by Stant Litore
AN ETHICS OF HUNGER:
EARLIER THAT WEEK IN THE SUBURA
ROME, EVEN then, was an old city—ancient and vast. Its great bulk sprawled over the slopes of seven hills, with the river Tiber winding between them, its banks choked by the crumbling insulae of the Subura. Each morning, the Subura’s residents woke to the reek of diseased fish pulled from the river and human urine and goose shit, and to the honking of geese on the water—there were always many geese near the river. The birds were sacred; six centuries ago when the Celts had invaded, axes in hand, the warriors had startled a flock of geese on the Tiber. The birds had risen into the air with their loud voices, waking the people in time to defend themselves. Today the geese often clogged some narrow street, but when this happened, people stood by and waited for the geese to clear the way. To harm or show disrespect to a goose was one of Rome’s oldest taboos. It was also treason, though the praetor’s hired guardsmen rarely bothered with arrests in the Subura.
Lately—since this last winter—it was a comfort to see the birds. Where the foot traffic of the Subura was halted by slow-moving, placid geese, one at least knew there were no walking dead on that street.
So in the mornings, the people of the Subura woke to geese. Then the men hurried to market to buy the day’s produce or sent out slaves if they owned any, then hurried themselves to whatever shop they’d found work at. The free women cleaned house or knitted fresh patches onto clothing that was already a patchwork of faded fabrics. The slave women were kicked from their masters’ beds and sent to prepare baths. And while the streets were still shadowed—the sun blocked out by the looming buildings—lines of slumped-shouldered, weary women, both slave and free, could be seen trudging toward the nearest public fountain with lidded jars on their shoulders.
Regina walked with them, empty water jar on one shoulder, her other arm around an old woman whose steps stumbled more often than not; like a few of the others in the street, both she and old Flora wore on their heads wide-brimmed hats, gifts from Father Polycarp and a precaution against the emptying of chamber pots from sixth-story insula windows. Urine brought a fair price from the fullers who used it in the cleaning of togas, but to some, hauling pots down from a fifth- or sixth-story apartment and then up the steep, cracked streets to the fullers’ shops on the uphill edge of the Subura seemed not worth the trouble. Regina was used to the occasional splashes into the street; they were the least of the Subura’s indignities. Yet she was grateful for the hat.
Flora didn’t talk much; the walk to the fountain exhausted her. She made that walk every other morning, and on each of those mornings Regina slipped out of Father Polycarp’s insula, pausing a moment at the doorstep until she heard Marcus slam the bolt shut behind her. Marcus Antonius was a young patrician recently taken in by Polycarp; over the past few months, he’d taken to helping out with odd jobs around the insula.
While Marcus shut and secured the door, Regina tugged the wide hat securely over her hair and looked out at the morning grimness of the alley (sometimes there’d be a smear of blood on the wall across the alley, or a silent body, or a not-silent body, and she would eye it carefully). Then she hurried down the Via Noctis to that other insula—one considerably larger but in far worse repair than Polycarp’s—where Flora lived with her grandson. As Flora’s grandson brought in some food by working from before dawn to after dusk as an assistant to the fullers, but had neither the coin to purchase a slave nor the meal to maintain one, it fell to old Flora to clean the apartment, prepare the morning and evening meals, and trudge down to the fountain and back. Regina had seen the grandson at the meetings in the Catacombs; he was one of theirs. So each of those mornings, Regina came to the door of Flora’s insula and asked for her; and when Flora came down, Regina took the great water jar from the grandmother’s trembling hands and lifted it to her own shoulder. Sometimes Flora kissed her cheek or smiled at her, with eyes that were beautiful and old; sometimes she simply trudged along beside her, grumbling quietly under her breath.
