by Stant Litore
Noon came to the Subura, and with it the sweltering heat of narrow spaces packed with too many living bodies. Men rested and napped briefly. They drank watered wine if they could. Within each walled insula, any children that lived there moved about in the atrium, laughing and shrieking if they’d been fed, or sitting beneath stunted shrubs and daydreaming if they hadn’t, or weeping if they’d been beaten or had witnessed their mothers being beaten. There were quite a few insulae where laughter could be heard at midday, but there were also insulae that brooded silently in the heat.
In an upper-story room at one of these apartment structures, the laughter of two girls in the atrium below could be heard through the window, but those sounds of joy brought into the room only a bite of bitterness, like winter air seeping through a crack in the wall that has never been properly sealed, a draft that shivers its way through skin and bone. On a pallet in the room, a man lay with his eyes open and his hands clasped too tightly for him to be resting. The traces of flour on his hands and arms declared him a baker, though he was unusually lean for one. He had burned off any fat he might have had with worrying, which he did so deeply and so often that his body interpreted his anxiety as a particularly strenuous kind of exercise and responded accordingly.
Beside him, a plump, energetic woman was stuffing clothes into a haversack with a vigor most people reserve for shoving sandbags into a wall against a flood. She was even breathing hard.
“How can you be sure the praetor will keep his word?” the baker asked his wife.
“He’s a patrician, isn’t he?”
She crammed a rolled-up tunic into the bulging sack, then struggled to tie it shut. “Toss me that coat, husband.” She nodded to the peg by the window. “We’ll need to hide this ’til tomorrow.”
With a small groan, he got to his feet and took the coat from its peg, then tossed it listlessly toward his wife; it hit her shoulders, and she sighed and bent to catch it as it slid to the floor. Her husband lay back down, his eyes pale. “I’d rather not set foot anywhere on that hill,” he muttered.
“Fine. I’ll go. In the morning. We can leave when I get back.” She was still wrestling with the ties on the sack; hissing through her teeth, she straightened and gazed down at it for a moment. She pressed her lips together. It wouldn’t do; if she tried to carry that sack over her shoulder, its seams would split. She would have to start over; she began pulling clothing from the sack. They were all such plain garments, light wool or brown linen, all except one gown as purple as a Caesar’s cloak, a hidden treasure at the bottom of the sack. It was her only relic of the past, something she’d been permitted to take to the Subura only because she was wearing it when she walked there. “I’ll never understand why you get the shivers every time I talk about going uphill.” Her voice was sharp. Outside the window, children were still giggling. “My first husband and I had a villa up there.”
“A small one.”
“A villa. That’s more than you’ve provided for me.”
She began arranging bundles more carefully within the sack.
“He threw you out.”
She stopped, her shoulders tensing. Her hands still. A few heartbeats, then she resumed filling the sack, though her hands moved more slowly.
“You’re barren, Julia.” There was a softness in the baker’s voice. “You’re barren, and he threw you out. Your equestrian husband threw you out. But with me you have never gone hungry.”
She kept packing. Her eyes blinked back the burn of tears, then they spilled. Her husband watched her cry with his thin and sorrowful face, but he did not go to hold her. At last she forced the final bundle in, then leaned over the sack and let it out, her shoulders trembling. For once she wept not for the things she didn’t have and couldn’t be, but for the empty hole inside her where a child might have been. Often she’d seen other women carrying their round bellies in their hands as they moved in their slow, waddling gait—or seen them nursing tiny infants at their breasts. Her own were dry of milk, and her womb hollow within her. Hearing the laughter through the window, she leaned over the sack and cried, letting the tears fall on the tightly folded undergarments and bunched tunics, the simple garments that told the world she was a baker’s wife. The low-caste Christians who occupied other rooms in their insula thought her husband something wonderful—a maker of bread. That didn’t hold much weight with her. No amount of fresh bread had filled the hole within her or warmed the cold inside her.
