The Everlasting

by Katy Simpson Smith

  Beat her, beat her, they were going to beat her.

  When Prisca showed her how to pray, the woman knelt facing the corner and whispered, “Jesus, show mercy to us all. Bless my husband, may he rot from the inside out, and bless my children, may they be told lies about their mother. Jesus, most of all, be a real thing. If you disappoint my small friend, I’ll come find you in the depths of the underworld and kick your balls until your human half collapses in agony and begs for a woman’s pity. We’ll see who has pity then. I’d also like you to explain why when you came down to earth you wore a man’s shape and took only men as your disciples; it’s enough to make me spew, imagining you all sitting around pretending you don’t shit. Praise be to Ceres. Amen.”

  Prisca couldn’t help smiling. “That was terrible.”

  The second time they asked her to deny her faith, they took her to a larger room, with more people, more purple. She wondered if her cellmate’s husband was here, and whether he was lonely, and whether her mother was lonely or if it was a reprieve to lose her daughter’s growing body as the crops shrank. They asked the questions she’d dreamed about, and though Jesus didn’t appear like a holy tutor to help her, she knew most of the answers. No; no; no; I will not; and I cannot tell you where the meetings are held or how many are present. They spoke of her youth—that’s a passing thing, she said, like beauty, or appetite, and shouldn’t matter. They spoke of her ignorance—I know enough to know right from wrong, she said, and I needn’t see the whole world to guess at the contents of heaven. They spoke of her family—she was about to repeat Hierax’s dodge but remembered Jesus was someone’s child too, and he forsook no one.

  She looked to see if there was a scribe writing down her statement, but everyone just sat there glumly, staring at the ceiling or picking at their fingernails. How many halfhearted men did it take to persecute a single girl? [For me, it only took one. I’m starting to see Him now through your eyes; I spy the crocus of forgiveness nuzzling from the bulb in your heart, still in the dark soil, and there’s an echoing uncomfortable murmur in mine.]

  They announced the sentence. She was beginning to understand that each time it would be worse, and one of those times, if they did not wake up to their own meanness, she would very probably die. She was twelve years old. She had been on the earth for no more than twelve years.

  They took her to an open square far enough from the forum to avoid disrupting business. There were orange trees nearby; she could smell them. A middle-aged woman with an armful of wrapped meat and a small child stopped to watch as the guards tied Prisca’s feet to an iron ring in the center of the piazza. She could see the sweat on the woman’s neck like a web of jewels. Her braids with kinks in them, messily done. The child pointed at Prisca and whispered something to its mother. From a nearby blacksmith they brought the iron pot sloshing with melted wax.

  She felt the sun first, its melty golden ball, its dripping hazy edges, how it yellowed the piazza and the woman and her child and how even the workers pausing on their lunchtime stroll caught some of that rich edge, so when the wax first hit her skin—the leading drop, sizzle and fat—it only seemed like the sun had finally leaned in far enough for a kiss, and her back writhed in a kind of pleasure. It was the woman’s face that first frightened her—not the child’s, which was vacant and openmouthed, but the woman’s, her lips peeled back in reflected pain. Only then did Prisca understand the drop had become a pour and her whole back was seething, her upper arms and legs carrying the drippings, her skin already exploding in a single fluid blister. She didn’t want to cry; the woman was crying. She closed her eyes tight to imagine the tallow as sunshine—it was just sunshine, hot and wet and now hard—and when she opened them the woman was walking quickly away, pulling at the child, who still looked back at Prisca blankly. The sear became a shock, and her back collapsed. She pressed against the stones, the wax an endless bubbling weight, and she was under an ocean on fire. She couldn’t form prayer, but just repeated his name. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. She would have to live inside time like a patient spore. Waiting. Breathing.

  Her cell was empty. The old woman with hair like white water was gone. Prisca lay on her stomach in the dirt and straw, the air alone on her blistered back as sharp as any knife. In the quiet and the dark, she crawled out of her turtle shell, and her pink, raw self shuddered into tears. She wished she had something of her own here, so she wouldn’t feel so entirely scrubbed away—the little wooden cow, or the lock she’d saved from Crispus’s haircut, or the hook she’d caught the eel on. The eel she’d stoned to death. She was a half-wit to think she could go to heaven.

