by Stant Litore
“Yes, dominus. A century and twelve. Six didn’t return from the Subura last night, when they took Polycarp.”
“Why wasn’t I told?”
His aide paled. “I only received the report an hour ago, dominus. They ran into some dead in the alleys, and I take it the encounter was harrowing. The captain got himself drunk and didn’t come in this morning.”
“I’m not paying him to drink,” Caius muttered. He should see the man, reprimand him, but he hadn’t the energy. “Dismiss him. Find his lieutenant and have every man posted on this hill. They are to patrol these streets.”
“These streets, dominus? The streets of the upper Palatine?”
“That’s what I said. I don’t want any more shattered doors.” He glanced at his own door, what was left of it. “Have that one replaced. Reinforce it with iron. No, have Decius do it. You get to the villa of the Flavii. Find out if they know what has happened and if all is well there. Then find me and report.”
“Yes, dominus.”
“Dismissed.”
His aide hurried up the street, and Caius stood in the sun, resisting an urge to rub at his temples. No use calling the Senate together. The only real power in Rome now was his—the keys to what remained of the state treasury, the authority to hire armed men, to convene treason courts, and to order executions. As for the Emperor… Caius grimaced and counted the days. Tomorrow was the Ides. On the Kalends, fifteen days ahead, the Emperor would be starting back to Rome. He would have to write to warn him against returning before the pestilence was better contained.
Pestilence.
He suppressed a snarl. This was not malaria or blue fever. This was unquiet among the dead, an omen of Rome’s fall, a rebuke to Rome’s living for neglecting their ancestors. He stared at that splintered door and whispered a prayer to Janus, the two-headed keeper of doors both visible and invisible. Caius’s hands shook even as he clasped them more tightly. With a shudder, Caius thought of the cracking of Rome’s invisible doors: the doors between the patrician hills and the plebeian sewage of the Subura; the doors between life and death; the doors between the open Forum of the present and the cluttered, private chambers of the past. Could nothing be held closed? Would there be no order and health in Rome’s house?
One locked door, in particular, stood in his mind, with fresh horror after his day’s encounter with the gowned dead. His son’s door. He wanted to see his son. Nodding curtly to his lictors, he began to take measured steps out into the street, walking with anxiety and dread back to his own villa and the door to his son’s room. The lictors filed behind him, duty-bound to escort him to the doorstep of his home.
All about the bed in his son’s room hung the masks of his ancestors, their masks for public occasions, dried now, some of them cracked, some of them faded in color and as hideous themselves as the faces of the dead; but they were his ancestors. Only the di parentes of his family could watch over his son.
The thing on the bed snapped its teeth in the air and twisted and bucked, writhing, its face contorted with terrible hunger and rage, its eyes blind, like small, scratched gray coins. Caius sagged back against the door and watched, just watched. Beyond that door and all about him, this villa high on the Palatine Hill was silent; the slaves tiptoed when their master was with his son.
Caius recalled the first time he’d seen his son like this, back at the end of the winter when the dead first appeared in the Subura. Caius hadn’t known the dead were rising at the time, hadn’t believed the reports he’d heard. He’d only known there was violence, a riot, on one street in the slum. In most seasons the Subura was best ignored, but a riot could not be tolerated. Riots left unchecked became very dangerous. Caius had sent guardsmen in.
When the guardsmen came back—their numbers diminished—they had brought with them, chained and gagged with bloodied cloth, the praetor’s son.
Seeing him, Caius had crumpled to his knees—he, a Roman, on his knees!—and it seemed hours before he could move or speak. His lictors stood silently by, shifting their feet, nervous at the nearness of the chained, animate corpse. The captain of the guardsmen who had brought him stood by as well. Waiting. They seemed to understand that the regular rules and expectations of dignitas did not apply here, under these conditions. Dignity operated by entirely new and different rules, when Rome’s highest public official saw his son so devoured by the dead and so changed.
At last Caius had beckoned one of the guardsmen near with his hand, asked the questions he had to ask. Briefly, giving his report in quick, clipped phrases, the hired man described what he had seen on that street.
