by Stant Litore
Polycarp bolted awake on his pallet and rolled to his side. His bedclothes stuck to him with his sweat. He gasped for air, then got his elbows and knees under him and pushed himself up, ignoring the groan and cry of his aged body. Stand. A true dream—that had felt like a true dream. And the beetle had been it, emblem of truth.
Panting, he got to his feet. The scent of burning wheat and flesh still stung his nostrils.
A clamor at the door. Knocking. It sounded so loud in his ears. He pushed away the last trailing horrors of his dream, drew a blanket like a shawl about his shoulders, and stumbled to his door, which opened on the insula’s narrow atrium. He pulled it open with a yank that nearly sprained his wrist.
“Marcus?” He squinted against the light from the oil lamp the youth held. “What is it, child?”
“Julia’s gone!” His eyes were wide. “She must’ve left before we locked the insula, and—”
“Where’s Regina?” With the dream still lingering in the dark behind him, and his joints screeching their anguish inside him, Polycarp couldn’t keep the sharpness from his tone.
“I’ll get her, father—”
“I’m here.” The small, short woman called from her open door. She was in her nightdress, but she looked alert as she stepped out among the atrium’s grasses and lilacs.
Above them, on the second, third, and fourth stories, a few faces peeked from their windows. Polycarp swallowed his alarm. “Quietly, daughter. Come inside.”
Regina came to the door he held open, and they both entered. Marcus set the lamp on the bare floor by Polycarp’s pallet, then knelt. Regina shut the door quietly, and the moment the door snicked shut, Marcus began talking, swiftly, as though to make a wall against fear, a wall made out of words. “There are so few of us. And now they’ll know where we are, and they’ll come, and—”
Polycarp lifted his hand. “Marcus, go to the larder.” In the face of this peril, they would need courage and a strong reminder of who they were. “Bring me tomorrow’s eucharist.”
Marcus nodded jerkily, jumped to his feet. In a moment he’d vanished through Polycarp’s one other door, which opened on a surprisingly well-stocked larder. It was possibly the only well- stocked larder in the Subura, and in a very real sense it was Polycarp’s life work. Any coin that fell into Polycarp’s hands, he soon translated into bread and meal to sustain the population of this midsized insula, as well as the hungry who came knocking at the door sometimes at dusk, offering their labor in return for food—or simply pleading.
Polycarp rubbed his temples for a moment. “What has happened, daughter?” He feared he already knew.
“Julia is gone. She informed. Marcus and I are sure of it.” She spoke tersely. She often did. Her dark hair she wore in a bun, and she paid little heed to cosmetics, which in any case she did not need: she was without doubt the most striking woman Polycarp had ever seen. To apply no kohl to her eyelids belied her Eastern heritage, but she wished little remembrance of the past, either of her own person or of her people. Her years in Rome before Polycarp found her had been years of suffering, and from them she had learned to dread wearing signs of her beauty.
Polycarp took in her words now with reluctance and fatigue. Informed. Such things had happened before. But not in this insula.
“Father, at first we thought the dead took her.”
He looked at her sharply.
She nodded. “There were dead in the alley on the insula’s north side, earlier. Six of them. They were—feeding—on one of the crossroads brothers. One of the brothers!” She paled as she spoke of it. “You didn’t see them, father, it was during your noon rest. They—they were tearing—things—entrails—out of his belly, and—” She paused.
He gave her time to gather herself; he folded his hands and prayed with his eyes open, his lips pressed together. Vivid before his eyes were the wasted cities and the fire in the grain. The empty houses where the dead waited behind silent windows, and no living things breathed or moved.
He would not let that world come to be. When the last day came and the sky rolled back at the sound of a trumpet, it must be the living, and not the dead, who lifted their arms and greeted his master’s return.
