The Secret History: A Novel of Empress Theodora (3 page)

“They’re for my mother and sisters,” I said, scrambling to pick up the bread. I wasn’t fast enough—one golden ring was trampled under the crowd’s feet and the other was snatched by a boy with nimbler fingers than mine. “My father died.”

“I don’t care if your whole family keeled over of the plague.” He grabbed a handful of my hair and dragged me back toward his booth. I yelped and people stopped to stare, but they must have decided a tussle between a slave and a dirty pleb girl wasn’t worth their time.

The man hauled me back to his stall and motioned to the vendor next to him. “Caught her,” he said.

“Pretty little wench,” the other man said. He gave a phlegmy cough as he stirred a giant pot of boiled cabbage. “Young though.”

I tipped my chin, ready to argue that I’d seen thirteen years, but the slave’s eyes roved over me. I’d add lying to my list of sins. “I’ve had eleven summers.”

“Old enough to learn the ways of the world,” the bread vendor said. He looked around for something but then unfastened the belt on his tunica. I struggled to get away, but he used the belt to tie my wrists tight behind me and looped the leather through one of the wheels on his cart. “Can’t have you running away before I figure out what your punishment will be, now, can I?”

“My mother and sisters are waiting for me.”

“Shut up,” the slave said. “Females shouldn’t speak unless spoken to.”

I tried to kick him, but he stomped on my ankle. I decided to do as I was told for once.

It took the better part of an hour for the slave to sell the rest of his master’s bread. The sky darkened around puffs of pink clouds, and a rainbow of glass lanterns lit the market as the Hippodrome beckoned the crowd like a pretty young whore on the docks. Finally the slave blew the crumbs from his cart and scowled as he untied me. He beckoned to his fat friend as he yanked me to my feet. “Annius, watch the cart for a minute.”

“A minute’s probably all you’ll need.” Annius laughed and waggled his bushy eyebrows at me.

I hadn’t noticed the little alley behind the soup stall until the bread slave pushed me into its blackness, one of the spaces in the city cursed with permanent darkness. He fumbled with something as a rat scurried over my foot. I stepped back, thinking to run, but was greeted by a cold stone wall. The slave grabbed me by my hair. “You owe me, girl.”

He was naked from the waist down, the thong that held his undergarments in place unstrapped beneath his
paludamentum
. I tried to shove him away, but he pulled my tunica with his free hand. Some of my hair came loose as I wrenched my head to the side and bit his hand, feeling the skin separate between my teeth and tasting the copper tang of his blood. He yowled and punched me to the ground, filling my skull with an explosion of white, followed by an eclipse of black as my tunica was shoved up around my waist. Something hard prodded between my legs.

I wrestled one hand free and shoved my fingers as far as I could down my throat. There wasn’t much in my stomach, but what there was came up all over him.

“By the dog!” He loosened his hold enough that I managed to twist
away. I didn’t look back but ran as fast as my legs could carry me. “You filthy, scabby slut!”

“Hang yourself on the cross!” I tore past the soup stall and kept running, dodging people as they shouted and shook their fists at me, a froth of laughter and sobs bubbling from my throat.

I found my way home, stopping only to wash myself in a public fountain, its water spewing from the mouth of a giant scowling fish. Two drunks whistled as I peeled my tunica from my skin to wash the vomit from my chest, but I focused on the cool clean water as it washed away the evidence of my stupidity. Tonight couldn’t get any worse.

I was wrong, of course.

All hope of cajoling my mother from bed evaporated when I walked in the door. She was still on her pallet, but no longer surrounded by wine fumes or passed out in a fog of poppy juice. Instead, she was very much awake, legs wrapped tight around a naked man as he pounded into her, her nails digging into the bare flesh of his hairy back. I slammed the door and slid down the wall of our building, hiding my face in my knees. I had left quickly, but not so fast as to miss my mother’s sharp glance or see the man, a complete stranger to me.

I stared at the dust, fingers plunged as far into my ears as I could make them go, yet not far enough to muffle all the sounds I didn’t wish to hear. I would have left, but I didn’t want my sisters to come home and stumble into what I’d just witnessed. The man emerged some time later, wiped his head, shiny and speckled like a plover’s egg, and straightened his tunica. He was startled to see me. “You must be Theodora. I am Vitus.”

As if that explained everything.

