The fighting life. It was not my opportunity. They saw my speed and agility and harnessed these things in service of…standing still for hours with a ten foot long pike by my side. They saw my quick mind, and acknowledged it by…rendering me immobile.

Instead, let me tell you of him, and his beauty as he stands there in the light, sun cascading off his wide and muscle-rounded chest, and drawing my gaze to the swollen nipples that guide my mouth to him, and would act as a beacon in the darkest night should I have need.

The stretch of his jaw is inexorable. He takes me easily though not all men do, this Parshano, prince of the church.

He is indeed tall and strong, as if his background really could be a military one, and at this point as I cannot place his position in the artist’s household I think of him as the Handsome Captain.

I survey him as he surveys us. The distinguished beard, the flickering eyes of deepest grey. The locks of white and black that fall like a porcupine’s stripes to the nape of his neck and gather high in the topknot that makes him so recognisable as he walks the city streets. They say he is fifty. They say he is seventy. I don’t know. But I can see with my own eyes he is handsome now, and that perhaps, in his youth, he was a real spectacle.