The Everlasting

by Katy Simpson Smith

  He had his hands in the water now, and maybe there was blood along with the dust, but maybe there wasn’t.

  “Did someone get hurt?”

  “Slaves,” he said. He directed his answer at the baker. “Spend their last coin on flowers for their girl, and turns out she’s seeing some other fellow too, right? Can’t get them to care about their work, too busy breeding. That one was liable to take off the other’s ear in his teeth. Don’t see that on the northern front.”

  “It’s hard to teach them culture,” the baker said.

  “Perhaps religion would do them good,” Prisca said. “Kindness.” She could have said freedom, but this seemed juvenile. Kindness was also a pretty stupid thing to say. She thought of her father and how deeply, conscientiously silent he would be.

  “It’s not my business to go around breaking up street fights. Someone should suit them up and send them to the arena. I was on my way to arrest a woman for stabbing her husband’s business partner. That’s more my line.”

  “And paid well for it, I imagine,” the baker said. He emptied the dirty water out the window to the alley.

  “You’d be surprised at how a woman’ll throw herself on your mercy. Throw themselves skirts first, is what I’m saying. Maybe I make the arrest, maybe I stay for a taste instead. Who’s to know the difference?”

  “God,” Prisca said. She imagined Crispus in a red soldier’s tunic, laughing.

  The baker wrapped her loaves in a straw basket and held his hand out for her money.

  “Do you not believe in God?” Prisca stepped up to the soldier, her head at his armpit, her growing feet close to his.

  “You better get back to your father now,” the baker said.

  “No, let her preach. What god are you campaigning for, girl? I believe in the ones that see to my needs, and I don’t skip the sacrifices. Bad luck’s a curse.”

  “I mean the one God, the God of Christ who was hung on the cross and rose from the dead.” The light fell in the shop—what a sign rain would be right now—and she felt a twinge in her bones, as if she’d placed one foot into Hades and the three-headed dog had licked her toes. There was always time to make different decisions, or else there was never time; once she spoke, it was impossible in the tightly woven fabric of the world that she had ever not spoken. “If you don’t believe in Him, and in Christ, and in the Holy Ghost”—though she wasn’t entirely clear on the Ghost’s physiology or relation to the trinity—“then you cannot come to heaven. Nor do you have any native goodness to lift you. You’re nothing but a weak man who pretends to be strong, and when the world ends, I daresay you’ll burn in flames.”

  The soldier flushed and looked with outrage at the baker, as if he were responsible, but the baker had his hands on Prisca’s back now and was urging her outside, and through the doorway she got a better glimpse of the afternoon disturbance: only one slave was left, but he squatted against the building across the street, his hand covering a raw red ear, the dirt on his open face run through with tears. A man who an hour before had been in love, now vacant. Prisca would’ve liked to kneel down with him and speak of the heart’s tyranny, to tell him that human love is a very bad joke, and the only being who could love him without betrayal, without diminishment, was a great swallowing spirit above. Wouldn’t it be a balm to hear it? [Don’t spread lies. No one has loved me with more betrayal, more diminishment, than He. On days I don’t despise Him, I tell myself He is good, only to stop my writhing. But here I am in grudging love with his creations, and heaven help me, I begin to think if He does right by you, pet, even He could be redeemed.] It was madness that her father kept this secret. Everything seemed very clear, that doses of Jesus, like opium, would turn all this sordid degradation into beams of light. Here, slave: a dose for you, to salve your heart wound. Here, baker: a dose for you, to give you conviction. Here, soldier: a dose for you, so you’ll throw yourself at the feet of the women you’ve wronged and beg them to forgive your cowardice. Underneath all that dirt was somewhere a pure city.

  Her hands were still scrabbling at the doorjamb when the soldier pushed the shopkeeper away and scooped her under one arm like a writhing sack of chickens.

  “Little bastard,” he whispered. He took her out into the street and the baker began shouting, and everything she saw became sharper now; the patterned swirls of red dirt in the road and the melody the weeping slave sang under his breath were portents to be read—surely the rain was coming—and the whole tight world of Rome was laid out in two dimensions.

