Theodora by Stella Duffy

picture of her dead and bloody father and her dead and bloody sister, and then others too, bodies she did not recognise, among some she did, the first man she’d fucked for money, the last she’d taken in the night, friends of theirs from the company and total strangers she knew only as people who sometimes went to the same shops in the Mese. All dead, all bloody. The Hippodrome ground full of them, body after body, piled upon each other, benches layered with death, the smell of blood and pain and above it all, the rasping, throat-burning cries from thousands of wailing mothers, circling the City like hungry gulls.
    Washed and dressed, her face unpainted, she left her own little flat and turned out into the street. To the left was her mother’s apartment, where she knew the older woman would be having a hard day, Theodora’s daughter Ana and the three little step-siblings didn’t understand why Hypatia kept crying, Basianus didn’t much care, just wanted them all to shut up so he could have a little peace at home, there was certainly no peace in his work. Several narrow streets away was Comito’s much more elegant home, where Theodora would be welcomed, if not by Comito who hated to miss her rehearsals, then by her sister’s new maid, who had too little to do with only Indaro to watch and was always looking for someone to look after. The last thing Theodora wanted now was to be looked after: any gesture of kindness would have her in tears again, and her face hurt too much for more tears. Her eyelids and cheeks were dry from the salt and her jaw ached from being wedged open withwailing. Beyond Comito’s elegant little apartment in the quiet back street was her real world. The crowds around the Bull Square and the Mese, Greens and Blues charging into the Hippodrome, a whole city crammed between the Theodosian Wall and the lighthouse on the far side of the Imperial Palace gardens. Actors and dancers hurrying late to rehearsal or performance, men strolling in and out of the Baths of Zeuxippus, Blue and Green youths trying to foment rebellion, recreate the riots they had so enjoyed a few years earlier, market traders screaming their great deals, builders hard at work on yet another wing of this new church or that, fishermen, sailors, soldiers, beggars, priests, nuns, whores, citizens and barbarians. It was her only world and she was sick of it.

Eight
    Two days later Theodora met Hecebolus. He was, even to a woman jaded with men, quite lovely. He was tall, with fine dark features and light eyes; his dark skin was usual for a traveller, a trader, less common in a man who was about to be given a political posting. Theodora slept with Hecebolus for pleasure. She had intended to make him pay, it just didn’t work out that way.
    ‘You’re not what I expected from a whore.’
    Theodora looked down at the man beneath her, ‘You’re not much like the average government lackey, either.’
    ‘No?’
    ‘No. And most of my tricks tend to be less …’
    ‘Good looking? Good in bed? Good?’
    He was smiling up at her, tired and comfortable after the pleasant endurance of their past two hours together.
    She laughed out loud at his arrogance and then nodded, agreeing that this man, who’d waited after her show, offered to buy her a drink, extended that offer to a good meal, and then took her back to his pleasant rooms overlooking the Golden Horn, was definitely a cut above most of the men she took to bed for money. But still, she did mean to take him for money. She stretched herself out along his body, her much smaller frame easily fitting inside his and, skin to skin, lips to mouth, whispered what she thought was a fair price, given how much they’d both enjoyed themselves.
    Hecebolus was still smiling as he sighed, wrapped one big arm tight round her shoulders and with the other across her hips held her close and said, ‘No.’
    ‘What?’ Theodora was not used to being refused her fee. It had happened once or twice, but as