The Last Stoic

by Morgan Wade

  “I haven’t seen Sebastianus since the attacks on Rome,” he said. “The beggars were just up the way as late as two days ago. The Mithraist, his disciples, the city guard came through, clearing the streets. I haven’t seen them since. I think they may have headed toward the domus where the Christians gather.”

  Marcus looked up the deserted street in the direction of the Christian domus. His impulse was to return to his apartment, barricade the door, and pretend like he wasn’t home. He was tempted to pack and leave immediately for his home in Verulamium. No goodbyes, just an ignominious retreat. But that would look suspicious. And what would Vincentius, his grandfather, say?

  He worried for the beggars. I owe them. I’ll find them first, make sure they’re safe. Then I’ll think about leaving.

  NINETEEN

  Gus met Patrick in the atrium of the Super Shepherd Ministries. They spoke in hushed tones, their voices ricocheting from the vaulted ceilings.

  “I’m sorry for accusing your friend.”

  Gus looked up at the crucifix at the head of the atrium.

  “Fuck it. We’re all imperfect under the eyes of the Lord, are we not? Fuck knows I am.”

  “Praise God, you are very understanding.”

  “I’m told you’ve already been punished. Thoroughly. The Reverend says you show a lot of promise, that you’re already making yourself useful.”

  “I’m glad he thinks so. Can I help with something?”

  “What do you know of our colleague, Mark.”

  Patrick hesitated.

  “Easy kid. I’ve got nothing against you. Fuck all. But I bear a heavy responsibility. Our firm has a long, proud history and in our business reputation is everything. We have no room for scandal. I investigate and fix. I’d be grateful if you would tell me what you know.”

  Patrick shared all he thought he knew, garnished with his own suspicions. He explained what it all indicated, that the foreigner was a radical, part of a sleeper cell, with plans for espionage, sabotage, and worse.

  “That adds up to a rather strange picture,” Gus said. “Thanks for sharing this with me, brother.”

  Gus laid his hand on Patrick’s shoulder.

  “I’m worried what could be done with this information, by our competitors for instance. Do I have your pledge that you will not make these allegations to anyone else but me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Here is a small token of our gratitude.” Gus pressed into Patrick’s hand a billfold containing two thousand dollars.

  “If what you believe is the case, we have a liability. If he were to follow through…”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “I’m wondering…”

  “Yes?”

  “Maybe you could keep an eye on him. Monitor his dealings. Report them to me. If something incriminating flushes from the weeds, a fireable offense say, all the better. It would eliminate our risk. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  “I certainly do.”

  “If you could bring that to bear...it would be time well rewarded. Interested?”

  “Yes, I would be glad to help.”

  “Excellent. He often leaves the office at lunch time and heads downtown. You could trail him from there. Let discretion be your motto.”

  “I will. But I wonder…”

  “Yes?”

  “Why not just fire him now.”

  “If it were me, that’s exactly what I’d do. But his family is tied to the Cornelius family, and Mr. Cornelius will be very reluctant to fire him. ”

  “I see.”

  “Besides, if he really has planned what you think he has planned, it’s better for us to nab him with evidence, don’t you think?”

  TWENTY

  A pair of city guardsmen patrolled the street in front of the mud-coloured, windowless Christian domus Dei. Marcus ducked into the portico of a closed shop. Patricius, undetected, found a similar alcove twenty paces back.

  The guardsmen strolled down the middle of the empty street gossiping and laughing. They poked their heads into alleyways, peered into storefronts, inspected carts and barrels before turning the corner at the far end of the street. Marcus waited. They didn’t reappear. He crossed the laneway to the front of the hall with its inscription chiseled coarsely into the keystone above the entranceway:

  “Pax tibi sit quicunque Dei penetralia Christi,

  pectore pacifico candidus ingrederis.”

  He tapped the door, cocking his ear as close as possible to its tarred exterior. No answer. He knocked again, firmly. No answer. Finally, he pounded it a half-dozen times.

  “Go away!” An angry hiss.

