by Stant Litore
We must live lives of unstoppable hope, Polycarp told himself. That was the only way. Even if we cannot see above the wheat. Even here, in this place, where the walls of cramped buildings obscured people’s sight of each other and of God’s open sky and God’s near presence no less completely than might the wind-tossed stalks of a harvest field. Even here, we must hope.
Polycarp clenched his teeth and stepped forward, lifting his hands, one gripping the corpse’s throat, the other taking it by the shoulder. Others closed around him, their hands grasping at his clothes, their mouths reaching for him in a hunger too profound and unanswerable for them to voice it in any sound more articulate than the moaning that rose, breathy and loud, from deep in their bellies.
BRITTLE LIVES
SEVERAL MINUTES later, the dead lay about Polycarp crumpled and still, at least twenty of them, the flickering light of the oil lamp casting wild and careening shadows across their slack faces. The father swayed on his feet, like a tree chopped near the root; then he toppled and lay with his forehead to the stones. Regina let out a cry from the door to Polycarp’s chamber, and the oil lamp she held tumbled from her hand and shattered in fragments of clay; the light went out, and everything in the alley was dark, the dead reduced to silhouettes. She froze, her hand whitened where she clutched the door.
She called to him softly. “Father!”
She heard him groan in the dark; the sound of it went right to her heart. As her eyes stung with tears, she ran from the door, darting up the alley to where he’d fallen, the grimed and smeared surface cold against her bare feet; she stumbled over the body of one of the dead and cried out, then caught herself on her hands. Everything in her blood screamed at her to run, before the thing she touched could twist and seize her ankle in its hard, inescapable jaws.
She had the sense, the terrible sense, that those dead might stand again, at any moment. But they lay still, they all lay still.
Crawling forward, shaking, she found Polycarp prone on the ground and knelt by him, taking him quickly in her arms. His chest was moving; he still breathed. Gently she ran her fingers over his face, his throat, his arms; he wasn’t bleeding, he hadn’t been bitten. But he made no response when she whispered, “Father, father.” She clutched him fiercely to her, and her eyes burned. Overcome with the terror of the alley and the wonder of what she’d seen.
It had happened so fast, so fast. The corpse at the door had fallen, slipping to the side of the threshold, and Polycarp had stepped over it into the alley to confront the others, moving as unhesitantly as though he were walking to the market. Regina had stood in the door, fighting her own urge to hide, unwilling to leave him. Her lips still warm from kissing him, her heart in turmoil. She had never seen him use the Apostle’s Gift before, and she hadn’t seen what he’d done to the corpse at the door; it’d been hidden by Polycarp’s back. She’d gazed out into the alley in the wavering light of the oil lamp, and she couldn’t breathe for wonder.
Polycarp had moved among the dead with an intensity and grace, as though he were dancing. He laid his hand on each one, as gently as a parent blessing a son or a daughter. Each time he touched one’s shoulder or its head, he gazed into its eyes. The first time, Regina gasped to see a living spirit flood back into those murky, dead eyes. For a moment a middle-aged woman gazed out through the eyes of the corpse, her eyes raw with regret and remembered pain. Polycarp held the woman’s gaze a brief moment; then she let out a slow sigh and crumpled to the stones of the street.
Polycarp did that with each of them, his eyes deep with sorrow. He seemed to have no fear. One grasped his shoulder, pulling him back; he touched its hand and glanced back at it, and then a young man was gazing back at him. The man breathed a soft moan—not the hunger moan of the prowling dead, but the exhaustion-and-relief moan of a man letting go of a burden too long carried. With that sound he slipped to the earth and lay still, no breath stirring inside his gashed-open and half-eaten chest. One of the dead had gone for Polycarp’s throat; he had caught the thing’s neck in his hand and looked steadily into its eyes. Even as that one slid to the earth, two others seized upon Polycarp’s arm, pulling him toward their teeth; the father simply touched them both on the head, looking in the eyes of one, then the other, as if witnessing and accepting each one’s confession, in no more time than it would have taken to shout. As though each one’s spirit had been bound deep within its body with chains of hunger and was now released at Polycarp’s touch, escaping the body in a death sigh.
