The Saint's Mistress by Kathryn Bashaar

apartment all day,
    and as the afternoon advanced I started looking out the window every five minutes, watching for
    him. I went out to a stall and bought some peaches and roasted goat meat and a bread-and-
    cucumber salad for our supper, and still he didn’t arrive. I was scrolling through one of his books
    when he finally came up the stairs and into our apartment. I leapt to my feet. “Well? How was
    it?”
    “Everything I could have dreamed,” he enthused. “I have so much to tell you, I hardly know
    where to begin.”
    I uncovered our supper, and he dove into both his meal and his story, talking with his mouth
    full as the words tumbled out. “This is the kind of place I’ve always wanted to be,” he
    expounded, “with people who think . There’s one fellow in my recitation who comes all the way
    from Hibernia, if you can imagine that, and yet speaks perfect Latin and orates like Cicero. I
    found Amicus.”
    Aurelius’ friend Amicus, the same one who had spoken up for Numa and me that day in the
    pear orchard, had preceded us to Carthage by three weeks. He, too, was studying rhetoric and
    philosophy.
    “Oh!” Aurelius added. “And I met up with our friends again!”
    “What friends?” I didn’t know we had any other friends in Carthage. I closed my eyes as I bit
    into my second peach, letting the juice run down my chin and between my fingers.
    “You know. Nebridius and Quintus.”
    I could feel the blood rising to my face at the mention of their names. “Our friends? When did
    they become our friends?”
    He waved his hand, then swallowed and wiped his mouth. “It was all in good fun.”
    “Did you get our money back?”
    “No. Don’t worry about it.”
    “They cheated us!”
    “It’s just something they do. You might not understand. I’ve already learned so much, just
    this first day. See, Cicero only talks about how people should interact with each other in the
    political arena, but real philosophers talk about why people are the way they are. Did you ever
    wonder about that?”
    “The only thing I wonder is when we’re getting our money back.” I stood and started clearing
    the table.
    “Think about God, Leona. See, if God is completely good he couldn’t make anything evil,
    right?”
    I was still thinking about this, but he went on. “Okay, so, where do our wrong actions come
    from then? They come from something separate, a separate substance if you will, which lives
    inside us, and over which we have no control. So, it isn’t really Nebridius or Quintus – or
    Aurelius or Leona, for that matter – who cheats or fornicates or steals; it’s the badness within.”
    “Then anybody can do anything and it’s not their fault.” I tossed the cheap clay takeout
    containers out the back window into the midden pile, and started stacking our own dishes for
    washing.
    “I knew you wouldn’t understand at first,” he said. “I’ll be able to explain it as I learn more
    about it. We’re all going to a hearing tonight.”
    45

    I shook my head. “A hearing?”
    “See, the Christians have it wrong. The real Trinity isn’t Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the way
    my mother would have it. The Manichees have the Trinity as Father, Son and Mani, and Mani
    speaks through their Elect and you can go and hear him.”
    “Uh-huh. And it costs how much to hear him?” I thought I was beginning to understand all
    too well.
    “It isn’t like that,” he argued. “Hearers give what they can.”
    “Uh-huh,” I repeated.
    “Women can be hearers. It’s very democratic. You can come if you want.”
    I didn’t want to at all, but I was lonely, so if he was going, I was going.

    “I have known my soul and the body that lies upon it.
    That they have been enemies since the creation of the worlds.”
    The gaunt priest chanted a psalm as we entered the darkened room.
    I had firmly avoided any conversation or eye contact with those devils, Quintus and
    Nebridius, on our way here, speaking only to