Free The Blood of the Martyrs by Naomi Mitchison Page B

the meeting they were both praying that the thing need not happen, if only the Lord Jesus would take it away! And when Persis was taken to the pool under the waterfall and felt the water of baptism, she thought that perhaps it would be all right, oh, she was almost sure it would! And when they brought her back she was lifting her arms for joy and some of the congregation thanked God for letting them see so lovely a sight. But Bersabe stayed behind to talk to Evodia and Syntyche, the two senior women of the congregation; they talked it over together, while Bersabe sobbed and Persis listened and became every moment colder and more frightened and lessable to think that the baptism had changed anything. Evodia took her aside and told her that in this town or that she might be able to find a church and friends, but above all she now had a Friend for ever, the Friend whose presence she had felt when the waters touched her. But already Persis, swaying from her two days’ fast, had forgotten how she had felt then. Only she remembered the names of the towns and the signs which she might look for, and repeated to herself the words which could make her known. But she could not bear the ruthful looks of the older women and the way they would not let her forget what might be going to happen to her.
    That night and for three more nights, she cried herself to sleep, and Bersabe slipped away from work to come and sit with her and smooth her hair and stare and stare at her lovely mouth and soft eyebrows and straight little nose—as she had not dared to stare and love while the thing might yet be averted. As she stared she prayed. And the fourth day the same dealer’s agent who had taken Roxane came to take Persis. Bersabe asked him very humbly if he could tell her where Roxane was, but he had no idea; she had changed hands several times. Bersabe was remembering what changing hands meant in the way of stripping and handling. She had been a pretty slave girl herself, away in Asia. At least there were some things people didn’t want to do to women after they got grey hair. One of the daughters of the house gave Persis a silver piece, and they were all quite nice to poor old Bersabe after Persis was taken away. She had screamed rather at the end, in fact both of them had.
    Persis was put on board ship and taken to Delos. All the time on the ship she cried and whimpered and did not think much about the church at Philippi or any of the Words she had been taught, only about her mother and her little brothers and the warm kitchen and the way to the well, and a certain crack in the wall that she always used to run her finger along, and a certain tree she used to climb, with handholds shiny from children’s using. But when she got to Delos she stopped being homesick because the immediate things that were done to her or that she thought were going to be done, were so very horrible that she couldn’t think of anything else. The slave dealers were mostly no worse thanother merchants and generally more interested in the price than in any other aspects of their merchandise, but in the hot, steep, crowded little city of Delos, something bad used to get at them: the smells and cries and the foreign voices and the constant handling of foreign and helpless women and boys. So it was a place where human beings asked much for mercy and got little. The dealers would get bored with their stuff and wouldn’t even mind spoiling it; there was plenty more. When they had been drinking they would go down to the warehouse at the docks and knock the chained barbarians about; anything that was hopelessly spoiled could be thrown into the sea. Of course, Persis was not treated like that; she was too valuable; she only heard it and sometimes saw it. She was darker and slenderer than the Greek girls, and easy to teach. By the time she had changed hands a few times, been re-embarked and landed again at Ostia, she was still technically a virgin. It did