Once outside, she did as her father said and ran all the way, her small sandalled feet kicking up the dust, which was largely dry animal manure pounded fine by the traffic. A cart would have watered it early that morning, but already the sun had baked it dry again. She liked the smell of it – together with the salt tang of the sea it smelled of home. On she dashed, past the grand buildings that lined the important middle road (the Mesê, it was called), past the huge bronze doors of the Imperial Palace where smart guards in fancy uniforms held their swords at the ready and winked when she sped by, past the Baths of Zeuxippus with the tall disapproving statues. She skirted the square in front of the Church of the Holy Wisdom with its towers as high as God. Ran on past rows and rows of pillars in front of shops that sold all kinds of wonderful things.
When she reached the Forum of Constantine she turned off the middle road onto lesser roads towards the Golden Horn where ships rode at anchor. Here rich people’s villas and simpler wooden houses stood side by side, all of them with tall crosses on their roofs. When she was smaller, she had found the forest of crosses frightening. But her father, who had been a priest in that other country where he had learned to tame bears, said they meant that Jesus was watching over her, over them all, and the crosses should rather make her feel safe. But she had seen some nasty things happen to people, in spite of the crosses. It was a world full of scary things, and she reasoned that Jesus couldn’t be watching everybody all of the time. So she trotted on as fast as she could, breathless now. She dodged vegetable carts, bleating herds of goats and sheep, porters, slaves on missions, off-duty soldiers in their green tunics, raggedy beggars, washerwomen with bundles, and sedan chairs in which rich people rode.
Nearer home the streets grew narrower, often no more than crooked alleys, more crowded and also darker, because the high tenement buildings blocked out the sun. She knew it was important to sidestep the piles of rotting garbage, not to breathe deeply, to watch out for peels that might make her slip, and to avoid being drenched by stinking slops emptied by housewives from windows above her head.
She stopped only once, to greet the blacksmith on the corner near their rooms, a man almost as big as a bear, who fascinated her because of his great strength and the way he casually handled red-hot metal, which he bent and hammered into any shape he wanted. She loved watching the horseshoes he fashioned sputter and hiss when he plunged them into water to cool them off.
“Afternoon, Tertius,” she called out in a pause between hammer blows.
He grinned at her, his teeth white in his swarthy face. “Afternoon, Princess,” he replied in his deep voice, with a mock bow.
She giggled happily. It was their joke, but she stepped more proudly after this greeting, skirting the buckets of pee standing outside Fat Rosa’s laundry, which took up all of the ground floor. Passersby were encouraged to fill the buckets up, because, Fat Rosa said, there was nothing like pee to get white stuff really clean. Theodora tilted her small nose as she avoided the disgustingly smelly area – many men had a poor aim – and finally reached the entrance to the stairs. Even if they did live on the top floor of an old building, she thought, even if they weren’t rich and didn’t travel in sedan chairs and had no slaves to look after them, the big blacksmith thought she was special. She knew that. She liked it. And she liked to be called Princess.
Anastasia was looking for Acasius. She seldom went anywhere near the stables where he worked, for she hated her husband’s job. It had no status. It was not very well paid. It was dangerous. And furthermore, it was a smelly occupation. Acasius, as he had chosen to call himself from when they arrived in Constantinople, was good about going to the baths before he came home, she had to grant him that – but Ragu, his one-legged assistant, smelled like a skunk and didn’t seem to care. Crossly she skirted a pile of dung in her golden sandals and lifted the skirt of her filmy tunic with a twitch. She was on at the Kynêgion in a few minutes, she’d be late, and there’d be trouble. But she had to find him, to tell him that the Emperor himself had ordered a special performance by the dancing bears to be put on directly after the last race, to entertain the visiting governor from Cyrenaica. There was no sign of either of her elder daughters, or she would have sent one of them.
As she reached the stable at the back of which the bears were caged, she pushed the half-open door aside and stepped into the gloomy interior with its feral smell.
“Acasius,” she called out sharply. “Acasius?” No response except a low, rumbling growl. She blinked in the semi-dark, blinded after the brilliant sunlight in the courtyard she had just crossed. A dark, hulking shape against the furthest wall moved. As her eyes adapted she recognised Bruno, the biggest of the bears. The smell in here was truly dreadful, she thought. It was …
Blood. There was a pool of blood on the floor and it flowed sluggishly towards her elegant small feet. Bruno had something in his paws, and he was chewing on it, rumbling in his throat. It was an arm. No, that couldn’t be right. She could not believe … he couldn’t have …
Against the white wall she made out her husband’s pale face, his dark eyes ghastly with terror. His shoulder was a gaping wound from which blood spurted in pulsing scarlet gouts. Crunch, went the bear. The pool of blood reached her squeamish toes. She drew in her breath, and screamed.
Chapter 2: For whom the trumpet sounds
Anastasia’s screams brought Ragu limping to her aid as fast as he could on his peg leg, followed by a guard who sent for a physician and a veterinarian. Ragu snatched up a pitchfork and began to prod the bear away from Acasius, who was barely breathing, towards the open door of the cage. The guard helped with a broomstick. The tormented bear roared. The sound reverberated in the confined space. It was a sound for the outdoors, that spoke of freedom, of fresh air and sweet breezes, of the open plains of Illyria.
The sound frightened Ragu and the guard even more and they attacked the bear with greater vigour. Between them they forced the huge animal to shamble into its cage. It sat down as the door crashed shut and the bolt shot home, rumbled angrily and refused to give up its trophy: the ragged remains of its tamer’s arm. As it continued to chew, white fingers appeared to flap in an obscene gesture of farewell. Anastasia leaned against the wall and vomited.
Next to arrive at a trot was the physician. A bald, muscular man accustomed to trauma, he took one look at the scene and leapt forward. He put his hand right into the open wound and probed amid the pulsating blood which soaked his arm and bespattered his tunic.
“Where … come now … come now … got it! You with the broom – go and call another physician. Tell him we’ve got a man bleeding heavily, he’s to bring a stretcher. I’ll pinch the blood vessel. Be quick!”
“Can you … is he …” Anastasia could hardly speak.
“You are his … wife?” She cringed beneath the man’s contemptuous glare that raked down from her heavily painted face over her diaphanous tunic to her golden sandals. It said, as clearly as words could have done: I see that you are an actress and therefore a whore.
“Yes,” she said. “Can you save him?”
“We’ll try. I’ve seen worse. But he’s lost a lot of blood and he’s in shock. We’ll move him to the sick bay. Can you come with him?”
“No,” she said. “I’m due to appear in the Kynêgion any minute, in the Pantomime of Pasiphae.” She could not afford to lose her job, so even when her husband lay bleeding to death she had to hurry down the road to take the stage as the Cretan queen Pasiphae who became enamoured of a bull. This mythical tale was one of the Emperor’s favourites and she had to perform it often.
Usually she enjoyed the roar of admiration that echoed around the amphitheatre when she made her entrance enveloped in a silver cloak, a glittering diadem in her long chestnut locks: Pasiphae, daughter of the sun, moon-goddess and sorcerer, wife to Minos, King of Crete. This day she did not hear it. Nor did she see the ranks upon ranks of men. She must have made the correct moves, for there were no boos. She must have started at the sight of the grand white bull, sent by the god Poseidon to assure her husband, Minos, of his right to rule the Cretan kingdom. She must have shown