by Stant Litore
His eyes narrowed. Without warning, he struck her.
She found herself on her belly in the dust, her ear and the right side of her face ringing. She retched again, then sobbed with pain.
“Mouthy bitch.” The guardsman’s hand gripped her hair, lifted her to her knees. Her vision was a little gray, and the ringing in her ear was louder. “Be glad you’re Brutus’s,” the man muttered.
Then the world dimmed fast as a flame dying at the end of a wick, and she blacked out.
“I am sorry,” Brutus whispered, his back against the door in the darkened shed. “I am so sorry.”
Regina lay on the straw. For the moment she lacked the strength to rise, even to her knees. She didn’t look at Brutus but stared at the boards of the roof. She was not a whore. No matter how many times they whipped her, she was not a whore. She was Regina Romae, and there were people who looked to her and depended on her. Brutus was looking to her, at this very moment. “Your hand didn’t wield the lash,” she murmured.
“My hand didn’t prevent it.”
“Stop,” she whispered. “Please just stop. I blame you for nothing.” She shifted slightly and immediately regretted even that small movement; the pain that lit in her back forced a moan from her. She was breathing hard for a moment. The strength she’d shown when driving Julia from the courtyard had passed; tossed into the dark of this shed, shaking from pain and reaction, she was again awash with fears of what would happen—to her, to Polycarp, to all of them.
“You’re the only reason I’m not raped and beaten whenever one of them is bored,” she whispered. “Don’t blame yourself for the things you can’t do anything about.”
At this moment she couldn’t bear the thought of comforting another human being. She needed the guardsman to be a strong presence, someone to lean on for a moment while she recovered her breath.
Brutus came and sat by her.
“I used to watch my father beat this girl,” he said quietly. “One of the house slaves. Her flesh would be cut up—so badly. I used to bring her wine afterward, hoping it would help. I will never forget her eyes.” His voice was thick with remembered pain. “I was very young, domina. I would have liked to have stayed my father’s hand, though it would have dishonored him, and myself. I would have liked to have said, No more, no more. This is unjust, father. When I heard Father Polycarp speak that one night, I understood why—why I’d wanted to stop my father so badly. But the truth is I never did.”
They were silent for a while, he with his guilt, she with her pain and her struggle to retain her certainty of herself. It was as though a pit had opened beneath her and she was falling in. Polycarp would be tried, and burned; the ten prisoners from the insula would likely be burned afterward without trial, herself among them. She had no refuge other than the kindness of this guardsman who knew the sign of the fish. And she lay in filthy straw in a tattered garment, beaten like a whore, and could extend refuge to no one.
She had not felt such an emptiness, such a weight of helplessness in many years, not even when she’d been carried bound up the streets of the Palatine with the hungering dead in pursuit. Her eyes were sore with crying. Every part of her body was sore, the outside and the inside. She thought of the prisoners in the other sheds. She knew each of them by name; she’d sat with them many afternoons, listening to their hopes and fears. She’d held the women close while they wept for the brutality and poverty of their lives. She’d given the men words of hope and courage when she found their shoulders slumped and their eyes defeated. She had given them advice when they had disputes or were simply angry with each other. She’d brought bread or broth up to them when they were sick. She had lifted their cares to her shoulders and carried them with her to Polycarp, all through the four years she’d lived as Regina Romae, the deaconess. She had been their refuge, as Polycarp had been hers. She was responsible for them. Her hands trembled. They were her children, yet she could do nothing to save them. The despair of it racked her, tore her more savagely than the whip had.
“Is Marcus all right?” she whispered.
“He is.”
Another silence. Anger began to crackle again in her heart. “Julia came,” she whispered. “To see me. After the lashing.”
“The spy?” Brutus’s voice dripped with loathing. “I’m surprised she’s still in Rome.”
That caught her attention. “Why?”
A low growl beside her, in the dark. “Caius deeded to her husband a villa in Arpinum, one that’s been city property for a while.”
