Free Theodora by Stella Duffy Page B

‘Collect their money in twenty minutes Little One, this won’t take long.’
    Sophia shook her head and picked up her bag to follow Theodora and make sure she was safe; several of their friends raised drinks to toast their stage star. Most of the patrons in this theatre bar were used to these scenes, but one was horrified. He didn’t enjoy theatre at the best of times, had only come along today because his friend had asked him, and now he’d seen the woman Theodora – who he thought had been perfectly adequate on stage, certainly overrated given her fame – offering her body for money.
    The friend he spoke to, an ardent fan of Theodora’s stage work, and one who’d been hoping for just such an opportunity this evening, wasn’t really listening, as he gathered his cloak to follow his lust. ‘Procopius, mate, stop being a cunt and give us a few coins, will you?’
    ‘You can’t be serious. Didn’t you just hear her? Asking for further orifices to better be pleasured?’
    ‘To be fair, it was a joke, she was only saying those blokes had small dicks. And we know you do too, so don’t let your jealousy make you rude. Give us your purse and I’ll go and help the girl out. Clearly she’s had a hard day, after that pair she’ll need someone she can actually feel.’
    With that, he grabbed his friend’s purse from the table, leaving just enough to pay their drinks bill, and ran out calling for Sophia, wondering how much it cost to get between the legs of the fêted star, the fated whore.
    Too few hours had passed when Theodora wrenched herself awake, mildly surprised she’d ended up in her own bed. Shereached for a cup of wine, but before she’d even brought it to her lips, her stomach had changed her mind for her, and she threw it down, not caring about the sticky mess it made of the floor; instead she drank water straight from the jug. She tried to walk to her door, gave up, sank back down on the bed, head aching and body bruised from men she’d taken the night before. She listened to the sounds from the street, children yelling and men shouting, Greens and Blues vying with louder and nastier insults. Today was a race day, they were starting early. Two narrow alleys away women were shopping in the cheapest market, in courtyards behind broken-down tenements grandmothers were already preparing meals for families, lucky children were in school, and those less fortunate were working or training as she had been not so long ago. Down at the wharves fishermen were unloading the early morning’s catch, ferries crossed the Golden Horn, while at the various City gates strangers piled in as they did every day, citizens of the Empire from so far away they had never heard a word of Greek in their lives, Goth and Vandal and Herule mercenaries hoping the newly anointed Emperor Justin might find a use for their skills where the old August had been content to keep his armies small and the treasury full.
    Life everywhere continued. Theodora understood this, though her dreaming in the drunken night had been so violent, so charged with blood, she could not but feel a little surprised to wake and find the City so alive. She tried to stand again and this time it was a little easier. Her head clearer, she took a cloth and began to wash the night from her body.
    Looking at the bruises on her thighs, licking the swollen lip where one man had kissed her too forcefully, and then later, much later, another had bitten her, she sighed. Menander was right, she never knew when to stop. The night of excess had not lessened her grief, she had not honestly thought it could,but she had hoped for a few hours’ release from the vision of her little sister, still covered in her own and the baby’s blood, dead on the bedroom floor of her mother’s apartment. And there had been some small respite, in the moment between drunken sleep and dream, the brief moment when exhaustion and wine claimed her mind, before her dreaming let in the ghastly