What Our Eyes Have Witnessed

by Stant Litore

  His eyes were watchful. Regina thought fast. She had come playing the role Caius expected to see her in, but the praetor was a shrewd man. Now she had to look every inch the broken slave. “I know you’re suspicious of me, Caius Lucius,” she said softly. “But I—I don’t—I don’t want to be a slave again. I can’t. I can’t.” Her face twisted; she summoned to the surface of her heart the very real pain that the thought of a return to slavery caused her, and trembling, she showed that pain to Caius openly, vulnerably. The risk of it—of being so vulnerable before this man— made it difficult for her to breathe. Regina let her hair cover her face, keeping her expression hidden. That afforded her some sense of shelter from his eyes and perhaps only made her appear more broken.

  She felt the praetor’s gaze on her for a long, silent moment.

  “You’ll have your papers,” the praetor muttered at last. She heard him sigh. “You are right that we need witnesses. This trial must be conducted with all the proper piety. You will confess,” he suggested, “that you have all eaten flesh, at his behest.”

  Her shoulders jerked slightly. “I will.”

  “You will also give witness that he abducted young Romans of good family, that he—”

  “I will say whatever will please you, Caius Lucius,” she whispered. “For the price I’ve mentioned.”

  Caius sat very still, measuring her with his eyes. “Very good.”

  Regina lifted her own eyes. The praetor’s face was pale; no, this man didn’t sleep much. Or laugh. Or smile. To her surprise, she felt a stab of pity for Julia, but it was a cold pity. Julia too had stood before this man’s eyes. But when Julia had stood in this place, she had taken the praetor’s judgment, his assessment of her, and taken it into her heart. Regina could well imagine how Caius Lucius Justus had gazed at Julia, the baker’s wife and once the wife of an equestrian merchant of the lower slopes. Caius would have seen a woman who had tumbled downhill, draining into the Subura, a decayed citizen, barely a Roman, barely more than a riverside whore. How his eyes must have tormented Julia! With what rage Julia must have hurried then to find someone lower than herself, someone who could be lashed and judged in her stead. With what need she must have begged the guardsman to chain Regina to the whipping post. How desperate Julia must be now, how fierce her hope that a purple gown and a spacious villa would make her the domina she longed to be. But being a domina was not a matter of the clothes you wore or the space you inhabited. It was a matter of your relationships with others, how you treated others in the shared theater of your lives. It was about your capacity to give gifts and inspire others to give too.

  Caius’s cold eyes shook Regina too. But Polycarp had not looked at her so. Strengthened by her pity, Regina met the praetor’s eyes for an instant, looked in them rather than at them. Saw the empty pain, like the reflection of a desert—and a vulnerability deeper than her own. As their eyes met, Caius’s brow creased. He leaned hard on his desk, and something shut just behind his eyes, sealing away the emotion. Yet he kept gazing at her—not judging now, but intense, focused.

  “How odd,” he murmured after a moment. “You almost remind me of—” His lips thinned.

  “Who was she, dominus?” Regina asked. She shivered once at using the word dominus—it nearly caught in her throat. But she had a tight grip on herself now; her four years of freedom would not crumble about her at a single word. And the word, like her deferent tone, had the effect she hoped for: it set Caius at ease. He looked distracted. As though he were confiding in a house slave in a moment of indiscretion. Perhaps it was the first time he’d confided in anyone in many years. It was perhaps the first time in years that he’d spoken with a woman beyond offering a polite greeting as he passed in the Forum.

  “My wife,” he said softly, after a few moments had passed. “She was my wife.” He did not even seem to notice that Regina was still there; he was speaking to something or someone he heard in the silence of his own heart.

  Regina noted again the medals on the wall, the perfectly swept floor, the crispness of the toga Caius wore, though his face showed the strain of little sleep. A moment’s sadness found her. Whoever that woman had been, she surely would not have wanted to be mourned in this way— coldly, and without memory of joy.

  “I grieve with you,” she said.

  Even as Caius’s eyes kindled, she knew that had been the wrong thing to say and the wrong tone to say it in. This was not a room in Polycarp’s insula, and this man was not one of Polycarp’s tenants. This man was proud and lethal, and he did not recognize in her a deaconess to confide in.

