Theodora (7 page)

As she grew older, her audience watching her turn from girl to young woman, Theodora learned to use the tricks of adulthood as well. One week there was a wave to a non-existent character just off-stage, allowing her gown to slip off her shoulder, revealing a hint of swelling breast and nothing more. The following week there was the barest possibility of a nipple,
almost revealed. The week after that she turned, just as she lifted her hand to wave, and berated an old man in the front row for daring to sit so close when he knew what was coming – and then, as the audience applauded her telling him off, she let the robe fall away anyway.

Theodora had trained her body to accomplish astonishing acrobatic feats; now she took her audience by the hand and, knowing she did not have Comito’s voice, Anastasia’s grace, she made them leap and jump and dance to her whim. She taught the crowd to assume she would be good even before she started. Having done so, she made them love her.

Eventually, all three of Hypatia’s daughters from her first marriage were living the life she’d hoped to spare them. The two older girls learned to cope with the disparity between their fame on stage, and that other fame backstage, fame on their backs, but as members of the main company they were at least working at a higher level, earning well. Courtesy of their own fan base and Sophia’s management skills, Comito quickly had several wealthy patricians who vied for her favours and the income from their attention was enough to take care of herself and contribute to the family, especially once she was a few years older and living in the small villa on the third hill, where a grateful patron kept her, a comfortable walk from the Hippodrome in a quiet street, carefully placed to avoid too much of the raucous Mese crowd. Less reserved than Comito and far less delicate than Anastasia, once she’d been introduced to the process, Theodora had no qualms about fucking a wealthy man for an evening if the family purse demanded it, but her friendship with Sophia ensured that the men were of a higher class than most who paid for theatre girls, and better looking too. She had always seen her body as a tool of work. Theodora found that as long as she maintained the split
between her body and her spirit, she could enjoy whoring for Sophia and, not surprisingly given her other physical skills, that she was good at it as well. But no matter how much money she made from the men, Theodora’s main focus, and all her real energy, was reserved for her time on stage. She loved her work, loved her audiences, and in a very few years she was their star.

Theodora stood alone, waiting. The audience were restless, eager. They were, she knew, giggling in anticipation of the belly laughs to come. These people were here specifically because they expected Theodora to make them laugh – she had trained them well in the past five years, her hungry public were now ready to enjoy themselves before she’d even made her entrance. Forty minutes earlier, Comito had opened the show with a song the whole crowd knew, a song made successful by another actress more than a generation earlier, but even the old men had to agree, Comito sang it better. Anastasia was ready to help with the fast change into her second costume, and then Comito hurried back on with the dancers to perform their chorus number, a chanted rendition of an old speech by Euripides. This crowd were not much interested in traditional theatre, they liked song and dance, adored bawdy comedy, but they would sit through an artistic number they understood to be good for them, as long as the Golden Voice was singing and there were barely dressed dancers to watch.

Comito left the stage to a generous round of applause, and then the dancers were joined by three young acrobats, bringing on an even higher energy, readying and enticing the crowd. With each layer of soft silk removed from a dancer’s body by a leaping tumbler, with every scarf pulled away and thrown to the ground, there was another whoop, another cry of pleasure. From the Green section of the audience came a yell of feigned ecstasy, taken up and amplified by a dozen or more of the Blues
opposite, always keen to stress that Theodora was rightfully theirs. The echoing call was a crowd-sized impersonation of Theodora’s most successful character, the one they had all come to see, a character she was about to disappoint them by not performing. Theodora had a new showpiece to offer, a further edge over which to push her already bold reputation. As Menander had always said, the girl was nothing if not daring. And, as Theodora now understood, if she was not daring, she would be nothing. The audience loved her, and would keep doing so as long as she kept feeding them what they wanted. She was about to feed them something they didn’t even know they wanted.

