The Reincarnationist by M. J. Rose Page B

job of the Flamen Furinalis, the priest who oversaw the cult of Furrina and tended to the grove that belonged to her.
    Not to the emperor.
    Not to the power-hungry bishops in Milan.
    But to the goddess.
    Past the palace, he turned onto the road leading out of the city. A man, probably overcome with too much wine, had fallen asleep sitting up against the side of a four-story dwelling. His head was lowered on his chest, his arms by his sides and his palms open, as if he were begging. Someone had dropped food into his cupped hands. There were always poor fools on the street at night, homeless or drunk, and others who always took care of them.
    Except something was wrong with this man.
    Julius knew it intuitively before he understood it. Maybe it was the crooked angle of the man’s head, or the utter stillness of his body. He reached down and lifted up the man’s face and, at the same time, noticed how his robe was slit up the front and torn open. On his chest were the dreaded crisscrossing lines, one vertical, one horizontal, the flayed skin exposing guts oozing, blood still dripping and staining the ground beneath him a deep scarlet.
    Now he could see the man’s features. This was no homeless drunk; this was Claudius, one of the young priests from the college. And his eyes had been gouged out in a final ritualistic indignity.
    Julius realized what Claudius was holding in his hands: not food, but the poor soul’s own eyes.
    How much suffering had been inflicted on this man, and why? Julius stumbled backward. The emperor’s endless thirst for power? What made it worse was that thepeople doing the man’s bidding didn’t realize he was using them and that no god was speaking through him.
    â€œGet away. Go now,” a voice whispered.
    It took several seconds for Julius to find the old woman hiding in the shadows, staring at him, the whites of her eyes gleaming, a sick smile on her lips.
    â€œI’ve been telling you. All of you. But no one listens,” she said in a scratchy voice that sounded as if it had been rubbed raw. “Now it starts. And this—” she pointed a long arthritic finger toward the direction Julius had just come from “—is just the beginning.”
    It was one of the old crones who foretold the future and begged for coins in the Circus Maximus. For as long he could remember she had been a fixture there. But she wasn’t offering a prediction now. This was no mystical divination. She knew. He did, too. The worst that they had feared was upon them.
    Julius threw her a coin, gave Claudius a last look and took off.
    Not until he passed through the city’s gates an hour and a half later did his breathing relax. He straightened up, not aware till that minute that he’d been hunched over, half in hiding. Always half in hiding now.
    Throughout history, men fought about whose religion was the right one. But hadn’t many civilizations prospered and thrived side by side while each obeyed entirely different entities? Hadn’t his own religion operated like that for more than a thousand years? Their beliefs in and worship of multiple gods and goddesses and of nature itself didn’t preclude the belief in an all-powerful deity. Nor did they expect everyone else to believe as they did. But the emperor did.
    The more Julius studied history the more it became clear to him that what they were facing was one manusing good men with good beliefs to enhance his own authority and wealth. What had been proclaimed in Nicaea almost seventy-five years ago—that all men were to convert to Christianity and believe in One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth—had never been enforced as brutally as it was being enforced here now. The killings were bloody warnings that everyone must conform or risk annihilation.
    Julius and his colleagues weren’t under any delusions. If they intended to survive they needed to abandon their beliefs or at least