Dionysia
It didn’t take us long to find the Christians in Thessalonika: everyone was talking about them, how they’d been meeting in the agora for days, how every day people with lame limbs got up and danced, lepers stretched out smooth, brown fingers, blind children smiled up into their fathers’ eyes for the first time. Because of these magic tricks—because that was what they were as far as I was concerned: How many times had I seen the Dionysian priests with their flaming powders and make-up anyway?—the number of Christians was swelling just like it had across Macedonia and the rest of Thessaly.
By the time we found them in the forum, a large crowd had gathered to hear Paulus speak, with no small number of soldiers at its margins. Lycas narrowed his eyes at them and shook his head. “They’re not Romans.” I squinted under my hood at the soldiers closest to me: sure enough, though armed to the teeth and wearing crimson, their uniforms lacked the distinctive imperial eagle, and their weapons, on closer inspection, were a hodgepodge, not standard issue. I nodded to Lycas and Calu, who were both watching me to see if I was thinking what they were: there was going to be an ambush. Somebody powerful hated the Christians and wanted to get rid of them under the Roman aegis. By the time the dust settled, the mercenaries would be back in plainsclothes and on their way out of the city, and nobody—especially not Rome—was likely to prosecute the loss of a pagan preacher and his random assortment of beggars, prostitutes, and escaped slaves.
I craned my neck to spot Paulus on the steps of the Forum. I could make out his bristling black beard clearly enough but not his words, which were something about brothers and sisters…. I ground my teeth and looked for Phemonoe without wanting to. Sure enough, there she was a little behind Paulus, disguised in humble homespun, practically invisible to anyone who didn’t know how to look for the way she stood, tense, ready, or the odd bulges in the draping of her chiton on her flanks. I saw a glint at one of her wrists and couldn’t stop the grin that twisted one side of my mouth: she was even wearing her vambraces under her sleeves, probably her greaves as well under her skirts. She could tell as well as I could what was going on with the soldiers that were now slowly working their way forward through the crowd as Paulus spoke—better even, probably. She was the one who taught me, after all.
Lycas tapped my arm then and pointed with his chin to the other side of the agora. I whistled under my breath. Now, there were the real Romans, half a squad’s worth. They, too, were watching the mercenaries, arms crossed over their breastplates. “They won’t get involved unless they have to,” Lycas whispered, unnecessarily. I had slept with him again in the Inn last night and was already regretting it because every time I gave this fool an orgasm it seemed to entitle him to explain to me one more thing I already knew.
Just then a woman from the middle of the crowd thrust out her arm toward Paulus and shouted, “This man stole two of my lawful servants from me! Arrest him!” A man beside her called, “He misleads the children to give up worship of our gods and the emperor. Arrest him!” As if on cue—because that was what it was—the mercenaries formed themselves out of the crowd into a phalanx and started driving toward the forum steps.
We were jostled where we stood beside the well as onlookers screamed and scattered around us. I jumped up on the rim of the well, then onto its roof. I saw Phemonoe shoving Paulus and another of his men behind her, saw her pull off her housewife’s weeds and her short sword flash. I had to stop myself from drawing my own weapon and running to her side. That was how it had always been.
“Dia, let’s get out of here,” I heard Lycas shout at me from below. “Either they’ll take care of her for you, or you can track her down later. We’re going to get stampeded.” I ignored him, my attention fixed like a bowsight on Phemonoe. She was fighting now, in the thick of it. One man went down, another. Then, she cried out and stumbled sideways, an arrow pinning her short chiton to the side of one thigh. My head twitched the direction the fletching was pointing, and I saw an archer perched on the overhang of the shop next to me. Before I could even decide what to do, I had put a throwing knife through his windpipe.
“What are you doing?” Lycas demanded, grabbing my ankle, as the archer tumbled off into the merchants’ oat barrels. I shook him off. Phemonoe had fallen back to the forum steps, cut the head of the arrow, pulled it free, and was binding her thigh with a strip of her discarded dress. The remaining mercenaries regrouped below her, and then they came on again.
She fought ferociously despite her wounded leg. But of course after a few minutes she began to flag—there was no way around it, injured and outnumbered. Lycas tried to pry me away again, but I didn’t even acknowledge the attempt this time. I was frozen. Part of me, the part that had been watching everything happen from the high place since Phemonoe had left me for the Christians, was gloating to see that the mercenaries doing Delphi’s work for it. But another part of me, the little girl who Phemonoe had pulled out of Archon’s clutches, was raging, screaming and crying, pulling at my cloak, begging me to get down there and save her.