Regina had trembled as she watched from the door, her heart beating with a purely animal fear at the nearness of the dead; she could neither swing the door shut nor step through it. At the extremity of her fear, her face darkened with shame and anger. She was no Roman patrician bred on milk and water, to tumble from her chair at the first sight of something unsavory. Of Rome she may be, but of the Subura, where knives, not gossip, flashed across dinner tables. And her ancestry was Syrian, of a people whose bones were strong as the bones of the hills in which they lived. She bore old lines on her back, a savage record of what could be witnessed and what could be survived. The oil lamp shook as Regina’s hand trembled, but she did not faint.
Now it was over. Her gorge heaved at the reek of the dead around them. In the dark of the alley where she knelt with the dead motionless about her, as restful as the bodies on their shelves in the Catacombs, Regina laid Polycarp gently to the stones and rested his head on her lap. Polycarp’s head felt light, too light. The sight of his face shocked her, and she stared at him, the defiled dead abruptly forgotten.
In less time than a Roman hour, new wrinkles and crevasses had been carved into his cheeks, deeply, as though a sculptor had attacked his flesh with a chisel and a fine-edged knife. The skin about his eyes was sunken, and the shadows of the alley turned his face into an ancestral mask, an image of the ancient and honored fathers. His eyes were closed.
He looked old—truly old, for the first time.
“Father,” she whispered, holding his head between her hands.
He hadn’t been bitten.
He was alive.
He stirred slightly and began to murmur under his breath. He took no notice of her. His lips moved soundlessly and swiftly in prayer.
Something opened within her, a great well of helplessness, and she stood at the edge but refused to topple in. Squeezing her eyes shut against tears that she utterly rescinded and denied, she rocked slowly, caressing Polycarp’s dry cheek with her hand. After a moment his lips stilled. His chest rose and fell. She drew in a breath, wondering if he was asleep. He looked it. Surely he had earned his sleep. She held his head, forgetful of the dead who had attacked or the Roman guardsmen who might. Caring only for this man, her father and her refuge, whom the night had nearly destroyed. She felt a little less fragile, seeing him sleep.
She had watched him sleep once before. On the first night after she’d been freed, the night when she’d discovered that she was still capable of loving. At first that had been a terrible night; she’d lain awake on her cot shaking, her gaze fixed on the ceiling with its peeling paint. Everything had felt alien to her—the air in the room, the mattress beneath her back (thin, yet far better than what she was accustomed to—and clean, it was clean), the even thinner light from the window looking out on the atrium. The father, she knew, slept on the other side of the wall; once, she heard him rise and move about. She stiffened then, certain that everything she’d heard and seen and felt that day had been only delusion, as she’d feared, and that in a moment the old man would come to her with dry, grasping hands and demand what all men demand. But he only paced back and forth in his little room, and after a while she heard mumbling—words too soft to make out, if words they were. Perhaps he was talking to himself, or to his God. Then the sounds stopped, and there was silence. She dared not move.
As she lay there, an agony of suspense and a horror of that silence took hold of her, until her palms were sweating. At last she couldn’t bear it; she got quietly
to her feet and went to the wall. Pressed her ear to the plaster. Listened. She could hear each distinct beat of her own heart. She could hear the oceanic song of her own blood. But nothing else. No footfall, no stuttering snore. She bit her lip, holding back an urge to cry out, to shriek, to hear what reaction her cry would bring. In her nightshirt she tiptoed to the door—the inner door that opened on the insula’s cramped but lush garden atrium. With a gentle push she swung the door open, grateful that its hinges were well oiled. She slipped out, pressed her body to the wall between her door and the father’s. Her heart pounding. Searching the higher windows with wide eyes, her shoulders tensed with memory of the beatings that followed an excursion from one’s cot.
