by Tessa Afshar
“I have been dreaming of seeing you like this,” he said and swung her up into his arms to lay her on the ruined pallet.
It was fitting that her wedding bed should not be pristine. Should be tumbled and used. Like her. The thought came sudden and piercing. She froze. Would he regret marrying her when his passion cooled? Her body, melting just a moment before under his restless fingers, became unyielding.
“Priscilla?” Aquila pulled away. He traced a finger down her cheek. “What is it?”
She stared at him mutely.
“You don’t like this?” His lips trailed down the side of her neck. “Or this?” They trailed a little lower.
She grew more rigid. He lifted his head, tiny lines of worry gathering at the corners of his eyes. In the darkening room, the irises had grown huge and charcoal colored. He eased himself away on an elbow. She became aware, in the uncanny way they had at times of reading each other without words, that she was making him doubt himself. Doubt his own ability as a man.
The breath leaked out of her. “I like it,” she assured him. “All of it.”
“Then what is it?”
She licked dry lips. “I . . . worry that you will . . . find me disappointing.”
He sifted through her words, trying to decipher their meaning. “You worry I will find you . . . tainted?
Her throat clogged. That word. It was perfect for her, wasn’t it? She nodded.
“You fear I will leave you?”
She thought about that. “I know you won’t. You are the man who couldn’t leave a dog on the side of a road. You wouldn’t walk away from me. Not physically. But I fear you might take back your heart.”
He cradled her cheek in his hand. “One day you will believe that I will never stop loving you. Never abandon you. Until then, you have to trust me, one kiss at a time.” He took her lips in a searing kiss. “One touch at a time.” He caressed her, fingers roving against the thin linen of her tunic. “One embrace at a time.” His arms came about her, drawing her closer. “You will trust me, one day, when I tell you that you are my beloved, more precious to me than my life. And the past has no power to change that.”
When he kissed her again, murmuring words of love and need against her skin, she resisted the shame that tried to reclaim her. She kissed him back, shyly offering herself to this tender man who had wooed and won her.
Their time together, undergirded by a foundation of love, was full of promise. But she knew that she had held a corner of herself back from him, shielded a part of herself that could not entirely relax in his arms. In the melting heat of intimacy with her husband, Priscilla became aware that there were layers of shame that clung to her so deep and hidden, they had proven inaccessible to the grace offered by both God and her husband. Layers that crippled her body’s ability to respond fully.
As she lay sleepless in Aquila’s arms, she could only hope that with the passage of months, she might one day feel free in her husband’s arms, meeting yearning with yearning, passion with passion, holding nothing back.
A week after the wedding, a messenger brought a letter from Senator Pudens. Priscilla read the short missive twice and frowned.
“Bad news?” Aquila asked.
“I am not certain. It sounds cryptic. He apologizes for intruding on us so close to our wedding and invites us to supper tomorrow.”
Aquila set down his cup. “That seems harmless enough. He wouldn’t invite us to supper if he had unpleasant news to share.”
“Sabinella has not been receiving visitors. The evening we prayed for her was an exception. And Pudens wouldn’t interrupt our time alone for a casual supper. This dinner makes no sense.” She crinkled the papyrus in her hand. “I fear Sabinella’s condition may have deteriorated. What if she is near the end and wants to say good-bye?”
Aquila took her in his arms. “We don’t know that. Let’s not think the worst. Tomorrow we will discover what it all means.”
Priscilla leaned into Aquila. His mere presence, solid and somehow unshakable, gave her comfort. Still, she could not dismiss a lingering cloud of anxiety, which had hung over her even after they had prayed.
For once, Priscilla walked faster than her husband, climbing the hilly roads into the Esquiline with the determination of a soldier on the march. Pudens himself welcomed them, his face wreathed in a wide smile. She felt her shoulders loosening at the sight of his beaming face.
“I want you to see something,” he said. He took her hand and led her to the garden, where Sabinella was sitting under the leather awning. The old Sabinella. The one with flesh on her bones and color in her cheeks. She stood, her movements more fluid than they had been in months, holding a hand out to Priscilla.
The fingers stretching toward her still trembled, but not with the devastating violence of recent weeks. Priscilla sprinted to the older woman and stood uncertainly, before Sabinella pulled her into a warm embrace.
Priscilla’s eyes welled. She had expected death and had instead found life. Limp with relief, she sagged against Aquila, who had come up behind her. “I don’t understand,” she said.
Sabinella drew her down next to her on the bench while the senator and Aquila occupied another.
“I am not healed,” Sabinella said, holing out her trembling fingers. “But it is as if time has reversed, and the disease has returned to its early days.” She smiled at Aquila. “After you prayed, something shifted inside me. I felt an utter absence of fear. I would call it peace, except the word is not adequate. A calm beyond anything I have known, even when I enjoyed full health. I ate a good meal and managed to hold it down. Then I slept, another small miracle.
“I thought the peace was the only gift of your prayer. But with every day, I grew a little stronger, until I became like this. Your God lifted the hand of death from me.” She reached for Pudens’s hand. “For some reason, the disease itself remains, though much diminished. More of an annoyance than an illness. I feel like I have been brought into an oasis. Given strength and life.
