares; he could manage it all by himself and check each one over the course of the day, make it home with game in hand in time for dinner. He’ll never go home again, never walk those barefoot paths through the brush and between the trees. What if you came to some harm, beautiful one? A sudden storm, a broken leg, a lion’s teeth: none of these things would respect an emperor’s favorite boy more than any other victim. Hadrian holds him in such high regard that he could not possibly let him risk himself in such an uncivil place. Or perhaps this is all as fantastical and as romantic as one of Hadrian’s preferred stories. The odds are just as good that he grew up in the valley, picking fruit, or in the city like any other common child, and was never an able hunter in his boyhood. Perhaps he never knew those forest-woods, nor called them by proper names; there can be no names more proper than the hard syllables of Latin designations or Hadrian’s flowery well-favored Greek. Perhaps he’s inventing something out of whole cloth to pretend he had a life before being loved.

He would not die, at least not right away, if he took only a few fingers, or one eye. He’s seen men live to old age with six fingers or with a sunken-in wilted crater where an eye used to be, they aren’t attractive prospects but these men manage well enough. If he doesn’t dare to risk the eye, he might crop his ears like a dog or cut a notch in his lip, he might carve up his cheek or hack away at the straight strong tower of his own nose. He’d stop short of castrating himself, but it’s a near thing – anything about him that men have ever delighted in. He feels the powerful urge to disfigure himself, and the desire’s more powerful still when he sees himself in the mirror; he wants to wreck and rearrange himself, and to debase himself like a coin with clipped edges.

But he knows it’d take more than this to make himself hateful. Hadrian loves him with the first wide-spaced bristles on his cheeks and spots on his skin and when he is sick and when he is uncivil and when he denies himself to him. He can surely bring himself somehow to love his beloved were he made disfigured; his wrath would be fearful, to be sure, and whoever ended up taking the blame wouldn’t be thanking either of them, but Antinous would be by his side again in a fortnight outfitted with a polished gemstone shaped to fill his empty eyehole and with a false nose of ivory. An oriental fantasia on the theme of the emperor’s gracious all-encompassing forgiveness and the masterful artistry with which he serves his beloved. He’d scrape up the dust of his bloody disfigurement and use it in powders for magic spells. He’d love him uglied. He’ll love him dead.

(Isn’t this what it is to love well in the Greek fashion? To proceed from particulars to higher concepts. Antinous is on his way to becoming a concept and he doesn’t think he likes it. Love is another snare he’s made for himself. Love is a noose.)

He is faced with no escape. His emperor would know his voice anywhere, could hunt him down on horseback with hounds baying from the scent of his clothing, he would know him by the bones of his ankle or the corner of his mouth or the softness of his back. He knows him in the dark already. There’s no place in the whole world where Rome isn’t, or where its king can’t find him.

His prison is flesh and his fetters are gold.

He convulses with stifled laughter. Hadrian makes him the gift of such a knife, knowing he could do anything with it – knowing he can do nothing at all. He doesn’t cut his own throat, or carve out his own eye, or score this flesh that has been his livelihood, but he must do something. He takes up the shears and cuts his hair short. Each long curl falls away like a pillar from the back of his neck; every sliding snik of the shears is like a little hymn.

It’s just the same as shearing sheep, the pretty oiled locks fall away and what’s left to see is his own long face. (And he does look quite a bit like a sheep, lip stuck out in morose thoughtfulness. Hadrian’s titled this particular attitude pouting. As opposed to his own great dignity in not getting his way, presumably.)

He bathes to sift out the lingering fluff of unshed clippings; his look provokes no murmur of comment among the slaves, which would imply that either they are tactful enough to leave well alone or that the result was becoming enough to look deliberate. He may never achieve the dream of graduating to the status of barber, but he has hair like a young boy’s or like the emperor’s own, little wet-dark curls plastered damp to his brow and in front of his ears that when dry will spring up prettily. One would hardly know his sweetly-graced head as the site of a sacrifice.

And he retires to bed and the service this promises for him. Hadrian embraces him not for what he is but what he’d like him to be; this much has been clear for quite some time. Let him try to wrap his arms around an idea, to cradle a poem or flatter a statue. Let him try.