by Stant Litore
Caius watched her, his eyes hard and cold. “And what did you see there?”
She lifted her head. “There were maybe fifteen, maybe twenty in that insula who never poured libations for the honored dead, never whispered a prayer to Janus when they went out or came in, never took any fruit or wine to our insula’s shrine. I tried to go there, but the door to the shrine was locked.”
Polycarp gave a start. Could that be true? He had not locked the old shrine, nor asked anyone to. The thought troubled him. He knew what it was to be barred from the public worship of one’s God.
“The shrine was important to me,” Julia continued, her voice a little shrill. “There was a time when I prayed every evening for a child.”
Caius lifted his hand. “What did you do?”
“My husband and I made a little shrine in our room and concealed it.”
There was a furious mutter from one of the jurors.
“Why did you conceal it?” Caius asked.
“I was afraid,” she said simply.
“Why were you afraid, Julia?” Caius murmured. “Surely the honoring of Rome’s dead and of Roman gods needs no concealment.”
She lifted a trembling hand to her face, rubbed her temple a moment with her fingertips. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t like to talk about it.” She closed her eyes. “Most of the time, I stayed in our room with my husband. You don’t know what it was like, living there.” She opened her eyes wide. “You can’t imagine it.”
“It is the jury’s duty to imagine it,” Caius said. “Tell us the rest, Julia. Leave nothing out.”
Julia took a breath. “They are all mad, Caius Lucius, jurors. The old Greek is the maddest of them. In that insula, everything is—it’s upside down. A pleasure slave keeps the insula’s accounts and presumes to look in on everyone. Yet a young patrician man, one of a high and ancient and revered family—” For an instant she cast a glare toward Marcus, who was looking at her with horror. There was a naked fury in Julia’s eyes, a real fury, not a play-acted one, as though Marcus’s abandonment of his toga at the insula had been a personal betrayal of her, of her hopes and beliefs, of things that mattered to her. And she couldn’t keep the fury entirely from her voice. “He is sent three times a week to the market to fetch bread, like the lowest, nameless slave. And then, that bread he brings, they give it out to—to beggars and layabouts and thieves while they themselves adjourn to secret meetings in Polycarp’s room or in despoiled Roman tombs, even in the very Catacombs beneath the city, to eat their own secret meals. They themselves speak of dining there, in the dark, on flesh and blood.”
Silence fell. The jurors looked breathless, as though Julia’s testimony had ridden them into wild country at full gallop. Polycarp focused on Julia—how she stood in her bright gown. He watched as her chin lifted. Clearly, the role she played now was that of the offended domina, stiff with horror at her night’s discovery of some evil rite performed by her house slaves when they thought the family asleep. Some handling of snakes, or some chanting in a circle, some remnant of whatever magic had been native to their conquered tribe. To the offended domina, Polycarp and the tenants of his insula were doubtless lower than the house slaves; though free, the men and women of the Subura slept on thinner blankets, dressed less well, dined less well. And perhaps, the domina might think, perhaps what secret rites these half-Romans might perform after dark would be more barbarous than any a few Germanic or Dacian slaves might dream of.
“Flesh and blood? Boar’s flesh, perhaps?” There was a violence beneath the cold in Caius’s voice. “Or mutton?”
“No. Human flesh.” She paused. “Desecrated flesh. They speak of eating the bodies of their dead.”
A growl from the jurors now, deep and bestial, a growl that rose from their bellies. Marcus looked even more pale.
“The desecrated dead,” Caius repeated. He leaned forward, his eyes fierce. “You had better tell us more.”
She hesitated, then shrank back, as though it had occurred to her, abruptly, how very serious the allegations she made actually were. She glanced at blind Justitia, her eyes wary. “That is all I know,” she murmured. “It is terrible enough. They would share the flesh in their gatherings at night. The old Greek teaches that the living mustn’t feed the dead; the dead must feed the living. Is it any wonder our affronted dead arise?”