But the night was quiet. A crescent moon had just risen over the roof of the insula; its light lay soft as milk on the leaves and closed buds of the garden. All the windows were darkened and silent; unlike the home of her former master, this was not a place that encouraged carousing after dark. Unable to keep her hands from shaking, Regina slid along the wall to Polycarp’s door, hesitated, then touched her fingers to its handle. There was no window to peer into; only the door permitted any sight of Polycarp’s chamber. Now her heart was violent in her breast, her mouth was dry. Praying that Polycarp had the hinges on all his doors oiled, she nudged the door open and slipped in.
She saw his shape—surprisingly small in the dark—curled on the pallet inside. Like a small boy, his knees drawn up near his chin. A blanket tossed aside and rumpled, but still tangled about one foot as though spurned in the anguish of a sudden dream. She’d left the door open a crack, and a thin line of moonlight lay across Polycarp’s legs.
He was sleeping. Just sleeping.
The whole earth seemed to slide out from beneath Regina’s feet; she felt as though she were falling from a great height. Slowly she lowered herself to her knees, hardly breathing. She kept her gaze fixed on the outline of the man on his pallet, on the slow rise and fall of his breath. He hadn’t stirred when she entered; he didn’t stir now. Whatever dreams had visited him, he’d dealt with them in silence without outcry, and was now at rest.
Regina sat, drew up her own knees, hugged herself tightly. Everything that had happened this day—it was too much for her. Only this morning, she had been shivering in the street, her mind lashed by the pain of the welts on her back, by the shame of her nakedness. Waiting only for the next one who would use her. Now she watched this old man breathe. Her eyes were adjusting again to the dimness, after the moonlight; she could see his face, softened by sleep. He was not so old, not truly; whatever he had witnessed in life had carved savage lines about his eyes and lips prematurely, even as what she’d witnessed had left her own back marked.
He had demanded nothing of her this day. Nor had the few others she’d met in the insula. A younger man who lived on the second story had assessed her for a few moments with his eyes, but as he might assess a woman he wished to court, not one he wished to purchase. That had been a new and exhilarating and frightening moment for her, but this moment terrified her far more. She’d never sat beside a man who demanded nothing of her. That realization hit her fully now; she trembled in the dark. Drawing a shuddering breath, she reached back, ran her fingertips over the welts between her shoulders. She could feel them even through her nightdress; the soreness of her skin lit with fresh fire at her own cautious touch, and her face twisted in pain.
What was she?
What would it mean for her, to be the kind of woman who could relate to a man who demanded nothing of her?
She thought of women of the Subura she’d seen in the streets. Some were broken and pitiable, or small and wretched, but others walked proudly, though the clothes they wore were threadbare and little better than those of the slaves that worked in their homes. They walked proudly because some at least of their time they could devote to things of their own making or their own choosing.
Some few of them had never been beaten.
This day, she’d taken a new name, a free woman’s name. When she was a child, her parents had named her Theodora, a “gift from the gods”; the slavers who’d abducted her kept the name but raped it of its intended meaning, using it instead to emphasize her body’s beauty when they brought her to a private sale. The master who purchased her there shortened the name to Dora, tearing away syllables even as he tore away her history and the last of her childhood. Dora was a brief name, a diminutive name, a slave’s name; it simply meant “a gift.” As a slave, she was property. She might be gifted to whomever her master pleased; she could not gift herself.
But Polycarp had freed her and asked that she take the name Regina. “Queen,” it meant, a giver of gifts: no longer a gift but a giver, and one who might give herself where she chose. The meaning of it did a violence in her heart: what would it mean to live in fulfillment of this new name? She no longer knew what she was.
The gentle strength of this sleeping man was unfamiliar and frightening; she didn’t know how to respond to him. For the first time in several years, a thousand memories of her childhood home flooded into her, moments of tenderness from her grandfather and her mother, before the flesh thieves had stolen her away. Father Polycarp had touched her cheek this day, after wrapping a cloak about her in the street; her grandfather used to do that, when she was a little girl. No one had touched her so, since. She lifted her own hand to her face now and found it wet.
