B009KUWVHG EBOK Read online

  A lifetime of begging was not what I’d envisioned for my future.

  And yet…

  I kissed my mother’s cheek and gave Anastasia butterfly kisses, wishing she would giggle and gift me with one of her precious smiles. Instead, she lay as lifeless as her doll. “Comito and I will take care of everything,” I said, not looking my mother in the eyes. “Meet us outside the Boar’s Eye after the races tonight.”

  I’d save us or ruin us. God help us if I failed.

  Chapter 2

  We stunk like pigs.

  No money meant we hadn’t visited the public baths in more than a week, rendering us unfit for the society of even the most pungent swineherd. Comito and I scurried past a pagan shrine to Apollo, then skirted the walls of the Hippodrome near the Palace of Lausus. A eunuch in the court of Theodosius II, Lausus had owned his own miniature palace, but he had distributed much of his wealth to the poor. Too bad he’d been dead for fifty years.

  The Baths of Zeuxippus were almost entirely deserted, just as I’d hoped. The majority of the city would be clustered around Constantine’s massive porphyry pillar to sing hymns to the Emperor’s gold statue, reputed to hold nails from Christ’s cross in its spiked crown, before moving to the Hippodrome for the New Year’s races before the sun set. A slave with dark stains at the armpits of his tunica stood at the entrance of the baths with the fee basket. By the dog—I hadn’t thought of that.

  “Aren’t we going in?” Comito bit her bottom lip. Two men in snowy tunicas practically broke their necks to gawk at her on their way out of the gates.

  “We don’t have any money.”

  She grabbed my hand and pulled me around the walls. “Over here.”

  We strode past the slave at the entrance and skirted the high wall to the opposite end of the complex. A sycamore tree grew close, near enough we could climb it and jump over.

  Comito hitched her tunica up so I could see her ankles, a sight many men would have paid good money to see. “Are you coming?”

  She shimmied up the tree and I followed, careful not to drop the bundle tucked under my arm as the rough bark scraped my palms and an angry squirrel berated us. The jump looked much smaller from the ground. I climbed out as far as I could until I was almost over the wall, clamped the top of the cloth bag between my teeth, and lowered myself down over the branch. From there I let go, landing with a resounding crash, tail first in an obliging juniper bush. Comito was already on the grass, looking as if she’d been waiting the entire time, not a golden hair out of place.

  “You do this often?”

  She brushed her tunica, blushing slightly at my raised eyebrows, but only turned and threaded her way through the maze of hedges.

  The baths had been built upon an ancient temple of Zeus, and the colorful mosaic paths retold stories of familiar heroes from the Golden Age: Theseus wrestling the Minotaur, Heracles slaying the Hydra, and Perseus hoisting Medusa’s head over her decapitated body. Marble statues marked as Plato and Virgil stared at me from a forest of figures long since dead, but I had eyes for only one man: Julius Caesar. Comito and I had never really gone to school—we spoke Greek and Latin, and we were lucky to attend a rare lesson at a church charity school—but my mother had helped us sketch our letters in the ashes of our cooking fire and taught us to read from her old codex of the Tale of Ilium, pawned by Vitus a few days ago. She also told us hearth tales of our history as we were growing up, stories passed down through the years by her mother and grandmothers. However, it was my father’s retelling of Caesar’s rise to power and his crossing the Rubicon that had been my favorite, although it inevitably sent my mother from the room and Comito to plugging her ears. I rarely got to hear the tale as Comito always begged for love stories, especially that of Cupid and Psyche. All the other myths of love ended in tragedy, perhaps cautionary tales for reality—but then, Comito had never been terribly concerned with reality.

  We passed the exercise green with its dozing slaves and headed to the women’s baths. The juniper brush had scraped my thigh, and I bent to inspect the scratch. “Go on,” I said. “I’ll catch up.”

