It was a generous offer, but I doubted it came from the goodness of his heart. I wouldn’t be taken advantage of again. “What’s in it for you?”
He started at the venom in my tone. “There’s room for an extra hand keeping up the church.”
I searched for any trace of hidden malice, but his eyes were warm. I supposed if I discovered any deceit on his part, I could always leave later. “I’d be a regular Saint Mary the Egyptian.” She, too, had been a prostitute but became an ascetic on the banks of the River Jordan, living off the wilderness until she died and was buried by a lion. I gave a wry smile. “But I have no calling to take on an order.”
“I don’t expect you to become an ascetic.” He returned the smile. “Or be buried by a lion.” He gestured me toward the sunshine but stopped short of the door. “One more thing, Theodora, to put my mind at ease. Do you believe in the single or dual nature of Christ?”
The way he asked it made me wonder if my new room and position might hinge on my answer. “I’ve been a bit busy these past few years, Father. I truly haven’t given the topic much thought.”
“Well.” He smiled so wide the wrinkles around his lips turned to deep crevasses. “Now you’ll have plenty of time to do just that.”
…
I stayed on with Severus as he proposed, donning an itchy black wool tunica and twisting my hair into a dark knot under an equally scratchy scarf. My hands bled with work and my knees callused over, but Severus’ church was the cleanest in Egypt.
Once a week, usually on Saturday evenings, Severus lectured in convents and monasteries, and the occasional lavish villa of Alexandria’s elite. His renown as the world’s premier Monophysite theologian had only increased following his banishment from Antioch. Whereas once I might have followed him in the hopes of meeting some wealthy patron, now I tagged along only to fill my mind.
Severus was a patient teacher, allowing me to ask questions after each lecture and praising my quick thinking. We talked of everything—the lives of saints, the Holy Trinity, and Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. Sometimes our conversations strayed to the Empire’s history, the stories of the old gods, and times of conquest. It seemed there wasn’t anything Severus didn’t know. I still wasn’t sure if I believed as he did regarding God’s true form, but I knew one thing: It was a miracle I’d found Severus when I did.
“You seem happier these days, Theodora,” he said to me one rainy evening as we returned from a lecture, jumping from cobbles to curb to avoid the sluice of winter rainwater rushing down the street. “More content.”
“I suppose I am.” It was easy to be content with a warm bed and full belly, not to mention the lack of the constant pressure to please and keep a man.
“Good,” Severus said. “God helps the helpless. He will happily lift your burdens, but only if you let him.”
I’d have been happy to gift God with many of my burdens over the years if only he’d been there to take them. Yet it seemed I felt lighter with every day I stayed at the convent, more confident that I could do more than just survive in this life.
“I hope God has strong shoulders,” I said.
“He does indeed.” Severus chuckled, steering me under an awning to avoid the worst of the rain. “He does indeed.”
Once, in my fifth month of pregnancy, I accompanied him for an afternoon visit to the anchorite hermits in the desert outside the city, praying with them while Severus granted the Sacrament. These ragged men and women lived off beetles and roots, sleeping in pagan tombs under blankets of sand, but their eyes blazed with the fervor of their worship. I wished I could be like them, but no matter how I searched, my heart never lit with the fire of God’s divine love. I still felt abandoned by Christ, but along with a deeper understanding of what it meant to be a true Christian—and not just go through the motions as I had my whole life—I discovered a quiet affinity for Mary as my belly grew. I could understand the Virgin’s sacrifice and motherhood more than a distant God who had ignored me most of my life. Instead of praying to Jesus as Severus suggested, I directed my prayers to Mary and felt a sort of peace fill me as I let out my tunica again and again. Yet the time after my lying-in stretched like a dark abyss when Severus might dispose of me, satisfied that he had done his duty to prevent me from destroying my child.
One late morning I felt a familiar pang as I’d swung my legs from under my hippo’s belly after breaking my fast in the refectory.
