by Stant Litore
It was after midday. Outside that door, six dead were feasting on a crossroads brother in the street.
Piscus did not come home to the insula that day, and for a time Regina and Marcus stood by the outer door talking about that, though Regina didn’t share her altercation with Julia. There was a small slat in the door that could be slid back to let one’s eyes look out into the narrow Suburan street, and from time to time, Marcus or Regina slid it back and peered out—but the dead had gone hours before and had dragged the remains of the crossroads brother with them. There was still a smear of blood on the stones.
When everyone else had returned to the insula from their day’s work—all but Piscus—Regina took her copy of the master key (only she and Polycarp had copies, he as father, she as deaconess), and she went from room to room, knocking gently, unlocking and peering within if there was no answer. Marcus accompanied her for the first two stories, walking beside her in his tunic and brown cloak. Those were Suburan clothes, rough and torn through much use. Polycarp had loaned them to him the day Marcus first took a room in the insula. That had happened about two months after Marcus’s initial visit to the insula door; in those two months, the young patrician had walked many times across the Subura to the market and back and had seen more things that had shaken him to the heart. At last, he went with Regina and Vergilius to one of the gatherings on the Sabbath, and when they returned to the insula he did not say goodnight to trudge his way warily back up the long slope to the Palatine. Instead he stood in the doorway of the insula beside Polycarp and Regina and Vergilius and slowly stripped off his toga, folded it neatly, and set it aside. Standing in his loincloth, he gazed down on it. “Sell it,” he said hoarsely, lifting his eyes to Polycarp’s. “I am no longer of the patrician Caelii. I am Marcus Antonius only. I cannot go back. When I am in my father’s house, I am only playing my part; nothing is real. I will share my bread here instead. I’ll spend what coin I have in my pockets to lease a room here. Father, set me to any task; I cannot go back. Not after what my eyes have witnessed.”
So Marcus walked beside the deaconess now in simpler clothes, and with a simpler name, one stripped of a portion of its history, a history the boy repudiated, one he chose no longer to need or desire. Watching him from the corner of her eye, Regina found herself considering him with new respect. She’d considered him a child, a boy. Yet when he’d shrugged off his toga as another youth might shrug off a child’s blanket, surely he had matured. She wondered why she hadn’t thought about that before. Like herself, he had found a name, one he could own with dignity as a free man.
There was a girl, Ariadne, on the fourth floor, who still wept herself to sleep some nights because a tanner’s son she’d wanted had married another. Ariadne had confided in Regina a week before, and Regina had told her that there were always other men and that all pains, even the most brutal ones, dull with time, becoming only scars, only memory. Now Regina cast a glance at Marcus, considering. The two would look well together. Marcus’s steady heart and unwavering devotion would heal the girl’s wounds. And Ariadne’s demure demeanor—almost too respectful even for a girl of Rome—would help Marcus find his backbone. He needed someone who would look up to him, even worship him, reminding him of his worth. And Regina smiled slightly; she knew something that Marcus probably wouldn’t know for some time: under the daintiness of that girl there was a hot fire in her spirit, one that would emerge at first in little flickers and at last in flame, once she felt truly secure in another’s love. And she was intelligent. It was likely that whatever they did in life would be done together—that she would offer ideas and the drive to see things done, even as she made sure her husband felt strong and sufficient as a god.
Regina caught her breath. What was she thinking, imagining such a match? Marcus was a patrician. Of that caste with the gods of Rome in their bloodlines. Her lips thinned. A patrician might take a woman of the Subura for a slave, a slut to be cast aside after use to sleep on the floor by his bed, but never for a companion. A slow anger lit in her breast, making it difficult for her to breathe—then cooled as she glanced at Marcus again, saw the plain clothes he wore and the hardness in his eyes at odds with the soft lines of his face. No, he was not a patrician. He was Marcus. They’d eaten bread together. That hardness in his eyes meant the things he’d seen had taught him that the blood in his veins was less important to who he was than the Spirit he’d accepted into his heart. Everything else—from the clothes he chose to wear to the skin and features God had clothed him in, were only trappings that might either provide example of or disguise the man he truly was in his heart.