  He pushed through the bustle of the street and the baker’s shouts grew fainter, and Prisca bounced against his hip until the soldier’s arm failed, and then he threw her over his shoulder, her bottom now skyward, her head bouncing against his back, all rushed and ringing with blood, and though she could’ve used her hands to pummel him, she let them hang, watched them swaying above the footprints the soldier left, above the street litter: a broken cup, spilled oats, another bunch of sunflowers rejected by a woman, the stems split and scattered. Sandaled feet, dusty hems, pale ankles, brown ankles. A beggar on the corner, his face covered in boils, one eye lost to disease or gouging: he too a testament to God’s mercy. Why, again, was there suffering? [Because God in His omnipotence could not curb me, and cast me out, and with only the weapon of suggestion I writhed into the human sphere and ushered you out of the garden into the drought. Or: I am the one listening, a fellow imperfect, and God is testing your free will in His after-dinner game of chance. This city holds adherents of both camps, and all other camps besides, and do you think rain is falling unevenly on this expanse? Do clouds hover over the orchards of only the faithful? In 250 years, the Visigoths will lay ruin to a Christian emperor, and his sister will order the strangling of his general’s wife, and Rome will crumple like a tissue in a pagan’s hand. Was that my doing, or your Lord’s? The street you’re bouncing down will run with the blood of Cola di Rienzo, who visioned a single Italy five hundred years too soon, and who was mob-slaughtered on this very hill (where now the public augurs sit) that will sprout the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, which to most tourists in fanny packs will seem too high to climb. Do you smell his gore on this stone? Suffering is a brief wipe across time’s face. It’s not there for any reason; I didn’t create it, nor He. It comes from the dirt, and from your deeds—no monk, or Medici, or man is spared.]

  They were in the forum now—the apartments and shops had become temples and open markets—and she wondered where her father was, and if he would be surprised when she didn’t show up to meet him and if below the worry would be a small spark of relief. As soon as they began to climb the Palatine, the soldier put her down and took her by the wrist. The pines curved above her defensively.

  He took her through a side entrance into a tall brick building with so many arches it looked like it might fly away. The floor was tiled with reds and blues and blacks and greens; she nearly ran into a column. The soldier dragged her to a halt before a cluster of guards. He told her not to move and conferred with an older guard with a man-sized lance. The other men looked at her like she was a mouse. She’d spent enough time in Rome to know which hill was which. She was in the palace of the emperor, Marcus Aurelius, hail Caesar.

  Prisca had not been afraid when the soldier pulled her to a smaller room, or when a man in purple robes asked her questions about her family, or when another man in heavier purple robes asked her to spout sacrilegious swears. Imagine the bearded man looking down from heaven, or what her father would say. Think of the story this would make for Crispus, if Crispus had ever listened to her. Remembering his mouth made her wince.

  The cell they put her in wasn’t the damp hole she’d hoped for, but a small bright room with a ceiling that stretched up almost three times her own height. It wasn’t clear what the emperor used it for when he wasn’t storing little girls. The window was too high to see anything except the darkening sky and the brushy corner of a tree, where a jackdaw spied on her. It was past dinnertime. Her moth
er would know by now. Her bladder was full, and it pressed in a tingly way; she crossed her legs twice (right thigh over left thigh, right ankle under left ankle), but this wouldn’t last long. She wondered if all arrested girls got sunny rooms without pots to piss in, and whether the emperor thought women were parakeets.

  When night came and she realized she’d have to sleep, she felt the first small prick of fear. Her mother wasn’t coming. This was not pretend. She went to one corner of the room and lifted her robe and peed, hating the sound of the liquid on tile, then crossed to the other corner and knelt with her face to the wall, her hands clasped against her chest. Her shoes had been lost, and the soles of her bare feet cupped her bottom. She’d often wondered what bodies were for—we fill them with food and then evacuate the food; we walk from place to place; we get sick; grown-ups do grown-up things with their secret parts; bodies get burned or broken or invaded, grabbed without permission, manipulated into shapes. It made no sense that Jesus would want one. Her stomach stopped growling and began to chew on itself. Her fingers, interwoven, shook a little. Her blood would come again soon, and she didn’t want to be humiliated in front of these men.

