Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria Read online

  Alone in the atrium, I consider the silence. My heart slows as each odd thing is explained. Then speeds up again. I must know for myself that her spirit remains in her body.

  I will not run to her room. I run to her room.

  The door is closed, but is that not as it should be? The door of one who is ill is kept closed. Who would shame them?

  But just as I reach out my hand to clasp the bronze of her handle, the door is suddenly slammed outward, and rushes by me a kitchen servant with a bowl in her hands. Hot water? Vomit? A poultice made by Olinda?

  “Oh,” is all I am spared for greeting, and the girl is off—and I am in through the door as fast as she comes out.

  All look up who are in my sister’s room where few have ever come. I notice first Minkah. Then Jone, who is not at the school of Didymus the Blind but is seated against the wall, her mouth soundlessly moving as a knotted string moves through her fingers. Didymus himself sits on a pillowed bench, his arm linked with that of the astronomer Pappas, both their faces far from the faces I am used to. And there is the occultist Paulus of Alexandria, and there Meletus the Jew and Palladas the poet, and there my own student Synesius of Cyrene who I am most surprised to see. Wonder of wonders, among this great group is Theon of Alexandria reclining on a divan. Two years in bed have made sticks of his legs.

  Paniwi crouches on the windowsill where Lais so often sits without speaking, without moving, sometimes it seems without breathing. “The Bringer” glares as wildly at all this as do I.

  Olinda of Clarus leans over the bed I cannot see, and at her elbow a short, bent, red bearded male offers her a tray.

  As I look at them, all look at me, even, for a moment, Olinda. I have ridden for days in the desert. I have not bathed nor have I changed out of my Libyan haik. The riding shoes I have unhappily worn were tossed away as I crossed our threshold. My feet would shame a worker in the City of the Dead. I smell of horse and of Isidore. I do not wait for explanation, just as Olinda does not wait to give one, but returns to her task as I stride across the cold tiles so I might see my sister.

  Linen covers the unclothed body of Lais from her feet to the edge of her pubis, more linen covers her breasts and shoulders, but her head and arms and belly are bared to all. Minkah keeps her left arm steady at the shoulder, my doting student Synesius does the same on her right…why Synesius? Ife crouches at her feet, holding them still. Though small, Ife is strong. On a tripod sits a bowl, in the bowl coals so hot they glow, and in the glowing coals, three bars of metal. Olinda’s bent assistant holds open a book filled with diagrams called On Pernicious Growth in the Body. I know this book. It is by Galen of Pergamon, once physician to Marcus Aurelius.

  I move no closer but stare at Lais, whose suffering face is everywhere pale, save for the deep purple moons that cradle her eyes. She is piteously thin, yet her stomach is as distended as a woman far gone with child. If she is awake, I cannot tell. If she knows I am here, I cannot tell. Her hair, no longer thick, no longer shining, splays out over her pillow. Her lips are chapped raw. Even as this, she is mysterious with beauty.

  “Why is she held so strongly?” I quietly ask of Didymus, though the sound of my beating heart must surely be heard by all. “Is she not drugged?”

  “Even so. No chance is taken.”

  “But I have been to the—”

  “Shush!” This great sibilance comes not from Didymus or from Olinda but from Father. “Unless you are needed, for the love of Zeno, be quiet.”

  My mouth is shut on the instant. It is then I spend the worst hours of my life, more terrible even than the dying of Damara or the long destruction of the Serapeum.

  With the heel of her hand, Olinda presses down on my sister’s belly as a bread-maker kneads bread. With each push, there is a moan. But at one strong push, even drugged, there comes from the mouth of Lais a shriek of pain, and from the mouth of Synesius a round sound of horror. Minkah holds to his place though the color of his cheek fades from the brown of the Nile at flood to the pale brown of a winter wren’s wing. Without a word, Olinda nods at her assistant who, without a word, hands her a scalpel. I would hide my eyes, turn away, leave this place, but as I did not leave my mother, I will not leave my sister. And this I note: Father does not blink an eye, but remains silent and still, as well as grim. As for Jone, more lives behind her eyes than I can fathom, but for now I pay it no heed.

