The Secret History: A Novel of Empress Theodora (2 page)

She gave a little moan as I snuggled into Anastasia’s bare back, hoping for more dreams like last night’s fantasy of roasted goat with mint yogurt. Comito claimed I had made cow eyes at the butcher’s son
when Mother sent us to collect our monthly grain ration earlier today, but in truth I was more impressed with the fresh leg of goat hanging from his stall than the cut of his calves under his tunica. It seemed like years since we’d had meat.

“Acacius.” My mother’s voice woke me, the same tone she used when my father came home after too much wine at the Boar’s Eye. There was another sound, a thud like a sack of flour hitting the ground. “Acacius!”

“Mama?” I opened my eyes. My father was facedown on their pallet, arms crumpled like twigs under his bulk.

My mother struggled to move him. “Help me, Theodora.”

The chipped mosaic blossoms scraped my knee as I helped shove him to his back. Anastasia whimpered in the moonlight.

Cold sweat covered my father’s skin as he opened and closed his mouth like a mackerel freshly pulled from the Bosphorus, fingers plucking the neck of his tunica. My mother clutched his hand to her chest. “You stay right here, Acacius.”

She rifled through a little cedar box with her free hand, the one with our scant supply of spices and medicines. Willow bark and chamomile filled my nose as Comito rubbed her eyes and Anastasia crawled into my lap, thumb in her mouth and her wooden doll tucked tight under her arm. It squinted at me through its charcoal smudge of an eye. My father looked from me to Mama to my sisters, and his tongue lurched in his mouth, as if he were trying to speak. Death has many sounds, the shrieks of men crushed by a chariot in the Hippodrome, the final rattle of ancient lungs, or the gentle sigh of a child ravaged by creeping sickness. My giant of a father only gurgled like an infant and then went still.

We sat in silence for a moment. Then my mother screamed and pummeled my father with tiny fists, dusting his chest with the yellow ash of crushed herbs. “No!” Tears streamed down her face. “No! Get up!”

She collapsed to his chest, golden curls covering him like a burial shroud as her body heaved with sobs. Departing this life in the throes of passion is as good a way to go as any, but I could not fathom my father greeting Saint Peter now. I clung to Anastasia as my tears fell into her hair.

“Don’t be sad, Dora.” She traced my cheeks with fingers still sticky from the honeyed
kopton
we’d eaten before bed, but her chin wobbled as my mother wailed louder. My little sister slid from my lap and touched Mama’s shoulder, but she jerked back as Comito added her voice to the howls.

I pulled Anastasia to me and tucked us into the crook of my father’s arm, savoring his fleeting warmth.

My father was dead.

Never again would he carry Anastasia on his shoulders to see the zebras before a show, or tease Comito until the tips of her ears turned red. He would never wrap me in an elephant hug that smelled of the wild rosemary he constantly chewed and the ever-present animal musk that clung to his skin, even after he’d just come home from the baths.

I don’t know how long we listened to one another’s tears, but his body grew stiff and clammy before I could rouse myself. He would have to be buried soon, before his flesh began to decay.

I touched my mother’s back, but she jerked away as if stung, still draped over my father. “The sun will rise soon.” I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand. “We have to purify him.”

She stumbled to her feet, hair veiling her eyes. “No. I won’t.” Her hands fluttered in the air. “I can’t.”

She slammed the door behind her, followed by a surly thump on our ceiling from the Syrian neighbors above. Raucous laughter from a nearby taverna floated to our apartment, the high trill of a woman and throaty baritone of the man who had likely paid for her services for the night. I stared at the shaft of silvery light that had swallowed my
mother, torn between the urge to follow her or stay with my father’s body.

“What should we do?” Comito wiped her puffy eyes. She was older than me by two years but looked far younger in the moonlight. Anastasia sucked her thumb and reached out to touch our father’s cheek with her little hand. It was more than I could bear.

“Go. Gather flowers.”

“It’s dark out.” Comito hated the dark—she still liked to fall asleep with an olive oil lamp burning, although she claimed it was for Anastasia.

I pressed a frayed basket to her hand as Anastasia whimpered. “The lion will eat us if we go outside,” she said, her eyes big as plums.

