The Secret History: A Novel of Empress Theodora (4 page)

The four of us sat in the shade of the triumphal arch in the Forum of Theodosius, listening to the racket of squeals and men yelling at the nearby swine market. Vitus had already pawned everything we owned, even our sandals and my mother’s saffron veil, and had gone back to the Blues to beg for a position, but none of us thought he’d return with good news. My mother’s voice was scarcely a whisper, yet the sound of it made me jump.

“A laurel crown.”

Emperors wore laurel crowns on parades through the city, but for a plebian to don the crown meant only one thing.

“No,” I said. I had nothing left in this life, but to be reduced to begging left a bitter taste in my mouth. There were always piles of beggars outside the Hippodrome before big races—mothers with laps of filthy children, Ostrogoth soldiers missing limbs, and the occasional blind old man with no family or political connections to take care of him—all wearing bedraggled laurel crowns. It was a sort of pregame entertainment to spit at the beggars instead of dropping a copper
nummi
into their open palms. And today was the first of September, the start of the New Year and the celebration of Constantine’s founding of Rome’s new Eastern capital—known in ancient times as Byzantion—almost two hundred years ago. The Hippodrome would overflow its stands.

A lifetime of begging was not what I’d envisioned for my future.

And yet…

I kissed my mother’s cheek and gave Anastasia butterfly kisses, wishing she would giggle and gift me with one of her precious smiles. Instead, she lay as lifeless as her doll. “Comito and I will take care of everything,” I said, not looking my mother in the eyes. “Meet us outside the Boar’s Eye after the races tonight.”

I’d save us or ruin us. God help us if I failed.

W
e stunk like pigs.

No money meant we hadn’t visited the public baths in more than a week, rendering us unfit for the society of even the most pungent swineherd. Comito and I scurried past a pagan shrine to Apollo, then skirted the walls of the Hippodrome near the Palace of Lausus. A eunuch in the court of Theodosius II, Lausus had owned his own miniature palace, but he had distributed much of his wealth to the poor. Too bad he’d been dead for fifty years.

The Baths of Zeuxippus were almost entirely deserted, just as I’d hoped. The majority of the city would be clustered around Constantine’s massive porphyry pillar to sing hymns to the Emperor’s gold statue, reputed to hold nails from Christ’s cross in its spiked crown, before moving to the Hippodrome for the New Year’s races before the sun set. A slave with dark stains at the armpits of his tunica stood at the entrance of the baths with the fee basket. By the dog—I hadn’t thought of that.

“Aren’t we going in?” Comito bit her bottom lip. Two men in snowy tunicas practically broke their necks to gawk at her on their way out of the gates.

“We don’t have any money.”

She grabbed my hand and pulled me around the walls. “Over here.”

We strode past the slave at the entrance and skirted the high wall to the opposite end of the complex. A sycamore tree grew close, near enough we could climb it and jump over.

Comito hitched her tunica up so I could see her ankles, a sight many men would have paid good money to see. “Are you coming?”

She shimmied up the tree and I followed, careful not to drop the bundle tucked under my arm as the rough bark scraped my palms and an angry squirrel berated us. The jump looked much smaller from the ground. I climbed out as far as I could until I was almost over the wall, clamped the top of the cloth bag between my teeth, and lowered myself down over the branch. From there I let go, landing with a resounding crash, tail first in an obliging juniper bush. Comito was already on the grass, looking as if she’d been waiting the entire time, not a golden hair out of place.

“You do this often?”

She brushed her tunica, blushing slightly at my raised eyebrows, but only turned and threaded her way through the maze of hedges.

