by Stant Litore
Polycarp’s fingers curled in her hair a moment. His pale eyes searched hers, and his cracked lips parted. “You are strong,” he rasped. “Strong as a queen. The others—they need you, Regina. Go now.”
She took his hand, turned the palm toward her and kissed it, her eyes squeezed shut against tears. Her shoulders shook with silent weeping. “Don’t,” she whispered.
“Regina, Polycarp, what’s happened?” A call from the door. She jolted.
Marcus’s voice.
Marcus. And the others. They needed her.
Strong as a queen.
She squeezed Polycarp’s hand once, then let it go. She shifted the father’s head from her lap and rose to her feet. She’d chosen to serve Polycarp and his God. It had been a free choice. Now they needed this of her. Her hands trembled. She wiped her eyes, took a steadying breath. Polycarp beside her was getting wearily to his knees; he turned from her, facing up the slope of the alley, then lowered his brow to the stones, an obeisance to the God he needed to speak with. All about them, the dead lay still, their spirits at rest, the bodies that’d been left behind no more now than driftwood washed into this alley by Death’s river.
Regina’s breast swelled with the force of her love for this man, her need for him. He meant to stand between the gathering and the Roman guardsmen, even as in the last hour he’d stood between them and the dead. How determined, how immovable he looked as he knelt among the dead, readying himself for whatever might come. Other men she had known, slave men and free: the tight-lipped and impoverished men of the insula who were so reluctantly rediscovering and reclaiming joy as they shared bread. The master who had enjoyed her body, lashing her at a whim or merely to distract himself from whatever pain or frustration he felt inadequate to face. These had been men who were not up to the task, men in whom there was no refuge, only the threat that if they wanted something of her they would bruise her in taking it, and that if she wanted something of them, they would crumple when leaned on. But Polycarp would never crumple. He could not be moved.
She could not let him down. He’d never let her down.
She walked to the insula door. Marcus waited there, and she could see Phineas and Vergilius behind him; no one had brought another lamp. She swung the door closed, with a last glance at Polycarp kneeling in the dark of the alley. Her hand trembled once, then she shut the door. She turned toward them, the wood of the door at her back. Their eyes were round with need in the dark.
“The father is at prayer.” She cleared her throat. “Phineas, get a lamp.” Her voice didn’t waver, though she felt unsteady as a shrub with shallow roots in a high wind. “Vergilius, get everyone into the hiding place. Marcus, will you go to one of the second-story windows and keep watch tonight for the guardsmen?”
Only when they had gone from the room—Marcus giving her arm one brief squeeze before hurrying out—only then did she lean her head back against the door, closing her eyes and shuddering, biting her lip against the cries that she would not voice.
Regina had gone, but Polycarp knew he was not alone. He could hear the labored breathing of the great, dark-haired behemoth that crouched some distance behind him in the alley. He did not know if the creature approaching him had any corporeal reality, any more than the red beetle he had seen in his dream and several times in his waking life. But the messages brought by the beetle and the behemoth were real. Messages of truth and hope from the beetle, messages of fatigue and despair from the lumbering, misshapen beast that had now prowled into the alley. The messages they brought were desperately real, perhaps so real that they required some corporeal being to carry them, even if otherwise no such being would have existed.
As the thing approached, Polycarp did not look up but kept his brow pressed to a pavement stone smeared with offal and dried urine; he kept his eyes closed not from fear but from a weariness so poignant it wore at his bones. To give the dead rest, he’d needed to look first into each one’s blind eyes and find beneath the gray scratches the remnant of the soul locked within the shambling corpse. He’d needed to witness each one’s secrets, each one’s sins, each one’s suffering—all that each one had loved and feared and regretted in their brief lives. Only then might he absolve them and set them free, and let the corpses slide lifeless to the alley floor. But he had needed to see each one’s heart not through a glass darkly—the way he saw Regina’s heart, say, or Marcus’s, or even his own heart—but as clearly as God saw, without any veils to protect his mind from the pain of another’s.