Looking at Julia now, Polycarp realized suddenly that she’d always borne false witness. She’d pretended to be a tenant content in the insula, a baker’s wife, when her heart was elsewhere. Before that, on some villa on the Palatine, she’d perhaps pretended to be a good and devoted wife to her first husband. She was always playing a part, always wearing a purple gown. Without disguise, naked, she might be too terrified to breathe; perhaps she had not even looked at her own heart in that way, unclothed, unveiled. She wanted others to see what she chose to show them; perhaps she wanted to see only what she showed herself. He wondered suddenly what had taught her, long ago, that she needed such veils. He wondered who she really was, what she really hungered for.
His dread grew heavier. Here was one he had not helped, one he hadn’t fed. He could hear the rising anger of the jury as she spoke—and faintly, beneath it, another sound: the low cry of the dead, many of them, somewhere below on the hill. But nearer than they’d sounded last night. The sound had a strange quality, as though their moaning had actually been audible for some time, though only barely, heard by the ear but unnoticed, and had suddenly become louder and more clear. That chilled him. He listened a moment, forgetting the witness and the jury.
They were climbing the hill. Dead did not often do that; they moved down streets toward the river, like water, their shuffling feet taking the easiest paths, unless they heard or smelled the living and gave chase, uphill or down. Perhaps now, one or two of the dead, or a few, had sensed some pedestrian on the high streets and stumbled toward him; perhaps, fleeing uphill, he was pulling dead after him—first a few, then a larger group that followed those.
Or perhaps they had heard the furious cries of the jury, carried toward the river on some ill wind.
Whatever had caught their notice, they were coming. Perhaps, hearing that low hunting moan, a few undead would break free of villas and gardens along the Palatine streets and join the swarm moving up the slope, until they came onward like a reeking tide, like the dead in his dream, a multitude decaying and hungry without reprieve. A few of the jurors had noticed the moaning now; several of them glanced up, and a shudder passed through them. But after a moment they turned their attention back to Julia, though with pale faces; in the past few days, they’d heard such distant moans too often for that sound to toss them into outright panic now.
Off to Polycarp’s right, by the fire pit, came the slow, slouching sound of a great beast shifting its weight.
You stand condemned, Despair whispered.
“Yes.” Polycarp was sweating in the sun. Convicted not by that jury but by the baker’s wife and by the cries of those dead. His larder had been too small, his voice too soft. He’d done too little. This day he was called to account for those he’d failed.
Yet something in him toughened, baked hard by the sun. He did stand here as a sacrifice. Not the sacrifice Caius wanted, an appeasement of the furious dead. Another kind of sacrifice. Glancing at the faces of the jury, he didn’t think he would be able to avoid a severe verdict or that his body would escape the flames. But his master while he lived had once said that a seed must fall to the ground, split, and die in order for a mighty tree to be born. His failures might be redeemed in this moment if the words with which he met his death could yet plant those seeds in the jurors’ hearts, seeds that would later bear fruit. Maybe it was too late, with the starving dead loosed in the city. Yet he had to hope. When the evils of the world sprang out of Pandora’s box in the old story, all that remained at the bottom was hope. “A fragile thing,” he murmured to himself, “but it is all we have. We have to hope. Against the madness of the world, we have
to hope. And even if I were without hope, still this is where I’ve been told to stand. My master is still sufficient. As long as I stand here in his stead.”
“Speak loud enough for us to hear,” Caius broke in sharply.
“Very well.” Polycarp lifted his voice. The courtyard shimmered in the sun’s heat. “This wearies me. There are no advocates present to question young Julia, no one to read in her testimony where there is truth and where falsehood. In such an absence, of what use are her words to you?” He faced Julia, whose face was contorted in the grip of her emotions. “I grieve for your pain, daughter. I regret that you found no home with us.” It was the only apology he knew how to make.
“I’m not your daughter,” she hissed. “My father was an equestrian, a man of worth.”