  “Do you?” His voice was like unsheathed steel. No longer was he distracted or bemused; his entire body was tensed.

  “I—” Regina groped for something to say, something she might have said, if she were truly a slave. Panic ran cold through Regina’s body. What if in that lapse of caution, in presuming an intimacy with the praetor, what if she had tossed away her chance? “Forgive me.”

  “How dare you pity me,” the praetor hissed. “You are nothing but a pleasure slave—wearing her mistress’s nightdress! You grieve with me? You?” His face went livid, and Regina’s heart beat frantically as Caius rose to his feet, his body taut with fury. “Get out of here,” he said. “Slave. I serve Rome. I have fought in her wars. I’ve cleaned her streets. I’ve seen her most unmentionable parts and draped my cloak about her naked shoulders. I’ve lost family to her, lost honor, lost—” He paused, panting. For a moment he shook, visibly. His voice sank almost to a whisper as he wrestled with something within himself. “I have not served her these many years to frivol away my time conversing with whores and desecrators of tombs.” He gestured for the guardsman. “She knows her task. Get her out of here.”

  Her task. The trial. Regina lowered her head, slave-like, but she’d gone breathless with relief. She was not just to be tossed back into the shed; she would be at the trial, she would have the chance to speak, to see Polycarp, to stand at his side. Dizzied, she felt Brutus’s touch at her arm, as though to steer her, but he didn’t close his grip. As Caius lowered his eyes to his papers, dismissing her, she took careful steps toward the door, not wishing to fall. She would see Polycarp. She would be able to speak for him. Her blood ran hot with elation; she lifted her head, even as Brutus guided her through the door and into the fierce August sunlight. She had done it! Whatever happened to her now, it would happen to her at Polycarp’s side. She would defend him, and the gathering, speaking the truths Rome didn’t want to hear. Let them try to silence her then! She was no slave. She might have only a moment, but she would take that moment. And speak what was in her heart, before all the world.

  In the sunbaked arena of Justitia’s courtyard, all eyes were on the drama being played out on the sand: the cold, furious eyes of the urban praetor; the eyes of the guardsmen tight with alarm and continually glancing to the temple gate and the sounds of moaning beyond it; the troubled eyes of the lictors who stood to either side of the curule seat like living props, and of the jurors, who sat on their benches as the eyes and ears of Rome’s upper castes. As the woman walked slowly across that open space, the other two who stood there before the praetor’s seat had their eyes fixed on her as well. Julia looked bewildered, seeing who approached. Polycarp looked stricken.

  “Regina,” he breathed. Caius had summoned Regina as a witness? How could this be? For a moment the father faltered. If Regina would not stand the test, then he had surely failed utterly, and the Romans were proven right after all: take the head, and the body of the gathering would stumble. Polycarp’s legs failed him, and he found himself kneeling in the dust, his vision blurred with hot tears. Inside the heavy silence of his heart, he cried to his God. Truth flits from our hands, and there is no faith in us.

  Despair crouched behind him; he could feel the heat of its breath, he could smell the cold- creek clearness of its body. Its paws rested heavy on his shoulders; its maw gaped for him. Hungrier and emptier than the craving dead.

  “Regi
na,” he whispered. Doubts tore through him, driven on a high wind that made his thoughts leap and spin inside him.

  Regina stopped when she reached him and took her place to stand a few strides from where he knelt, between him and the other witness.

  “Dora Syriacae.” That was the stern, cold voice of the praetor. “You stand before a jury of Roman citizens, charged with judging a man who may stand under penalty of death. You stand also under penalty if any false word escapes your mouth, for you speak within the grounds of the temple of Justitia, most sacred among goddesses. Will you speak verity and truth, Dora Syriacae?”

  “I refuse that name,” she said quietly. “I will bear witness to what I have seen, praetor urbanus, but I will not answer to that name.”

