The Purple Shroud: A Novel of Empress Theodora (43 page)

Armeneus nodded. ‘I’ll see to it.’

But she was already asleep and so he didn’t need to explain he hadn’t meant it would be hard to find Thomas, rather that it would be hard to bring him to the City in time, that it was obvious there was so little time.

When Theodora next woke, she sent for Esther and Leah to finish the silk cloth Sophia had been making. Told them to make sure it was dyed the deepest purple possible.

Another time she woke to sit up, bright and almost her old self, but for the cadaverous body she had become. She called for Narses, and for the first time in the twenty-seven years they had worked together, they talked openly of the time before they met. They talked about Menander, about the old days when the man who was her taskmaster had been his lover. She shared stories with Narses about her youth, her time in the Pentapolis, in the desert, stories she could never have told him before, when he might have used that information to force her agreement to this policy or that, and when Narses smiled and then roared a wicked, dirty laugh, she saw him fifty years younger, saw exactly what Menander must have seen in him.

She slept the rest of that day, and for several days after.

On the afternoon of the longest day, when the City outside was drowsy with midsummer heat, Theodora woke from what seemed to her an impossibly long sleep. She looked around at the people in her room: Justinian on one side, Comito on the other, at the foot of her bed, all kneeling, all praying, were Ana and Anastasius, Antonina and Joanina, Mariam and Macedonia. Sophia was standing behind them,
her eyes closed in the prayer-trance Theodora had taught her. Most of the women’s eyes were red from crying, and many of the men’s too. Behind them were ranged any number of chief civil servants and the highest-ranking Palace staff, many kneeling, all of them praying. Narses and Armeneus stood against the far wall at either end of a long line of quietly intoning priests. She stared at them for a moment, the room went silent, each one waiting, and then Theodora opened her mouth to speak, her dry lips cracking as she did so, her voice hoarse from lack of use, but with a smile at their shocked faces.

‘Not today … I don’t think.’

Justinian covered his face with his hands and let out a slow groan.

Theodora took his hand and whispered, ‘I’m sorry, this is impossible for you. It won’t be long, I promise, then you can move on, get on.’

Her husband stared at her, horrified and accepting, furious that she was preparing to leave him and telling him he could live on without her. Even more angry that he knew he had no choice.

‘The priest is here,’ said Justinian.

‘There are many priests here,’ Theodora said, ‘more than I’ve seen in my room since the last time Sophia-the-half-size and I …’ she stopped herself and nodded across at Narses, ‘there … didn’t say it. See how far I’ve come?’

Narses nodded back. ‘The priest Thomas, Mistress,’ he said, indicating the man beside him.

Theodora peered, her eyes cloudy from the infusions Alexander had given her. It was indeed Thomas – an older, stouter, greying version of the man who had insisted on hearing the depth of her truths more than half her life ago.

‘You should all leave us,’ Theodora said, ‘I need to speak to this priest.’

Slowly the rooms emptied, Justinian leaving last, and eventually Theodora was left alone with Thomas.

He bowed and waited for her to speak, and after a while she did so, slowly. She talked of her fears, of her anger, the losses she had endured, and the pain she was suffering now. She told him about Palace plots and her involvement in them, she told him about intrigues she’d only ever guessed at, things Justinian and Narses planned between them that she regretted – and plenty she did not. She told him about Anthemius and her love for the man who was now her adopted daughter’s husband. How she had never ceased to find him attractive and that she thought the barb of seeing him so happy with Mariam was more than enough of a punishment. She said she regretted she had not been able to do more to help Justinian bring the Church together, but that she was also pleased about her work with Jacob Baradeus, even though that work might have partly caused the failure of union.

She frowned. ‘I am a living contradiction, Thomas. A dying one.’

‘Few of us are as purely intentioned as we’d like.’

‘And my work as one who allowed beatings and imprisonment, who knew of poisonings and political murders and did not stop them, even benefited from them?’

The priest opened and closed his mouth. There was no stock answer to her admission, and none he dared give his Empress.

‘Exactly so,’ she said. ‘Still, I am proud of being my husband’s consort, I can say that.’ She was holding the emerald Virgin, turning it in her hand. ‘This stone, it was stolen from a bishop in the Pentapolis.’

‘You stole it?’

‘Yes, Severus told me I could keep it.’

‘Oh.’

‘I think it’s time to give it back to the Church.’

‘Shall I have it returned to the Pentapolis for you?’

‘No. That bishop is dead now, I hope, old bastard. Have them send it to Ravenna, there’s an artist, working on the new church, he’ll use it well.’

Theodora was sleeping again before Thomas blessed her, sleeping when Justinian came to lie beside her. She wrenched herself back from the half-comfort of sleep for a moment, to remind him of his promise to care for Sophia, to care for the future Theodora had planned for her, and then dropped gratefully back into the daze of Alexander’s medicine, away from the pain that bloated and shrank her body in waves, threatening to split her skin as it shattered her bones.

For the next week she was tossed between sleep and pain, pain and sleep. She woke, close to dawn, her body burning.

‘This is breaking me, please, make him help me, make Alexander help me,’ she said to Justinian, crying.

Justinian knew what she was asking and shook his head. ‘I can’t, I’m not good enough to give you up. I want you to stay.’

‘In this pain?’ She was incredulous.

‘Yes,’ he was crying now too, ‘I should be kinder, but I’m not. I can’t let them help you leave me.’

‘It’s too hard,’ Theodora said.

Justinian agreed, ‘Yes it is.’

He kissed her, gently, and she kissed him back, fiercer, pulling him against her.

She screamed then, silently, her mouth wrenched open, a breath of pain, and her breath smelt sweetly foul.

‘Please?’