“I do not doubt it.” Polycarp coughed to clear his throat, which was terribly dry. “But it is not ownership of a State Horse that makes a father a man of worth, but whom he chooses to feed and how he chooses to feed them.” He glanced at the jury, saw Marcus watching him now with eyes that shone with pride amid a bruised and sleep-deprived face. Polycarp took a little strength from that. “Manius Curius,” he told the jurors, “lived in a cottage and devoted himself to the growing of turnips. Yet he was one of Rome’s first men, whom all in Rome still revere. And I know of another just man, a writer of laws, who once left a palace to live in a desert tent, that he might teach a starving tribe to gather bread from the ground.”
“Enough,” Caius snapped, the sharpness of his voice cracking across the walled ground. “Jurors, your pardon, but I must hasten these proceedings. There are dead on the hill—we can hear them. Be without fear: I have guardsmen in the street to meet them. But we who are here must proceed swiftly, hasten this trial and the rites that follow, to do justice on the one who has caused Rome so much harm, bringing this dishonor, this plague, and this evil upon us. I don’t plan to tarry over tales and trivialities.” He turned to the accused.
“Polycarp, your violence upon Rome, upon its traditions and its health and upon the Roman peace, will be suffered no longer. I can bring another witness to confirm what Julia has told us, but I would rather avoid the delay. As the appointed magistrate of the city, I require you to recant your perverse beliefs and submit yourself to our judgment. I will ask again. Polycarp, father of the tomb despoilers, the god destroyers, the atheists, do you recant?”
But once again Polycarp had stopped listening. Or rather, he was listening again to the dead. They were nearer. There were faint shouts and cries that subsided quickly, smothered beneath the growing noise of the long, drawn-out wailing of the approaching corpses. Far too much like his dream of the dead city and the wheat.
The sun was beating hard on Polycarp’s bald head, and the dust and grit beneath his feet swam for a moment under his gaze. He looked up, glancing sideways at the sun, taking its measure. The blaze of it made it difficult to think. If only that sun was a little kinder, a little more like the sun he’d known in Thessaly. He smiled faintly, remembering how he had once, as a boy of twelve summers, felt that kinder sun on the back of his neck as he sat at the edge of his parents’ wheat field. He had burned that day, but hadn’t noticed; his entire mind and being had been focused on a large red beetle crawling across the back of his hand. It had landed there of its own accord, and its little wings had snapped back under its shell, translating it in an instant from a flying blur of red into a small creature that crawled across the surface of the earth as men and women do. He stared at it, holding his breath. Then he got slowly, slowly to his feet, taking the utmost care not to dislodge his find. With exaggerated caution, placing one foot at a time, he moved along the edge of the field, fearful—so fearful—that the beetle would fly away. His heart was louder and more violent in his chest than he’d ever felt it before. He glanced up, could see his mother standing by the threshold of the house.
She knelt by him when he reached her, the beetle still perched on his hand. It had crawled over the webbing between two fingers (tickling him so that he nearly jumped) and then along his palm as he tilted his hand carefully to keep it from falling.
“What did you bring me?” his mother asked, her smile warming his entire world.
Without speaking, he simply held his hand a little higher, for her to look.
“A beetle?” She cupped Polycarp’s hands in hers, holding his hand steady as the little creature crawled along his palm, teasing his skin with its tiny legs. “Symbol of truth and eternity,” she said. “My grandmother from Kemet taught me that when I was a girl.” She laughed softly as she passed her mothers’ knowledge to her son, her one child (Polycarp had never had a sister), a gift as sustaining as a head of ripe wheat, as precious as a berry. And even as she laughed, the beetle’s wings flickered out of its shell, tiny and fragile. Polycarp held his breath, and his mother fell silent, watching.
The wings trembled once, twice. Then the beetle flitted from the boy’s hand, zipping into the air. Polycarp watched, his mouth open, as the beetle flitted to a smooth white stone, its color stark against the rock. From there, the beetle flew to an ear of wheat at the edge of the field. It clung to the ear, and the wings flickered back into its shell.
“The world is full of truth and life,” his mother whispered. They were speaking in Greek, that melodic language that, as an old man, Polycarp still thought in sometimes, even after decades of using mostly Latin. Aletheia kai zoe, his mother had sung to him: truth and life. “Polycarp, my little Polycarp, you must find what is true. But you cannot hold it in your hand or keep it captive: it will fly. Truth always does. And you must follow when it does, wherever it leads you.”
