by Stant Litore
“I was only there once.” His face lifted. “But I have never forgotten it. The words he said. About the Gift.”
Regina leaned in a little, whispering more intensely. “You are right to help us. The Apostle’s Gift—it is real. I have seen it. I’ve seen what he has done. And the other things he teaches—that we each have a gift, no matter who we are or what class—those things are real too. You are right about me—I was a slave. Maybe I still am, to this day, though I fight my chains each morning. But I too have a gift. I keep accounts for our insula. And you have a gift. One needs only look at your eyes to see it. I don’t know what yours is. Maybe,” she lifted the last of her bread, “maybe your gift is ministering to prisoners.” She smiled. “I only tell you this because you need to know, whatever happens at that trial. His words are true.”
“I believe it,” he whispered. “Cry out again, domina—as though we are finishing our love— and then I have to go.”
She did her best, though her face burned to make such sounds in the presence of a man who was not her lover. But in her heart a warmth and a strength was welling up. Domina, he’d called her. Lady of this house. Though this “house” was only a shed with dirty straw, he saw her within it as its keeper, not as a slave or a prisoner—despite his words earlier. She feared speaking again, for the gratitude in her was so strong it might spill from her in sobs or unintelligible sounds.
This next day might contain any peril. She might yet be beaten and raped. She and those confined in the other sheds might be burned alive or executed in any number of terrible ways. She didn’t know yet what had become of those in the hiding place at the insula—save that nine were in prison sheds like this one. It was possible the Roman praetor might hunt through all the streets and insulae of Rome for those of the gathering. It was possible the hunt could spread to every city in the Empire. This had happened once before; it could happen again. Yet her hands trembled with hope. As long as a Roman guardsman could believe in the Gift and in the message, and bring bread to a prisoner who was without status or citizenship, as long as that could happen, the gathering was alive. In hiding, without refuge, yet fiercely alive. Suddenly she was certain that Polycarp was not weeping in his own shed, that he was standing and waiting for what would come, with that unbending strength of his. Her face flushed; she burned with shame at her vulnerability and her tears. She was the deaconess; Polycarp depended on her. The others in their sheds depended on her. This guardsman, in his way, depended on her. How could she have been so entirely without hope, so lost, weeping in the straw?
“Thank you,” she managed to whisper. “What is your name?”
“I am Brutus Secundus.”
“I will remember it, Brutus Secundus. You are blessed among the gathering for your kindness.”
She tore a small stretch of cloth away from the hem of her ruined nightdress. After wetting it in a little wine from the flask, she began to scrub at her face and arms with it, cleaning the grime from her skin.
“I’ll bring a cloth later.” Brutus considered her a moment. “In fact, I’ll bring a bucket of water if you wish it.” Seeing her look, he added, “It won’t be hard to explain. You’re from the Subura. I need only tell the other guardsmen that I want my slut washed before I have her.” He flushed in the dark. “Forgive the words, domina. We are rough men, and most of Rome looks down on us, even when Rome needs us. So we are used to looking down on the Subura; it can feel good knowing there is someone for us to look down on. It is not how I think, but it is how most of us think.” He cast a glance at the filthy straw. “Yet no one should have to sleep in this. I’ll bring water.”
She understood the gift he was giving her, and why he’d used those words, though they had made the doors in her memory shift a moment on their hinges. My slut, he’d said. Brutus was offering her protection from the other men and asking nothing in return. Even as Polycarp had done, housing her in a room in his insula.
She nodded, her eyes moist. “Thank you,” she whispered again. “Thank you.”
Though she stood in peril for her life, though she’d been separated from Polycarp and Marcus and all the others, for the first time since the moaning of the dead in the alley she felt some measure of safety.
She let the dirtied cloth fall to the straw; she didn’t dare tear away more of her dress. It was some relief, at least, and though she still smelled, with the sudden cleanness of her face she felt more capable, more sufficient for the needs of the day.
