1
I saw the fields and wept bitterly for their unfruitfulness; I poured out my lament, since the rain does not pour down upon us. Some of the seeds dried up without germinating, buried by the plow beneath clumps of dried earth. The rest, after just beginning to take root and sprout, were withered by the hot wind in a manner pitiful to see…. Farmers sit in their fields and clasp their hands against their knees…weeping for their wasted efforts. They look at their young children and burst into tears, they see their wives and wail with grief, as they stroke and caress the dried-up crops, racked with sobs like parents who lose their children in the flower of youth.
————-——Saint Basil of Caesarea
Annisa, 369
SOMEWHERE ON THIS PARCHED ESTATE a beggar is looking for me. So says the boy. An almost-monk, all elbows and apologies. “A woman and child, Mother,” he pants, ducking between bare flame-shaped poplars and the silverberry’s yellowing leaves. The title still surprises. “The baby’s not right. The woman too, maybe—she needs you now.”
Then he disappears, leaves fluttering to earth behind him. I hear his steps crunching snail shells and bracken back toward the barley fields. No word of peace, no hint even of where these urgent guests are waiting—I try to quell the heat of indignation as I cross the threshold to the women’s quarters and set the blankets down. Reason must still command the soul, chafed and wearied though the body be. The Lord is visiting us in the guise of elusive, hungry guests. I have only to find him. Only.
A footpath to the main villa cuts through the belt of trees and runs between church and storehouse. The dust of my footsteps hovers there like heat made visible. With the rest of Pontus, we watched the snowless winter give way to a scorching spring. The grain was already in the earth. We hoped our prayers might avail to break the drought and grant a harvest after all, and a few light rains seemed the beginning of an answer. Then the heavens turned to bronze. Wheat and millet withered in the fields. The barley alone limped to harvest—my brother Peter had the monks hand-irrigate the fields nearest the river. They’re cutting grain now, and sleeping outside with scythes in hand to protect the drying shocks. We lost a quarter of the barley to thieves on the first night of harvest.
I enter the atrium of the old villa. The pool beneath the skylight is dust-dry, the cistern it feeds empty since the spring. Only the sun pours in around lion-headed downspouts. I shield my eyes and step into the fine room where my father once entertained orators and landowners like himself. Huntsmen gallop through a mosaicked forest where a speared stag bleeds crimson. Apart from the busy floor, the room is empty.
Perhaps someone showed them to the infirmary? The boy said the baby was
unwell. It would be quicker to cut through the villa, but the thought of explaining more guests to the sisters leaves me weary. I choose the lesser burden of heat, skirting the sun-blasted vegetable garden that sprawls between kitchen and infirmary. Veil and habit cling like a second, coarser skin.
At the threshold I hear a thin wailing. “Let me see you in them,” I breathe, and step blinking into the dimness.
“I asked to speak with the lady of the house!”
I draw a cross in the direction of the woman’s voice and sign myself as well. “She’s with you now.”
A scrambling, and the voice shifts to the floor. “I—forgive me, lady—”
I motion her to her feet, the dimness at last receding. A ragged woman clutches a child to her breast. She’s young, perhaps, beneath the hollowing of hunger—too young to be one of the slaves we freed eleven years ago. Her eyes are hard and wild.
“What are you seeking?”
“Two nights ago in my sleep I saw a bright light and a thousand terrible angels and they told me to bring my girl to this house to be raised in fear of your God—” She catches herself, flushing dully. Then she thrusts the baby toward me. “They threatened me with tortures. Bad signs in the earth and heavens, and—”
I take the child from her trembling arms. Its listless eyes seek nothing. With a finger I stroke the scanty, curling hair. “What’s her name?”
“Mary.”
“Truly?”
The mother looks away.
“Your hunger is your claim on me. Please speak plainly.”
In the murk her eyes burn me. “Her name is Persephone.”
Child of forbidden fruit. “She’ll be raised in our prayers if she stays with us.”
“What are the gods to me? It’s enough to not see her die.”
“She can’t be weaned.”
The woman strikes her breast once, a tired mourner. “My milk is dry.”