“I wanted to join the sisters for prayers in a few minutes,” I told the nun in the infirmary, a shriveled old woman ancient enough to have heard Jesus’ sermon on the rock. The fine spring day was filled with birdsong and the buzz of the honeybees kept by the nuns. A good day for a birth, but I craved the quiet calm of settling into prayers with the sisters, the image of the Virgin smiling down on us. One never knew whether a birth would bring joy or sorrow—or death. “The pains are fast, but I’ll be back as soon as I finish.”
The nun gestured to a mattress, clean, but slumped in the middle after years of bearing the sick and dying. “I’m due for my afternoon nap. Let me check you now.”
I supposed when I was her age I wouldn’t let something as trivial as a child being born interrupt my nap either. I lay on my back and stared at the pile of woolen bandages I’d helped her cut a few days ago while she probed between my legs.
She chuckled and wiped her hands on a mappa. “The babe has a lovely head of thick dark hair.”
“Excuse me?”
She pushed me down, her tongue pursed between gums toothless as a newborn. “A few minutes longer and you’d have dropped the poor mite on its head.”
This time my child wasn’t born in the filth of an alley among trampled fish heads and rotten vegetables, but in the warm cell of a Monophysite convent, caught by the scrubbed hands of a wimpled sister. I still screamed and begged God to let me die.
The old nun laid the squalling bundle of blood and wrinkled flesh on my deflated stomach. “Your son, Theodora. A perfect gift from God.”
Ten tiny fingers with ten ragged fingernails and a head with a troubling conical shape, topped by a spike of black hair still tangled with vernix. He was a gift from God.
And he was all mine.
…
Severus came to see me the last day of my lying-in. I expected him to hover near the door and mumble his congratulations, but instead he plucked my son from his basket and tucked him to his chest.
“A sturdy lad,” Severus said. “What have you decided to call him?” He gave a wide grin. “I don’t suppose you considered Severus?”
I chuckled. “Too late, my friend. One of the sisters already suggested John.”
“A sturdy name, too.” Severus’ eyes softened as John gave a wide yawn, showing off his pink gums. Severus patted my son on the back, but he didn’t look at me. “And has his mother decided what she’s to do now?”
I’d known this moment would come, but it still caught me off guard.
“I’ll probably go to the Blues here in Alexandria, see if their network can help me get back to Constantinople.” The Lord only knew what they would expect me to do for such a favor.
“I see.” Severus tickled John’s palm until my son’s tiny fingers closed around Severus’ thumb. “I thought you might stay here.”
“With you?”
His eyes flicked to mine. “With the church.”
I felt the reprimand. Before I’d given birth, I’d asked Severus why he’d never married.
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m just curious,” I had said. “I can’t fathom why a man like you—talented, easy on the eyes, and too smart for his own good—doesn’t have a plump wife and a house packed with children.”
“Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t do whatever it is you do with men,” he said, opening his codex of the Gospels.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He studied me, then sighed. “No, you probably don�
�t. And that makes you even more dangerous.” He caressed the codex when he closed it. “God has given you many gifts, Theodora, gifts that would make any man lucky to call you his wife. But”—he smiled—“I am too old for you. And I decided long ago never to marry. The church decreed a man of my rank must cast off his wife if he seeks to serve the Lord. I couldn’t do that to any woman I loved.”
“You are a noble man, Severus.”
He smiled, sadly. “A man will give up much for love.”
I thought of those words as I watched Severus with my son now. It seemed to me a woman would do much for love, too, most especially for her children. I thought of Mary, of her sacrifice as she watched Jesus on the cross. “I can’t stay in Alexandria,” I said. “I need to get back to Constantinople. To my daughter.”
“Of course you do.” Severus extracted his finger and ran his palm over John’s spiky tuft of hair. “But I’ve seen great growth in you since you came, Theodora. You’re no longer the frightened girl who showed up at my altar. And I have a feeling the young woman you’ve become would continue to flourish if you stayed at the convent a while longer. The invitation remains if you’d like to stay.”