Regina’s face heated with shame. Marcus had never looked askance at her or at any of the tenants, even the poorest. How could she think this of him, that he would spurn a Suburan woman because she lacked patrician ancestry?
She straightened and knocked at the next door. In any case, this was no time for matchmaking. As she exchanged a hurried word with the tenant who opened at her knock, ensuring all within were safe, worry bit at her insides. Who else might be missing, besides Julia and Piscus? And would there be any answer at the baker’s door? There was no body in the atrium; the woman had not leapt from her window. That brought little relief; terrible and unnecessary as that death would be, it was surely better than being devoured by the dead, perhaps to rise later herself in irrevocable hunger. And the thought of it brought Regina a pang of guilt; she’d been avoiding thinking about Julia, even playing matchmaker in her head, but she needed to speak with Father Polycarp about Julia.
Regina found herself taking her time, her steps methodical and precise, not hurrying. Reluctant to reach the fourth story. Marcus began to fidget, getting antsy beside her; he clasped his hands behind him as if to control it. That brought Regina another small smile, another small distraction from her worry; whatever name he claimed, doubtless some things about Marcus would always be patrician, such as his concern for his own dignity. Yet she was certain his heart belonged no longer to the Palatine Hill but to Father Polycarp and his God.
“Please take the third floor, I’ll take the fourth,” she told him. There was no need to make him wait for her reluctance. “Just take note of any doors that don’t answer; I’ll come to those.”
He nodded eagerly and moved toward the stairs. Regina let out a sigh and resumed her own walk. She finished the last couple stops on this second floor and then moved to the stairs herself; she could hear Marcus’s rapid steps on the walkway around the third story.
As she moved along the fourth floor, each door was answered, a weary or a delighted or a troubled face peering out at her. A few words exchanged. “Peace and grace to you,” Regina would murmur after a moment, then move on. As she checked the rooms, one door after another, her tension tightened in her breast. Everyone was here. No one lost, no one eaten. But no one had seen Julia and her husband come in tonight.
The Subura was not a place where men and women chose to be out after dark. Not, at least, if their business in the alleys was the kind that might be conducted by daylight.
Julia’s door was the third from the end. As before, it was ajar. Regina felt a chill as she lifted her hand and gave a couple of hard raps on the thin pine of that door.
No answer to the knock.
Dread clenched about her heart.
“Julia?” she called.
No sound within. On the story below, Marcus’s voice was lifted as though he were arguing with one of the tenants. He probably wasn’t, though—he was often animated when he spoke, and especially when he was nervous.
“Julia?”
She threw open the door with a cry. “Julia!”
She wasn’t there.
The room was empty.
Regina went in and stood by the table, her heart in her throat. Too empty. The room was too empty. There were empty shelves. The closet doors were open, but there were only a couple of worn tunics on the rack within.
She’d packed.
Julia had packed her thing
s. She hadn’t thrown herself from the window. She hadn’t been eaten by the dead. She’d planned this departure.
She’d—
A low, keening cry rose in Regina’s throat. She pressed her fingertips over her lips and leaned back against the table. Everything came together in her mind like so many leaves swept by the wind into one pile against a low wall, the pile growing until it might almost overwhelm the stones. I was domina of my own house—I want it back, I want it all back—I’d do anything for that—this whole place is a travesty—I have no intention of staying here.
“Oh Julia,” she moaned, “what have you done?”
