Theodora Read online

  He slapped her first: that was normal. Hit her across the back and buttocks with his stick: that was normal. As was the list of questions, the reminders of their place as dancers, as baby whores to the great and the good. Then, using her hesitation as his excuse, he held her down for fifteen minutes. Twisting her into shape he explained to Theodora, and to the others, what he was doing. Pointing out where her muscles were too tight, her legs too stiff, that she needed to loosen, to let go, to be free in her body and then her energy would flow. She was too proud, he said, her head so high, her back so tight, too fond of making others laugh, never knew when to shut up, when to just work, to let it be about the whole, not just about her. She was too fond of being watched. Given her family background, her stature, her colouring, she was damn lucky to have a job at all. He would teach her to yield, cede, it was his duty to her as teacher and mentor, he would be failing her if he did not, it would only be harder later, when she was in the chorus and the director gave instructions she could not follow because she was too fond of standing out. And, if Menander could not get through that wilful mind, then he would start with muscle and bone. Her flesh would make her learn.

  Theodora fought back, resisted him, she fought because the other girls did not. And still Menander forced himself on her, pushing her body into position, laying himself out across her back to keep her still, keep her in place. She could not move beneath his weight; big and strong for a eunuch, Menander had spent his life fighting the constraints of the biology his own parents had sold him into, he would make Theodora overcome her physical limitations too. Eventually she grew silent. It was permissible to fight back once, it was what everyone expected of her. Twice and she would be in real trouble. Three times and she would be out of a job. Theodora readily acknowledged she could be wilful, disobedient, was merely an adequate dancer, with an ordinary voice, good only for acrobatics and comedy, but she had always been responsible and she was also ambitious. She could not afford to lose this job.

  One ear ground into the sand and dirt, the other twisted beneath Menander’s flat palm, she listened to him training the other girls. Their rehearsal went on; she would have to make up practice in the brief break. This was punishment and lesson. The girls, encouraging each other, were talking to her, their coded messages and shouts, apparently intended for one or the other of them but really for Theodora in the dust beneath their teacher’s body. Menander counted out instruction, method, placement, action, talking the girls through one scene and into the next, taking his team through their everyday paces. Theodora had displeased him and so here she was, exactly as he said she would be, as he had threatened, promised, so many times before. He whispered she was not as pretty as the other girls, she needed other skills. He would make sure she knew those skills, that her body knew those skills, that she – as he had himself – would overcome nature’s limits.

  Theodora’s older sister Comito was already being considered for the public stages at the Hippodrome and the Kynegion amphitheatre, she was known for her voice and her beauty. Little Anastasia was so fine and delicate – or she would be once the cold water had taken down the swelling on her lip and the makeup woman had painted her face for the evening. Their friend Chrysomallo would never be as good a dancer as the others, but she had that long, golden hair, and a pretty voice. Helena had done well today too, and the half-dozen others in the company. Everyone had done well but Theodora who, with her lack of skill and her big mouth and her ignorance, had done this to herself. Ending up posed in pain beneath the body of the man she feared and loved. She wanted only to please and daily found herself fighting instead, forced to yield instead.

  Later, Theodora lay on her stomach as Comito massaged oil into her sister’s aching back and cramped thighs.

  ‘Sometimes I think you do it on purpose.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Annoy Menander. To get his attention.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. A six-foot, fifteen-stone ex-acrobat eunuch lying on top of me, while I eat dirt – that’s exactly the kind of attention I crave. Careful!’ she shouted as Comito dug into a particularly knotty muscle in her calf. ‘It hurts.’

  ‘It’s supposed to.’

  ‘Like everything else I have to endure.’

  ‘You’re such an actress. You could just work harder and have him sit on you less.’

  ‘I’m sure he’d rather go and sit on his Armenian.’

  Both girls laughed then, at the idea of their harsh teacher and his supposedly even tougher boyfriend, the eunuch soldier.

