Theodora (24 page)

‘I am. I keep telling you, I know I didn’t have some blinding-light conversion, there was no angel, no miracle, I simply came to an understanding that made sense to me. That doesn’t mean it isn’t real.’

‘No, and we know that those blinding-light conversions are more to do with hysteria than anything else, like Orontes’ crazed followers. Unfortunately they are also what most people find easier to believe in. So of course I believe in your faith. You, though, are going to have to show it when you go home. Not just believing quietly, but finding a way to make it plain.’

‘You want me to act out my faith?’ asked Theodora, ‘Perform it?’

‘Yes, if you have to. Hopefully it won’t need to be quite so obvious, but you are going to need to behave differently, at least a little. And that means you can visit your sister, but not the theatre and definitely not your old friends. It will be safer for you to stay away from them until you’ve established yourself with Justinian.’

‘Great,’ Theodora said, knowing how well that would go down with her old colleagues.

The two women kissed then, slowly.

‘I won’t forget you.’ Theodora said quietly.

‘No, but you will be late if we don’t go now.’

Days later, the coastline of Bithynia shimmered finally in the heat of the opposite shore, and then disappeared into the night. Theodora didn’t want to go down to the tiny cabin she shared with the other single women. Her fellow travellers might be content to get a glimpse of the City once the lookout had shouted his sightings of Chalcedon to the east and then Constantinople to the north-west, but she intended to catch the first light on the hills and churches herself. She was markedly different to her travelling companions anyway, the only one of them going
home. Everyone else was travelling to the City as a trader or adventurer or pilgrim, some visiting for the first time, others returning to buy or sell, there for the deals only, the market in cloth or spice or – in the case of at least one of the older men, she was sure – in flesh.

There was a pilgrim family in their group, all the way from Moesia, and while the older man barely acknowledged the parents, he happily left his private cabin to spend hours on deck playing with their two little girls, building their trust in card games and dice where there was no common language between them. Theodora, meanwhile, made a note to herself to check where the old man went when he left the ship. Everyone in the City knew about the trade in child slaves, the stories of girls bought for a pair of shoes and then contracted until their fourteenth year. In their training sessions Menander had merely to threaten to call in the slavers for the girls to bend deeper, leap higher, spin faster. Dancing girls and nine-year-old acrobats and even teenage whoring were normal in their craft, but theatre girls were paid, in good coin too, and that made all the difference. Her people despised the likes of this man, his money made from forced flesh. She’d keep an eye on him, and if she still had friends in the City, they’d know what to do. Or they would once she found a way, against Macedonia’s instructions, to contact them. Whether or not her past friends would welcome her was a different matter altogether.

The leaving felt a very long time ago now, the turnaround on stage could be brutal, Theodora had no idea who she still knew back in the City, maybe all her colleagues had left in the three years she’d been away. She’d only had four days in Antioch to prepare for her departure, but had grabbed a moment to write to Comito, sending the letter on an earlier ship with the news that she was coming home. The sisters had communicated
sparingly over the years, but there was enough gossip in the Antioch market for Theodora to know that Comito was singing even more successfully, which meant their family was safe, Ana looked after. Theodora was to return a changed woman, but any repentant ex-actress would hurry to see her family. She wasn’t expecting a fatted calf any more than she was expecting a warm welcome from the likes of Sophia or Menander, or any of the other friends who thought she’d been a fool to run off with Hecebolus. Now, as she returned alone and practically penniless, it would certainly look as if they had been right. But had she not met Hecebolus, she would never have been in Alexandria, or the desert, which had quietly turned her life around, just as working with Macedonia had given her a reason to return to the City – even if she didn’t yet know what that reason was. And now here she was, actually coming home. It was too much to think about, too much to worry about. There were other people’s plans she must follow and that was enough for this night that was almost day.

An owl screamed, the shore must be closer than she’d thought, a hazy line began to divide the forests of Bithynia from the sky, it was morning. There, on the distant eastern shore, were the old buildings of Chalcedon. Soon she would be able to count the hills of the City, maybe even make out the outline of her church, her Hagia Sophia. Theodora shifted her gaze to the still-dark west and waited. She didn’t know she had been so hungry for this view, hadn’t allowed herself to think about it. Now, waiting for home to emerge from the dark, she knew she was starving, and had been for a long time.

