Theodora (4 page)

Anastasia, being the smallest of the girls, was positioned right at the front of the group, and was therefore easy to reach when one of the audience members, over-zealous in his approval, brimming with food and wine and the thought of what was yet to come, reached out a strong arm to pull the girl to him, the better to enjoy her charms, to see her more clearly through eyes reddened with wine. In response Anastasia did the one thing
their mother had trained her three daughters to do as long as they could remember. So many possibilities of harm, both at work and in the City, Hypatia had drilled the girls: if grabbed, bite, scream, kick – all three at once, if possible. Anastasia bit. She sank her teeth into the fat hand that held her and she did so with force and anger. The man roared, his companions laughed at first and then, when they saw that the sharp little teeth had drawn blood, there was a silence. A yawning, fearful silence from the performers on the makeshift stage, and a growing, furious rage from the bitten man, backed up by the anger of his friends.

Theodora stepped into the gaping breach between stage and seat. With a leap and a loud cry that Menander would have beaten her for there and then if he had not been stuck at the back of the room, she ran to the dining table, jumping over the laps of the few men who were still seated, to pick up a knife that had fallen to the floor and been unnoticed by a servant who would later be punished for the mistake. Then, before the audience could see what she was holding and become even more agitated, Theodora rounded on the horrified Anastasia, her mouth wide with the cry all three girls had heard every day of their lives. The call of the bear-keeper, lion-trainer, animal-master. The fierce shouts and sharp yells, descending to the low-pitched whistle and cajoling whisper with which their father, and now their stepfather, entertained the crowds who came to see him put the great creatures through their paces. Comito caught on immediately and, pulling Helena tightly by the hand and forcing her to join in, began to play a patrician gentleman, fat with good living, disappointed in his wife, life and career – a character fairly close to many of the men before them – and happy to enjoy a session of animal-baiting as release. It only took a few words for Anastasia to realise her role – it
had, after all, been one of the first games she had ever played, one of the few, shadowy memories she still kept of the father who’d been part of her first starring role. She roared, she snapped her dangerous teeth, she advanced on Theodora, who ducked beneath her little sister’s outstretched arms and clawed fingers, to come up behind her and hit the girl-as-bear lightly on the top of her head with the knife handle. Anastasia took on the bear’s bewildered look of pain and sorrow and their audience relaxed a little: seeing the girl punished with the knife handle, even if only in jest, accorded with their sense of propriety. Sensing the happier mood, Anastasia advanced, Theodora parried, back and forth, all the while offering asides to the relaxing audience. She commented on the excessive girth of the patrician Comito was now playing – funnier still because everyone knew the audience had spent half the night ogling Comito’s tall, lean and very fine body, and they all knew Theodora was really mocking the barrel shape of their evening’s host, with a perfect alliterative rhyme about the ‘lard-loaded lech’. While acrobatically fighting off the bear’s advances, her twists and turns applauded by the other girls in order to encourage applause from the real audience, she stage-whispered a lewd story about Chrysomallo and Claudia, describing over her shoulder, under her arm, and once, bent double, through her legs, the series of shocking pictures that had been running through their pretty but empty golden heads as they surveyed the room all night. Both girls stayed stock-still in their statue poses, one white with fear that she, with no skill in anything but dance and still-mime, would also be called on to improvise and help ease the tension, the other embarrassed by Theodora’s Hippodrome-coarse language, suffused with a deep pink blush that clashed horribly with her perfect golden hair.

By the time the game was over the audience were crying with laughter, the bite had been tended by an obsequious
servant, and Menander’s girls were toasted in still more wine, Theodora above all. As Comito, the elder of the two mimes, and several of the older dancers were led away for the rest of their evening’s work, Theodora was grabbed up and hugged by the man with the bitten finger. He called out to Menander at the back of the room. ‘This one, I’ll take her. She has fire.’

