The Saint's Mistress (37 page)

slop. I’m not leaving until I get some of whatever you holy-holy women get to eat.”

“You’ll be leaving right now.” The voice came from behind him, and a pair of hands pulled

him away from Lucy and shoved him to the side of the line. His wooden bowl clattered on the

stone floor, spilling thin, grayish porridge.

I hadn’t seen Eraclius approach. He gave the man another shove. “You’ll go hungry today,

and come back tomorrow with a better attitude. Go on. Leave these women alone.” He stood

with his hands on his hips until the man scuttled out of the forum, spitting on the ground several

times as he went.

Lucy continued ladling porridge for the next person in line. “Are you all right?” I asked.

She nodded, ladling her next bowlful. “He wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last. People are

hungry. It makes them crazy. He didn’t hurt me.”

“Thank you,” I said to Eraclius. Then I indicated Lucy’s cauldron. “We’re almost empty here.

I was just going into the temple to see where our refill got to.”

“We’ve already run out at the basilica,” Eraclius reported. “I’ll come with you to check on

how your supplies here are holding up. It looks like you didn’t plan for enough, and we’ll have to

start delivering more grain to each station.”

In the weeks that we worked together, I had come to respect Eraclius’s intelligence and hard

work, and his defense of Lucy was not the first time that his masculine strength had rescued us,

but he still resented my replacing him as Bishop Augustine’s favored scribe, and never missed an

opportunity to point out to me any mistake that I made.

I swallowed a sharp retort. “Can you send someone for more grain?”

“I’ll stop at the warehouse myself and let them know to send you more, while on my way

back to the bishop’s office. I need to get back and copy Bishop Quintus’s sermon for Sunday.”

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“Oh, he’ll be preaching in place of Bishop Augustine?”

“Bishop Augustine isn’t well,” Eraclius explained, and I almost smiled at his smug pride at

having news about the bishop that he thought I didn’t know. In fact, I had been increasingly

worried about Aurelius. Every day, he seemed to grow thinner, the creases in his face deeper, the

shadows around his eyes darker.

“We’re preaching on the relic,” he went on. “Bishop Quintus will preach at the cathedral, and

others of us are to deliver the same sermon at smaller churches throughout the city.”

“The relic?”

“The vial of Saint Perpetua’s milk,” Eraclius replied, avoiding my eyes. “I remember you

expressed doubt, but, trust me, Bishop Augustine carefully verifies all miraculous claims. He

insists on signed statements from witnesses in every case.”

“And got them from Bishop Quintus and Brother Marius in this case, of course.”

“Of course.”

I nodded. As the weeks had passed without any further discussion, I had come to hope that I

would never again hear of the false relic. I understood now that the question had only been

discussed in my absence. And, I had to admit that the city was near despair.

“We have to do something,” Eraclius went on, as if reading my thoughts. “Boniface had to

arrest a group of apostates just last week. They stole a chicken to sacrifice to Ammon.”

I had heard of this, as well as of the baker who had been executed for selling extra loaves of

bread to those who could pay a premium. The whispers that we should surrender were growing

and since Boniface and Augustine would never agree to this, violence was always just under the

surface in the city.

The midden piles in backyards grew as no one could venture outside the city walls to dispose

of garbage at the more distant dumps, and the city began to reek of rotting food scraps and

human waste, and to buzz with heavy, malevolent flies.

At least, the Vandals had run out of body parts to catapult over the city walls. Now they used

their war machines to hurl stones over the walls, so that each week several people were crushed

from above and the whole city had taken to glancing up at the sky every few minutes.

I sighed. “Eraclius, that vial is not going to solve anything. “

He shifted his shoulders and looked away from me. “We need a miracle of some kind.”

I looked at the long, ragged line of hungry people waiting for their only meal of the day. My

brother and sister had come to this city many years ago. Numa and Tito must both be dead by

now, but I often thought I could be unknowingly serving porridge to a child or grandchild of

theirs. As long as we could save lives for one more day and then another and another, as long as

our food and water lasted, we had hope.

“Maybe we have a miracle already,” I said. “The aqueduct hasn’t been cut yet, and the water

in the cisterns is holding up. If we can hold on for just a few more weeks, we can keep feeding

even the poorest long enough to keep them alive until help comes from Carthage or Rome.

Already, we’ve been able to feed more people than I’d have dreamed was possible.”

Now Eraclius looked at me and smiled. “Just as our Lord did with the loaves and the fishes.”

I laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that, but yes. But, seriously, Brother, I’ve never seen that vial

of Bishop Quintus’s work a single miracle, and I don’t ever expect to see one.”

“Well, Bishop Augustine accepts it as miraculous and that’s good enough for me. We’re

presenting it Sunday. Pray that you’re wrong and it produces a miracle – or at least that it gives

people enough hope that they stop fighting in porridge lines and sacrificing chickens.”

“I’ll pray,” I promised, “but I’m not expecting any miracles.”

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Aurelius’ door was open, and I found him sitting at the window.

“Hello, Leona. I don’t think I feel up to dictating anything today, but you are welcome to sit

with me for a while. How many did you feed today?”

“More than three thousand at the forum alone, in addition to whatever Eraclius and his crew

did at Saint Stephen’s. Eraclius had to rescue Lucy from a roughneck today.”

He shook his head and said almost exactly what Lucy had said. “Hunger and fear make men

susceptible to the devil.”

“Eraclius is a good man,” I said.

“Yes.”

“He’s hurt that I’ve supplanted him as your scribe.”’

