by Stant Litore
“There are many gifts, and no one who encounters the Spirit of God is without one. Some are given gifts for teaching, or for healing, or for perceiving things that are yet to come. The gift entrusted to me was that of apostleship, for I was sent out to witness, and to see to and see into the souls, living and dead, who suffer in this city, to hear their griefs and to absolve them.
“I will tell you about this Gift. It is to see with God’s eyes, to hear with God’s ears. It can only be given to one who is first willing to look and hear. One with the Gift sees through all veils, through all garments and costumes. If one of you were to come join me on this sand, take my arm, meet my eyes, you would find me gazing not only beneath your toga to the man beneath it, but through every cerement you’ve wrapped about your heart. It might be a terrifying experience for you—to have your every regret, your every fear and secret hope, naked and seen. But in that moment, if you were willing, you might also see your own self just as nakedly. You might be forgiven. You might lay all those secrets down and be as one who runs naked and free on the grass. That is a very great Gift, though a fearful one.”
Polycarp let his gaze move across the jury, but each of them lowered their eyes, a few with their faces terribly pale. He gave a small nod. “It is a fearful thing, yet something each of us yearns for—to be naked before God or before another human being. To be intimate and loved for who we truly are. And if this is so with you who live, it is so, too, with the dead. Think of how burdened your hearts are. Those who die so burdened yearn and hunger even in death. Desiring intimacy, they rise and devour, for consuming another is the only way they know to take another into themselves. But I think there is one very great difference between the dead and the living. If I were to touch one of the dead and gaze into its eyes, it would be far readier than any of you to lay down its burdens and rest.”
A murmur rose among the jury. The young man who’d cried out the loudest when Polycarp was brought in now hissed through his teeth, his eyes dark with horror.
“Yes,” Polycarp said quietly. “It is a terrible thing to touch the dead. In the land in which the gathering was born, that touch would make you unclean; you would be cast out. And it is true that if one of the dead should feed on you, the fever will come and you will burn, and die, then walk restless yourself, because the fever-death gives you no time to unveil your so carefully hidden heart to any of your brothers or your sisters, and in that way prepare for the last river crossing that is death. But what other way do we have to calm the restless dead, other than to embrace them? Do you really think that destroying these walking bodies by the sword does your dead more honor? Or that the only way to deal with that which wishes to consume you is to flee it or destroy it? Deer and fanged beasts live in such a way; men and women must not.
“My brothers on the jury, I give witness that my touching of the dead does not spread the fever, nor do I enter into your tombs with any purpose to wake or desecrate those who sleep. Why should I? The restlessness of the dead disturbs me as much as it does you. May God will that my testimony satisfies your ears better than this incoherent witness about despoiled tombs or rumors of midnight feedings. And that brings me to the other accusation I’ve heard today. Let us speak of that.
“I am accused of eating flesh and drinking blood. I would laugh at the absurdity of this, but you take it seriously. Very well. There is much flesh and much blood in Rome. Have someone visit my larder. See if there is less bread and grain there than one might expect. Ask the market by the Fulvian Cistern if I buy from them less often than another man.”
The jurors were shifting in their seats uneasily; their faces told him too plainly that they did not believe him, or did not want to; with the wailing of the dead audible in their ears, they wanted very badly to have someone to blame. Polycarp shook his head, barely restraining the frustration that burned in him. The heat of the sun on his head, the heat of the sand beneath his feet, made patience difficult; sweat was pouring down his back beneath his tunic. “But you will not,” he said. “You do not care to. Because the real accusation is that I have taken ‘your fathers’ Rome’ from you, and that because of me, your fathers rise from their mausoleums in wrath to devour their sons, as did Uranus in the old story they tell in the country of my birth. Caius Lucius Justus, and men of the jury, if your fathers and your kin who are dead are wrathful, it is not at me. Give you back your fathers’ Rome, you cry. In your fathers’ Rome, men treated their own gods and their temples—and aging men, for that matter—with more respect and less noise. Why should I expect to be left in peace to serve my God with those who’ll serve with me, when you are so neglectful of yours?”