  With one deft movement Olinda slices through the skin and muscle of my sister’s rounded belly. Immediately the little man presses one of the hot bars against the cut to staunch the bleeding, and the hiss this makes chills my bone. I find myself flailing inside my own skull. As well as blood, there flows clear fluid, as water in its color and consistency; the bedding of Lais is soaked.

  The large thick flap of bleeding skin is laid down over my sister’s hidden pubis, exposing the precious organs beneath, then, handed a flat knife curved at the end, Olinda gently pushes at the colon so that she might see the liver. She does the same with the stomach, sadly shrunken now yet still as a pear in shape. There is a small strange bulb of growth near the liver. I watch, I hear, I smell, I am near to fainting. As my tears fall, I am ashamed to say that my gorge rises.

  “If this is all, my cutting is not in vain.” So saying, Olinda lifts the stomach up from where it rests.

  It is then we see what more lives in the beautiful body of Lais.

  It is like a bare baby bird dead in its cracked open egg, like the mass of jellied meat in a forced open oyster, like a suppurating sore that has eaten its way through the skin of the mouth. It is the size of a scream. There is not one among us who does not draw breath and draw back at the sight. But there is one among us who rushes from the room. Throughout Jone had become increasingly ashen. I do not blame her if she hangs her head over the privy.

  “What is it?” whispers Father, too shocked to speak louder.

  Olinda does not answer, busy with a small metal pick she has taken from the burning coals, but her assistant whispers back, “Some would say it is an egg laid by a devil.”

  “No demon, you idiot, would dare lay its egg in my daughter. Therefore, what do the rational say?”

  Olinda now replies, ever so carefully burning and cutting away the monstrous thing that has been killing the eldest daughter of Theon of Alexandria. “It is an aberrant growth of the stomach. But why? You will not find a physician who knows. I need perfect quiet and perfect stillness now. If I cut any but the putrid mass, she will die.”

  There is perfect silence and perfect stillness. Even from Paniwi, who has never ceased glaring down with her huge orange eyes.

  And then the thing is lifted away from where it has been secretly growing, a thing that could never be made of that which is Lais, but lived as a stranger, and is now thrown as an unwanted babe into a bowl on the floor. At speed, the little man throws a cloth over the bowl, and also at speed, Olinda takes a needle curved as a thorn, threads it with gut, and deftly sews the skin of my sister’s belly together again. The thing is done.

  Synesius, now released, rushes away as Jone rushed away. Not knowing I was gone to Siwa, he had come merely to ask me yet another question, only to find his young strength needed for Lais.

  His goodbye is given quickly and from behind his hand.

  ~

  Father is back in his bed, Jone back in her school. Our Egyptian once again tends Father. Ife would be lost without him. And so should I.

  I go back to my teaching and my studies, and as I have had greater and greater need of doing, I have hired an amanuensis. Rinat comes to me through Meletus, taught by him in his schul for rabbinical Jews. A daughter of the daughter of one of his friends, she is younger than Jone and is in all things her opposite: quick, slender, open-hearted, dainty in her habits. Rinat is a treasure.

  Lais lies attended by Olinda. Minkah is there every moment he can be.

  I live in a workroom of books, devices for measuring the positions and movements of the stars, my geometer’s tools, my alchemica
l apparatus, my counting board. My workroom is reached through a door over which sits a bust of Thoth, god of knowledge and inventor of number. Thoth is a trickster, which is as it should be: numbers are sly. Near him stands an altar to his sister Seshat, Goddess of archives and writing. I write on a table made of stone as green as emeralds, Damara’s table, or make drawings of the device Minkah will create when Lais is not so needful of him. But no more than an hour passes that I do not run to Lais to smile at her, to see her smile at me.

  As the oracle of the oasis foretold, Lais lives.

  ~

  On this day at dawn, I allow myself to leave our house for other than lectures. On the back of the fast moving Desher, I pass over the Draco Bridge and under the Moon Gate, then away from the City of the Dead along a road that will not take us out into the desert but along the edge of the lapping sea. I am not filled with death or the hiding of books, not even of the mathematics I must teach this afternoon in the public gardens—as it was Father’s, it is my duty to give free lectures; without a library or secular schools, the poor cannot hope to learn even their letters—I am filled instead with what Father spoke of last night over Chaturanga, an Indian game of war. Tapping his finger on the back of his piece, a war elephant, and eying the piece that stood in its way, my piece, no more than a foot soldier, but a dangerous foot soldier, Father had noted that Aristotle had implied not only an actual infinity but a potential infinity.