I wanted life to return to the way it was a month ago, when the ground under my feet had been solid. But time was not so obliging.

Vitus gave me an indecipherable look when I didn’t speak, then turned and shuffled off, his step a little too jaunty for my liking.

“Theodora, come here.”

My mother was dressed in her old tunica, staring at my father’s scratched backgammon game on the table, her eyes empty pools of darkness. I stepped inside as she slammed the game to the floor, splintering the wood and scattering the ivory pieces like an army of drunken ants. One rolled to my toe and came to a stop. I almost stormed back out the door, but my fury got the better of me.

“How could you? Father would die another death if he could see you now.”

She leveled a glare at me that could have frozen the fires of Gehenna. “Do you think I wanted to sleep with that filthy ox?”

“It certainly looked as if you were enjoying it.”

She lunged from the table, her arm raised to slap me. I steeled myself for the blow, but her hand fell back to her side. “Of course that’s how it looked. I have to keep a roof over our heads.” She swallowed hard and walked back to the table, knocked the wax seal off an amphora of wine, and guzzled what little was left in it. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she gave a dry chuckle. “Sometimes things don’t work out quite the way you planned.” She waved me forward and enveloped me in a hug I had to force myself not to pull away from. Her skin reeked of that filthy man. “Vitus is the new bear keeper for the Greens.”

My father’s job.

“So you’re whoring for him?”

“In a manner of sorts. I married him.”

The ground caught me as my knees buckled. It was then that I noticed the clump of saffron next to my mother’s pallet. Her wedding veil.

“You’d marry him before the grass has a chance to grow on Father’s grave? A man you don’t even know?”

“This house belongs to Vitus now. I loved your father. Fiercely. But I can marry Vitus and keep our home and the grain dole, or I can refuse and we starve on the streets. Asterius was very clear about that the
night your father died. Fortunately, Vitus was easy to persuade.” Of course he was—my mother was at least half his age. “We women are the pawns of men, Theodora. The sooner you learn that, the better.”

The ground beneath my feet wouldn’t hold steady today. I wanted to cry and scream at the same time. “There has to be some other way—”

“There isn’t.” She slammed the terra-cotta jug on the table. “I’m too old for the tavernas, so unless you and Comito plan to take up a room—”

“Where is Comito?” I needed to steer the conversation to safer waters.

My mother’s hand flitted in the air. “I can’t be bothered to keep track of your sister. Anastasia is upstairs with the Syrians.” She caressed my cheek. “I know this is hard, but your father would understand. We have to survive.”

She passed me the remnants of their wedding meal. No boiled greens with
garos
sauce,
sphoungata
of eggs and cheese, or honey cakes, but a thick slice of crusty brown bread to symbolize their future prosperity. It was stale.

The bald man—Vitus—came home after I’d picked up Anastasia, and we’d swept up the backgammon set and dropped it in the trash heap behind our building. Vitus stunk of a taverna, although my mother’s breath smelled more of wine than his. My new father’s chin was soft, and one black hair curled around the outside of his nostril like a spider’s leg. This man likely counted today a blessing. I still thought it a curse.

“I brought a gift for you and your sisters,” he said. “It’s not much, but I thought you might enjoy the treat.” He handed me a dried mallow leaf envelope stuffed with almonds, spiced with garlic and pepper. My stomach growled.

I handed the gift to Anastasia. She shoveled several of the nuts into her mouth like a starving squirrel. Perhaps this man wasn’t the devil, only one of his minions. “Thank you.”

I covered my ears that night as Vitus grunted like a rutting pig on my mother’s pallet. He took so long, I escaped with Anastasia outside to sleep in front of our door next to the half-full urn of urine for the fullers to collect in the morning. The air was still warm, and it was certainly more tolerable outside than in. Comito traipsed home in the middle of the night, smelling like cheap rose water and something else I couldn’t place.

“Holy Mother of God,” she said. “I almost stepped on you—I might have broken my neck.”

“What a pity,” I said, rolling over.

“What are you doing out here? It’s not that hot.” She moved to open the door, but her face contorted as she heard what I’d been trying to avoid. “Did I miss something?”

She had no idea.

.   .   .

