Cappadocian John too. But I suppose that his many prayers in Church hindered Hecate's action; for he continued to thrive. Then they swore by the Sacred Rattle — a most terrible oath — that they would never rest until one or other of them had reduced John to the nakedness and beggary which were his due. The sequel will be told before this book is over.
An old Syro-Phoenician sorcerer from whom my mistress Antonina learned her magic — my master Damocles had befriended him — cast the two girls' horoscopes one day, which amazed and terrified him by their brilliance. He told Theodora that she was fated to marry the King of the Demons and to reign more gloriously than any woman since Queen Semiramis and never to lack for gold. As for Antonina, she should marry a patrician, the one good man in a wholly bad world; and, whereas Theodora's share of misfortune would occur in the earlier part of her life, Antonina should be spared misfortune until extreme old age, when it would be soon done.
Theodora bent her brows at him and said:' Old man, are you trying your usual flattering tricks on us? Arc you unaware, for a start, that men of birth are forbidden by ancient law to marry women of our profession? Confess that you lie!'
He trembled, but would not retract a word, inviting her to show the figures of these horoscopes to any reputable astrologer. So she did so, and the second astrologer, an Alexandrian Greek, made much the same deductions as the first.
Then she said to my mistress Antonina, laughing: 'Dearest girl, what your husband will not be able to accomplish for us by goodness, I shall make my husband accomplish by demonry.'
Another memory that I have is of Theodora going into the Theatre wearing nothing except the obligatory loin-cloth and a large hat. That was when she was almost fully mature in body. Her game was that her loin-cloth was always coming untied: she used to go with it in her hand to the busy faction-official who attended people to their seats and complain that 'certain men of Belial' had rudely pulled it off her. She desired him to escort her to some private place and assist her to put it on again. Meanwhile she modestly covered her thighs with her hat. Her gravity, her mock-distress, her persistence, used to exasperate the official, to the delight of the benches.
Theodora was small and sallow complexioncd. She was not a particularly good dancer or instrumentalist or acrobat; in fact, she was rather below the average of excellence at all these things. But she possessed an extraordinarily quick wit and a complete freedom from sexual shame: she seems, indeed, to have shown a singular inventiveness in her carnality, so that 'I learned this from Theodora' was a current joke under the statue of Venus, the chief trysting-place of the brothel district. And all the time that she was apparently engaged merely in money- making and pleasure Theodora was busily studying Man; and there is no better way to study this subject than as a Megaraean sphinx, to whom young men and old reveal their true selves more openly than to their chaster mothers, sisters, or wives. My mistress Antonina was a student of Man, too, and she and Theodora soon learned to despise even the gravest of their clients for their unquenchable conceit and credulousness and ignorance and selfishness, and to turn these traits to their own advantage. By charms and remedies they both managed to avoid pregnancy, except Theodora, who had to procure an abortion on a couple of occasions, but without ill-effects.
They had only two intimate friends, Indaro and Chrysomallo, girls of their set; with whom, some six months after Antonina's visit to Adrianople, they planned to leave the stage, if they could get permission, and set up independently. Permission was extremely difficult to obtain, but Chrysomallo and Theodora had the good luck to gain the favour of the Democrat of the Blues, who controlled the political side of the faction, while Indaro and Antonina laid successful siege to the Demarch, who controlled the military side. The usual ruling was that the husband of any actress who left the stage for the sake of marriage must pay a heavy contribution to the Fund. No other excuses were accepted except penitence, but no penitent might return to her old employment under a penalty of being shut in a house of correction for the rest of her days. Nevertheless, these four girls won permission to leave, on the understanding that they remained good Blues. With their savings, and money borrowed from their backers, they clubbed together to take a well-furnished suite of rooms in an elegant house close to the Statue of Venus, and opened it as a place of entertainment: being officially backed by the faction, it soon became the most fashionable resort of Constantinople. By this time my mistress Antonina's mother was dead; Antonina had inherited me from her. The club catering was entrusted to my charge. As independent entertainers the ladies were no longer forced to pay a high proportion of their private earnings to the Dancing Master; instead, they became full members of the fiction, paying their subscriptions regularly to the Fund. Indaro and Chrysomallo were both highly trained, the first as an acrobatic dancer and juggler, the second as a singer and instrumentalist; and my mistress Antonina was equal to either of them in those accomplishments. Theodora was their manager and their clown. The four of them had some very happy, amusing, altogether shameless times together, and I am glad to record that they remained good friends both then and throughout their subsequent lives; and I, who have survived them all, regret them all.
