by Stella Duffy
There followed several missions like the first, some under Macedonia’s direction, others specifically for the Patriarch. Once they were asked by Timothy to help free a misguided son from an overbearing sect, another time Macedonia decided that one of the town’s pimps had gone too far and it was time his whores, led by herself and Theodora, took revenge. On several occasions they wined and dined visiting traders, passing back information gleaned across comfortable couches and groaning tables to either the Patriarch’s people in Alexandria or Macedonia’s contacts among the Blues in the City. Despite her initial reservations, Theodora came to relish these games, they were a form of the playing she’d always enjoyed, but now when she went home it was to Macedonia who had become her friend as well as her lover. There was still a little necessary whoring sometimes to get one or other of them out of a tricky situation, but Theodora was happy. Working for Timothy, doing his bidding with Macedonia to guide her, she almost forgot that her bosses intended that she return to Constantinople eventually. Timothy and Macedonia did not.
‘You need to leave.’
Theodora stretched in the bed, leaned up to look out of the window, over the tiled roofs to where stalls were still laid out, their sun-bleached canopies dozens of shades of warm red and ochre in the afternoon light. ‘There’s plenty of time, the market won’t be clear for another hour or more, and I hate pushing through the crowd.’
‘You need to leave Antioch.’
Theodora was suddenly cold, her voice low. ‘Why?’
‘The Patriarch has new work for you.’
‘What work?’
‘He wouldn’t tell me, not specifically, but it’s important.’
‘I don’t want to go.’
‘He knows that.’
Theodora pulled away when Macedonia reached for her.
‘You knew he had plans for you.’
‘I thought these were his plans. Here, with you.’
‘The Patriarch’s not stupid, Theodora. You and I? He knows we’ve become closer than he intended.’
‘So he’s sending me away to punish us?’
Macedonia shrugged. ‘I don’t expect he cares, his concern is always for the Church. We are irrelevant to him.’
‘So why does he want to send me away?’
‘He’s not sending you away, he’s sending you to work for him.’
‘Where?’ Theodora asked even though she knew there was only one answer.
‘The City.’
*
The Emperor Justin was becoming more aggressive in his behaviour towards their fellow believers, those who maintained the primacy of the Christ’s divinity over His humanity; the refugees from the City told angrier stories about the treatment meted out from the officials at the Chalke, entrance to the Palace, and Timothy needed someone working for him from inside. They were sending her home with a letter of introduction to the Palace officials who really ran the Empire. It was a simple enough thing, and it was everything. The people Macedonia maintained contact with, on Timothy’s behalf, were very different to Theodora’s circle. Many of them had known her work – as an entertainer, Theodora from the Hippodrome had had no equal, but she would never have been welcome inside the Chalke gates before. Now the Patriarch was sending her back to get into the hidden centre of their world, she would need to go home as the newly penitent Theodora.
There were a few days to prepare and then it was time to leave. The ship was sailing on an early tide, they spent their last hours together awake and in bed.
‘You will need to be on your best behaviour, all the time.’
‘This isn’t one of my best behaviours?’
Macedonia curled down and held Theodora, ‘It’s one of your finest skills, but they need to believe that you are totally changed when you go home.’
‘I am. I had no faith before: now I do. That’s all the change I need.’
‘I know the importance of faith as well as you, and I know, too, that in a place like the City, appearance matters as much, if not more. We have someone who will give you work, and a place to stay.’
‘I can stay with Comito. I might have been a few years away, but I doubt very much they’ll turn me down at the actors’ entrance to the Kynegion.’
Macedonia sat up, her voice very clear in the still room that was slowly gaining light as the sun began to rise over the mountains. ‘Theodora, you are part of Timothy’s plan to get close to the man who may become Emperor.’
‘Justin has other family who could succeed him as well as this nephew.’
‘Perhaps, but Justinian is his favourite. Many people believe he paved the way for Justin’s own accession, the Emperor owes him. The Patriarch wants you to build influence with Justinian, but the Palace won’t let you near unless you approach him as a changed woman.’
Theodora laughed, without humour, ‘Timothy doesn’t want you and me to make love in this bed, but he has no qualms about pimping me to Justinian.’
Macedonia shook her head. ‘By all accounts the Emperor’s nephew works day and night at his studies, the man barely goes to bed, and certainly not for sex.’
‘Maybe he takes a eunuch?’
‘Not that we’ve heard. All the Patriarch asks for now is that you try to make him like you, engage him. From what our people tell us, Justinian is interested in the world – you’ve travelled, you’re good at charming people, once Timothy arranges the introduction, your job will be to find a way to get close to him.’
‘Yes, but he’s sending me, not some other woman, and we all know how best I get close.’
‘Maybe this is a test for you.’
‘What? To see if I can keep from ravishing some lumpen Slav who’s only come to prominence because of his mother’s brother? Even I can probably hold off there.’
‘I agree it doesn’t sound like much of a test, but just in case, you have to give the appearance of being a new Theodora.’
‘I am. I keep telling you, I know I didn’t have some blinding-light conversion, there was no angel, no miracle, I simply came to an understanding that made sense to me. That doesn’t mean it isn’t real.’