  “It’s ok.” Marcus kept his voice low. “I’m not a guardsman. I’m looking for two friends of mine.”

  “Go away!”

  “Is Sebastianus with you?” Marcus asked.

  The voice remained silent.

  “Is Sebastianus, friend of the poor, staying with you?” Marcus pressed.

  “Go away!”

  “You must help me. I’m looking for a pair of Parthian beggars who Sebastianus was helping. I fear they have been taken away.”

  “Sebastianus is no longer here. Leave us alone.”

  “Where is he?”

  Silence again.

  “Where?”

  Marcus thumped the door until neighbours came from their shops and apartments to insist that he stop.

  “For the sake of Jupiter, stop your racket!”

  “Do you want the city guard back?”

  A youth from across the street heaved a cobblestone and it narrowly missed Marcus’ head. He conceded, wandering away along the adjoining thoroughfares, Patricius stalking close behind.

  Capricious bends in the tight laneways were disorienting. Nothing looked familiar. It was as though he’d stepped into a different city altogether. Men on the street wore the rectangular woolen himations wrapped over their shoulders, in the Greek style. Unlike Greeks, these men, uniformly bearded, had blue tassels suspended from the four corners of their himations. Others moved amongst them, floating in and out of porticos noiselessly, like spectres. These were enveloped in chitons without tassels, with gauzy shawls covering their heads and faces.

  The Judaean quarter.

  Near the market, Marcus heard something he could recognize. A faint fluttering. Sura’s nai. He ricocheted through the bemused throng, stopping abruptly, listening hard at each stall and portico as he neared the flute song. It was strongest down an alley that ended at a squat iron door. Odours of sour milk and fermented fruit filled the narrow space. Green grocer rubbish. The melody ascended from the sacks and stalks and peels and scraps that littered its length. There was a figure in makeshift chiton, himaton and head dressing hunched amid the debris.

  The flute fell silent. The figure rocked backwards and forwards, chanting.

  “Sura?” Marcus whispered. “Nasir? It’s me, Marcus.”

  The figure paused.

  “It’s Marcus, I brought bread and cheese. I’ve looked everywhere for you. I couldn’t find Sebastianus. No-one’s seen him in days.”

  The chanter adjusted the improvised head covering, peeked, and then removed it. Sura poked her head from the many layers of rags.

  “Sura! What happened?”

  “Marcus, we are cursed. Aramazd forsakes us.”

  Sura described the city guard collecting people from the street, the suspicious, the foreign, the beggars. They fled for the Hebrew markets. They found the old grocer who knew Sebastianus, the one who gave them remnants on occasion, the one who liked music. He agreed to hide Sura, if she played for him when he asked. Nasir continued to run.

  “I’m very worried. He’s angry and afraid. He’s certain Sebastianus is in prison. He said there is something he must do, people he must meet.”

  “Come,” Marcus said, “let’s leave this place. Do you know the way?”

  Sura held Marcus’ arm and directed them out of the Judaean quarter. He led her to his insula.

&n
bsp; “The priest of Mithras said our street corner was infected with evil.”

  Sura sat on the edge of Marcus’ straw mattress, her lame leg folded under the whole one. She held the elbow of her handless arm against her body. She was in her old robe again, having discarded the rags and washed in Marcus’ basin. Two goblets of mulsum, the flatbread, and the cheese sat on the rough, wooden table before her.

  “The priest announced that the attacks on Rome were the beginning of the end, the first blow of a final battle between good and evil, that the good citizens of this city should now do their part.”

  “Please. Eat.” Marcus broke apart the bread and halved the cheese.

  “There are rumours that the Pilus Posterior, Rufus Quintillus, is camped in the city’s garrison with his soldiers. They say Quintillus is a devout Mithraist and that he has taken it upon himself to fulfill the priest’s directives. That even now they are sacrificing prisoners at the mithraeum.”

  Marcus coughed, a breadcrumb catching at his windpipe, and he shook his head.