This year, Polycarp had often come upon one or two dead in the streets and done what he could. A hush always fell when Polycarp confronted one of the shambling corpses, and afterward the citizens of the Subura parted to let the father pass, their eyes warm with awe. Polycarp had been watchful since the losses of the last winter. Seven or eight dead had attacked another insula, one farther upriver, where the holy widows kept their chastity and their own larder for the feeding of Rome’s abandoned—particularly the Subura’s children, the many without mothers. Breaking through the doors, the dead had overwhelmed the few who’d sprung up to defend the widows: a slave wielding a broom, a few unarmed patrician youths who had taken to visiting the Subura to aid the widows, and an elderly woman who took up a knife from the kitchen and barred its entrance, growling as loudly as the dead themselves. The dead had bitten many that night; Caius Lucius’s guardsmen had not been far behind, burning the insula and several others near it, with the dead and the living within. During the assault and the torching, the guardsmen had found at least one youth from the upper castes there, which had frightened them. They hired informants now, seeking to know who in the Subura was speaking with people of the hill slopes.
Polycarp took a deep breath. The holy widows had been a community of mercy; their loss was a deep wound, one that hadn’t really closed.
And now things appeared to be getting worse. A crossroads brother had been overwhelmed. Had been eaten. Not by one or two dead, but by six. Perhaps the crossroads brothers had left too many streets unwatched—those streets where the landlords of the Subura, who were themselves starving men, could no longer pay the brotherhoods’ fees. With a chill, Polycarp wondered how many dead were walking out there.
“It is something I never wish to witness again,” Regina said quietly. “Vergilius wanted to fight the dead, and Marcus wished to wake you, but I stopped them.”
“You should have wakened me,” Polycarp said quietly. Faintly, he heard Marcus opening cupboards in the larder.
Regina looked down, hiding her eyes.
Polycarp sighed. “You mustn’t fear as much for me, or for the insula, Regina. We have to fear for the people—out there. Now those dead will be elsewhere, feeding. We cannot simply let them wander on, restless and devouring and unreprieved. If we do that, why are we here?”
Regina gave one brisk nod. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Tell me the rest, daughter.”
Regina took a breath. “When we realized there were dead in the alley, we set a watch at the door. Piscus didn’t come home. So we checked the rooms. All of them. I got the key and opened up their apartment, and neither of them were there, but their larder had been emptied, and many of their clothes were gone. They left,” she finished simply.
Polycarp swore under his breath. Marcus would have looked shocked if he’d been able to hear from the larder, but Regina did not. She did look shaken, and pale. Polycarp reached for her and grasped her arm, putting as much strength into his voice as he could manage. “We will move, daughter. It is not the first time.”
“We’ve grown too big to move.” Her voice was very quiet.
“Nevertheless—” He stopped.
Clear in his ears he heard the words from his dream.
Stand, Polycarp.
He clutched his shawl tighter about his shoulders. Was this what the Anointed One had meant? That he must not move? If so, he could well imagine what fire was coming—the fire of execution pyres, lit by Roman guardsmen. His lips thinned. The red beetle had settled in the burning wheat. He had never ignored it before.
But in the dream, there had been many burning. Who else would suffer?
He thought of Julia’s sharp voice and Piscus’s silent manner and the large eyes that had earned him his nickname, Fish. Ah, Julia, Piscus
, why?
“You are right,” he said. “If they informed, then guardsmen may be here tonight, or in the morning. We cannot move everyone in that time, not without doing it visibly. And if there are still dead near the insula, it would be dangerous to try to move so many. We must stand whatever is coming.” He looked to the larder, listened for a moment to the rattling of wood as Marcus fetched the communion cup. Marcus was so young. They were all so young.
“I have feared this day,” Polycarp murmured.
“Father.” Regina’s voice was low, urgent. “We can’t know what Julia and Piscus have told them, whose names were reported. Maybe the Romans know only that there are some of us here. We can burn or bury the scrolls, and the cup—”
“No,” Polycarp growled. “If some of us are to burn, let us do it as who we are. Without the cup and the breaking of bread, we are nothing.”
Regina seemed about to say something, but whatever it was she held back, for Marcus returned from the larder with a small basket and a flask of wine. The aroma of baked bread was faint, for the bread was a day old. Still, it was this bread, and the scent nourished Polycarp. His senses sprung awake at last.
“We are not crossroads brothers,” he said. “We desire not Roman pax, order and safety, but eirene, peace: lives woven together into a fabric beautiful and tough that cannot be torn or unraveled.” He sighed. “Julia didn’t understand that.” He considered Regina. “You and she were close,” he said.
