Sardis

Sosipatra fills her lamp before dawn by counting, because she has counted warps since she was nine and cannot afford to look at anything too closely. She is a widow with a workshop, two children and a good name in a city that trades on good names — Sardis, rebuilt on imperial charity and grateful ever since, with a straw-gold river below it and, above it, a citadel whose watch-post has stood empty for centuries.

She is awake at every wrong thing.

Then a trader from the coast lodges a night in her house, and before he sleeps she sees him kneel — not to the flame, but in its light, his lips moving in silence.

She does not ask. He is gone by morning. Months later she hears of a dozen people who meet after dark in the lower city — and finds she has already decided to go.

Theophilos is sixty-two, and the day owes him nothing. He sleeps well. He walks down into Sardis each morning past a river that has carried no gold since before his grandfather's time, a temple nobody ever finished, and a citadel he stopped looking at forty years ago.

He has belonged to the city's assembly for thirty years and been its elder statesman for most of them. When his oldest friend — a magistrate of Sardis — remarks warmly that the believers here are not the kind who make difficulties, Theophilos takes it as the compliment it was meant to be.

Then a traveller comes in off the Thyatira road, sits through a gathering with great courtesy, and asks what the assembly is contending with.

Theophilos looks around the room for an answer. It takes him three seconds to understand that there isn't one.