  “They sacrifice bulls. Not humans.” He turned away, remembering the secret meeting he attended. “I know some Mithraists.”

  “Is that so? I pray you are right. I fear for Nasir. He’s my only family.”

  “I’m sure all will pass before long.”

  “That I had your optimism, Marcus. The purge will last until all who are not like them are either enslaved or dead.”

  Marcus straightened in his chair.

  “You’re upset,” he said, patting her arm. “This is a difficult time. I’m afraid too. You have to understand, folks around here are unsettled by the attacks on Rome. The world changed that day the Emporium was burned to the ground. They’re afraid.”

  Marcus tried to imagine what Vincentius would say. “But we’re still free. We’re still Roman.”

  “Afraid?” Sura attempted to stand, upsetting the rickety table and sending its contents of bread scraps and cheese rind to the floor.

  “What do these people know about fear,” she said, bracing herself against the wall, wagging her finger at him, “what do you know about fear?”

  Marcus could see in Sura her brother, the matted, sweating madman that he encountered the first time he met the Parthian beggars on the street.

  “Lunatics immolate themselves in a half empty warehouse six hundred miles from here, who knows why, and Roman citizens from the Nile to Hadrian’s wall are cowering in their beds, afraid to look underneath the mattress for what they might find, turning in their friends and neighbours to the delators because of a peculiar look or word. Is this the same group of people that built an empire out of a pestilent swamp? Evidently not. When was Rome last attacked? One hundred years ago? One hundred and fifty?”

  Marcus shook his head. Spittle leapt from Sura’s lips like water from an overheated pan.

  “When is the last time this wretched city has ever been attacked? Never! Not once! At least not for many centuries, when there was an entirely different tribe of people living here before they were scattered and ploughed under by early Roman pioneers. And yet, the people of this city, and cities like it, behave now like they’re under siege. All of those lofty principles praised by the ancient Roman founders: freedom and courage, moderation and self-sacrifice, honesty and justice, they disintegrate like pillars of sand in the face of that remote breeze. If that’s all it takes to shake the foundations, the Mithraists are right: this is the beginning of the end.”

  Marcus moved his chair and avoided Sura’s eye.

  “This is not fear!” Sura continued. “Fear occurs elsewhere. Godforsaken places.”

  “Sura, you’re upset, you have every right to be, but I don’t think that’s fair.”

  “Do you want to know fear Marcus? Imagine a five year old girl, standing at the edge of her father’s field, hunting for mushrooms. Perhaps it is a field and a farm much like your own father’s, in Verulamium. Her father and mother are ploughing and tilling, while the child happily occupies herself at the edge of the forest. Can you picture it? Now see this girl watching from a hedge with terror, as a Roman century arrives on the scene, materializing like spirits from a nightmare, butchering the livestock before marching into the farmhouse. That was how I experienced the first Roman expedition into my homeland, the one led by the emperor Commodus.

  As you may know, Commodus was a sporting man. He loved his game hunting. Now! Picture that same five year old girl, trembling and crying, her eyes as wide as a pair of bronze coins, as the soldiers release her parents and they dash across the stubbly field towards the hedge in which she hides? Can you possibly understand that little girl’s terror, to see the great emperor himself clucking his giant warhorse into action, its hammering hoofs pounding the soft earth like an abomination from deepest Tartarus, bearing down on the Parthian farmers, her fleeing parents, emperor and steed blocking out the very sunlight and the child cowering in the bushes?”

  “It is said that the emperor, with his bow, stopped a leopard in its tracks in the Circus Maximus from one hundred paces with a single arrow. I have seen his prowess with my own eyes. A pair of Parthian peasants scrambling through the dirt is a trifle, a mere warm up, for the marksman emperor, killer of leopards. A half dozen arrows loosed from his bow plunged into the sunburned backs of my mother and father, only fifteen feet from me. I watched, breathless with panic and fright, as my parents expired on the field that they had spent their lives sowing with their sweat and were now, in death, irrigating with their blood. Their anguished cries were almost drowned out by the pounding in my ears. And though my every fibre longed to escape the safety of my hiding place and be with them in their time of dying, I heard their desperate pleas for me not to leave the hedge under any circumstances. And I obeyed.”