  “Comito!” A young man with a mop of damp curls jogged across the green—Karas, the butcher’s son. Comito glanced in my direction and picked up her pace, ignoring him, but he caught up to her and grasped her hand. I cursed myself for being too far away to hear their conversation and hurried over as Karas kissed her fingers. She flushed prettily and tucked a curl behind his ear before giving him a playful shove.

  “Hello, Theodora.” He grinned and swept a bow as he passed me.

  I bumped Comito’s hip with my own as we watched him jog away. The boy did have nice calves. “It seems you and Karas are getting along well these days.” Realization dawned on me and my jaw fell. “You’ve been meeting him here, haven’t you?”

  Comito pinched my arm so hard I gasped. “You can’t tell anyone. Promise you won’t tell a soul.”

  I shook my arm free—there was sure to be a mark. “Of course I promise. You and he aren’t—” I raised my eyebrows. “You know—”

  Comito elbowed me in the ribs, scarlet from her cheeks to her hairline. “That’s none of your business. I love him. We’re going to get married and have a dozen babies, live in a room above the butcher shop—”

  “You’re as bad as an alley cat in heat.” I grabbed my sister’s hand and yanked her to the women’s changing room. “And you smell just as bad.”

  We hung our tunicas on the same hook and shivered our way to the frigidarium. Comito gasped as she stepped gingerly into the cold water, her nipples puckering as the water reached higher and higher up her body until it kissed the triangle of pale hair between her legs. Just as her blond curls were the height of fashion, Comito’s curves were supple and soft, breasts like ripe pomegranates and skin so translucent the blue web of veins showed on her hips and chest. I, on the other hand, was all brown angles, better suited to being a charioteer than a woman. I plunged into the chill, making sure to splash her perfect hair.

  “Do you really think this will work?” Comito chewed a damp strand of hair with chattering teeth. I had told her of my plan, and I was shocked when she’d agreed to help. Neither of us wanted to see our sister buried next to our father.

  I shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”

  We stayed in the frigidarium until we couldn’t take the cold anymore, then ran covered in goose pimples to the large pools of the tepidarium. A jowly matron turned her nose up and heaved herself out of the water as we entered. We quickly drained the cup of wine she’d left behind, both making sure to avoid the thick smear of henna on the rim.

  No coins to pay for oil, or a slave to scour our backs, I scraped a borrowed bronze stirgil over Comito’s skin a little harder than was necessary, but she returned the favor until my skin stung as if I’d been attacked by a nest of hornets.

  We dried our hair and slipped back into our tunicas. Mine was mostly green, save the orange stain on the hem where Anastasia had dropped garos sauce during last year’s feast of Saint Paul. Both our necklines and armpits were stained from too much wear, but hopefully no one would notice.

  “Come; you can do my hair,” Comito said.

  It took two tries for me to plait my sister’s hair to her satisfaction, but her fingers were deft as they tugged and pulled my dark hair into something presentable. She held me at arm’s length and sighed. “I don’t know how you manage to be such a heathen and still have a pretty face. It must be your eyes.” She frowned. “Today they’re hazel.”

  “And tomorrow they’ll be brown,” I said. “Like manure.”

  We giggled—it felt like the first time I’d laughed in ages—as another woman walked into the changing area. A Christian since my baptism, I still knew all the myths of Aphrodite, but this copper-haired woman could have beaten the goddess of love and beauty to win Paris’ golden apple. Although she was past the first flush of youth, a blush like dainty rose petals bloomed on her high cheeks in the warmth o
f the baths and her bronze hair brushed an impossibly tiny waist. She held her arms out, and a slave unpinned her stola—an expensive one made from crimson silk with yellow butterflies embroidered on the hem—and whisked it to its own hook before the fabric touched the ground. The smell of musk perfume hung heavy in the air.

  “The consul is waiting in the steam baths,” the slave said. “He said to hurry—his wife expects him home before their guests arrive to break bread for the krama.”

  Men and women weren’t supposed to mingle in bathhouses, but it appeared no one followed that rule any longer.

  “It would do his waistline good to miss the afternoon meal.” The woman winked at me. “I think I’ll have a massage first.”