‘No, and we know that those blinding-light conversions are more to do with hysteria than anything else, like Orontes’ crazed followers. Unfortunately they are also what most people find easier to believe in. So of course I believe in your faith. You, though, are going to have to show it when you go home. Not just believing quietly, but finding a way to make it plain.’
‘You want me to act out my faith?’ asked Theodora, ‘Perform it?’
‘Yes, if you have to. Hopefully it won’t need to be quite so obvious, but you are going to need to behave differently, at least a little. And that means you can visit your sister, but not the theatre and definitely not your old friends. It will be safer for you to stay away from them until you’ve established yourself with Justinian.’
‘Great,’ Theodora said, knowing how well that would go down with her old colleagues.
The two women kissed then, slowly.
‘I won’t forget you.’ Theodora said quietly.
‘No, but you will be late if we don’t go now.’
Days later, the coastline of Bithynia shimmered finally in the heat of the opposite shore, and then disappeared into the night. Theodora didn’t want to go down to the tiny cabin she shared with the other single women. Her fellow travellers might be content to get a glimpse of the City once the lookout had shouted his sightings of Chalcedon to the east and then Constantinople to the north-west, but she intended to catch the first light on the hills and churches herself. She was markedly different to her travelling companions anyway, the only one of them going home. Everyone else was travelling to the City as a trader or adventurer or pilgrim, some visiting for the first time, others returning to buy or sell, there for the deals only, the market in cloth or spice or – in the case of at least one of the older men, she was sure – in flesh.
There was a pilgrim family in their group, all the way from Moesia, and
while the older man barely acknowledged the parents, he happily left his private cabin to spend hours on deck playing with their two little girls, building their trust in card games and dice where there was no common language between them. Theodora, meanwhile, made a note to herself to check where the old man went when he left the ship. Everyone in the City knew about the trade in child slaves, the stories of girls bought for a pair of shoes and then contracted until their fourteenth year. In their training sessions Menander had merely to threaten to call in the slavers for the girls to bend deeper, leap higher, spin faster. Dancing girls and nine-year-old acrobats and even teenage whoring were normal in their craft, but theatre girls were paid, in good coin too, and that made all the difference. Her people despised the likes of this man, his money made from forced flesh. She’d keep an eye on him, and if she still had friends in the City, they’d know what to do. Or they would once she found a way, against Macedonia’s instructions, to contact them. Whether or not her past friends would welcome her was a different matter altogether.
The leaving felt a very long time ago now, the turnaround on stage could be brutal, Theodora had no idea who she still knew back in the City, maybe all her colleagues had left in the three years she’d been away. She’d only had four days in Antioch to prepare for her departure, but had grabbed a moment to write to Comito, sending the letter on an earlier ship with the news that she was coming home. The sisters had communicated sparingly over the years, but there was enough gossip in the Antioch market for Theodora to know that Comito was singing even more successfully, which meant their family was safe, Ana looked after. Theodora was to return a changed woman, but any repentant ex-actress would hurry to see her family. She wasn’t expecting a fatted calf any more than she was expecting a warm welcome from the likes of Sophia or Menander, or any of the other friends who thought she’d been a fool to run off with Hecebolus. Now, as she returned alone and practically penniless, it would certainly look as if they had been right. But had she not met Hecebolus, she would never have been in Alexandria, or the desert, which had quietly turned her life around, just as working with Macedonia had given her a reason to return to the City – even if she didn’t yet know what that reason was. And now here she was, actually coming home. It was too much to think about, too much to worry about. There were other people’s plans she must follow and that was enough for this night that was almost day.
An owl screamed, the shore must be closer than she’d thought, a hazy line began to divide the forests of Bithynia from the sky, it was morning. There, on the distant eastern shore, were the old buildings of Chalcedon. Soon she would be able to count the hills of the City, maybe even make out the outline of her church, her Hagia Sophia. Theodora shifted her gaze to the still-dark west and waited. She didn’t know she had been so hungry for this view, hadn’t allowed herself to think about it. Now, waiting for home to emerge from the dark, she knew she was starving, and had been for a long time.
The first thing she saw, vague at this distance, was the wall. Not Constantine’s wall, falling down when she left and no doubt even more so now, but the new wall, the one her mother still called the outer wall, that really marked the edge of home. For an hour or more their small ship had been veering west in its northern course across the Sea of Marmara. Slowly the hills took shape as the sun rose from the opposite shore and they were lit with sharp sunshine. Then the inner wall. Then, and Theodora wasn’t sure this could be true, didn’t know if it was possible, at this angle, there and then gone, she saw the very tip of the Hippodrome with her own obelisk pointing above, the one her father had used to explain the Empire, the distant countries they were part of. It was an imagining, she knew; Menander, and even more so Sophia, would have mocked her for the sentimentality. Theodora had been picturing them more often during the journey. The City could be harsh, she probably would have heard if something had happened to her people, but she couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t be sure of anything. The land was rushing closer now, clearer, and then they could see the port and then a small hand slipped into hers.
