What Our Eyes Have Witnessed Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2011 Daniel Fusch

  Stant Litore is a pen name for Daniel Fusch.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612183930

  ISBN-10: 161218393X

  Frontispiece by Danielle Tunstall

  Model: Martyn Dalzell

  To my wife, Jessica, for her love and her laughter

  and

  To my daughters, River and Inara—

  may we strive to our last breath

  to leave you a better world

  CONTENTS

  Historian’s Note

  The Day Before the Ides of Augustus

  An Ethics of Hunger: Earlier That Week in the Subura

  Someone at the Door

  Brittle Lives

  Regina Romae

  Caius Lucius Justus

  Polycarp on the Ides of Augustus

  Aletheia Kai Zoe

  The Apostle’s Gift

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Polycarp’s gaze

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

  WHAT YOU are reading is one installment of The Zombie Bible, a series of narratives based on certain well-known records of humanity’s enduring struggle with the undead. The original records are a mixture of poetic texts, lyrics to ancient songs set to drum and lyre, works of prophecy, legal testimonies, and chronicles both historical and hagiographical. Originally inscribed in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin on substances as varied as papyrus scrolls, chiseled rock, animal skins, and thin parchment, these records speak eloquently to us of one of history’s few constants:

  Hunger.

  The persistence of hunger as a defining factor in the human condition has never been more clear to us than today, as we face the resurgence of the old pestilence in several parts of our globe. In those regions of the world already broken by earthquakes and famine, where men and women no less noble or intelligent than you and I (though considerably more impoverished) each day face the menacing threat of the walking dead, the greater horror is the brutal reality that the dead represent: the reality that people devour people, and that when our dead rise, they look like us.

  If we can learn anything from retelling the stories of our spiritual ancestors—whether Polycarp the martyr, David the lover, Devora the prophetess, Samson the warrior, Simon the fisherman, or any of a hundred others—we can perhaps learn again how to face a rapidly decomposing world with a wild and conquering hope, an impossible hope.

  I do not know if hope can be stronger than hunger. But I know that they believed it so.

  Few episodes in European history have left such a lingering impact on Western consciousness as the outbreak of the living dead in ancient Rome and the subsequent persecutions of the early Church and its sister sects. It’s important to know that these outbreaks didn’t occur until late in Rome’s history. While it lasted, the Roman Republic had seen only a few isolated encounters with the undead—the loss of an embassy in Pontus, the discovery of an infected island in the Middle Sea during Pompey’s campaign against the corsairs, and that terrible winter that left one of Julius Caesar’s forts in Gaul surrounded by a forest filled with moaning and ravenous dead.

  It wasn’t until the time of the Emperors that an outbreak occurred within the Eternal City itself. At first, a few reports of cannibalism in the riverside ghetto known as the Subura, largely ignored or dismissed as the primitivism of the immigrants who in that century were already flooding into Rome in great numbers from the East. But in Rome under Nero, conditions in the swollen belly of the Subura became so crowded and so unpoliced that the pestilence grew to an epidemic that threatened to consume Rome itself. Nero in his madness and panic torched the city, then blamed both the plague and the fire on an obscure Eastern cult that had taken hold in the Subura. The cult, who called themselves Brothers and Sisters of the Fish, had seen enormous gains in membership during the year of the plague, as their apostles offered both a promised cure for the walking death and a vision of a more egalitarian city in which no crowded and hungering Subura would exist.

  The fire ended the outbreak, but Nero’s persecutions afterward did more to secure him a place in history than either the dead or their elimination. Tacitus’s Histories record the lurid details of what occurred in a tone so objective and documentary that its power to shock the reader is magnified. Pointing to the cultists’ communion rite, which on the surface appeared to resemble acts of cannibalism, and to their talk of the “Gift” of a cure that involved touching and absolving the restless dead, Nero apparently adopted an extreme “punishment shall fit the crime” approach to extinguishing their gathering. The few walking corpses that had been rounded up and chained were loosed in Roman arenas on hundreds of captive Christians, and Roman crowds cheered to see those who had (presumably) brought the plague to Rome devoured by it.