“We have no wetnurse. I can send to the shepherds to see if any goats have carried young despite the drought, but if not…”
“Our goat died.” She shrugs, and I see a woman going wearily to an unmeaning end. For her, death is no door, no sleep ending in a blaze of resurrection.
“You could join us here, along with your husband—”
“He won’t come to the Christians to beg.”
“He sent his child.”
“He sent me to expose her.” She grasps the front of her tunic as if to tear it, then her hands fall slack. “I won’t see her die,” she says in a lullaby lilt, gazing at the baby in my arms.
“Perhaps she won’t die.”
Persephone begins to cry, a thin, rasping bleat. Her mother reaches for her. I give the child back and sign the woman to follow me. Into the tyrannous afternoon heat and along the garden to a door in the kitchen courtyard. Leoba is stirring a cauldron on an outdoor fire. Her pale Allemani skin is scorched red with heat and sun, but her expression chills as she takes the measure of the woman behind me.
“Where are you this last week, Mother?” she asks in a low voice as I pass.
Not at table, as she well knows. Perhaps the chill was meant for me. “I need food for this woman.”
“And yourself,” she says flatly.
I enter the kitchen as if I don’t hear her. Rounds of flatbread are piled on the table near the oven, the reduced portions of the drought awaiting the common meal. I give the woman what was meant for me. She shifts Persephone to one arm and tears the bread like a beast, hardly pausing to swallow. It’s gone in the space of a few breaths.
“My husband will be wanting me,” she says hoarsely.
“Did you come by the path or the road?”
She nods toward the villa’s front, and I lead her to the avenue where plane trees and brittle cypress cast a little shade. The road at the end of the lane is a shimmer of heat. She stops when we reach the church. She presses cracked lips to Persephone’s face and then holds her out to me, a renunciation more fierce and tender than any I’ve ever made. I take the child. The blessing I speak falls hollow, and the woman stumbles toward the unsheltered road.
Persephone is a limp bundle in my olive-brown hands. Too light and too still. I cradle her to my ear and am half-surprised to still hear her breath. We need milk. The hills that rise behind the martyr shrine are a distant green, but it’s not safe for a woman to go rambling out there in search of our shepherds. I shelter Persephone’s face with a corner of the veil that hides my hair. When her mother is a small figure in the distance, I follow her steps to the barley field by the river.
I’ve never seen furrows so crowded. The blades of the harvesters cut short swathes of gold, and the gatherers stoop heavily to bind the grain, but it’s the gleaners that surprise me. There are more than our tenant farmers and freed slaves. Gaunt men and women I’ve never seen stagger just behind the gatherers, scouring the ground for every stray grain.
“Mercy,” I whisper.
Persephone whimpers. Milk. My little brother Peter is walking the edge of the field, speaking to harvesters and gleaners alike. He’s thin and grimed as the others, dust in his beard, but his face keeps an alert tenderness that steadies me. I catch his eye and wait for him to come.
“Peace, Macrina. What brings—” He falters as he sees the child in my arms.
“I need someone to go to the shepherds and find a goat still giving milk.”
He calls the almost-monk and sends the boy loping up toward the forested hills without asking for explanation. Then he frowns up at the sky, deepening now from blanched white to gold. “I hope he makes it back before sundown.”
I do too, for the baby’s sake as well as his. “Thank you, Peter.”
The path back to the villa is interminable. My limbs are weighted, and Leoba’s disapproval flickers at the dark edges of my vision. I wouldn’t let any woman in my care give herself to a private weeklong fast, certainly not after months of stinted portions. But I might appoint them all to starvation if I deal unwisely with the need around us. I need to know the Lord’s will.
I also need clean wrappings for Persephone, assuming she’s with us long enough to eat and mess like a living child. At the villa I turn to the weavers’ room, opposite the stag hunt that once received wealthy guests. Sisters are wrapping spindles and setting aside weaving for the daily meal. They murmur peace like reeds by a river as I enter. Neither my mother nor my blood sister Theosebia is among them. As they leave, the youngest breaks the customary silence to ask about the baby.