  Polycarp heard the steel in her voice. Heat built within him, blunting the sharp edge of grief and sending wild energy coursing through his body, as though he were translated from a man to a lion. With a growl, he sent the beast that crouched behind him slinking away and forced himself back to his feet. He had no time left; therefore, he had no time for despair. He blinked the moisture from his eyes and saw in a blur Regina standing straight as a pillar near him, her eyes dark and her face dry of tears. She wore the same nightdress she’d worn the night the dead came to the insula, but now it was filthied and dirtied, and torn and tattered at the back. Yet she stood very straight, and he caught his breath at the loveliness of her.

  Caius stared at her from his curule chair, frowning. He looked taken aback by her manner. “Tell us what you’ve seen, then,” he said.

  For a long moment she stood silent. The jurors were silent too, gazing at the witness. The moaning in the city outside the walls of justice was the only sound. A hot gust of wind rushed into the courtyard, lifting dust and driving it across the compound in gray clouds; Polycarp felt the dust coat his legs, dry and gritty.

  She lifted her head, looked across the courtyard at Polycarp. Their eyes met. The wind lifted Regina’s hair and tugged at the torn strips of her nightdress. In her eyes, Polycarp saw pain and desperation; then, though he was not touching her shoulder or her face with his hand, her eyes opened to him, and he gazed inside the rooms of her heart, as he so often had gazed into the eyes of the walking dead. He saw rooms that were locked and chained; he could almost hear the screams behind those shut doors. He saw other rooms that were vast and wide as oceans; in one, her love and faith in him, a faith so profound and unshakable that it shook him to see it. In another room, the many moments when she’d held others in her arms and given them refuge, and the love, deep and maternal and fierce, that she bore now toward each of those she’d sheltered. He saw her loss at having borne no children, and her joy at having found children in the men and women who lived in the insula under Polycarp’s care. He saw her determination to preserve them—and him—a resolve that was like a hard, cold wall of rock in her heart.

  She turned back to Caius.

  “I cannot say what you wish me to say,” she said hoarsely. Quivering with the intensity of her emotion. “The dead are eating the city, and you want me to malign Polycarp—Rome’s one good man—and the man who is trying to help you—even while the dead moan outside that wall. I cannot. Not even if you offered every other believer in Rome amnesty could I playact this farce.” She turned to face the jurors, and her voice rose, her eyes shining with rage. “I will tell you what I’ve witnessed. The ancient families close themselves within windowless walls as though stepping early into their tombs; and Roman men and Roman women scream in hunger and illness outside, while those within choose to hear nothing. I’ve witnessed a woman sell the lives of those nearest to her so that she can wear a finer garment. I’ve seen men who buy women for less price than you would buy a toga, and beat them until they can neither stand nor sit. I’ve seen men buy children too.” Her voice rose louder and higher, carrying with sharp clarity across the courtyard. “I’ve seen a woman beat her slave for taking a bite of her bread without permission, while at home that slave’s children are but skin stretched thin across their ribs and can’t sleep for hunger. You hurl your filth and your sewage and your shit down on us, and then you look across the hills with your self-satisfied faces and don’t even glance down at the people whose faces you’ve smeared with your stinking offal. You accuse us of the desecration of your dead, but day upon day, you desecrate the living!”

  “Have a care, Dora,” Caius growled, his eyes filled with shock.

  “You have a care. You think I am the only witness to stand here?” Rage had translated her; her face shone, and every line of her body was tense with the violence within her. Her voice rose nearly to a shriek; she gestured at the gate and the groaning beyond it, which sounded nearer than it had before. “Your fathers witness it. They witness everything. They see what you do, and what you don’t. They were never so callous as you are; they are ashamed of you. They are ashamed of how you’ve defiled their memory. How you leave your neighbors dying and uncared for. You deserve to have them lurching out of their tombs to devour you!”

  “Be still!” Caius rose from his seat, his face white.

  “I will not be still! Lash me, Caius Lucius Justus, if you wish! Here before all these men. Show them how a Roman praetor administers justice! But I will not say what you wish to hear. You are contemptible, a small and shrunken man presiding over a small and shrunken city that was once great.”

