Theodora (16 page)

Sixteen

A sea breeze, elegant civic buildings with beautiful carving in stunningly varied shades of marble, a glorious obelisk, all the more perfect for never having been moved, Alexandria felt like a real city. Turning down narrow streets into darker alleyways, through twisting lanes and out again into a large central square, always following the sound of the crowd, Theodora came to a massive market overflowing with goods from across the southern and eastern reaches of Africa. She saw the utterly foreign interspersed with the achingly familiar, clothing and dry goods, fresh ingredients and cooked foods, silks and patterns and spices brought from the north, from the City, from home. She heard the hard-working cries of beggars and traders, seamen and merchants, all underscored by the babble of dozens of different languages, from the local Coptic and the not-so-distant Syriac, to the guttural Slav and Goth grunts she’d known well as a child. Everywhere too, there were the constant calls of furious street preachers, telling stories of exile from Syria, from Palestine, from the City itself, anti-Chalcedonian faithful, persecuted by the Emperor Justin, finding some safety here in Egypt. Even the August couldn’t enforce his doctrines this far, not while Timothy lived and ruled as Patriarch of Alexandria. A pope to his people, a living saint to those who loved him, Timothy presided over the Church in Egypt and was nominally the Emperor’s bishop, but he had enormous influence over the population who both loved him and agreed with his understanding
of the faith, and though Constantinople had massive wealth, it lacked a steady supply of grain, the one staple that kept its people content and its status as capital. The Emperor Justin, a little fonder of circuses than Anastasius had been, was still required to keep his people happy by giving them their daily bread, it was his duty and their expectation – and the grain for that bread came from Egypt. He could not, therefore, afford to anger the keeper of the bread basket any more than his predecessors. He followed his religious inclinations everywhere else but, for now, he left Egypt alone.

Theodora, exhausted, drawn, but making an effort to hide her tiredness and to smile sweetly, pulled back her hair, stood straight and walked from almost four weeks on the road into the welcome heat of hundreds of people shouting and arguing, eating and drinking, cursing and laughing and, above all, trading. She stood at the edge of Alexandria’s central market, the huge library down one main street, the famous medical school just behind, breathing in the scent of a dozen perfumes and the smell of foreign foods and the stink of strangers as lonely as herself. She stood in the heart of this most commercial of cities and her joy at being back in a mess of people was almost overwhelming.

Ten feet in front of her an Egyptian pickpocket swept by a beautifully dressed young Nubian man, cutting a purse from the black man’s waist belt without either of them dropping their pace. To her left she watched as a Visigoth prostitute gave a gurning old man a blow job under a trader’s table and five minutes later she saw the whore hand over not quite half the coin to her pimp, the bald man waiting impatiently between the stalls. Theodora noted with approval that the whore spat after her boss as he stalked away. She watched one woman smack another woman’s child across the face for cheek and then saw
the child come running back for a hug and kiss from the harried child-minder who didn’t know which child she truly loved from one day to the next, those of her own blood or the brood of other mothers’ brats she cared for, each child tied by a tight string to another, seven of them pulling in different directions like puppies in a sack, on their way to the river.

All this she saw in the two minutes it took her to gather her courage and her story and then, with one deep breath, she squared her shoulders, pinching her cheeks and biting her lips to bring up the colour, opened her green eyes wide and, checking her precious bag was well hidden beneath her cloak, plunged in herself.

Theodora introduced herself to various traders, asking for somewhere to stay, a reputable house. She said she was travelling, a pilgrim, from the City, looking for a room in a clean house; she played with her purse as she asked, so the merchants knew she was able to pay, and she also carefully dropped the names of several well-respected Blues from the City. It was important, if her plan was to work, that she get in with the right people as quickly as possible. She spoke clearly and elegantly with her finest stage Greek accent, giving every impression of being a true lady fallen on slightly difficult times. There were plenty of hard times about – earthquakes, religious divisions, young men, and the not so young, gone off to war in Italy and never returned. It was unusual, but not unheard of, for a woman of breeding to find herself lost, without family to fall back on. Theodora let it be known she was looking for support in Alexandria and had the money to pay for it, but that she planned on heading back to the City as quickly as possible, where any amount of recompense might be available from a wealthy, aged and ailing great-uncle – and she his only surviving relative.