“A mother was sent to expose her infant, and she brought her here instead.”
The girl Irene sucks her cheeks in and shakes her head. “That’s bad. You see how big her belly is? She’s that hungry.” Irene shakes her head again, and I remember that she also came to us from a tenant farming family. One of our own. That day was a happy one—they were Christian, and she was old enough to make her own profession of virginity. But she knows hunger better than I do.
“I came here to find more swaddling cloth for her.”
“We have that, for certain.” Irene kneels to rummage through a chest against the far wall. Then she’s presenting me with an armful of frayed and tattered cloth. “They think we can mend everything, but it’s not true. But baby won’t mind. You’re in a good place now,” she adds, half-singing the words to Persephone.
Her confidence burns like rope on bare skin. I dismiss her to the meal without attempting to explain my absence.
I need guidance. The church is a longer walk than I can bring myself to face, so I cross corridor and colonnade to rest on a bench beneath a courtyard peach tree. This used to be the cool green heart of the villa. There’s another peach tree opposite mine. In better summers, their branches would have merged into a single canopy, heavy with fruit. The library entrance is sheltered by a grapevine trellised on a poplar.
I lean back too far and feel the prick of brittle stems. Dead bushes and flowers to hide the empty rainwater basin. It’s a sight repeated in every corner of the courtyard. The poplar is still half-robed in leaves, but its vine looks dead, and the peaches are yellow specters of autumn come three months early. At least the low myrtle shrubs are a stubborn green. I study them as if the color might banish thirst. The kitchen well still reaches water, but to get a drink I’d have to face Leoba again. I lift my eyes to the blushing heavens instead. “You bring desolations on the earth,” I whisper.
Persephone wakes to my voice and makes a few rasping cries.
“Hush now. You’ll get used to prayers if you live here. For rain and wisdom and the love of God…”
She quiets too quickly. Footfalls behind me mean the sisters are leaving the dining room for evening prayer. I stand, feeling the bench against my legs until the darkness passes. My mother is silhouetted in the fading light of the atrium. When I clear my throat, she finds me.
“Honestly, Macrina, another day of this stubborn fasting—”
“Peace to you too, Mama.” I step into the colonnade and hold the baby out to her.
“Oh, child. Did you find her? Mercy, she’s small. Shh, love. Shh. We’ll keep you. Shh.”
Persephone wasn’t crying, but I imagine she’s comforted by my mother’s crooning. Most children are. As quickly as I can, I tell her what passed between the pagan woman and me. Mama keens softly when I speak of exposure.
“And they even had a goat like our tenants. Most have less. There will be more like her, Macrina. We ought to go out looking.”
“I don’t know if we have milk for this one child.”
“The shepherds—”
“I sent a boy.” The blistered courtyard wavers, hot and hateful as a fever dream. I close my eyes and hold myself against the darkness. Spirit quickens flesh. The body will submit.
“Macrina?”
“I need to be at vespers. Will you tend Persephone?”
“Is that her name? Of course I will. And if you would just eat—”
I give her the bundled rags Irene found for me and hurry down the shadowed path. The evening song is rising as I take my place at the head of the women’s section.
————
——- O gracious Light,
Pure brightness of the ever-living Father in heaven,
——-O Jesus Christ, holy and blessed!
The lamps burn hot. He is indeed worthy to be praised by happy voices, but such voices will grow scarce as the life withers from this land. The Lord withholds rain from the righteous and unrighteous alike. We do our faltering best to be so evenhanded in mercy.
With such mutinous thoughts, I’m relieved to make it to the end of the prayers. The chattering boy accosts me outside the women’s doors, breathless with his own success.
“Mother, there was a goat with young, just as you said! I took it to the kitchen, with your mother—I mean—she’s feeding the child now. Will you keep her? The child I mean, not your mother or the goat—”
“I’ll keep all three,” I answer, closer to smiling than I’ve been in weeks.
“Grand! I mean, thanks be to God.” He vanishes yet again without a blessing.
