The Last Stoic (16 page)

Marcus rushed through the narrow streets and alleyways
of the city’s poorer
neighbourhoods, many blocks from his own comfortable second-floor uptown
insula.  Memories returned of the drunken, late-night flight months earlier
through these same streets, after the Ludi celebrations.  It was often said
that the empire would never be the same after the attacks on Rome, but Marcus
had always dismissed such talk.  Today he was inclined to agree.  Something
had
changed. 

The Parthian beggars were nowhere
to be found.

As he had often done, Marcus left
the worksite at midday and wandered downtown to meet Nasir and Sura.  In his
rucksack he carried a circle of flatbread and a ripe wedge of cheese, enough to
share.  They weren’t on their usual street corner.  Or the next.  They weren’t
anywhere within a five block perimeter.  He quizzed people living on the
street.  No-one had seen them. 

Marcus stopped his rushing and
clapped a hand to his head.  The answer had come to him.  Sebastianus must have
found them permanent lodging.  Finally, after months of promising.  He imagined Nasir and Sura in a humble one-room apartment, with a couple of rumpled, straw
mattresses, a makeshift wooden table and candle, and perhaps a stool or two for
sitting.  Nasir could now find work.  Good old Sebastianus! 

Shifting the rucksack he carried
from one shoulder to the other, Marcus caught a whiff of the pungent cheese it
contained.  He remembered his intended picnic and his pace slowed to a
shuffle. 

Across the street Marcus noticed
the dry goods shop in which he had waited with Nasir, Sura and Sebastianus on
the day that the Mithraite priest had swept down the street with his acolytes
and press gang, recruiting young men on the annona as foot soldiers in the
Emperor’s legions.  The merchant seemed to know Sebastianus that day.  He might
know his whereabouts now.  Standing on the threshold, Primus and Secundus
brushed past as they emerged from the shop’s porta.  

The Baeticans were never in this
part of town.  Marcus had never seen one without the other two. 

“Primus!  Secundus! 
Salvete?”
 

His colleagues seemed not to have
noticed him.  They passed and left the portico.  Marcus grabbed Primus at the
elbow. 

“Primus!  What’s wrong?”

“Marcus.  I see it’s you. 
Greetings.”

“What is the matter with you
two?  You look terrible.  Where’s Tertius?”

“They got him.”

“They took him away.”

“Who?  Who took him away?”

“The soldiers.”

“The guardsmen.”

“Why?”

“We don’t know.”

“You must have some idea.”

Secundus raised his eyes from the
ground, looked at his compatriot and shrugged sadly.

“Someone at the caupo said
someone else overheard Tertius mocking the emperor.”

“They turned him in.”

“But we mock the emperor every
day.”

“Things have changed.”

“There are delators everywhere.”

“Delators?”

“Yes, of course.  Informants.”

“Where did they take him?”

“We don’t know.”

Marcus wanted to take Primus by
the shoulders and shake him, his manner was so laconic.

“How long did they say they would
hold him?”

“They didn’t.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Go home.  Return to Baetica.”

“Without Tertius?”

“Gus told us, there’s nothing
that can be done.”

“Could you not hire a lawyer. 
Plead his case?  If it’s a big mistake, it should be easy to free him.”

“Where have you been?  Things
have changed.  You heard Papinian was executed last week.”

“By the Praetorian Guard, right
in front of the emperor.”

“Rome’s most eminent jurist. 
Dead.”

“What good is some pie-eyed,
provincial lawyer from the hinterlands going to do us in Rome, if Papinian is
mutilated and bloodied and dragged around the streets of Rome?”

Primus groaned and turned away,
“We shouldn’t even be talking like this.  Not here.  If we stick around,
they’ll scoop us up too.”

“You should watch yourself,
Marcus.  You could be in danger too.”

“Me?”

“Yes, of course.  The road is
almost complete.  We won’t be needed around here much longer.”