I reached out and squeezed his fingers—the first time I’d ever touched him. “Thank you. You’re a good man, Severus of Pisidia.”
His hand lingered under mine. “A selfish man, actually. I don’t want to have to scrub the floors of the basilica myself.” He made the sign of the cross over John and turned to go.
“Severus—”
“Yes?”
“I’d like to be baptized with John, this time with the Monophysite prayer. Could you arrange that?”
His eyes smiled. “It would be an honor.”
…
The waters were cool and salty as Severus tipped me back into the baptismal pool. There was a moment of dark tranquility, silent as a womb before strong hands pulled me back into the air.
“Holy God,
Holy and mighty,
Holy and immortal,
Christ crucified for us.”
A mosaic of Mary looked down on me as I chanted the Monophysite prayer with Severus, then watched as he dipped John into the same waters. My red-faced son howled as if someone had dropped him. Just as Tasia had. She’d be two now.
Alexandria had given me a fresh start, purifying and healing me. Never again would I sell myself. I would find another way to survive—to live—for my children. And for myself.
Chapter 14
THIRD YEAR OF THE REIGN OF EMPEROR JUSTIN
“Bird! Bird!” John squirmed to point at the gulls that screamed overhead, giggling as one swooped in front of our faces. I smoothed his hair, but it stubbornly stuck up in a sort of rhinoceros horn at the front of his head. Almost two years old now, he was big enough to walk, but I didn’t want him getting trampled on the docks despite the ache in my shoulders from carrying him in his linen sling all morning.
“How long to Antioch?” Severus stood beside me in his black homespun, my woolen bag a lumpy brown puddle at his feet. This time I journeyed with a wooden rabbit Severus had carved for John when he was teething, a spare tunica for each of us, and a precious parchment copy of the Gospels that Severus had given me on my last name day. I was eighteen.
“A month, maybe more.”
“Don’t let the Blues harass you into doing anything you don’t wish to,” Severus said. He took something from his pocket and slipped it over my head.
I gasped at the heavy silver cross inlaid with amber, strung on a gold chain thin as a strand of hair. A mosquito was frozen in the center of the ancient stone.
“This must have cost a fortune.” I moved to take it off, but Severus covered my fingers with his age-spotted hands.
“Turn it over.”
Tiny words were etched into the back of the silver. “Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.”
“Proverbs 3:3.” Severus pushed the black veil back from my shoulders, the movement of a proud father. “So you don’t forget what’s important.”
I smiled through my tears even as he turned and stared at the ship he’d arranged to take me as far as Antioch. From there I would connect with the Blues to manage the rest of the way to Constantinople, although I still wasn’t sure how I’d pay my way. My letters to Mother and Tasia had gone unanswered, as had two I’d sent to Antonina. I had been gone for a year before John was born, and then almost two more years in Alexandria. There had been no word from anyone since I’d left the Queen of Cities three years ago. I told myself they might have moved, but I feared what I might find upon my return.
Severus glanced at me, his lips in a hard line. “Write to me as soon as you’re settled.”
“Are you worried about me, Severus?” I tried to make my tone light, but he wasn’t the only one who was worried. I was about to be alone as I’d never been before, with my son to care for.
“I’m not worried at all,” Severus said. “Alexandria has made you strong. It’s time for you to use that strength.” It wasn’t only the city that had tempered me. Severus had restored my faith in all that was good in the world. I owed him my life, maybe more.
“I’ll write so often you’ll soon hide from the post,” I promised.
“Never.” His eyes shone in the sun as he kissed his fingers and pressed them to John’s forehead, so close I smelled the rosemary and lemon on his homespun. “May God keep you both.”
The last of the freight had been loaded—we traveled not with fish this time, but with dusty crates of Egyptian grain—and the captain strummed his fingers on his beefy arm.
“Good-bye, John.” Severus kissed the top of my son’s head.
“Bye-bye.” John waved, backward, still watching the gulls.