  Lost to all but the rhythmic pounding of Desher’s hooves and the whoofs of air forced from Desher’s lungs, I think: potential infinity? Infinity there is, or infinity there is not. If it is, it is actual. If not, how is it potential? I ask as Parmenides of Elea asked: “What would cause it to be when it was not?” And then, what is meant by infinity? Though number itself is inherently a limitation, there is no limit to the number of numbers. Can number therefore describe infinity? Euclid would laugh at such a question. He would say that infinity is not a numeric conclusion we never reach. But I would say: like number, the infinite has no limits of any kind, not of size or shape or duration.

  A thought suddenly strikes me, one so fundamentally obvious, I bring Desher out of a full gallop into a dead stop, sending up a spray of sand.

  If there is infinity, then all we know must be infinite which would include time and space. Being infinite, neither would have ever begun nor would they ever end. And by this, the world simply is. Without a first creation, what need for a first creator? What need to placate or fear that which does not exist?

  Desher’s wet red neck mapped with pulsing veins, her huge red nostrils flared wide to gulp air, I sit on my mare in quiet wonder, oblivious to all else. Even Plotinus believed in some sort of generation by virtue of the contemplation of what he called “a prior,” by which he meant that which was before, or outside, reality. But what if there is no “before,” no “prior,” no “cause,” no “inside,” no “outside,” no “end”? What if there is only the now and the experience of now, without beginning, without end, existing only in Mind forever and forever?

  A voice, close and deep and intimate, says, “How fortunate I am this day.”

  Spun away on the instant from infinite Mind, I come back to the world of turn and turn again. And there before me, mounted on a roach-maned high-tailed beauty dressed in golden blankets with a bridle and reins woven through with gold, sits Theophilus, Alexandria’s Christian Bishop. If Scythians still swept out of the North bringing terror to all, how they would applaud him. As Isidore did not, Theophilus rides what Persians name wind foot, a mare. Stallions stop too often, piss where they stop, are given to hubris and sexual excitement and betraying their presence. But mares are subtle. This one has dropped her ears, at the same time pointing them backwards towards Theophilus. She tells me what she thinks of him. He is cruel to her. She is afraid of him.

  I look beyond Theophilus. Glance at the cliffs above him. Off towards the endless sands. He seems as alone as I, yet he has brought his god with him, a huge cross of gold set with precious stones, each one as big as a coin. On his gold cross hangs a silver man, the nails in his silver hands small red rubies, the nails in his silver feet a larger red stone. I am made churlish to see Theophilus. I am made churlish to see that he wears around his neck a man tortured by rubies and silver. I ride to be alone. I ride to celebrate that I can ride, that Lais is not left at home alone and dying.

  I say: “Do not detain me, sir, I have work to do.” And with that, I chirrup to Desher, who leaps instantly forward. Behind I hear the voice of Theophilus, “If you leave, you force me to once again visit your home, for we have business, you and I.”

  If any demon I know, it is this demon: curiosity. In the year and a half since we spoke in a storage room, Theophilus has kept his word. I am not dead by the hand of some Galilean, as the “pagan” Emperor Julian called his kind. And I have kept mine. I have taught, both privately and publicly. My word was easy to keep, just as I said it would be. Therefore—what business have I with our grand Patriarch?

  I am vexed that I would know. But I tap Desher’s glossy red shoulder, wheeling her back towards the blinding arms of the rising sun.

  Theophilus is not Greek nor is he Roman nor yet Egyptian. His hair, curled on both head and beard, are like the cliffs that arise from the sand, not golden, not yellow, but the brown of dirt baked hard in the sun. His eyes are not the blue of the sky or the sea. They are the mottled green of small lizards, those who live hidden away in the walls, only to come out at darkest night to call with loud rusty voices.