Fetching water was dangerous for the Subura’s women. The brotherhoods that guarded the fountains at the crossroads might bother or molest them. Or there might be too many women at the fountain, and taking too long to return, those who’d waited near the end of the line might bring the water in only to receive a beating for it. Worse still, the women had to cast uneasy glances down each alley they passed. If Regina saw a dark shape moving slowly in the alley, she pulled Flora past as quickly as she could and hastened on with her head low, her heart pounding. The figure she’d seen might have been only a street thief or a beggar rising from his night’s bed in the alley’s refuse. Or it might have been one of the dead.
There had been quite a few in the spring, but most weeks in the early summer there had been only one or two. The last month had been bad; quite a few mornings, wary residents had emerged from their insulae to see dead feeding in the street, sometimes not just one but two or even three. And there had been the matter of the potter’s shop on the second floor of the fourth insula on the Via Borealis. The potter had lived there with his two sisters and had just taken in his brother’s family of six, who had been evicted. They now squeezed together into the potter’s bedchamber, while the potter and his sisters slept on the floor by the wheel and the clay bowls. One of the brother’s small boys was suffering from a fever that night.
This month, the potter’s rent had been late, and the landowner had finally unlocked the door, intending to go in and have a word with the potter about it. But when he opened the door, nine hissing dead spilled out. The other residents had slammed shut their doors, and after eating the landlord, the dead had wandered moaning in the atrium for a few hours. An infant in one of the first-floor apartments started to scream toward midday; the dead clustered at the door and pummeled on it until they finally broke through and devoured the family within.
Before dark, one of the crossroads brotherhoods appeared at the outer door of the insula, en masse, eight armed men—members of one of the small fraternities that considered themselves keepers of the winding streets, servants of the old gods of the Roman crossroads, and the Subura’s honored caste, even though the rest of the Subura considered them thugs. Since the late winter when the dead had begun to walk, the crossroads brothers had taken to hunting in the streets near the insulae that paid them, slaying the dead they found. They traveled in pairs, or three or four together, and so far had kept the numbers of dead thinned.
The landlord’s widow had hired them for an exorbitant fee, one that would almost certainly bankrupt the insula. Upon arriving, the men threatened to kill her if she couldn’t pay inside of two months; in tears, she promised that she would sell the building and get them the coin. Then the brothers went in.
Only four walked back out.
That had been last week.
Word of that had spread through the Subura, and at least one landowner had taken to making nightly rounds, knocking on each tenant’s door before dark and waiting for the tenant to call out that all was well. Most landowners, however, did not do this, though they shuddered at the tale. The last few days, when Regina had gone to the fountains or to the market, she’d taken to glancing up at the dark windows in the high buildings, fearful that she might see a gray, torn face peering back.
When someone was bitten, most of the time they concealed it, went home, locked their doors. Fever and death followed a few hours later or during the night. If others were locked in with them—their family or others who were either sharing rent or squatting along with them—they might be wakened later by grasping hands and devoured. If the person lived alone, they woke mindless, hungry, shambling about the room, locked in until kin came to look for them, or the insula’s owner came for rent, or some thief picked the lock on the door, or until they broke through the door themselves. There might be many such rooms in the Subura now, people locked in with their own hunger, awaiting release.
This particular morning, Regina and the other women were filing down a narro
w street that plunged downhill between the clammy stone walls of the insulae toward the fountains. They were near the river and could hear the voice of the brown water. The stones beneath their feet were moist and stank; in a few shadows beneath the walls where the sun never quite reached, handfuls of obstinate mushrooms had squirmed up through gaps in the stones, though not the kind of mushrooms one could eat. Here, the women stopped.
They were not waiting for geese.
A few of them turned the moment they saw what was in the street, and ran. Some of these dropped their jars, shattering them; others clung to theirs. Those who didn’t run stood very still, frozen in their horror, their eyes all fixed on the same object. A corpse lay in the street on its belly, emaciated, its ribs showing through torn flesh; the arm it reached toward them was terribly shrunken, as though it had not eaten for weeks prior to its death. Its sunken, filmy eyes stared at them without recognition, and it hissed and snarled from a mouth only half-filled with teeth. It tried to drag itself toward them with its other hand, clawing at the dusty stones, but its legs were broken. Its jaws snapped at the air; then it moaned. The sound of its cry passed through the women like a shudder. Somewhere within earshot on some other street, there was the clack of a door slamming shut.