She drew in a breath, met Brutus’s eyes. “I know Polycarp is guarded. If you have opportunity to speak to the others, please tell them that Regina and Polycarp stand firm. Tell them they must stand firm too. Tell them the gathering persists. That nothing is broken, nothing is ended. Please tell them this.”
CAIUS LUCIUS JUSTUS
THAT NIGHT, the night before the trial, silence filled Caius’s villa, dark and palpable. As no one had approached Livius’s room for hours, the moaning within had ceased. That silence should have been a relief, a cool drink after a hot wind. Yet instead, the silence was menacing, a violence on the ears. It seemed a promise of fresh wailing, waiting only for the stumbling of one’s foot to provoke a muffled curse or an unsteady tremble of one’s hand to send a cup clattering to the polished marble floor. Such sounds as these might wake the horror that lay chained behind Livius’s door. The slaves had performed their evening’s duties in fear and now shivered on their pallets, waiting for uneasy dreams to take them.
In the praetor’s study, Caius sat at his desk, his hand making anxious, jerking movements as he sketched the Latin letters of the last order he hoped to give as urban praetor and senior magistrate of the city. His hand had cramped, and now he clutched the stylus with a desperation that didn’t suit the dignity of his office. He had already begun the order over again, twice. Had labored half the night on it. He stopped frequently, his expression grim. In the thunderous silence, he listened for sounds from his son’s chamber, but heard nothing.
Once, he left his study and passed like a shadow through the sleeping villa until he reached his son’s door. He reached for the handle. Stopped. Waited there a while.
Caius’s palms were sweating. He found it difficult to breathe. Horror of what waited on the other side of the door swept through him, shaking him like a fever. It was not grief but raw, animal horror. He felt that whether he turned the handle and went inside (though this he’d done a thousand times before) or turned from the door and fled, either way he would be stuck, body and spirit, into madness—if he did anything but stay very, very still and wait for this horror to pass.
As slowly as the creeping of a snail through the garden, rationality returned. His heartbeat slowed. For a moment he was dizzy; then he leaned against the wall by the door.
The horror would not pass, he realized. It would not end, not ever. Not unless he destroyed the body of his son.
But he could not do that. He couldn’t.
The order he must write awaited, yet he avoided returning to the study. He left his son’s door now and went to the slaves’ quarters, woke one of them with a kick in the dark, sent him to bring wine to his study. Then Caius went and stood in the atrium to wait, gazing up at the stars. He had not looked at the stars for—a long time. Not since Livius had died.
The stars were lovely and cold, and he thought perhaps he had never seen them before, not truly. He gazed at them with his head tilted back, hands clasped behind his back in Roman fashion. Erect and dignified. His throat was tight. He could almost hear Scipia his wife laughing in the garden, as she used to. Grief welled up so full inside him that he could hardly breathe.
Scipia. How different his life was without her. Her laughter and the flash of her eyes had always distracted him from his duty, yet driven him too to excel at it. Tonight, on the eve of the trial, she would have known just what to say to quiet the troubles in his heart.
He had first seen her on the marble steps of the Senate House, wishing her aged father well as he climbed to
a legislative battle over some question of public land. Caius had been one of the younger senators of his faction, possessing little rank then, only the great prestige afforded him by his family name and the dignity of a successful term as a minor official in the northern wars. He recalled standing at the doors of the House, gazing down the steps at that radiant woman, where she stood straight and slender as a statue of Rome on the steps. Caius had never been a hesitant man, and he’d presented the matter to his father in the most direct terms over dinner. A cold and unaffectionate man, with all that mattered to him concealed within an impenetrable shell of propriety and caution, Marcellus Lucius Justus had responded only with a grunt. But that had been enough. At dawn the next day, the older Lucius Justus had walked across the Palatine to the house of the Luculli and had made the marriage arrangements.