Regina glanced up. “Not close.” She appeared to be choosing her words with care. “We shared a—a few words, sometimes. Neither of us had children. I worried for her.” She closed her eyes a moment, then opened them, and they were hard. “Now she is gone, and we are still here.”
“Yes. We are still here,” Polycarp agreed. “Come. Let’s set aside our fear and our grief, for a while.” He glanced at Marcus, and the youth hesitated, then handed him the basket he held. He held the youth’s eyes a moment, saw his fear under tight but fragile control. Young Marcus. Polycarp had grown fond of this fearful but desperately earnest boy. Less than a year ago, the youth had woken them all by pounding on the door of the insula. An illegitimate scion of one of the great families on the Palatine and raised among almost unspeakable wealth and privilege, in his boredom Marcus had fallen in with one of the rowdier bands of Palatine youths and gone carousing in the Subura for a lark, the night before he came to the insula; somehow he’d become separated from the others. Whatever had happened to him afterward, or whatever he’d seen, it left him shaken and changed. When Polycarp opened the door that next morning and saw the youth standing there disheveled, his face smudged with dirt and sweat, the young patrician blurted: “I am Marcus Antonius Caelius. They tell me you are trying to help Rome—make her better than she is. Even the Subura. I want to help.”
Polycarp had blinked at the boy, only half-awake. The name was known to him, and he was having difficulty understanding the youth’s purpose in standing at his threshold. The boy was clad in a finely made toga, the regalia of a patrician, its elegant folds speaking of dignity, its white color speaking of an ancestry that the patricians chose to believe was in part divine. This whiteness could be achieved only by bleaching the cloth with urine collected by fullers from the Subura’s inhabitants, an irony that occurred at least to Polycarp, though perhaps not to many patricians, whose slaves took the togas to the fullers’ shops and brought them back so that no patrician ever had to smell the urine of his inferiors. Only by using the forgotten castes and keeping that use invisible could the patricians maintain the illusion that donning a toga conferred on them the dignity and half divinity they wished for, or that the performance of walking the Forum in their togas was anything more than just that—a performance.
In any case, Marcus’s toga may have been an immaculate, patrician white the day before, but now the cloth was smeared with the grime of a night spent in the Subura, stained with a reality that had become, overnight, terribly visible to him.
Polycarp considered the boy. “How do you wish to help?”
Marcus just shook his head, as though bewildered at himself. “Just—help. I don’t care how. However you need.”
“Can you repair broken walls?”
“No.”
“Can you cook?”
“No.”
“Can you weave or sew?”
“No.”
Polycarp looked the boy over. His skin was soft; possibly he had never even dressed himself. But he had no slaves with him now. “If I hand you some of our scarce funds,” the father said quietly, “can you go to the market near the Fulvian Cistern each day and bring back bread and wine, and any fruit that doesn’t look too rotten?”
The boy flushed. “That is a slave’s work!”
“Yes, it is.” Polycarp regarded him without letting his face show his mood. “We are all slaves here, young Marcus. Slaves of the One God who wishes to repair a broken city and bring peace to the living and the dead. He has bought us, we are his.”
Marcus gazed inward for a long moment, and then something passed across his eyes. “I don’t mind it.” His tone went solemn. “The work. I won’t mind it. All my life, I’ve been hungry—so hungry for my life to mean something. I think down here it might. Last night there was a—a child—starving. Her ribs—” Helplessness in his eyes; he wasn’t able to get the words out.
“I’ll send someone for her,” Polycarp said softly.
“I don’t think they’ll find her.” His hands were shaking. “She ran from me. She isn’t there anymore.”
Something ached in Polycarp, seeing the appeal in the boy’s eyes. In their own way, the men and the women of the Palatine needed his larder and the teaching of the apostles, no less than the famished lives in the Subura did. Those who fed no one could feel as empty, as unfull, as those whom no one fed. As Polycarp swung the door wider and stepped to the side, a light of gratitude lit in Marcus’s eyes.
“Come in, Marcus,” Polycarp told him, “and tell us what you saw.”