  Somewhere her parents were fighting again: You’ve abandoned the gods, and now look. No, you’ve closed your ears to Christ, and now look. She wanted to tell them there was no way to know, you just had to trust. Trust what? She didn’t know. Faith was a tiny shard of mirror in the chest that sometimes cut and sometimes flashed light.

  When she was done with sobs, she crawled to the plate of bread by the door and pulled it into strips and rolled the strips into balls and had a game of marbles until the guard brought her water and a sponge to wash her wounds and told her she’d better eat that because she didn’t know when it’d be her last. Famine wasn’t her family being reduced to eating pigeons; it was fearing to eat the bread because as long as the bread was there, there’d be bread.

  “I can help with washing if you need it.”

  She looked down at the sponge, tired. “Yes, please.”

  The guard’s hands didn’t know how to be soft, but he did his best, and she tried to smile through the tears so he wouldn’t worry.

  “I don’t know why you do it,” he said. “Stubborn.”

  “I don’t know why,” she said.

  “I always tell folks better to confess, or whatever they’re asking. Silly making a fuss over it, especially when they’re like to be inventive. Tallow today, who knows what tomorrow. Only a fool’d stick around to find out.”

  “Do you have a wife?”

  “Course I do, and never raised a fist.”

  “Didn’t you ever make a fool of yourself trying to win her over?”

  He paused, sponge in hand. Gave a chuckle. “Well, now.”

  His kindness, and hers, made her feel good. She didn’t know whether she was supposed to feel good. But when she curled up for sleep, a crinkling spider noise across the ceiling made her turn onto her back to see, and the straw scoring her blisters reminded her how much more bad she felt than good; but then, was it wrong to feel so bad? [I will make them build you a monument. I’ll snake my slender fingers in their hands and lift the yellow bricks myself, I’ll keep stacking them higher than last year’s rubble so your name is inerasable, I’ll mount you on a hill, I’ll send you monks, pilgrims, tourists, I’ll wet future tongues with your twin syllables. I am who makes history.]

  This time they quizzed her in a wooden stall below the arena. The tigers’ moans made the horses kick against the boards. She got sand in her toenails. She’d always wanted to see the subterranean labyrinth; it was messier than she’d pictured. They needed a few good stable boys to keep the animals mucked and to make sure the fighters were polite. She was hearing the most terrible words down here.

  One of the soldiers leaned into another and whispered, “Is this all right?”

  Look at all those tall men surrounding that one little girl. The nearest woman was probably two stories up somewhere in the stands, with a fan and a sack of lupin beans, sucking away at the brine, waiting for the spectacles and wondering whether her husband would be able to smell the circus on her. But no—a gladiator stopped by the open door of the stall and gave Prisca a glance before striding on, revealing a tumble of long hair falling against the leather shine of armor. A gladiatrix.

  It was hard to hear their questions this time, the tumult of the arena rocking around them like a musty underground sea, but she knew them well enough by now. No, she said, and no, and I will not, and Faith is my father. They looked wo
rn down, worse than her.

  “You want to take her up?” the man with the most feathers in his helmet said to the man with the least.

  He looked her brother’s age and was ghoulishly pale when he nodded and reached out for her arm. She politely lifted her wrist and placed it in his hand—that movement alone setting off a chain of shocks across her scathed back—and she didn’t look too closely at the pimples crowding on his chin, as if he had nodded so much that they’d all fallen to the bottom of his face. He led her past the other stalls, a racket of fangs and pacing muscles, and the other guards fell in line behind them. Down below, their feet sounded like delicate deer feet.