In the shed, Regina wondered where that woman was now, and what things she and her husband had told the praetor and what things they’d held back. Perhaps they’d held nothing back. Perhaps even now Julia was walking through a villa garden, one of those opulent gardens she’d craved, with flowery vines hanging from orchard trees, and great marble sculptures of fauns and naiads. Or perhaps she was reclining in a veiled palanquin, visiting one of the Forum markets to buy new house slaves with her thirty pieces of silver. All of those luxuries, all of those trappings—Julia would use them to tell herself who she was. In the Subura, where Regina and Marcus had found their names, Julia had been without family or identity, cast out from the life she’d valued; perhaps she had felt nameless, only a face among a thousand faces.
If only Regina had realized what Julia had been talking about—what she’d been, in her way, trying to confess to her. Regina moaned softly and leaned her head back against the boards of the shed wall. Her breast felt tight. Difficult to take full breaths in this small shed, this holding place. She closed her eyelids and forced herself to breathe evenly. She’d been sold, like a slave—they all had.
She tried to think. She was the keeper of accounts, the observer and solver of problems, the deaconess. She had to think. What would become of them? Who had been arrested from the insula—and were they to be questioned or were they to be condemned? Where had they taken the father—what had they done with him?
Her eyes burned. Marcus stirred slightly, and she stroked his hair soothingly, holding in her tears. She knew at least one thing. Marcus lay beaten in her lap, and he needed her. She didn’t know who else had been arrested, whether those in the larder had been taken, or some of those who’d hidden in their upper-story rooms while the guardsmen slammed through the door, or only herself and Marcus. But for Marcus Antonius at least, she was still the deaconess of the gathering in Rome. He was hurt, and he needed her.
At that moment there was a rattle in the lock.
Her eyes shot open.
It seemed to take a long time for the lock to turn, and as the rattling continued, her heart pounded. For a moment she was terrified that the lock wasn’t turning because it was one of the dead at the door; memories of the night before fell on her. She watched the door, unable to see anything. Then the door swung open, and two men stood there. Living men. She stiffened, recognizing one—the man who had touched her. Framed in that door, he looked large as a Celt. The other she hadn’t seen before; he was young, only a few years older than Marcus. They gazed in at her, perhaps taking in the sight of the smudges of dirt on her face, the bruise on her left cheekbone, and Marcus unconscious with his head in her lap.
“Look at the whore,” the larger guardsman muttered to the other.
Regina’s throat tightened. “I am a prisoner in this shed,” her voice trembled, “but I will not take that name. I am a free woman.”
“You.” The guardsman stabbed his finger at her. “Are a cultist. A desecrator. You’ll shut your mouth and let us have what we came for.”
She stiffened, her pulse pounding in her throat. Quickly she tensed up, ready to fight. Something in the back of her mind started to scream as the large man moved toward her, his companion staying by the door.
But as he bent over her, he only seized Marcus by the arms and hauled him to his feet. The boy was still breathing raggedly, but his eyes fluttered open. The man began to muscle him to the door.
Regina leapt to her feet, her fright of the moment before forgotten in the face of a more terrible fear—that of separation. “Where are you taking him?”
The guardsman glanced over his shoulder, smirking at her. “He’s a patrician, isn’t he? Imagine that, skulking about with you rats. This little fellator will stand on the jury. Maybe he’ll remember who he’s supposed to be.”
Regina spat on the guardsman’s cheek; the man backhanded her. She fell to the straw, her head ringing, the left side of her face burning. She lay dazed. She heard Marcus moan her name faintly, then a scuffling sound as he was dragged from the shed. The slap of the door against the jamb. Then it was dark again, with only the thin shivers of light through the chinks in the wall.
Alone, Regina curled up and sobbed quietly.
This little shed was too much like that cargo hold she’d been chained in—so long ago—on the tossing sea journey from Syria to Italia. The clink of the chains, the leering faces of the flesh thieves who’d stolen her, crowding her into the hold with other Syrian girls they thought desirable and marketable. Their hands on her body, grasping and bruising her. That whole journey had been a fever, a nightmare; her mind hadn’t been right afterward, not for several years, not until Father Polycarp had come, clothing her and granting her a room to herself, with an open window.