Night fell over the Subura. Quietly, a few doors opened in the dark, and furtive shapes slipped out into the deadly streets, clad in dark cloaks and cowls. They went in pairs, or clustered quickly into small groups for fear of any prowling dead, and stole through the narrow alleys between tall buildings as silently as though they were God’s watchmen come to inspect the world while its residents slept. But they were not watchmen; they were men and women of many ages and occupations, carrying a bit of bread beneath their cloaks, ready to barter it for hope. Those sliding along the sides of insulae on the wider streets found themselves joined by other figures (and they were not few) who had stolen out of homes uphill, slipping down from the villas of the well fed to join the weekly exodus.
The small groups passed through the Subura, heading downriver, until they had moved beyond the ancient boundary of Rome; they darted through the unlit streets between tall and decaying buildings until the buildings thinned and they came to a street that ended in a jumbled cliff of soft volcanic rock. There was a door in the rock face, and it stood open on its hinges; a man waited there, in a dark cowl and cloak like theirs, a torch in his hand. Beside him there was a vat of oil. The man asked a question of those who approached, and they murmured the correct answer, then dipped their torches (if they’d brought torches) into the oil, and the door warden lit them. With a last wary glance up the street, the dark-cloaked figures passed inside, slipping quietly into the Catacombs and down those long corridors lined with shelves on which rested hundreds of silent, shrouded cadavers—the dead of Rome’s lower classes, interred here by families who could not afford a mausoleum on a hill. Those who hadn’t brought torches had to walk in a darkness more complete than the void before God spoke the name of the earth, stumbling frequently over some unevenness in the earthen floor and leaning out a hand to catch themselves, feeling, with a shock, ribs or a long femur against their fingers. With the pestilence in Rome, one could not walk past the shelves of the dead—even these, the clean dead—without trembling.
There were several large caverns in the Catacombs, and the dark-robed people were gathering in the nearest of these. The cavern was packed with maybe a hundred living, men and women of several classes. In the flickering light of the torches some of them held, you could see here and there among the crowd the aquiline nose of the Roman patrician—the revered class, considered by birth and bloodline to be descendants of gods. But everyone attending, even and especially Father Polycarp himself, wore over their daily garments a dark robe and a cowl that most had now tossed back onto their shoulders. The clothes served to conceal them as they crept through the city to the entrances to the Catacombs. But the cowl and robe served a second purpose as well—they concealed class and station. Those gathered here had replaced their various costumes of caste and social connection with this simpler, shared garb. Here, unless you looked for features in a face, everyone was without adornment and without mark of wealth or poverty. Here, all of them were of one family.
Polycarp stood among them; they had made a little circle of empty space about the slab of rock where he stood. He carried no torch, and he clasped his hands behind him; sometimes, late at night, they trembled with approaching age. His voice remained strong, and as the last few, furtive members of the community of the Fish entered from those dark, open gaps in the wall that allowed the corridors to empty into this cavern, Polycarp raised his voice in song, leading them in the Phos Hilaron. It was a hymn to the nearness of God in the day’s last light, a reminder to them all that though they worked in the dar
k, they waited for the sun to return.
As the people sang softly, they brought out from under their cloaks their offerings for the night, for the act of sharing that bound these people together, all these people who met so often now in secret. Few had come empty handed; most had brought bread. A loaf, if they could afford it. If they couldn’t, then something, even if it were only a bite of stale barley bread, perhaps the only morsel they had left to eat. The singing, then the hearing, then the sharing of bread—it was a rite that was becoming familiar through repeated use, though it was unlike anything that had been practiced in Rome before. As they sang they held the bread in their hands, lifted as though each meager piece was sacred. Perhaps for those of them that lived in the crowded, ravenous Subura, all food was sacred. And perhaps those who’d slipped down from the Palatine by cover of dark were relearning the holiness of bread from the passion they saw on their downhill neighbors’ faces. After Father Polycarp spoke tonight and blessed their sharing of bread, they would each break the piece they held, whether it be a loaf or a smidgen, and they would pass the pieces around the gathering, until all had eaten.