  The temple was bright with gold and colored marble and sunlight piercing through the yellow columns, but they wouldn’t let her inside. The guards lined up by the ivory doors with spears all angled the same way. Next to the crisp-robed priest, Prisca felt small and soiled, her eyes wide, her hair in a knot. No one could’ve slept on such a hard floor. He put the incense in her hand and gently pushed her toward the outdoor altar, and she wondered why on earth they were going to so much trouble, and weren’t there louder and more dangerous Christians than she.

  “I will not,” she said, clenching her fist so tight against her chest that the incense crumbled. A low fire skittered across the altar, and around it the four big oxen seemed to snort at her through their bronze nostrils. Men walking in the distance stopped to look.

  “Think of everything Apollo has given you,” the priest murmured. His statue loomed over them, one arm cradling a lyre, his mouth open, saying she knew not what. “You come from farmers, yes? Think of the crops that reach up toward the sun, the grain and olives that fill your belly. Think of how beautiful this day is!”

  But sun was the opposite of what they wanted. He was a kind man, really. She could see in his pattern of wrinkles that he liked smiling. But no one had ever told him he had no consequence.

  “God gives us sunny days,” she said.

  “Yes, this god. Just thank him, that’s all. You don’t want to be ungrateful, do you?”

  She was grateful for her fists that were doing the crushing, and her stretchy strong mind that had led her away from falsehood and make-believe. She’d once offered her small-girl treasures to Apollo at the family shrine, but he’d offered nothing back. He’d never walked the earth on man-feet, put the back of his hand on the foreheads of the weak.

  “I cannot,” she answered him.

  “What will your parents say when they hear you’ve been disobedient?”

  “My mother will weep,” she said, “and my father will look into his own soul and wonder why he’s such a coward that he went silent when the Word needed trumpeting.”

  “You are a very bad girl,” the priest said. “You’ll be hurt if you don’t obey, do you understand? This is just a brief moment in your life when you think one thing might be true, but someone has led you astray, and you’re too young to know better. You’re made to be sweet—just look at your face.” And he reached out a hand to stroke her cheek. “Put the incense in the fire and go home. Look at your sweet round face. Go ahead, throw the incense. You’re a good girl.”

  She dropped the incense and ground it beneath her heel and said in her most proper voice, “I’m very sorry, sir. I know you’re a good boy, and I don’t like to make you mad.”

  He straightened up, and his mouth crunched like a caterpillar. He turned to the guards. None of them looked happy when they came to surround her, but the one with the whip looked least pleased. They pulled her robe down so her back was bare, though she was only conscious of her front, the almost-breasts being exposed in this lovely open place, and her face turned red with shame, so that when the blows came, the pain was almost a relief.

  The first time her father beat her, she’d stolen a scroll from his library and used it to wrap a handful of apricots. She’d wanted to give them to a friend—a neighbor girl who’d since moved away, ruining her chances at female friendship. It was from a book of her father’s favorite poetry, and as he lashed her bottom with an olive branch he made it clear he wasn’t just angry at the loss of words but disappointed in his daughter’s intellect. “The next time you steal a book from me,” he said, “read it.” She’d had red welts that took a week to subside, but she hadn’t bled.

  Now the pain was higher, shriekier. When the blood came, her skin felt like it was raining. Her arms still crossed against her chest, pressing in the tender spots, covering her growing self. She prayed God wasn’t watching. She had planned to be brave, but she hadn’t considered humiliation. Is it true that you cannot be hurt unless you allow yourself to feel hurt? [No.]

