Theodora (19 page)

Two days later Theodora accepted an even coarser shift in place of her black cotton robe, offered thanks for the begging bowl she was handed, and took up the small bundle she was allowed to keep – her own cloak, a stretch of cloth to serve as shade, blanket and bag, and joined the group of penitents who would walk before day broke, in less than an hour, into the desert heat. They drank water and ate dry bread, left the house with the Patriarch’s blessing behind them. Theodora walked with the others, in silence, leaving it all behind.

Almost all. There was still an emerald, the size of a newborn’s fist, prised from its ebony setting in the few moments she’d had alone to wash and now strapped beneath her left breast. It was not entirely comfortable but Theodora did not need comfort. The Patriarch could place his faith in her potential, and she hoped he was right, would be happy for him to be correct about her soul. Meanwhile, though, she was tired and hungry and thirsty before she’d even walked into the sand, but she definitely wasn’t stupid.

Nineteen

Within two days of their journey inland the travellers were in an entirely different landscape. As they walked alongside a thin river, away from the slightly more temperate coast, other than a narrow course of green lining the water, the land ahead of them quickly changed from the fertile fields that fed every corner of the Empire to a harsher, hotter, hard-baked earth. Two days later when they turned away from the river as well, the earth receded beneath a covering of stone and sand. Strategically placed so that even fetching water was a two-hour task, Severus’ camp sat beneath an ancient mountain, ridges smoothed from years of sand-scouring wind, caves dotted across its sheer surface, massive boulders that had fallen in earthquakes scattered around the site. The mountain was right on the edge of the desert proper, all the travellers could see for miles was sand and stone turned deep red in the low sun, muting to a dark amber as the temperature plummeted and the desert sky light-show took over. They were not quite the stars of home, but they were dazzlingly clear, and Theodora could follow them north if she wanted. Meanwhile, and with no moon yet risen, they gave a welcome pale light as she accepted a cup of hot water and a chunk of desert bread from Severus who, as always, served the newcomers, taking a moment to study each in turn. After they had eaten and drunk, Severus sent each of the new community members to a different place around the camp. Some went to caves low in the mountain, others
to the shelter of the very few trees in the area, a couple to the ragged single-person tents dotted about the site. Theodora was allocated a large, irregular boulder as her own place; it would provide shade in the heat of the day, warmth from its heated rock during the cold night. That boulder was to be her home for the next year.

The first three months were the hardest, getting used to the harsh climate, and to the community of people, becoming accustomed to the lack of privacy and the simultaneous loneliness. There was always someone around, it was never really possible to be fully alone, yet these many people, sometimes a hundred or more, did not become friends either. The community was one of nodding acquaintances, who sometimes heard each other’s most desperate secrets in the group meetings Severus guided, yet each was on a solo journey to the spirit, and there was no desire, or time, for anything as distracting as friendship. Slowly Theodora came to feel part of the loose group and, in the morning and evening talks with Severus, when they gathered to hear the teacher, she began to understand something of the faith the others professed so passionately.

Theodora’s conversion was no glorious epiphany but a slow erosion of her cynicism. The inner sceptic that had stood her in such good stead as a child in the theatre, working backstage, was gradually washed away, not by an astonishing vision or even by the constant desert wind of burning days and freezing nights, but by Severus’ humour and wisdom when he taught, explaining the serious and the utterly irrational, bringing the esoteric into the everyday, speaking in many languages and not just the Greek of the Church or the Latin of state, using whatever words he could find to make sense to his disparate group. As the teacher explained his personal understanding of the divine, Theodora slowly realised she too had an understanding of the
Christ, a spark of faith she had not noticed – or allowed – before now. It was not as passionate as their leader’s, not as eloquent as that of some of the other believers, and certainly not as deep-seated as that of the real ascetics who occasionally joined them, coming back to the community after a year or more alone in the wilderness beyond their mountain – but what was, in effect, her conversion, felt all the more real for having shown itself through thought and discussion rather than a blinding revelation. Not that revelations were not also possible.