“Until we meet again, Severus.” I kissed both his cheeks. “I love you.”
His eyes widened at my words, and then he smiled. “As I do you, Theodora.”
We stood on deck until Severus’ form disappeared. Only then did the tears slip down my cheeks.
…
John snored softly in my arms as we jostled our way to Antioch’s theater. I had felt like a leaf cast about in a storm since we’d left Alexandria, plagued by dreams of a great demon who would meet me in Constantinople, and I wondered every day at the possible folly of my decision. I desperately missed Severus and the security of my little cell in the convent.
I counted fifteen churches in Antioch and at least thirty tavernas, some gleaming with new façades and others a hodgepodge of ancient walls and fresh mortar. We passed the slave market with its river of naked bodies of every hue, plus two small theaters and a rowdy cockfight with the carcasses of several bloodied birds already strewn about the cobbles. Suddenly, the earth shuddered under my feet. People froze like ants in a summer shadow; then the ground stilled, and they continued their gossip and haggling as if nothing had happened. The crumpled skeletons of several buildings lay where the last quake had knocked them, their broken pillars like exposed ribs. A group of youths sat atop the rubble of an old church, tossing a skin of wine between them. Antioch was the hedonistic capital of the world, so often shaken by earthquakes that its citizens had learned to live for the moment and repent later. It wouldn’t do for me to stay here long.
I expected to be shown to the manager upon entering the pillared building of the Blues’ administration, but the slave ushered me into a room lined with codices and a few crumbling scrolls, the dusty scent the same as the cargo hold we’d just left. A woman sat with her back to me, her hair hidden under a blue scarf. The slave cleared his throat, and the scratching of her stylus stopped.
“An actress from Alexandria, kyria.”
John chose that moment to lift his head, yawn, and grab one of the bronze hoops at my ear. It went straight into his mouth.
“Theodora?” The woman had turned around and set down her stylus. “Your customers would never recognize you in that costume.”
; I almost dropped my son.
I hadn’t seen Macedonia since the night of the Medusa performance when I’d burst onstage for the first time. I wore my black wool tunica today, worthy of a postulant nun. Macedonia, however, shone like a peacock in mating season—a peacock with a taste for gold. Gold discs hung from her ears, knobs of the metal gleamed from her thumbs, and there were even gold ribbons threaded atop her veil. “What are you doing here?” I said.
She chuckled. “I might ask you the same thing.”
“We stopped on our way to Constantinople.”
“I see you’ve been busy.” She nodded at John. “Traveling with the boy’s father?”
She was nothing if not straightforward. “No,” I said. “Just the two of us.”
“Children are a rather avoidable ailment, you know.” Macedonia made a face at John that he found hilarious. “You’ve been gone from the capital for some time now.”
“Almost three years. When did you leave?”
Macedonia gestured to a wooden stool as the slave reappeared with two glasses of watered wine and an amphora carved with frolicking satyrs. She smoothed the hair at her temples—still copper, but I thought I detected traces of henna there. “Almost a year ago. Whoring only lasts until our youth fades,” she said. “I had to move on while I still had the chance.”
It was hard to picture Macedonia, one of the most successful scenicae in Constantinople, scrambling for survival. She sipped her wine. “I made Justinian an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
“Justinian?” I recalled the man with the dark curls at Justin’s coronation. I could easily picture Macedonia on his arm.
“He practically runs the Empire for his uncle,” she said.
I shifted John to my other knee. “So, he became your patron?”
“In a manner of sorts. Justinian is an unusual man with unusual tastes.” She looked up from the brim of her glass, took a long sip, and smiled. “I’m his spy.”
I laughed. “No, really.”
“It’s the truth. I dance, too, to keep up pretenses. And then I report every filched coin, every rumor of misappropriated taxes to Justinian. Men like to talk after a romp between the sheets or a few too many drinks. I still prefer to listen.” She gave me an odd look. “Speaking of—I heard about Hecebolus. It’s unfortunate that things didn’t work out between you two.”
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