“Your God did this for me. Tell me: how can I repay him?”
Silence filled the arbor. That question had blown open a holy portal; it invited one whose breath had made the heavens and the earth to partake of their exchange. Exhilaration swelled through Priscilla. She sensed that something had shifted in the axis of the world, and the Kingdom of God had drawn near. “Ask him to draw near to you,” she murmured.
Seventeen
“THAT’S THE THIRD SENATOR THIS WEEK,” Aquila said, writing the latest order on a sheet of papyrus to ensure he wouldn’t forget the details. “They are all sending their stewards over, thanks to Pudens.”
Benyamin examined the tip of his awl. “That makes thirteen large orders for the next month, plus the demands of daily trade. We can’t keep up. We need to hire someone. It will cut into our profits, but we have no choice.”
Priscilla, who was working on a heavy basket in the corner of the workshop, snapped her head up. “I could help. I have watched you and Benyamin work and I know I can learn. Especially smaller pieces like the round cloaks.”
Their work did not demand physical strength as much as proficiency. A woman could do it as well as a man. But Aquila did not want his wife to feel forced into the trade. “Do you really want to?”
She nodded eagerly. “It will be a family venture.”
He smiled. He had worried, when she had first moved in, that she might feel uncomfortable living with two men who were accustomed to their bachelor ways. Instead, the four of them had quickly grown past the initial awkwardness of their cramped quarters and become deeply attached to each other. Perhaps the most profound change came in Lollia.
The first afternoon Lollia had returned from Rufus’s house, before she had a chance to stow her meager belongings, Priscilla and Aquila had turned her right around and marched her out.
“Where are you taking me?” she had wailed.
“You will see,” Priscilla had said, blue eyes shimmering with joy.
; They came to a stop beneath the overhang at the magistrate’s door. Before stepping inside, Priscilla said, “Lollia, I could never free you while we lived under my brother’s roof. The only protection I could offer you was to keep you as my slave. By law, he had no power over you as long as I owned you. Now that I am married to Aquila, my brother is no longer a threat.”
“We are here to give you your freedom,” Aquila said quietly.
“You shall not remain a slave,” Priscilla added. “From now on, you will live with us as a member of the family.” They had made their promise official, paying the magistrate to draw up a certificate of manumission. Lollia had walked out, clutching that certificate, tears blinding her aged eyes. She belonged to them in a different way now. Not out of obligation or law, but by the unbreakable ties of love.
It had been one of the unexpected joys of his marriage, this sudden expansion of belonging. It wasn’t merely that he had married Priscilla. They had welded their small worlds together and created not only a happy couple, but a tight-knit family.
He had noticed that anything Priscilla did with and for that family made her glow with happiness. “Benyamin could teach you to work with the leather,” he said. “He taught me everything I know.”
His uncle grinned. “Not too old to still teach you new tricks, young man.”
Aquila nodded acknowledgment. “True enough.”
“Don’t forget me. I can learn too,” Lollia piped up.
Benyamin raised a thick brow. “I charge for my tuition, you know. An extra bowl of stew every evening.”
Lollia shrugged. “You already have an extra bowl of stew every evening.”
Aquila studied the pile of orders before him. The rapid expansion of their business was causing a few problems that Priscilla and Lollia’s added help would not solve. They had purchased more leather from Rufus, and their supplies were taking over every surface. Ferox had started to look haunted, crying to be let out at all hours. Aquila himself felt the oppression of his shrinking world and knew they needed a new home. One large enough to suit the demands of their growing trade.
There was another reason he wanted to move. The senator and his family were starting to grow in their faith. They were like a painter’s blank wall, with no prior knowledge of God. Unlike Priscilla, whose year at the synagogue had laid strong foundations of faith, they knew nothing and required patient tutelage. They had tried coming to Rufus’s home once, but although they found the people there welcoming, it felt foreign to them, as if they had to become un-Roman in order to follow Yeshua.
Understanding their discomfort, Priscilla had arranged to meet them at the senator’s villa. The slaves and servants in the Pudens household were invited to join in these gatherings, and their numbers were growing by the day. Every night they could, Aquila and Priscilla went to the Esquiline to teach this precious community about God. The past few months had blurred into a whirlwind of constant motion and joyous growth.
But Aquila knew he could not keep this pace up. He could not keep losing hours traipsing up and down the hills of Rome while new orders mounted. If he had a larger house, one more conveniently located, he could open his own home, saving himself the time swallowed up by endless commute.
Such a property cost money. More than he could afford at present. When they finished the new orders and added a few more, perhaps he might be able to make the transition. But that couldn’t happen for months. Perhaps years.
Priscilla awoke with a start. Through the opening of the window she could see the moon flickering bright, still dominating the night sky. She lay open-eyed, trying to discern what had wakened her. Benyamin’s loud snores in the next room were punctuated by Lollia’s softer ones in the workshop. Aquila slept on beside her, undisturbed. Nothing seemed out of place.
