A Triple-headed Serpent. Marié Heese

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СКАЧАТЬ saint to pray that she would conceive. Yes, she thought, there had been plenty of people who could repeat the delicious tale of her humiliation when the holy man refused her plea since he considered her religious beliefs to be heretical.

      But even though these things were widely known, there was yet more. Known only to her mother, who was dead, and to Fat Rosa the washerwoman, who was dead also.

      Narses found her pale and shaken.

      “This is dreadful, Despoina,” he said. “I was not told. I would not have …”

      “It is diabolical,” she said. “Have you seen him? How old is he?”

      “No longer a child,” he said, “but not more than a youth. He says he is eighteen.”

      “What does he look like?”

      “He has black hair, and dark eyes. And he is slightly built.”

      Somebody has chosen this impostor well, she thought. She could have borne a son of that description. It would seem plausible.

      “He grew up in Alexandria. Never had a mother, he says, he thought she had died giving birth to him. His father and his grandmother brought him up.”

      “So? What made him come here, now, with this …”

      “His father died. And then a man came to see him, and told him that he was the son of the Empress of Byzantium.”

      “Does he believe this himself, do you think? Or is he part of a plot to discredit me?”

      “He looks naïve,” said Narses. “I think he would very much like to believe it. He probably dreams of a life of luxury and ultimate power. Understandable. Had he truly been your son, after all, would the Emperor not perhaps adopt him?”

      “And how has it been explained to him? What does he think happened?”

      “This man who came to see him – a military man, he says – told him that his father had slept with the Empress when she was a young girl who performed on stage … but had taken him away because he … he did not trust her with a child. And she just wanted to be rid of him.”

      “It is diabolical,” she said, again. She kept her arms folded tightly across her chest, as if to hold herself together.

      “The timing, unfortunately, fits. His age, I mean. If you had had a child at fifteen …”

      She said: “People will be only too willing to believe this. There are many who would be eager to believe any vile calumny about me. They have never stopped gossipping about me. Have they?”

      “There are those that remember,” he said carefully, “that you were an actress, Despoina.”

      “Yes, and they remember my lewd pantomime with the geese,” she said. “And they think I was a whore. Do you think I was a whore, Narses?”

      His usually imperturbable face quivered. “No, Despoina.”

      “I had this act, you see … Did you ever witness it?”

      “No, Despoina.”

      “It was lewd in the extreme. Geese used to peck up grain from between my legs. I appeared to be naked, but in fact I wore a flesh-coloured linen shield. Then I would mime sexual ecstasy.”

      “I have heard tell of it,” he admitted.

      “On the stage, my performance was shameless and abandoned. Yet off the stage I was an ordinary girl. Ordinary and naïve. I fell pregnant to Gaius Lepidus, and yes, I was only fifteen.”

      “The champion charioteer?”

      “Yes. He would not acknowledge the child, would not marry me, would make no provision.”

      “And you were poor.”

      “Yes, very. And my mother was ill. I could not bear that child. We were going hungry as it was.”

      “Despoina, you need not …”

      “I will tell you,” she said. Not even to Justinian could she speak of this. He knew who and what she had been, but he did not know of this. Even to her close female friends she had not told it. But Narses, Commander of the Palace Guard, was a eunuch. Somehow that fact seemed to make him a safe confidant about such matters. Also she had come to place absolute trust in him. She felt that he was more than an official; he was her friend. “I aborted that child,” she said. “Does the general gossip include a story about that?”

      He avoided her eyes. “They say all kinds of rubbish, Despoina.”

      “Do they say that? Answer me!”

      “They say … they say … that when you were young, you fell pregnant many times. But … but … I have never credited it, Despoina.”

      “Many times,” she said. “And aborted every one. Murdered all my sons.” Her black eyes glittered with unshed tears.

      “They are ignorant, and malicious, Despoina.”

      “Yes, what do they know? I murdered only the one.”

      “Despoina …”

      “Fat Rosa helped me,” she said. “Gave me some witch’s brew she had from her grandmother. It was early on, I didn’t know … I thought it was just …” She sat staring at a brilliantly coloured mosaic on the palace wall, but what she saw was another image altogether: Blots of clotted blood on the tiled floor of Fat Rosa’s apartment. Amid the red slick, a tiny form. A tiny mannikin. A head, disproportionately large, emerging from a kind of transparent sac, complete with features that might have been formed in clay: blind eyes, a nose, a mouth. Tiny arms and legs that ended in stumpy, club-like hands complete with fingers. A vestigial member. She had screamed at the sight. If only she could eradicate that image, like taking a hammer to a wall mosaic and utterly destroying it. But she did not have a hammer with the power to obliterate that dreadful memory.

      “I had a son,” she said. “But I murdered him. I could not have done that more than once.”

      His face was doleful. “Circumstances, Despoina …”

      “Yes, circumstances cause things to happen. The Church teaches us that we have free choice. In my experience, you know, I have not often felt that I had free choice.”

      “I understand you were … a courtesan. From necessity.”

      “I had two … no, actually three protectors,” she said. “First there was Darius Pollo. Then I went to Apollonia, in the African Pentapolis, with Hecebolus. He promised to marry me. I was going to be the governor’s lady.”

      “He was the father of Juliana?”

      “Yes. She was the one good thing that came of that. But he turned out to be jealous and violent. He almost killed me, but his major domo saved me and the palace priest took me to the nuns in Alexandria. And then I was … briefly … with a soldier. Just to … just to get … home.”

      “But that life is behind you now, Despoina. СКАЧАТЬ