The benches erupted at that, and again the temple was a clamor of angry voices. Polycarp shouted over them. “I am not done, fellow citizens—I am not done!—I grant you!—I grant you, it is possible that the gathering may one day stand guilty of great crimes, for though assembled by God, we are a fellowship of men and women, and we are as broken as we are beautiful. But the gathering I serve does not stand guilty today. You wish to believe that we who worship differently are therefore a different kind of people, a people capable of any sacrilege and therefore deserving of any punishment. But your wishing does not make it so! You make so much of the fact that I come to you here from the Subura. It is pointless. The distinctions you make, make fools of you. Patrician, plebian.” He turned, held the youngest juror’s gaze with his. “You wear the toga; I wear the simpler tunic of the people. It means nothing. Stripped of it, you and I look the same—just two men hungering and thirsting. It is only a garment. What matters is the heart.” He took his sleeve between his chained hands, tried to tear it; the cloth was stubborn. “Look at it. Look at it!” he cried. “A thousand threads—different threads—woven together so they cannot break. That is what we are to be. We are to be one cloth, one body, one gathering. Patrician! Plebian!” he shouted. “You weaken Rome with your distinctions. Rome now is not one whole cloth but layers, castes, one sitting atop the other. It needs only a strong wind, and the separated layers of the city will be tossing in the air, tumbling and helpless. We cannot survive unwoven from each other. You have to understand that.
“Listen to that in the streets outside. Those walking mouths are there because you have not fed your people, and because men and women and children, Roman or otherwise, die daily, unnoticed, in the Subura. If you had no Subura, you would have no region for the dead to fester. What can be plainer than that? That is what you should be talking about among yourselves. The choices of your past have come home to you. They are at the gate. Maybe it is too late to recover anything. But maybe it is not.”
He raised his voice, a fire burning in his heart. The words seemed to pour through him now as though from some other place, and for an instant he wondered if this was what it had been like for the prophets of old, proclaiming words God himself had given to their ears. He felt like a tunnel through which a backdraft of flame was rushing, scorching his insides, yet exhilarating in its wild energy.
“We are all on trial,” he cried. “Our dead are here to demand answers, and we are out of time. We have to choose, now, this day. Will we have a City divided into the eaters and the eaten—a City populated in the end only by the hungry dead!—or will we build a City where we break bread together, all of us, Roman and Greek and Syrian, male and female, master and slave, not feeding on each other but feeding and sustaining each other? Give me your verdict, please, then let me rest. The past few days have been more exhausting than any in my life. I will admit that I would rather die in my bed than in a fire. But now, if you can’t manage to look at the truth and decide what to do about it, I am done talking with you.”
Julia was gazing at him, appalled, as though he were some kind of creature she had never seen before, whose behaviors and postures were utterly alien to anything she might expect or know how to interpret.
Polycarp merely turned aside and gazed at the statue of Justitia. His eyes glanced behind her, at the pillars of
the temple and the door behind them, which must lead to the inner alcoves and the inner court, where sacrifices were made. He longed to see some small flicker of red, a beetle crawling on the marble steps, perhaps, or flitting past Justitia’s blindfolded face. Some sign, some confirmation that he was this moment standing where he needed to be. He had said the words that poured into him and through him; he could think of nothing more to say. Yet he didn’t think anyone had heeded him. What good was it doing, that he stood here? He kept his eyes from the cold fire pit, wondering how soon it would be lit. The dead were moaning outside, and the jury were talking among themselves in heated voices. He felt unutterably weary.
“Citizens, calm yourselves!” Caius’s voice broke the air. “Guardsmen, bring the other witness.”
Polycarp pressed his hand to his head; the sun was very hot on his brow. And the dead. Those moans—there might be a few corpses now literally in the very street outside. Or perhaps in a house near at hand. But he could hear them. So little time.