  She paused. Her eyes burned; her face was dark with fury. The groans outside were indeed nearer, and loud, as though the dead had come to witness as well, to confirm Regina’s words and give their own wordless but vocal condemnation. A few of the jurors cast uneasy glances at the temple gate; the rest couldn’t look away from Caius’s witness.

  Polycarp gazed at Regina with astonishment and pride. He hadn’t known what strength she kept locked in her heart. How could he have doubted her?

  Julia’s eyes were round with shock. She drew in a breath to speak, but before she could say a word, Regina rounded on her fiercely. “You have had your say. We’ve heard you already. We know your quality now, Julia. You chose to serve something small. I’ve chosen to serve something great. I’ve been a slave; I will never again serve anything so small that it can fit in my heart without filling me so full that I can serve only with tears of joy.”

  Julia visibly withered under Regina’s eyes. She swayed on her feet, as though she might faint. Her eyes looked to the jurors, then the silent lictors in their line by Caius’s curule seat—so many witnesses as she was berated by a former slave. Her face went dark with shame, and she said nothing. She appeared on the verge of tears.

  The jury, too, were silent, watching Regina with startled faces. It was possible that they—and most Romans—had never heard a woman speak this way, in public, in open and unconcealed anger. Certainly none of them had ever heard such a declaration from a slave. Such was the force of Regina’s voice that they could not think of her as a slave, one who should be lashed for temerity; such words could only be spoken by one who was free, terribly free, more free than most women they knew, more free than most men. A few looked stricken, as though her words had stung them and called them to account; in Regina’s face, streaked with dirt and sweat yet hard and intent, some saw the very face of Justitia, her blindfold removed, her eyes hot with wrath and demanding their response. Others shifted in their seats, unsettled, trying to grope for that rage they’d held clutched so tightly only a few moments ago. Their rage had been stolen from them; this woman had walked into the courtyard with an anger more just and more articulate; in the face of it, the jurors found themselves fumbling. The moans of the dead surged suddenly loud in their ears, and a few began to sweat.

  Marcus’s eyes were shining. The dampened coals that all day had sat heavy in his chest had now blazed into new fire. Whatever happened this day, the jurors would remember it. They would never forget Polycarp or Regina, or the obligation of hearing and action that their testimony had placed on each of them. His shoulders firmed with that certainty and with
the determination to persist in the work these two had begun.

  Caius’s face was pale, and his voice had lost much of its volume. “Citizens on the jury, pardon my idiocy in summoning as a witness this—this slave and whore. I think it’s time we—”

  Abrupt and loud, a new sound swept into the courtyard, interrupting him: the cries of geese on the wing. The jurors, Polycarp, the praetor, the witnesses, the guardsmen—for a moment all their faces tilted back and gazed at the sky. Against the glare of the sun and the cloudless heat of the heavens, a dark V was flapping swiftly overhead, moving south out of the city. For many heartbeats, they all watched the geese departing. The day was hot; it was too early for a winter flight. It was as though the sacred geese were fleeing a city they could no longer live in, a city no longer worthy of their warning. Or perhaps the flight itself was their last warning.

  When the V had disappeared behind the roof of the temple, with Justitia’s blind face staring sightlessly after them, all was quiet in the courtyard, though the dead still moaned in the street without. Caius’s hands shook. “We are done,” he said after a moment, even his voice hushed and dismayed. “Give your verdict.”

  THE APOSTLE’S GIFT

  AS THE dead wailed just outside the temple walls, the first juror stood. It was the young man, the one who’d screamed at Polycarp when he entered. Polycarp met his eyes, and the youth glanced down. “Condemno,” he said quietly.

  The second stood, his voice louder. “Condemno!”

  “Condemno!”

  “Condemno!”

  One after the other, the jurors gave their sentences, some in urgent shouts, a few in quiet, almost ashamed voices. The unanimity was neither a surprise nor a disappointment to Polycarp. He let out his breath slowly; he had known, walking in through that wooden gate, that he entered a temple not to Justitia but to Timor. It was fear alone that was fed and worshipped here. For a few brief moments, he couldn’t hear the groaning in the street; the jurors’ cries overwhelmed it.