Regina’s hands curled, making claws of her fingers. A villa. All for a villa of her own. “I think she’s a witness,” she said after a while. “At the trial. I think that’s why she’s here.”
“The praetor doesn’t even need witnesses. With the dead on the hill, everyone’s crying out for blood, someone to blame. He’ll burn the father tomorrow. He won’t need witnesses to get a majority vote from the jury, and a majority vote is the most he’ll need, because he’ll claim that without papers, the father has no citizenship.” He grunted. “But he does want witnesses. We’re supposed to talk with all the prisoners about it.”
“About witnessing?” She looked on him with horror.
Brutus gazed back at her, in the dark. “Caius is offering freedom—for the witness. On condition of exile from Rome after the trial. No one’s taking him up on it.”
She laughed softly, then wept as the laughter made her welts burn again. “He doesn’t understand. We can’t be bought.”
“He bought Julia.”
“That’s different,” she murmured. “She’s not of the gathering. She just lived at our insula. Polycarp gave her a place to stay when her husband shut her from his villa, and later she married a baker, who moved in with her.” Her anger cooled as abruptly as it had risen, and she found only sorrow in its place. “She was never really happy. I thought it was because she missed her first husband on his hill. I didn’t understand her, Brutus.”
He watched her a moment. “Don’t blame yourself for the things you can’t do anything about,” he said.
Regina began to cry softly. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed after a moment. “I’m sorry.” She turned on her side to try to hide her face, but moaned sharply at the pain.
She heard him shift in the dark. “Is there anything I can bring you, deaconess? There are other things in the station to eat besides bread and wine. I can bring you something more, I think. Decius and the others—they’ll just think I’m—infatuated.”
She smiled amid her tears. He was trying to cheer her. But she needed more right now than a pastry to eat. “Pray with me,” she whispered.
He took her hand in his; his was large and calloused. Softly as though he might break them, he murmured the words:
Phos hilaron hagias doxes, athanatou Patros,
ouraniou, hagiou, makaros, Iesou Christe
“Joyous light of the deathless Father’s holy glory...” The words fortified her heart; in this dark shed with its dirty straw, they seemed especially precious. So many times in the evenings, she had seen Polycarp stand in the insula’s tiny atrium by the lilacs, looking at the sky, intoning those words in a Greek so musical you could cry listening to it. She gripped Brutus’s hand briefly and managed the next words of the prayer with only one quick break in her voice:
elthontes epi ten heliou dysin, idontes phos hesperinon,
hymnoumen Patera, Hyion, kai Hagion Pneuma, Theon.
“Having come upon the sun’s setting, having seen the evening light, we praise in song…” Brutus whispered back:
Axion se en pasi kairois hymneisthai phonais aisiais
And Regina recited the final line, her voice strengthening:
Hyie Theou, zoen ho didous, dio ho kosmos se doxazei.
“Worthy it is at all times in all seasons to praise you with glad voices, God’s Son, Giver of Gifts, Giver of Life, for which the world glorifies you.”
God is the Giver, she whispered in her heart. Made in God’s
likeness, we are not mere gifts to be given but givers ourselves. We are givers: we must remember we are givers.
“Thank you,” she told Brutus, then added to the prayer: “I trust you can hear us, for I know Polycarp trusts you and that you hear him. Be our refuge in this hour.”
A calm settled over her; freed of its despair, her mind began to plan. For a few moments, she didn’t even feel the pain in her body; she simply tallied accounts in her mind, as she so often had as deaconess in the insula. Then everything clicked into place with total clarity.
“Brutus,” she said, “you must get me in to see Caius Lucius.”
He shifted beside her. “Why?”
“You said he wants witnesses.”
“He does. What are you thinking, domina?”
Deep beneath the calm that lay over her, something within her ran screaming into the smallest corner of her mind at the prospect of what she had to do. The rest of her was cold and still and clear.