The jurors had turned in their seats to watch the second witness approach; a guardsman was escorting a woman over from where she must have been standing behind the jurors’ benches.
The woman was short, but she stood with incredible dignity and poise. Yet her eyes brimmed with unshed tears, and the hand she held over her heart was clutched too tightly about the torn fabric of her nightdress. She stared straight ahead, as though terrible things were to her left and to her right, as though she knew that she could only keep walking forward if she chose not to look at them.
Polycarp swayed suddenly on his feet.
He knew her.
Perhaps better than anyone in Rome, he knew this woman.
If she was here to witness against him, if she had broken, then surely all his work was broken. How would the gathering in Rome hold, if neither he nor she were left to care for it? How could the gathering anywhere hold? Her presence here was a spear through his breast, and the anguish of it a blow that all but knocked him out of the world of light and heat into some far other place, cold and dark.
The woman was Regina.
ALETHEIA KAI ZOE
THE DAY before. An open square just outside the walled compound of Justitia’s temple.
Regina shrieked again as the three-bladed whip tore into her back. The pain and heat of it flashed through her body; her legs buckled, giving out beneath her. For a moment she hung limp from the post by her chained wrists, panting, waiting for the pain to dull. Her nightdress hung in tatters from her shoulders.
The guardsman wielding that whip meant to break her.
She bit her lip hard, clenching her teeth. Over and over in her mind, above the screaming of her body’s pain, she recited what she knew to be true, what she held to be true. I am Regina Romae. I am a deaconess of the gathering in Rome. I am no slave; I give refuge and comfort for the lost. These bonds, this pain, they do not make me a slave. I am Regina Romae.
The lash struck her again, and she jerked and screamed through her teeth. The whole world melted into the heat of the blow, and when she came to, she was sobbing, on her knees, hanging again from her wrists. A rough hand seized her hair, tugged her head back, the guardsman’s breath hot on her throat. “Writhe for me, little slut,” he hissed, and forcing her face toward his, he kissed her, assaulting her mouth. He tasted of bad wine, smelled of sweat. She screamed in helpless fury, but his lips smothered the sound. She fought him, thrashing, but his hand held her head still until he was done. Then he dropped her head back and stepped away, chuckling. Hot rage seared through her as she panted for breath. If she could only wipe the taste of him from her lips—but her wrists were confined high over her head, manacles biting into them. She spat into the dust.
The lash struck her across her hips, and she jerked again, then hung sobbing, panting. God, it hurt! Her face was wet with perspiration and tears. She found the rage within her, seized it, fed it. She was Regina Romae. She was the deaconess of the gathering in Rome.
The lash tore another scream from her throat.
She was Regina Romae. She provided refuge. She would not break.
“God!” she cried. The blades of the whip had struck her side, flicking around to sting her breast. She twisted away from the blow, sobbing, her face burning at the guardsman’s laughter. For years, her bitterness and shame at her past had remained only a tiny seed, one she didn’t allow to sprout but was unable to discard entirely. Now her captivity had made that wild seed burst into weed and flower; with a violence and a voracity that stunned her, it had grown into a raging thorn plant twining about her heart and lungs, threatening to strangle her.
She hung in a haze of pain and didn’t feel or hear the guardsman step toward her—but the manacles sprang open and she slid to the dust, where she lay panting. Her back was a great blaze of heat, with lines of fire traced over it, crossing old scars. Dazed, she stared at the dust and drew in what air she could. She heard the sound of quiet whimpering and, realizing the sound was her, she pressed her lips together. She closed her eyes, started to pray silently to Polycarp’s God. She felt footsteps near her body and tensed.
“Can I see her?” A woman’s voice, not far away. The voice was familiar to her, but her thoughts were too scattered to give the voice a name.
“Why not, domina? I’ll get her on her feet.”
Large hands gripped her arms, and she was pulled up. The world swung about her for a moment, and she vomited; it splashed in the dust and grit. By some blessing she didn’t get any on her body or on her torn and soiled nightdress, but her lips were slick with it, and her mouth tasted filthy to her. Cursing, the guardsman released her arms, leaving her to sway on her feet. She heard him walk away and then stop. Regina found that her dizziness had faded now that she’d retched, and she started working up enough saliva to spit.