The dance master walked slowly to the man’s side, speaking quietly but firmly, in Latin rather than Greek, making his point with the language of the law. ‘I apologise, she is not yet mature sir, she cannot work further tonight. Besides,’ he added, taking Theodora firmly from the gentleman and sinking his thumb and forefinger into the fold of her collarbone, pinching hard, ‘it is her fault we were late beginning our performance. She is to be punished.’ He sighed, looked into the gentleman’s face for understanding of servants and students and women – even if he, as a eunuch, knew only the tribulations of two – and the men laughed together at all the burdens life had imposed on them.

Menander was true to his word. While they waited for the older girls to finish the night’s entertainment, in the private bedrooms the host had prepared, he kept Theodora beside him, striking her every now and then with his cane, stinging blows to her back and buttocks while he sang a lullaby to the younger girls curled up on couches around the room. He lectured her about the placing of her head when she’d whispered two of her funnier asides, pointing out that if her chin had been slightly lower then even the gentlemen furthest distant would have heard her better and she wouldn’t have had to speak in such an obvious stage whisper, explaining in full detail exactly why the laughs she did get were not quite good enough, that her timing was just a little out, that her instinct was nothing and training was all. And Theodora, who at eleven was not yet old enough to go on the public stage alone, who had to wait another hour
at least while Comito, in a private bedroom, earned extra coin for herself as well as their master, heard Menander’s words and felt the stinging blows as praise. Which they were.

While Theodora was feeling the bite of Menander’s cane, and Comito and the older girls were entertaining senators and City merchants in private rooms, some of the other guests were already making their way home. Several travelled together, talking about Comito’s amazing voice or Anastasia’s pretty face, and then, in lowered tones, one mentioned Theodora, another raised an eyebrow, a third whistled quietly. It was one thing to acknowledge a fine singer, quite another to comment, no matter what was going on in the private bedrooms behind them, on how very forward the small dark girl was, how at ease she seemed on stage, in her body, in her flesh. These men prided themselves on their cosmopolitan nature and broad minds, they made a skilled audience, and it was obvious they were watching a child on the cusp of blossoming into a fine comic actor. In addition though, to her clear intelligence, Theodora also had something almost primal about her, something that glowed on stage – very carnal, very old Rome, definitely not quite the new Christian. The sooner her family married her off, the better – that one was clearly wilder than was good for her, or for any man who might be tempted.

Most of those leaving early were happily married men who preferred the charms of their wives to those of dancing girls, one or two were committed Christians – as was every citizen, no doubt – but these few took the religious injunctions against adultery and lasciviousness more seriously than others. Justinian was leaving for neither reason. He simply wanted to get back to his desk. There was work to do.

Justinian had come to the City as Flavius Petrus Sabbatius, a
twelve-year-old boy, sent from Illyricum to live with his uncle Justin, who himself had travelled as a boy from their Slav village, had risen steadily through the ranks, and was now Chief of the Excubitors, the Palace guards. He renamed the boy for himself and brought him to live in an extended family that included another nephew, Justinian’s cousin Germanus. Germanus had followed their uncle into the military, but Justinian had always preferred the intricacies of strategy and historical battles to the truth of blood on the field. His work in the Palace, in the study, creation and implementation of law, gave him access to the libraries and the records dating back to the City’s founding that were stored in locked vaults beneath the Hippodrome. Justinian believed his uncle knew enough about the military for any man; if Justin was to rise even higher than his present rank – and it certainly seemed possible – he needed to know about everything else as well. Justinian was far too interested in his work aiding his uncle’s ambitions to waste a night with a dancing whore.

He had certainly enjoyed the evening, the food was excellent, the wine even better – what little of it he took, never one to indulge his appetites – and the dinner companions proved themselves not only wise but useful. The host, a fellow Slav whose family had done very well for themselves both at home and in the City, had promised that several of the other guests would be good contacts for Justin, and he had been true to his word, making introductions that Justinian was keen to follow up on later. Unlike most of the other guests though, once those contacts had been made, Justinian was as keen to sit at his desk as he was to dine, to read a treatise on the new Egyptian tax proposals as to read a young girl’s face, to study by lamplight and to sleep in curtained dark as to pay for a dancer by the hour.