“I need to be there in the temple when Polycarp is tried,” she said. “I need to be a witness.”
In the silence, she could hear Brutus breathing in the dark.
“Someone needs to counter Julia’s testimony,” she explained, “someone needs to stand with him. I need to be there—tell Caius Lucius I will stand witness. Tell him I will say whatever he pleases. I was a slave once; he will believe it of me. Tell him the lashing broke me. If you have to, tell him you had me, that you beat me afterward, until I begged to be a witness. I don’t care what you say—just please get him to see me.”
Brutus’s eyes were pale, and for a long moment he chewed the inside of his cheek. When he spoke, his tone was hesitant. “These lies are the same as the ones I tell to the other guardsmen—that I come to the shed to make you my whore. But it troubles me to lie to the urban praetor. I heard the father speak once. He said, ‘better to die than to speak untruth.’”
Regina’s eyes flashed. “I will speak a small lie to one man so that I can speak the truth to many. This thing has to be done.” Panic welled up within her. She had to be there, at that trial. “Brutus. Brother. Please. We are all God’s actors on this stage of the world. There is a time when we must tear aside all the masks, let everyone see each other as they really are. That time’s tomorrow, at that trial. But we have to wear our costumes, play our parts, until then—to get there. Please.” Her voice quivered but did not break. “Please—you must do this. Please. The father mustn’t stand alone.” With a moan of pain, she lifted herself from the straw; Brutus pressed a hand to her back and helped her sit up, though his touch on the welts made her scream again.
She sat there, breathing. Then she lifted her shoulders, took a graceful sitting posture, folded her hands in her lap. “Will you do it?” she whispered against the pain.
“I will,” he murmured.
Regina closed her eyes, the relief nearly unbearable. Polycarp. She would see Polycarp. When he defended the gathering, she would stand beside him.
Brutus looked at her in the dark. There was a touch of awe in his tone. “I never knew a woman could be so brave.”
“Then you haven’t known many women. We endure much for the ones we love.” She drew a slow breath. “Please go now and tell the praetor.”
He hesitated.
“Please, Brutus. I want to be alone.”
When he’d left, Regina sat very still for a while, in this shed that had become an unexpected refuge, guarded as it was by Brutus, a quiet place where she could rest in the dark and search her own heart. She searched her heart now. She had been a slave once. She had been a slave a long time. A man had come and freed her, given her a warm coat and a place of safety. He had reached into the empty dark and found her heart there and cupped it in his hands and pulled her near, to where there was light and warmth. She closed her eyes. The full import of what was going to happen slammed into her there, in the dark. She almost couldn’t breathe with the dread of it. Fresh tears burned her eyes. They were going to kill him. Father Polycarp. Her Polycarp. They were going to burn him. And likely her as well, and the others, all those imprisoned in the other sheds. Phineas, who wrote letters every week to his three sisters in Nola and who amused and sometimes annoyed his neighbors with his obsessive fear of balding. Philemon, with his paints and his longing for a wife. Hadassah the Jewess, who had the most beautiful singing voice, though no one outside the insula had ever heard it. They were all so precious to her. Their need for her in this hour called to her. She was Regina Romae, and the men and the women of the gathering depended on her. That was the truest thing she knew, and the truth of their need, and the truth of hers—a sign of the need of every living person for shelter and succor—lit in her like a fire. Alone in the dark, she wept quietly, and prepared herself.
It was a surprisingly small office for the urban praetor, hardly much larger than the shed, and Regina found she had to close her eyes and force slower breathing; the walls seemed to close in on her. She stood before the praetor’s desk with her arms at her sides. Each time she took a breath, the slight movement lit fires in her back. Her face was still moist from her tears, and it was all she could do to stand and keep from wincing. But she stood very straight. She would show no weakness she did not have to.