  ‘You know I work hard, but it’s different for me. I don’t have a beautiful voice like you, and I’m not sweet like Anastasia. If I’m not careful I’m going to end up as one of the swimming whores.’

  ‘You’ll never be a swimming whore, you’re not pretty enough.’

  Comito wasn’t being unkind. The girls who wore thin silk robes and danced in the water when part of the Hippodrome was flooded for their shows, were much less dancers than beautiful models for the men to ogle, more lovely once the water rendered their expensive silk costumes practically transparent.

  ‘God, you’re right. Can’t sing, can’t dance, not pretty. I don’t fit.’

  Comito smiled, digging her thumbs into the knotted muscle, her hands keeping time with her words. ‘You don’t fit because you don’t want to. You wouldn’t want to be just pretty, you’d rather stand out, make them laugh.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with comedy.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘It’s dull, all that looking lovely and keeping quiet, and there are so many funny things, absurd things.’

  ‘You don’t need to point them out every time.’

  ‘I can’t help it. Menander hates it when I get laughs, says it distracts from the show.’

  ‘It does – and it’s useful. He knows that, every audience needs a break from even the best singer, the loveliest dancers. We’re just a sideshow to the main event, when they want a break from the racing: the old men go to piss, the young men place their bets.’

  ‘So you singers are their sideshow and I’m yours?’

  ‘You are when you make your performance about the laughs. It’s good, it works. You just need to judge when to speak out and when to stay silent. Menander’s only another man, little sister, don’t worry so much about what he thinks.’

  ‘I fight him. I argue more than any of you.’

  Comito wiped her hands on her rehearsal gown and helped Theodora sit up. ‘That’s just another way of begging him to see you. None of us is perfect all the time, not even me, but he hardly ever shouts at me, because he knows I don’t care. I’ll do my best, not his. If you didn’t care so much about gaining his praise, you’d get a lot less blame as well.’

  Two

  An hour later, walking away from the rehearsal space beneath the Hippodrome, Theodora broke away from her sisters. Comito and Anastasia were both keen to hurry home, to grab whatever they could find to eat, have a quick rest and then return, ready for a final rehearsal before the evening’s show in a private home overlooking the Sea of Marmara. Theodora told her sisters she wanted a moment to rehearse alone. Anastasia, the tiny and delicate little one, had the appetite of a dock worker – if Theodora didn’t care to eat and rest before they were called again, then all the more for her. With too many mouths to feed with their stepbrother and sisters, and too little to feed them on, the household did not do leftovers, and certainly not for girls who upset their teacher and bruised their little sister, accident or not.

  Comito knew Theodora was lying, but she also knew that after a day like today, so close to tears with every shout and blow Menander directed at her, Theodora would risk even their mother’s wrath to have some time to herself. Comito knew Theodora ached for room to spread her body, and peace in which to think, neither of which was available in their three rooms, a mile and a half from the city centre, in the jumble of half-finished, overcrowded slum houses between the old Constantine Wall and the Golden Gate. It had been
a hard day, a hard week, and tonight’s private performance was very important to Menander; food was the last thing Theodora cared about right now, and anyway, if she found herself hungry later, there would always be a passing worker she could beg for a share of his bread dole. Theodora might be too smart-mouthed for their teacher, but it was a mouth that could charm and cajole a coin from even the hardest-hearted patrician, hidden behind the curtains of the sedan chair that carried him from one place to another without ever having to touch the polluted ground.