“How did it happen to him?” Caius interrupted, his voice hoarse and choked.
“We found him at an insula. The Christian women they call ‘holy widows’ were there, and there were dead coming at them out of the alley. Eight of them, growling and hissing like beasts. Your son was with four or five men holding the door of the insula against them, unarmed. The dead broke through. My own cohort was close behind, and we encircled the entire district, five or six insulae. Several riverside tenements. I lost three men getting your son out of there. The women were—screaming. Inside the building.” Sweat broke out on the man’s brow. “After what we witnessed in there, praetor—we burned everything. All of it. A few dead came lurching toward us out of the fire—they were still walking, still moaning, even as they burned. We made sure to destroy all of them, all the bodies.” The guardsman swallowed. “Your son. Those bites on his arms. He died of fever even while we were burning the street. We’d seen what would happen. We—we expected it, praetor. He was dead. Not breathing. Yet he opened his eyes as we carried him uphill, chained, on a litter. He opened his eyes. And he was like this.” He gestured at the gagged, growling corpse.
It had been too much to take in; the effort of it had shattered him. He had clung to the few facts he could grasp: the rising of the bitten dead, his son’s destruction, and his son’s inexplicable presence in an insula in the Subura, defending the lives of some meaningless community of women. “I didn’t know he was part of that—that cult.” His shoulders shook; in a moment he would be sobbing.
“Get out of here,” he whispered. “Let me be alone with my son.”
Now, watched over by all the great men of his ancestry, Caius’s son fought his chains on the bed. Looking on, Caius refused to weep. A magistrate of Rome should weep for Rome only and not for kin or companions lost.
Yet he was also a father.
He’d had his slaves nail the bed to the floor after the third time the corpse overturned it, wrenching hard enough that the bed flipped and came down on top of it. Such things only happened when someone was present with his son in the room. When his son was alone and the door was shut, as far as Caius could tell, his son lay silently on the bed, limp in his chains—until he heard someone move about or speak near the door, in which case he would thrash into wild motion again.
At first Caius had ordered his house slaves to feed his son and bring him drink, though he’d had to threaten his slaves with beatings, then with crucifixion, to make them approach the corpse. The first man with the courage to do it had lost two fingers to the snapping teeth when he tried to feed biscuits into the corpse’s mouth. Knowing the pestilence would take him, Caius had his throat slit and had commanded the body burned.
Then he had one of the house’s female slaves try; the slave women were less costly to replace. But the same thing happened; when she poured water into the corpse’s throat, it was spewed back at her, and with a hissing scream the creature lurched, almost upending the bed, and fastened its teeth deep into the woman’s arm.
Her screams had been terrible to hear.
Only by cutting away a large chunk of her arm were the other house slaves able to get her loose from the ravenous, growling thing in the bed.
After giving orders for what was to be done with her, Caius had stormed from his chamber and raged into the atrium under the open sky. Standing there in the garden at the heart of
his villa, he’d turned in circles, screaming at the windows of the rooms of his house: “What is wrong with you insects? Can’t you even feed one boy! One bleeding boy! What is wrong with you?”
For an hour he’d shouted obscenities, the veins standing out in his neck. At last he collapsed and lay on his belly in the garden, weeping into the dirt. He stayed there all night. The earth felt cool against his cheek; in the end it was a comfort, something real, something he could trust.
The next day, he did not have anyone attempt to bring his son food or water.
Now Caius leaned against the door of his son’s room, his chest tight. Though he had no cup in his hands to make a libation, and though he was not standing beside any fresh sacrifice in a temple, he prayed. He prayed first to his ancestors, staring fixedly at their masks of clay or woven grass where they hung high on their wall above the bed. He spoke with them for a long time, explaining the crisis and pleading with them. Then he prayed to the unseen lares of his house—the old, old gods of home and hearth, who have no names.