It was clear at this point that Phemonoe wasn’t going to make it. She had dispatched all but three of her opponents—they lay either dead or gravely injured all about the abandoned agora as if a butcher’s cart had tipped over in the square. But the three men remaining were obviously the strongest and most skilled of the lot. Uninjured and unflagging, they circled her like wolves, patient, as she braced herself on her uninjured knee and the point of her sword. She wasn’t panting or crying or snarling at them. She merely watched them as if planning her next move. But I knew well enough from the blackness of her eyes, the pallor under the blood splattered across her cheeks that this was the end. I turned to tell Lycas that he could go, but he and Calu were already gone, unwilling to drag Dodona any further into this mess. I shrugged, stood, dropped my cloak from my shoulders, and leapt into the agora.
Phemonoe
There is a really strange and perfect moment of calm that comes only at the end of a lost fight, after your rage at your weakness or inability or just plain old bad luck has burnt itself out; after the desperate casting around for any path of salvation comes to nothing. But it’s not the same as giving up. I don’t know how to describe it other than to say that the few times I’ve experienced it in my life have been the only moments in which I felt I fully lived in my body, that I fully inhabited every corner of myself. This time, I knew it to be the last time I would ever experience that feeling, and tears slid down my cheeks. If I could say how I felt then, which I couldn’t at the moment, I would say I felt profoundly grateful—to Paulus and Lydia and Silas and Euodia, to Dia, to the oracle, to all the Hosioi. To my father and mother and brothers, even. To the cold wind off of Parnassus and the long, regal march of black-green cypresses down the stadium and all the sacrificial bullocks with their liquid eyes and the stillness of the Castalian cleft. “Thank you,” I murmured my final prayer to God and closed my eyes as the mercenary’s sword swung up between me and the sun.
I heard a clang and a grunt and then a laugh that I knew better than I knew my own heartbeat. Someone hauled me up onto my feet. I groaned against the screaming pain in my leg and opened one eye into Dia’s blinding grin. “Don’t thank me yet,” she said. “I’m just getting started.” She propped me on the steps and turned to face down the mercenaries. To their credit, they didn’t even ask her who she was or what she was doing; they just came for her.
The thing that had always set Dia’s fighting style apart from the rest of ours was its gymnastics. She had the poise of a bull-vaulter and the bravery to attempt maneuvers the rest of us would never, and when they worked—which they did often enough to keep her alive—they were not only wickedly effective but amazing to watch. So it was this time. As the first man thrust at her with his sword, she simply sidestepped, and he stumbled past her while she spun around twice, putting her behind the second man. She grabbed his cloak as she spun and wheeled him to the ground by it, sweeping the third man off balance in the process. As the second man went down, she slit his throat with one of the many thin throwing blades she kept ranged along her ribs in a leather harness binding her chiton. Then, she ducked under the first man’s downward slash, stood up to take his balance, and flipped him over her hips and into the third man, who had just gotten up. Before they could untangle themselves, she had stuck knives into parts vital enough that they collapsed back to the blood-slick pavers, either dead or soon to be.
She picked up her sword from the pavement, wiped the blade clean on the cloak of the second man, and resheathed it as she came back to me up the steps. But behind her, I saw the Romans coming. They had obviously decided to finish what the mercenaries had started, for the good of the Empire. Not to mention it stung their pride to watch a slip of a thing like Dia dispatch men like them like barnyard fowl. I counted ten, and I could see by the way they moved they were battled-hardened, worth three mercenaries each. I didn’t even have the energy to feel despair. I just shook my head as Dia came up to me and helped me stand again at the top of the steps. She turned and saw what I saw.
I wanted to say so much to her. She might have wanted to, too, I don’t know. But it didn’t matter: the time for that was past. I drew my sword, and she drew hers. The Romans started up the steps toward us.
“I’m sorry I’m not going to be able to buy you that vineyard on Parnassus I promised,” I rasped out. It was all I could think to say—not enough, but what ever is?
Dia shrugged and grinned, wiping the sweat and blood from her eyes with the gauntlet of her shield arm.
“You can keep your bad wine, Noe. Your god, too. As for me, I’ve got everything I want right here.”
The Rookery 