‘Why are you crying?’
Theodora shook her head, she would rather not have the little girl see her like this; she had no idea what they had to face in the City, she didn’t want her to see weakness as a possibility.
‘I’m not unhappy, Mariam,’ she answered. ‘It’s just that I never thought I’d see this again.’
Mariam, who was all of six years old, nodded, knowing. In the long pilgrimage that had begun just days after her third birthday, she had seen her parents in paroxysms of helpless laughter, waves of ecstatic grief, swallowed up by the bliss of blind revelation or a torpor of spiritual exhaustion. It was perfectly normal to her that an adult should exhibit one emotion yet insist they were experiencing another.
An hour later the deck was full, everyone looking for landmarks and signs, the two pilgrim girls certain that the swell they saw further up the Bosphorus must be the whale Porphyry. Theodora didn’t have the heart to tell them that in an entire childhood in the City she’d only seen the famed whale twice herself: what did it matter if the girls thought a wave was a whale? They’d see more shocking sights than that in the weeks to come. Sailors pushed gawping passengers out of the way as they climbed ladders and lowered sails, shouting and swearing and sweating as they did so, and finally a local boy caught the heavy hemp rope and was tying the ship into dock and the gangplank was lowered and Theodora picked up her bag, ran a hand beneath her left breast to check the emerald was in place and, joining the long queue of passengers, made her way down on to dry land. Homeland. And even as she did so, she looked around her and made a note to watch the old trader as he watched the pilgrim family.
She had intended to make her way first to Hagia Sophia to give thanks for her safe arrival, and then to the address Macedonia had given her, a street in the main industrial quarter. She would get her bearings, introduce herself to the people who were to give her work and lodging, and she could also wash before heading back uphill to find her family and friends – Macedonia had warned her to take her time, but she hadn’t accounted for the surge of longing Theodora felt when the City wall came into view. Unfortunately for her sensible plans, Leon, Sophia’s uncle, the chief scene painter for the theatre, was waiting at the dock for a shipment of Persian pigment that was a whole week late already and had only now come in on the ship ahead of Theodora’s. She considered walking right past him, wondered if she might be able to make it to the end of the harbour and then up one of the narrow streets towards the Mese without being seen, but Leon was in full oratorical flow, and even as her head urged her to hurry away, her steps slowed, her eyes turned back. After all this time, Theodora couldn’t bring herself to miss the spectacle of Leon in mid-tantrum, shouting at the ship’s captain who had handed over his delivery with any number of dents and marks on the wooden box, and screaming, too, at his own assistant, who was being too slow and too clumsy with the box in question.
‘You lying, arsing thief. Captain? Captain of a fucking rowboat, more like. I pay you good money and for that I get this? I tell you sailor, if a single spot of that insanely expensive lapis has been knocked off and leaked into anything else, that’s it, not a damned cent. You think my bosses won’t notice just because you’re colour blind? Marcellus you stupid little bugger – and I use the word advisedly – lift it carefully, this sea-cunt has fucked me about enough, must my own staff exhibit the same brute stupidity? No, I don’t know about full payment, how about a further third now and then the final instalment when I get back to my workshop and check out just how seriously you’ve screwed up my supplies? Marcellus! If I have to tell you one more time …’ And then his eyes locked with the woman staring, smiling, tears running down her face. ‘Dear God, sweet Mary Theotokos, Theo-fucking-dora. What are you doing here? Why didn’t you tell us you were coming home? We’d have had the boys out. And the girls. The whole troupe on the dock. Come here, you dark-skinned bitch, have you spent these years just lying in that ghastly
African sun? Come here and give Uncle Leon a big fat whorey kiss and prove to me you’re not the virgin fucking nun of rumour!’
Theodora laughed aloud, discarded Macedonia’s sensible plans, and ran to Leon’s strong arms, into the smell of him – stage paint, the last meal he’d eaten crumbled still in his heavy, unfashionable beard, and whatever perfume lingered on his skin from the boy he’d had the night before. Quite possibly the unhappy Marcellus who now tagged along with both the dented pigment box and Theodora’s bag. Leon hurried her away, the captain shouting pointlessly for his full payment, Marcellus stumbling behind, and Theodora giving herself over to her people, to the City, to home.
Twenty-Five
Leon took her first to Comito’s new apartment; it was on his way to the theatre workshop, and now that he had escaped without paying the full delivery price he was perfectly happy to send Marcellus ahead with the precious cargo and sit in on the family reunion. Theodora let Leon lead her uphill, soaking in the City as they walked. The smell caught her first, the mix of wild herbs and cooking spices, of tens of thousands of people crammed into such a small area, hundreds of them thronging the narrow streets. Beneath the foodstuffs and the bodies there was smoke from cooking fires, the bitter tang of burning metal from the copper and silversmiths’ workshops, and above that hung precious incense from the dozens of churches and shrines, each individual perfume stirred into the whole by the constant sea breeze from three directions at once – it was the unmistakable smell of home and it made Theodora want to cry, it was so full of a past she no longer lived.