All the while his son roared and snarled and spat, and tore at the tattered mattress with his nails. After praying, Caius stared down at his son, everything inside him gone empty and cold. He should end it. He knew that. He should have his son’s body burned. But that was no way to give a Roman citizen rest. And this was his boy. He’d had only one son. Only one. His wife Scipia had died in childbirth; when the midwives had sent for Caius, he had come quickly, but not quickly enough. After hastily accepting the newborn son as his own and then handing the child to one of the women, Caius had stood silently by Scipia’s bed, gazing down at the stillness in her eyes. For all that night, he gave no thought to his son (for whom the midwives quickly found a wet nurse), nor to the family hearth, nor to any of his responsibilities as paterfamilias of his house. He simply gazed down at his wife as her body cooled and hardened.
When he’d risen stiffly at last, in the chill hours, and went, half-aware, to tend the hearth, he had found it as cold as she. He’d reeled back in horror; the cold hearth was a sacrilege. A Roman patrician must never let the fire in his home go out; he, and he only, no slave or servant, must tend it, honoring his fathers who’d passed the fire down to him. In that one night, Caius had failed both his wife and the di parentes, his ancestors.
That was really when everything had gone wrong. The world had tipped on its side, and he had been sliding off ever since, his fingertips scrabbling for purchase. Since that day, everyone else he cared about had slid away. Only he was left, the last player clinging to a tilted stage.
When the boy’s time came to greet the gods in person, Livius his son should have awaited them in a great stone mausoleum, high on the hills of Rome, with inscriptions of honor carved into the cool marble on which he lay. Now Livius reeked of decay rather than burial spices, and leapt in his bonds. And when Caius himself died, no son would tend the hearth for him or perform the rites to remember him and honor him. Caius Lucius would become a wandering shade, restless, hungry, homeless. An eater in the dark.
Shutting the horror of it away into some dim compartment far from his heart, Caius set his hand upon the door.
“Vale, Livius.” Be well. The greeting seemed a terrible joke, yet Caius could never leave the room without speaking some word of parting. This was his boy.
He left, shutting the door quietly behind him. The growling of the thing could be heard too clearly, even through the barrier of stout cypress wood. Refusing to hear it, Caius strode down the hall and out into the atrium, crossing the garden toward his study. He walked blindly, by habit, his eyes noting neither the eyes of the slaves watching him carefully from the windows about the atrium, nor the last summer blossoms on the cherry tree, nor the vines that had twined about a neglected marble Cupid (not because of a neglectful gardener, but because the gardener had fled the villa the same day Livius was brought home to his bed; since that day Caius had attended little to the affairs of his house and had not bothered to replace him).
When he reached the study, Caius seated himself in his chair, keeping his back very straight. There was no need for public dignitas here, no need for posture—not even his slaves were permitted to enter the study—but dignitas was the one raiment left to him; otherwise he was stripped and bared to the icy rain of a malicious world, one that had already cut from him his wife and his son, a world where the ancestors no longer interceded or cared. So even in the extremity of his grief, he sat like a Roman.
There came a knock at his door.
Caius took slow, slow breaths until he felt capable of answering. “You may open the door,” he said.
The door swung open. The slave there—one of the females—knelt swiftly at the threshold, without entering.
Caius glanced at her briefly, indifferently. “What is it?”
“Your aide is at the door with a message, dominus.”
Caius looked more closely at her. Her face was white, and the hands she held clasped in her lap were trembling. She kept her eyes lowered dutifully. Whatever the aide had said had scared her. A hard stone of dread settled in Caius’s belly. “Well? What is the message?”
“He said to tell you he’d been to Flavius’s villa, dominus. There was no answer at the door, but he heard moaning within. He—he heard—the dead, dominus. Inside. He went to the nearest villa, where Cassius Tertius and Portia live, dominus. Domina Portia told him that Flavius is away on business, touring Transalpine Gaul. His wife and daughter had the keeping of the villa. She said the moaning had started the night before, and they’d been too scared to go to Flavius’s door.”
Caius cursed. “Is my man still at the door?”
“Yes, dominus.”