The time between vespers and compline is a haze of heat and weariness. All the sisters know we have a baby in our midst. Mama is jubilant that she takes milk. I linger in the sanctuary when the community retires for first sleep. The air is hot. Tongues of flame stand motionless above the candles. In the solitude I draw close to the altar, Persephone’s mother and the army of gleaners vivid in my mind.
“What would you have us do? For fear of refusing your Son, we can’t deny the starving. But we don’t have enough.”
I see the boy’s fumbling confidence in me—a goat, just as you said!—and Irene’s certainty that the baby will be well because she’s here. They’ve followed me. They and the whole choir of virgins and monks, my mother and sister and brother as well. They seek the Lord, of course, but it’s my way of prayer and surrender that’s shaped their path.
“You tell us to lay down our lives in love, and I’m not afraid. But these other lives—they vowed obedience for the salvation of their souls. Do I lay them down also? Can I command their generosity, if it’s obedience unto death?”
I can’t tell how long the silence lingers. Suddenly the door on the men’s side of the sanctuary scrapes open, and Peter’s voice calls softly. “Macrina?”
“I’m here.”
Sandals slap across the earthen floor. His breath catches as he sinks to his knees beside me. “Mother said you didn’t sleep last night either.” The flame before us wavers.
“You know it’s custom to keep silence between the hours of prayer.”
“I won’t even ask when you last ate. You worry me.”
“Then lift your cares to the Lord, and let me do my work.”
“You wouldn’t even let Basil kill himself with fasting and vigils. A pagan might starve himself to buy rain, but a Christian—”
“What would your sanctified reason have me do, Peter?”
He’s silent a long time, and I know I haven’t kept the anger from my voice. Softhearted little brother. He means well. I stare at the dark between flames and cast about for a suitable apology.
“I shepherd the men of this community,” he says before I can find one. “But you mother all of us. We need you in this trial.”
His knees crack as he rises, and I’m left to my prayers and silence in the heedless dark. This used to be a place of answers. Wonders, even. But midnight prayer comes and goes, the community breaking its sleep like the holy apostle Paul singing praises in jail. No one interrupts me in the second part of the night.
The sanctuary has turned cold when the sisters and brothers return at dawn. Familiar words slip and tremble like light on the water. Mama is bent with the child on her back.
As Peter pronounces the blessing, his eyes find me, pitiful without a trace of vindication. I draw my veil closer and will the trembling to cease.
He descends as soon as prayers are ended.
“Peace of Christ to you,” I say thickly.
“And also to you. Sister Vetiana, will you support her?”
An arm loops through mine, steady as a tree. Peter moves with us toward the door on the women’s side.
“Macrina?” Mama’s voice is suddenly close. “What’s wrong, child?”
It’s taking a great deal of effort to move my feet, but I mumble something about a fever.
“A two-night vigil, a fast of unspecified length, and a fever,” Peter corrects me. “Can you have Sister Lampadion meet us in the infirmary with bread and broth?”
Mama sighs, and I flinch from the mingled exasperation and worry I’ve provoked so often in my forty-two years. “I’ll send her and come myself as soon as Persephone is fed.”
Outside, our shuffling feet raise little incense clouds of dust. I wonder if Peter and Vetiana are taking me to a different infirmary, one much farther from the church than the place I met the pagan woman. The light pounds skin and bone. Then we’re indoors, somewhere, Peter asking something I can’t hear. He and Vetiana lower me gently to a mattress on the floor.
A breath later, she wakes me. There’s a red bowl in her hands, and bread. My fingers tremble, so she lifts the liquid to my lips and I drink. The bread aches between my teeth. She touches my head in benediction as I sink again to the sleep my body craves.
2
The dust-laden wind stirs the trees that still have leaves: bodiless and potent, fit symbol of the Spirit of God. It blows the chant of prayers through the open window and dries the sweat on my skin. When I shiver, I’m wrapped in blankets. When the heat returns, someone is wiping my face.
There is evening and morning. Leoba comes with porridge to feed me, as if the intervening years are nothing and she’s again the strange golden-haired slave to the child I used to be. Light moves across rough stone walls. The fitful chant from the field sinks finally to nothing. The harvest is over.