  Marcus didn’t speak. His mouth was parched.

  “They bled to death slowly, while the Roman soldiers lunched.”

  Sura continued, in a softer tone.

  “Parthia was bloodied that year, but not conquered. For many years afterward there was civil war and all the atrocity that comes with brother fighting brother. And then, the Romans came again, this time under Caracallus, to crush what little was left. Fear, Marcus, is to watch the decapitation of your elderly uncle at the hands of a Miles Gregarius. Fear is to find your aunt, driven to suicide by her despair, a blue, bloated corpse beached on the river. Fear is to be trampled by Roman warhorses as you try to move livestock to safety, so badly mauled you almost die.”

  “And then there is Nasir. We have lost our entire family and I am no longer whole. Somehow he emerged physically intact. Daily he plots his revenge. Fear and rage eat away at him like a disease. Deep in his core there is a brittle, charred cinder, curdling his blood. Brutality is all we’ve known in this life. War is waged every day in my homeland. Here, we just try to survive, because we don’t know what else to do.”

  Sura sobbed.

  “The world didn’t change when rebels burned the Emporium to the ground Marcus. It just came to Rome for a day.”

  Marcus stared hard at the motes of dust suspended in the still air of the insula. Sura had her head buried in her shoulder.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said, finally, breaking the silence.

  For several minutes, neither of them said a word. Sura’s sniffling began to subside. Marcus stood, walked to her, put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed gently. She rested her head against his chest.

  “You both should stay here for as long as you need to,” Marcus said, his eyes still lowered.

  “You’re very kind. But we couldn’t do that.”

  “No, really, I insist. I really should have had you here much, much earlier. I’m ashamed not to have invited you sooner. I’m ashamed to say it didn’t occur to me.”

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Patricius stood for an hour outside Marcus’ insula. When it became obvious that Marcus and the Parthian beggar were staying and that Marcus would not return to the Frontinus worksite that day, he departed, mulli
ng over what he had seen.

  It was odd behaviour, he thought, but was it illegal? Guilt by association was about the only charge. Even then it was weak, since he hadn’t seen either of the Parthians do anything criminal, particularly not the woman. He needed something incriminating. Patricius returned to the street corner where he first saw the beggars, and Sebastianus, shortly after his arrival in the city. He was unsure of what he’d find there. He found Nasir.

  The Parthian was by himself, rummaging through the debris at the curb. He muttered and kicked at the refuse, striking his palm with his fist, butting his head against the stone of the nearby wall.

  Patricius watched the man’s torment from a safe distance, marveling at his madness. A thrilling new course of action presented itself, revealing how he could achieve what Gus had requested and all of the accolades and rewards that would entail. Cautiously, he moved forward toward Nasir, raising the collar of his cloak up around his cheeks, partially obscuring his face.

  “Comrade!” he shouted, from several paces away.

  Nasir stopped, swiveled and stared at Patricius with wild eyes.

  “Do you remember me?” Patricius asked, hopefully.

  Nasir continued to stare. He found the man hailing him vaguely familiar, but could not place him. Patricius gambled that he would not be recognized from the street or his participation in the purges instigated by the Pater.

  “It’s me comrade, your friend.”

  Nasir seemed neither to accept nor deny him, so Patricius pressed on.

  “What afflicts you comrade? Why do you rave? What troubles you?”

  Nasir emitted a terrible groan.

  “All is lost,” he wailed, “my sister is gone, my family is gone, I am dead.”

  “Your sister?”

  “Yes, Sura, poor sainted Sura. I hid her in the Judaean quarter, but she is no longer there. I’ve searched for her everywhere. She’s gone. Gone! Mithras strike me down, I have failed her.”

  “You follow Mithras, bringer of light?”

  Nasir paused again to face Patricius.