Comito continued to disappear to God only knew where, and I learned to follow suit, spending my afternoons roaming the markets along the
Mese
and imagining I had the coins to buy gems from Asia, Persian silks and spices, and Baltic amber. More in our price range were the jars of leeches and senna and licorice root for constipation, both of which Mother sent me to fetch for Vitus. I spent countless hours in the engravers’ market, curled up amongst its ever-present cats while I read Ovid and tried to make out Ptolemy’s theories on the workings of the universe until my head hurt and the merchants realized I had no money and chased me away.

I watched men stop to stare at Comito as she dodged her way around the stalls. God had gifted my sister with my mother’s thick mane of golden hair and blue eyes rimmed with lashes long as a camel’s. Unfortunately, she had the brains of a rabbit—a not very intelligent rabbit.

“Theodora!” She grabbed my arm, her cheeks flushed. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you—Uncle Asterius turned us out.”

“What?”

“He fired Vitus and hired a new Master of Bears. I don’t know why.”

I grabbed Comito’s hand and pushed our way through the streets toward the Hippodrome and our building. A melon vendor shouted curses to make a whore blush as I shoved a customer with an overripe muskmelon out of my way, feeling the juice spatter my legs as the fruit crashed to the cobbles.

Comito was right. Our scant belongings had already been dumped outside our door by the time we got there. I opened my mouth to ask my mother what had happened, but two angry voices coming from the alley next to the Boar’s Eye stopped me.

“Make sure I never see you again if you value your life.”

“I won that job—you can’t fire me!”

I crept closer to see Asterius and Vitus practically nose to nose, my stepfather’s face red as a freshly stewed beet. Asterius pushed Vitus back with a finger on his chest. “You should have stayed content shoveling manure in the stables, but you’ve used this opportunity to spout that Monophysite drivel denying Christ’s humanity to anyone who will listen. Everyone knows religion is bad for business.”

“I’ll report you to the consul.”

Asterius gave a fearsome grin. “The consul and I are both of the opinion that Monophysites are heretics better suited to the fires of Gehenna than the sacred sands of the Hippodrome.”

Vitus remained rooted to the spot, clenching and unclenching his fists. Then he stormed off in the opposite direction, his worn leather boots kicking up little puffs of dust. I wished him good riddance, except that without him we were back where we started.

“Uncle Asterius—” I shrugged my mother’s hand off my shoulder and stepped from the shadows. “Our house—”

He whirled on me. “Belongs to the Greens. Find someone else to take up your charity case.”

“You can’t do that. We’re not citizens yet. We won’t even qualify for the grain ration without an address in the city!”

He kept walking. I kicked a crate of rotting fish heads and stubbed my toe. Hard.

I hobbled back to my family and hoisted Anastasia onto my hip—she was as heavy as a bag of turnips as she snuggled into my neck, her breath warm on my skin. “I’m hungry,” she whimpered.

I looked at my mother crouched on the ground and Anastasia with her oily ringlets and thick tears welled in her eyes. Comito bit her lip, a sure sign she was about to turn on the waterworks.

I forced a smile for Anastasia, rubbing her nose with mine. “You’re always hungry, silly goose.”

I was at an utter loss. We had nothing to sell, no skills.

Vitus rejoined us. As a Monophysite, he was no better than a pagan. But he was all we had. “I’ll take care of us.” He sounded as sure of himself as the rest of us felt.

“How?” I asked.

“Don’t be pert, girl. One of the stables will hire me. We’ll just have to wait until morning.”

My mother’s lips were tight. “And where do we sleep tonight?”

No one answered.

“The Greens’ stables,” I said.

“You’ve lost your mind, girl,” Vitus said. “If Asterius found us—”

“He won’t.” I stared him down, hands on my hips. I wished I were a little taller so I didn’t have to look up his nose. “There are no games tonight, right?”

“No.”

“Then he won’t be there. And it’s better than the public latrinas.”

No one could argue with that.

.   .   .

Vitus did not find a job that day. Or the next. Or the day after that.

I mustered the courage to pinch a loaf of twice-baked barley bread
one day—this time from a stall run by a woman—and Comito magically produced a ring of garlic sausages after one of her disappearances, but it wasn’t enough. Mother grew ill-tempered when the wine ran out, and Anastasia whimpered through the days and even into her sleep. The sixth day she fell silent, a frightening lethargy settling into her limbs. Not even her one-eyed doll or a round of the Kingdoms game with her as Empress and Comito and me as her maids could rouse her. Something had to be done.