Our hearts are such small things. There is in the world both too much beauty and too much suffering for a human heart to hold.
Polycarp sobbed quietly as he rested on the mute stones, listening to the heavy paws and the wheezing breaths of the thing in the alley. Despair had come to visit him, as it had often done in the years since he came to Rome; each time, it was a little harder to send the beast away. Most often he heard the tread of its paws on nights such as this, after an encounter with the dead.
You are old, the creature whispered. You are old, Polycarp. And there are too many hurts to heal. You are not sufficient for this task.
“My master is sufficient,” Polycarp murmured, too tired even to feel revolted at the grime he felt against his lips as they moved.
But you are here, and he isn’t.
No. Polycarp braced his hands against the stones. I am his hands, his feet. I must stand up.
He swayed a moment, looking out at the tumbled bodies. In a moment of wild imagining, he pictured them placing their hands to the street, even as he was doing, and lifting themselves up. Not as slouching, unsteady dead, but as the living called back.
Called back. Any spirit could be called back.
Go away, he told the behemoth. I have no need of you and no time to listen to you, nor to the Adversary who sends you. You are unwanted here, as unnecessary as these bodies, these empty shells that carry no life.
The creature Despair did not fall silent, but Polycarp kept it now at the edge of hearing. He needed to reflect on what had happened in this alley. How severely it had tired him, how vulnerable it had left him. He needed to pray, and think, without the pollution of Despair’s whispered enticements.
He’d never considered having to face so many dead, more than a few at a time.
During the recent year of the pestilence, whenever Polycarp had come upon the dead in the Subura, he’d refused to conceal himself, though the approach of them made his palms sweat. Once, he’d stood in the path of a tall man lumbering down a street in the still dawn while the living peered out from their windows. The thing’s entrails had spilled from a gash in its belly, and it was trailing them slickly behind it; Polycarp had stood and forced himself to breathe calmly even as the thing sensed him, raised its one unbroken arm, and let out that long, deep moan of unquenchable hunger. But as it lurched toward the father, it tripped in its own innards and lay moaning and twisting in a tangle of them, right in the street. Polycarp approached it slowly, then bent and touched the thing’s side with his hand, saw the soul come back briefly into its eyes. Then the corpse went still and rested as silent as though it lay in a mausoleum and not on the grimed stones of a Suburan street.
Polycarp had sat looking at the body for a few moments. Then he bent to the side and vomited up into the street.
Another time he’d been walking home and had heard screams; he’d broken into a run, pouring on speed until he feared his heart would burst within him. He was no longer made for running. Others in the street ran the opposite way, away from the screams rather than toward them; someone hit him and he fell. He might’ve been trampled if there’d been more people. But there were only a few, and then the street was empty. He rolled onto his side, got up onto his hands, and looked up the street. There, at the open doorway of a jeweler’s shop, two dead were feasting on the small, still-twitching body of a man who may have been the proprietor; his fingers wore many rings. They had dragged him half out of the shop and were sharing his arm between the
m, biting deep, then tearing the flesh away in long, bleeding strips. They did not look up as Polycarp got to his feet.
The two dead were a woman, young, and a small child whose eyes were as gray as the woman’s and who tore into the flesh as ravenously.
Polycarp prayed without words as he walked toward them.
Afterward, when he was done, he crawled into the dark of the jeweler’s shop and leaned against a great, wooden case that doubtless held locked within it many items of beauty. He drew up his knees like a boy does and rested his arms on them. Bowed his head. The dark was quiet and comfortable; he wanted rest as he had never wanted anything before. He had never even wanted a woman so much. He hadn’t even wanted God so much. He just closed his eyes and breathed. In a while the tears came; he felt them cooling as they slid down his cheek.
