Theodora (27 page)

When Narses sent Theodora to them, they were doing as well as any Jew could in the City, and things felt easy, if not absolutely safe. The family lived with both acceptance and distrust, often in the same moment, as did all their people: permission to renovate the synagogue had been granted by the Palace last spring, though a request to consider a new build was summarily rejected. Certainly no one was talking of expulsion as had happened in other parts of the Empire, but there’d been a violent attack on the son of a copper worker by several Green youths just six months ago. The Greens said it was a matter of boy against boy, but the Jews felt differently, they’d heard the whispers behind the fists. More obviously, it was as apparent to the Jews as to the Christians that the Church was changing around them, and a Church that was fighting itself might instead be happier looking outside for argument. For now they were safe, in future they might not be. Copper and bronze
workers needed heavy raw materials, the heat of a furnace, water to cool and set. A silk weaver, however, needed only a loom, which a smart man could make himself, while the raw material, that precious thread, was easily bundled away in a hurry and light to carry. With their relative stability and quiet faith, the old man’s family were as good as any to double as Theodora’s teacher and landlord. Moreover, as Jews, they had probably never entered a theatre in their lives, it was likely they had no real idea who she had once been, and Narses believed that was all to the good. Even for someone used to hard work, just a month to learn a new craft, one that most were born into, would be a challenge. The less that was known about Theodora, the faster she could get on with the new life.

A new life of spinning and weaving. Of calluses on her hands, cuts on her fingers, nails turned yellow and red from tannin and betel stains, the stench of dye and fixer deep in her hair and skin, no matter how fully she used the quiet hours of the Jews’ Sabbath to wash in sea water or lemon juice. A life of learning daily from the granddaughter Esther, minding Esther’s baby while she was shown the method and then trying herself, and failing, the baby given back as she was shown again.

It was hardly the homecoming she’d hoped for. Theodora went to bed aching from bending over the loom, dreamed of the stomp and shuffle through the night, and woke again to try to get it right, Esther’s quiet and patient smile when she regularly failed infinitely more irritating than Menander’s fury had ever been. Theodora was used to teachers who stood over her shouting, beating understanding into her flesh, compliance into her bones. Esther, three years younger than Theodora, a placid mother of one with another on the way, just shook her head, smiled with a grandmother’s patience, added the wasted thread to the pile ready to re-use later, and began again. Theodora
moaned she’d never get it, and Esther would simply take the baby back to her hip, hand over the shuttle and tell her to get on with it.

‘Talk to me while we work.’

‘What about?’ Esther asked.

‘Tell me things I don’t know, things I’ve missed while I’ve been away. What do you think of this Emperor? Of his nephew? Is he really as boring as they all say?’

Esther shook her head. ‘What do you think I know of the great and the good? There were all sorts of rumours a few years ago, that Justinian had tricked or cheated his way into the Emperor’s favour, but nothing ever came of it, he stayed the golden boy. Some say he encourages his uncle to come down harder on the Greens than the Blues, but they used to say the opposite of the old Emperor. We never saw any difference down here, Blues or Greens – both sides will be friendly to us if it suits them, attack us if it doesn’t.’

‘Of course, there isn’t one of them who got position without doing something, good or bad to gain it, but what about him as a person?’

‘Theodora, I don’t know. Or really care. We’re not being harassed right now, that’s good, that’s all I need to know. Now get on with some work and stop trying to distract me from the fact that your weft is too tight, you’ve managed to weave two great long strands of your own hair into this seam, and if you were making that piece with real silk instead of rough-spun wool, you’d have thrown away the equivalent of one poor soldier’s annual income on a wasted lot of thread.’

There came a day, three weeks in, and with a lot more solid concentration, when Theodora knew what she was doing, without thinking about it. The cloth grew beneath her hands, and she was simply making, as Esther had promised would happen
eventually, with intent but without actual thought. Theodora’s attention was on the whole, not the specific, and so, as in the best of dances, the most successful of shows, the specific was part of the whole and held perfectly within it.

‘Oh my God, Esther. Look. Look!’