I would have laughed—my father had been telling Anastasia myths from the Golden Age, most recently acting out the story of the Nemean Lion falling from the full moon—but instead I blinked hard and tweaked her nose. “Silly goose, Heracles slew the lion. You’ll be perfectly safe.” I bent down to whisper in her ear. “And you’re much scarier than any lion when you growl.”

She bared her teeth and made claws with her hands, her little mouth opening in an adorable roar. I swallowed hard and dropped a kiss on her head. “Help Comito pick a pretty posy. And find Uncle Asterius.” My voice quavered as I spoke to Comito. “He needs to bring a priest.”

They left and I was alone. I shouldn’t have been alone—this was my mother’s job. I didn’t know how to prepare a body, how to purify my father so he could pass to the afterlife. But there was no one else.

My hands trembled as I struck the flame for our oil lamp and rummaged through our lone trunk, past my father’s ivory backgammon set with its missing piece and the worn codex of Homer’s
Song of Ilium
. I tossed out Mother’s saffron wedding veil before I finally found what I was looking for—a single bottle of olive oil pressed from our own trees in Cyprus. I tried not to cry but had to set the bottle down to
wipe the stream of snot and tears from my face. Once started, I couldn’t seem to stop.

I didn’t hear my mother return until she gathered me into her arms, the hot smell of wine on her breath as she pressed her lips to my forehead. Together we readied my father—she washed his body and redressed him in his green tunica, and my uneven stitches sewed him into his brown cloak until only his face and the splayed toes of his feet showed, the better to allow the angels to examine him and determine his fitness for paradise. He looked asleep, and I prayed that he might sit up and roar with laughter because we’d fallen for another of his jokes. Yet God was deaf to my prayers.

Myrrh choked the air and the sun had almost heaved itself over the horizon when Comito arrived with a priest and Uncle Asterius, Anastasia asleep in his arms with her thumb tucked in her mouth. He wasn’t really our uncle, but our father’s boss. As leader of the Green faction, he was also one of Constantinople’s most powerful politicians. He draped an arm around my mother. “You have my deepest condolences, Zenobia.” He crooned something in her ear that made her blanch white, but then she looked at us and gave a terse nod.

Uncle Asterius swept me into a hug that smelled of the lavender used to sweeten his linen. “Poor child,” he said. “Everything is going to be all right.”

Even then, I knew that to be a lie.

The funeral began in the thin morning light as Uncle Asterius’ bleary-eyed slaves hefted the greenwood coffin onto their shoulders, my father’s circus whip and pitchfork nestled beside him. Yawning shopkeepers crossed themselves as we made our way to the cedar-lined path that led to the cemetery outside the Gate of Charisios. The air stunk like rotting fish, compliments of the nearby
garos
factories, forced outside the city walls with their vats of fermenting fish sauce. The flowers my sisters had picked on the banks of the Lycus River—daisies, blue crocuses, violets, and scraggly yellow poppies—had
already begun to wilt over the sides of the box, and the calm hymns of the lone priest battled with the mournful dirges sung by a professional mourner paid for by Uncle Asterius. We recited a truncated version of the Divine Liturgy and each kissed the rough wooden cross the priest held over the coffin before accepting a square of dry bread and a sip of
phouska
, the watery, sour wine only the poor would drink. My mother’s hands trembled violently as she struggled to cut a lock of my father’s hair, and the tears ran unchecked down her cheeks. I took the knife from her.

I stared at the blade and ran my thumb down its edge, transfixed by the pearl of blood that dropped onto my father’s rough brown shroud. One swift cut and I could join him, free myself from grief’s jagged teeth.

Two dark eyes stopped me. Anastasia wiped her nose on her sleeve and took my hand in her little one, kissing the tip of my thumb above the blood. “You hurt yourself, Dora. Are you going to die, too?”

I shook my head, the words tangled in my throat. It would be cowardly to abandon my family. I had many faults—Comito was always quick to point out my temper and snitch on me when I lied—but I wasn’t a coward. Family was all we had.

I managed to cut a lock of my father’s dark hair, identical to my own, and folded it into my palm, mingling my blood with the black strands. My mother fell to her knees and refused to rise long after the slaves tucked him into the red earth. We were alone in Constantinople—no money squirreled away under a pallet and no way to provide for ourselves.

I’d have promised God anything then to have our old lives back. Unfortunately, our new lives were just beginning.