  Mindful of how fire had cleansed the city, Nero made living torches of the cult’s leaders, both men and women, burning them on trees in the Emperor’s gardens. Senators and patricians of Rome walked through the gardens while the captives burned around them; they talked of the latest scandals, or affairs of state, or how to replace members of the Senate and the People that had perished in the epidemic. They did not glance for more than a moment at the human torches that lit the garden paths, nor listen too closely to the muffled screams from their gagged mouths. In this way, Rome balanced its accounts and banished from its streets both the memory of the plague and (they believed) the presence of those they blamed for it.

  Modern readers are often astounded by the crumbling of Rome; everything we know about the Roman military (its discipline, its encouragement of innovation and creative problem-solving, and its adherence to a rigid code of duty and patriotism) appears well suited to the task of quarantining and eliminating an epidemic of the undead. Yet everything about Roman culture and religion conspired to leave the Roman civilization helpless against the actual occurrence of that plague within their own city. Three cultural norms made this the case: sanitation, caste, and ancestor worship.

  First, the Romans placed an unprecedented importance on sanitation; as the river was badly polluted, nine vast aqueducts carried clean water to the hillside homes of the wealthy and to public fountains throughout the city. Additionally, the more affluent classes spent several hours a day bathing and oiling their bodies. The Romans invented the world’s most advanced sewage system up until that time. The wealthy housed their dead in marble mausoleums, houses of dignity and silence; the poor housed theirs in catacombs beneath the city—in both cases, out of sight. This concern with cleanliness translated too easily into an aversion to contact with the lower classes.

  That brings us to caste. In the days of the Republic, an enterprising man could raise caste on the basis of merit and money. By the time of the Emperors, the caste system had become much more rigid. The ghetto dwellers in the Subura, in particular, were ignored unless they began to riot during a grain shortage—a circumstance that Rome’s upper castes feared more than any other horror. Pestilence along the riverside tenements and insulae—unless it spread to the wealthy villas on the Palatine Hill—represented only the loss of so many hungry mouths. This meant both that the majority of residents in the Eternal City lived out
their lives in almost unspeakable poverty and hopelessness, and that the Roman government paid little if any attention to outbreaks. The Roman military, barred by law and ancient custom from crossing within the boundaries of the city, had its eyes on the distant borders, not on the slums at home.

  Third, ancestor worship. The Romans looked to their entombed fathers for religious guidance and for intercession with the gods. When high-caste Romans found their fathers, brothers, wives, husbands, and slaves rising from their deathbeds and hungering after their flesh, this crisis was a negation of everything they lived by, everything they’d known to be true. The realization that their honored dead could not be called upon to aid them in their crisis—that the dead were the crisis—shattered them.

  When the dead walked the streets, Romans shut their doors—but the type of refuge one took depended on caste. The patricians on the Palatine Hill lived in vast, one-story villas with no outward-facing windows; all windows looked inward, on a shrine about the hearth and on a garden atrium spacious enough to walk about and take pleasure in. Before the rising of the dead, this lack of outer windows served to prevent the inconvenience of looking at one’s neighbor; a high-caste villa (inhabited by a single family) was its own unit, inviolable and inviting no interference in its own governance.

  The multistoried and crowded apartment complex one encountered in the slums, known as the insula, was a very different type of shelter. While there were no outward windows on the first story (originally a precaution against thieves), the upper stories had windows looking both inward on the narrow atrium and outward on the streets and the other buildings that loomed near. In the insula, it was impossible to ignore one’s neighbors. You could hear them through the wall. You could smell them. You could hear the splash as the next-door tenant tossed his offal into the street. If you stepped to your window, you could see the daily traffic of the Subura, and once the plague began, you could see the dead hunting.

