by Stant Litore
But that loathsome corpse that had shattered his door—that was no thief or whore from the Subura. It was not even a merchant’s wife who had lurched free of her tomb after being bitten by a thief. This was one from the old families. What by the gods was it doing here? He leaned harder on his hands, sucking in breath and trying to think past the roil of emotion in his chest. The walls were very close. One fact was a cold, clear light in his mind: he had the old man, the Greek, who led those who disturbed the dead. He glanced up, noted the trail of slime left behind by the slide of that corpse. As with the dead, so with the rotten among the living: cut into the head and the body dies.
“Dominus.” It was his aide, speaking from the inner door. Caius raised his head and looked past his aide to see the old man standing in the doorway. A man preternaturally tall, his head bald and his wrists manacled before him.
“Polycarp,” Caius said curtly, an identification not a greeting. He gestured to the space of floor in front of the desk. A smear of viscous fluid led from that space to the hole that had been the outer door. The aide remained by the inner door, and the old man came forward and stood before the desk. His eyes were calm, though they held weariness like the stress of an old house in a high wind. He stood straight, exuding confidence, though the creases about his eyes told of physical pain—possibly his joints, judging from how gingerly he held his manacled hands and how slowly he had moved. It was not the slowness of reluctance but the slowness of one in pain who takes great care with where he places his body, which muscles he chooses to move and when.
“Good day.” The old man’s voice rasped a little with age, but there was strength in it.
“You know who I am?” Caius fixed his eyes on the man.
Polycarp looked back without blinking. Or answering.
“I am Caius Lucius Justus, the praetor urbanus. You are arraigned for sedition and treason, Polycarp. My guardsmen took hold of you because they were informed that you lead the new atheists.”
“We are not godless,” Polycarp murmured. “We simply devote ourselves to a different God.”
Caius waited a moment, getting his emotions under control. “I will not insult you by asking you to explain that we.” His voice had grown icy. “I know you have followers throughout Rome, probably many. Nevertheless, I have you, and others from your insula. It is enough. I mean to put a swift end to this infection in the belly of our City.”
Polycarp glanced over his shoulder at the brown smear across the marble tiles. “It seems you have other infections to worry about,” he offered dryly.
Caius flexed one hand, feeling the grain of the wood beneath his palm, resisting the urge to beat the desktop with his hand, driving his anger into the wood. Then he stiffened. Out of nowhere, the thought hit him of where he had seen that ring before. That little silver ring on the dead hand. It was a betrothal ring, bearing no device or gem—an ostentation of the Aemilii, who considered themselves too famed to need any device and thought their family name an adornment richer than any other they might offer. That dead, half-eaten girl had been Flavius’s daughter, who would have wed Drusus Aemilius in another year. Caius couldn’t recall whether he’d ever met her, but he knew her father, and he knew that ring. His hand shook slightly. Flavius’s daughter. Gods. Not just any patrician girl. The daughter of a senator, and not a quiet backbencher at that—one of the first men in the city.
“This thing is devouring Rome,” he muttered. Across from him, Polycarp was watching him as though to peer into his heart. Something in Caius’s chest constricted and hardened into a tight, enraged knot. “This is your doing.” He gave Polycarp a cold, assessing look. “Even youths on the Hill neglect the rites and the obligations to our honored fathers. Because of your teachings, too many youths no longer bring offerings of fruit or bread or wine to the shrines of our fathers, who hunger now and cannot rest. And whom they devour—” He blanched. “Those cannot rest either,” he muttered after a moment.
A crawl of silence. That terrible stain on the floor.
Once, the festivals for the honored fathers had been lush, extravagant affairs—magnificent affairs; now each season, fewer attended, fewer brought gifts to feed the ancestors and quench their thirst. Polycarp’s superstition was taking too great a hold on the city. Caius shuddered at the thought of so many hungry, neglected dead. Now they were rising and feeding on the living—on the very people who left them ravenous.
Polycarp was watching him with an intensity in his gaze that Caius found unsettling. He struggled to hold his temper, distracted himself by shuffling through the sheaf of parchment on his desk—notes from his informants and reports from various minor officials on this movement that had taken hold in so many border towns and now in Rome itself. “Polycarp the Greek,” he said, his tone clipped. “You were in Smyrna for a while, among the Christians there. Then you came here, to Rome, where in the past we have put your leaders to death. Why?”
“I am most needed here.”
“I might not agree with that,” Caius muttered. “But certainly the filth of the Subura has proven fertile ground for you.”
“Yes,” Polycarp said softly. “I know you think that. Probably you imagine me to be some parasite fastened to Rome’s belly. But you’ve found the gathering here on the hill, and it frightens you. My calling has been to feed all of Rome, Caius, not only the Subura.”
Caius sucked in a breath, his hand pausing over the papers. “What do you mean by that?” His hand trembled slightly, almost too slightly to be seen; yet Polycarp’s gaze flicked to his hand and then back to the praetor’s face.