“You’re pathetic.” The other woman’s voice.
She opened her eyes. That woman standing before her—she knew her.
“Julia,” she said flatly.
The baker’s wife stood there with her arms folded beneath her breasts. She was no longer dressed as a woman of the Subura; she wore a gown of fine purple fabric, rarest of colors. In fact it was too rare—it was the kind of gown a woman of the equestrian class might wear if she wished to be seen as having patrician blood somewhere in her line.
Julia’s eyes shone with a cold and bitter joy. She looked Regina over, assessing her, much as a domina might assess one of her house slaves who’d just received a beating for some infraction. Regina’s face burned.
“I wonder if you have any idea,” Julia said, “how sickening it was to me to see a slave girl queening it over the insula?”
“Brought—” Regina swayed, steadied, found her voice again. A cold, hard knot formed inside her. “I brought your husband broth when he was sick. I listened—tried to—when you felt alone.”
“So you performed a slave’s services, once or twice, and you think I should be grateful.” Her eyes blazed. “Uppity slut. I know, you were happy there. In that—place. And you think I should’ve been happy too. Right? I suppose you were happy. After what you were, anything would be a step up. But I’m not like you, girl. My first husband—we lived on the lower slopes. We had a villa. We had two slaves. And all of that was taken from me. All of it.” She blinked back tears furiously. “Do you think I enjoyed taking gifts of—of broth and—and pity—from that mad old man? Do you think I enjoyed living there? Do you think after what I’ve been, that I’d be grateful to you?”
“No.” Her tone was cold. All the warmth had left her body. Julia’s accent was equestrian again, and for an instant, at the sound of it, chains fell from the locks of closed doors in Regina’s mind, and shrieking memories beat upon the doors like a thousand screaming dead. But then her blood drummed loud in her ears, louder than Julia’s petty tone, and with the roar of her blood she heard Polycarp’s deep voice, as though he stood before the doors in her memory, between her and the past that would devour her. His voice,
telling her she was Regina of Rome, queenly and loved. And free. Brutus’s softer voice, calling her domina, domina. And her own mind was still chanting ceaselessly against the brutal pain in her back, chanting the words, I am Regina Romae, I am Regina Romae.
The rattling of the doors stilled.
Rage burned hot in her body, rage so fierce she forgot even the pain that seared her. “No,” she hissed. “No, you aren’t like me.” She lifted her head, meeting the other woman’s eyes. How hateful the sight of Julia’s cold smile seemed to her, and how small. “I’m bound here for your amusement, and I see you are amused. But I know who I am now. I know who I am. You—that gown you wear is nothing more than a costume. A part you’d like to play. It doesn’t change who you are, Julia.”
Julia’s face contorted. “The praetor didn’t order you lashed,” she blurted. “I asked the guardsman for that.”
Regina smiled thinly. “How nicely did you ask him, Julia?”
With a small shriek, Julia drew back her hand for a slap, but Regina was quicker; she caught the other woman by the wrist, tightened her fingers cruelly. For a moment she held Julia’s eyes with hers. Everything in her became hard ice. “Don’t—ever—touch me.”
She squeezed her grip, and Julia’s face twisted in pain. Regina held her eyes. “You should leave Rome, Julia. Tonight.”
Then a hand clamped over Regina’s shoulder, and she cried out as the hard fingers crushed down on a welt. Regina released her grip on Julia, hissing through her teeth. White as death, Julia backed away. Her mouth worked as though she wanted to say something. After a moment, though, she just turned and moved away at a brisk clip, retreating without a glance over her shoulder.
The guardsman turned to Regina, and she glared up at him. Drew the back of her hand across her lips, wiping away flecks of vomit. At least the vomit had cleaned his kiss out of her mouth. “What now?” she asked coldly.