Theodora (8 page)

They took her to the Cappadocian surgeon, paying well over the odds for the privilege of even entering his home, but catching sight of his knife and the skewer, Anastasia ran crying from the room. The man demanded half his fee anyway, offering to take a blow job from the famous Theodora if they didn’t think he was worth the coin. She threw the money in his face with her spittle. Finally, Anastasia had been too gentle and far too tired when, after four days of labour, her own mother had begged her to allow them to kill the baby, the one that was ripping apart her daughter’s too-small frame. Anastasia died and the baby boy did too. Theodora cursed the baby as she’d heard
the old street whores do, damning him to Hades and to hell and the netherworld, all three in one furious ecumenical breath. When damning the dead baby made no difference to her tears, she turned, as she always did, back to work. To the succour of applause, the balm of the crowd, the drunken embraces of her friends backstage.

Late in the evening, two days after the funeral, their hysterical audience that afternoon none the wiser, no sign of grief on either sister’s face or in her performance, Theodora sat with Comito and their friends, Anastasia was remembered and remembered until the dead young woman in the ground had her own monument of words. Each of the dancers and actresses knew it could so easily have been any one of them. Sophia knew for certain it would have been her, but for every abortion, every procured miscarriage, every single termination of all her own pregnancies. No small number in a woman sold into the theatre and its concomitant whoring by her disappointed parents at the age of four. That Sophia had proved good at theatre work was pure luck. That she had learned early what dangers there were for her in sex and procreation was down to watching another dwarf performer racked in vain by the full-size child she’d birthed backstage. Dead with the cord round its neck and the mother never able to work again either. Experiences that made Sophia keener always to pimp than to whore. That night she gave in to Theodora’s demands for a job, gave in even though she had said half a dozen times it would have been better for the actress to go home and sleep away the last two days of abandon and pain. Theodora was having none of it and finally Sophia relented.

‘But only one tonight, yes?’

‘One, two, half a dozen, I don’t care. Just give me their money.’ Theodora was more drunk than Sophia had seen her
before, and yet not a single word was slurred. ‘I want to work this pain out of my body. I don’t care how I do it and I don’t care how many. But I can’t sleep, and I can’t lie alone.’

‘Lie with me.’

Theodora smiled. ‘Little One, I’d take you any day …’

‘I wasn’t offering sex.’

‘Why not?’

‘I only make love to women who are awake,’ Sophia replied.

‘I’m not sleeping.’

‘Yes you are. Grief is like sleep.’

‘Not enough like sleep.’

‘You’ll wake from it, but it takes time.’

‘I haven’t got time,’ Theodora answered, shaking her head. ‘I need to feel better now. So if you won’t fuck me into oblivion, bring me some men who will. And make sure they have full purses.’

She’d spoken louder then, louder than she’d intended, too many years of theatrical training making their presence felt, and two soldiers leaning against a bench on the far wall looked up.

One nudged the other and they stood up together, the first saying, ‘We’ll take her.’

The second added, ‘If you can take two men of the Greens?’

Theodora turned from Sophia, very slowly, and carefully looked them both up and down. Neither older than twenty-five, they had country accents. One was short and round, his hairline receding already, the other a reedy half-man, half-boy, still trying to encourage whiskers with a daily face-scraping shave. She sighed, and then, as elegantly as she had ever performed a gesture on stage, she reached out a hand to each man’s groin, weighing them up for a moment, before she spoke in her most elegant classical Greek accent: ‘How about I pierce both my nipples? You could fuck one each and then I might feel
something.’ Then, both hands still holding tight to the terrified soldiers, she walked backwards pulling them out of the bar to Sophia’s rented room two houses away, calling over their shoulders as she went, ‘Collect their money in twenty minutes Little One, this won’t take long.’

Sophia shook her head and picked up her bag to follow Theodora and make sure she was safe; several of their friends raised drinks to toast their stage star. Most of the patrons in this theatre bar were used to these scenes, but one was horrified. He didn’t enjoy theatre at the best of times, had only come along today because his friend had asked him, and now he’d seen the woman Theodora – who he thought had been perfectly adequate on stage, certainly overrated given her fame – offering her body for money.