And then, slowly, Justinian nodded. He lifted himself from the bed, kissed her lips, her eyelids, her brow. ‘I won’t be long,
Alexander is just outside, I’ll call him, he’ll make it better, make you better.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘I love you.’

Theodora sighed her love, her thanks; she had no breath to speak.

Justinian had taken less than a dozen steps towards the door when he knew. The room felt different, no longer on the blade edge of his beloved wife’s pain. She was no longer hurting. He turned back. Her hands, for weeks clenched in agony, were already becoming loose, softening. Her brow was not creased, her eyes were open and clear, and the tears on her cheeks had not yet dried, but she was gone.

He bowed then, deep and low, at the foot of her bed, and kissed her foot, ‘Theou doron.’

Narses sat with Justinian and Armeneus guarding the Empress’s door as her women washed her body, Comito singing prayers softly under her breath, preparing to bury a second sister. The cleansing rituals done, Theodora was draped first in a thin, fine cloth, as was customary. The priest made the blessing over her body, and then she was wrapped in the purple silk Sophia had made for her, the City’s silk for the City’s Empress. As Theodora had predicted, it made the perfect burial shroud.

Her funeral was attended by dignitaries from the Persian royal family and by Goth, Vandal, Berber, Cathar, Hun, Slav and Herule leaders. A full Imperial procession of priests and bishops followed her body, Justinian at the head, her women behind, followed by the forty deaconesses of the Hagia Sophia and every penitent from Metanoia. Citizens and slaves alike lined the streets as the Empress was taken up to the Church of
the Holy Apostles, where she was buried in the Imperial Mausoleum, the rest of the church still to be completed around her. She was laid to rest as the priests called ‘Theodora’, calling her to the Christ.

For a year, Justinian visited her sarcophagus every second day, then every week. The Church of the Holy Apostles was consecrated on the second anniversary of her death. It had grown its finished self around the figure of the Emperor, mourning his consort.

I
n Ravenna, a master mosaic artist placed a small piece in a section of a much larger work. He was high in the centrepiece of a new church, his back ached and he was tired, had been tired all day. Stephen’s much younger wife was pregnant with their third child; he wondered if the pain he felt was connected to her. They already had two daughters, he would be happy to have a son, someone to take on his work. He would have been happy to finish the job and go home, but there was a great deal more to do, and this was his most important commission to date, one he had requested for himself, so long ago. He would stay working until the light in this almost-complete church was fully gone.

Quietly, carefully, he cut another piece of the precious stone. It was not usual to add true gemstones to a mosaic, but his subject was no usual woman. The work was painstaking, he was careful to get the balance right. The image he was completing came both from memory and from the sketches sent to him last year, charcoal drawings of a small, thin, tired woman in pain, nothing like his memory of her.

He placed one tiny piece of deep red smalti, half the size of
his youngest daughter’s fingernail, into the cement, and then another, checking colour and shape, moving it a hair’s breadth to the right, then back again, thinking about his wife who hated that he spent his days staring into the face of the dead Empress. At fifty, Stephen was an old man compared to those friends of his youth who had died in battle and siege, from plague or the simple accidents that come to young men. He’d seen much in his life, in his own travels, but none of it compared to the sights he had seen in the City. The hills, the constant presence of shifting water; the light, above all. He remembered how the old men of his childhood spoke of Rome, recalling the glory days of their grandfathers’ youth; now all faces looked East.

He returned to the precious stone. It had been brought to him a week ago, he was told it must be part of the mosaic. He made a prayer over the stone, its once-sharp edges smoothed by the years it had been held in the Augusta’s hands, and then he cut into the emerald Virgin. He cut it in secret, and he placed it in secret too. It would not do to tempt the young artisans in his team, better they thought he was simply handling the finer pieces because he wanted to get her face just right. Hiding the real emerald and true pearls in amongst the marble and handmade molten pieces, as was requested when the gems arrived. Hidden in with the real blood too, where his apprentices’ fingers had slipped, splitting skin and opening flesh on the thousands of razor-sharp shards of marble and glass that made up the whole. Stephen himself had fine long fingers, cross-hatched with the scars of his own apprenticeship. He carefully placed another piece of the deep green stone, and thought how well it looked, how much it suited her, warm against the cool marble of her skin. He would work for a little longer, his wife would wait, the image was growing under his hands, Theodora taking shape.

An hour later, walking away from the rehearsal space beneath the Hippodrome, Theodora broke away from her sisters. Comito and Anastasia were both keen to hurry home, to grab whatever they could find to eat, have a quick rest and then return, ready for a final rehearsal before the evening’s show in a private home overlooking the Sea of Marmara. Theodora told her sisters she wanted a moment to rehearse alone. Anastasia, the tiny and delicate little one, had the appetite of a dock worker – if Theodora didn’t care to eat and rest before they were called again, then all the more for her. With too many mouths to feed with their stepbrother and sisters, and too little to feed them on, the household did not do leftovers, and certainly not for girls who upset their teacher and bruised their little sister, accident or not.

Comito knew Theodora was lying, but she also knew that after a day like today, so close to tears with every shout and blow Menander directed at her, Theodora would risk even their mother’s wrath to have some time to herself. Comito knew Theodora ached for room to spread her body, and peace in which to think, neither of which was available in their three rooms, a mile and a half from the city centre, in the jumble of half-finished, overcrowded slum houses between the old Constantine Wall and the Golden Gate. It had been a hard day, a hard week, and tonight’s private performance was very important to Menander; food was the last thing Theodora
cared about right now, and anyway, if she found herself hungry later, there would always be a passing worker she could beg for a share of his bread dole. Theodora might be too smart-mouthed for their teacher, but it was a mouth that could charm and cajole a coin from even the hardest-hearted patrician, hidden behind the curtains of the sedan chair that carried him from one place to another without ever having to touch the polluted ground.