Now that room was gone. All those she’d cared for and who’d cared for her were gone. She was as alone here as she’d been in the galley. The soiled straw scratched at her arms.
A while later, she lifted herself on her elbows, rolled, sat up. She breathed slowly. Wiped at her eyes with her fingers. She didn’t know what would become of her when night came again. But whatever would be done to her, she would not meet it weeping. Forcing her hands not to tremble, she smoothed her dress, filthied from the streets and the straw. Then ran her fingers through her hair. When the guardsmen came for her, she would be ready.
“I am no whore,” she whispered.
Another rattle in the lock. This time Regina stood to meet it, lifted her chin. She was a woman of Rome and a woman of the gathering. She had reason to be proud.
The shorter guardsman entered, and she could hear a man laughing somewhere outside. He laughed back, then swung the door shut. Then he stood before her and drew aside his cloak; she watched his face warily but didn’t move. He took something out from under his cloak, pressed it into her hand. Her eyes widened as she felt the warmth of a fresh loaf of bread against her fingers. “What is this?” she breathed, searching his eyes.
“You are not alone.” Breathing quickly, the guardsman took her other hand and drew with his finger against her palm the shape of a fish.
It was all she could do not to cry out. “Thank you,” she gasped. She tore a small piece of the bread away and chewed it for a moment. The bread was still soft and moist, and easily swallowed. “Where is he? The father?”
“Another shed, not far. He is well; sometimes the men at his door can hear him praying. They say there will be a trial tomorrow.”
Regina felt she might faint. She swayed slightly on her feet, clenched her hands around the bread. He was alive. Father Polycarp—her Polycarp—was alive. Thank God. He was alive.
“Can you take a message to him?”
The guardsman was silent a few moments, then shook his head. “I don’t believe so. I have no business at his shed, and I could pretend I’d come to gawk at the prisoner, but—they wouldn’t let me in.” He paused. “I should tell you there are nine others. In the other sheds. Nine from your insula. I don’t know if you knew.”
Regina’s heart missed a beat. “Others,” she whispered. “Who?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know their names. I will see if I can find out.”
Regina reeled at this news that confirmed all her fears. Others. Nine of them. How would the gathering survive this? And what would become of those who depended on the gathering? What about the men who came to
Polycarp’s larder to get bread for their children? What about old Flora, whose water jar Regina carried?
Yet Polycarp lived. And there was a friend among the guards.
Regina tried to gather herself; so many feelings pounded through her that she felt dizzy. She tore the loaf in half, handed one half to the guardsman, and for a few moments they ate together in silence. The man brought out from beneath his garments a tiny flask and held it, waiting. This kindness was unlooked for; it was something to hold onto. It occurred to her to doubt him, to suspect some trap for her. But Roman justice needed no trap to convict her. She had to trust; this sudden hope was too sharp in her breast.
“Thank you,” Regina breathed, between swallows of soft bread. “This is of God.”
“It is,” the guardsman whispered. “I’ll bring you word—what news I can—before the trial begins.”
She placed her small hand over his. “Don’t endanger yourself.”
He shook his head. “No. No danger. If I come in here a few times, the others will simply think I’m using you.” His face flushed in the dim light. “You must cry out, once or twice.”
Regina nodded and sucked in a breath. After a moment she expelled it in a short, shrieking cry. Then another. The guardsman jumped. “How’s that?” she whispered.
“Convincing.” He passed the tiny flask to her, and she took a gulp gratefully, then sputtered and choked for a moment. It held wine, not water; it stung the back of her throat.
“I am sorry for the indignity of this,” the guardsman muttered. “There’s little I can do to ease it without suspicion. A hired guardsman isn’t usually attentive to the needs of a slave.”
Her eyes burned; she risked another sip, swallowed. “I am free.”
“They will choose to believe you are not.”
Regina nodded, handed the flask back in hands that shook—not from fear now but from excitement. “I don’t remember your face from the gathering in the Catacombs.”