“They want our labour, our
expertise, and our money.  But not our strange names and funny accents.”

“Farewell, Marcus.  Take care of
yourself.”

“If you’re ever in Irni, make
sure to visit.”

The Baeticans hiked away, burlap
sacks on their backs, bulging with supplies for the long trip home.  Marcus
looked after them until they disappeared and he entered the shop.  Behind the
counter was the same shopkeeper that had greeted them the day they eluded the
Mithraite priest. 

“I haven’t seen Sebastianus since
the attacks on Rome,” he said.  “The beggars were just up the way as late as
two days ago.  The Mithraist, his disciples, the city guard came through,
clearing the streets.  I haven’t seen them since.  I think they may have headed
toward the domus where the Christians gather.”

Marcus looked up the deserted
street in the direction of the Christian domus.  His impulse was to return to
his apartment, barricade the door, and pretend like he wasn’t home.  He was
tempted to pack and leave immediately for his home in Verulamium.  No goodbyes,
just an ignominious retreat.  But that would look suspicious.  And what would
Vincentius, his grandfather, say? 

He worried for the beggars. 
I
owe them.  I’ll find them first, make sure they’re safe.  Then I’ll think about
leaving.

Gus met Patrick in the atrium of the Super Shepherd
Ministries
. 
They spoke in hushed tones, their voices ricocheting from the vaulted ceilings.

“I’m sorry for accusing your
friend.”

Gus looked up at the crucifix at
the head of the atrium.

“Fuck it.  We’re all imperfect
under the eyes of the Lord, are we not?  Fuck knows I am.” 

“Praise God, you are very
understanding.”

“I’m told you’ve already been
punished.  Thoroughly.  The Reverend says you show a lot of promise, that
you’re already making yourself useful.”

“I’m glad he thinks so.  Can I
help with something?”

“What do you know of our
colleague, Mark.”

Patrick hesitated.

“Easy kid.  I’ve got nothing
against you.  Fuck all.  But I bear a heavy responsibility.  Our firm has a
long, proud history and in our business reputation is everything.  We have no
room for scandal.  I investigate and fix.  I’d be grateful if you would tell me
what you know.”

Patrick shared all he thought he
knew, garnished with his own suspicions.  He explained what it all indicated,
that the foreigner was a radical, part of a sleeper cell, with plans for
espionage, sabotage, and worse.

“That adds up to a rather strange
picture,” Gus said.  “Thanks for sharing this with me, brother.”

Gus laid his hand on Patrick’s
shoulder.

“I’m worried what could be done
with this information, by our competitors for instance.  Do I have your pledge
that you will not make these allegations to anyone else but me?”

“Of course.”

“Here is a small token of our
gratitude.”  Gus pressed into Patrick’s hand a billfold containing two thousand
dollars.

“If what you believe is the case,
we have a liability.  If he were to follow through…”

“I see what you mean.”

“I’m wondering…”

“Yes?”

“Maybe you could keep an eye on
him.  Monitor his dealings.  Report them to me.  If something incriminating
flushes from the weeds, a fireable offense say, all the better.  It would
eliminate our risk.  Do you see what I’m getting at?”

“I certainly do.”

“If you could bring that to
bear...it would be time well rewarded.  Interested?”

“Yes, I would be glad to help.”

“Excellent.  He often leaves the
office at lunch time and heads downtown.  You could trail him from there.  Let
discretion be your motto.”

“I will.  But I wonder…”

“Yes?”

“Why not just fire him now.”

“If it were me, that’s exactly
what I’d do.  But his family is tied to the Cornelius family, and Mr. Cornelius
will be very reluctant to fire him. ”

“I see.”

“Besides, if he really has
planned what you think he has planned, it’s better for us to nab him with
evidence, don’t you think?”

A pair of city guardsmen patrolled the street
in front of the mud-coloured,
windowless Christian domus Dei.  Marcus ducked into the portico of a closed
shop.  Patricius, undetected, found a similar alcove twenty paces back.

