Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria Read online

  Dark deadens the world outside our windows. It is darker still in my heart. From the moment I last heard her speak of love for me, she has never spoken again. She has never opened her eyes. She did not move as Minkah tenderly placed her in her litter for the run home, he and I sick with terror every step of the way, nor when we lay her limp on her bed.

  At first sight of her, Olinda of Clarus gently placed her finger in the center of my sister’s forehead, saying, “All that remains is for her body to follow her spirit.”

  I convulsed with shock and with sorrow.

  I know the precise moment Lais left this world for another, for in that moment Paniwi turned her wild yellow eyes on me, gave out a great yowl, then leapt from the bed of her mistress and straight out the window. The leap was perfect…no sound of her leaping or of her landing.

  Jone who does not read, has not even a book to hold, tries to warm me with her own small body. Jone is not warm, but the warmth of her intention would warm me if I could know warmth—for I have heard the words of Olinda and know them to be true words. Though her body is only now gone, Lais left this world as she sat by my side in the Hippodrome.

  Paniwi knows what I know. I have killed my sister. As Athena by accident killed Pallas, the sister she loved more than herself, so too I have killed my sister who I loved more than myself. This is what is also true: truth is not to be found at the Oracle of Siwa.

  I am not Athena who then called herself Pallas Athena to confess to her darkness within. I will not, as did Athena in memoriam, sculpt with my own hands a huge statue of Lais. I am not worthy of the heroics of a goddess, though I am as equally dark as she. It is I who am at fault and I who must attone for my fault.

  The boat in which we learned to sail was named by Lais Irisi—“fashioned by Isis.” The Irisi lives hidden away in the Royal Harbor near what is left of Mark Anthony’s Timonium, the temple he had constructed after his defeat at Actium so he might dedicate it to another like himself, the bitter and abandoned Timon of Athens.

  That Father will fall faster and farther does not touch me. That Jone will—and how shall Jone react? I cannot answer. I do not care to try and answer. If any feeling is left me, it is sorrow for Minkah. How he must rue the day he made my family his.

  Alexandria is alive. The Great Harbor washes her thighs of white marble as she stretches herself against the curved shore. But I am not alive as I set my course. No moon sails the sky. Only by the lights from countless apartments high and low, do I know the tiny island of Antirrhodos slides by on my left.

  ~

  A sail is a wing, a boat is a bird. Caught in the wind, we go with the wind.

  The short tunic I wear is dark with dirt and salt sea spray and the sweat of my body. I have no food. I have water, for there is ever a gallon or more stored in the small compartment under the Irisi’s foredeck.

  I have lost my sense of time. How long since sailing away through the dark and treacherous mouth of the Great Harbor, allowing Spirit to feel the way through rock and shoal? It is full winter, the season of storms when even the great ships of grain are lost to the wild Green Sea. Small boats like the Irisi seldom last against the might of wind and wave.

  The skies have been the grey of stone, the seas a series of small waves running like leaves before the wind. There is as yet no challenge to my little boat who rides them as I would ride Desher. Somewhere, a great leaping of dolphins curved up out of the waters only to enter again as sleek as silver and silk. These strange creatures of perfect grace and wild with joy have been the last to come near, and if that was one day past, or two, I could not say.

  With only sky above and sea below, I head neither east toward the city of Canopus lost in its maze of reeds, nor west toward the city of Synesius, the ruined Cyrene. I will not see Augustine’s Hippo, nor do I hope to cross the whole of the open waters to Rome where I have never been nor have I ever longed to be. I might find some fabled island of Greece. I might not. I have no astrolabe. It sits unfinished by Minkah on my mother’s emerald green table. Yet I know I sail straight for the belly of the sea. The sun rises. The sun sets. Moving above the clouds as a woman moves behind curtains of soft white linen. By night, if it is clear, I would know my position by the stars, but the nights are not clear. The only true choice I make is not to sail south where Alexandria continues whether I am there to teach or I am not.