The first thing she saw, vague at this distance, was the wall. Not Constantine’s wall, falling down when she left and no doubt even more so now, but the new wall, the one her mother still called the outer wall, that really marked the edge
of home. For an hour or more their small ship had been veering west in its northern course across the Sea of Marmara. Slowly the hills took shape as the sun rose from the opposite shore and they were lit with sharp sunshine. Then the inner wall. Then, and Theodora wasn’t sure this could be true, didn’t know if it was possible, at this angle, there and then gone, she saw the very tip of the Hippodrome with her own obelisk pointing above, the one her father had used to explain the Empire, the distant countries they were part of. It was an imagining, she knew; Menander, and even more so Sophia, would have mocked her for the sentimentality. Theodora had been picturing them more often during the journey. The City could be harsh, she probably would have heard if something had happened to her people, but she couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t be sure of anything. The land was rushing closer now, clearer, and then they could see the port and then a small hand slipped into hers.

‘Why are you crying?’

Theodora shook her head, she would rather not have the little girl see her like this; she had no idea what they had to face in the City, she didn’t want her to see weakness as a possibility.

‘I’m not unhappy, Mariam,’ she answered. ‘It’s just that I never thought I’d see this again.’

Mariam, who was all of six years old, nodded, knowing. In the long pilgrimage that had begun just days after her third birthday, she had seen her parents in paroxysms of helpless laughter, waves of ecstatic grief, swallowed up by the bliss of blind revelation or a torpor of spiritual exhaustion. It was perfectly normal to her that an adult should exhibit one emotion yet insist they were experiencing another.

An hour later the deck was full, everyone looking for landmarks and signs, the two pilgrim girls certain that the swell they saw
further up the Bosphorus must be the whale Porphyry. Theodora didn’t have the heart to tell them that in an entire childhood in the City she’d only seen the famed whale twice herself: what did it matter if the girls thought a wave was a whale? They’d see more shocking sights than that in the weeks to come. Sailors pushed gawping passengers out of the way as they climbed ladders and lowered sails, shouting and swearing and sweating as they did so, and finally a local boy caught the heavy hemp rope and was tying the ship into dock and the gangplank was lowered and Theodora picked up her bag, ran a hand beneath her left breast to check the emerald was in place and, joining the long queue of passengers, made her way down on to dry land. Homeland. And even as she did so, she looked around her and made a note to watch the old trader as he watched the pilgrim family.

She had intended to make her way first to Hagia Sophia to give thanks for her safe arrival, and then to the address Macedonia had given her, a street in the main industrial quarter. She would get her bearings, introduce herself to the people who were to give her work and lodging, and she could also wash before heading back uphill to find her family and friends – Macedonia had warned her to take her time, but she hadn’t accounted for the surge of longing Theodora felt when the City wall came into view. Unfortunately for her sensible plans, Leon, Sophia’s uncle, the chief scene painter for the theatre, was waiting at the dock for a shipment of Persian pigment that was a whole week late already and had only now come in on the ship ahead of Theodora’s. She considered walking right past him, wondered if she might be able to make it to the end of the harbour and then up one of the narrow streets towards the Mese without being seen, but Leon was in full oratorical flow, and even as her head urged her to hurry
away, her steps slowed, her eyes turned back. After all this time, Theodora couldn’t bring herself to miss the spectacle of Leon in mid-tantrum, shouting at the ship’s captain who had handed over his delivery with any number of dents and marks on the wooden box, and screaming, too, at his own assistant, who was being too slow and too clumsy with the box in question.

‘You lying, arsing thief. Captain? Captain of a fucking rowboat, more like. I pay you good money and for that I get this? I tell you sailor, if a single spot of that insanely expensive lapis has been knocked off and leaked into anything else, that’s it, not a damned cent. You think my bosses won’t notice just because you’re colour blind? Marcellus you stupid little bugger – and I use the word advisedly – lift it carefully, this sea-cunt has fucked me about enough, must my own staff exhibit the same brute stupidity? No, I don’t know about full payment, how about a further third now and then the final instalment when I get back to my workshop and check out just how seriously you’ve screwed up my supplies? Marcellus! If I have to tell you one more time …’ And then his eyes locked with the woman staring, smiling, tears running down her face. ‘Dear God, sweet Mary Theotokos, Theo-fucking-dora. What are you doing here? Why didn’t you tell us you were coming home? We’d have had the boys out. And the girls. The whole troupe on the dock. Come here, you dark-skinned bitch, have you spent these years just lying in that ghastly African sun? Come here and give Uncle Leon a big fat whorey kiss and prove to me you’re not the virgin fucking nun of rumour!’