She considered him. The praetor’s toga was perfectly, impeccably draped about him, as though he meant to appear as flawless and orderly as a marble statue—but his face was dark about the eyes, and his left eye was bloodshot. This was a man who clearly didn’t sleep much. Nor did he look up from his scrolls and scraps of parchment. He did that to intimidate her, she supposed. As though she were barely worth notice.
Her fingers gripped the dirtied fabric of her nightdress firmly. She would not be intimidated.
“Our informant had mentioned you to me as one Dora Syriacae, a manumitted slave.” Now he did glance up, his eyes cold. He leaned forward slightly in his seat.
“A manumitted slave.” He said the words slowly. “Yet you have no papers on your person. So I must express my doubt, Dora, that you are really free. Are you?”
“I have been free since the day I met Polycarp,” Regina said softly.
Yet she was breathing too fast. Now that she was here, standing before this togate incarnation of patrician Rome, feeling his judging eyes on her as he sat beneath the rows of his medals and behind the hard weight of his official desk, she found that she was standing again over a dark pit of doubt. Did she believe the words of the hymn she’d sung with Brutus? Did she believe in the promise of a restored world to come, a world made new—justice for the impoverished and the homeless no less than for the residents of hill-slope villas, the dead at peace, loved ones long parted brought back together? In that moment, standing before the praetor’s desk, with the lines of the lash on her back and fresh on her heart last night’s memory of the shambling dead and the nightmarish proximity of that long-ago cargo hold on a half-floundering slave ship, she didn’t know. She gripped the fabric at her hips more tightly. Perhaps the world was, after all, only what the Romans said it was: a world where the strong used the weak and the cunning used the naïve, among both gods and mortals. A world where things lost remained lost, and things eaten remained eaten. She wanted to cry out at the horror of it; she pressed her lips into a thin line.
“I am free,” she said.
She must believe, because Polycarp did. To voice or acknowledge her doubts now would be a betrayal of him.
“Perhaps I am unimportant to you,” she said, with forced calm. “No more than a former slave whose legality you question. But I can be useful to you, Caius Lucius. I would like to serve as a witness, in return for proper papers.” His face showed no change in expression; neither did she blink. She kept her voice measured and rational. “Father Polycarp is an elderly man. His dignitas is very great. Is it usual to bring old men and wise to a trial? You may not be able to convict him without some ignominy, Caius Lucius.”
“I’ll manage,” Caius said drily.
She looked at his e
yes, found something there that startled her. “You haven’t seen him yet,” she breathed.
He frowned as though puzzled by her manner. “Seeing his followers first is instructive.” A note of caution now in his tone.
Regina laughed suddenly; it welled up inside her, in a flood of relief, and she couldn’t keep it silent. Caius’s face darkened, and strength rushed back into Regina, a pouring like water into a cup, until she was filled with it. For a moment she kept laughing. How he sat there—so proud! Like the Nemean lion after feasting on an antelope. She fought for breath and loosened her fingers, letting the folds of her nightdress slip free from her hands. For a moment she stood straight as a queen. Well. Caius Lucius was about to meet Polycarp, and no antelope. Let him condemn the father if he dared. Regina’s face shone; her heart was so full. Polycarp was greater than this small and frightened man. He was greater than the dead that had pursued her the previous night. He and his God. He was greater than the slave ship that had carried her—for he’d taught her that she might have a new name. Even when this little praetor burned her man, Polycarp would still be greater than this moment, and she was suddenly, fiercely certain that the gathering would never forget his memory. She took full breaths. She believed.
Caius’s face had flushed. He lifted his hand; Brutus took a step toward Regina. She lowered her eyes, her head. Her heart racing. Her laughter had endangered her. She must appear the frightened slave. “Pardon me,” she whispered, taking the flame of hope within her and cupping it in her hands, trying to dampen its light to other eyes. “I meant no disrespect, praetor urbanus. I laugh because I am near fainting. I have been lashed, Caius Lucius Justus, and left without food or water. The strain is very great, too much for a woman.”