Theodora was just the right age to pick up the kind of man who’d enjoy a well-trained companion and pay for her passage in return, all the while hoping to cheat her when he got hold of her uncle’s money. Her story was good, she knew an old man who fitted the bill exactly, and several of the merchants she spoke to thought they might know the street, the uncle, the family villa of which she spoke so eloquently. It did the trick. She was given addresses for three different rooming houses, accepted the kind offers of introduction, promised to look up the helpful gentlemen once she was settled into her new room. Then she walked on, making sure they watched her perfect bearing, the elegance of her could-be patrician pace, and the half-smile as she turned to wave goodbye, a smile that promised rather more intimacy than her assumed accent usually did.

A day later she had her new home. The room was sparse, and far too dark for Theodora’s liking, in a small and cramped house, but her landlady Ireni was a quiet woman who cooked well, charged the minimum for room and board, and asked no questions. None at all. Theodora knew enough of the Blues of Constantinople to prove her faction credentials. Ireni’s first husband had been a shipping worker, they’d been based in Antioch initially, and when he died she’d gone with an Antioch local to Gaza. Her second husband had been a Green. He’d also been a drunken, aggressive bastard, which meant Ireni was more than happy to take in anyone from the other side, her own family of Blues having warned, before they disowned her, exactly what lay ahead. Even when she returned widowed, reluctantly admitting they’d been right, they still refused to see her. Ireni knew what it was to be alone in the world, said she wanted to help any young women who came to her door, and Theodora certainly needed help. Though while she believed Ireni’s tale of the philandering husband, she wasn’t quite as convinced by the detailed story about his untimely death down a well in a back
square in Gaza, nor did she understand why Ireni’s two sons, apparently overcome by grief at their stepfather’s death, had felt the need to rush off to join the military in Italy after the funeral, leaving their mother to pack up and come back to Alexandria all alone. Two women, twenty years apart, neither telling her full story, one able to offer a room and sanctuary, the other with money to pay. It was good enough.

Getting a passage back to the City was a lot harder to arrange. The sailors were just as skilled at haggling as she was, and all of their prices were beyond her purse, unless she sold the candlestick, which she was not yet ready to do. The richer gentlemen she met, in her hope that she’d be taken on as a sailing companion, were keen to spend a night or two in her company but not quite as accommodating as she’d hoped. There were no offers of a paid fare.

Theodora came tired and dispirited into Ireni’s house on her fourth night in Alexandria. It was Saturday and her landlady was preparing her Sabbath evening.

‘Will you join me?’

Theodora looked at the bread and the wine laid out on the narrow table. There was a small chunk of roast goat to one side, half a dozen home-grown herbs as a salad on the other, dressed with a thin drizzle of oil and the juice of a late lemon Ireni had pulled from her tree that afternoon.

‘There was cheese earlier, but I had to eat it. I was too hungry.’

The Egyptian shook her head at her inability to deny herself, rubbed a fat-fingered hand over her round belly and grinned. ‘Anyway, at your age, still looking, you don’t want to get too fat, do you? We widows are lucky in that, no men to judge our girth. Take my advice, girl, you might not think it now, but a husband will come in handy one of these long nights.’

Despite her irritation at the tone, Theodora thanked her
hostess as prettily as she had ever thanked one of Menander’s wealthy patrons, adding that Ireni was quite right about needing to keep her figure in check, then she sat at the table with its small meal and was glad to do so.

One jug of wine became another, then a third when the second jug cancelled out Ireni’s concern for her housewifely budget. The blessing loaf was followed by plain flatbread, the women chatted little as they ate and the candle burned low in its holder, an official bronze grain-measure one of Ireni’s sons had apparently acquired in Antioch and which the older woman kept even though she had never needed to weigh out the precise measure of grain accorded to soldiers – ‘always useful to have something you can sell in an emergency, and it works well enough’ – and though it was practically spring now and Ireni certainly had enough flesh on her bones to keep her warm, she even added a precious log to the failing fire.