One day Theodora told us — for I was treated more as a friend than a slave, and they all confided in me — that she had been invited to accompany a patrician named Hecebolus to Pentapolis, of which he had been appointed Governor, and that this opportunity of seeing the world at her case was too good to be missed. We all begged Theodora not to leave us, and Chrysomallo warned her that Hecebolus was not a man to be trusted — was he not a Tynan by birth and so a born trickster? Theodora replied that she knew how to take care of herself and that her only anxiety was about leaving us to manage without her. Off she went; after a couple of amusing notes from cities on the route to Pentapolis, we heard nothing more cither from her or about her for a very long time. Then a staff-officer came on leave from Pentapolis and told us that one evening Theodora had lost her temper with Hecebolus, who had tried to keep her in a sort of cage all to himself: she had emptied a pail of slops over him, brocaded tunic and all, as he was dressing for dinner. He had thrown her out of his residence immediately, and refused even to let her remove her few clothes and jewels. The staff-officer believed that she had then persuaded the captain of a vessel to take her to Alexandria in Egypt; but he could tell us nothing further.
It was a very different Theodora who limped back to Constantinople many months later. The misfortunes prophesied for her by the Syro-Phoenician had been concentrated into a single year, and they had been very bitter ones. Our gay, self-reliant Theodora, who had never failed to tell us her most ludicrous and painful adventures, kept pretty silent on the subject of her experiences in Egypt and her humiliating return journey by way of Caesarea and Antioch and the interior of Asia Minor. We nursed her slowly back to health, but even when she was strong enough, to all physical appearances, she did not feel equal to resuming her work at the club-house.' I would rather spin wool all day than begin that life again,' she cried. Much to our surprise, she actually borrowed a spinning-wheel and began learning to use this melancholy if serviceable instrument in the solitude of her room. The other ladies did not laugh at her, because she was their friend and had evidently suffered almost beyond human endurance. So the steady sound of the spinning-wheel was now heard in the clubhouse at all hours of the day and night; and when clients asked, 'Will that damned whining noise never stop?' the ladies would answer, 'That is only poor Theodora earning an honest living.' But they took it for a joke. They never caught sight of her.
One of our clients was a strange, round-faced, smiling, lecherous fellow named Justinian, a nephew of the illiterate old barbarian commander of the Imperial Guards, Justin. Justin had sent for Justinian when a youth, from the mountain village in Illyria where he had himself once been a shepherd-boy, and had given him the education that he regretted himself not having had. Justinian — whose baptismal name was Uprauda, 'the upright' — still talked Greek with a strong foreign accent and far preferred Latin, the official language of his native province. None of the ladies knew what to make of Justinian, and though he was courteous and amusing and seemed destined to become a person of importance, he made them feel uncomfortable, in sonic obscure way, as if he were not quite human. None of them enjoyed taking him to her private room. My mistress Antonina, for one, successfully avoided doing so on every occasion, and without incurring his hostility. Indaro told a queer story: how one evening she had fallen asleep while Justinian was in bed with her and, suddenly waking up and finding herself alone, had seen a large rat scuttle from under the coverlet and out through the window. With my own eyes I saw a still queerer sight. Justinian said one night, as he and the ladies were talking together, 'I heard noises at the front door.' But all were too lazy to investigate, and I was busy at some task behind the wine-bar. Then I noticed an emanation float out from Justinian's shoulders, a phantom head which swooped out of the door and presently returned. Justinian said: 'The noise was nothing: let us continue our talk.' The ladies had not seen what I saw; but it was a characteristic of these phenomena that not more than one person ever saw them at a time, so that each one doubted his senses, and no argument was possible as to the authenticity of any particular vision.
He was a Christian and revelled in theological discussions, as much as, or more than, in faction gossip and salacious jokes and stories; and he used to fast regularly. he always came to the club-house at the close of his fast-days and would cat and drink enormously. Sometimes he had fisted, he said, for three days, and his appetite