  It was the end of a warm spring day, and there was excitement about the coming City festival. The May holiday would mean a day off school for the children and for some workers and slaves. For just as many though, it meant more to do in preparation – local police needed to be ready to come between Greens and Blues when the rows broke out, after the young men had spent the day drinking; in the churches and monasteries priests were gearing up for the long round of extra ceremonies to perform, more masses than usual to bless the great City; Palace staff could expect to work double-length days over the next week as they prepared for the celebratory and thanksgiving processions. Theodora made her way back through the extra-busy crowd. When she was once again near the Hippodrome gates, she stopped to look over the people’s heads at the obelisk, silently giving her regular greeting to the owl carved halfway up the ancient stone. She had few clear memories of her father, but cherished one of sitting high on his shoulders, being carried through the crowds, the big man explaining if she ever lost her way she need only look out for the owl. Theodora no longer believed in that safety, but she trusted in the owl anyway. From there she made her way over the City’s second hill and down to the narrow streets lining the Golden Horn. It was a less direct route to her destination, but easier this way, in the alleys and lanes, to avoid the excess of people. Even stage girls were not that common a sight in streets paved by men for the feet of men, crowded with partisan lads who cheered their teams, jeered each other, and did far worse to young girls when drink had stirred them enough. Foreign men were also thick on the streets, dressed in the strange clothes and stranger haircuts of Goth and Herule mercenaries, come to Constantinople looking for work and all too often finding wine and argument. Theodora knew exactly how to perform for these men when they spent money on a show; she was less keen on the street performances they sometimes demanded for free.

  At the narrowest point of the Golden Horn, where the ferries travelled all day and much of the night across the stretch of water to Sykae, she climbed back up the first hill right to the edge of the Palace wall, sneaking past sentries who were more interested in throwing dice than they were in girlish shadows. Finally she came out into a short lane that led close to the Chalke, the main entrance to the Imperial Palace. It was safe to ignore the beggars and supplicants thronging there, these refugees had far more to worry about than a girl out on the streets alone.

  The warm day often meant a cold night ahead for the street-dwellers crowded between the Chalke, the Senate and the Baths, the beggars who supposedly did not exist in this perfect City of the perfect Empire. A chill and potentially illegal night if they could not find an administrator to agree charity, or a penitent sinner hoping to placate the Christ who believed rich men were the camel’s impossible hump in a needle’s tiny eye. If that didn’t work here – practically on the doorstep of Hagia Sophia – then the hungry many could always try further up the Mese, heading towards Constantine’s statue, where Christianity was diluted by the nationalities of the market traders, and any number of other gods’ blessings could be employed to charm aid from the superstitious. These newcomers to the City – traders fallen on hard times, disabled soldiers damaged in war, young chancers with nothing left to chance – had discovered that it was wise first to make their case at the meeting point of Church and State.

  Theodora blessed herself as she passed the cripples and the begging children. She had work, she was learning her skills, she earned her own keep, and some extra to help the family. She knew she was lucky, her mother and stepfather made it very clear – Menander told her so several times daily. There but for the grace of God. She came eventually to a side entrance of Hagia Sophia, the hundred-year-old church that would have been far older but for the riots a century before, riots Theodora understood only as a laugh-line, a final gag, certain to cheer the Hippodrome crowds as they waited for the next race, guaranteed to bring down the Kynegion house, just as the rioters had laid low the Great Church, making way for this new sanctuary. Great enough for her current need.

  Theodora stood at the side door, an entrance she’d found by chance several years ago, a door left unlocked more often by accident than intent. She tried the latch, felt her tight shoulders and chest begin to ease as the heavy carved wood opened into the dark of the building and made her way forward; silent, slow, cautious, moving into the heady scent of spent incense and a solid wall of other people’s lingering prayer, their pain and desire forced into the marble and the stone by sheer strength of want, entreaties of hope and despair trapped in windows of translucent alabaster. Always, in this building, Theodora felt other people’s pain and shook it off to concentrate on her own need; now she climbed on shaking legs, with stiff muscles, to the gallery, the place of women, unlit and quiet.