Twilight renews the song. Those who walked and labored this day now light the lamps. I watch the dark grow into silence.
Then, from the dim places of memory, I hear the sea. Wavelets splash the harbor stones and the gulls cry gladly. I saw it once in my waking life. Heavens above and waters below, the end of the world a double abyss of blue.
Old memory unspools across the formless night. The journey with Father and Grandmother, visiting our country estates at harvest. The port city of Sinope, with fishmongers and travelers and boats like beads strung along the horizon. The celebration of the martyrs. We’d come in time for two festivals: Phocas, the gardener of Sinope, and Thekla, whose fame is great throughout the world.
I remember the pressure of Grandmother’s hand on mine. Stern when I whined about the smell of the crowd. Steady through the keen and sweep of the long singing.
“Do you see the painting of the men at table? The one with a crown is Phocas, and he’s feeding the soldiers who will kill him in the morning. That’s what the Lord is like.”
Birds gleamed from the tiled floor, and I thought the wren with its chick was watching me. The salt air was heady with incense.
“Look up at that woman wrapped in flame. That’s Thekla. She’s given herself to God as a virgin, and he defends her, and she has many years yet to show his glory…”
In the morning the congregation flowed through the basilica doors like water, surging around the priest who bore the martyr’s sacred dust.
“Is she here? Is she really here?” I kept asking.
Grandmother looked down at me with light that fell silver to the sea, and I knew the air thronged with powers like the courtyard jostled with people.
After the service, she bought me a fried cake layered with walnuts and sticky honey. We stepped from Sinope’s narrow streets to our own courtyard in Neocaesarea. Fever or young memory collapses the journey between to nothing. From the harvest festivals to Epiphany, the bitterly cold days of our Lord’s descending. I walked past the bare pomegranate tree and soaring rose thorns. The back part of the villa was the kitchen and slaves’ quarters, and it was screened with a wooden partition painted like the forest of Grandmother’s tales. Somewhere I had heard that the Lord took the form of a slave. I wanted to see him.
Behind the forest door there was a hallway, and another door into a smoky room. I walked slowly. The shutters in the outer wall were pulled tight against the cold, but a watery light seeped around them. There were amphoras big enough to hide in. My head came even with the table that ran the length of the room. By the far wall, the oven glowed like a phoenix nest, and three figures were silhouetted against it. I drew nearer. The figures were women shelling pistachios. I could not tell which one was the Lord, so I bowed before all three. Then I cupped their busy hands and kissed them—the skin was rough and hard to my lips—and then, without a word of explanation, turned and fled to my room.
The next day I found a tiny basket of rushes outside my door. It was full of pistachios.
Years wing past in the aching dark, and the pistachios yield to a girl of eight years learning to work wool with her grandmother.
“Macrina, do you remember the painting of the holy martyr Thekla?”
I nodded, pulled too hard on the wool I was spinning, and broke the thread. My bone spindle clattered across Grandmother’s plain-tiled floor.
“Did you hear how she came to be in the fire that day?”
If I had heard it far away in Sinope I didn’t remember. Grandmother handed the spindle back to me.
“Listen now, then. Saint Paul was preaching the message of the Word’s descent in the city of Iconium, and his words came to the ears of a virgin named Thekla.”
“Which words, Grandmother?” I didn’t repair the broken thread.
“The Word who is the Son, who is God who took on flesh. Thekla heard how this Word suffered death for the love of mankind, and how he rose from the dead and joined us to him in the sign of holy baptism. And her heart was inflamed with love. Three days she sat at her window, longing to give herself in chastity to this pure and lowly God. But she was betrothed.”
Grandmother made her voice swagger. “‘Thekla, my Thekla! You’re not a cobweb on the windowsill! Up, woman, and blush for your Thamrys!’ But Thekla did not answer. Now Thamrys had no eyes for the God of heaven or the life that breaks the grasp of death. He only saw his bride spurning him on the word of some wandering prophet. He was furious. He had the apostle Paul flogged and released. Then he took Thekla, his bride, the delight of his eyes, and he delivered her up to the arena to be burned.”
