The assistant stopped playing and the bear stopped rocking, but still waved its heavy arms and whuffled through its nose.
“Well done, Bruno,” said the bearkeeper. “You are a good bear. You are the best dancer.” He leaned forward towards the bear, stretched his neck, placed his hands on either side of its head and raised his face so that he was intimately close to it. With great control he breathed right into its nostrils. So close, she thought, shivering with dread and delight. So close to such terrible teeth.
“Why does he do that?” she whispered to the assistant.
“Calms ’em,” said Ragu as he packed up his instrument. “And shows ’em who’s the boss.” His one good eye peered warily at the bearkeeper and the hulking animal. She knew that a lion in a hunting game had clawed his other eye out, right here in the Hippodrome; the same lion had chewed off half of his left leg. That was before the Emperor had banned hunting games altogether. The physicians that served the Hippodrome had managed to save his life, but, her father said, his nerve was gone.
“This breathing act that Acasius does gives me pains in the stomach,” said Ragu. “Man’s mad.”
“Do bears like dancing, Ragu?”
“Huh! No,” and he spat into the sawdust. “See, what the trainers do, they put a burning hot metal plate under the bear’s feet and they play a tune at the same time. The bear hops about to avoid the pain and cool its feet. After a while, when it hears the music, it starts to hop, pain or no pain. Then the trainer teaches it to keep time to the music.”
“Did my father do that to Bruno?”
“Nah. That was the trainer before him. Your father believes in other ways.”
Acasius patted the great bear and fed it honey-cake. “There! Now, off you go, into your cage, get along, get along, there’s a good bear.” The huge animal ambled away, rumbling softly to itself. The gate of its cage clanged shut.
“Come out and watch the next chariot race,” Acasius said to his daughter. “We can stand at the back where nobody will see you.”
She loved her father’s place of work under the vast Hippodrome, where the chariot races took place. Next to the Hippodrome there was the huge palace complex where the Emperor lived. Her father explained to her that the Imperial Palace was linked to the upper part of the Hippodrome by a corridor that led to a balcony, called the Kathisma, where the Emperor would sit surrounded by important visitors and by many men who served him, to watch the bears dancing, the tournaments and, above all, the chariot races.
“There is room,” said Acasius, “to seat one hundred thousand men.” The little girl looked at him, puzzled. “Enough seats for one out of every five people here in Constantinople to have a seat,” he explained.
She nodded solemnly. Five she understood. “We are five,” she said. “Father and Mother and Comito and baby Stasie, and me. Like my fingers.”
“Yes, dear.” He bent down and lifted her. She wrapped her legs around his sturdy body and he drew his cloak around them both. Respectable women were not allowed to view events at the Hippodrome, nor were monks and clerics, but he would smuggle his small daughter in to where they might watch, hidden, in a safe place. He strode out with her along vaulted passages fitfully lit with smoking torches and emerged into the sunlight at a vantage point below the Kathisma.
“We can watch from here. See, we’re right next to the area where the chariots are hitched up. We’re directly below where the Emperor sits. The start is over at the end, there.”
She peered through the fence at the support staff who laboured to hitch up the chariots for the next race. The unmistakable odour of stable, of horses and manure, thickened the air. Voices snapped orders, wheels crunched, horses whickered and whinnied. She could sense the heat, the tension and the power of the animals milling about: dangerous, surely – and so close! But she was safe. Her father held her safe. His arms were strong and the woollen cloak warm. He still smelled of sweat and bear, she thought. But he would stop off at the baths to wash before coming home for his dinner. Mother would not like him to come home smelling like this.
Just as they took up their place, the previous race ended and a roar went up. It seemed to the child that the sound wrapped itself around her like the cloak. “Oh!” she said and covered her ears. “What a noisy place!”
“The favourite has won,” her father smiled, “and so lots of people have made money.”
“I expect they are glad,” she said. She knew about money. Money was important and they never had enough of it. She knew that.
Workmen scurried onto the racetrack to remove the tangled wreckage of two chariots that had crashed spectacularly at the further bend. To distract the crowd, a gaudy procession now emerged from an arched entrance in one long side of the horse-shoe track: two white horses decked with bells and plumes galloped out in front, each with a trick rider who balanced bareback, jumped off, ran alongside, leapt up again, somersaulted, stood on his head, and generally defied death by trampling hooves. Next came a group that juggled flaming torches, then scarlet-clad giants on stilts; four ostriches with feathers dyed brilliantly green or blue dashed onto the track bearing small riders who clung perilously to their long necks; a squat dwarf in a golden tunic trotted out with a gilded crocodile on a kind of sled, acrobats cartwheeled, carried each other upside down, and formed a human pyramid which rapidly dismantled itself before the topmost little person could crash into the dust. Clowns in baggy stripes brought up the rear; they fell over, staggered, and whacked each other with huge flat weapons that emitted loud farting noises on contact. The little girl cheered and laughed with the crowd.
“Oh, I wish they would never stop!” she cried. But already the participants in the next race were in place behind the gates from which they would set off.
“Twelve gates, you see, sweetheart,” said Acasius. “One for each of the signs of the Zodiac. The heavenly signs, you know, for the months of the year.”
“I know, for when you were born. My sign is Aries, the sign of the Ram. Mother says so. She says it means that I am strong and one day I will be powerful.”
Acasius smiled indulgently at his small, pale daughter. “Yes, my sweet Theodora. And the circus arena is the earth. The Hippodrome is the navel of the world, the Christian Roman world of which Constantinople is the capital. The very centre. And when the Emperor sits in the Kathisma, he is seated …”
“… right at the centre of the world,” she finished, smiling with delight. “Is he there today, Father?”
“I believe he is. But we can’t see him from here, we’re directly beneath him.”
“What is his name? Does he have a name, like ordinary people?”
“Anastasius.”
“Oh! Nearly like Mother. And Stasie.”
“Yes. Also: Thrice August. And Basileus. And …” he whispered in her ear, “old Odd-eyes. Because he has one blue eye and one black.”
She giggled. “Maybe he sees one kind of world if he closes one eye and a different world if he closes the other one.”
“He shouldn’t see us at all,” warned Acasius. “Especially not if we think he’s funny.”
“But he can’t see us.” She snuggled into the cloak. She rubbed her cheek against his rasping chin. He would need a shave, too, before he came home. Her interested gaze took in more details of the huge stadium.
“There are snakes,” she said, and pointed at a column that glinted