“We share bread,” Polycarp said. “An act of remembrance and purpose in this city where both the living and the dead hunger. We have shared bread with slaves and with their masters in the Subura. We have shared it with merchants of the lower slopes. And we have shared bread with sons of the Palatine Hill.”
Caius’s eyes burned with the thought of his own son. His hand kept shaking.
“You intend to put me to death,” Polycarp continued. “This seems certain to me. But it will do you no good, Caius, and even if you succeeded in suppressing the teaching and the sharing of bread, it would only do Rome harm. But you will not succeed, for it will not end with me. You have the wrong man.” Polycarp smiled wearily.
The praetor bristled at the man’s bravado, his arrogance, but kept his emotions under tight control. “Who is the man I need to execute, then?”
“He is not here. Though he is, I trust, in all places.”
“Speak plainly, you abominable Greek,” Caius snarled.
Polycarp gazed at him a moment, and his smile faded. There were lines about his eyes, but they were lines of fatigue, not fear. “Your mind is very Roman, Caius, and very literal,” he said after a moment. “Perhaps you think the only way to deal with the dead or the living is with a sword cut, as though all ailments are of the body only. But however many heads you cut, the dead keep rising—because you have not understood why they hunger, why they find it necessary to rise and eat. You make the same mistake with the living who are discontented in this city. There are other ways, Caius, to give the living and the dead rest—”
“So I’ve heard,” Caius cut in. “You touch the dead.” He glanced at the grain of the wood beneath his hands, struggled for calm, composure, dignitas. “Some magic from the East, the informant tells me. The most debased kind of superstition.”
“I might call yours debased, praetor urbanus. You try to feed the dead with wine and bread and fruit, carrying bowls of it to your mausoleum, while your brothers and sisters in the Subura live famished and ravenous lives without bread or wine or fruit or hope. In your literal-mindedness, you give the dead the food they don’t need and keep the living starving for the food they do need. You are the highest officer of Roman justice. I ask you, Caius Lucius Justus: what justice is this?”
“Your words twist everything,” Caius said. “But I know everything you have done in Rome, Polycarp. I have questioned Julia and others
my guardsmen took from your insula. I know about your sharing of bread. I know about the rites where your followers pass around a cup of warm blood and a handful of flesh. I know how you meet in the tombs and Catacombs, disturbing the dead in your obscene belief that you can satisfy the wrath of our ancestors with no more than a wish and a hope and a mumbling of platitudes brought here out of the East.” He took a shuddering breath. “And you have the gall to tell me you are not troubling our dead, that you are not spreading this desecration in Rome.”
“I am not spreading this desecration in Rome,” Polycarp said softly.
“Don’t mock me.”
“What do you wish me to say?” Now there was an edge of anger in the old man’s voice, and his eyes burned. “The dead hunger and walk. You need someone to blame, and it’s clear you’ve brought me here to make an example of me. Yet I am a Roman citizen—”
“Then you will be tried as one!” Caius roared, his face livid. “Tomorrow! I have witnesses against you, Polycarp. We will satisfy Justitia, whose temple this station serves, and then you will burn!”
“Why even a trial?” Polycarp asked. “I am condemned already; your words confirm it. Why not burn me today?”
“Don’t tempt me.”
That smile, that self-affirmed smile, returned to Polycarp’s lips. That smile that said, You do not shake me. I know who I am, and you cannot bend me.
“You wish to silence me,” Polycarp said, “so you will give me a jury of ears to hear me.”
Caius leaned forward, enunciating each word. “Some on that jury will have lost someone to the dead. They are furious. They want someone to suffer for what has been done in Rome. So do I. You will burn, Polycarp. I promise you that.”
Polycarp’s eyes darkened. After a moment he said, “The shed I’m kept in is dark and quiet, and a good place for prayer. I am growing fond of it. May I go?”
His voice was so calm and clear. He did not sound as though he were asking for permission. He sounded more like he was dismissing the praetor.
Caius bit back the words he wished to speak, words that would diminish him and the dignity of his office. After a moment he gestured for his aide, who quickly took hold of Polycarp and led him out of the room, taking him down the hall toward the other door that led out to the sheds. Polycarp left without a glance over his shoulder at the praetor. Alone again, Caius drew in a deep breath, then slammed his hand on the desk.
That detestable Greek and his followers—the dregs of Rome—had taken Caius’s son from him. Had destroyed him. Had destroyed his house. Caius heard the sound of a door opening and shutting elsewhere in the building: Polycarp being put away. Burn him.
His gaze lifted to the shattered door; his slaves were there, waiting permission to enter. One held a cloth, the other a pail of water. Caius’s gaze settled on the brown smear across his floor, and he ignored the slaves.
Flavius’s daughter. Gods.
He was alone here, alone with those medals on the wall, mute reminders that whatever his fortune in past battles on far borders, he had lacked the strength to protect or preserve his own. Even here within the walls of his own city. In his way he had failed Rome as surely as the old Greek had; the heat in his breast flickered out as quickly as it had come, leaving only cold hollowness in its place. It was often so. He would stand in his toga behind his cedar desk and prepare judgments, yet inside that toga and inside his skin he was only the husk of a man. He was alone. No living members of his family. If not for dignity and duty, he would have thrown himself on his sword months past.