For Caius, that had been a year of Fortuna’s favoring; a wedding, the softness of Scipia’s lips on his, and then the miracle of her belly’s gentle growth. In the Senate, Caius had spoken with passion and clarity of the need to return to traditions now fallen into disuse, to preserve the ways of their fathers. At home, he’d prayed beneath the masks of his di parentes and sat long in the evenings with his hand on Scipia’s belly, awaiting patiently some kick or nudge from the child she would give him, the next of his family.
But Fortuna had played him false. His wife’s death at Livius’s birth had meant the absence of any good Roman mother to instruct Caius’s son in how to live a pious life, one of proper respect for the honored fathers and fear of the Roman gods, piety that might have kept Livius safe from the Eastern superstitions that had so infected Rome. Caius himself had little to offer his son; his own father had barely spoken more than a few words to him during his childhood and his youth, and as an adult Caius had found that he was more at ease debating in the Senate or hiring advocates for the Roman courts than he was devoting time to his son at home. Buying a Greek slave girl to serve as nurse to young Livius had seemed a reasonable action to take when Scipia died, but the girl had filled Livius’s mind with every kind of superstition, and Caius had sold her off in a fury before the boy was five. Buying her had been a mistake; he realized now he should have instead remarried, and at once. A quick remarriage would have meant suffering some loss of dignitas, but it would have been better for the boy.
And there might have been other children, if he had.
Perhaps he should still remarry.
He gazed up, his memories bitter within him. How beautiful those stars were, yet how violent and how cold.
A sudden wailing came to him on the night air, and he shuddered, his reflections shattered. The very sound he most dreaded: the moaning of the dead. But it did not come from behind his son’s door. It was muffled by the walls of the villa. Perhaps far away. Sweat ran down Caius’s face. In the night, that moaning brought a terror that could not be reckoned with or disciplined away. By day, the praetor might deal with the rising of the dead as a crisis to be met and addressed with dignity and action; by night, in this home so full of the presence and the memories of his own dead, the cries of those corpses outside were a dissolution of everything a man could be certain of. He should hear silence broken by occasional cries of birds or even a distant hum of human noise from the Subura, if he stepped out into the atrium and listened acutely. Or the sound of the wind in the cypresses on the far slope, above the Forum. There was a certain way Rome was supposed to sound, at night. No more. The wailing of the dead made what lay outside his walls in the dark uncertain. It was as though some wind had come and torn away the city he knew, leaving only moaning, chaotic darkness outside.
There was only one refuge left to him: his study, a tiny, enclosed trap of a space. Where that unfinished order awaited him. He walked back to it now, leaving the garden, and found that shutting his study door and drawing slats down over the window only muted the moans of the dead a little; he could still hear them, faint but persistent.
Before shutting the door, Caius retrieved the small silver tray left at the study’s threshold by the slave he’d kicked awake, and he set it carefully on the desk; it carried a silver goblet filled with wine and a fresh bottle of ink. Caius could remember a time when such obedience and perfect discipline would have brought him pleasure, when seeing a slave leap to perform a task promptly and properly had been as cooling to his temperament as a glass of the best wine in the city. He took no pleasure in it now.
He sat at his desk. Everything was coming apart. The events of the day had speared deep into his chest. That corpse-woman crashing through his door, hands lifted and growling with a hunger to bite and tear apart everything that mattered in Rome. Polycarp’s unapologetic defiance of Roman tradition, And an hour before that, Caius’s interview with the slave the Christians called a “deaconess,” whose words had pried inside him and found where he was vulnerable: his shame at having failed his son and having failed even his wife’s memory.
He closed all of that off inside him, breathed raggedly. Dignitas. Duty. What was the hour? He had to finish writing that order. He reached again for his stylus and ink. Lifting the stylus in his hand, he looked at the small Latin letters his father had carved into it, before Caius was born: the family name. Caius felt the pressure of his ancestors’ eyes, the open, vacant eyes of those dozens of masks, though they hung in his son’s room and not in this one. They had abandoned him, those ancestors, yet still he felt the weight of their demands. Impossible, unanswerable demands.