The baths had been built upon an ancient temple of Zeus, and the colorful mosaic paths retold stories of familiar heroes from the Golden Age: Theseus wrestling the Minotaur, Heracles slaying the Hydra, and Perseus hoisting Medusa’s head over her decapitated body. Marble statues marked as Plato and Virgil stared at me from a forest of figures long since dead, but I had eyes for only one man: Julius Caesar. Comito and I had never really gone to school—we spoke Greek and Latin, and we were lucky to attend a rare lesson at a church charity school—but my mother had helped us sketch our letters in the ashes of our cooking fire and taught us to read from her old codex of the
Tale of Ilium
, pawned by Vitus a few days ago. She also told us hearth tales of our history as we were growing up, stories passed down through the years
by her mother and grandmothers. However, it was my father’s retelling of Caesar’s rise to power and his crossing the Rubicon that had been my favorite, although it inevitably sent my mother from the room and Comito to plugging her ears. I rarely got to hear the tale as Comito always begged for love stories, especially that of Cupid and Psyche. All the other myths of love ended in tragedy, perhaps cautionary tales for reality—but then, Comito had never been terribly concerned with reality.

We passed the exercise green with its dozing slaves and headed to the women’s baths. The juniper brush had scraped my thigh, and I bent to inspect the scratch. “Go on,” I said. “I’ll catch up.”

“Comito!” A young man with a mop of damp curls jogged across the green—Karas, the butcher’s son. Comito glanced in my direction and picked up her pace, ignoring him, but he caught up to her and grasped her hand. I cursed myself for being too far away to hear their conversation and hurried over as Karas kissed her fingers. She flushed prettily and tucked a curl behind his ear before giving him a playful shove.

“Hello, Theodora.” He grinned and swept a bow as he passed me.

I bumped Comito’s hip with my own as we watched him jog away. The boy
did
have nice calves. “It seems you and Karas are getting along well these days.” Realization dawned on me and my jaw fell. “You’ve been meeting him here, haven’t you?”

Comito pinched my arm so hard I gasped. “You can’t tell anyone. Promise you won’t tell a soul.”

I shook my arm free—there was sure to be a mark. “Of course I promise. You and he aren’t—” I raised my eyebrows. “You know—”

Comito elbowed me in the ribs, scarlet from her cheeks to her hairline. “That’s none of your business. I love him. We’re going to get married and have a dozen babies, live in a room above the butcher shop—”

“You’re as bad as an alley cat in heat.” I grabbed my sister’s hand
and yanked her to the women’s changing room. “And you smell just as bad.”

We hung our tunicas on the same hook and shivered our way to the
frigidarium
. Comito gasped as she stepped gingerly into the cold water, her nipples puckering as the water reached higher and higher up her body until it kissed the triangle of pale hair between her legs. Just as her blond curls were the height of fashion, Comito’s curves were supple and soft, breasts like ripe pomegranates and skin so translucent the blue web of veins showed on her hips and chest. I, on the other hand, was all brown angles, better suited to being a charioteer than a woman. I plunged into the chill, making sure to splash her perfect hair.

“Do you really think this will work?” Comito chewed a damp strand of hair with chattering teeth. I had told her of my plan, and I was shocked when she’d agreed to help. Neither of us wanted to see our sister buried next to our father.

I shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”

We stayed in the
frigidarium
until we couldn’t take the cold anymore, then ran covered in goose pimples to the large pools of the
tepidarium.
A jowly matron turned her nose up and heaved herself out of the water as we entered. We quickly drained the cup of wine she’d left behind, both making sure to avoid the thick smear of henna on the rim.

No coins to pay for oil, or a slave to scour our backs, I scraped a borrowed bronze stirgil over Comito’s skin a little harder than was necessary, but she returned the favor until my skin stung as if I’d been attacked by a nest of hornets.

We dried our hair and slipped back into our tunicas. Mine was mostly green, save the orange stain on the hem where Anastasia had dropped
garos
sauce during last year’s feast of Saint Paul. Both our necklines and armpits were stained from too much wear, but hopefully no one would notice.

“Come; you can do my hair,” Comito said.