  “You will not visit my home. My sister only now recovers.”

  “I have heard this.”

  It does not soothe, hearing I am known by this man. But people talk. Events unfold. In action, character becomes clear. I have lived through all the terror he has brought to my city. No doubt I shall live through more. And if I am talked of, so too, is he. Theophilus is ambitious far beyond the word ambition. He would build churches with anyone’s money save his own—but he does not do so to honor the “only begotten son” of his pieced together god who hangs even now around his neck. The churches are monuments to himself. This is not surprising. Few men of ability truly believe what they profess to believe, not even the Emperor Constantine who publicly converted to Christianity, but whose last breath honored the name of Sol Invictus through which emanated the radiation of the Cosmic Mind.

  My hand ready on Desher’s reins, I wait to hear what he means to say. But I will not ask.

  Theophilus does not dally with me. “Isidore is changed. He is harmed in some way.” Isidore? I did not expect this as our subject. “Where once I could trust him in all ways, that trust seems threatened.”

  How odd that he and I should feel as one about Isidore. “What has this to do with me?”

  “When you went to Siwa, did he not go with you?”

  “Did Isidore tell you this?”

  “Isidore tells me nothing. He does not need to. Many eyes and many ears and many mouths are mine. Isidore is not the priest he was. He seems distracted.”

  “Again, what is this to me?”

  “I have plans for my priest. I need him pure.”

  I am again under palms on a mat in the sand. Pure? Why do men obsess so over the body and its simple harmless functions, shared by all? Augustine believes the body corrupt, even Empedocles spoke of falling into body. Everywhere the fashion is duality: body and soul are opposed. I do not agree with Augustine or Empedocles. I cannot follow fashion. I am as pure as I think myself to be. If I am impure in the eyes of others, especially this poxed “patriarch,” I care not a fig or a date or a shattered pot. If God, as this one claims, created the world and all that is in the world, how then can anything made by His Hand be impure?

  It seems Father’s Beast sees all this in my face. He grows larger. “You know who I am. You know what I can do.”

  “I do. My father grows daily more ill from your abundant skills.”

  Does this make him smile inside? I think it does, and so thinki
ng, wish I had not given him the pleasure.

  “Then you know that only by my word are you allowed to teach.”

  I too smile inside. The word of Theophilus is only as strong as the word of Theodosius, Emperor of the East. Eugenius, zealous pagan, ex-secretary, and Emperor of the West, grows stronger, as does his pagan general, Arbogast. And the Western Empire itself? Almost to a man, it desires the return of its gods. What happens there could happen here, for surely Arbogast casts longing eyes on Egypt and its vast supply of grain. Should he prevail, what then could this beast “allow”?

  Sitting straight on the back of my noble horse, hoping to appear as noble as she, I say, “Why do you menace me?”

  Theophilus too sits upright, maneuvering his mare with his heels so that she arches her glossy brown neck and snorts down her wet black nostrils, causing the golden bells on her bridle and reins to jangle and clang. This is to show me my place. Desher has no bells. She has no tassels or breast collar, no bridle studded with gems. “Only this, schoolteacher. If Isidore appears at your lectures, if he stops you as you would ride by, if he comes to your home, you will not speak to him.”

  “And if he speaks to me?”

  “You will not listen.”

  “And if I do?”

  “Then you will be required to cease your teaching.”

  I sit for a moment, stunned. It is not that I would see Isidore, for I would not. It is that I am told who I might speak to and who I might not speak to. I would, if I were standing, slap his face. Not by worth but by position, has he power over me. To Kur and its crevasse of dust with his power! And yet, if I cannot teach, how do I care for my family? Physicians, schooling, servants, horses, books, paper, sweets, the services of Rinat…all these are costly. He has left me no choice.

  “I will not see him. Nor will he see me.”

  This time his smile exposes itself on his face. His smile seizes at my stomach, squeezes it like a rag. Once again, I speak to Desher, and am gone. Unlike my mistake with Isidore, I do not look back. I do not know if Theophilus watches me go, or if he does not. Desher and I do not stop until we have galloped a mile on the sand at the edge of the sea. And then I look back. If Theophilus remains where he was, I cannot see him.