Phemonoe
“God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well.”
It was pure habit: as Paulos gave his sermon, I split my attention in two, just as I had when I attended the Pythia at her public appearances. Half of me listened and watched him; the other half scanned the crowd for signs of trouble. Paulos had made it clear, after I had smashed a few heads together when the Philippian magistrates came for him, that I was not to use force on his behalf because—just as he was saying now—the Lord God would see that justice was done on his behalf. And indeed, when his jailer in Philippi opened the gates and let him and his companions walk free, I had to allow the merit in his argument; I had never seen something like that happen before in my life. But still…if I could head off a problem before it became a problem, with a well-timed overturning of a cart or a bucking horse or a sudden fire in a barrel…surely God wouldn’t hold it against me.
Here in Thessalonika things had been peaceful for the first week or so. But now again, as word was getting around about Paulos’s teaching, and as the number of people following him and listening to him was growing, I was starting to see more plain-clothes Roman guards standing at the edges of the crowd, or trailing us from a distance as we went from the house where we were staying—much more cramped than Lydia’s spacious estate in Philippi—to the synagogue. My instincts told me that it wasn’t long before the trouble started again.
“You have turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath…. Now, brothers and sisters…you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night…. But you, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness so that this day should surprise you like a thief. You are all children of the light and children of the day.”
Did I miss Delphi, and Dia, and the Pythia, and my sisters in the Hosioi? Every day. The look on Dia’s face in Philippi was like a knife in my heart every time I remembered it—first the betrayal like an open wound, and then, like a dark infection setting in, the disgust. Idiot, I cudgeled myself mentally as I craned my neck to survey the far side of the throng gathering to hear Paulos in the Thessalonian agora. Why had I thought Dia would immediately see things the way I had, choose to leave the Hosioi and stay with me at Lydia’s? I had been delirious, I guessed. I still was in many ways. Dia had been right to accuse me of finding something I had lacked at Delphi. But it wasn’t luxury. It was family. Lydia had been to me, even in the few weeks I had lived in her house, the mother I had never had—seeing me for myself and not as a reflection of herself. One day as I was helping her prepare a shipment of linen for export to Rome, I was studying her account book, marveling at the way she arranged all of her expenses and profit lines so it was clear at a glance where the business stood. She came up beside me and put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you interested? I could teach you, Phemonoe.”
I stiffened a bit under her touch, embarrassed. “My lady, I have never had a head for these things. Tyche…I mean, all I was every really good at at Delphi was fighting.”
“There are more ways to fight than with fists and swords,” she said with a gentle smile. She was a tall, regal woman with just the beginnings of silver threads weaving through the dark silk of her braids. “Indeed I have found my greatest fight as a woman to be against what others have told me about myself, what I can and can’t do and who I can and can’t be.”
After Paulos was freed from prison and it was clear he needed to move on from Philippi, I was sorely tempted to stay behind with Lydia. But I wanted even more to stay with Paulos. He was in many ways the father I should have had from the start. He sought my growth and well-being rather than consuming me in service of his own desires. What he knew of the Hebrew Scriptures and their fulfillment in Christ, what he had heard and read from the Apostles of Christ’s teachings, I found myself thirsting after them more than I ever had wine. I was certain I got much more from him than he ever got from me. And yet, I was still of help to him and his companions. Although he had forbade me the use of my fighting skills in his service, I was deft at scouting routes, spotting problems before they happened, steering us clear. So, when Paulos left Philippi, I went with him, though I left more than a few dark purple drops on the tablos draped over Lydia’s shoulder at the docks.
It was on our sailing to Thessaly, as I stared out at the lapping blue waves and wheeling gulls, that I realized why I felt so at home among the Christians: no one needed me for anything. They got what they needed from their God. Our God. That freed us to see other people as people and not as commodities, things to be used. We shared everything we had freely with each other and the people who needed help in the towns we passed through, knowing God would supply our needs and everything we had was a gift from Him in the first place.
Did that mean everything was paradise among us? Of course not: Paulos and Silas were constantly mediating squabbles over petty matters, contending with the usual problems with drunkenness, gossip, thievery, gambling, and sex that cropped up in any congregation the size of the ones that we left behind us in each Thessalonian city we passed through. Not to mention the disagreements about what Christ had said and how we should carry out His wishes on this earth. And then there were the constant threats from the established cults and authorities in Macedonia and Thessaly. That Paulos was a Roman citizen helped him with the local consuls. But it didn’t protect him from the Romans themselves, who were growing increasingly antsy hearing about this “one true God” who was potentially a higher authority than the other gods, than Caesar himself. I knew from listening to the prophetae talk about Sulla’s sack of Delphi what Rome did to any authority they perceived as competition….
Still, though, through all of this, I was amazed at how peace reigned among the Christians. Somehow we worked out our differences. One after another we escaped the traps set for us by jealous cults and nervous magistrates. Paulos raised his hand to a storm at sea, and it calmed like a horse. Having spent most of my life in the presence of a god, I knew divine handiwork when I saw it. Paulos’s God was certainly with us. In the towns where he preached, crippled beggars threw their crutches down and danced, poxed girls uncovered shining brown faces, mute boys sang for joy. In one day the crowd following us would start at 20 and end at 200.
That was roughly the size of the crowd here in the Thessalonian agora, but it wasn’t making me happy, largely because of the growing fringe of helmets and spears bristling at its margins. I wormed my way through to Silas and whispered in his ear that Paulos needed to end his sermon, that we needed to get him to safety. Silas nodded and put his hand on Paulos’s shoulder from behind. But it was already too late. A woman screamed from the edge of the crowd. I jerked around toward the sound to see a small phalanx of soldiers pushing their way toward us with their shields, throwing people to the ground. I realized then they weren’t here to arrest Paulos. They were here to kill him, citizenship be damned. Perhaps they weren’t Romans at all but mercenaries hired by one of the cults.
I pulled Paulos and Silas back and thrust them toward the temple portico behind us. “Go!” I shouted. And I drew my sword. I saw Paulos’s eyes widen and stifled a grin. He didn’t know I had been carrying it. That was one of the very few benefits of dressing like women did in these cities—lots of folds of fabric in which to hide weapons. I looked sharply to Silas. “I really do not like repeating myself,” I growled. He blanched and pulled Paulos with him into the shade of the portico.
The crowd had scattered as much as a crowd of that size can, and there were now only a few people between me and the armed men. I did a quick count: a dozen, give or take. Other soldiers were standing back at the periphery still, watching, which confirmed my guess that these were mercenaries, and the Romans were hoping they would take care of their problem for them in a way they could wash off their hands later. It was good news for me that they weren’t going to get involved. Still, there was little chance of me taking a dozen armed and trained men on my own. The best I could hope for was to slow them down long enough for Paulos and Silas and the others to get away. And that was enough. I had never been one for regrets, even less so now with the hope before me of a heaven where girls weren’t treated as I had been, as the other Hosioi had been—bought and sold, beaten, raped, and used like animals, whether by our families or the cult of Apollo. I thought of Dia then, and for the first time, regret stuck between my ribs like a dagger point. I saw her winning the race at the stadium in Delphi, her arms out like birds’ wings, laughing. I sent up a prayer to my new God that she could live that way forever. And then the men were on me.
The Rookery 