The friend he spoke to, an ardent fan of Theodora’s stage work, and one who’d been hoping for just such an opportunity this evening, wasn’t really listening, as he gathered his cloak to follow his lust. ‘Procopius, mate, stop being a cunt and give us a few coins, will you?’

‘You can’t be serious. Didn’t you just hear her? Asking for further orifices to better be pleasured?’

‘To be fair, it was a joke, she was only saying those blokes had small dicks. And we know you do too, so don’t let your jealousy make you rude. Give us your purse and I’ll go and help the girl out. Clearly she’s had a hard day, after that pair she’ll need someone she can actually feel.’

With that, he grabbed his friend’s purse from the table, leaving just enough to pay their drinks bill, and ran out calling for Sophia, wondering how much it cost to get between the legs of the fêted star, the fated whore.

Too few hours had passed when Theodora wrenched herself awake, mildly surprised she’d ended up in her own bed. She
reached for a cup of wine, but before she’d even brought it to her lips, her stomach had changed her mind for her, and she threw it down, not caring about the sticky mess it made of the floor; instead she drank water straight from the jug. She tried to walk to her door, gave up, sank back down on the bed, head aching and body bruised from men she’d taken the night before. She listened to the sounds from the street, children yelling and men shouting, Greens and Blues vying with louder and nastier insults. Today was a race day, they were starting early. Two narrow alleys away women were shopping in the cheapest market, in courtyards behind broken-down tenements grandmothers were already preparing meals for families, lucky children were in school, and those less fortunate were working or training as she had been not so long ago. Down at the wharves fishermen were unloading the early morning’s catch, ferries crossed the Golden Horn, while at the various City gates strangers piled in as they did every day, citizens of the Empire from so far away they had never heard a word of Greek in their lives, Goth and Vandal and Herule mercenaries hoping the newly anointed Emperor Justin might find a use for their skills where the old August had been content to keep his armies small and the treasury full.

Life everywhere continued. Theodora understood this, though her dreaming in the drunken night had been so violent, so charged with blood, she could not but feel a little surprised to wake and find the City so alive. She tried to stand again and this time it was a little easier. Her head clearer, she took a cloth and began to wash the night from her body.

Looking at the bruises on her thighs, licking the swollen lip where one man had kissed her too forcefully, and then later, much later, another had bitten her, she sighed. Menander was right, she never knew when to stop. The night of excess had not lessened her grief, she had not honestly thought it could,
but she had hoped for a few hours’ release from the vision of her little sister, still covered in her own and the baby’s blood, dead on the bedroom floor of her mother’s apartment. And there had been some small respite, in the moment between drunken sleep and dream, the brief moment when exhaustion and wine claimed her mind, before her dreaming let in the ghastly picture of her dead and bloody father and her dead and bloody sister, and then others too, bodies she did not recognise, among some she did, the first man she’d fucked for money, the last she’d taken in the night, friends of theirs from the company and total strangers she knew only as people who sometimes went to the same shops in the Mese. All dead, all bloody. The Hippodrome ground full of them, body after body, piled upon each other, benches layered with death, the smell of blood and pain and above it all, the rasping, throat-burning cries from thousands of wailing mothers, circling the City like hungry gulls.

Washed and dressed, her face unpainted, she left her own little flat and turned out into the street. To the left was her mother’s apartment, where she knew the older woman would be having a hard day, Theodora’s daughter Ana and the three little step-siblings didn’t understand why Hypatia kept crying, Basianus didn’t much care, just wanted them all to shut up so he could have a little peace at home, there was certainly no peace in his work. Several narrow streets away was Comito’s much more elegant home, where Theodora would be welcomed, if not by Comito who hated to miss her rehearsals, then by her sister’s new maid, who had too little to do with only Indaro to watch and was always looking for someone to look after. The last thing Theodora wanted now was to be looked after: any gesture of kindness would have her in tears again, and her face hurt too much for more tears. Her eyelids and cheeks were dry from the salt and her jaw ached from being wedged open with
wailing. Beyond Comito’s elegant little apartment in the quiet back street was her real world. The crowds around the Bull Square and the Mese, Greens and Blues charging into the Hippodrome, a whole city crammed between the Theodosian Wall and the lighthouse on the far side of the Imperial Palace gardens. Actors and dancers hurrying late to rehearsal or performance, men strolling in and out of the Baths of Zeuxippus, Blue and Green youths trying to foment rebellion, recreate the riots they had so enjoyed a few years earlier, market traders screaming their great deals, builders hard at work on yet another wing of this new church or that, fishermen, sailors, soldiers, beggars, priests, nuns, whores, citizens and barbarians. It was her only world and she was sick of it.