Nine months after her arrival, Theodora was sent high up to the other side of the mountain, to a small cave, with her blanket, a water supply, and ten days’ food allowance, and left to get on with it, as the Christ had done, for forty days and forty nights. She had been schooled in what to expect, what she would probably experience, how to ration her food and water, but no amount of discussion could really explain what it was to be so truly alone.

On the first night she simply cried, and the second, and the third. By the fourth day she began to realise who and what she was crying for. She kept seeing, feeling, the image of a little girl. Eventually, paying more attention to the phantasm that hunger, thirst and solitude conjured up, really looking at what she saw in her mind instead of simply dismissing it as a mirage, she saw the light brown eyes, the straight brown hair, the stolid, stoic acceptance, and realised the little girl was her daughter Ana. The child she had thought of less than a dozen times since she left the City, the child she had probably thought of less than a dozen times even when she was living two miles from her. According to a letter that arrived when Theodora was still with Hecebolus, Ana was now with Comito, cared for along with Indaro by a child-minder, now that Theodora’s older sister was
doing so well in her work. Ana would be five, helping the dancers in the chorus, ready maybe to start learning a few lines, little songs if it turned out she had a good enough voice, had developed any stage presence at all. Theodora prayed the girl might have a good voice if that was the case. Singers became whores later than dancers, sometimes not at all. She wished more singing and less dancing on the child she had only just remembered was her daughter, she wished freedom from the theatre for her entirely.

By the end of the first ten days Theodora had seen or created – she was not sure which, and it didn’t matter to her experience – visions of all the relatives she knew to be dead as well as several who were certainly alive, and, more strangely, the spirit of the bear that had killed her father. The bear made her cry more than any of them, in its sorrow at the one untamed action that changed the course of all their lives. The next day, the eleventh, she stayed in her cave as she had been told, only going outside when the light finally left the wide sky, to see the rations that had been left for her. She ate a very little bread and took almost an hour to slowly sip a cup of water, and then spent one of the easiest evenings of her life. The visions receded with food and drink, leaving only a sense of peace at having laid a few ghosts to rest, as well as acknowledging in spirit – if not in flesh – the presence of others not ghostly at all.

The second quarter was harder. Told to meditate on her own transgressions and, with the lesser rations permitted for the second quarter, the images came thick and fast. Cheating Anastasia of a handful of coins when they were performing together. Biting just a bit too hard on the cock of a man who liked it mean, but maybe not that mean. Spitting a curse after Menander’s name. The dozens, hundreds of times she had fucked not for love, or need, but for the joy of money, and
often for the stolen coin of thieving men themselves. In the cave, Theodora cried in pain at her own sins and denied her cramping stomach bread for a fourth day in a late-offered but sincere penance. When she woke on the morning of the sixth day, the fifth having passed in a self-induced daze, she forced water down her swollen throat, forced herself to eat, a tiny mouthful at a time, bringing herself back to full awareness. It had been made very plain to her that while she might want to punish herself with death, only God was able to grant that solace – it was her duty to stay sensible to everything she discovered about herself in this tiny cave, in the space that was now her whole world.

In the third ten days a new shift took place. She began to see where she was, studied the walls of the mountain cave and saw the small marks, indentations, countless signals other penitents had left in the past, marking out time or sins or life for themselves, or those to come. She studied the cave for three days, and when she was finished with the walls inside she turned her gaze outward, to the sand and the rock. Looking into the heart of Egypt she saw Isis and Osiris, Anubis, saw the fish-goddess, the ram-god, saw them all lined up, one on top of the other, as she had every day of her childhood, on the obelisk in the Hippodrome, listening to her great-grandmother’s fairy stories of the Roman gods, the Hebrew prophets, all so different to the one divinity that was their Christ. Yet now they seemed to belong. They were of the sand and rock of her cave and, just as they had done when she dreamed as a little girl, they came down from their places on the obelisk and sat with her. Isis whispered of making the ideal man from the best pieces, breathing her life into him and carrying his child as she did so, her own brother’s child. Anubis talked of an earlier time, whispering in his cracked jackal’s voice of the weight of her heart,
insisting there was more to spill, that Theodora could lighten the load still more. Kebechet the snake came offering clear water, life water.