  I seldom move from the stern. If I am becalmed, I will make a canopy of my sail and drift. If I meet with a storm, I will use all my skill to ride it. But if I cannot, then I cannot. The skin of my left hand is rubbed red from the sheet line. I leave blood on the Irisi’s white trapezoid sail. The skin of my right arm is bruised by the steering oar. The skin of my body blackens as the skin of my mouth splits like fissures in rock. By these signs of the body, I know time has passed, more than it seems since running from the room of Lais.

  Sometimes I sleep seated and leaning against the oar. Sometimes I do not sleep. Sometimes, a rat who has found a home in the Irisi, curls under my bench to keep company with me. It is as thick as the hilt of a sword and its fur the color of a blade. Once I found a roach in my hair. I am bitten by fleas. But if hunger is theirs, all are welcome to whatever use they can make of me. If hunger was mine, it is long since silent. I allow myself small sips of water. In this way I have water to last a few days. When I sleep, I lash down the oar and shorten the sail. When I am awake, I sail, sometimes by day, sometimes by night. On the one clear night, I raised my weary eyes to the stars. I imagined them holes through which shine the souls of the hidden palace of Tuat. I imagined them each a sun as our sun around which some other earth circles. I imagined them the eyes of gods or of demons. I felt stared at. I shut my own eyes and still I saw them.

  If I survive what I now do, it will not be by my own choosing. Not that I choose to die. Nor do I choose to live. I do no choosing at all.

  On the first night, responding to Irisi’s billowed white sail, my mind still questioned: was there a time when the world was not? If it was not and then it was, something can appear from nothing. If so, how? If not, then all is actually nothing, and what we experience as “world” is in truth a magical dream. But do I know this? I know what many great minds have been taught, for they have taught me. But who has taught them? How far back does it go, this teaching?

  On the second night, I thought only of home. Did Father gnaw at his pillow? Has he yet to notice my absence? Minkah must be half mad with the death of Lais—has he found time in his madness for me? And Jone, Lais’ well loved “mouse.” Who does she seek solace with?

  I have determined to remain still in both body and mind and to accept what swims towards me. For something comes, of that I am certain.

  It is day again. I have fallen asleep as I do more and more, and as I sleep, tormented by dreams of snakes with scales of fire and trees uprooting from soil to walk the earth and of winged insects writing nonsense on walls, the rat I share my boat with has curled itself around my feet. We are both the warmer for it.

  From one instant to the next, I come awake, slapped in the face by a cold hand of water. The sky, pale blue when last I saw it, is a curved metal mirror, and a gelid wind has come up that snaps first here and then there. I know what I see, what I hear, what I smell. A storm comes, a great storm. Stupor flees as a cur flees a stone. I am fully alert to my danger. Weakened by lack of food and water, I have strength enough to grasp the sheet line, causing the Irisi to wear on the wind.

  The cold deepens by the moment, the wind strengthens, the waves grow farther apart, and each rises higher than the one before. We ship water, the Irisi and I, our rigging strained to the utmost.

  And now rises a wave to starboard that seems come out of nowhere, and not such a wave as follows one after the other like floods in the Nile or tremors in the earth, but a wave like the tremendous raising up of a great watery head out of the sea, a cobra’s flared head…and in the blue-water cobra are caught fish whose scales gleam with blue light, and strange dark shapes th
at toss and circle and swirl, torn and twisted up from the deep sea floor. Higher and higher rises the cobra with its cowl of living water until it hangs over the Irisi before it falls with the heaving of the sea…and this wave will swamp us. Immediately, I slack my line to spill wind. There is nothing to do but head into this wave, hoping the Irisi and I might ride up and over it—and we do. But then, behind, comes another wave larger still, and another behind that, and the Irisi takes water over her bow as, head-on, she plunges into the next wave and the next. Salt sea water washes over the gunwale and into the Irisi’s sole, and I, holding fast to the oar, plant my bare feet hard into the wet sole so that I might quickly switch headings and quarter the sea, all in the hope I will ride up the waves. But still I ship water, so much so that I am turned side into wave and at that the Irisi lays over, her blooded white sail so close to the shipping sea how shall she right herself?

