The Saint's Mistress (31 page)

insistent that they be left to be controlled by the women’s house, not by me, his friend. It seems

you still have a certain power over him.”

Quintus always had the ability to inspire opposition in me, regardless of what else I was

feeling. Even though I cared nothing about the land any more, I was glad he didn’t have it, and,

in my grief, I was beyond caring about any vows of humility and obedience to my bishop. “I

have no power over Aurelius. He saw what was right.”

“How can it possibly be right to leave productive acres in the care of women? I would have

used it to advance our Church. You think you’ll use it to feed your peasant population, but you

don’t know how to manage it. I can’t imagine how you persuaded him.”

“Partly by reminding him of your debts to me.”

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“Yes, yes, he reminded me, too.” Quintus waved this off as if it were irrelevant. “How many

of them can you feed on a few acres anyway? This is foolishness, Leona. They shouldn’t be

concerned with their comforts in this world anyway.” He popped an olive in his mouth and

reached for the goblet of wine beside him.

“And what about you? Shouldn’t you be unconcerned with your own comforts?” I said.

Quintus’ hand stopped halfway to his mouth. “I’m doing God’s work, and I’m used to living a

different way,” he said after a pause. Then he completed his sip of wine and scowled at me.

“Anyway, I’m your bishop. I’m not answerable to you for what passes my lips. Sometimes you

go too far, Sister.”

I shrugged. It didn’t really matter to me what Quintus ate or drank, didn’t matter whether I

was insubordinate to my bishop, didn’t matter what happened to Monnica’s acres. Buried in the

dark weight of grief, and I felt myself already in hell.

“You lost your son,” Quintus said. “You’re not yourself, and so I excuse you.” He paused and

then continued, “Aurelius has gone on to Hippo as Ambrose and I had both urged him to do. I

believe he will find God’s work for him there and be comforted in his sorrow. I pray the same for

you.”

He made the sign of the cross before me and dismissed me.

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Punishing heat beat down on Thagaste for the next several days, adding to my sense that I was

living in hell. The sun was a white explosion as soon as it cleared the horizon, blasting skin and

piercing eyes. North Africans are used to intense heat, but those days were like standing inside a

bread oven.

I instructed the sisters to rest during the heat wave and do only such work as was necessary

for survival: fetching water, milking the goats, plucking fruit and olives for our meals.

But, I myself could not be still. Whether lying on my bed or seated outside in the shade,

stillness brought me to the black wall of my grief, a wall that stretched forever in all directions so

that I could see nothing but darkness and stone. So, instead, I worked, and remembered, and

argued with God.

The bishop had made a small scriptorium for the monks who worked as scribes in the town.

My women had no such luxury. We worked by the light that streamed into our dining hall, and I

worked there now, putting a binding on a Hebrew scripture that I had spent many months

copying from a crumbling scroll.

With a clean old cloth spread on the table to protect my pages from any oil or stain, I pierced

the folds of each quire with an awl, carefully measuring so that the holes were spaced exactly the

same on each sheaf of pages. Next I picked up a larger awl and pierced the faces of each quire in

five places to prepare them for the thongs that would bind them to the book’s cover. Then I

threaded my needle with linen thread and began binding each individual quire by sewing along

the folds.

The work with the awls had been very exacting, taking all of my concentration and making

sweat prick my face and trickle down my sides. The sewing was more mindless and my thoughts

began to scurry around the wall of my grief, looking for an explanation for my loss.

Why? Why had Adeo been taken from me? I had left him in Italy and come back to North

Africa, specifically so that I would no longer be tempted to sin with his father. I had devoted my

life to my community, eating little, resting little, copying the word of God, and when necessary

laboring in the African sun beside the younger women whose care and spiritual welfare had been

entrusted to me. Should I not have been rewarded to this?

Unbidden, words from a recent sermon of Quintus’ came to me. He had been quoting the

Hebrew scripture: “I the Lord your God am a jealous god, punishing children for the iniquity of

the parents, to the third and fourth generation.”

I thought again of my years of sin with Aurelius, and of the greed I had felt before we lost

Adeo: greed for Monnica’s land, greed to lay eyes on my son again, and then my surprising

renewed greed for Aurelius’ body. A fist of guilt squeezed my heart as I remembered the horrible

day of Adeo’s head injury, how angry and petulant I had been that day over being left to mind

him while Aurelius enjoyed the Circus with his friends.

But then I started to argue with God. Adeo was full of goodness and would have been a gift to

Your Church. Yet You took him from us because of our past sins. Why? Why would You look

only at our sin? Wouldn’t all lives come to nothing but sorrow if You looked only at our sin?

I could almost hear God’s response in my head:
Most lives do come to nothing but sorrow.

Not rich people, I thought bitterly. Not people like Quintus, who always find themselves

power and comfort, whether in an Empire or a Church. What about him and his sins? What about

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all the innocent people he and Nebridius harassed back in Carthage? Even now, what good does

he do for anyone except himself and his own ambitions?

Even the rich die.

Then how can You be good? You told us to treat the poor and the suffering as we would treat

You, and then look at how You treat us. If You are all powerful and all good, then why did You

make a world filled with nothing but sin and misery and death? What’s the point? If life is all

sorrow, why even live?

No answer. No comfort. Just that black wall, and the feeling that I was dying from the inside

out.

Later that afternoon, a sweating boy arrived with the message that Quintus summoned me

right away, but I waited until evening to walk into town, and still arrived light-headed and

prickly with sweat.