  Her voice had a lilting quality, like a harp. The woman was too well dressed to be one of the common pornai, the crass prostitutes who worked in the brothels and tavernas. Byzantine patricians kept their wives to have children and visited pornai to attend to their bodily needs, but few could afford to patronize a scenica, the most expensive sort of courtesan. No wonder this woman’s skin shone and her silk gleamed as if it were worth a man’s monthly salary. It probably was.

  I looked to Comito, but she had eyes only for the silk. My elbow in her ribs earned me a fierce glare.

  “We have to go,” I said to her. “There’s much to do before the races.”

  “Are you girls going to the Hippodrome tonight?” The courtesan stood completely naked—she could have put a statue of Helen of Troy to shame.

  “Yes.” I didn’t meet her eyes. We weren’t going as proper spectators, but no one needed to know that, especially not this scenica.

  “Do you support the Blues or Greens?”

  The Blues and the Greens went far beyond simple chariot factions to also oversee Constantinople’s civic functions such as controlling guilds and maintaining the militia. The Blues were the party of the patricians and old landowners. Greens tended to support industry, trade, and the civil service. Comito gestured to our tunicas. “Greens.”

  The woman’s nose wrinkled, but even that didn’t mar her allure. “I cheer for the Blues,” she said, “even if my patron that evening prefers the Greens.”

  “We’ll see you on the opposite side then.” I linked my arm through Comito’s and hauled her out of the bathhouse to the sound of the courtesan’s silvery laughter. “Poor things,” I heard her say to her slave. “I think I scared them away.”

  The sun was already sinking, and the butterflies in my stomach threatened to declare war with one another. This had to work.

  For the final touch to our costumes, Comito and I lingered to decorate each other with cornflowers and lilies scrumped from the bath gardens, garlands in our hair and pinned to our shoulders, posies of violets clutched in our hands. Comito made me wear the daisies. They were pretty but smelled awful.

  We were jostled into the rush of people as soon as we stepped into the street, but we managed to wait until the Hippodrome’s gates swallowed most of the crowd. A group of children sat outside the amphitheater entrance with wilted laurel wreaths on their heads and their hands outstretched. One boy displayed hands with nubs instead of fingers, the thumbs completely missing, while a little girl only a few years older than Anastasia had her greasy hair pinned back in an elaborate twist, the better to show the ragged scars where her ears should have been. Families with too many mouths to feed often sent their children to beg, but it was more profitable if the child was mutilated first. I watched a man in an ebony litter drop a coin to a black-haired boy with holes of waxy flesh where his eyes should have been. That could be us.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” Comito whispered.

  I gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, holding tight in case she tried to bolt. “Everything’s going to be fine.” A thief and a liar—next I’d be swindling my own mother.

  The four prancing bronze horses guarding the Black Gate stared down at us, their patina long since green with age. Most of the crowd climbed the stairs to take their seats under the sky, but we passed a group of men placing bets on charioteers as we followed the path to the arena floor. We’d visited the Hippodrome before, but always with Father while he trained the bears. Then it had been silent, the wooden benches empty except for the occasional crust of stale bread or empty wineskin.

  “You girls interested in some pregame entertainment?” One of the gamblers waggled his hips at us while his friends laughed.

  “Not with you.” I pulled Comito along, but her feet dragged.

  “They’d probably pay us,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “We haven’t sunk that low.”

  At least not yet.

  I gasped as we passed through the entrance arch and the walls opened up. The Kathisma, the loge shrouded in purple for the Emperor, was vacant, but the Hippodrome was a hive crawling with a hundred thousand people, the loud hum of their voices crowding out my thoughts. The floor of sand stretched before us with the Blue administration on one side and the Greens on the other, while the consul sat directly across from us, a fat man in a snug white tunica clutching the consular scepter with its golden eagle. On the floor, the bronze charioteer statues of the spina stood frozen in a line stretching from the twisted Delphi Column, its three gilded snakeheads balancing the golden bowl looted from the famed Temple of Apollo. Next to it, the pink granite of the towering Egyptian obelisk pierced the night sky. The Mediterranean had seemed too vast to cross when we’d left Cyprus. Tonight the Hippodrome’s floor seemed even larger.