  Someone wrapped her tunic around her delicately, and she walked back with them, head down, past the other buildings in the emperor’s compound, past the palace where she’d spent the night, and down the hill, where the scattered pine needles made the path slippery. Most of the guards had peeled away, and only one was left. He held her upper arm like it was a horse’s rein. Her back was drying; she could feel the cloth beginning to stick. If they thought she wouldn’t run, they were right. Refusing to surrender the soul meant sacrificing the body. They could do what they liked—she would only confess to the roaches how hungry she was.

  In her new cell, as crawly and dank as she’d fantasized, another woman sat cross-legged in the center of the room, weaving her fingers through silver hair. Prisca stood politely by the door and waited for a hello. The woman had northern features, so must be a slave. After five heartbeats of silence, Prisca remembered that Christians knew nothing of class, and she fell to her knees and reached out a hand.

  “Forgive me,” she said and introduced herself.

  The woman smiled. She seemed to have more teeth than most people. “Where’s your mother?”

  “My mother is the church,” she said, “and my father is God.”

  “A Jew!” the woman said with delight.

  “No, a Christian.”

  “A Christian Jew! Welcome, fool. Are you hungry?”

  Prisca nodded.

  “I saved you some.” And she got stiffly to her hands and knees and scuttled to the corner of the dirt-floored room, where she turned a cedar bucket right side up. Beneath it were a hunk of bread and a seashell. “Oyster?” she said.

  “Thank you,” Prisca said, bewildered.

  “Faith alone not enough?” she asked.

  Prisca acknowledged the joke with a smile.

  “How old are you?”

  “How old are you, madam?”

  “Ah! A playful one! Here, go stand behind the door. That’s right. Very quiet. The guard’ll stop by soon with your dinner, which you’ll like, but don’t make a cluck and we’ll have our little fun.”

  When the old woman stood, Prisca saw her robes were hemmed with a purple band. “Soldier, soldier! Help!” Silence in the hallway. “Soldier, it’s the girl!”

  Someone clanked down the hall and opened the pass-through at the top of the door.

  “A miracle,” she said breathlessly. “The Jewish girl—her god must have come for her. One second here, next second gone in smoke.” She clapped her hands. “Poof! Do you smell it?”

  The guard was hurrying at the locks as she continued to prattle.

  “Enough to make me believe,” she said. “All praise to Mithras.”

  He was in now, Prisca hidden behind the swung door, and was looking frantically in the corners.

  “I don’t know why you bother locking the Jews u
p; their god always comes to get them. And I was so happy to have another lady in here, someone to share the gossip with—you know, which guard is heavy-handed with the ladle, which has a little humor.”

  The guard stopped. Prisca let out the tiniest snicker, and he swung the door back slowly, saw her pinched in there, her hands over her mouth. He neither smiled nor sighed, but walked heavily out again, closing the door behind him and shutting the pass-through.

  She didn’t care if the woman was a murderer, she was glad to know her.

  Sometime in the night, the old woman unclothed herself and draped her robe over Prisca’s sleeping body. In the morning, she braided the girl’s hair in loops tighter than her mother ever had. In the afternoon, a speck of sun got through the high window, and the old woman pretended to chase it with a net. Prisca lay down on her side and rubbed her feet.

  “Are you a slave?” she asked. “Did you steal from your master?”

  “My husband?” She sat down, spreading out the purple band of cloth. “Minister to Caesar, hail to all that. What could I have stolen? Nothing but his good humor. After all those years, from gangly boy to proclaiming on the rostrum, and he lost his ability to see the joke.”

  “You made fun of him.” Prisca scratched her shins, where the hazy hair was growing thicker.

  “Women are good at cutting themselves down. Men are good at pretending they never shit.” She inched closer; Prisca could feel her salty breath on her face. She had such puzzling, hawkish eyes. “What does your messiah say about little girls? Does he call you special?”

  Prisca squeezed her eyes shut and tried to summon him. Sometimes Crispus strode across the backs of her lids; sometimes she herself appeared there, hands on hips, as if to say, What else do you want?

  “A martyr without a voice in her head?”

  “I’m not a martyr,” Prisca said, sitting up quickly.

  “What do you think they’re going to do to you?”