Until this night in the alley, he had never experienced a greater strain than his encounter with the two dead at the jeweler’s shop. When he’d set one hand on the child’s shoulder and one hand on the woman’s, and they had turned growling to bite at him, he’d looked into their eyes and seen—
He ached with what he’d seen. His breath caught in small sobs. He rocked, hitting the jewelry case with the back of his head.
When the child’s spirit had looked out of his hungering body and gazed for the briefest of instants at Polycarp, the pain the father witnessed in him had been terrible. But the woman’s suffering had been worse. In her eyes he’d seen the anguish of a woman who’d never been told she was beautiful, had in fact been told that she was of utterly no worth, unloved and unvalued by everything that breathed, whether mortal or immortal. The whole earth could fall through the hole in her and would not fill it. She had poured wine into that hole, and the touch of men, and even her nightly rape of that small boy—the one whose body Polycarp had found feeding on the jeweler beside her. And when the dead had come to her room, she’d put up no struggle as they fed on her and the boy. She had poured them into the hole too.
Bad as that hour had been, this night in the alley had been far worse. Too many dead who’d never had the chance to say farewell to their own pasts, to the tears that were never shed, the joys that were never consummated, the hungers that were never satisfied. His heart had not known there was so much pain, so much loss, in the earth. His head had known, but his heart hadn’t known—not the way it knew tonight, after witnessing the unveiled anguish of twenty souls.
Polycarp bit down against a groan, strove to get his knees beneath him again, then had to stop, gasping for air. His ears caught a new sound in the alley, but he ignored it. For the moment all that mattered was the air moving in and out of his body. He tried to form words for a prayer and finally cried out in silence, pleading for respite. For recovery. For strength.
The sound—the new sound—intruded again. He focused on it.
A clinking of metal.
Muted, yet unmistakable in the stillness that had fallen over the tenements since the dead appeared.
Relief settled over Polycarp’s shoulders like a warm blanket. Thank you, master. Thank you. One more test now, one more task, then I can rest. He heard the scrabbling of unsheathed claws on the stones as the dark beast fled the alley, running not because of the clink and clatter of Roman breastplates but because, as Polycarp breathed more evenly, there was no longer opportunity for it to speak.
The clinking grew near, then fell still, and a hard voice spoke above his head.
“We seek the insula where Polycarp hides. Is this it?”
Polycarp began to laugh softly, helplessly. Lifting his begrimed face from the ground, there among the bodies of the dead, he lifted his hands too. He reached for the pair of manacles the guardsmen held ready and for the rest from care they offered, even as in an earlier year of his life he might have lifted his hands toward a lover’s face.
REGINA ROMAE
IN THE hours since the guardsmen had taken them from the insula, sleep hadn’t come for Regina. She sat with her back to the rough boards of the wall in this prison shed she’d been tossed into, still in her nightdress. Her eyes on the locked, wooden door. Marcus’s head she cradled in her lap; from time to time the boy moaned in the dark, stirring fitfully, and she stroked his hair. Having someone to care for helped her breathe calmly, kept her from shuddering into sobs. She had to keep it together.
There were bruises about Marcus’s face, and Regina was careful not to touch them. While Regina and Vergilius had hurried the tenants from the first two stories into Polycarp’s larder and into the hiding place, Marcus had been watching the alley from a high window. Seeing two of the guardsmen take Polycarp away, he’d wanted to run after them—he’d even taken up a dagger; she hadn’t known he owned one. Regina had cried out to him to stop, to come to the hidden cellar; but he’d run to the door, reaching it even as the guardsmen burst through.
