(See lower sidebar menu for links to all available chapters)
Chapter Five (continued)
Lucius tried to assume an air of
casual comfort, as if he had expected to find himself in just that spot and
felt entirely at home there. After a few moments, the others in the courtyard
stopped glancing at them, and all attention focused again on Polycarp and the
elders, at the head of the assembly. It only took Lucius a moment to realize
that, for all his attempts to look comfortable, he had stepped into the midst
of a wholly foreign world.
The building itself was
unremarkable, but what was going on inside it was strikingly new. He had
worshiped at his family’s shrine in the Caelius house, and he had duly attended
festivals and sacrifices at the various temples of Rome, but none of the
familiar markers of piety that he was so accustomed to there were here. He was
used to seeing a regimented array of idols, or at least one grand one in the
center of it all, but there was no such thing here. He was also used to seeing
an altar for the offering of sacrifices, but that was absent too. Instead,
there were one or two lightly-sketched images on the wall behind the elders,
but the stories described there were foreign to him. And instead of an altar,
there was a table around which Polycarp and the elders stood, with just a few
rustic items present: a scroll, a loaf of bread, and a ceramic jar with a
matching cup. The faintest hint of incense filled the air, but nothing near the
mind-fogging clouds that exhaled from the doorways of Roman temples.
One of the elders up front appeared
to be at the center of the unfolding ritual—a gray-haired man of about fifty.
The other elder was far older, perhaps as old a man as Lucius had ever seen. He
was thin and bent over with the twisting malformations of age, and his bronzed
skin had the look of fragile softness amid all its sags and wrinkles. But
beneath a set of unruly brows flashed a gaze of warm intelligence, and Lucius
felt the ancient man’s eyes burning on him more than once. Polycarp, for his
part, stood meekly by the side, apparently ready to assist in the actions of
the ritual when his time came.
The first elder was chanting
something, and every so often all the people standing in the courtyard would
chant something in response. It was a wavering, Eastern sort of chant, in which
all the words toward the end of each line ran together in a seamless stream.
Lucius was still adjusting his ear to the Ionian dialect of Greek, and having
to listen to the words in chant-form made it all the more difficult.
Eventually, though, he began to make sense of some of it. It was clear that the
chanting was mostly one long prayer, addressed to an unseen God. There were other
characters invoked, too, beside the main God—a reference to his son, who had a
strangely Eastern-sounding name, and to a sacred spirit.
He stood there for quite some time,
noting all these things. He had practically forgotten that he had ducked into
that courtyard just to get away from Ariston. He cast a quick glance over his
shoulder, and saw that the young Greek was still there, his face an alternating
picture of boredom and suspicion.
Ariston caught Lucius’ glance and
raised his brow in question. “Are you really staying here?” he whispered.
Lucius shrugged. He didn’t really
want to stay, but if it succeeded in dislodging Ariston from his company, it
was worth the cost.
“You know that there’s a decent
chance the magistrates will come and shut down their meeting, right?”
Lucius shrugged again.
Ariston smirked. “Choose your
friends carefully, Tiro,” he winked, stepping back toward the archway that led
toward the street. “I’ll be watching.”
Lucius turned his attention back to
the atheists’ ritual. He hoped to be able to return to the street soon enough,
but he wanted to leave enough time to make sure that Ariston had disappeared
again. The Greek’s accusations had shocked him to the point of desperation, and
he wanted nothing more to do with him. If that meant throwing in his lot with
the atheists, then so be it.
He
listened to the cadence of the prayers, gentle in their rhythm, rising and
falling like whispered breaths of wind. And the more he listened, the more
entranced that he became. He wasn’t trying to think about the prayer, much less
to join into it, but it tugged at him with calm persistence, the way that one’s
feet may be slowly pulled into the soft, wet sand by each retreating wave.
There was a remarkable tone about these prayers that he had never heard before—not
the resigned, rote litany of lauds to pamper divine pride, nor the wishful
pleading for blessings. No, here was a profound confidence, a delighted
assurance that the God they addressed heard them, cared about them, and would
answer their pleas and praises. In short, there was joy here, and it startled
him.
He began to listen more closely to
the prayer, to its celebratory exclamations, to its peace and its pauses. And
in the midst of the prayer, chanted forth by the elder, answered by the people,
he heard a common refrain: Lord, have
mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.
Lucius
had heard similar words prayed in fear in Roman temples, prayed to avert the
wrath of a capricious god, but here it sounded different. Here it was prayed in
a tone of knowledge and of rest, as if the answer was already known. It felt to
Lucius as if these people knew already that their God would grant them mercy,
not because of their prayers or deeds, but because he himself was the Lord of
mercy. There was power, radiant power, in that oft-repeated cry.
And, to his great shock, Lucius felt
himself begin to cry.
Mercy. Mercy. Mercy.
It
pounded against the crumbling walls of his heart like the hammer-blows of a
galley drum. It’s what he longed for, but knew he couldn’t get—mercy from the
Roman magistrates, mercy from his father, mercy from the gods. He needed it—he didn’t
deserve it, but he needed it.
And there, in the midst of all those
strange, world-defying atheists, the hard edges of Lucius’ soul began to be
ground down, cut back by the incessant pressure of this rampant, free-flowing,
untiring mercy. And as he vainly tried to wipe away the tears that were spilling
down his cheeks, he saw again the eyes of the ancient elder, fastened firm on
him.
No comments:
Post a Comment