  This fierce proximity likely contributed to the persistence of the forbidden religion, despite the persecutions of Nero. The early Christians insisted that all human beings smelled the same, hungered the same, suffered the same; their message of the essential value of every Brother and Sister of the Fish, regardless of caste or sex, was one that resonated with the riverside tenants and eventually even with some youths in the high-caste residences on the hills. The stories they told also offered a fresh way to understand the loathsome rising of the dead, in their emphasis on a break from a tragic past (whether a communal past or an individual one), absolution rather than personal responsibility for atonement, and the promise of an eventual restoration and recovery of everything that had been or would be lost.

  It is perhaps one of history’s great ironies that the Church of later centuries fell so often into the same cultural dead ends that the early apostles abhorred, permitting reverence for the dead to take precedence over compassion for the living. My own hope is that this narrative, an account of the acts of Polycarp, might hold for us an admonition and pause for thought, even here in the towns and cities of our own time.

  Our story opens several generations after the reign of Nero. Though barely recognized as such on the Palatine Hill, Rome’s second outbreak was already well underway.

  THE DAY BEFORE THE IDES OF AUGUSTUS

  CAIUS CROUCHED and lifted a bit of the creature’s gown between his thumb and fingertip, then used the fabric to wipe away the gray, viscous matter from his dagger. The corpse was distorted, a nightmare version of a woman. Perhaps a woman as demons of the underworld might imagine her, if they had never seen one. Its face drained of all pigment except where it had been gnawed and chewed, between the woman’s lip and her right ear; half her upper lip had been bitten away, exposing the long roots of her teeth. A mangled cavity where the woman’s nose had been, and pale eyes that were like the eyes of dead fish. A few moments before, this thing had torn through the door of Caius’s official station, hands lifted to grasp at him, its mouth emitting a low cry of hunger that Caius could still hear, loud in his ears, even now that this thing lay still on the floor.

  For a while Caius stayed crouching, his heart racing, waiting for that cry to fade from his mind. He found it difficult to breathe; the walls of his little office were very close. Struggling for calm, he took note of details about the corpse. One arm was broken and twisted at a terrible angle. Much of its left leg was chewed, and across its lower belly, the white garment it still wore was torn. The flesh beneath it was ripped open too. When this thing had been a woman, when she’d died, something had been eating her. Numb, he drew his eyes from the thing’s wounds, scanned the rest of its body. Hair done up in what must have been an elegant coiffure. Blood matted in it now. Traces of cream on the thing’s one remaining cheek, some expensive cosmetic. The smaller two fingers on its right hand were missing. On its left, a silver ring graced the third finger. That held his attention a moment; he swallowed. The ring was familiar, and though he tried, he couldn’t recall where he’d seen it before.

  He drew a slow breath, pressed the back of his hand to his lips, tried to recover. One thing was clear. The corpse that’d smashed into his office wore a white gown of the finest fabric, though much of it was now in tatters. A patrician’s gown. When this creature had been a woman, screaming as other lurching dead fed on her, she’d been a patrician woman, a daughter of Rome’s highest families.

  “Where did you come from?” Caius whispered. Sweat on his palms.

  “I’ll try to find out, dominus,” a thin voice said behind him.

  With care, Caius set aside on the floor the knife he’d driven into the thing’s head. Gradually, the world around him began to exist: the guttering of the oil lamp, the breeze through the broken door lifting tiny bumps on his skin; the warmth of his dagger’s hilt in his hand, slick with his sweat; the sweet, nauseous reek of decay; the too-fast breathing of his aide who stood behind him. Uneasy, he lifted his eyes toward the shattered cypress wood of the door, catching a glimpse through the broken wood of the sunlit public square beyond and his lictors moving to guard the exits into the nearby streets. His lictors were not really guards—just a ceremonial entourage accorded to the city’s highest-ranking official. No doubt taking up station around the square made them feel useful. The actual guardsmen stood somewhere outside near the prisoners’ sheds; he’d hired those with coin.