Muttering under his breath, he hastened to make the small, angular letters of the Latin script on the parchment he’d started earlier. His mouth was dry and his eyes bloodshot; he kept lifting one hand to scrub at them with his knuckles. He did not know how late it was. He labored over the order.
When Caius finished at last, he felt hollow, like bark with no wood inside it, a cypress scored and burned out by lightning. Shaking from lack of sleep, his hands folded the parchment, and he set it carefully aside to take with him in the morning. He rose groaning from his seat and took up the oil lamp from his desk (its reek had filled the small study); he took up also the goblet of wine his slave had brought and which he hadn’t touched yet. Gently he carried both out with him. He had one more duty to perform this night.
For a mercy, the dead, both inside and outside his villa, were quiet. Walking stiffly against his weariness, Caius went first to the atrium, to the apricot tree that stood in the northwest corner with a marble dryad embracing it. Scipia had loved that tree and that dryad, but Caius was too tired now to mourn her. He had burned himself out; he was finished. In another day, everything would be finished. Reaching up, he plucked two apricots from the branches—two golden fruit, August ripe—and, making a fold in his garment, he carried them with him, with the oil lamp in one hand, the goblet in the other.
As in most patrician families, Caius Lucius lived near his dead, and his dead slept near their living; the mausoleum was a great marble enclosure just outside the villa and nearly as large as it. A little path led from the back door of his villa up through lush shrubs and flowering beds to the great marble gate of that place of stillness. Caius murmured a prayer to Janus, god of doors, and a word of respect to the di parentes who had fathered his family, then slid open the gate and slipped into the courtyard of their house.
The garden within had grown wilder than the garden in his atrium; it was overrun with tangled vines and clinging flowers, and the small pond near the path was choked with nenuphars. Unpruned branches overhung the little path that wound among the shrubs and the marble chambers of the dead—all their houses, each with a door shut tightly. The many generations of his dead. Caius stopped at the doorstep of his grandfather’s resting place and looked around. It was not his work to keep either this courtyard or his own atrium tidy—that was a slave’s work. But it came to him suddenly that he had no garden slave to tend his estate. The thought made him sigh. Another failure. How mournful this garden of the dead looked. Untended. He was as complicit as any Christian in Rome in the negle
ct of the dead.
He poured the wine gently, spilling a little of it on the marble steps. Then he set the cup down and placed the two apricots beside it. Wearily he sat on the doorstep but kept his back straight; he was in the presence of his ancestral dead, and though their censure would be silent, here dignitas was more important than ever.
“I let the hearth fire go out,” he said quietly. “The night my son was born. I shamed you. But still I bring you food and wine the night before every Ides and the night before every Kalends, as the men of this family have done for six hundred years.” His voice trembled. “Tomorrow I will seek justice against the man who has offended all Rome’s dead. And once that is achieved, I will seek justice against myself, as I ought to have done months ago. For I also have guilt toward you, honored fathers. I also must make atonement.” He lowered his eyes. “I fear it, di parentes. And I have shamed you too with my fear.” He hadn’t had the courage to end it before. Death without leaving behind a son to tend the hearth fire for him could mean eternity as a wandering, wasted spirit. But he knew now that he was already living as a wandering shade. Unrestful death could not be that much worse than this faded, empty life—and it would have one crucial difference. Having cast himself upon his sword, he’d have regained his honor.
He glanced about the garden, his eyes bleak. “No son will bring food and wine for me, and no scion of our family will bring you food on the next Kalends. I hope my actions tomorrow will bring you rest and atone for my breach of duty this next Kalends; I know there will be no rest for me. I ask for your blessing, di parentes. I have never needed it more.”
Caius lowered his head, as a son receiving a blessing. A breeze caught at the cypresses along one wall; he heard the soughing in the high branches. There was no moaning of the dead.