“We can feed on each other,” Polycarp had taught them on many such nights, “or we can feed each other and feed with each other.” In the great Games of the Colosseum, the Emperor and father of Rome, paterfamilias of the family of Rome, would give out loaves of bread to the gathered crowds of his children, to assuage the sharpest bite of Rome’s hunger so that the people might not rise in riot. But such bread was given to quiet the people, not to feed them or fill them. Polycarp, a father of this city within Rome, was interested in filling them. He would do so by teaching them to share bread with each other.
“I know that it has become a fearful thing to us, coming here through the dark streets,” Polycarp told them now. His voice carried across the cavern, filling the silence that followed song. “But we must not fear the dead. Fear is a greater evil to us than death; our brothers and our sisters who can’t yet sleep need our pity, not our terror.” He lifted his hands, gesturing at the shelves on which silent corpses rested. “We mustn’t fear the dead. They sleep. Those who now wake and walk can be given sleep. But we must understand—they walk not because they are unfed but because the living are unfed. My brothers and sisters, let the dead feed the dead. Rome builds vast mausoleums, houses grander than the houses of the living, and holds festivals, bringing food to the dead—food no one eats—while in the Subura, Rome’s living starve.” His voice softened, and trembled with the passion of what he had to tell. The cavern became very quiet as the gathering strained to hear him.
“I will tell you a story,” Polycarp said. “Long ago, the first man to be killed by a brother was tossed into a deep pit, his legs first broken with blows of a thick staff. There was water there in the pit but neither meat nor roots, and he starved, famished until he was little more than bones on the ground. It was a hungry and a horrific death. And his spirit could not rest; he rose lurching from the earth, moaning in his hunger. And when his brother came to gloat over the body, the famished dead devoured him, after which the brother also rose, half-eaten and ravenous with need.” Polycarp gazed out, seeing the horror in those many eyes. “It is the hunger of the living that creates the restless dead,” he said. “The dead themselves are here, all around us, sleeping. That is why we meet here, in the dark, among our sleeping dead, to share bread among the living. It is a reminder of who we must feed, if we wish our dead to rest.”
The others’ faces were uplifted, eyes shining in the torchlight. He saw Regina with her eyes alight and Marcus with his face grim but his eyes fierce with a young man’s fealty. Polycarp smiled. He knew that beneath their robes, they each held a loaf from Piscus’s ovens; Polycarp accepted bread in lieu of rent from the insula’s baker, though neither the baker nor his wife, Julia, had yet joined the gathering underground. He let his gaze roam wider; he saw faces he knew from other insulae in the Subura or from the Forum; he saw a young man with one ear who served as a merchant’s stable slave and, standing beside him, a senator’s daughter. His heart warmed. Once, just three or four of them alone would meet here on the Sabbath each week. Now there were at least a hundred each time. Such gatherings had sprung up in cities across the world, meeting in secret places like this, under the earth in old cellars or places of burial. Communication between them was rare and treasured. As Polycarp gazed out at their faces, he found it a thing of great comfort to see so many together in one place.
“Listen to me,” Polycarp called to the gathered brothers and sisters. “I will tell you about the Apostle’s Gift. I will tell you about this thing that God will do through us for the city and for the world. How we will take from death its terror.” His face glowed with passion. “Listen to me,” he breathed. “Brothers and sisters, it is quiet here. No hunger here to distract us. All our lives, we feed on what leaves us hungry, drink from what leaves us thirsting. Because we are always left hungry and always thirsty, we begin to think that those visible objects of our hunger are what we need most. A loaf of bread, a pouch of coins, the respect of others, success, a woman’s body, or a man’s. Or even a person or a thing from times past, something lost and remembered that we crave. But it is not so. These are not what we need most. Our hunger thieves us from our true selves. Like a violent fever, the hunger eats away mind and spirit. In the end, everything that we truly are is gone. Only the hunger remains. Even other men and women are no longer anything but food to us, meat for our desires and obsessions. Then we are lost—unless some other brings a Gift. We cannot recover ourselves alone.”