The guardsmen strolled down the
middle of the empty street gossiping and laughing.  They poked their heads into
alleyways, peered into storefronts, inspected carts and barrels before turning
the corner at the far end of the street.  Marcus waited.  They didn’t
reappear.  He crossed the laneway to the front of the hall with its inscription
chiseled coarsely into the keystone above the entranceway:

“
Pax tibi sit quicunque Dei
penetralia Christi,

pectore pacifico candidus
ingrederis.
” 

He tapped the door, cocking his
ear as close as possible to its tarred exterior.  No answer.  He knocked again,
firmly.  No answer.  Finally, he pounded it a half-dozen times.

“Go away!”  An angry hiss.

 “It’s ok.”  Marcus kept his
voice low.  “I’m not a guardsman.  I’m looking for two friends of mine.”

“Go away!”

“Is Sebastianus with you?” Marcus
asked. 

The voice remained silent.

“Is Sebastianus, friend of the
poor, staying with you?” Marcus pressed.

“Go away!”

    “You must help me.  I’m
looking for a pair of Parthian beggars who Sebastianus was helping.  I fear
they have been taken away.”

“Sebastianus is no longer here. 
Leave us alone.”

“Where is he?”

Silence again.

“Where?” 

Marcus thumped the door until
neighbours came from their shops and apartments to insist that he stop.

“For the sake of Jupiter, stop
your racket!”

“Do you want the city guard
back?”

  A youth from across the street
heaved a cobblestone and it narrowly missed Marcus’ head.  He conceded,
wandering away along the adjoining thoroughfares, Patricius stalking close
behind. 

Capricious bends in the tight
laneways were disorienting.  Nothing looked familiar.  It was as though he’d
stepped into a different city altogether.  Men on the street wore the
rectangular woolen himations wrapped over their shoulders, in the Greek style.  Unlike
Greeks, these men, uniformly bearded, had blue tassels suspended from the four
corners of their himations.  Others moved amongst them, floating in and out of
porticos noiselessly, like spectres.  These were enveloped in chitons without
tassels, with gauzy shawls covering their heads and faces. 

The Judaean quarter. 

Near the market, Marcus heard
something he could recognize.  A faint fluttering.  Sura’s nai.  He ricocheted
through the bemused throng, stopping abruptly, listening hard at each stall and
portico as he neared the flute song.  It was strongest down an alley that ended
at a squat iron door.  Odours of sour milk and fermented fruit filled the
narrow space.  Green grocer rubbish.  The melody ascended from the sacks and
stalks and peels and scraps that littered its length.  There was a figure in
makeshift chiton, himaton and head dressing hunched amid the debris. 

The flute fell silent.  The
figure rocked backwards and forwards, chanting. 

“Sura?”  Marcus whispered. 
“Nasir?  It’s me, Marcus.”

The figure paused.

“It’s Marcus, I brought bread and
cheese.  I’ve looked everywhere for you.  I couldn’t find Sebastianus. 
No-one’s seen him in days.”

The chanter adjusted the
improvised head covering, peeked, and then removed it.  Sura poked her head
from the many layers of rags.

“Sura!  What happened?”

“Marcus, we are cursed.  Aramazd
forsakes us.”

Sura described the city guard
collecting people from the street, the suspicious, the foreign, the beggars. 
They fled for the Hebrew markets.  They found the old grocer who knew
Sebastianus, the one who gave them remnants on occasion, the one who liked
music.  He agreed to hide Sura, if she played for him when he asked.  Nasir
continued to run.

“I’m very worried.  He’s angry
and afraid.  He’s certain Sebastianus is in prison.  He said there is something
he must do, people he must meet.”

“Come,” Marcus said, “let’s leave
this place.  Do you know the way?”

Sura held Marcus’ arm and
directed them out of the Judaean quarter.  He led her to his insula. 

“The priest of Mithras said our
street corner was infected with evil.” 