“Eraclius will be my successor as bishop of Hippo. But nobody can transcribe my words as

you can, and I confess that I enjoy your company again after all these years.” He rubbed his

temples.

“Bishop? Are you all right?” I asked.

He turned to me. “I have pains in my head these days,” he admitted.

“Let me rub your neck for you,” I offered without thinking, and then felt myself flush,

embarrassed at how easy it was to forget the years and fall into old habits.

He gave me a sharp sideways look for a second, but then his eyes went vague and he said,

“That might help.”

“My hands are as strong as they ever were,” I bragged, rising and standing behind his chair.

“I’ve spent many years hard at work and I think I’ve reached old age stronger than I was as a

girl.”

Aurelius nodded and submitted to my massage. His neck was red and creased from a lifetime

in the African sun, and tufted with white hairs. The skin was loose as I kneaded and squeezed the

muscles beneath.

“Remember the baths in Carthage?” I said.

He sighed. “I do. A hot bath would feel good now. But soon we’ll be out of wood even for

cooking fire. None of us should even think of heating water for bathing.”

“I know. I see so much hardship every day. I worry about some of the parents. I see them

give their share of the porridge their children. Yet, if the parents die, who will care for the

children who live?”

“God gives us all that we need, if not in this life then in the next.”

“That’s no answer for children who are starving or parentless here,” I argued. It was the same

old argument we had always had: the theoretical versus the practical, on opposite sides once

again as if the years apart had never happened.

He reached back and patted my kneading hand. “You’d be surprised at how little it takes to

sustain life.”

My hands stopped moving. It suddenly made sense to me: the weakness and the headaches.

“When did you last eat?” I asked him.

“I have what I need,” was his reply.

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“Leona, I ate little to start with, only what I thought I needed to stay alive and save more

souls. And I find now that I need even less than I thought. Love of food is yet another sensual

pleasure that only distracts from love of the Lord.”

“You’re making yourself ill, and causing me work.”

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“You can stop when you like.”

He grunted as I pressed hard on a knot of shoulder muscle. “I’m sorry,” I said.

He held up a hand. “All right. But, we’ll have to be done for now. Boniface will be here

shortly to discuss the defense of the city if Genseric decides to attempt an attack over the walls.”

“Do you think he’ll do it?”

“No. Why should he? He only has to wait us out a few more months to starve us out, unless

the Lord grants us a miracle.”

“That flask of Quintus’s isn’t going to bring about any miracles.”

“God can do anything, by any means.”

I believed with all my heart that that was true, and yet I felt a sense of foreboding about the

introduction of the relic.

156

On the hottest day of August, the day before the Saint Perpetua sermon, all the fountains in

Hippo ran dry.

Lucy warned me early in the morning, while I was still at prayer. Even this early in the day,

the heat in my little cell in the bishop’s guest house was heavy as iron, and sweat trickled down

my back and felt slick behind my knees and elbows. Lucy stood in the doorway and waited for

me to finish my prayers, but I sensed a human presence and my feeling of the Lord’s presence

deserted me, so I turned, and creaked into a stand.

Lucy wasted no time. “Genseric has cut the aqueduct,” she announced, and then rushed into

more explanations, wringing her hands. “I sent one of the novices to the fountain to fetch water

for our breakfast porridge, and she was gone so long I thought she had laid down somewhere and

gone back to sleep. ‘The fountain was running slow,’ she said, and Leona, my heart about

stopped. I knew what it must mean. I hoped it wasn’t true, so I ran to see for myself. You know

that fountain in the courtyard behind the cathedral gushes like a young man’s stream. Oh, Leona,

it was a trickle when I saw it”

My own heart sank like lead into my stomach. We had to expect that the Vandals would

eventually cut the aqueduct. In the three months since the start of the siege, Boniface had had

work teams laboring round the clock to divert water from the baths into cisterns where it could

be stored against the day when the city’s supply of water from the distant mountains would be

cut off. Now we would have to pray that the stored water would last until the fall rains started in

November.

“What will the people do when we run out of water?” Lucy fretted. “How will we keep them

alive?”

What will they do indeed, I wondered. Every fountain in the city must be as slow as our own,

or soon would be, and within hours they would be as dry as a crone’s teat. How long would it be

before panic and violence took hold?

Boniface and Augustine had been prepared all along for the disaster of the severed aqueduct,

and immediately issued emergency instructions, directing all residents of the city to cistern

stations in their own quarter to fetch water, one quart per person per day. The instructions were

posted on notice boards throughout the city for the literate, and would be repeated in the

churches on Sunday for the rest.

Boniface’s soldiers guarded every cistern station and no exceptions were made for those too

young or too ill to stand in line for their quart. Each person had a small cut placed on the back of

their left hand as they were issued their precious quart, to prevent anyone from getting into line a

second time in the same day.

“What about the ill?” Lucy worried, when I explained the system to her. “They need the water

more than any. Isn’t there some way they could get a ration?”

“Their family members will have to share with them,” I said, and it hurt me, too, to think of

the awful choices that people would be forced to make, between saving themselves and trying to

save a loved one who was ill and might die anyway. “Both the bishop and the general are

adamant that the system must seem fair. There can be no room left for anyone to cheat, or they

fear violence.”

157

The forum had its own cistern, and so Lucy and I and our helpers were outside serving

porridge just as usual after Mass on the Sunday of the Saint Perpetua sermon. My dauntless Lucy

stood at a cauldron, stirring with a wooden paddle, while a younger sister dipped and re-dipped

the ladle, serving one after another of the gaunt, stinking citizens of Hippo. Lucy used her