by Stant Litore
Once, the silence of his own ancestors after a prayer would have chilled him, signifying as it might a removal of their protection over his house. But now he knew there were worse things to hear from his dead than silence.
As the sun lifted above the cypresses and the morning haze, promising the hottest day the summer had yet brought to Rome, Caius stepped down from the villa door into the street between two lines of standing, respectful lictors. He’d slept little and his body was heavy beneath the precisely draped folds of his toga, but at the sight of his lictors he straightened his shoulders. They were a visible reminder of his duty, his last duty to Rome. He must hurry to a brief bath; then he had a shrine to visit and the sacrifice of a bull to oversee, so that the gods would attend the day’s trial at least partly appeased and in a good mood. Afterward, he’d repair to the temple of Justitia, where in a few hours the day’s jurors would be gathering, ceremonially washing their hands and faces at the gate to enter clean into the presence of Justice.
Here, at Caius’s own doorstep, the urban praetor looked out at the gentle curve of the street and at the cypresses that half hid the grounds of neighboring villas. A few other patricians were about; he saw two men in pristine togas walking slowly along the hill and, moving the other way, four bronzed slaves carrying on their shoulders the weight of a palanquin, behind whose colored veils reclined some Roman domina or some daughter of high family. Somewhere a raven called. Everything Caius saw was perfectly placed, perfectly cultivated. Every person he saw wore their clothing well; every tree wore its foliage well, trimmed and lovely. Everything here was as Rome should be, the very Rome he used to serve with love rather than weariness. For the first time in many days, he took a moment’s comfort in this well-disciplined set upon which the intrigues and debates of Roman family and Roman policy were played out. Caius drew in a deep breath, tasting the warm August air; it carried the scent of lilacs from the villa gardens and, beneath that heavy perfume, the sharper, resin tang of cypresses.
Tucked neatly into the sash across his toga was the parchment he’d folded up before leaving his study this morning. That parchment would keep this Rome, his Rome, safe and clean. There must be no more violated villas, no more Roman girls stumbling down the street without a palanquin and without air in their lungs, to claw through the doors of state officials.
“This is the day on which all depends.” He said the words aloud and nodded to his lictors. “Stand tall; look well. Not even a hair out of place. Today, remember that you are Romans attending Roman justice and ensuring Roman peace in a barbarous and degraded world.”
“Yes, praetor,” one of them said.
“The Roman dead rise furious at dishonor.” His face was hard. “Today we will show them that their sons are still worthy of them.”
“Yes, praetor.”
Caius nodded again and stepped forth into the street. But almost immediately he stopped; his heart gave a lurch. Near enough to shout at, a figure had just come around the corner of the villa across the street and was stumbling unevenly along its wall. Its left side fell against the marble, and it stumbled along a little further with its shoulder against the stone.
Caius’s throat clenched; he held back a moan of horror. He held up his hand to halt the lictors.
Caius watched, every sense alert, as the figure dragged itself along the wall. It was a man, young, perhaps twenty. A breastplate on his chest, bloodstained. A sandal on one foot, the other bare. Thick leather. Military grade. But the man carried no weapon. His hair was cropped short, his face pale. There was a bloody wound on his arm.
Caius held his breath; he could sense the lictors holding theirs. But there was no scent of death in his nostrils. The blood on the man’s arm looked fresh. He stared ahead sightlessly, but his skin didn’t have the gray pallor of the dead. The military dress was an oddity.
“Soldier!” Caius’s voice carried across the street.
The man’s head turned, too slowly. Then he left the wall and staggered into the street toward them, one hand lifted, a moan from his lips. Caius tensed. The lictors drew back.
Then the moan became a word. “He—eelp—”
Caius let out his breath slowly. His legs felt suddenly weak; he forced himself not to buckle. “Get him,” he snapped.