The thing’s fingertips curled around a broken paving stone, and it dragged itself another inch nearer. Regina’s heart was in her throat. She and the others stared at the hungry dead, still not moving. A girl who couldn’t have been more than fifteen lifted her water jar high over her head, her face white, as though she meant to bash it over the corpse’s head once it came closer. Regina kept her eyes on the corpse—wishing desperately that Polycarp were here, to bring his Gift to the dead and leave it unmoving, limp on the stones.
Then she heard quick, sandaled footsteps farther down the street, coming from the direction of the fountain, and she tore her gaze from the dead thing. From around the other curve of the street, behind the crawling corpse, two men appeared. They were dressed in dark tunics, but they wore black armbands beneath the shoulder and walked with a cold, certain gait that would have told anyone in the Subura who they were, even without the armbands. One carried an oak cudgel that had probably served previously as the leg of a table. The other carried a long knife, its blade nearly long enough to qualify it for the Roman gladius, or short sword—except that it was curved, and the etching of a stylized horse into the blade declared it was Numidian in origin; perhaps some horse lord of the windblown steppes above the Sahara had once carried it strapped to his shin. It was a lethal-looking object, and illegal.
These two men strode up the street; the corpse hadn’t noticed them—it was still trying to pull itself, bit by bit, toward the water carriers. The men didn’t hurry. Any other morning, Regina would have watched them with wariness or fear; now, her fear was focused on the dead, and she watched the men approach with only a kind of terrible fascination.
As they neared the thing in the street, the two men exchanged a look. The one with the cudgel nodded; the other stepped forward. The creature still groped its way toward the gathered women, its teeth parting in a long, hissing snarl. Bending, the man took hold of its hair and drove the Numidian knife hard into the back of its skull. The thing convulsed, jerking, then lay still on its belly, its cheek against the stones. Its face concealed in its ragged hair. A movement like a sigh swept through the water carriers.
No blood seeped from the wound. Regina’s arm tightened around Flora’s shoulder. She lifted her eyes from the corpse, fixed her gaze on the men in the street.
The man holding the knife was breathing hard, and he remained bent over the corpse, the blade still sheathed in its skull. His chest moved as he drew in great breaths. He had done the thing quickly and with an efficiency that spoke of an easiness with killing. Still, even the space of time since the dead first began lurching along the riverbanks this last winter hadn’t been enough for a man to let go entirely of the ancient taboo against defiling one of the bodies of Rome’s dead. The other man hefted the cudgel onto his shoulder and clasped the knife wielder’s arm, squeezing briefly. The tender gesture seemed an anomalous thing in that street, where those two scarred and armed men leaned over a heap of decrepit and slaughtered flesh.
The men were brothers, not by blood but by society. Theirs was the nearest of the crossroads brotherhoods, whose members included an assortment of veterans whose pay hadn’t quite emerged from tightly locked state coffers (or had been squandered on drink), manumitted slaves who’d once served as bodyguards, and former professional assassins who’d been discredited and could find little work. They had in common wounded lives and a hunger for coin, and they extorted high fees from the insula owners in return for “protection.”
The man with the knife tried to wrench the blade from the creature’s skull but found the blade lodged deep; with a grimace, he shoved his boot against its back, then jerked the blade free. A few of the women hid their eyes; most didn’t. The corpse rolled slightly, half exposing its face beneath a veil of filthy hair. At the sight of that face, the brother with the knife made no sound, but his hand that held the knife began to shake. After a moment he spoke in a low voice to the other crossroads brother, who answered back in an arguing tone. They debated quietly for a moment. Then the brother with the cudgel cursed and turned to the women, that crowd of both free and slave, with their wide hats and their water jars. “Follow me, see? I’ll get you to the fountain. Move. Now.”