  Up the stairs they went, and the animal noises thundered into human noises, hooves into sandals, and the sun washed it all white, so Prisca had to raise an arm to her eyes to keep from stumbling. She should’ve eaten the bread. Her guard still clung to her. There was a chance that if she kept calmly walking, she could guide him right out of the stadium. But she stopped at the fence around the arena and was awestruck in spite of herself. In the sand had been planted dozens of palms and cyclads, mini-oases between the piled dunes, and camels were being circled through the scene by men with bells on their shoes; surely this was like Jerusalem. The audience booed. They were used to the wonders of the world. When the camels dispersed, the lions came in: two, with ribs as clear as sticks. Their mouths hung open, and their heads swayed side to side. Still eyes, empty eyes. Paws as big as bowls.

  “Nothing but house cats,” the guard said, possibly to himself.

  The one with the scraggled mane stopped at a palm trunk, catching a smell, and began rubbing its cheek against the bark, back and forth, so hard it must have gotten splinters. The maneless one climbed to the top of a dune and stood perfectly still, not even scanning the crowd, its jaw gaping dully, the only thing moving its switch-switch of a black-tipped tail. Maybe they were so skinny because they were bad at their jobs.

  On the opposite side of the arena, another gate opened and three moon-pale men with chained wrists were pushed out onto the sand. Two of them clung to the wall, sliding their bodies around the edge, feeling around for another exit. The third, whose hair sprang from his head in curly clumps, started running. With his wrists held high above his head, he had an expression almost of ecstasy. Running, stumbling, full tilt across the sand, with the only knowledge that mattered: they were all going to die today, but at least it would happen in the sun. His atrophied legs carried him along with pride. The maneless one went for him first; the bigger lion strolled along the perimeter, being patient with the cowards. Prisca kept her attention on the wild man’s face, how it never slackened as his hunter loped up behind. The lion never had to leap—it was more like a lunge, fluid and all of a piece—and the man toppled, his hands still in the air, the chains the last part of him to hit the ground.

  Prisca turned around and squinched her eyes shut and listened to the crowd as it applauded and cringed and rose to its feet and booed and urged the murder on with a noisy thirst, so that she knew exactly when the last man had been killed. Men in armor with long poles came out to drag the bodies away before the lions could eat their fill.

  The guard opened her gate. It gave a shy clank behind her, and she knew he wouldn’t watch. She looked around for other Christians or criminals to be propelled from other openings, but no one followed her. At first she didn’t spot the lions. As she walked toward the oases with as much slow and sane grace as she could muster—remembering how Crispus’s Livia looked under similar palms, how womanly; damn her for existing in this moment!—she saw one lying down in the shade, its mouth still open, its empty stomach going in and out like a robe on the clothesline. Her legs went light-headed, but no one in the stands could see anything but her slow, sane walk, one foot and then another foot. The one without a mane, the hungrier one, had been making a loop around the edges, sniffing out the blood left there, and when it spotted Prisca it stopped. The crowd was chanting something that rhymed. She forgot why she was there. What on earth. Little Prisca, a recent Christian, fresh from the farm, here before several thousand eyes like an acrobat or an emperor. But it was her death they were eager to see, the death of little Prisca, a recent Christian.

  Then let them watch! The lion moved so slowly toward her, maybe because she’d locked her eyes on it; it was pretending it wasn’t moving at all. She pressed her hands together, not because that was how she best liked to pray, but so the pagans in the stands could see. Of all the ways they’d devised to kill off the faithful, she rather thought this was the nicest.

  “Come here, old cat,” she whispered, her hands still clasped in front of her chest. “Tch, tch, tch.”

  The lion stopped again, one paw raised midair, but Prisca kept strolling. She glanced to the bundle of palms off to her left, but the boy lion was on his side now, his eyes winking closed in some pleasant memory. Both of them had rusty muzzles. She wasn’t trying to think of a way to save herself, but of how to stage a scene of sacrifice so lovely that the women would go home and tell their children how good the Christian girl was and how maybe Jesus could train them too, before they’d broken every pot in the kitchen with their clowning. She was glad the guards had allowed her a clean tunic this morning; she hoped she gleamed.

  “Come here, cat. Let me tell you a story.”