  I call out in the crash of wave on wave and the seeming sound of the Irisi breaking asunder, “Spirit! Is this what is mine?”

  If there is answer, I cannot hear it for then comes the greatest wave of all, not a cobra but a sphinx of a wave, and it breaks over the mast and over me…and I am on the instant washed overboard. For one long moment I grip the gunwale as a shriveled thing, a blackened thing. I am no thing. Through salted lips that bleed, through a salted throat that sears with pain, I cry out, “Take me. Do not take me. Choose!”

  My strength deserts me. I cannot hold on. Falling away from the Irisi, I endure what I hope will be my last thought.

  Let me be with Lais.

  ~

  I awake, if I awake, to the dark. If hand I still have, I cannot see it. If body I still have, I do not feel it. If sound there is, I cannot hear it. If there is still something of me that might reach out to touch, I cannot move it. If there is still an I and if that I is called a name I dimly perceive as mine—Hypatia, Hypatia—I could not prove it.

  I have passed beyond the gate, but as what?

  Time passes…or it does not. Without sound or sight or touch or taste or smell, how does one tell?

  Even dead, I am full of questions. But if dead, I have brought with me my heart. If I would be comforted in death by lack of feeling, to my horror I am not. If I would be met in death by the bliss of those gone before, to my sorrow I am not. But if I would be obscure, lost, abandoned to a meaningless nothing, this I have gained.

  I drift farther and farther into deeper and deeper green. I hear, though what I hear is strange beyond strange. Long low musical sounds, as mournful as a widow at a tomb. High short sounds, as curious as a dog at a door. Clicks like insects in the heavy heat of the day. Enveloped by waving fronds of slick yellow green, I too sway as the fronds sway and my hair is like the sea grass. I do not breathe. I have no sense of breathing. I have no sense of a need to breathe.

  I grow quiet within. Fans of sea bubbles rise from somewhere far below. I am without mind and all is Mind. Like a sea snake, delight curls up my spine and all the while, lights like tiny stars, dance in the deep waters. I become full of import. I become transported by meaning. I weep at the bottom of the sea.

  ~

  I am not sunk in the sea, but lie on the sand that lies by the edge of the waters. What remains of my tunic is yet wet, but not so wet I am recently washed ashore. I have been here for a space of time. The skin of my legs and my arms and my face are as much sand as the beach is sand.

  Flat on my back, I turn my head to see only sea and sand that curves away until I can see no farther. I turn my head again and there is the Irisi and beyond the Irisi the lighthouse, made small by distance. She is keeled over on her side, her mast snapped in two, her sail torn and lying, as I do, curled in the sand. From a hole in her side creeps my rat. It too lives.

  The Irisi is not lost, but damaged. I can see she will become again what she was. I too am damaged but I will never become again what I was. A thing that has drowned in the sea is a thing claimed by the sea.

  By what means I am returned to life I do not recall. But someone or something has chosen. And I can do nothing but accept what has been decided by my taking the Irisi out into the sea, alone, in the season of storms.

  I turn my head away from our little boat and begin to count the grains of numinous sand.

  ~

  I return to a house in deepest mourning. With the loss of Lais, the house itself seems lost. The servants go about in silence. Even the horses make no sound. All lives, yet nothing is truly alive.

  I return to a city in mourning for Lais was beloved of all. I return to my teaching because I must continue to teach or those of my household who so silently mourn will do so in rags.

  But in truth “I” do not return at all. Hypatia as she was is gone. The Hypatia who rose from the sea is as yet undiscovered, and until she is found, I play the part of the Hypatia all know. I do this for myself as well as for others. If I did not, who should I be?

  If any suspect the struggle and the change, it is Minkah.