But even as a couple of his lictors stepped forward, the soldier missed his step, his body tilting to the side in a curiously graceful motion; then he fell. Cursing, Caius broke into a run, coming quickly to the man’s side. Several of his lictors gathered in a helpless circle about the man; others hung back. Caius’s pulse sped up. He didn’t understand how this bloodied, stumbling soldier had come to the Palatine or why, but this was a Roman soldier dying in the street. He reached the man where he lay panting on the stones, then stopped sharp, everything in him going cold, as his eyes found the wound on the man’s arm.
The wound was a half-moon circle of teeth marks.
As he had in that hour when a dead patrician girl had broken into his station by the temple, Caius took note of details. The man’s face was flushed with fever, he was shaking. His lips kept moving as though he would speak, but his eyes were glassy. And that livid mark on his arm—Caius had seen such wounds before. On his son’s body, and on the bodies of house slaves he’d sent to tend his son.
The bite. The wound that meant restless death.
The man moaned again—a sound of helplessness and anguish, not of hunger—and his eyes, horribly glazed, gazed up at Caius.
“Water,” he moaned.
“Where did you come from?” Caius hissed.
“Water—please—tribune—”
“What has happened? Where did you come from? How were you bitten?” His voice sharp with urgency.
“Tribune,” the man groaned. He twisted onto his side, shaking. “Tribune!”
“I am not your tribune. You are in the streets of Rome. Explain yourself.”
The man’s eyes fixed on some point just past Caius’s ear. The praetor could feel heat radiating from the man’s body as though a sun were barely concealed beneath the thin sheen of his flesh. “Centurion—Licinius Albus sent me—find the tribune—tell him—” A spasm of coughing.
“Tell him what?” Caius demanded. The lictors shuffled their feet and stayed well back from the dying man. There were whites around their eyes. They could all see the bite.
“We fought them,” the man choked, his hands convulsing in the grip of the fever. “We fought them—the risen fathers. Fought them. They pinned us—yesterday morning—in a small insula. Held out as long as we could. Not just forty, tribune. Not just forty. More came. Many. We fought them. The risen fathers. Water—please—water.”
Caius’s blood ran cold at both the mention of many dead at the riverside insulae and at the mention of Roman soldiers within the boundaries of the city. He thought of the medals on his wall, the rusted gladius in his study: military battles were to be fought along the Rhine or the Danube, never the Tiber. Battles in Rome were to be fought in the Senate House, if at all. Much good that the Senate ever did. The thought of legionnaires within the city chilled him. Yet for a single, dizzying instant, Caius’s mind grasped what he might do with a legion of Rome’s best at his call. Cleanse every insula in Rome of its dead in the space of a single evening. His hands shook as though he was fevered himself. No. No, he was not a Caesar. The last time a man had unloosed a thousand legionnaires within the boundary of Rome, the city had been torn in two. That must never happen again. What purging had to be done, must be done with limited civil forces, easily controlled and easily dispensed with when they were no longer useful.
The praetor took a slow breath, the momentary vision passing from him. “Where is your centurion?”
“Eaten.” The man’s lips curved in a terrible, fevered grin. “Tore him out through the— window. All those—hands. Couldn’t stop them. Eaten—eaten.”
Silence settled in the street, broken after a moment as another cough racked the man’s body. Caius listened, s
training to hear sounds above the low hum of human noise by the river far downhill. He could hear no moan of the dead. Yet he remembered the wailing in the night; the silence now seemed as ominous as the silence outside Livius’s door—as though the dead were waiting only for some misstep or shouted word to wake them and bring them groaning up the hill.
Caius crouched beside the feverish soldier, took a better look at him. He had a scar across the bridge of his nose; it cut across his right cheek almost to the ear—a remnant of some battle fought on some far frontier against a living enemy who bled when you cut him and who tried to cut you back. The skin of this legionnaire’s face was blotchy and dry, every hint of moisture baked from his flesh by the fever within him.