Then she heard Ferox sniffing under the closed door of their chamber, where he was not allowed to enter at night. He did this sometimes, when he wanted to demonstrate his dissatisfaction with the arrangement. But something about the soft insistence of the dog made Priscilla get up and open the door. She had expected him to scramble inside. Instead, at the sight of her, he wheeled in the opposite direction and walked toward the workshop. She grabbed the oil lamp they left burning on a stand through the night and followed him. He pawed the gate that led to the road, as if desperate to go out. It was an unusual request. Once settled in his bed, Ferox did not like to leave it until the morning.
Priscilla lifted the bar quietly and let the dog out. He headed in the direction of the shed at the side of the house where they kept wood for cooking. Lately, they had begun to store larger pieces of leather there, which they needed for making tents. More a shack than a shed, the structure did not offer a watertight shelter. If not for the fact that they intended to use the leather quickly, they could never have left their expensive supplies there.
Ferox sat outside the shed and gave a tiny whimper. “What do you have there, boy?” Priscilla asked. The dog whimpered again and sniffed at the door.
He had probably cornered a rabbit. She had left her warm bed chasing after a silly animal taking shelter for the night. Ferox’s behavior gave her pause, however. Ferox on the hunt was usually excited, his tail wagging, his barks loud with delight. Tonight he remained persistent but quiet. Intent. Curious, Priscilla pulled the door open and held the lamp aloft.
Something stirred in one dark corner where they had stacked a tall pile of leather. Something definitely larger than a rabbit. Priscilla drew a sharp breath. A shape ran into the light directly toward her.
Several things became apparent to her at once. The occupant of the shed was a child. A boy no older than eight or nine. Startled by Priscilla’s sudden appearance, the child began to run toward the door. Run with admirable speed, headed directly for where Priscilla’s body unintentionally barred the only exit. At the last moment, Ferox sprang into the mix.
“Oomph!” Priscilla gasped as she went sprawling on the floor. Arms and legs tangled for an indefinable moment. By instinct, she snaked out a hand and, before the boy could gain his feet, grasped him firmly around the arm. “Hold a minute.” She exhaled, trying to calm her racing heart.
The child pulled as hard as he could, panting. “Hold, I said,” Priscilla commanded, getting to her feet and pulling him up with her. “I won’t harm you.” She righted the lamp, which still burned in spite of landing on its side during her tumble.
Priscilla took a firmer grip on the child and studied him in the weak light. His bones stuck out from his thin frame, matted hair falling over a pair of haunted brown eyes. He was filthy, head to foot covered in dirt, his tunic an indistinguishable color under layers of mud and grime. Bug bites covered his arms and legs in a pitiful array of bumps, some scratched into raw scabs.
Her eyes rounded. “I know you! You fetched me water in the Forum. What are you called?”
He stared at her defiantly, refusing to answer.
She tried another tack. “Are you hungry?” To her relief, he stopped squirming. “I have leftover bread from dinner. Fresh cheese too. And a juicy apple. Do you want me to make you a plate?”
The boy nodded once.
“Come in, then, while I get you the food.” The arm under her fingers grew rigid, and he dragged his body back, attempting to free himself.
“Calm down. You don’t want to come in? Very well. Sit down and I will fetch you a plate.” She let him go. “No one is going to hurt you here, boy. Sit, I say. I will be right back.”
The boy stood still as if considering if he should run or risk remaining for the food. Ferox drew close enough to lick the boy’s hand. He jumped and snatched his fingers away. Then his mouth softened, and he reached out cautiously to pet the dog’s head.
Priscilla had the sense that the child was no stranger to dogs. “His name is Ferox,” she said. “You want me to leave him with you while I bring your dinner?”
The boy nodded.
“Ferox,” she said again. “He likes it when you call him by name.”
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br /> “Ferox,” the boy repeated.
Priscilla smiled at him, pleased. She forced herself to walk away, knowing the child might decide to run as soon as she turned her back. She piled food on a plate and rushed back to the shed to find him on his knees, playing with the dog. As soon as he heard Priscilla approach, her unexpected guest wheeled about like a feral cat, eyes watchful.
When she held the plate out to him, he walked close enough to take it from her. She was touched when he wiped his hands on the sides of his tunic before tearing into the bread. He shoved the food into his mouth and swallowed before he had time to chew.
“Slow down,” she cautioned. “You will make yourself sick if you eat too fast.”
He tried to obey for a moment, but hunger broke his resolve, and he stuffed an enormous piece of bread into his mouth, shoveling cheese in after. A horse could not have devoured the apple any faster. Ferox, who had observed the child feasting in silence until then, stood on his hind legs and begged brazenly.
“Ferox! Behave yourself,” Priscilla chided.
The boy hesitated. To her disbelief, he broke the last piece of cheese in half and held one piece to Ferox. The dog gulped down the morsel and licked his lips.
“That was generous of you,” Priscilla said softly. “Wait here. I will bring you more.” At the door, she turned her head. “I am Priscilla.” She waited expectantly.
Her visitor frowned as if contemplating if he should respond. “Marcus,” he said finally.
He had only offered his first name. Most free Roman males had three appellations, the second connecting them to a particular family. Given names were rarely used by strangers, saved only for close friends and family. She doubted this wary child wanted to share his first name as an offer of friendship.
