by Stella Duffy
‘You have treated Livia and the others here as yet another audience, but my community are well trained and eager to share their learning with you. They don’t want to see you walk through the motions of salvation. What would be the point?’
Theodora tried to explain, to say as elegantly as she could the truth that the community were her passage back to the City, just as Hecebolus had been her passage to Africa. That all she craved now was a return to her old life, if only she could do so in safety.
‘You were happy in the City?’
‘I have been.’
‘And you have been unhappy.’
‘No one is happy always.’
‘Livia is.’
Theodora couldn’t help herself. ‘I’m not sure Livia and I have the same understanding of happiness.’
‘Possibly not. What is it to you? Happiness?’
‘Where can I start? Good food, good wine. Laughter. Applause.’
‘When the laughter and the applause and the food and drink are gone, what then?’
‘Then I’m just as pleased with what is always there, the company of my friends. People who love me, people I love.’
‘And when there is nothing to stand between you and your soul? When you are silent and alone?’
Theodora shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Father, you can’t catch me like that. Then I’m happiest. All my life I have run away to silent churches and high trees and the hills that are hardest to climb. The Stylites up on those narrow pillars have always seemed especially blessed to me, far above the mess of daily life. Both the riches of the City and the riches of silence have given me enormous pleasure, though I am happy to admit, I do enjoy both.’
‘And you don’t feel that this desire to hurry back to the City means giving up the possibility of one for the other? You may have experienced the peace of an hour or so alone Theodora, but have you tried days? Weeks? Have you considered months?’
‘I have considered many paths for my life, Father. Unfortunately I have actually had the opportunity to choose very few.’
The older man nodded. ‘I’m glad you can see that. It’s also true that what I’m about to offer may not seem like much of a choice either. As you know, you have sanctuary with us now, if you leave the house, you will not. However, our community in the desert, with our brother Severus, is also part of this house.’
‘Severus? Of Antioch?’
‘He was Patriarch there, yes.’
‘And he was deposed by Justin, just before I left the City. You want to send me, for sanctuary, into the desert, to join a man the Emperor himself removed from his job?’
‘Severus and his community are in a place of safety, where he is able to continue his work. Yes, you could also have sanctuary there. We would like you to go. To choose to go.’
‘To choose where I have no choice?’
Timothy shook his head. ‘There is always choice. You can choose to go to the desert and follow the rule, but only in action, not in your heart. You can choose to stay on bended knee until your bones break, but keep your spirit closed to change. You can always choose to keep something back, Theodora. I expect you always have?’
She nodded, feeling uncomfortably that not only did he understand her strategies, but also that she wanted him to.
‘So now you can choose to do it differently,’ Timothy continued. ‘To really give yourself. I don’t say it will be easy – even for one who wants peace, a single night alone in the desert can be terribly long. I don’t say you can make the offer of giving yourself just once and be done with it, either. The true giving of the self must be offered with every new moment. To come to yourself, Theodora? Your true self? That is most certainly a choice.’
She knew what he was saying, Menander preached the same to his students: the transcendence of pain in pure submission to the body, to the dance, to the moment. And she knew that on the occasions when she had risen above, when she had truly chosen to give in to the work, the audience, the theatre, those were the times when she had experienced utter – fleeting – bliss. She understood that in the desert, in a community of ascetics, giving over the suffering of her body and mind to the primacy of spirit, she might find a similar joy. It was tempting. That, and freedom from the men who must even now be waiting at the gate for her, but she did have questions.
‘How long will it take?’
The Patriarch laughed. ‘Who knows the days of the Lord?’
‘All right, but if, after I have truly given myself to your rule …’
‘Not my rule, Severus leads that community. When he was exiled from Antioch, lost his position, it seemed the safest place to be. An ex-Patriarch is never a favourite with the Imperial Palace. So yes, after you have truly given yourself to Severus’ rule, however long that takes …?’
‘If I still want to return to the City?’
‘When that day comes, then it will be your choice to leave and you may do so freely, as an absolved penitent. You will go with my blessing.’
She chose to accept his offer. And, after she had admitted the theft, followed his direction that she should ask Livia to return the stolen candlestick to Hecebolus’ men. It would not stop them coming after her if she later renounced her desert pilgrimage, but it would mark the start of making amends. As Timothy said, once he and Severus declared her absolved, then Hecebolus would have no reason to charge her with any crime. Theodora wasn’t convinced that simply following the actions of penitence was the same as the spirit of penitence, and Timothy explained his belief that action was the beginning of spirit, that a rule followed faithfully could, eventually, lead to faith. Theodora asked, wouldn’t he have preferred faith in the first place? The Patriarch smiled, explaining that he always looked for faith in his followers: some were sure they had it and he could see no sign, others were adamant they did not and yet he felt it shone from them. He was sure of her potential. Theodora was used to hearing her body, her voice and her performance criticised on every level. She was used, as well, to hearing tens of thousands roar with laughter and approval at her on-stage style. And, with Hecebolus, she had grown used to hearing herself praised as a woman, a lover, a partner. She had never before heard herself compared favourably to the faithful, it sounded blasphemous to her, and yet – in the Patriarch’s wide smile, in his silly sticking-out ears, and in the certainty that came with the rich depth of his beautiful voice – it seemed almost possible he could be right.
Two days later Theodora accepted an even coarser shift in place of her black cotton robe, offered thanks for the begging bowl she was handed, and took up the small bundle she was allowed to keep – her own cloak, a stretch of cloth to serve as shade, blanket and bag, and joined the group of penitents who would walk before day broke, in less than an hour, into the desert heat. They drank water and ate dry bread, left the house with the Patriarch’s blessing behind them. Theodora walked with the others, in silence, leaving it all behind.
Almost all. There was still an emerald, the size of a newborn’s fist, prised from its ebony setting in the few moments she’d had alone to wash and now strapped beneath her left breast. It was not entirely comfortable but Theodora did not need comfort. The Patriarch could place his faith in her potential, and she hoped he was right, would be happy for him to be correct about her soul. Meanwhile, though, she was tired and hungry and thirsty before she’d even walked into the sand, but she definitely wasn’t stupid.
Nineteen
Within two days of their journey inland the travellers were in an entirely different landscape. As they walked alongside a thin river, away from the slightly more temperate coast, other than a narrow course of green lining the water, the land ahead of them quickly changed from the fertile fields that fed every corner of the Empire to a harsher, hotter, hard-baked earth. Two days later when they turned away from the river as well, the earth receded beneath a covering of stone and sand. Strategically placed so that even fetching water was a two-hour task, Severus’ camp sat beneath an ancient mountain, r
idges smoothed from years of sand-scouring wind, caves dotted across its sheer surface, massive boulders that had fallen in earthquakes scattered around the site. The mountain was right on the edge of the desert proper, all the travellers could see for miles was sand and stone turned deep red in the low sun, muting to a dark amber as the temperature plummeted and the desert sky light-show took over. They were not quite the stars of home, but they were dazzlingly clear, and Theodora could follow them north if she wanted. Meanwhile, and with no moon yet risen, they gave a welcome pale light as she accepted a cup of hot water and a chunk of desert bread from Severus who, as always, served the newcomers, taking a moment to study each in turn. After they had eaten and drunk, Severus sent each of the new community members to a different place around the camp. Some went to caves low in the mountain, others to the shelter of the very few trees in the area, a couple to the ragged single-person tents dotted about the site. Theodora was allocated a large, irregular boulder as her own place; it would provide shade in the heat of the day, warmth from its heated rock during the cold night. That boulder was to be her home for the next year.
The first three months were the hardest, getting used to the harsh climate, and to the community of people, becoming accustomed to the lack of privacy and the simultaneous loneliness. There was always someone around, it was never really possible to be fully alone, yet these many people, sometimes a hundred or more, did not become friends either. The community was one of nodding acquaintances, who sometimes heard each other’s most desperate secrets in the group meetings Severus guided, yet each was on a solo journey to the spirit, and there was no desire, or time, for anything as distracting as friendship. Slowly Theodora came to feel part of the loose group and, in the morning and evening talks with Severus, when they gathered to hear the teacher, she began to understand something of the faith the others professed so passionately.
Theodora’s conversion was no glorious epiphany but a slow erosion of her cynicism. The inner sceptic that had stood her in such good stead as a child in the theatre, working backstage, was gradually washed away, not by an astonishing vision or even by the constant desert wind of burning days and freezing nights, but by Severus’ humour and wisdom when he taught, explaining the serious and the utterly irrational, bringing the esoteric into the everyday, speaking in many languages and not just the Greek of the Church or the Latin of state, using whatever words he could find to make sense to his disparate group. As the teacher explained his personal understanding of the divine, Theodora slowly realised she too had an understanding of the Christ, a spark of faith she had not noticed – or allowed – before now. It was not as passionate as their leader’s, not as eloquent as that of some of the other believers, and certainly not as deep-seated as that of the real ascetics who occasionally joined them, coming back to the community after a year or more alone in the wilderness beyond their mountain – but what was, in effect, her conversion, felt all the more real for having shown itself through thought and discussion rather than a blinding revelation. Not that revelations were not also possible.
Nine months after her arrival, Theodora was sent high up to the other side of the mountain, to a small cave, with her blanket, a water supply, and ten days’ food allowance, and left to get on with it, as the Christ had done, for forty days and forty nights. She had been schooled in what to expect, what she would probably experience, how to ration her food and water, but no amount of discussion could really explain what it was to be so truly alone.
On the first night she simply cried, and the second, and the third. By the fourth day she began to realise who and what she was crying for. She kept seeing, feeling, the image of a little girl. Eventually, paying more attention to the phantasm that hunger, thirst and solitude conjured up, really looking at what she saw in her mind instead of simply dismissing it as a mirage, she saw the light brown eyes, the straight brown hair, the stolid, stoic acceptance, and realised the little girl was her daughter Ana. The child she had thought of less than a dozen times since she left the City, the child she had probably thought of less than a dozen times even when she was living two miles from her. According to a letter that arrived when Theodora was still with Hecebolus, Ana was now with Comito, cared for along with Indaro by a child-minder, now that Theodora’s older sister was doing so well in her work. Ana would be five, helping the dancers in the chorus, ready maybe to start learning a few lines, little songs if it turned out she had a good enough voice, had developed any stage presence at all. Theodora prayed the girl might have a good voice if that was the case. Singers became whores later than dancers, sometimes not at all. She wished more singing and less dancing on the child she had only just remembered was her daughter, she wished freedom from the theatre for her entirely.