Regina had thrown herself before them, to give Vergilius time to shut the secret door in the larder—but it was too late. The guardsmen had come too soon; even as they rushed through the door, one of them caught sight of movement in the larder and shouted out; then Marcus was at the guardsmen with his fists, and they beat him until he lay still. Regina tried to bar their way into the larder with her body, though her heart hammered as they came at her; one seized her arm and she raked his face with her nails. With a bellow, he flung her to the floor on her back. Though she kicked at him as he bent, he shoved his knee into her belly and lashed her wrists before her with cord that bit savagely into her skin. She screamed; the man struck her. Then she lay still, dazed a moment, her head ringing with the pain of it—a terrible, gray moment where she thought she might pass out, where she didn’t know whether it was a guardsman pinning her or her old master who used to crush her to the floor with his right hand balled into a fist, his left reaching for her body. Regina’s breath came in short, frantic gasps.
The guardsman’s voice came to her through a roaring in her ears—orders he was barking. “That larder. And every room. Search them.”
The others. The others—they needed her. Marcus lay unmoving by the door.
“They’re just tenants.” She forced the words out, tasting blood on her lip.
“Maybe,” one of the other guards snorted. “And maybe this is a rats’ nest.”
“We’ll know quick enough,” the guard who pinned her grunted. A blade scar sliced from his left temple across his nose to his jawbone on the right, giving his face a kind of savage beauty. His eyes were weary but without pity. The hardness in them dulled the edge of Regina’s panic, enough for her to breathe. Her old master’s eyes had been cruel, watery, self-indulgent. The eyes of this captor held only self-interest and determination. This man might strike a woman to quiet her—or strike a man for the same reason—but he would not do so for the pleasure of it. For a moment Regina focused on getting her breath back, regathering herself, as the guardsman turned his head toward the others. “There’s no one here with more than a fist to swing. I’ll take these two now—already sent Quintus and Lucullus back with the old man. You follow with whatever else you find. Praetor can sort it out. Tenants.” His voice was thick with derision.
The other guards stepped past her into the larder, and she screamed and tried to throw herself at them. But she couldn’t get out from under the man’s knee; her hands were trapped so tightly that her wrists burned as she struggled. The man who had her snarled and got to his feet. He’d left a length of cord free when he tied her; now he dragged her to her knees using it, and his hand gripping her arm pulled her to her feet. Then he was pulling her behind him, leashed like a slave new from the docks, even as she screamed for the others to stay concealed. He tossed Marcus’s limp form over his shoulder, took a firm hold on the leash, and pulled her stumbling out the door and past the restful dead. The insula fell behind, and the guardsman took them through the narrow streets of the Subura, uphill toward the richer parts of Rome.
Regina knew many residents of the slum must be watching from their windows, and she hung
her head, hiding her face with her hair. She burned with the shame of being dragged so, in her nightdress, through the streets in the deep dark before dawn.
She tried to tell herself that she was Regina Romae, a deaconess of the gathering in Rome. But as she stumbled over the uneven stones, bruising her toes, and as her hands went numb, she didn’t feel like Regina. She felt like Dora—that slave who’d so often found herself bound, helpless, in another’s power. Something welled up in her breast and her throat, a desire to beg, to do anything to be freed of this terrible, biting rope. That feeling terrified her.
As they left the Subura, her captor stopped a moment. Regina glanced over her shoulder and gasped. Dark shapes were stumbling out of an alley and lurching into the street behind them. One of them let out a deep groan. Marcus stirred faintly on the guardsman’s shoulder.
“Gods,” the guardsman breathed. “So many. Gods.”
He cursed and dragged her forward at a run, yanking on the cord so violently that she sprawled to the stones, smacking her shoulder and crying out. At the cry, more moans erupted behind them—down the street, but too near, too near! Regina kicked out in panic, tried to get her feet under her; a hard hand gripped her arm and wrenched her back to her feet.
Then they ran.
The stones battered her feet; she sobbed for breath. Her side burning, she began to pray to Polycarp’s God. She cried out the Phos Hilaron in frantic Greek syllables; in this terror it was all she could think of. Phos hilaron hagias doxes athanatou Patros, she cried as they ran: a prayer for light and joy on a street where the buildings leaned so close that running over the stones was like racing through a tunnel in the earth.