His ambition, for power, for office – both for his uncle and,
maybe, eventually for himself – was born of a desire for change. Justinian was not impressed with Emperor Anastasius’ strategy of safety and thrift: it kept the coffers full and the military well fed, strong enough to defend the borders – but it was not exciting, it was not what Justinian expected of an Emperor of the new Rome. Nor, as a Western Roman, did he approve of the August’s anti-Chalcedonian leanings. This Emperor was good enough for now, but there would be better times to come, and Justinian wanted to be at the centre of them. Not that he shared these thoughts with anyone other than his uncle, but the boy who had travelled halfway across the Empire at just twelve years old admitted in private that his true aim was to help realise a glorious new Rome. Wider and stronger and fully one. One state, one Church, one leader. It was a big idea, and Justinian – lacking the battle scars or the charisma of other equally ardent men, of his cousin Germanus, even – set out to do what he could, in the way that suited him best. He went back to history and studied strategy instead of force.

Justinian enjoyed his life, working with his books and papers, advising his uncle, and if his few friends sometimes mocked him because he didn’t want to pay for a different actress every second night, or because he was overly temperate with his wine, he didn’t mind. Let them think he was boring, he already knew that seeming dull was a better cover for ambition than any backtracking his cousins could manage when they were hungover and apologising the morning after for abusing the Emperor or rudely mocking the Patriarch. There was only one other person Justinian discussed his hopes with, and the brilliant Narses could hardly be considered competition. A eunuch might rise high in the court – with no children to build his own dynasty on, he would always be considered safer than a whole man – but no matter how well he did, or how loved he might be, he could never become Emperor.

Justinian walked out into the spring evening. The night smelt of wood smoke and, this close to the harbour, the mussels the fishermen had earlier boiled up for supper before their own night’s entertainment with other young women, whose stage would only ever be the street and the harbour bars. He turned away from the crumbling stones on the waterside, walking steeply uphill, picking his way through the people still out despite the late hour, soldiers and beggars and a few drunk young men; he felt safe from their often violent and always lewd late-night behaviour more because he was a fellow Blue than whatever sanctity his patrician’s cloak supposedly offered.

Before going into the house, down the long passageway that opened out from a very ordinary street into the spacious and beautiful courtyard of his uncle’s home, he peered up through the low cloud, hoping to check the stars. Several astronomers had suggested they would see a new comet soon; if they were correct, there were plenty of people, from the fully ignorant to the best educated, willing to believe that the comet was a sign in itself. One of those believers was the Emperor Anastasius; the first sighting would be a good time for Justin to propose some of the new ideas they’d been discussing for the military. Justinian and his uncle both believed in the value of military might, the City needed a fine army, it was the present core of the great Empire after all, an Empire that was rising in the east even as it was, unfortunately, fading in the west. But the clouds were too dense for him to see clearly, and whatever comet might be on its way would not be revealed tonight, so Justinian, his duty done, went inside.

Within ten minutes he was settled at his desk, a glass of well-diluted wine close by, the evening still clear in his mind. That girl who’d saved the little one’s skin with the bear story, she was very clever. It had been a joy to see such a child – she couldn’t
have been more than ten or eleven – put her native intelligence to such good use. And of course, clever was even more enjoyable – though his very proper aunt Euphemia would certainly not approve – when it could turn somersaults and make a dozen men laugh aloud at the same time. Justinian unrolled a sheet of paper, and took up his pen, surprised – and a little shy – to find himself imagining all those young women again, cavorting before him. Two hours later the management of Egyptian grain levies was fully occupying his thoughts, the dancers forgotten.

Four

The City’s feast day began with services in the dozens of churches all across the metropolis, long processions into the street, priests holding relics high above the people. Blues and Greens held back their jibes as a splinter of the True Cross or a fragment of cloth from the True Shroud passed by, a moment later their animosities cried all the louder for the solemnity before. As light fell fast to let the night begin, flower garlands were carefully removed from statues of saints and holy men, taken down to one of the harbours and thrown on to the water, Christian offerings given to pagan water deities by sailors keen to appease all the gods of the past and present, just in case, no matter what their priests’ more Christian injunctions might be.