It took two tries for me to plait my sister’s hair to her satisfaction,
but her fingers were deft as they tugged and pulled my dark hair into something presentable. She held me at arm’s length and sighed. “I don’t know how you manage to be such a heathen and still have a pretty face. It must be your eyes.” She frowned. “Today they’re hazel.”

“And tomorrow they’ll be brown,” I said. “Like manure.”

We giggled—it felt like the first time I’d laughed in ages—as another woman walked into the changing area. A Christian since my baptism, I still knew all the myths of Aphrodite, but this copper-haired woman could have beaten the goddess of love and beauty to win Paris’ golden apple. Although she was past the first flush of youth, a blush like dainty rose petals bloomed on her high cheeks in the warmth of the baths and her bronze hair brushed an impossibly tiny waist. She held her arms out, and a slave unpinned her stola—an expensive one made from crimson silk with yellow butterflies embroidered on the hem—and whisked it to its own hook before the fabric touched the ground. The smell of musk perfume hung heavy in the air.

“The consul is waiting in the steam baths,” the slave said. “He said to hurry—his wife expects him home before their guests arrive to break bread for the
krama
.”

Men and women weren’t supposed to mingle in bathhouses, but it appeared no one followed that rule any longer.

“It would do his waistline good to miss the afternoon meal.” The woman winked at me. “I think I’ll have a massage first.”

Her voice had a lilting quality, like a harp. The woman was too well dressed to be one of the common
pornai
, the crass prostitutes who worked in the brothels and tavernas. Byzantine patricians kept their wives to have children and visited
pornai
to attend to their bodily needs, but few could afford to patronize a
scenica
, the most expensive sort of courtesan. No wonder this woman’s skin shone and her silk gleamed as if it were worth a man’s monthly salary. It probably was.

I looked to Comito, but she had eyes only for the silk. My elbow in her ribs earned me a fierce glare.

“We have to go,” I said to her. “There’s much to do before the races.”

“Are you girls going to the Hippodrome tonight?” The courtesan stood completely naked—she could have put a statue of Helen of Troy to shame.

“Yes.” I didn’t meet her eyes. We weren’t going as proper spectators, but no one needed to know that, especially not this
scenica
.

“Do you support the Blues or Greens?”

The Blues and the Greens went far beyond simple chariot factions to also oversee Constantinople’s civic functions such as controlling guilds and maintaining the militia. The Blues were the party of the patricians and old landowners. Greens tended to support industry, trade, and the civil service. Comito gestured to our tunicas. “Greens.”

The woman’s nose wrinkled, but even that didn’t mar her allure. “I cheer for the Blues,” she said, “even if my patron that evening prefers the Greens.”

“We’ll see you on the opposite side then.” I linked my arm through Comito’s and hauled her out of the bathhouse to the sound of the courtesan’s silvery laughter. “Poor things,” I heard her say to her slave. “I think I scared them away.”

The sun was already sinking, and the butterflies in my stomach threatened to declare war with one another. This had to work.

For the final touch to our costumes, Comito and I lingered to decorate each other with cornflowers and lilies scrumped from the bath gardens, garlands in our hair and pinned to our shoulders, posies of violets clutched in our hands. Comito made me wear the daisies. They were pretty but smelled awful.

We were jostled into the rush of people as soon as we stepped into the street, but we managed to wait until the Hippodrome’s gates swallowed most of the crowd. A group of children sat outside the amphitheater entrance with wilted laurel wreaths on their heads and their hands outstretched. One boy displayed hands with nubs instead of
fingers, the thumbs completely missing, while a little girl only a few years older than Anastasia had her greasy hair pinned back in an elaborate twist, the better to show the ragged scars where her ears should have been. Families with too many mouths to feed often sent their children to beg, but it was more profitable if the child was mutilated first. I watched a man in an ebony litter drop a coin to a black-haired boy with holes of waxy flesh where his eyes should have been. That could be us.

“I don’t think I can do this,” Comito whispered.