What Our Eyes Have Witnessed by Stant Litore

Author:Stant Litore [Litore, Stant]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: undead hordes, ancient history, mash-up, zombies, biblical tales, C429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 161218393X
Publisher: 47North
Published: 2012-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

She was the deaconess; she should’ve brought her worries at once to the father.

If only she’d told him.

But she’d been too shaken. Too shaken even for anger, or for anything other than hurrying to her own room, to its refuge and safety. Shutting the door, she’d leaned against it and hugged herself tightly. The words Julia had used fell on her like robbers then in the dim light of her room—slave, slave, slut, slut—and she whimpered through closed lips, then flushed in shame at the sound. She was not a slave. Not anymore. She mustn’t act like one. After a few moments, she stepped to the shelf along the back wall and plucked down a small flask of wine, one she kept there for mixing with water to drink. She opened the flask, nearly spilled it, her hands shaking. She allowed herself only a sip, then placed it back on the shelf.

Slave, slave.

After a while, her blood still loud in her ears, she knelt on her bedding on the floor and prayed aloud, though softly, sharing the secrets of her heart with Polycarp’s God, that God he promised was always near and whose comforting presence Regina felt at rare times. The love Polycarp said his God had for the gathering, for his adopted children bought out of the slavery of their pasts, of their evils and their regrets—Regina knew about that love chiefly because of the love she saw Polycarp give to those in the gathering. But lacking the courage yet to speak her heart to Father Polycarp, she spoke instead to his God.

She prayed for most of the morning, concealed within her room. She prayed for the courage to believe in her freedom and for the courage not to flee when threatened. Blinking back tears, she prayed her gratitude that she was no longer in the master’s house, no longer lashed or beaten or kicked from her bedding in the early hours, no longer answering to a name she did not want or laboring fiercely to delight and appease a man she hated. Even if she at times felt as though she were still in that insula, she wasn’t. She was here. “Help me not to be scared,” she whispered. “I want to help Polycarp, I want to make his work easier. It is a good work. He is such a good man. I hadn’t known there were such men, before I met him, before he saved me. But I am frightened, so frightened. I don’t even know why. Please. I just—I need—I want to be free of my past.”

Her heart roared awake inside her, like a lion lashed to the earth with hard cords, roaring in both fear and desperate hope. Without words, she laid out, vulnerably, the tangle of her feelings for Polycarp. Her face was wet with tears; this part of her prayer took a long time. It brought no answers, but a little comfort, for in thinking on Polycarp, the doors in her mind that

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