That was the picture in the fire, then. I pressed all the blood from the new callus on my forefinger, but the story did not relent.
“Paul, after his flogging, struggled through the crowd to reach her. Meanwhile she searched everywhere for a sign. As they bound her to the stake, she saw it: a glimpse of Paul’s face, yet more than Paul. For an instant she saw her Lord of love and resurrection—”
“She saw God?”
“She saw his brightness shining through his servant Paul. Then they turned her head aside, and the vision was lost. But she cried boldly to her Lord as they kindled the flames.”
I closed my eyes until spots of light danced like sparks.
“Just as the fire caught, the sky poured water and the earth around her ruptured. In his compassion the Lord had spoken. The flames were quenched and the onlookers who called for her death were injured, and Thekla departed the arena unharmed. Like a lamb to its shepherd, she returned to the apostle Paul.”
“And like a lamb to its shepherd you may come with me,” Mama said from the doorway.
I jumped. Strange to say, I think Grandmother did too.
“We should have left for the baths an hour ago.” Mama scolded as if I’d schemed to delay us as she swept me through the corridor. She held my hand so tightly it hurt. When she called for Eudoxia, Helena’s nurse appeared from our shared room. “I’ll take Helena. Get my cloak and the girls’, and see that Abaskantis brings oil, sandals, towels. We’re leaving now.”
Mama let go of me to carry four-year-old Helena down the dark staircase. Eudoxia caught up with us beneath the tree heavy with jewel-bright pomegranates, and as soon as our cloaks were fastened Mama took my hand again.
“Why isn’t Grandmother coming?” I asked.
Mama hurried us through the atrium onto the steep street. The baths were only a little above us, but I slowed my steps to see the sharp-boned hills rising behind the city. The pines were green, and a rooster crowed above the voices that drifted up from the lower market.
“Pay attention, Macrina!” Mama pulled me out of the path of a stinking launderer and past the one-legged man and leprous woman who begged near the baths. She forgot coins for them today. We didn’t slow until we were in the warm-domed dressing room with its smell of sweat and oil.
“But I don’t want a bath!” Helena was puffing from our walk, and she folded her arms and glared at Mama like an angry old slave.
“You love the water, dove,” Mama coaxed, trying to smooth the scowl from Helena’s dark eyebrows.
I unclasped my cloak and folded it. If I stood on my toes, I could put it in the tall clothes niche. Abaskantis changed my shoes for thick wood sandals so the heated floor wouldn’t burn me. I put my tunic up too before Helena had even yielded her cloak.
“She’s ready, Lady Emelia,” Eudoxia said. “Do you want me to take her while Helena—”
“No.” Mama’s voice was sharp. “No, I want Macrina with me. You take Helena.”
Mama undressed quickly and led me to the warm-water pool, squeezing my hand as if we didn’t come here at least once a week. She was brown walnut-wood and I was brown apple, but today we were trees in a storm. Women called greetings from the pool, and she barely nodded. Our shoes slapped the mosaics I wasn’t supposed to look at, where the centaur was grabbing the woman’s towel. I stared up instead. The glass-tiled ceiling glittered red like fire, and from there I squinted at the forms in the wall’s brass mirrors as if I might see more than a face I knew.
“Macrina, quit dragging your feet. It’s cold outside the water.”
Mama’s hands were cold, at least. She pulled me to the pool stairs and had to remind me to leave my shoes at the edge. Sometimes we floated like a family of fish, but today she kept us on the bench near the wall, unbraiding my hair till it waved like a dark nest in the water and using her fingers to untangle the knots. I always had knots. I wanted to keep just my nose above the surface, but she said I’d breathe water and drown. So I stayed by her on the bench, drifting in Grandmother’s story. There was a woman walking by the endless sea, and her eyes could see the Lord.
Leah McMichael has lived with one foot in the ancient Roman world since Macrina captured her imagination eight years ago. She has a bachelor’s in creative writing and a master’s in early church history, and spends her days farming, writing, and editing in Indianapolis.
Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash
