by Stella Duffy
Theodora shook her head. ‘How do you know that? I certainly don’t.’
Then he explained about the project they had in mind, how a skilled actress, more valuable because of her past than in spite of it, was perfect for their plan. The group he was sending to Antioch were to found a new community, Theodora was not to stay with them. She would be met by a dancer, a young woman who had been working for them for some time. The woman, Macedonia, had set up a number of contacts, both in Antioch and Constantinople, people sympathetic to their cause, some of them in the highest echelons. Theodora would spend time with this young woman, learning her work – sometimes actually taking care of their fellow faithful, other times finding information for them, using her skills to create and maintain contacts; and she would then be more useful to the cause once they sent her back to the City. Antioch would be less of a shock than Constantinople, but more like home than Alexandria. It was the perfect staging post. And Macedonia would train her well.
‘You already have many of the skills we need, you know how to talk to strangers, have been trained in charming their confidence.’
Theodora didn’t like the sound of this. ‘Yes, but that was for a very different reasons – wasn’t it?’
‘Macedonia will explain your mission further when you are in her care.’
Theodora stared at the priest. ‘A mission? Is that what you call it these days?’
Timothy was calm, his beautiful voice still resonant, still charming, but everything about him was changed in Theodora’s eyes. He spoke softly. ‘We are not asking you to sleep with men for us, Theodora.’
‘To spy on them, then? To use my skills, gain their trust, lie to them?’
‘We believe there may come a time when it will be useful for us to have people, in both Antioch and Constantinople, who are faithful. What we will ask them to do then, I cannot say, it will depend on what comes. Macedonia has been able to help many of our number who have been persecuted. She has also found people who are with us, but need to keep quiet about their sympathies. Since Justin came to power, since his nephew Justinian took charge of the army, we have suffered further. We have our traditional paths for dialogue within the Church, of course, but we have also been looking for new ways to influence those in the City. We think you may be one of those ways. You can be influential, Theodora.’
‘And that’s not using me?’
‘We are all used in the service of God.’
‘So why don’t you send me directly back to the City?’
‘We believe it will be better to take time with this.’
‘To see if you can trust me, you mean?’
Timothy did not respond. He stood up, their interview obviously over. ‘Macedonia will meet you when the group arrive in Antioch. We will be very grateful.’
He was already walking away from where she sat, her mind reeling, her heart hurting. ‘I thought you cared for my soul?’ she said.
Timothy turned back, he was quite still, very serious. ‘I do, but the care I have for the future of the Church is far greater. You can see that, can’t you?’
‘That you are being expedient? Yes, I can see that. I’ve been taught by men like you before. I didn’t always trust them as much as I have trusted you.’
‘You can continue to trust me. Trust that I will always put the faith first, that is my job. Right now, Severus and I believe you can be useful to us; in truth, we do not yet know exactly how. Your soul is your own affair, the Church is mine, and that is far more important than anything either you or I might want for our own lives. I understand you have been through a great deal in the desert.’
‘I have come to believe. Slowly. It was not an overnight revelation, something passing, a vision, an epiphany brought on by the fast. It is real to me.’
‘Good. I am glad to hear it. And that belief must now find its root in real life, in the everyday. Not everyone is suited to live a life apart, not everyone is meant to. Some of us must remain in the world, make our changes from within …’
‘Get our hands dirty?’
‘Yes. If necessary.’
He shook his head then, as if he really had no more choice than she did, and she thought perhaps she heard a suggestion of regret in his beautifully modulated tones. Then he walked away leaving Theodora on her knees, disappointed and hopeful and clinging to the possibility that her old world might yet feel new with the addition of faith.
The next morning they left for Antioch, the ancient and vibrant Syrian city on the Orontes River, its citizens first brought to the Christ by Peter himself. The community faithful prayed as the ship took them into their new life, hoping to gain inspiration to help them in their next task. Their fellow travellers lounged about the decks: merchants and salesmen, a handful of newly qualified students, young men from the Alexandria medical and law school, returning to their own towns to practise their new skills. Theodora sat alone in the prow and looked ahead. She had spent a year in the desert and discovered a great deal about herself, things she wanted to maintain, allow to grow. Yet now she was being sent back to work – if not in the flesh, then at least in the idea of her old world. To act, to perform, to be directed by men who were telling her to wait for their order and then carry it out, whatever it was, whenever it came. She knew she loved Timothy and Severus. She hoped she could trust them too.
The last few days at sea were hard work, a lack of wind right at the end of the journey held them still for several days, the Levantine coast behind them and the mountains of Syria just visible on the horizon haze ahead, then there’d been a brutal offshore storm that sprang up out of nowhere and had the majority of the faithful reaching for their amulets and good-luck charms, crying out to the Christ to bring them home safely. Slowly the storm calmed, a rainbow in the north-east was seen to be a sign of all good things to come, and the captain led them into dock only four days off target and – he checked, though he didn’t tell his passengers – with just a quarter of a barrel of fresh water left in supplies. Theodora held back on deck, waiting to see if her contact would be there. From above the heads of the others waiting on the dock, a woman nodded, just enough for her to notice. Theodora walked down and, with legs still shaky from the journey, introduced herself to the woman who was to become her friend.
The Spartan’s conquering – Macedonia would say marauding – influence on her family’s home country, the land she’d been named for, was obvious in her light blue eyes, her fair hair, her long strong bones. She was tall, at least a head above Theodora, and her long hair was pulled up higher on her head. She wore heavily patterned old clothes, robes left by her mother, dresses her grandmothers had worn thirty years earlier, cloth and cloaks passed down from old women she had befriended. Although she was just a few years older than Theodora, Macedonia’s dress, combined with a self-certain manner, gave her an air of authority unusual in a woman not born to the patrician. While she did not have Theodora’s sharp tongue, she was perfectly capable of standing her ground and making sure she was heard, and not merely from the constant jingling of the four dozen gold and silver bracelets she wore on each arm, fine fortunes brought back from Hindustan by her father and his brothers who had worked the spice routes, given to her as a girl and never removed, so that now her wrists had grown too wide to take them off and the slightest movement set her ringing. She had given birth to two children, but neither lived beyond three weeks and, with no husband, her matronly potential was undercut by the kind of vigour that a family would have drained from any other poor woman. Macedonia was attractive, passionate, obvious, open, well known, and well loved in Antioch – everything that Theodora would have thought it better for a spy not to be. Her hostess explained, however, that it was simple to hide her true status behind a mask of exposing all – secrets led to exposure, not the other way round.
Macedonia’s home was deep in the centre of the city, on one of the few streets that had escaped damage in the earthquakes of the past century: it had old-fashioned houses spinning off fro
m long alleys, where rooms looked out on to tall narrow courtyards or back down into the street, and the stone steps and cobbles were so ancient that they had been worn soft by the tread of years. Theodora had grown up in streets like this, she felt easy in Macedonia’s two old rooms and, despite the peace she’d left behind, she was excited to be living in a big city for the first time in many months, a city she did not know with a woman she didn’t know either. She was closer to home than she had been in years and glad to be here.
It took less than a fortnight for the women to become lovers. For Theodora, it was a natural progression. Back on the ship that brought them here, she could not have imagined the possibility of enjoying another’s body, it seemed too remote from her intensely spiritual experiences in the desert. In Macedonia’s bed, in the middle of the night, it seemed completely natural.
In the morning, her dark-skinned body stretched against Macedonia’s softer, paler flesh, she asked what happened next.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, here we are together …’
Macedonia smiled. ‘You’re being very coy all of a sudden.’
‘You’re my first lover since I found God.’
‘The Christ found you years ago, you just weren’t paying attention.’
‘The fact remains, we’re not the ideal couple.’
Macedonia frowned. ‘I’m not sure what the ideally faithful look like. The Christ told His followers to leave their families and follow Him. I follow the Patriarch Timothy and I trust he knows what he’s doing. You feel the same about both Timothy and Severus, and they sent you to me.’
‘To become your lover?’
‘To be my partner in this work.’
‘And what work is that?’
‘Other than making me happy?’
‘Other than that. I’m used to making people happy, and I don’t really think Timothy sent me here to just lie in your bed.’
Macedonia reached an arm around Theodora and pulled the smaller woman on top of her, ‘No, very single-minded these priests. Still, we’ve a few hours before we need to do anything too demanding, why don’t I take some time to explain my work to you more fully?’
Theodora smiled. ‘Why don’t you?’
Twenty-Two
Despite her fears of a return to the world, Theodora quickly became fond of Antioch. It was an astonishing place, seemingly capable of combining prayer and play in equal measure, ideal for the transition from the desert to the City. She found it was perfectly normal to spend an evening eating and drinking and laughing in a bar, and then see the same people the next day in a prayer meeting, everyone earnestly debating, agonising over the smallest discrepancies in understanding or translation of the sacred texts, especially in this city of so many languages. The world still functioned in Latin in the old Rome in the West, as did much of the Church, while in the new Rome of Constantinople, Greek belonged to the people and their faith, with an uncomfortable Latin for the state. Antioch was entirely different. To the citizens of this third city of the Empire, business was far less important than faith. Here the subtleties of the Greek preferred by the poetically inclined, those who liked their religion spirited as well as spiritual, rubbed alongside the Syriac, Aramaic and Coptic of the earliest Christians, spoken by faithful who were demanding faith in their own languages, and were also beginning to whisper that they might want their own nations for those languages too. In Antioch, the religious engaged with the mind as well as the spirit, while it quickly became apparent that the city also engaged wholeheartedly with the flesh.
*
Macedonia’s work was a combination of many things, not all of them entirely legal, more often than not involving some kind of spying or information-gathering, and occasionally veering toward the dangerous, though so far she had always emerged safe from her efforts. The few who really knew her work claimed she got away with her meddling because her Blue-leader grandfather had known too many important people in Constantinople for it to be possible to bring her down; others said that the protection of the Alexandrian Patriarch left her inviolate, others still that she was shielded by certain connections in the current Palace hierarchy itself. She admitted to Theodora that she took commissions from both Timothy and the Blues, maintaining what balance she could, and used her spare time for her own endeavours. The big boys could make their plans and schemes around the problems of Church and state; her choice was to ensure the people on the ground were taken care of as well.
The task Macedonia hoped Theodora would help her with first was in aid of one such ordinary person. Phebe and Macedonia had once been friends, but several years earlier, when Macedonia became Timothy’s acolyte, Phebe followed another leader, Marcus Orontes, a preacher utterly opposed to Timothy’s beliefs. Orontes had grown up in Sykae, across the water from the central City where Theodora had plied her childhood trade. He left the City as a very young man, and travelled to Antioch, where he not only made his name as a preacher, advocating a faith that was unusually pro-Chalcedonian for that area, but he also so despised the City and all it stood for – the corruption of Rome, as he called it – that he had even taken the name of Antioch’s river, the Orontes, as his own name. Unlike Theodora, he had apparently cut off his past entirely. Macedonia had heard that Orontes was now preparing to publicly cast Phebe out of his group and, knowing his methods, she was ready to rescue her when he did, not least because what Phebe had learned while part of his group might prove helpful to Timothy’s plans in the area.
Theodora agreed to help because it was what Timothy had asked of her and because Macedonia needed another to make the scheme work, but when the plan was explained, her stomach lurched with sick uncertainty.
‘Of course I can do what you ask … I could always do that, I just …’
‘Don’t think it matches your image of a good Christian woman?’
They were in bed together, going over the strategy again.
‘No. Yes …’ Theodora answered, ‘I’m not stupid, I can be as realistic as the next homeless, stateless believer.’ They both smiled then and Theodora continued, ‘I’d just hoped this kind of work was behind me. Assumed it was.’
‘Understandable, but it is another of your skills, isn’t it? We have been taught to be true to those talents, to use what we’re good at, not pretend to be other than we are.’
‘And doing so in the service of the Christ makes it all right?’
‘I believe it does.’
‘There are plenty of the religious who would disagree with you.’
‘Of course, but I don’t serve them, I serve the Patriarch. And myself.’
‘And which of those two do we serve today?’
‘Both. Hopefully.’
Her lover’s simple belief in the value of pragmatic action was persuasive to Theodora, who had been well trained in the practicalities of poverty, but it didn’t stop her being nervous as they approached Orontes’ huge home, the base for his followers. Macedonia’s plan was far removed from Theodora’s recent experiences in the desert, and while there was certainly going to be a performance of a sort, failure here would be much more dangerous than the sting of Menander’s cane.
‘We should have left earlier.’ Theodora was disheartened by the throng of people already in the courtyard when they arrived at the house. ‘We’ll never get up front.’
Orontes would be speaking soon and there was a clear sense of anticipation among his followers.
‘Yes we will, work with me.’
Theodora watched Macedonia, quickly caught on, and the two women shape-shifted their way through the tight crowd, moving from virgin to whore, working whichever form suited the person nearest. Macedonia pushed slightly too close to a young man who, of course, stepped back where he hungered to step forward, while Theodora smiled shyly at an older woman who had no choice but to let the eager young acolyte past. Within five minutes Theodora and Macedonia were standing in the second row of the courtyard that now held about two hundred people, looki
ng at Phebe, wrapped in a coarse woollen blanket and rocking in fear in the centre of the space.
Marcus Orontes started innocuously enough. As with so many of these new leaders, their small sects dotted all across Syria and the Levant, his text was mainly that of the Jews, as he cited first Ezekiel and then Daniel, with a little Lamentations thrown in for good measure. Then he increased the tension and pitch of his oration, reminding his audience that they stood here, so close to the birthplace of the Christ, and that they, not the dangerously misguided Nestorians or Arians or anti-Chalcedonians, were following the Church’s true path. Theodora had to hand it to him, the man was a very good speaker, and he was far prettier than Timothy. He waited until the crowd’s murmuring agreement died down, then left the raised dais at the side of the courtyard and began circling Phebe. Eventually, his voice soft and low, he began to speak.
‘Each of us is part of a proud tradition of steadfast faith that follows in the footsteps of those who brought the Church to Antioch – Peter the evangelist, Paul, Barnabas the faithful. Yet there is one among us, who has worshipped with us, has adored the Christ with us, who has chosen to leave our community, turning her back on us.’
He paused and the crowd gratifyingly filled the silence with something between an ‘ooh’ and an ‘oh’.
‘One who wishes to leave the sanctuary of community and arrogantly strike out on her own.’
He continued for almost a full hour. On and on about the group’s sanctity as a unit, each individual as part of the whole, about Phebe’s betrayal of them all. Just at the point when he might have sounded cruel, he neatly managed a little self-deprecation, apologising to the group, and further, to the wider city and Christian whole even, for not noticing sooner what a viper he had allowed into their community, for being taken in himself by her cunning, her female graces. He likened himself to Adam, to Samson and then, in what Theodora thought was the kind of narrative leap that would have been booed off stage at the Kynegion but seemed to be going down very well with the Antioch crowd, to John the Baptist, betrayed by Salome. And every time he berated himself, his people confirmed his position as their leader, their head, their teacher. He certainly knew how to work them.