  A slave at the consul’s elbow held the red and purple prize mappa that would signal the start of the games. Our chance would be lost once he took that cloth.

  “It’s now or never,” I said to Comito.

  We started to walk. The crowd seemed to quiet, but that was likely a trick of my ears. I couldn’t hear anything; I couldn’t see anything other than the dais filled with Greens to my right. Asterius sat in the middle, dressed in a white tunica edged with emerald satin, a merry grin on his face as he laughed at some joke and tore a chunk of meat off a chicken bone. I hoped he’d choke on it.

  We tossed flower petals as we passed bronze statues of horses and charioteers, festooning the ground with white and purple as sand scratched my bare feet. Asterius saw us as we ran out of flowers. If looks could have killed, Comito and I would have been smitten to dust in that moment. The fool should have known this was coming—custom dictated private quarrels be settled publicly. Just not this publicly.

  My smile worsened his glare. I gave Comito a tiny nod, and we recited the words we’d practiced on the way to the bathhouse earlier, hoping our voices would carry to the rest of the crowd.

  “Life, health, and prosperity to you, valiant Greens, O noble men,” we shouted in unison as the stands quieted. “Our father who served you was taken to God, and we bow to your Christian mercy.”

  It was the Greens’ turn to acknowledge us. Asterius made us wait until the crowd began to murmur.

  Now the show truly began. Our life had to be more dramatic than any show on the stage of the Kynêgion if we were to sway the crowd and persuade the Greens. We clutched each other and fell to our knees amidst the strewn flower petals, cheeks pressed together. “Our father is dead, our mother defenseless, our family homeless and destitute. We, the daughters of Acacius, Keeper of the Bears, seek your infinite mercy. To you Christian gentlemen, this is our plea.”

  I spared a glance for the spectators behind the Green administrators, almost entirely men. Most of the observers wore faces of pity. That was a good sign.

  The cluster of men shrouded in green on either side of Asterius remained seated, arms crossed in front of their chests. Not a good sign.

  Asterius glowered at us as he rose. We were only daughters of a bear trainer, and he knew it. He said not a word, indicating our petition was not even worthy of his breath. Instead, he turned his back on us.

  I had been stupid. Our last hope was obliterated, shattered by this man simply because he wouldn’t be bes
ted by two girls. We would be forced to beg in the streets, and the city would mock us for our humiliation.

  The crowd erupted into a cacophony of hissing. I had to hold Comito up as she sobbed into my shoulder, but my eyes were dry. I spat at the sand in front of Asterius and helped Comito stumble to the entrance arch.

  We would have to beg. I couldn’t return to my mother empty-handed or watch Anastasia wither and die. I tried to squeeze away the thorns in my eyes as darkness swallowed us.

  “Wait!” A man dressed in blue grabbed my arm. “You have to come back.”

  “No. We have to go—our sister—”

  “Listen to them, Theodora.” Comito’s nails dug into my other arm as the man dragged us back toward the arena. She wiped her eyes as I saw the men on the Blue dais, standing and singing.

  The consul banged his eagle scepter as the voices of the Blues rang out across the floor, rich and low in timbre. My heart nearly stopped at their words.

  “Gentle and most Christian daughters of Acacius, fear not the heartless, unchristian Greens. We Blues have seen your valor and shall answer your pleas.”

  This was an unexpected bit of drama. Their response was probably only a way to best the Greens before tonight’s tournament had even begun, but they could steal kopton from babies for all I cared. The Blues would be our salvation.

  Asterius’ face was a vibrant shade of red, his giant hands clenched into fists on the top of the arena wall. I blew him a kiss, much to the crowd’s delight, and pulled Comito toward the Blues. They were smiling, motioning us forward with their arms much as I imagined the Sirens had beckoned Odysseus and his men.