Esther sighed at the blasphemy, raised her eyes from the tiny hand-loom where she was weaving an intricate pattern, vastly more difficult than the simple fabric Theodora was working, and smiled. Her pupil’s hands were working in the syncopated cross-rhythm she’d taught, her back was bent lightly over the work, allowing her arms to be neither too close nor too far, keeping the tension perfect in both warp and weft, and cloth was growing from thread. It was plain cloth, simply made, but it was cloth, and it would work, it would wear. It might even last.

‘I’ve made it, I’m making it. This is incredible. Don’t you think? I’m actually making a thing.’

And Theodora, who had received standing ovations for every possible performance, who had brought the Hippodrome to its knees with laughter and leaping up again in her praise, who had seduced the Governor of the Pentapolis, surviving his passion and his disdain, who had undergone trial by sadness and sickness and inner demons in the desert, and then had come home, brave enough to start again – and who was rightly proud of all these things – now understood the simple pleasure of making.

As a dancer, as an acrobat, and especially as a whore, Theodora had long ago learned to look forward to the moment when the mind relaxed and the body took over. She now realised that weaving cloth was no different, and that – exactly as with any new physical skill – once she’d mastered the basics, the rest was a matter of building. Taking the form and adding to it. From cotton, Esther promoted her to fine and then finer
wool. Then, on the third day of frenzied making, Esther tried her out on her first silk. This was not the famous silk, more costly than gold, that the family specialised in. It was a lesser thread, sold by their Chinese contacts to traders who didn’t really care about quality, or – in this case – sold cheaply to someone with Esther’s skill to make into a perfect item, recreating the imperfections as a feature of the design. For Theodora’s task though, the cheap silk, still costly compared to any other thread, was used as it was, with no pattern to incorporate the knobbly slubs which would otherwise spoil a perfect finished piece. The resulting fabric would not be dyed in the purple, or even the far cheaper reds and deep ochres of which the Imperial household were currently so fond, but it was silk and, like every other silk thread in the City, had travelled all the way from the East, keeping the secret of its provenance, to be remade here, in this workshop. It was precious.

Theodora gave herself over to this new dance, she relaxed into the cloth that did not yet exist, allowing the piece to use her to create itself. The first half-hour was sticky, stalling, slow, but the rhythm of the new material found itself in her body and the thread began to run smoothly through her hands, she in the trance of making and Esther sewing proudly nearby. By the end of the day there was a single piece of cloth, half an arm-length long and three fingers wide. The seams frayed a little, the tension was slightly too tight at one point, but Esther took the piece and, circling her forefinger to her thumb, leaving a hole the width of a child’s fingernail, pulled the piece through.

‘You see?’ she said, ‘Only silk – even poor silk, with these slubs and imperfections – can do this. My grandmother would take a stretch of fabric large enough to make robes for two full-grown men, and if she couldn’t pull it through her wedding ring, then she would say it was not good enough and my grandfather would have to sell it more cheaply.’

‘So how did your family make a living?’

‘People come to us for the best. Once won, that trust remains.’

‘You think that’s why we value silk? Because it can be run through a grandmother’s narrow ring?’

‘And the secret of its origins, the distance it travels, the borders crossed. But no, that’s not why I value it.’ Esther leaned across to Theodora, pulled up the sleeve of her student’s plain robe, and stroked the silk across Theodora’s skin: ‘This is.’

The fabric brushed her skin, barely touching, there and not there, light and warm as a kiss given to a sleeping lover. It was the closest Theodora had come to a caress since she’d said goodbye to Macedonia and Esther quickly moved the cloth before it caught the stain of Theodora’s tears.

Theodora had just three days to enjoy the pleasure of her new skill. On the fourth day a messenger came from Narses, telling her to present herself at the Chalke. Adding, as plainly as only a Palace messenger sent to the Jewish industrial quarter to meet an ex-actress could, that Narses recommended she wear her sober best. Theodora spat after the insolent youth and then walked upstairs to enlist her landladies’ help in the dressing. Mother and daughter were both well skilled in elegantly understated clothing. Their business meant they could have worn the finest fabrics, could have fashioned those fabrics into the most exquisite robes, but the fluctuating fortunes of their faith had proved that dressing down was always safer than dressing to attract interest. Theodora did not explain why she had been summoned to the Chalke, and neither woman asked. They had accepted Narses’ payment for teaching and housing their student, they understood the fee also purchased a certain lack of interest. For now, Theodora was showing only nervous excitement; if she later came home showing another emotion, she
would probably share it. In the few weeks she’d lived with them it had become obvious that Theodora was not one to keep her feelings to herself.