By the end of the first ten days Theodora had seen or created – she was not sure which, and it didn’t matter to her experience – visions of all the relatives she knew to be dead as well as several who were certainly alive, and, more strangely, the spirit of the bear that had killed her father. The bear made her cry more than any of them, in its sorrow at the one untamed action that changed the course of all their lives. The next day, the eleventh, she stayed in her cave as she had been told, only going outside when the light finally left the wide sky, to see the rations that had been left for her. She ate a very little bread and took almost an hour to slowly sip a cup of water, and then spent one of the easiest evenings of her life. The visions receded with food and drink, leaving only a sense of peace at having laid a few ghosts to rest, as well as acknowledging in spirit – if not in flesh – the presence of others not ghostly at all.
The second quarter was harder. Told to meditate on her own transgressions and, with the lesser rations permitted for the second quarter, the images came thick and fast. Cheating Anastasia of a handful of coins when they were performing together. Biting just a bit too hard on the cock of a man who liked it mean, but maybe not that mean. Spitting a curse after Menander’s name. The dozens, hundreds of times she had fucked not for love, or need, but for the joy of money, and often for the stolen coin of thieving men themselves. In the cave, Theodora cried in pain at her own sins and denied her cramping stomach bread for a fourth day in a late-offered but sincere penance. When she woke on the morning of the sixth day, the fifth having passed in a self-induced daze, she forced water down her swollen throat, forced herself to eat, a tiny mouthful at a time, bringing herself back to full awareness. It had been made very plain to her that while she might want to punish herself with death, only God was able to grant that solace – it was her duty to stay sensible to everything she discovered about herself in this tiny cave, in the space that was now her whole world.
In the third ten days a new shift took place. She began to see where she was, studied the walls of the mountain cave and saw the small marks, indentations, countless signals other penitents had left in the past, marking out time or sins or life for themselves, or those to come. She studied the cave for three days, and when she was finished with the walls inside she turned her gaze outward, to the sand and the rock. Looking into the heart of Egypt she saw Isis and Osiris, Anubis, saw the fish-goddess, the ram-god, saw them all lined up, one on top of the other, as she had every day of her childhood, on the obelisk in the Hippodrome, listening to her great-grandmother’s fairy stories of the Roman gods, the Hebrew prophets, all so different to the one divinity that was their Christ. Yet now they seemed to belong. They were of the sand and rock of her cave and, just as they had done when she dreamed as a little girl, they came down from their places on the obelisk and sat with her. Isis whispered of making the ideal man from the best pieces, breathing her life into him and carrying his child as she did so, her own brother’s child. Anubis talked of an earlier time, whispering in his cracked jackal’s voice of the weight of her heart, insisting there was more to spill, that Theodora could lighten the load still more. Kebechet the snake came offering clear water, life water.
Seeing the snake woman, feeling the cool of the water
she was offering, really feeling it running over her skin, through her hair, into her eyes and nose and mouth, Theodora remembered to drink for the first time all day. In her fasting stupor she reached for the cup and then pulled back her hand in slow motion as she woke to see an owl, the owl from the obelisk, swoop down and drag away the snake that lay within striking distance, the one that would have had its fangs in her hand had she touched the cup. Drugged on her body’s own sources and lack of nourishment, Theodora watched her hand grasp the cup, sipped her water and acknowledged the bird that had just saved her life. It had not failed her yet. It would lead her home. This land, this sand, was getting far in, she was happy here, would stay as long as they let her, but even so, she knew it was not home.
Awake and sensible enough to order her thoughts, Theodora meditated, as she had been instructed, on the visions that had come to her in the fast. She concentrated on Isis, on the goddess’s reconstruction of her broken brother-husband Osiris, and then thought of her own men, father and stepfather, Menander and Hecebolus, lovers and teachers, and often both, and often nothing but pain.
She recalled Severus’ lesson on love, the half-sermon, half-prayer he had given, speaking in Syriac as often as any other language, proudly using whatever words were most appropriate to express universal truths, refusing to stick to the Latin the Roman west loved, the Greek the Church preferred, choosing instead to use whichever languages his followers understood to make his point clearer to them. His constant insistence that the only true partnership was between man’s humanity and God’s divinity, that anything else was ephemeral. Later that night, only the second evening she had been in the desert, and still unsure of the strange people around her, the wild men, the ragged women, those who came late at night to the fire, arriving like wary animals, spacing themselves far from each other and yet as close as they could to Severus, Theodora had raised her voice into the starlit night, asking her question, letting the words fall out in an uneven trickle.
