Theodora by Stella Duffy

Author:Stella Duffy
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780748126590
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2011-01-05T13:00:00+00:00

Twenty

Theodora slept well that night, her stomach full from the small chunk of bread she had taken three hours to eat, her veins flowing well with rehydrated blood. She woke happy too, the deep green of the emerald catching morning light when she went outside to give thanks for the beginning of her fourth ten-day period. Grateful and already just a little sad that she would have to leave the bliss of this solitude, return to the community.

For three days she followed a simple pattern, drinking little, eating less, and sleeping most of the time. Timothy and Severus both came back to her in the dream, their sermons making more sense here, far from anyone else’s interpretations. In particular she felt she finally understood why they rejected the accepted Chalcedonian orthodoxy of the City and of Rome. Here, in the desert, it made perfect sense that the Christ should be man, yes, but also, and more importantly, purely divine. It made sense too, as Severus maintained, that it suited the Patriarchs of Rome and Constantinople to believe in a dual-natured Christ: believing Him both human and divine allowed them to walk their own tightrope between the humanity of the Empire and the divinity of the Church. They had need of a dual Christ just as their Church that preached His poverty had need of the Empire’s coin. Here, in the desert, there was no need for church or temple and no need for the funds to build them. No need then, to force the Christ into two natures.

Menander’s teachings too, and her father’s, also made appearances in her visions, with injunctions to hold her leg line, to curtsy nicely for the Senator, and never to go near an eating giraffe. In her sleep she heard the tunes her mother’s mother had sung to hide the sound of Hypatia’s birthing cries when Anastasia was born. Her grandmother’s songs were in Hebrew mixed with a little Aramaic, words that Theodora seemed to understand in the sleep-trance of her cave. She was just seven when the old woman died and she lost the closest thing she felt to a maternal connection; Hypatia had been far too busy trying to keep her family together to give much attention to the minor matter of mothering. Not that the old lady had been gentle either, but she had sung well and occasionally, when she was in a good mood, Theodora had found her way to the grandmother’s lap and rested there.

She used the quiet days of this last week to reaffirm her commitment both to her newly acknowledged faith, and to the branch of that faith espoused by her teachers. As in the desert below, there was no blinding light that persuaded her of the true path, it was instead the confirmation of a gradual conversion that had been growing in her for the past nine months. Timothy and Severus’ teachings made sense to her, and Theodora of the Hippodrome, of the brothel, could never have achieved so much if she had not been practical as well as wild.

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