Theodora laughed aloud, discarded Macedonia’s sensible plans, and ran to Leon’s strong arms, into the smell of him – stage paint, the last meal he’d eaten crumbled still in his heavy, unfashionable beard, and whatever perfume lingered on his skin from the boy he’d had the night before. Quite possibly the
unhappy Marcellus who now tagged along with both the dented pigment box and Theodora’s bag. Leon hurried her away, the captain shouting pointlessly for his full payment, Marcellus stumbling behind, and Theodora giving herself over to her people, to the City, to home.

Twenty-Five

Leon took her first to Comito’s new apartment; it was on his way to the theatre workshop, and now that he had escaped without paying the full delivery price he was perfectly happy to send Marcellus ahead with the precious cargo and sit in on the family reunion. Theodora let Leon lead her uphill, soaking in the City as they walked. The smell caught her first, the mix of wild herbs and cooking spices, of tens of thousands of people crammed into such a small area, hundreds of them thronging the narrow streets. Beneath the foodstuffs and the bodies there was smoke from cooking fires, the bitter tang of burning metal from the copper and silversmiths’ workshops, and above that hung precious incense from the dozens of churches and shrines, each individual perfume stirred into the whole by the constant sea breeze from three directions at once – it was the unmistakable smell of home and it made Theodora want to cry, it was so full of a past she no longer lived.

Leon recognised Theodora’s aching nostalgia. ‘It’s like this whenever I come home from working in other cities, all those years with the touring companies. I know it and I don’t. You’ll get used to it.’

Theodora shook her head. ‘It feels like all my years every time I breathe.’

He nodded. ‘It will pass.’

‘I’m not sure I want it to.’

She didn’t add that while they stood here, in the moment
before she saw her sister, her mother, her daughter, there was still the chance that her father might walk down the hill towards them, that Anastasia might be alive, and the big man would pick up all three girls in one massive hug, their mother laughing and telling him it was no way to behave. This was the way the City always smelt, always looked, she could stand here and be four years old and it might yet be easy.

They stopped halfway up the hill. Comito’s first-floor apartment had a wide balcony, and even from the street itself there was a good view of the Sea of Marmara. A maid showed them to the central courtyard where Hypatia was fitting a new dress for one of Comito’s private recitals later in the week. The maid coughed an announcement and then the family reunion was a spin of amber silk, mother and daughters crying and laughing with pleasure at the sight and sound of each other, while Ana stood shyly behind Indaro, both girls amazed at the whoops emanating from the usually serious Comito.

While the maid and children ran to fetch drinks and food, Comito made it clear she expected Theodora to live with them and take up where she left off – with two growing girls in the house it would be good to have Theodora earning again, and there would always be a job for her with the company. Theodora knew it for a kind lie, her fans had loved her but, like every star attraction, she was only as good as her last show, and that show had been many other star performers ago. She thanked Comito for her generosity and neither sister needed to say they knew things had changed.

She was relieved when Comito had to leave for rehearsal, taking the girls with her. After just half an hour she felt strained in Ana’s company, wanting to find a way to be a mother to this child, the quiet little girl who knew her more as a distant sibling than anything approaching a mother, but with no idea where to
begin. The sisters parted with kisses and promises and Theodora was glad to see that Comito knew her well enough to demand only that she let them know where she was if she didn’t come back that night. If Theodora had somewhere else to stay, then Comito trusted she’d find out about it soon enough. But beyond the vital sibling reunion, with the theatre fifteen minutes’ fast walk away, there was no time to hear Theodora’s stories, not with a grumpy director and a jealous chorus waiting. Everyone understood that Comito was never late, she cared too much about her reputation for that. Theodora was thankful, too, that her daughter and niece went to the theatre with Comito. She’d made promises to herself about Ana back in the desert, and she hoped to keep them, to be a better mother some day – she was relieved it didn’t have to be today.