Sura sat on the edge of Marcus’
straw mattress, her lame leg folded under the whole one.  She held the elbow of
her handless arm against her body.  She was in her old robe again, having discarded
the rags and washed in Marcus’ basin.  Two goblets of mulsum, the flatbread,
and the cheese sat on the rough, wooden table before her. 

“The priest announced that the
attacks on Rome were the beginning of the end, the first blow of a final battle
between good and evil, that the good citizens of this city should now do their
part.”

“Please.  Eat.”  Marcus broke
apart the bread and halved the cheese.

“There are rumours that the Pilus
Posterior, Rufus Quintillus, is camped in the city’s garrison with his
soldiers.  They say Quintillus is a devout Mithraist and that he has taken it
upon himself to fulfill the priest’s directives.  That even now they are
sacrificing prisoners at the mithraeum.”

Marcus coughed, a breadcrumb
catching at his windpipe, and he shook his head.

“They sacrifice bulls.  Not
humans.”  He turned away, remembering the secret meeting he attended.  “I know
some Mithraists.”

“Is that so?  I pray you are
right.  I fear for Nasir.  He’s my only family.” 

“I’m sure all will pass before
long.”

“That I had your optimism,
Marcus.  The purge will last until all who are not like them are either
enslaved or dead.”

Marcus straightened in his
chair. 

“You’re upset,” he said, patting
her arm.  “This is a difficult time.  I’m afraid too.  You have to understand,
folks around here are unsettled by the attacks on Rome.  The world changed that
day the Emporium was burned to the ground.  They’re afraid.”

Marcus tried to imagine what Vincentius would say.  “But we’re still free.  We’re still Roman.” 

“Afraid?” Sura attempted to
stand, upsetting the rickety table and sending its contents of bread scraps and
cheese rind to the floor. 

“What do these people know about
fear,” she said, bracing herself against the wall, wagging her finger at him,
“what do
you
know about fear?”

Marcus could see in Sura her
brother, the matted, sweating madman that he encountered the first time he met
the Parthian beggars on the street. 

“Lunatics immolate themselves in
a half empty warehouse six hundred miles from here, who knows why, and Roman
citizens from the Nile to Hadrian’s wall are cowering in their beds, afraid to
look underneath the mattress for what they might find, turning in their friends
and neighbours to the delators because of a peculiar look or word.  Is this the
same group of people that built an empire out of a pestilent swamp?  Evidently
not.  When was Rome last attacked?  One hundred years ago?  One hundred and
fifty?”

Marcus shook his head.  Spittle
leapt from Sura’s lips like water from an overheated pan. 

“When is the last time
this
wretched city has ever been attacked?  Never!  Not once!  At least not for many
centuries, when there was an entirely different tribe of people living here
before they were scattered and ploughed under by early Roman pioneers.  And
yet, the people of this city, and cities like it, behave now like they’re under
siege.  All of those lofty principles praised by the ancient Roman founders: 
freedom and courage, moderation and self-sacrifice, honesty and justice, they
disintegrate like pillars of sand in the face of that remote breeze.  If that’s
all it takes to shake the foundations, the Mithraists are right: this is the
beginning of the end.”

Marcus moved his chair and
avoided Sura’s eye.

“This is not fear!” Sura
continued.  “Fear occurs elsewhere.  Godforsaken places.”

“Sura, you’re upset, you have
every right to be, but I don’t think that’s fair.”

“Do you want to know fear
Marcus?  Imagine a five year old girl, standing at the edge of her father’s
field, hunting for mushrooms.  Perhaps it is a field and a farm much like your
own father’s, in Verulamium.  Her father and mother are ploughing and tilling,
while the child happily occupies herself at the edge of the forest.  Can you
picture it?  Now see this girl watching from a hedge with terror, as a Roman
century arrives on the scene, materializing like spirits from a nightmare,
butchering the livestock before marching into the farmhouse.  That was how I
experienced the first Roman expedition into my homeland, the one led by the emperor
Commodus.