.   .   .

The food in our cupboard finally ran out a week later. I’d picked the weevils from our bag of barley flour—it was still a quarter full and we were entitled to a free bread ration at one of the city’s public bakeries,
but Anastasia’s stomach growled so I could hear it across the room and she cried for milk, now as much a luxury as pearls. I went to beg from one of our neighbors, an elderly widow who kept a brown and white nanny goat on the third floor.

“Your mam should go to the patriarchate,” the woman said as she took the olive wood cup from my hand. “They’ll give her bread tokens and some dried food, usually apricots. Sometimes they have blankets. Medicine, too.” The warm milk squirted into the cup, and my stomach rumbled. “’Tisn’t much, but it’s something.”

I couldn’t tell the old woman that my mother’s sometime habit of overindulging in her wine was now the norm and that the sickly sweet smell of poppy juice had become her new perfume. Yesterday I’d come home to find Anastasia crumpled on the floor, her face red as a radish with tears cutting swaths down her dirty cheeks. The poor thing had soiled herself while my mother lay on her pallet, arm flung over her face so I feared she was dead until I felt the dull throb of blood in her neck. I cursed her for abandoning us when we needed her most. I cursed the world; I cursed God.

I would have to get the food myself.

It took me half the afternoon to find the church, only to be told by the priest that my mother had to claim the monthly stipend allowed by the Widow’s Battalion. That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

I wove my way down the wide cobbles of the
Mese
—Middle Street—toward the main market, but I was forced to wait as a gilded sedan carried by eight bearded Lombard slaves lumbered down the street. The outline of a woman shone through delicate silk curtains—the
kyria
of some grand villa from the look of her, probably married to a senator and richer than God. I wanted to do more than see her—I wanted to
be
her. That little daydream abruptly ended as one of her slaves stomped a puddle of horse piss and who knew what else, splashing my sandals and tunica with filth.

Time to pull my head from the sky. We needed food.

At least a dozen languages swarmed around me as I entered the chaos of the food market—mostly Greek but a smattering of Latin in addition to what sounded like Coptic, Armenian, and possibly Syriac. A man wearing a string of cold sausages around his neck passed me, a pot of
garos
in his hand as he dipped and ate the meats, licking his greasy fingers. Under a rickety wooden stall two pigeons tussled over a bruised cabbage leaf, one I was tempted to swipe from them. My eyes roved over wheels of cheese wrapped in bristly pig skins, rainbows of spices in brown baskets, and crates of gossiping chickens to linger on a wooden cart with a charcoal brazier manned by a merchant with sweat dripping down his bare—and rather hairy—chest. Strips of lamb sizzled on the coals, and there was even a suckling pig roasting, probably preordered for some senator’s feast after the chariot races tonight. My stomach rumbled, but I couldn’t very well hide dripping hot meats down the front of my tunica.

My heart hammered up my spine. I’d never stolen anything in my life; I had never needed to. Theft was a sin, but I hoped God might look the other way if I stole our dinner this once. After all, it was his fault we were in this predicament.

The
kopton
stall beckoned, the flaky pastries drizzled with honey and almonds making my stomach groan with a vengeance, but I settled on a cart of plump
boukellaton
watched by a man with heavy eyes. The bread was sprinkled with sesame seeds and golden brown, not the cheap kind mixed with ash we were sometimes forced to buy. Anastasia liked the ring shapes—they made excellent bracelets—and bread was more practical to lift than most everything else.

I pretended to browse through a pile of apricots, sniffed one, and set it down. The
boukellaton
vendor was a slave with thick, dimpled arms dusted with flour. A woman dressed in a plain white tunica and accessorized by half a dozen children caught his attention as she swatted a boy out of her way and motioned to a small mountain of
barley loaves piled on the ground. The slave turned his back to me. Sometimes God did work miracles.

I swiped two loaves and ran as if the cobbles were on fire. My heart pounded in my ears as I clutched the precious bread. I had done it.

The fabric at my shoulder tore as someone whipped me around so fast the loaves tumbled from my hands.

“I don’t suppose you forgot to pay for those?” The slave towered over me—eyes wide-awake now—as his lips curled back in a sneer of perfectly straight teeth. His face was a map of pockmarked old scars and white flakes sprinkled his greasy hair.