“Tell him to send guardsmen to the villa and to make sure the men don’t speak of it to anyone. The hill is anxious enough after the past few days. We don’t need a panic.”
“Yes, dominus.”
“And you tell the other slaves this. If anyone in my villa speaks of what they’ve heard, I’ll have every woman in this villa flayed. And the left ear cut from the head of every man. Am I clear?”
“Yes, dominus.” She was shaking.
“Leave.”
“Yes, dominus!” She sprang to her feet and shut the door. Caius could hear her quick footsteps running down the hall.
Then silence.
Gods.
He sat in the silence, thinking of that enclosed villa farther up the slope. And thinking of the body of Flavius’s wife, shuffling about its dim rooms. Were her slaves diseased and hungering as well—or had they fled? How had the daughter gotten out into the streets, and not the mother?
He shook his head, reached for his stylus and parchment and for a little bottle of ink. He uncorked the bottle, dipped the stylus, paused. He sat there a while, the stylus held poised over the bottle, a great drop of blue ink clinging to its tip.
What was he to write?
What could he write?
Flavius was another man who had lost a wife and a child, even as Caius had, though he did not yet know of his loss. What was there to say?
Blinking the weariness from his eyes, Caius began to ink words into the parchment, in hard Latin capitals. To Flaccus Flavius Germanicus, in Transalpine Gaul, he wrote. Caius Lucius Justus, praetor urbanus, Rome. Vale. He dipped the stylus again, then began to write with a furious haste, barely making the letters legible. This infuriated him—a letter, as everything else, needed discipline and poise—but he did not slow his speed. He must write this quickly or not at all.
I must express my dismay in informing you that a tragedy has befallen your family in Rome. The nature of it is of such horror that I can only write of it because I am able to reassure myself that you will receive it with that same dignity with which you once received word of the tenth cohort’s defeat along the Rhine when we campaigned together in Germania, so many years ago. I know that in you the blood of the ancients is strong and that you are well able to receive news of terrible misfortune. I must inform you, Flacc
us Flavius, that your wife and daughter are deceased. They became afflicted with that unmentionable plague that appeared in Rome during the last winter. I know that it will bring you some comfort to learn that I have made arrangements to ensure that their suffering will be brief. The ashes will be held in a silver urn under the care of the Vestal Virgins and under the watchful eyes of the gods until your return to the Eternal City.
A dutiful and patrician wife, and a daughter of grace, beauty, and intelligence, betrothed to a fine house: Rome is lessened by their loss, and all Rome continues to hold the ancient, eminent family of the Flavii in the highest respect and reverence.
Si vales, valeo, amico meo.
He set the parchment aside to let the ink dry. Then he wrote, less hastily, a missive to the Emperor in his pleasure gardens.
There are wakeful dead within the city and they are many. Your Divinity would be best advised by his appointed magistrates and by the people of Rome to prolong the time of Your pleasure and rest. Though we know Your sense of duty to the Roman people is matched only by the wisdom of Your governance, the preservation of Your life is of great priority; I will make Rome safe for Your return if You but delay that return to the next Ides.
Finishing the message and placing it aside with the other letter, his face grim, Caius reached for another page.
There was one more thing that needed doing; he had known it, perhaps, from the moment that patrician girl had burst through his door. Dipping the stylus again, he began to pen the order, the last order he intended to give as praetor urbanus. He could pass the small parchment to his lictors after Polycarp’s trial.
By this order, he would atone for his failure and for that of his family. He would atone for not having raised Livius a good Roman worthy of his fathers and for not having been there when he died. He would atone even for Flavius’s absence when his daughter died, and for the shortcomings of all the fathers of Rome who had not kept the city clean and secure. He would not allow the next generation of Romans to let the hearth fires go out, misled by Polycarp’s cult until all the patrician dead returned, even as the Subura’s impoverished dead had returned already to wander empty Rome, neglected and ravenous. Caius would do more than simply put Polycarp to death. He would do Rome one great service: he would end the plague, regardless of the cost, regardless of any death toll needed to achieve it. His hand trembled as he inked the first words of the order.