Seeing the snake woman, feeling the cool of the water she was offering, really feeling it running over her skin, through her hair, into her eyes and nose and mouth, Theodora remembered to drink for the first time all day. In her fasting stupor she reached for the cup and then pulled back her hand in slow motion as she woke to see an owl, the owl from the obelisk, swoop down and drag away the snake that lay within striking distance, the one that would have had its fangs in her hand had she touched the cup. Drugged on her body’s own sources and lack of nourishment, Theodora watched her hand grasp the cup, sipped her water and acknowledged the bird that had just saved her life. It had not failed her yet. It would lead her home. This land, this sand, was getting far in, she was happy here, would stay as long as they let her, but even so, she knew it was not home.

Awake and sensible enough to order her thoughts, Theodora meditated, as she had been instructed, on the visions that had come to her in the fast. She concentrated on Isis, on the goddess’s reconstruction of her broken brother-husband Osiris, and then thought of her own men, father and stepfather, Menander and Hecebolus, lovers and teachers, and often both, and often nothing but pain.

She recalled Severus’ lesson on love, the half-sermon, half-prayer he had given, speaking in Syriac as often as any other language, proudly using whatever words were most appropriate to express universal truths, refusing to stick to the Latin the Roman west loved, the Greek the Church preferred, choosing instead to use whichever languages his followers understood to make his point clearer to them. His constant insistence that the only true partnership was between man’s humanity and God’s
divinity, that anything else was ephemeral. Later that night, only the second evening she had been in the desert, and still unsure of the strange people around her, the wild men, the ragged women, those who came late at night to the fire, arriving like wary animals, spacing themselves far from each other and yet as close as they could to Severus, Theodora had raised her voice into the starlit night, asking her question, letting the words fall out in an uneven trickle.

‘But there can be love … between people?’

It was the first time she had spoken since she arrived, other than to give her name, and the first time she had heard a question asked aloud. She didn’t know if she was transgressing some hidden rule, but she did know she wanted an answer.

Severus had one; he was speaking in Greek now. ‘There can be a kind of love between people, but it cannot be what you have thought was love until now. You cannot be ruled or taken over by love – when you are, it is intoxication, not love. You are human and therefore you love to be intoxicated. We, very many of us, have loved intoxication.’ Several of the older men sitting in the evening dark laughed with him. ‘The only true love is for the Christ. In that love you must give everything, break down your spirit until it is only willing, only ceding, only giving. You, and all too many of the others here –’ He turned then and looked to one young man close behind him, waiting until the young man lifted his eyes and nodded – ‘have given too much of yourselves to each other and not enough to God. You cannot ever give enough to God, put a limit on your idea of enough – you must give it all. Then, if you are fortunate, perhaps God will keep you free of human love. Allowing you more time for His love.’

Theodora pushed her luck. ‘But what if God intends you to love another person?’

Severus smiled through the darkness, his stained teeth
shining in the firelight. ‘I believe it does happen.’ Again she heard the disparate chuckles from others in the darkness. ‘If He intends you for an ordinary life, then so be it. Until then, there is time to give all.’

Then Severus began to chant all the words for love, all the words Theodora knew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, Hebrew, Coptic, and many other words she did not know for sure but understood from the effect they had on the others that they, too, must mean love. He kept repeating until he found a rhythm and something like a tune and then, slowly, quietly, others began to join. There was no leader and no followers, just the hundred or more of them, sitting on the cold sand and singing into the dark, changing with the people but not changed by any one of them, it was the work of many and the rule of none. Eventually the sounds became a chant, then song, then – for some, for others, finally for Theodora – a dance. It went on for almost an hour, stopping as quickly as it had begun when Severus announced the silence was upon them. Each one immediately retrieved his or her blanket or robe and made their way to their own little hillock or tent or cave where they slept. Theodora felt herself walking close to Severus as she made her own way back and the old man reached out a hand. He did not touch her, not quite, but she felt his blessing and fell asleep smiling. It was insane, living here, among these crazy mystics, these terrifying holy people and, Theodora realised, it was funny. It made her happy.