“Your centurion brought armed legionnaires into Rome, I take it.” Caius spoke quietly, for this man’s ears only. His tone low and intense. “I am not surprised that the gods dealt with him harshly for that impiety and that disrespect for our law. This is a civil problem that needs a civil solution. It is not a military problem.” Caius glanced up at one of his lictors and nodded. As the togate man stepped near, Caius reached for the fallen soldier’s hip, drew from its sheath the long knife he found there. The soldier was convulsing again, his arms clutched to his breast. Caius spoke through a tightened, dry throat. “May you find Elysium,” he murmured, then drew the knife swiftly across the man’s throat. Blood flowed out around the blade; Caius was careful not to let it touch his skin. The man gurgled and was still.
Breathing hoarsely, Caius rose to his feet. “Take this,” he murmured, passing the hilt to the lictor who stood by him. “Go within and summon my slaves.” The lictor stepped away; Caius did not take his eyes from the dead man, whose blood had pooled about his head. “The head must be destroyed,” he said softly, to no one in particular. His hand strayed to the folded parchment at his side. Caius’s certainty of what had to be done tightened and solidified into a small rock inside him. In the darkness of his study the night before, he’d been assailed with doubts and many strange thoughts. Now he was certain.
Arrests and trials and prayers to the gods weren’t enough to contain this festering, hungering pestilence; the insult to Rome’s fathers must be removed, must be utterly cut out of the city, as a surgeon might cut a tumor from a man’s leg. Caius would burn the thread of Polycarp’s life, then hand the parchment to his lictors, issuing an order against the Subura that would be executed in blood. It would happen swiftly, but it would happen one district at a time, so that all the districts would not rise together in a general riot. Wherever they found dead, the guardsmen of the city were to put everyone in that building or that street to death. Many of the living would perish—but they were only people of the Subura. Illiterate lawbreakers and blasphemers of the gods.
He could think only of his son’s door and the terrible, fragile silence behind it. No more patrician families need lose their sons or their daughters to this atrocity.
He heard the creak of the villa door opening behind him and turned to see the lictor he’d sent reemerging onto his doorstep, attended by two of the villa’s male slaves. Caius spared them only a glance. “Clean this body from the street. One of you run for a surgeon. The brain must be cut away cleanly, then the head sewn up. I weary of burning the bodies of good Roman men and women. This one fought in Rome’s wars; let him be interred with honor—as soon as his family can be found. Make haste.”
And with that, Caius stepped around the body and moved down the street, his lictors flanking him.
Anger seethed in him; he would see justice done this day.
Someone must atone for the dishonor done to the neglected fathers. For the hearth fires whose coals had gone cold. For the little shrines whose marble steps were dry and unstained by wine because those who should tend them had become cultists.
He would see Polycarp burn like a sacrifice. He would watch the old Greek’s flesh curl and blacken in the heat. And then, when this duty was completed, he would hand his secret order to the lictors and would go home. He would then have done all that he could, all that he must do as a father to the Roman people in the Emperor’s absence; he would be free then to focus on his duties to his own home and to atone for his own personal loss of honor. He would lock the gate of his villa and walk to his son’s room and wish him well. Then to his study. There he would take down from its place on the wall the sword that had rested there since the days of his military service in Dacia, before his son’s birth; he would slide the blade from its leather, look for a few moments at the reflection of his cold face in the gleaming metal, then set the hilt against the floor.
He would quietly fall on his sword. And it would be over. His honor recovered.
After he watched Polycarp burn.
POLYCARP ON THE IDES OF AUGUSTUS
THE GATES to the temple of Justitia swung open, revealing the carefully prepared theater of the day: a sunlit courtyard with a floor of dust and gravel, the temple itself at the far end gleaming white (the marble freshly washed). Before the temple, the white curule seat where Caius the praetor sat, the lictors in a row behind him before the temple steps, holding bundles of rods tied with ceremonial cord, representing state authority to discipline and punish. To the right, a narrow pit in the earth where a fire might be lit; to the left, rows of benches and carefully groomed, togate men seated on them. Many leapt to their feet as the guardsmen pulled Polycarp through the gate, and in an instant the low hum of conversation in the courtyard was shattered by cries of rage and fear:
“Desecrator!”
