a necrophiliac, remember?"
Adriano's eyes didn't stray. They stared at the boy and filled with pain, slowly, slowly. And each drop was indefinable sweetness in my mouth, singing joy in my heart. "Child!" the Emperor said, in soft chiding. "Antinous."
"I didn't want it," the boy said, torpidly, painfully, through lips already growing stiff with death, with the poison of undying death I had put in his body. "I don't want it."
They stood there, I don't know how long. They stared at each other as lovers separated by an abyss.
"Antinous . . ." Adriano said.
"Only sun and water, I remember you told me," the boy whispered. "Only sun and water . . .. Not age, not time . . .. now I shall never change . . ." And he stared at the Emperor with hopeful eyes.
But all the Emperor said was, "Antinous," again, in that even, tender whisper, as one who reproaches a child for a minor folly.
That was the moment of my triumph, the sweet moment of my triumph, when I knew I had won and the boy was mine and Adriano would beg me
Then, abruptly, Antinous moved with a light quickness that should have been impossible to him, stepped closer to the torrential, rain swollen river. "A sacrifice," he said. And smiled impishly. "A sacrifice for your Imperial health, your Imperial life." For a moment, he lingered on the side of the river, then laughed, "May you live long, may your life be lengthened by the years that should have been mine."
"Antinous!" Adriano screamed, but did not move.
In my memory now it all happens in the slow motion of the cheap horror movies that would, centuries later, occupy my sleepless days: Antinous's jumping, his body hitting the water, his attempts at swimming, instinct against will. Each of these unnaturally prolonged, centuries in passing.
But I had drained him of life and strength and he could not have saved himself, even if he so wished. Slowly, slowly, he went under, was dragged under, until only his hair floated at the surface, seemingly for an eternity.
"I would accept him, even now," Adriano said, evenly, calmly in the tone of one who trades a greeting with a stranger at the baths.
I looked up at him. His gaze was on the river where nothing remained to be seen, nothing other than the dark waters that had swallowed his lover's body. His eyes were empty, vacant, equanimous.
Later, in the eight years he survived his lover, grief would come to him, scalding grief, and he would weep publicly like a woman, and he would build temples and monuments