looking for Acasius. She seldom went anywhere near the stables where he worked, for she hated her husband’s job. It had no status. It was not very well paid. It was dangerous. And furthermore, it was a smelly occupation. Acasius, as he had chosen to call himself from when they arrived in Constantinople, was good about going to the baths before he came home, she had to grant him that – but Ragu, his one-legged assistant, smelled like a skunk and didn’t seem to care. Crossly she skirted a pile of dung in her golden sandals and lifted the skirt of her filmy tunic with a twitch. She was on at the Kynêgion in a few minutes, she’d be late, and there’d be trouble. But she had to find him, to tell him that the Emperor himself had ordered a special performance by the dancing bears to be put on directly after the last race, to entertain the visiting governor from Cyrenaica. There was no sign of either of her elder daughters, or she would have sent one of them.
As she reached the stable at the back of which the bears were caged, she pushed the half-open door aside and stepped into the gloomy interior with its feral smell.
“Acasius,” she called out sharply. “Acasius?” No response except a low, rumbling growl. She blinked in the semi-dark, blinded after the brilliant sunlight in the courtyard she had just crossed. A dark, hulking shape against the furthest wall moved. As her eyes adapted she recognised Bruno, the biggest of the bears. The smell in here was truly dreadful, she thought. It was …
Blood. There was a pool of blood on the floor and it flowed sluggishly towards her elegant small feet. Bruno had something in his paws, and he was chewing on it, rumbling in his throat. It was an arm. No, that couldn’t be right. She could not believe … he couldn’t have …
Against the white wall she made out her husband’s pale face, his dark eyes ghastly with terror. His shoulder was a gaping wound from which blood spurted in pulsing scarlet gouts. Crunch, went the bear. The pool of blood reached her squeamish toes. She drew in her breath, and screamed.
Chapter 2: For whom the trumpet sounds
Anastasia’s screams brought Ragu limping to her aid as fast as he could on his peg leg, followed by a guard who sent for a physician and a veterinarian. Ragu snatched up a pitchfork and began to prod the bear away from Acasius, who was barely breathing, towards the open door of the cage. The guard helped with a broomstick. The tormented bear roared. The sound reverberated in the confined space. It was a sound for the outdoors, that spoke of freedom, of fresh air and sweet breezes, of the open plains of Illyria.
The sound frightened Ragu and the guard even more and they attacked the bear with greater vigour. Between them they forced the huge animal to shamble into its cage. It sat down as the door crashed shut and the bolt shot home, rumbled angrily and refused to give up its trophy: the ragged remains of its tamer’s arm. As it continued to chew, white fingers appeared to flap in an obscene gesture of farewell. Anastasia leaned against the wall and vomited.
Next to arrive at a trot was the physician. A bald, muscular man accustomed to trauma, he took one look at the scene and leapt forward. He put his hand right into the open wound and probed amid the pulsating blood which soaked his arm and bespattered his tunic.
“Where … come now … come now … got it! You with the broom – go and call another physician. Tell him we’ve got a man bleeding heavily, he’s to bring a stretcher. I’ll pinch the blood vessel. Be quick!”
“Can you … is he …” Anastasia could hardly speak.
“You are his … wife?” She cringed beneath the man’s contemptuous glare that raked down from her heavily painted face over her diaphanous tunic to her golden sandals. It said, as clearly as words could have done: I see that you are an actress and therefore a whore.
“Yes,” she said. “Can you save him?”
“We’ll try. I’ve seen worse. But he’s lost a lot of blood and he’s in shock. We’ll move him to the sick bay. Can you come with him?”
“No,” she said. “I’m due to appear in the Kynêgion any minute, in the Pantomime of Pasiphae.” She could not afford to lose her job, so even when her husband lay bleeding to death she had to hurry down the road to take the stage as the Cretan queen Pasiphae who became enamoured of a bull. This mythical tale was one of the Emperor’s favourites and she had to perform it often.
Usually she enjoyed the roar of admiration that echoed around the amphitheatre when she made her entrance enveloped in a silver cloak, a glittering diadem in her long chestnut locks: Pasiphae, daughter of the sun, moon-goddess and sorcerer, wife to Minos, King of Crete. This day she did not hear it. Nor did she see the ranks upon ranks of men. She must have made the correct moves, for there were no boos. She must have started at the sight of the grand white bull, sent by the god Poseidon to assure her husband, Minos, of his right to rule the Cretan kingdom. She must have shown her horror as Minos made the fateful error: he replaced it on the altar with a lesser animal and sent the marvellous bull to join his herds instead of sacrificing it as was proper.
She had so often acted the role, so often demonstrated the queen’s obsession with the great white bull, brought about by Poseidon’s curse to punish Minos, she had so often played the seductive strumpet, she had seduced the bull so many times, that even today, when she moved without thought, without volition, she convinced the audience. Slowly she removed the cloak: tease … pause … pose. Gracefully, now down to her semi-transparent tunic, she discarded the diadem and handed it to a waiting slave, then the bracelets, one by one. She caressed her white arms as she did so. Then she delicately peeled the tunic from her shapely body – to the accompaniment of raucous applause and shrill whistles – and dragged it in the dust. She tossed her golden-brown hair. She drew the tresses over her pointed breasts with their red-painted nipples in a pretence of shyness; she titillated the avidly watching men, made them hot and hard with desire, made each one of them wish she was seducing him and not the mythological animal.
While all she saw, what blotted out everything else in her consciousness, was the white face of her husband huddled against the stable wall, the spurting blood, the white fingers waving a grotesque farewell, and all she could hear was the bear going crunch. She maintained her composure, except when she removed the second sandal and it fell to the ground sole side up, and she saw that it was stained with blood. Then, she screamed.
But her scream coincided with the bull prancing back into the arena: two men beneath a cover of white leather, with a huge horned head that tossed as it cavorted around and around, and the audience assumed it was all part of the fun. How they laughed when Daedalus provided the wooden simulacrum of a cow, into which she had to climb through a gate in the rear, lie down and insert herself with her bare legs protruding from the front, so that she could couple with the bull! How they whistled and stamped when the actor who formed the front legs of the bull activated the spring that caused its huge member (also leather, stuffed) to spring erect! And how the amphitheatre echoed to the roar when the bull pushed his vast member into the cow!
There was a slot under her buttocks that allowed the bull to enter the cow, with a great production of the act of coitus while she kicked her legs in feigned orgasmic delight. Usually she managed to distance herself from this performance and feel nothing more than mild contempt for the men who enjoyed this coarse mime. Mostly she was simply bored: it was a job, she did it and she was good at it. She had her fans. But today, when all she could see was a white face and gouts of blood and a white hand obscenely flapping, today she lay in the uncomfortable wooden box that smelled dank and stuffy, with the bull bumping up against her and thousands of voices cheering it on, and she felt violated.
When she descended from the shell of the cow, it took all her resolution to remain on her feet and register appropriate horror when the monster to which she had supposedly given birth cantered onto the scene: Minotaur! Half man, half bull.