Eight

Two days later Theodora met Hecebolus. He was, even to a woman jaded with men, quite lovely. He was tall, with fine dark features and light eyes; his dark skin was usual for a traveller, a trader, less common in a man who was about to be given a political posting. Theodora slept with Hecebolus for pleasure. She had intended to make him pay, it just didn’t work out that way.

‘You’re not what I expected from a whore.’

Theodora looked down at the man beneath her, ‘You’re not much like the average government lackey, either.’

‘No?’

‘No. And most of my tricks tend to be less …’

‘Good looking? Good in bed? Good?’

He was smiling up at her, tired and comfortable after the pleasant endurance of their past two hours together.

She laughed out loud at his arrogance and then nodded, agreeing that this man, who’d waited after her show, offered to buy her a drink, extended that offer to a good meal, and then took her back to his pleasant rooms overlooking the Golden Horn, was definitely a cut above most of the men she took to bed for money. But still, she did mean to take him for money. She stretched herself out along his body, her much smaller frame easily fitting inside his and, skin to skin, lips to mouth, whispered what she thought was a fair price, given how much they’d both enjoyed themselves.

Hecebolus was still smiling as he sighed, wrapped one big arm tight round her shoulders and with the other across her hips held her close and said, ‘No.’

‘What?’ Theodora was not used to being refused her fee. It had happened once or twice, but as a good citizen, she had not only the weight of her fame, but also the power of the City behind her – the City that officially decried her second profession, but also taxed her earnings both on-stage and off.

‘Sorry, I don’t pay.’

‘You should have said that first.’

‘You should have asked for payment first.’

‘I usually do,’ said Theodora.

‘And why didn’t you this time? Because you were happy? Enjoying the body of a man who enjoys yours? Eating a pleasant dinner and drinking good wine in the company of a man who has travelled and seen something of the world and met plenty of women in his time …’

‘Hardly a recommendation.’

‘For either of us.’ Hecebolus was still holding Theodora close though she was trying to move away now, pushing against his body, digging her toes into his shins, her fingers on his torso, sharp nails threatening to spoil his skin at any moment. ‘But still, it is not usual for me to see someone on stage and know the moment I see her – the moment I saw you – that I wanted you.’

Theodora did not stop pushing, he did not stop holding her to him.

‘It is, though, usual for me. I am used to men wanting me.’

‘Not used to me wanting you. Not used to me wanting you as a lover, not a whore.’

‘Don’t be silly, we’ve had a nice evening, that’s all.’

‘We can have more.’

‘We’ve both drunk too much.’

‘We can do this sober.’

‘I don’t fuck sober.’

‘Maybe you’d like to give it a try.’

‘And maybe you’d like to pay my way.’

‘I don’t pay my lovers.’

‘I don’t have lovers.’

‘You do now.’

For so many reasons, and for none in particular, Hecebolus was different. He was smart and bright and ambitious – all good things and all very much the kind of thing she saw day in, day out among the young men of Constantinople. Unlike the men she usually met, he really did want to spend time with her, he liked to talk almost as much as he liked to have sex. He wasn’t frightened of her – her passion for work, food, drink or, now, for grief did not scare him off. Theodora could not talk easily to her family about their loss, she had never been especially close to Hypatia, and in their pain the two women became even more distant; Comito dealt with her tears by concentrating even more on her singing. Hecebolus happened to be in the right place at the right time for Theodora’s grief. He had never known Anastasia and so it was easier to talk to him about her. It was easier for Theodora to make a story of her loss. Eventually, she even let Hecebolus see her cry. Just once, but it was enough. And because he held her, and listened, and did not offer solutions or try to make it all right, or tell her she would get over the pain, because he simply allowed her to cry, Theodora chose to trust him. Trust him enough to leave with him.