I met with him in his dining room, while he ate his supper.

“I expected you earlier,” he complained.

“It was too hot earlier.”

He ignored this and plowed on. “A situation has arisen: refugees from the borderlands, driven

north by the Aitheopian skirmishes. Their village, it seems, was completely destroyed, nearly

everyone killed or carried away as slaves. A small handful survived and somehow managed to

make it to towns north. Two of them have landed here on our doorstep.”

I waited for him to go on, too sunk in my own sorrow to spare any thought for what these

refugees might have endured.

He speared a boiled quail’s egg into his mouth and continued, “The older woman claims to

have grown up here and hopes she might still find family. She begs the protection of the church

while she and her daughter re-settle themselves here. I naturally thought of you. With your

compassion for the poor and suffering, it seemed to me that the women’s house would be willing

to take them for a time. And, of course, they should be among other women.”

“Of course,” I agreed, out of habit more than compassion.

“I was hoping that you would take them back with you this very day.”

“Of course.”

Quintus gestured for his new slave, the one who had replaced the disloyal Banco, to fetch the

women. The slave returned with two dusty wraiths, one old and one young. The older woman

was small and sinewy, with large, sad eyes. The feeling that I had seen her before tickled me, and

then I noticed the unusual cross around her neck, the exact match of the one I still wore. My

heart began to pound.

“Miriam?” I said.

The older woman frowned at me at first, then her eyes widened. “Leona?” she whispered.

I faltered stepped towards her, still thinking I might be mistaken or dreaming, and then I

folded her in an embrace, and joy and wonder rose in me like a dawn.

“Leona,” my old friend repeated, and collapsed into rasping sobs in my arms.

I took Miriam and Lucy back to the women’s house with me that night, and took them into

my own bed, dusty and bad-smelling as they were. They were too exhausted to say much that

night, but in the morning I questioned Miriam over a breakfast of cheese and grapes, while Lucy

still slept.

“Can you talk about it?” I asked her. “Did anyone else from your village survive?”

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“Survive, I think yes, but carried off for slaves,” she told me. “I think we’re the only ones

who lived and escaped.”

“How did you manage to escape?”

“When they came, Lucy and I were away from the village, hunting for herbs. We heard the

noise: men yelling and women screaming and horses. So I knew what must be happening. We

hid in an olive grove all day. Lucy kept crying for her baby and I told her it would be all right,

they don’t hurt babies, but we both knew I was lying.”

“She had a child?”

Miriam closed her eyes and nodded. “A beautiful, healthy little boy, not yet twelve moons

old. She left him with her sister-in law while we went out for our herbs. Olivia had a baby, too,

and she and Lucy used to care for each other’s babies, each just like her own, even shared their

milk at times. Those two little cousins were as good as brothers to each other.”

“Oh, Miriam.” I reached out and squeezed her shoulder.

Miriam pressed her fingers to her forehead and shook her head. “He was my grandbaby,

Leona, and I knew what was happening in that town. If there was any way I could have given my

own life to save that baby, I would have done it, but the only way I could save my Lucy was to

make her stay in those trees. It was a long, long day, listening to the screaming coming from our

village, and then the Aitheope army passed on the road behind us, with their stinking horses. It

took them almost an hour to get past us, and I had to hold Lucy down and clap my hand over her

mouth to keep her from crying out. Even after they were past, we waited a long time to creep

back into the village. My heart was in my throat the whole time, wondering if maybe they left

someone behind to guard, but … well, they didn’t need to, because they didn’t leave behind

anything alive. Took all the food, took everything. Left not one person alive.”

She paused to take a ragged breath, and I waited.

Miriam stared into the distance, as if the horror were still before her. She went on, “We found

the babies, both dead, their necks broken, and Olivia…” Miriam put her face in her hands and

rocked back and forth. “Oh, Leona, that poor, sweet girl. I don’t know how many of those men

must have violated her, but there was more blood on her legs than on her throat that they cut

when they were done with her. My poor Lucy, she about went crazy when she saw that, the

babies dead, her friend dead like that. I had to wait until she slept to pry that baby out of her

arms. I washed all three of them myself, and then I tried to sleep, but all that death around me

and still feeling like those soldiers might come back any time…We didn’t find Lucy’s or

Olivia’s husbands’ bodies. Probably they were taken away for slaves, strong, young men like

that.”

“Oh, Miriam,” I said again. My own breath was ragged, my heart writhing, as if her loss were

my own.

Miriam shook her head. “Two women, dry soil, there was not any way we could dig a grave

for Olivia and the babies. We put the babies in her arms and covered them with rubble to keep

the birds off them, but we left the rest. We needed to get someplace before we starved and the

only place I could think of was here, back home.” Miriam shuddered out a long sigh and

continued her story. “I scrounged through the village for whatever was left of our food, to take

on the road with us, and we set out. We walked by night and found places to hide in the day, and

so we kept safe. We ran out of food the last day and were lucky that someone passed on the road

with a cart and gave us a ride the rest of the way here. I don’t know if we would have been able

to walk the last miles as hungry and weak as we were. Lucy never talked the whole way, never

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said a word and never cried one tear. I don’t know, maybe she’s lost her mind.” Miriam put her

face in her hands again and wept. I drew her into my arms and let her tears soak my shoulder.

A rainstorm had broken overnight, bringing relief from the brutal heat of the past several