“You make our youth turn from their ancestors!”
“You starve our dead!”
“You famish our temples and shrines!”
“You sicken Rome!”
“I lost my wife to you, you filthy fellator!”
And one man who must surely have been the youngest there beat his chest with his hand and yelled: “Give us back our fathers’ Rome!”
Polycarp let the shouts wash over him. He heard in their voices the anguish of their spiritual crisis. In the past few days, they had heard the moaning of the dead nearer their doors; the dead had attacked the very Palatine by night. Patrician Rome had wakened and looked about in horror. They didn’t know what was happening or why; they only knew they were threatened.
As the jurors on their benches clamored for his blood, Polycarp looked about him. Though considerably smaller, this courtyard was an arena not unlike the Circus Maximus where other leaders of the gathering had once been tossed to the chained dead. Before Rome had built any Circus or Colosseum or public arena, gladiators had performed their games at family feasts in the villas of the Palatine, their gory deaths a sacrifice to honor the ancestors of that family. In the same way, the deaths of the Christians in that evil time had been meant to honor and appease the disrespected, wrathful, and rising dead. Now, this day, the dead were restless again, and the guardsmen led Polycarp before the screaming jurors as a sacrifice to their dead. Before bringing him in, they’d first given him a clean white tunic to wear, then replaced the manacles on his wrists. He wore the costume of a culprit, but it occurred to him that it was also the costume of the ritual sacrifice, with perhaps one difference in the details. When a Roman bull was brought to the altar, temple attendants pulled the bull in with but a bit of white string about its horns. Polycarp felt the heaviness of the chains depending from his wrists—did they need so much metal to restrain one old man?
Polycarp looked at Caius where he sat across the long courtyard, stern and cold. Then he glanced past the praetor’s curule chair, letting his gaze settle on the tall statue of Justitia where she stood at the top of the steps, one hand upraised as if to forbid entry, the other holding a great pair of scales, and a diadem on her brow—as though to suggest that in Rome, which in previous centuries had been governed by no king or queen or emperor but only a senate of men who trusted to their own hearts and minds to find consensus, that here Justice alone was regal.
How lovely, that marble face. A fold
of stone cunningly contrived to resemble soft fabric covered her eyes. Justitia seemed calm, impassive, and entirely unmoved by the cries of the jury. A wry smile tugged at Polycarp’s lips. “This is not what I imagined your temple would sound like, Justitia,” he murmured.
At a hard shove against his back, Polycarp nearly lost his footing.
“Be silent, desecrator,” the guardsman barked.
Holding his peace, Polycarp focused for a moment simply on walking over the sand toward Caius’s seat. He ignored the heat of the sand beneath his feet. Heavy on his shoulders sat the fatigue of having looked into the eyes of the walking dead, and his body was sore; he growled low in his throat. He must have the strength for this day. He had a role to play, lines to speak. Not those Caius expected, perhaps. He had been playing his part on a larger stage long before this day, a stage the shape and size of a city—but this day would likely be his final act. To the Greeks and the Romans both, the world itself was a stage on which the theater of history was played out for the entertainment and delight of the gods. Men and women quarreled and fought and died on that stage, until the god descended in a machine to intervene at the end of the drama. But as a father of the gathering, Polycarp saw the stage differently. On this stage, men and women who knew God could play the active part of the device that would carry into the theater the deus ex machina, the god in the machine. Their role was that of God’s machine, God’s body. They were his hands and his feet, stepping in not just at the end but at the very moment in the drama in which they found themselves placed. Through the gathering, God might intervene early to transform the grisly sets of the Subura and the cold, remote sets of the Palatine into new places, and to change the players’ costumed garb to represent miraculous transformations within their characters.
This day had been long rehearsed. Now Polycarp hoped he could call at least a few of the others in this arena—the jurors, the lictors—to play the parts they truly needed to play, to see their togas and their carefully groomed hair, and these very manacles Polycarp himself wore, for the costumes they in fact were.