As you may know, Commodus was a
sporting man.  He loved his game hunting.  Now!  Picture that same five year
old girl, trembling and crying, her eyes as wide as a pair of bronze coins, as
the soldiers release her parents and they dash across the stubbly field towards
the hedge in which she hides?  Can you possibly understand that little girl’s
terror, to see the great emperor himself clucking his giant warhorse into
action, its hammering hoofs pounding the soft earth like an abomination from deepest
Tartarus, bearing down on the Parthian farmers, her fleeing parents, emperor
and steed blocking out the very sunlight and the child cowering in the bushes?”

“It is said that the emperor,
with his bow, stopped a leopard in its tracks in the Circus Maximus from one
hundred paces with a single arrow.  I have seen his prowess with my own eyes. 
A pair of Parthian peasants scrambling through the dirt is a trifle, a mere
warm up, for the marksman emperor, killer of leopards.  A half dozen arrows
loosed from his bow plunged into the sunburned backs of my mother and father,
only fifteen feet from me.  I watched, breathless with panic and fright, as my
parents expired on the field that they had spent their lives sowing with their
sweat and were now, in death, irrigating with their blood.  Their anguished
cries were almost drowned out by the pounding in my ears.  And though my every
fibre longed to escape the safety of my hiding place and be with them in their
time of dying, I heard their desperate pleas for me not to leave the hedge
under any circumstances.  And I obeyed.”

Marcus didn’t speak.  His mouth
was parched.

“They bled to death slowly, while
the Roman soldiers lunched.”

Sura continued, in a softer tone.

“Parthia was bloodied that year,
but not conquered.  For many years afterward there was civil war and all the
atrocity that comes with brother fighting brother.  And then, the Romans came
again, this time under Caracallus, to crush what little was left.  Fear,
Marcus, is to watch the decapitation of your elderly uncle at the hands of a Miles
Gregarius.  Fear is to find your aunt, driven to suicide by her despair, a
blue, bloated corpse beached on the river.  Fear is to be trampled by Roman
warhorses as you try to move livestock to safety, so badly mauled you almost
die.”

“And then there is Nasir.  We
have lost our entire family and I am no longer whole.  Somehow he emerged
physically intact.  Daily he plots his revenge.  Fear and rage eat away at him like
a disease.  Deep in his core there is a brittle, charred cinder, curdling his
blood.  Brutality is all we’ve known in this life.  War is waged every day in
my homeland.  Here, we just try to survive, because we don’t know what else to
do.”

Sura sobbed.

“The world didn’t change when
rebels burned the Emporium to the ground Marcus.  It just came to Rome for a
day.”

Marcus stared hard at the motes
of dust suspended in the still air of the insula.  Sura had her head buried in
her shoulder.

“I’m very sorry,” he said,
finally, breaking the silence.

For several minutes, neither of
them said a word.  Sura’s sniffling began to subside.  Marcus stood, walked to
her, put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed gently.  She rested her head
against his chest.

“You both should stay here for as
long as you need to,” Marcus said, his eyes still lowered.

“You’re very kind.  But we
couldn’t do that.” 

“No, really, I insist.  I really
should have had you here much, much earlier.  I’m ashamed not to have invited
you sooner.  I’m ashamed to say it didn’t occur to me.” 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Patricius stood for an hour
outside Marcus’ insula.  When it became obvious that Marcus and the Parthian
beggar were staying and that Marcus would not return to the Frontinus worksite
that day, he departed, mulling over what he had seen. 

It was odd behaviour, he thought,
but was it illegal?  Guilt by association was about the only charge.  Even then
it was weak, since he hadn’t seen either of the Parthians do anything criminal,
particularly not the woman.  He needed something incriminating.  Patricius
returned to the street corner where he first saw the beggars, and Sebastianus,
shortly after his arrival in the city.  He was unsure of what he’d find there. 
He found Nasir.