Ludo thought, that day as they sat together on a low rise of crumbled stones far from the center of things, that Nerezza should have been a Vestal. In her utter impenetrability, she could have held the whole of Rome within her, red brick and tufaand aqueducts and catacombs, within the borders of her womb, and they would have been safe within her, safe forever, for no Goth or Gaul could broach that barrier.

“They didn’t sting me, at all, not even once.” Ludo sighed.

“I’m not surprised. Insect life is a funny thing there.” Nerezza squinted herself in the broad, brazen sun, the molten light which poured like splashing wine over every shattered plinth and capital.

Ludo cleared his throat a little. “The Etymologiaesays that bees are virtuous because they are much loved by all, and sought after with great longing by everyone, because their honey tastes as sweet in the mouths of paupers as in the mouths of kings. Do you think that’s logical? That a creature can be virtuous just because it is loved and sought after, that the act of being loved, of being sought after, even if it is passive, is equal to an act of martyrdom or great piety, which is active? That it can confer grace to a whole species?”

“I think any encyclopedia is bound to have a great number of lies and fancied-up stories in it, Ludo.”

Ludo shut his eyes against the light; he saw the pinkness of his eyelids swim before him. “But what does it mean, then, if a man is sought out by those virtuous bees? Sought out with great longing by creatures whose very souls are defined by the fact that they are greatly longed for?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wanted them to sting me. It was like the church, with all the silent people and their awful limbs, animal limbs. I wanted to be covered by other souls until mine was pressed to death, like a witch. Why do I feel that so much, when I’m there? Why do I want to be drowned in other people? I never want that here.”

“It’s different, for everyone. I can’t answer any of these things, Ludo. I’m glad you saw Lucia, that it . . . gave her up to you. Because you can’t really think that by chance you stumbled onto her Sunday tea. But I have no grace, nothing to add to any encyclopedia of that place, I am not sought after and I have no virtue.”

He wanted to say: I seek you. He wanted to say: You are not my wife, but you are my Virgil, leading me through circle after circle of Purgatory. How can a man not love the body that brings him so close to God? But in the face of her inviolable mood, her frowns and her stares, he could not make himself drag her into Dante.

“Oh, Ludo,” she whispered, “if you want to be happy, just let it be.”

“Before the teahouse, I would have clawed through the earth for fifty years to find Lucia on the other side, an old woman, bald and tired, leaning on a cane. Maybe she’ll still be there, with arthritis and absolution. But even if I never see her again, I have to go, I have to keep going to Palimpsest. I have to try. It is a world without an Etymologiae. Without an etymology, without origin. I’ll go, and I’ll lay a map of that place over my heart instead of Rome. I’ll rent a small shop, an accountant’s office, and write columns upon columns, everything that people know in that city. I will write, do you understand? I’ll bind books, too, I’ll bind them, as I have always done, and there will be pages like raw cream and the finest glues, the strangest glues, made from every kind of rendered beast, but I will bind only what Ihave written. Perhaps in fifty years, an old woman, bald and tired, leaning on a cane, will pass my shop and ask herself what strange old man is looking for his glasses in the display window, and we shall have a great deal to talk about. We will have coffees. I will save a chair for her. I am capable of that. Of waiting, of faithfulness. I am capable of service, of holding a city in my inviolable belly.”

Nerezza watched him with murky eyes, shaded by pity and loathing and envy. Ludo did not understand it, but the nature of eel-kind is beyond the comprehension of land-dwellers, and he let her invisible body, black as rope, circle him, circle him, crackling, sere.

“How can you talk about it as if you’ve already managed everything, merrily planning your little life in Palimpsest? Such a selfish little boy you are, Ludovico! You’ve borrowed a toy, and you think it’s yours forever. If Lucia had shoved you off her that night you would never have known about any of this.” Hard, friable tears moved in her eyes. “Do you understand anything? Radoslav is dead. If we have it right, if what Agostino told you is true, if we’ve guessed the way, I can never go. Not ever. And I won’t watch you gaily traipse into my country because your wife thought it was easier to just lie there and let you fuck her.”

Ludovico chewed his lip. Mine, mine and not yours.For as often as he heard it, there might as well have been a sign reading thus hanging over the city.

“I suppose a knight cannot always expect the monsters he meets in the wood to kindly point the way.”

Nerezza narrowed her dark eyes. “Are you the only human in the world then? And all of the rest of us monsters?”

She stood and strode away over the broad ruin, leaving him to chase after her, to seek her, to follow her meandering path home.

But Nerezza lost him in the close streets, and when Ludo finally came to her door she was not there. Clever bee, sought out after all. Agostino answered the bell, and sat with him on the couch while he warmed his hands around a mug of coffee—Ludovico found he could not bear the thought of tea, after the wonderful cups and discs of ice. Tea on this side of the world was too quotidian, too bitter, too thin.

“They’ve gone for the night, Anoud and Nerezza,” Agostino said, rubbing the bridge of his enormous nose. “You must have upset her.”

“Probably.” Ludo sighed. “I seem to do that rather more often than I mean to.”

The two men sat on Nerezza’s long, hard chaise. “How did you find her?” Ludo finally said, trying to keep his voice from sounding too eager. He had no jealousy in him anymore with regards to his eel-girl, anyway. Not too much. Impossible to pull such a feeling up and into the sunlit world. She was unpossessable, a Vestal with a terrible gaze.

“She found me.” Agostino shrugged. “I don’t know how she managed it. I was living in Madrid, my company’s satellite offices are there. I was in sales.” He laughed a little, rueful, amazed, at who he used to be. “We made pencils. I used to smell of nothing but graphite. One morning my phone rang and a woman told me very matter-of-factly that I would need to come to Rome immediately, that she knew me and needed me and loved me, and even her voice was like someone reaching through the line to kiss me and strangle me at the same time. I couldn’t even say no to her voice.She’s . . . like that. You can’t say no. And, you know, we had a lot to talk about. She introduced me to Lucia,” Agostino hurried forward nervously, “and we found Anoud together, brought her up from Rabat. She was working in an olive oil plant, can you imagine that? She was always shiny, like she couldn’t get it out of her skin, even after we kissed her and kissed her. And Radoslav . . . ” But there he trailed off, his voice grew husked and tight, and he passed a broad hand over his eyes.

Ludo put his arm around the young man, and a single wracked sob escaped his skinny chest as he let himself be held. After a long while Agostino turned his face to Ludo’s neck and kissed him gently, hesitantly, and again on his jaw, his ear. Ludovico stiffened and sucked in his breath. It was not that he had not expected something like this—surely his wife had not been prudish, and had as many women as men. But he was not Lucia, not a great serpent-lion with long and indiscriminate teeth. He did not have a different body for everyone. He did not look at men the way he looked at women. Ludo tried. He tried to decide where Agostino might fit in the menagerie of his recent lovers—the Bull, he thought, testing it against the heft of his heart. Evangelist, earth-tiller, labyrinth-tenant. Could he take such a thing within himself? If his body refused such an inversion of the usual order, would Agostino be hurt, angry? How could women do this, how could Lucia have done this? How could they bear so many other bodies within their own?