  There was no one else in the square; at the cry of the dead, Romans did not come to look—they shut their doors.

  The corpse beside him had filled the office with its stench. “Burn it,” Caius growled without looking from the door. “And bring me the old man.”

  He heard his aide retreat back farther into the building. With an almost silent groan, Caius got to his feet, retreated behind his desk, and stood there, splaying his hands on the wooden surface and leaning forward. The grain of the desk was fine cedar from Gaul. The luxury of it brought him little comfort. Nothing he owned brought comfort or solace anymore. This desk, the military medals on the wall behind him, the sword that rusted in its sheath in his study at home—they were only tokens of failure. He had stopped looking at them.

  Caius measured his days now solely by the slow walk from his high villa down to the baths, a few streets below on the slope. There he sat in long silences while dutiful slaves scrubbed his back and other men, young and old, chattered at the other end of the shallow pool about politics or scandals or heroic ambitions, or other things that were dry and constant as dust. They had learned not to interrupt his silences. Caius would let the water lap at his thighs and breathe in the steam, then stand while the slaves clothed him in a toga immaculate and perfect in its summons to duty. After that, the walk back up the hill to the temple of revered Justitia, defender of the wronged—a walled, marble complex of vast size on the opposite slope of the Palatine from his villa, with his small official station an annex just outside the wall, like a barnacle on a ship’s hull, and beside it a row of wooden sheds for the temporary holding of the accused. He walked
with firm, quick steps and without any slouch to his shoulders, though his insides were hollow and empty. The small clump of official lictors carrying their bound rods of office trailed behind him, signaling to any who looked up as they passed that here walked one of the senior magistrates of Rome, in whom was invested the hopes and the keeping of the Eternal City.

  The walk always ended here, at his office.

  Caius didn’t watch the two slaves who entered the room from the inner door, though he listened to the slide of the corpse across the floor. “Scrub that floor,” he called without glancing up, and heard them stop by the door. “I want no trace of that thing left, not a drop of blood, not a flake of skin, not a strand of hair. You hear?”

  “Yes, dominus,” one of them murmured, and when Caius remained silent, the slide of the body resumed. Caius heard the crack of the door being kicked the rest of the way open, a wooden rain of splinters. That walking, hungering corpse had made kindling of his door. Always before, when someone had come to that door, they had come not as a visitor nor a passerby nor a client but as the accused, as shattered Romans driven by hunger to sometimes extravagant crimes. Often men had been forced through that door, trembling. Caius had seen their heads jerk when they heard it click shut behind them.

  Until today. This ravenous corpse had burst through like an accusation itself. And what strength these dead had, to break a door! The dead could use all their strength, uncaring; they would break themselves in breaking through a door to get at the living, in the desperation of their hunger. This one had broken its arm doing it.

  The accursed thing had worn a patrician’s gown and a ring of considerable price. This hadn’t been some wretch come crawling uphill from that rats’ nest of the Subura—that throng of riverside tenements and crowded insulae that smothered the banks of the Tiber. That river ran brown, having taken within itself all the sewage and offal of the Eternal City. The midstreet ditches carried refuse downhill from the quiet villas and gardens of Rome’s upper castes, and in the entrails of the Subura, men and women who lived like animals chucked their own vomit and dung in after it. Caius’s lips thinned. All filth, both Rome’s offal and Rome’s human dregs, drained down into the Subura—where, a year ago, those dregs had overwhelmed and drowned his son. His only son. Now all that filth was backing up; the diseased dead were stumbling up the long slopes. A few packs of dead stalked even the Palatine Hill, and Caius’s hired guardsmen were kept busy thinning their numbers. Men said in the streets that the statue of Roma in the Forum Romani had been heard crying out Rome’s secret name in the dark watch before dawn—the name that once uttered must bring about Rome’s fall.