He gazed out over the gathering. So many faces, so many eyes glinting in the torchlight. The days to come might bring any good or any evil. Some of them might be eaten by the dead. Some of them might be found out and imprisoned by the Roman praetor. Some might face illness or doubt. But tonight, in the quiet of these underground tombs, they were gathered and ready. They had put aside the costumes of their daily lives. They had shared bread. They had opened their eyes and their ears. They’d begun to hope. They dared to hope.
“What is that Gift?” he smiled. “Seeing us, and loving us, as we truly are.”
SOMEONE AT THE DOOR
AT SOME late hour of the following night, in the dream country, Polycarp found himself standing in a city populated by the innumerable starving dead and smoldering with crumbled buildings. With nothing to feed their hunger, no living flesh on which to gnaw, the dead jammed every road and every alley in the Subura; they lurched against each other in their thousand thousands. Never had he faced so many.
They pressed against the walls of the villa in which Polycarp took refuge, a villa with white walls and a pleasant garden in its atrium, high on the Palatine above the ruin of the earth. The door was shut against them, but the pounding of their bodies on the heavy cypress wood was loud, rhythmic, constant. The door rattled and shook, leaping in its hinges. Polycarp took a step toward the door and hesitated, his heart pounding. He did not want to face those lurching, clawing dead; his palms were sweating. Yet the moaning of so many beings torn from life and torn from death—their suffering called to him. He could not stand idle at the sound of such misery.
He groaned and looked up, and, startled, he found the garden gone; instead he stood in a wheat field, the same field he’d known as a child in Thessaly, in Greece. That alerted him. There was some reason why he was here, some message. Something he must pay attention to.
The wheat was high above his head. The stalks tossed in the hissing of the wind, pressing against his body; behind him, distant yet too near, he heard the low wailing of the dead. He shivered, then began to move; he kept glancing at the sky, looking for something—he couldn’t remember what. The sky was unhelpful, as gray as the unclean flesh of the dead. The very sky and earth were defiled.
There were faint voices far behind him, like a wind coming—and also sharp, crackling sounds. He glanced over his shoulder and found that fire crackled through the wheat; soon smoke billowed about
him, thick and choking. For a while he ran from the flames, rushing through the wheat as fear-maddened as a rhinoceros in the Colosseum; his sides burned, there wasn’t enough air for his lungs. He stumbled and in that instant saw on a head of wheat before his eyes a small red beetle, its wings out though it stayed perched.
He stood still, his eyes fixed on that spot of color in the gray wheat.
He fought for breath.
There were noises behind him like beasts crashing through the wheat; a dark shadow rushed past him on the left. He forced himself to look away from the beetle. Glancing behind, he saw the wheat and the sky red with flame and, dark against the flame, running men and women, some of them on fire. Their hair and their clothes burning as they ran, so that they seemed angels in the instant of their fall, messengers of the world’s end. They rushed toward him and past him. The reek of scorched hair and flesh hit his nostrils with a shock. The dead were back there as well, in the wheat; he could hear their moaning. Perhaps the walking corpses also were already burning, even as they hunted.
The red beetle. He had to follow it; it had always led him before. Its wings were out; yet it stayed perched. How could that be? This burning field where the dead and the living went up like torches in the wheat could not be where he was meant to be. Here he would burn, or be devoured.
He tore his eyes from the fire to look again to the beetle. Turning, he found himself staring—with shock—into the eyes of his master. Felt the master’s hands on his shoulders, stopping him. “Stand, Polycarp,” the Anointed One said.
