Smyrna

Smyrna, in the years when the harbour still ran clear.

Lyra sells dried figs from a board she rents by the day — a small trader, alone the way the freed are alone, with no family she can name and the hard steadiness of a woman who knows the cost of everything. Above the lower city the great hill wears its temples like a crown, and never once is it hers.

Then a leather merchant stops to buy figs for the road south and says a thing he cannot stop saying: that in Ephesus a man teaches of one God who raised the dead, and that he has carried it three months and does not know what to do with it either. He takes his figs and goes. The story stays.

And Lyra, who has never gathered a soul in her life, cannot let it stay with her alone.

Smyrna is the proudest harbour in Roman Asia — a city that allied with Rome before Rome was great, and measures every citizen by how loudly they show it. Its temples crown the hill; devotion to the emperor is the price of belonging.

Rhoda can pay none of it. Born a slave, freed with a name that was chosen for her, she cards wool for wages barely above hunger and buys the oil for her lamp before she buys her bread. Each evening she carries that lamp to a workshop where the faithful gather in the dark — and each month, the cost of not bowing climbs a little higher.

She has no property to protect and no standing to lose. Offshore, on Patmos, a letter is being written to the seven churches of Asia — and Smyrna, the poorest of them, is named on it.