Semi-naked dancers, tumbling acrobats, covered the centre of the stage. The crowd could tell they were being primed for something, but were not certain what that something was. Various whispers had gone out, secrets told to the right gossips, several members of the audience alerted that there’d be something different in this show, their excitement filtering through to those who knew nothing yet, but felt the frisson immediately on arriving. A new performer perhaps, or a new piece. This crowd loved their singers and dancers, adored Theodora’s comedy sketches, her soft-porn mime shows. Like any crowd they enjoyed both the comfort of sitting back to watch old pieces they knew to be good, and also the nervous anticipation of the new – that knife edge where, no matter how well written and well rehearsed, a new piece might fall flat on its face in front of a full crowd. For the regular theatre-goers, an on-stage disaster could be almost as much fun as triumph.

The drumming intensified. Theodora was locked into a private space of her own – performing her private ritual as she always did before walking out to the crowd, lightly slapping her body all over, arms, legs, feet, torso, head, face, striking
her skin, her flesh, snapping her mind into awareness, total concentration. She took a deep breath, held and then relaxed her shoulders, lifted her chin. Then, at her signal, the dancers parted, the acrobats threw their last tumble and, focusing directly ahead, Theodora walked out between them, centre stage.

She was not wearing the costume the audience were hoping for and there were a few groans, a murmur of disappointment; one of the Greens called out ‘Shame!’ Others who knew, or thought they did, shushed them and whispered to wait, just wait. Theodora smiled and with a tiny move that shimmered through her body – hip-wiggle, shoulder-lift, breast-push – she shrugged off her outer gown to reveal a short, old-fashioned Greek dress more appropriate for the classical repertoire than for her usual material. As the cloak fell to the ground, she slowly lowered herself to follow it, speaking so quietly she forced the crowd to hush, and as they did so they realised that she was giving one of the old, famous speeches. Theodora was Leda, lying in bed on her wedding night, waiting for her Spartan king to attend her. The crowd listened, uncertain. Theodora was acting. Nicely, prettily, quite well, no one could fault her enunciation, her vocal technique, but this wasn’t what they wanted from their Theodora. They were a crowd of eager men, they wanted what they were used to. She kept on. An old speech, one most of the crowd had grown up hearing, had seen performed by several famous actresses from the old days, it was traditional acting, the real thing. Theodora continued until there was an attentive, if slightly sulky, silence. And then, having forced them to wait, made them listen, she generously gave her people what they wanted.

One by one the dancers returned. Now they were dressed as the handmaidens of Leda. Regular theatre-goers had seen this
scene dozens of times. As the dancers mimed brushing their mistress’s hair, readying Leda for her husband, the audience were confused: more straight acting, more traditional theatre. But when Theodora lay back on the cushions the dancers had piled high behind her, the short robe she was wearing fell apart, revealing that she was almost naked beneath. The crowd let out a gasp that became a sigh of collective relief and obvious enthusiasm and the show proper – the show they had been hoping for – began. Each of the dancers reached into the cleavage of her own, equally brief, classical dress, pulled out a small gilt bag and began sprinkling grain over Theodora’s torso and legs. Several young men on the front benches offered to come and help.

When her lower body was covered in little mounds of grain, she called off-stage, ‘Come husband, come master, come King!’ One of the oldest actors in the company waddled on, looking even fatter and more lecherous than usual, and a laugh ran through the crowd. This was more like it, the much-loved Petrus of Galatia as Spartan King. The moment his plump and wrinkled fingers touched the edge of Theodora’s spread cloak, the dancers, now reformed as Chorus, began to whisper the arrival of the god, Zeus himself, and then the actor sat back, opening his own robe and allowing half a dozen geese to jump out on to the stage. The geese, having been starved for a day prior to the show, began, quite naturally, to peck at the trail of grain laid across Theodora’s body. Chorus and old actor stepped back and with each peck Theodora screamed Zeus! and oh god! and more, please more! writhing and undulating on the stage. The audience were delighted – the elegant and ferocious god-as-swan of myth reduced to six fat geese, the virginal Leda a rapacious tart, and the Chorus intoning the many names of the great god Zeus exactly as they would have done in a serious theatrical production while Theodora provided a counterpoint
of wriggling orgasmic squeals. Ten minutes later she left the stage after the third round of raucous applause, pausing as she went to allow half a dozen of her most eager fans to prostrate themselves, granting them one by one the great privilege of kissing the soft arch of Theodora’s daintily proffered left foot.