It was a powerful thing, that Roman dignity. It must be observed not only in word and deed but in the posture of his body, in the stillness of his hands when he spoke, in the fashion of the draping of his toga after the baths, in his gait, in the austerity of his face.
His forehead ached; he opened his eyes, realized he was leaning over his desk like a woman grieving. Angrily he lifted his head, stood like a man. He stood there, breathing, just breathing.
A tap at the door, and his aide’s voice. “She came right from her villa, dominus.”
“What?”
“The dead girl. She must have come from her own home. The guardsmen saw her stumbling down the street from the uphill villas.”
Caius turned on the aide. “Why didn’t they bloody stop her, then?” He gestured furiously at the splintered door, then strode to it, his aide following. He shoved the broken door out of his way and stepped into the sun.
The sky was blinding after the close dimness of the station office; he stood and let his eyes adjust. A guardsman, armed with a stout pole, leaned against one of the sheds along the wall of the temple compound, ten strides away—the sheds where the prisoners were kept. The man looked pale. Caius gave him a cold look. Why hadn’t his guardsmen stopped the corpse of the patrician girl? The sight of her stumbling toward them, reeking like a thing on the wrong side of the grave and hissing at them, had terrified them. That was why. Nearer at hand, Caius’s entourage of lictors waited faithfully, togate men carrying bundles of rods bound with cords, emblems that he whom they walked behind carried power to discipline and correct the Roman people.
Caius glanced down at the grit and dust of the station’s doorstep. Perhaps there had been footprints there, mute records of the coming of the dead; now there was only a long, smudged swath through the dust where the body had been dragged back out. He grimaced and squinted uphill against the sun. Flavius’s villa was ten streets above them on an offshoot of the Via Sacra and was significantly larger than any villa around it; it was right near the hilltop, below the Palatine House where the Emperor would reside during the colder months. The Flavii were an old and wealthy family, much older than the Emperor’s.
Everything was still on the hilltop. In the afternoon heat, none of the living were stirring; no slaves were in the streets and would not be, perhaps, for another hour. Caius imagined the dead girl lurching along in the street, making her way on shuffling feet to his door, her arms lifted in accusation. She had come to his door. The door of the man who bore responsibility for the city and for the safety and public dignity of the city’s patrician class. He cursed softly and shaded his eyes.
“Are you going to ask the Senate to convene?” his aide asked.
“Why?” Caius murmured. “So they can sit around and argue while this gets worse? The Senate can go to oblivion before I let them waste my time.” He looked out over the city, listening. There—he could hear it now. Moaning, carried to him on the wind: the cries of the dead. Somewhere in the city. He glanced uphill toward the villas of Rome’s high families and clasped his hands behind him to keep them from shaking. That had been Flavius’s daughter. The dead were not just a few lurching shapes in the lower gardens of the Palatine; they were bursting into villas now, or perhaps seizing and ingesting good citizens from the street. He didn’t know. But they were here. They were breaking through his door. And he was left alone to deal with them; the Imperial Family, and the Praetorian Guard with them, had left the city at the start of the summer. No doubt they were in one of their expensive country villas, where opulent pleasure gardens to arouse the envy even of the princes of Susa were enclosed within walls within walls within walls. The Imperial Family had walled out the dead and all the living who were of lower classes than themselves—indeed, all of the City of Rome. That left Caius and any guardsmen he could hire out of the shrinking public funds to keep order in the city. He could write to the Emperor, of course, but the wine-sotted fool would only accuse him of exaggeration.
Caius’s face darkened. He should have had that cesspool, the Subura, burned to the ground last winter, when the pestilence first began to cause real trouble. But he had not understood the extent of the threat. How could he? Rome Mighty and Eternal had survived everything: riots, grain shortages, screaming Celts leaping over the walls, axes in hand. No doubt it could survive this too. Anyway, the use of fire to stop pestilence was no small thing. In a city as crowded as Rome, fires could be ill afforde
d because it might prove impossible to put them out.
Coldly he took stock. He had guardsmen. He had Polycarp in custody. And a few others of his kind, minnows he’d netted with the whales. The wench he’d interviewed earlier that day, the former slave, Dora Syriacae, with the proud look in her eyes and her bearing; his heart troubled him at the memory of her words. And the youth, that boy, a patrician boy, one of the Caelii, hardly older than his son had been. Another patrician sneaking into the Subura to worship with the desecrators. But tomorrow, a trial, and Rome would be cleansed by fire of that foreign vine in their city whose growth so entangled their youth and starved their dead fathers.
“One hundred eighteen,” he murmured.
“Dominus?” His aide sounded uncertain. Well, this day would rattle anyone.
“One hundred eighteen,” he repeated. “Guardsmen.”
“One hundred twelve, dominus.”
“One hundred twelve,” he repeated.