‘Right then, enough of men and waste.’

‘Really? Oh, yes, of course.’ Theodora nodded, accepting Ireni was ruler in this house, and stood up to go to her bed.

‘Sit down, I didn’t mean we have to stop talking, would I burn a good log if I did?’

Theodora sat back, relieved. ‘I think I’d have to cry myself to sleep if I went to bed now, this is the best night I’ve had in months.’

Ireni took the wine jug and carefully poured the dregs in equal measures into both their cups, then she asked, ‘What do you know of faith, girl?’

‘I go to church.’

‘We all do that.’

‘No, no,’ Theodora interrupted her, eager to make her point, ‘I love church. My church, back home. I used to sleep there, it’s a nice place, it’s good, safe.’

Ireni nodded, she’d been in some safe churches herself, some unsafe ones too, and it wasn’t what she was talking about anyway. She looked at the girl opposite, who was so young that what Ireni had to offer might make all the difference.

‘I said faith, not church. What do you make of faith?’

‘Ah, well, I don’t … you do?’

Theodora might look tired, was certainly a little drunk, but like the consummate performer she’d been trained to be, she could summon sobriety at will. She’d been looking forward to the easy sleep of wine, but there was a change in Ireni’s tone and – as well as needing to keep the landlady happy, Theodora was keen to negotiate a cheaper rate for a second week – she was interested. There weren’t many twice-widowed matrons keen to talk about faith before bed; those who did so tended to be on their way to a nunnery, while Ireni had been telling Theodora only half an hour ago that she hugely enjoyed a good shag and wondered where the hell she was going to get a third spouse to take her on before it was too late and her arse was as big as her belly.

Ireni explained, ‘There’s a monastery, out in the desert.’

Theodora nodded, the desert beyond Alexandria was famous for its ascetics, the sand and rock-dwellers who took the injunctions to fast on various days to heart and soul, turned forty days into forty months, years. ‘There are hundreds, aren’t there?’

‘Not quite, but yes, there are a good many.’

Theodora grinned. ‘So how do fasting nuns fit with you wanting a new bloke? Can’t quite see you giving up the husband-hunt and heading for a cave.’

‘It fits with you wanting to get home.’

Theodora was fully sober now. ‘Oh.’

‘You don’t seem to be doing all that well on your own, do you? Chatting up businessmen, trying to cadge a lift on any old sailor’s ship …’

‘Thanks.’

‘No point my lying.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘So try my way.’

‘A desert retreat?’

‘Yes.’

‘For …?’

‘Fallen women. And men. Anyone, really.’

‘Right.’

‘Anyone ready to repent.’

‘But I don’t want to spend the next forty years fasting in the desert, Ireni, I want to get home.’

‘You said.’

‘So how do those two things join up? You think if I go to a nunnery I’ll find such peace I’ll give up on the City?’

‘It’s not unheard of, but no, that wasn’t what I was thinking. The Alexandrian Patriarch has recently agreed to send a small community of ascetic women back to the City, via Antioch, possibly Sinai, ideally starting new communities in each of the places. But the ultimate aim is to set up a new community of women, in Constantinople.’

‘Right.’

‘Fare fully paid, room and board taken care of.’

‘Bedroll and fasting bread, you mean.’

‘Probably, but if the roads are good and the new settlements easy, you’d be back in the City before winter.’

‘Next winter?’

‘Child, the way you’re going, you could be stuck in my house a year, or worse, have to go back where you’ve just come from.’

Theodora looked up sharply.

‘It doesn’t take a genius to tell you’re running away from something. This would be a way to hide for a while, get yourself
together before you go home. I know you think you’re so damn strong, but it wouldn’t hurt to take some time, peace and quiet. You might even like it. I’ve been on the odd fast myself, great for the figure, and the spirit too, sometimes.’

Theodora wasn’t thinking about her soul, she was wondering who else might have worked out where she’d come from. Thinking how right Ireni was: it was so much harder to get home than she’d expected. And, beneath those more pressing thoughts the underlying one she’d become more aware of in the time since she’d left the Pentapolis – how very tired she was of using her body as her work.