Much later that evening, to the continued applause of her delighted co-workers, sweet wine and honey-grilled figs protecting her hard-worked vocal cords, Theodora adopted the voice and pained expression of one of the City’s most notoriously hard-line bishops, intoning in his strong Thracian accent, ‘The girl’s a slut, it’s true, but it’s the old gods she mocks, not the Christ. I’ll say this much for her – she’s no pagan.’

Seven

Theodora, seventeen years old, toast of the Kynegion, beloved comic of the theatres, star of the Hippodrome, was not prepared for the pain she felt when her little sister Anastasia died. She and Comito clung to each other sobbing, holding their dazed mother between them. They stood the requisite distance behind the men at the funeral, praying to the Christ and His mother for succour, for understanding. Praying too, silently, to the other god, the one they had learned of from that impossibly ancient woman, Hypatia’s grandmother who’d lived with them when they were very little girls. Theodora’s earliest memories were of her grandmother’s frail body hunched over the fire, mixing herbs for teas and poultices for their father’s animal scratches, offering remedies in her strong Syrian accent, and whispering of the seasons and the moon and her own family’s prayers from a time before the Christ was King: the prayers which still permeated everyday life in the City, which popped up unannounced in the thoughts and wishes of the people; prayers to the now-defunct gods whose statues remained above the town walkways, whose chants and charms filtered down through the drunken songs of old men and the whispers of even older women, praying for help and hope and understanding, from wherever it might come.

Anastasia had never risen as high in the ranks as Comito or Theodora, though some of her sisters’ gloss had rubbed off on
her. None of Hypatia’s three older girls had to take on the worst of the work: that was left to the lesser-skilled dancers and the poorer singers of the chorus. They still, though, traded in their own flesh. It was part of the job, as were the unplanned pregnancies that came with the work. Generally the actresses, well aware of their bodies as both on- and off-stage tools of the trade, dealt with the problem early enough; they were lucky that the wardrobe mistress was also highly skilled in herbal medicines, she knew her girls and usually knew what to do for them. Occasionally though, there were mistakes. Comito realised too late that her bleeding was missing and, though the old women tried every method they knew, the little thing stuck fast and grew faster. Eventually she gave birth to a girl, taking two months off work, fed the child backstage, and carried on. It was not unusual and, wonderfully, Comito found she even began to enjoy the company of her daughter as Indaro grew older.

Theodora’s child was also the result of a failed abortion. Theodora was fourteen when she gave birth to Ana, not that plenty of other more respectable women weren’t mothers by that age, but there were far too many years ahead in which to work and earn to waste time bringing up a child or spending good cash on a nurse. Unlike Comito, Theodora was no natural mother, she took the child home and left her there. Hypatia and Basianus were already reliant on the income from their most successful daughter to take care of the young step-family; Theodora thought it was time they did her a favour in return. Though she was careful to caution Basianus that if she ever heard he’d used the whip on Ana the way he had done with her, she’d make sure he paid – and it would cost him more than his livelihood. Basianus, bitter at his lack of success in the job his wife had begged for him, was all too aware that Theodora held far more influence in the Hippodrome than he did, and so,
if he was not a kind foster father to her child, he was at least a careful one.

Things were much harder for Anastasia. As Theodora said, their little sister was simply too sweet. Too sweet to work half a dozen men a week and take their money willingly, using it to further herself, to lift herself out of the brothel that was their backstage life and into a nice little apartment with a sea view and just one or two regular suitors. Instead she’d fallen in love with a pallid Lycian boy from the stables, keeping them both poor by turning down offers so often that in the end the offers ceased to come and she and the stable boy lived on what little they could earn from legitimate work. Even then she’d been too sweet to say no to sex at her fertile time, too gentle – or too damn coy, Theodora thought – to push the horse-boy away, to offer something else instead, anything else instead, to make sure her womb stayed empty. Later still, Anastasia had been too soft to deal with the pregnancy immediately, no matter that both Comito and Theodora assured her the herbs would be easy, the three days of discomfort now so much simpler than an invasive abortion later. When the belly finally began to show, despite her wearing tighter bindings and eating still less food, Anastasia, now unable to work on stage, agreed something must be done.