  What funny moves we make for the ones we love. And if there was no such thing as a singular God or Christ his son, how the pagan pantheon must be laughing. Maybe it was a luxury to claim goodness. Maybe you relied on the stronger people to carry on the business of life while you swanned around denying yourself pleasure. The Bible was unclear on this point, but it was very possible that her presence here in this stadium—alone, egged on by the prurient hordes—was the worst kind of egotism.

  She began to cry. She stopped where she was and fell down to her bruised knees and had a good, all-out sob. The crowd quieted. The lion paused again, three strides closer. Prisca suddenly was very conscious of all the mistakes she’d ever made in her life, including the fact that this, her showy attempt at penance, might be one of them. To be turned to a hot ball of need at the very last instant—oh, everyone close your eyes. She was all the way down now, her limbs on the ground, her tears making puddles in the sand. When she opened her eyes there was a paw in front of her, and with nothing but a tumbling train of apologies to God in her head, she reached out and brushed the top of the paw with her fingers.

  “Hello, cat,” she said. “We’re both hungry.”

  She felt it snuffling around at the top of her hair, snorting in her smell. A stiff whisker poked her ear. She raised her head and saw first the bloody jaw and clotted fur and then the wet black leather of the nose, the nostrils still exploring. She sat up as slowly as a sprouting seed and scratched the top of the lion’s paw with the hand she’d left there. Its breath came out in short huffs. Her hand climbed up to its knee—or was it ankle? [elbow]—and then to its broad haunch, scratching all the way. The fluff behind its shoulder was like white silk, and she dug at the knots there, pulling out a burr that must have traveled with it from Africa.

  As she rubbed up into the roll of skin behind its neck, the lion’s chest began emitting a guttural noise, like the hard sputtering of the plow through rocky soil, and its eyes—which she glanced at for the first time now—narrowed. Her hand found the short fur at the base of the ear and pulled at the skin there, first tenderly, then digging in with her fingernails. The lion twisted its head against her hand, pushing into it, eyes fully closed, jaw wide. Half its teeth were stained brown or missing altogether, and the remaining canines were dull. How terrible for those men, to be gnawed into with dull spokes. How terrible for her. She dragged her fingers along its chin, unclotting the rough stains of blood, and it leaned its great head back and pushed so hard against the pleasure that it collapsed onto its side, trapping Prisca’s hand beneath its head, where it continued to rub and roll and send its rocky rattling purr through its broken cage of teeth.

&n
bsp; She became aware of the crowd chanting again, loud boos, and she instinctively pulled her hand back. The lion took her shinbone in his jaws, so gentle, and licked the top of her foot with a great rasping tongue. Don’t stop, it said. She held its giant head in both hands and rubbed her thumbs against its cheekbones, in the hollows below its eyes. She picked out a gnarled strand of mucus from the corner of its eye, and it half shook its head in frustration. She stood up. She didn’t know what was happening. The maned lion under the distant palm was sitting up now, intrigued. Prisca took two steps backward.

  Pieces of bread and clay cups were being thrown onto the open sand, and a cluster of guards gathered at a nearby gate with lances, prepared to agitate the beasts.

  “This wasn’t the time, cat,” she said, and the lion stood again, circling its long blond body around her hips. “I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t good enough yet.” She had a strong childish desire to leap onto its back, just to see if it would hold her. Let her take this bizarre victory as a rebuke from the Lord. And let the thousands watching tremble at his power. Were they not cowed? [Did He scorn me too to save me? I’d claw the love out of my heart if I thought I could survive its absence. Hold it gentle, girl; don’t let it drop.]

  A messenger from the emperor’s box scurried over to the waiting guards and gesticulated. They nodded and brought their lances up straight, a sign that active engagement had been deferred. The messenger turned toward the desert scene and made another broad hand motion at Prisca.

  “They’ve had enough of this show, old cat.”

  She walked toward the gate as slowly as she’d walked into this nightmare, listening for the footfalls of the cat in sand. Maybe there was a town somewhere beyond the far reaches of the empire where people grew food and ate food and in the evenings smiled and listened and put their hands on one another’s skin. That’s the town that would have no need for religion.