  During this time of sorrow I do only one thing that flows out from the Hypatia who recently lived. In the farthest reaches of a night soft with the light of a silvered moon curved as Diana’s Bow, and timed by the flight of Venus, I light the flame that will heat the rare aqua animus in which silver, to my mind more noble than gold, will metamorphose into that which is no longer silver, no longer aqua animus, but the transcendent aqua spiritus. To fast for three days and then to drink of Spiritual Water under the face of the moon, to call upon Isis, Demeter, Inanna, I hope to shine with a light as lustrous as silver for I too will transmute…and in this state I will cry out to Lais. I would have her hear me. Of more worth, I would hear her.

  I awaken to find myself lying in a slant of moonlight. Above me stands Paniwi who, for the second time, leaps from a window. As fast as she, I am up and searching for her in the street below our house. She stops to look back just once before becoming no more than shadow…and then a shadow lost in shadows.

  “Lais,” I call out, “my life is yours. Live through me.”

  ~

  Later, not knowing why, I cut off my hair.

  BOOK THREE

  “I am the First and the Last…I am the knowledge of my inquiry, And the finding of those who seek after me, And the command of those who ask of me, and the power of the powers in my knowledge of the angels who have been sent at my word, And of gods in their seasons by my counsel, And the spirits of every man who exists with me, And of women who dwell with me.”—The Thunder, Perfect Mind

  The Return of the Sun, 399

  Hypatia of Alexandria

  Six years have passed and with them my life. I am now Hypatia of Alexandria, revered throughout the Empire. The books I write, the students I send out, those who travel great distances merely to hear me speak, the praise of Augustine and of Synesius—all this should swell my heart if not my head.

  On this day, Jone believes her Christ was born. Minkah calls it “The Return of the Distant One,” for on this day Het-Heret, without beginning or end, is coaxed back by the sorrowing land, desolate without her. As a Greek, Father prefers to think the sun returns with Persephone, Light bringer, Life giver. By whatever name, cold turns to warm, dark to light, despair to hope. Yet I remain still at heart. Lais died on this day; it is a perfect day for what Minkah and I will do.

  If I have grieved, so too has Minkah. I have lost not only my beloved sister and faithful friend, I have lost inspiration…the one true thing that proved Spirit exists. Minkah has lost love. For more than a year, we did not mention her name. But slowly we spoke, a remembrance, a feeling, and as the years passed and each year we sat at her tomb, it is as if she were with us again. Lais has not died. Not so long as I live and Minkah lives. And each year, I grow closer to our Egyptian, seeing him as the brother Father would have him. There are times when I see him as more, but I shudder away this dishonorable thought. He is my brother. His heart lives with Lais.

  ~

  We walk, Ia’eh and Minkah, Desher and I, towards the
dark ridge of stone where the books lie hidden, awaiting the day they should be found again. I would urge Desher to speed, but cannot, for Lais’ poems reside in earthen jars and these reside in leather bindings—if they should be broken in my need to see sooner done what was promised!

  When Cleopatra ruled, the books numbered four hundred thousand …and this, I think, is true. By the time of Theon of Alexandria, an age in which the books were no longer in the Great Library of the Palace of the Ptolemies, which was also no longer, but housed instead in the “daughter” library of the Serapeum, they numbered three hundred and sixty thousand. Those lost to the burning of Bishop Theophilus amounted to a tenth of these. But no matter if full half were lost, that Minkah brought out from Alexandria so many amazed me then; it amazes me still. He not only carried them here, but brought back an account of where each cave was sited, and which jars were placed in which cave.

  “There,” says Minkah, pointing, “an hour more now, maybe less.”

  I have waited these six years to bring my sister to the caves. Sas, sissa, sex, sesh; no matter the language, six is similar and similarly understood. Only in Greek is it named Hexad for Greeks never hiss sssss, they exhale h.

  The Christians say their god made the world in six days. But they do not know why, though their book asks: Doth not nature itself teach you? The Nation of the Bee builds its hives by the number six, the fish orders its scales, the tortoise its shell, the insect its legs, the snake its skin. In six is the perfect balanced three: structure, purpose, order. Father taught, as did Nicomachus of Gerasa before him, that six is the number of completion.