Putting on Esther’s dark blue gown, allowing Naomi to run tiny, invisible tacking stitches across the bodice so it fitted perfectly, and then to cover her shoulders and arms with a barely lighter blue shawl, fixing it so it covered her right up to her collarbones, bending to Esther’s pressure to tie her hair back simply, with no tendrils to distract, to attract, Theodora submitted to the ministrations of mother and daughter as if she were allowing her dressers to costume her before a show. Whatever was to come this evening, it would be something of a performance. She would take herself to Narses as a penitent, a woman who was now a simple weaver, and he would then show her to Justinian, his boss who would be Consul. After that it was up to her to find a way to befriend, or at least interest, the man they said was interested in none of the things she usually had to offer – charm, elegance, humour, flesh. Narses had said Timothy wanted her to become useful to Justinian. There might be more to come, but for now, this was all. Theodora had been many things to many men: useful was new. As was covering her body in several layers just in case she might prove too tempting to the one man everyone said was more interested in books than flesh. If he was that staid, then surely one less shawl couldn’t hurt. She thanked Naomi and Esther, handed back the final veil of dark silk they’d been trying to get her to wear over her hair, and stepped out into the street.

Twenty-Eight

Despite its high walls and self-sufficiency in almost every part of its daily business, the Palace was very much at the centre of City life. An army of domestic and civil servants was needed to run the buildings and offices, and not all of them lived in the Palace complex itself. Most people knew someone who had a sister in the kitchens or a brother in the Empress’ retinue or an uncle who was a valued member of the library staff, and even those who did not have a direct family connection to the Palace could not help but be aware of its presence, at the physical head of the City, central to its functioning and the business of the Empire. The coming and going of Imperial processions to churches and Senate meant that most citizens felt some kind of physical as well as emotional connection to the Emperor and those who worked for him, maintained by a lively interest in the stories of what went on behind closed doors, drawn curtains. This interest was enthusiasm, concern, engagement, disappointment, mistrust, hope – and it was gossip.

Any number of these rumours centred on Justinian and, even in her short time back in the City, Theodora had heard most of them. He barely ate and slept even less, he roamed the Palace hallways at night, on occasion with his own head tucked beneath his arm. He hated politics, he loved politics. He and his uncle had been so perturbed by the former Consul Vitalian’s offences against the old Emperor Anastasius that it was inevitable they would have Vitalian deposed, and then executed, once they
came to power. Alternatively, he and his uncle had, as good supporters of the Council of Chalcedon, pretended to agree with Vitalian’s stance against the old Emperor Anastasius’ anti-Chalcedonian beliefs, and at the last moment turned against their ally, engineering his downfall for their own good. Justinian had entirely orchestrated his uncle’s rise to prominence, over the heads of Anastasius’ own family members, Probus, Hypatius and Pompeius; or perhaps he had simply been trying to secure a good situation for his uncle, and was horrified when Anastasius chose Justin as successor, not least because it forced him into the limelight of state. He was a virgin, he preferred eunuchs, he had been secretly promised to the Goth Princess Amalasuntha in an Imperial alliance that would one day unite East and West once and for all – all that was needed was for Amalasuntha’s husband to die. He believed the second flood was on its way, he knew which of the many relics in the City’s churches were true and which fakes, he planned to rewrite the findings of the Council of Chalcedon to patch up the growing schism, or he had no faith at all. He was true, he was false, he was really Justin’s son, he was Justin’s sister’s bastard, his dream of one new Rome was the only way forward for the City and the Empire, he would bring the Empire to its knees. For a reputedly quiet academic, Justinian was a much-imagined man, and Theodora dreamed every possibility in her brief walk to the Chalke.