“Father.” Marcus’s voice was low as Polycarp took the basket. “The guardsmen might be on the way, even now.”
Polycarp considered that as he lifted the cover of the basket and drew out a soft loaf. The bread was no longer warm from the oven that it must have left that afternoon; it was cool to the touch. “They might be, Marcus. But the Romans tend to do their violence in the open, by sunlight. In any case, our God is the same at night as he is in the day. I think we should remember that.”
He lifted the bread high in both hands, though his hands shook and he couldn’t keep them still. He prayed silently a moment, then murmured for the others to hear, “We who live do not nourish the dead. Our dead nourish us. On the night of his death, Yeshua, the Anointed One, took bread and broke it.” Quickly, cleanly, Polycarp tore the loaf in two. “He said, ‘Take, eat, for this bread is my body.’” One half he handed to Regina, the other to Marcus. Marcus lifted the bread in both hands to his mouth and nibbled at it. Regina tore hers in half and handed one half back to Polycarp. There was a shadow in her eyes now, and Polycarp’s throat tightened. Gently, he touched her cheek with his fingertips. “Take, eat, daughter,” he said softly.
She looked up, and after a moment she nodded slightly and smiled. Though faint, her smile appeared to change her eyes to the color of a summer pool. Polycarp found himself reminded of a favorite pond of his youth, one alive with frogs and vibrant weeds and adorned on both its surface and its pebbled floor with rich sunlight. Regina lifted her bread and began eating it. Polycarp watched her eyes, and with his gnarled, bent fingers, he tore off little pieces of his own bit of bread, one after the other, and brought them to his mouth. The taste of it filled him. He wet each piece in his mouth, chewed a few times, and swallowed. He felt the softness of Regina’s hand brush his—one of those small comforts a person offers another that are nevertheless mighty comforts, because they foreshadow the blessedness of the new earth that is to come.
Yet the touch troubled him.
An old warmth lit in his body, one he hadn’t felt in a while. He didn’t know why it was kindling now—perhaps it was the sweat and dread of his dream, and his body’s need to feel alive and virile. Perhaps it was because of what he’d glimpsed in Regina’s eyes when she gave him that smile.
If the Romans came, he at least would be seized. Even if he were to succeed in concealing or sheltering the others, which seemed unlikely, this could be his last night as a free man. Regina appeared acutely aware of this. He saw her hands tremble. There was so much in her heart that she had never spoken aloud, so much he would not acknowledge.
He reasoned with himself as he ate. With this bread, I take into myself the body and the sacrifice and the love of our master. He has called me to do a task, a task that has become too large for me, it is true. But if I am to stand fast and do it, I must not allow myself distractions. I must permit this woman to remain a daughter to me and not a distraction. Else I shame our master and fail this task.
For a few moments, they ate silently. Polycarp felt Regina’s eyes on him, and lifting his head, he returned the gaze. She looked away. At last he reached into the basket for the skin of wine and found that with the bread in his body he had the strength to lift it; Marcus reached in and took up the little wooden cup—wooden, for their master had been a carpenter—and held it steady as the old father poured the wine. Polycarp listened to the splash of it in the cup; the scent of it filled the little room with a hint of places far beyond this life-crammed Subura—vineyards open to the sun and wind, and quiet lakes beside which berries grew. It made him smile. He corked the wineskin and placed it reverently back in the basket, and covered it. Marcus handed him the cup. Polycarp’s voice was stronger now as he lifted it and spoke the words of their rite.
“And he took up the wine and blessed it, and said, ‘Take, drink, for this wine is my blood, spilled for you in a new Covenant with God. Do this as often as you are together, in remembrance of me.’” Gently he lowered the rim of the cup to his lips, sipped, then handed it to Regina. Again her fingers brushed his; he felt the warmth of them. She was a little flushed, and the soul he glimpsed through her eyes was troubled with many things. Hunger for a man to hold her but also for a father to shelter her, he could see that, had always seen it, though never had it been so near the surface of her eyes as tonight, and that concerned him. But there were other things there too. Fear—understandable. And shame, which he did not understand at all. After a moment she glanced down and sipped the wine.