“Where will it fly, mother?”
“I don’t know,” she laughed. “But you must follow it. It might fly across the river, or over the fields, or up that cliff over there. It doesn’t matter. It will take you to the one thing you need today, the one thing you need to do. Trust it. It is sacred.”
He nodded and sprang from her, chasing the beetle. He slowed as he approached the field, holding his hands before him, almost cupped, ready to catch it. He stepped carefully toward the ear of wheat, higher than his head, where the beetle rested. But when he was only a few steps away, it flickered deeper into the field.
For a moment he paused, looked at the tossing sea of wheat. Then he threw himself into the grain, moving quickly but stealthily, as boys sometimes do. He could hear, so faintly, the hum of its wings. It would stop, then start again, that sound. He followed it. His body felt alive and taut; if he had to jump to catch the beetle, he felt he could jump high as the sun. Something more life- filled and vibrant than blood pulsed through him.
In the summers in Greece, with the wheat stirring in the breeze and the sky open as a woman’s heart, every youth knows in his blood that he is a god, immortal, uncontainable, with a world to roam. Polycarp’s heart beat in his ears as he pursued the small beetle, the tiny hum of its wings the kind of lullaby that seduces flowers into dreaming of bees. He stalked through the wheat.
Then stopped. Breathing hard.
He waited. Quick, urgent heartbeats.
He’d lost the sound.
Horror seized at him; he looked about urgently at the endless wheat—a great expanse of grain higher than his head, nothing visible but the high stalks. A breeze passed through, making the heads of wheat caress his face and arms.
Must he turn back now, return to his mother’s arms?
Could he even find his way back?
He looked to the sky, hoping to catch a glimpse of the beetle. But there was only the sun: its heat above him something palpable he could feel, a weight on his face.
When he lowered his eyes from the sun, he met Caius’s stern, hard look. The dead were moaning; he could smell Caius’s fear. He called to mind Caius’s question of a moment before. “No, I will not recant,” he murmured, lifting a chained hand and passing it across his eyes to clear away the stinging sweat. “I am an old man, and perhaps I fear death more than I did when
I was young. But there are other things worthier of my fear. Why should I lose myself in the wheat for you, Caius Lucius?”
Polycarp straightened and turned his back to the praetor, faced the jurors. “Now I will give my testimony. And you will listen, for I am the oldest one present, and I have seen more of life—and death—than any of you. It is likely I have seen things you could hardly believe.”
His voice was very clear. In that moment his dignitas—the most important of qualities to any Roman—was so great, so intensely visible, that no one spoke or interrupted him. Even Caius remained silent now while Polycarp spoke, though the praetor’s body grew tense as a bow stretched taut to the point of snapping.
Polycarp spread his manacled hands as wide as he could; an ell of chain restrained them. Among the jurors, Marcus was gazing at him out of a bruised face with that same look Polycarp had seen in his eyes the night he went to confront the dead in the alley. The look of a man who wanted to leap in front of his father and shield him, but could not see a way to do so. Polycarp smiled faintly, for him.
“You are greatly misinformed about who I am and what I have been doing,” he said. “I am Polycarp. I was born in Larissa, Thessaly, a Roman citizen of Greek blood. I was born a second time in baptism in Smyrna, where for some time I served a small gathering of both citizens and noncitizens, both rich and poor, who were devoted to the sharing of bread, the teaching of our master’s apostles, and to prayer and fellowship. While I was there, a message came to us from the holy widows in Rome, describing to us the severe hunger suffered in the Subura. There were many tears as it was read, for matters in Smyrna are not as bad as here in Rome, and your brothers and your sisters in smaller cities have compassion for you who live in this great one.
“Hearing the message, the elders among us appointed me to go to Rome as an apostle, and with the appointment was passed to me the Apostle’s Gift. Perhaps you wonder what I mean by this; I will tell you. We of the gathering worship One God, the Giver of Life, the Giver of Gifts.