  *

  Her father is standing by the animal and even though he is so close to the claws and the teeth, close enough for the child to touch the beast’s fur if she reaches out her hand, he takes a step closer still. Holding her tight in his arms now, he lifts her high and swings her on to his shoulders. She can smell his hair; it is the smell of his work, of cages, stables, animals, of this bear. Her father spends his days with the animals, and his hair smells of this bear. The bear is bigger than her father, her father is bigger than the other men working here, in these dark rooms beneath the Hippodrome: he is tall and wide and dark-skinned. Her mother shouts at him in the late evening, tells him to wash himself, he looks like a Barbarian. The little girl has her father’s colouring, like him she is strong, he and Theodora are special, they are the same, just the two of them. He holds her tight on his shoulders, she is used to being here, good at balancing, everyone says so already, that she will be a fine acrobat. She would like that, loves to watch the acrobats rehearse, even when their master shouts in anger and screams at them to do it again and again, to be better, better, she loves it, the leaping and jumping and flying. These tumblers can fly on the ground, make a loaded catapult of a wooden floor. She copies them sometimes, at home, when her mother is not watching, or when she is pushing them at their lessons, letters and numbers and more letters – their mother who hates her body for not yet providing a son, who curses her flesh that is so female it produces only girl children, who knows how hard it is to be a girl child and will claim education for her daughters if it is the last thing she does. Education, and ridding them of the stink of the circus. Hard to do when your husband is the chief animal trainer, the only bear-keeper, and famous for it too, but not impossible – other women have climbed a little, and a little is better than nothing. Her girls will read and write, they will speak their Greek better than the street, and, if she has any say in the matter, they will have Latin too. Above all, they will not be actresses. At least then she will be able to find husbands for them, marry them legally, marry them out of the stink of theatre. Meanwhile though, the dark and small Theodora sits proud on Acacius’ shoulders, one still-chubby fist gripping his hair, the other waving proudly to her father’s assistants who comment on her smile, her loud voice from the tiny frame, her deep-set eyes. She is just five years old, and already she feels the power she has over an audience.

  Then something happens. She has been laughing, enjoying the height and the strength she feels up here and, with no warning, the place of safety on her father’s shoulders disappears, she thinks he must be playing, this is what it feels like when he throws her in the air, when suddenly there is nothing beneath her, soon he will lift his strong arms and catch her. Soon. But not now
. She is thrown up and back and there are no arms catching and she falls smack against the wooden wall behind them, a fistful of her father’s hair in her hand. There is screaming, loud, wailing screaming, from her mouth and also from his, and then the screams are coming from all over the building, from all the others, watching in sick horror. And though someone runs to pick her up, and though adult hands try to shield her eyes, and though it is over almost before it has begun, Theodora sees the bear, her father’s bear, the bear he loves best of his beasts, she sees the claws drag through his skin as easily as her mother pulls a stick across the Marmara shore, writing their letters in the sand. Her father’s skin parts as the wet grains do, falling back, there and then not there, swiftly displaced, but where the sand moves allowing the water to fill the narrow trenches that spell alpha, beta, gamma, her father’s flesh is opened and it is his blood that wells up, spilling over. Three minutes later his heart has pumped him dry into the sand and dirt beneath the Hippodrome. There is no tide to wipe him clean and begin again.

  *

  Theodora lay in the gallery of Hagia Sophia, her skin clammy, head aching. She had not meant to fall asleep, certainly had not meant to see again in vivid dream the picture she pushed away when awake. Her dead father, his face twisted in pain, the bear’s claws and teeth, the blood running through the creature’s fur, running down to the child, blood on Theodora’s hands and face. And, in her five-year-old’s mind, all that blood was her fault, because she was on his shoulders and she must have distracted him and she had been there beneath the stage with her father when she should have been at home learning how to be a lady with her mother and sisters. Her mother had never said so, never would, but Theodora knew it had crossed her mind too, more than once. She shook her head, trying to dislodge the image, to regain the sense of security she’d felt as soon as she lay on the gallery floor, letting her aching limbs and back sink into the cool stone, as gentle a touch as Comito’s oiled hands.