He gestured furiously with his cudgel, then strode back down the street. The women began to follow; Regina helped Flora move along the edge of the street, with an insula’s wall at their backs.
The silence that had fallen over them had broken; they were all whispering now.
“We’re going to be dead soon.” Flora looked up at Regina with watery eyes.
Her heart raced. “No, we’re not.”
The old grandmother clutched Regina’s arm with a grip that startled her, and rasped her words as Regina helped her along; the younger woman couldn’t take her eyes off the dead thing on the stones.
“When I was a girl,” Flora wheezed, “our insula had a pear tree. Great juicy pears. Juice’d run down my fingers. One time a boy kissed it off them. Gone now. Boy, pears, everything. Chopped down. No fruit, hardly no bread. And some of us as hungry as—as that.” With her other hand, she stabbed a thin finger at the corpse. “Won’t be long now.”
“Come live at our insula,” Regina urged, not for the first time. “We have bread there.”
“I know. Grandson’s gone before, brought it back. Kind, your father. Like an old cypress he is, branches spread over you, giving his shade. Up on the hill, the people with gardens have their praetor, and you down here have your father. But you can’t fit all of us in his insula, dear.”
“Someday we will,” Regina whispered, her tone passionate, though the whites of her eyes showed as she watched the still figure in the street and the guardsman standing over it. They were past it now; she was looking over her shoulder. In a moment they would file around the curve in the street, and it would be out of sight. Yet she didn’t feel safe. She wanted to be back in the insula; the longing in her was fierce for a wall around her, a high wall and solid, and one of her choosing. It took all her will to turn her eyes forward and help Flora on over the broken and treacherous stones.
It took a few moments for all the women to file past the corpse and follow the crossroads brother around the curve of the street, for they flattened themselves against the wall of one of the two facing insulae, giving the fallen body a wide berth—all except for one woman, plump and gray haired, who walked up to the corpse, gave a contemptuous snort, and stepped deliberately over it before walking right down the middle of the street.
Eventually the street was empty. There was only the lone crossroads brother, still standing over the corpse, knife in hand, an anguished look on his face. He crouched on his heels and reached for the thing’s hair. Hesitated a moment, then drew back his hand. Then, suck
ing air in between his teeth, he gathered up the thing’s filthy hair in his fingers and lifted it free of the face.
He looked stricken. Long moments passed as he gazed at the face of the dead. He covered his mouth and chin with his hand; his eyes were moist. Perhaps it had been someone of his blood, a sister or a cousin. Perhaps a past lover, a warm, living woman he’d once held in his arms and kissed, who had whispered secrets into his ear and listened to his. Perhaps it was only someone he’d known as a youth, some girl he’d played ball with in the atrium on hot afternoons and whose dead, rotted face recalled long-neglected memories that hit him now with the violence of fire or flood, reminding him of things lost and things not quite gained, and of the sewage of time that carried everything downstream and away.
He let the hair fall, concealing the face, then he clasped his hands tightly and stayed crouched there. The tears in his eyes didn’t spill. He just sat looking at the dead woman, weighted to the ground by the horror of it. He didn’t notice the honking of geese or the murmur of the Subura about him, or the slow, dragging footsteps of one of the dead lurching into the street behind him out of a dark alley. It approached stiffly, its head bent to one side on a broken neck, its hands half-lifted, ready to grasp. The thing moaned, low and desperate, as it reached the crossroads brother, and the man turned then, with wide eyes. In the moment it took him to pull himself out of the past and lift the Numidian knife, the thing had bent over him, grasping his shoulder in one hand and his hair in the other; even as he brought the knife up with a yell, its teeth tore into his neck.
