The Reincarnationist

Chapter 45

Julius and Sabina

Rome-391 A.D.

The crowds lined the streets and watched as the procession moved toward the gates of the city. To them it was tragic drama, it was sport, it was spectacle. For the first time in forty years, a Vestal Virgin was going to be buried alive for violating her vows.

Sitting atop her funerary bed, which rested on a cart held aloft by six priests from the college, Sabina let her eyes follow a woman who walked along the dray, a baby in her arms, keeping them in sight every second of the long, slow march.

The dust rose up and got into the priests’ nostrils, clouded their eyes and coated their skin. It was too hot to be walking this distance, too hot for them to be carrying this woman, so hot it was inflaming the crowds, whose voices rose to the heavens with their jeers and curses.

Julius feared that even on this holy procession, there would be violence. In the last month the emperor had issued a proclamation commanding citizens everywhere to encourage all remaining pagans to convert.

“Encourage” meant different things to different people: more temples had been plundered, more priests had been attacked during religious services, more fires had been set and more buildings had burned down to their stone foundations. Romans who had prayed to pagan gods months before, now, either out of true faith or to curry favor with the administration, came at holy men with weapons. With every priest they subdued, the greater their control and power grew. That was what religion was about now: power.

Each night, Julius and Lucas had continued to meet and plot in secret, often joined by Julius’s brother and fellow priest, Drago. This procession was part of those plans.

Nine weeks before, Sabina had stopped trying to hide the pregnancy. She would be buried alive as custom and law dictated, one week after her child was born, in a tomb they had built in the hills near the sacred grove.

No one knew that Julius was the father, so his punishment had not yet been meted out, and he’d been free to work on the tomb. They’d made a show of its construction: bringing in artisans to create an elaborate fresco and a detailed floor mosaic.

During the past week, as they put the final touches on her resting place, Sabina had sat nearby, nursing, cooing and smiling at her baby. But she wasn’t the only one watching. There were spies everywhere. In fact, Julius was counting on them. So the digging was carried out during the day in plain sight of the bystanders who came to watch.

It had been so long since a Vestal had been buried alive, the citizens of Rome found great symbolism in the upcoming event. With the last Vestal’s death would come the death of the old ways.

But once everyone had left and the sun had set, late each night under cover of the deepest darkness, there by the sacred grove, where Sabina and Julius had been meeting as lovers for so many years, where he had found out she was carrying the child who would be her death sentence, he and his brother worked on the secret of her grave until their fingers bled.

Pagans believed that after they died their souls were reborn and given a chance to right the wrongs they had done in their last life. As long as Julius could move the earth with his hands, nothing was going to stop Sabina from having a chance to be reborn in this life.

From her perch on the funerary dray, Sabina looked from her child to Julius, who walked on her other side. Now her eyes glittered with unshed tears. They’d be saying goodbye to each other soon. Their life together, the way they’d known it, would end. There would be no more meetings in the grove, no more nocturnal swimming in the pond. Julius wouldn’t see her skin dappled with the moonlight under the oak trees that had sheltered them and hid them for so long.

Tomorrow both of them would start the next step of their journey.

He smiled up at her. Courage, he mouthed to her, knowing she couldn’t hear him with the crowds jeering and shouting.

Courage, my love.

In her lap, her hands were empty. She was not allowed to carry anything into the tomb with her. The box was tucked inside a girdle, its bulge covered by her robe, its edges digging into her ribs: her dowry for her next life. The most treasured of all the treasures was going into the grave with her. For more than a thousand years the Vestals had stood guard over the sacred fire and what had been hidden under its hearth; it was only right that Sabina would guard it in her next life, as well.

They had arrived at the tomb. It was time.

She looked over at her sister and the baby she’d entrusted to her. Leaning over, she kissed the child’s soft cheek. “I’ll see you soon, my little one.” Then she looked at her sister. “You remember what to do?” she asked Claudia, who nodded, too overcome with tears to speak clearly.

“If the worst happens, the treasure is worth a fortune. Neither of you will ever want for the rest of your lives.”

“Don’t talk like that…nothing is going to happen. It’s going to work out.” It was dangerous to say anything else.

Sabina put her arms around her sister and her baby and held them, feeling her daughter’s little fists beating on her chest as she struggled to reach for her milk.

Finally Sabina let them go.

Julius and Lucas helped her off the dray and down into the tomb. Quickly they went over the plan-knowing the crowd was outside, and if they spent too much time underground it would be suspect.

Lucas left first, climbing up the wooden ladder.

Julius took Sabina’s hands.

“Sabina-” he whispered.

She shook her head. “No, shh.” She put one finger to his lips. “There’s all the time in the world for us, you’ll see.” She sounded so sure of herself, he thought. So certain. But the tears running down her cheeks belied her optimism.

She stood up on her toes and kissed him, hard, on the mouth, trying to say everything that she couldn’t articulate with words. Julius tasted salt on his lips but didn’t know if it was her tears or his.