In the alley among the crumpled dead, Polycarp’s eyes slitted open at last, pale as moonlight on water. For a moment he just drew in breath and air, and gazed up at her. “Beloved daughter.” His voice a hoarse croak.
She bent over him and brushed her lips across his brow. She felt his breath near her ear, then the whisper of his voice.
“Our lives are—so brittle,” he rasped.
“Shhh,” Regina whispered, cradling his head.
The father lifted his hand, gripped her fingers suddenly. His eyes focused on her; the breath labored in his chest, as though it took great effort to speak coherently after what he’d done, what he’d witnessed. The intensity of his eyes held her; though he was clearly fighting to voice these words through a fatigue that grappled with his spirit, his halting voice held the same passion and fierce intent with which he’d so often addressed the gathering in the Catacombs. She returned his tight grip on her hand. “Some things can never—be atoned for. Can only be—absolved, or—not. Without—that grace—all rotting, we are all—” His breath hissed between his teeth, as though for a moment it hurt him even to breathe.
“It’s over,” Regina whispered. “They’re all at rest. You gave them the Gift, father.” She tried to find words for the fullness of emotion inside her, so much fullness, so much she couldn’t hold it. “You saved them.”
“All of them?” he whispered.
“Yes, father.” She lifted his hand, pressed the back of it to her lips. After a moment she glanced up, looking out across the alley filled with unmoving dead. Above them, a few furtive stars shone in a narrow crack of sky between the buildings leaning in on them. She thought of sleeping Rome in its thousands all about them, and shivered. “I have to get you inside,” she whispered. “We have to hide you.”
“No—there is no more hiding.” The soft hiss of his breath. “Have to—stand.”
“Father—” she gasped.
He gave her a small, grim smile, his eyes opening again. They were clearer now. He placed his hand over hers. At the tenderness of it, the dry warmth of his touch, she blinked back hot moisture from her eyes. She shook her head, appalled at what he was asking of her. Panic began to rise in her, panic at the shattering of everything that had held her and kept her safe these past four years in the insula, these years serving Polycarp. The sight of him sleeping, the need to care for him, to give him refuge—the gentle weight of his head in her lap—all of this had held the panic back. Now her body went cold with it.
“Daughter. The guardsmen—need to find me. And not you.”
“I’m not leaving you
.”
“Regina.” He looked at her, his voice very soft. The pain in his eyes made her gasp. “If you love me, daughter, go inside. Leave me here—to talk a while with God.” His eyes were still so pale, as though every inch of his body was in pain—though he lay so still. He lifted his hand to touch her hair, and she leaned her cheek into his fingers, her lip trembling. “Our God,” he breathed, holding her eyes with his, “is the same here—at night—as he is by day in our rooms. We must submit when called, daughter. We must each of us submit, each of us surrender. We are all the redeemed slaves of God. Else—else, we are—” He gasped for air a moment; his gaze became intense, holding hers. “The gathering is as vulnerable to vices—pride, self-interest—as any other group of people. Daughter, hear me. Without our submission when called, we would become only a—only a mirror—of the Palatine. Only another kind of Senate. We must remain a gathering of servants. We must choose to live in this way.” He breathed open-mouthed for a moment. “I know what I must do, daughter—and I must ready myself for it. But you—I would have you safe.”
“No,” she whispered, “no.” His God asked too much! He asked of all of them too much! “I can’t—” She forced the words out, something inside her tightening. “Father!” she pleaded. “Polycarp—”
She’d never called out his name before.
She felt that everything in her, all the pieces of herself that she’d moored so carefully, were coming apart on dark waters. The insula had long since become her refuge, and Polycarp in his acceptance of her had become her refuge also. Now both refuges had been violated—by the dead, by Julia’s betrayal, by the guardsmen who might even now be coming down the narrow alleys. She gave a low, moaning cry; she might lose everything tonight, everything that meant anything to her. They might all be taken or be separated forever. These moments might be the last in which she would ever see Polycarp—how could she leave him?
