Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria (15 page)

Staring up at me, he smiles.
 
Staring down at him, I say, “Is this yet another teaching of your Christ, one I have not read?”

His smile does not fade; it drops as rock from a high place.
 
He rolls away from me.
 
His heart may not be, but his body is warm and sated.

I do not return to my mat, but to the small lake where I wash myself, and wash myself.
 
I scrub until I would scream with pain.
 
And then I return to sit up against a palm, and there I remain awake.
 
I no longer follow the tracks in the starry night.
 
My mind is dark.
 
It is chaos.
 
I am Socrates.
 
I know nothing.

~

When we awake, Isidore and I are again silent.
 
But this silence is as the lowermost tomb in the City of the Dead.
 
Yet we rise and we dress and we mount our horses so that side by side we ride to the foot of the rock on which stands the Temple of the Oracle.

A woman awaits us.
 
She is not old.
 
She is not young.
 
She is not interesting.
 
Her hand is out for my “donation” before ever a thing is said and in it I place more than is needed, for I see her eyes widen at the sight of the coin I bring.
 
For this she unlocks the temple door and walks inside.
 
She does not wait for me, but merely assumes I will follow.
 
Thankfully, Isidore does not.

Inside is as simple as outside: a stone courtyard, a small first hall, a smaller second hall, and then the stone sanctuary, smallest of all.
 
In the sanctuary there is nothing more than a short wide pillar seated on the sanded stone floor.
 
The top of the pillar is shaped as a pine cone.
 
The pine cone is an
omphalos
, said to allow direct communication with the gods.
 
Not well fashioned yet the pillar and the pine cone are most certainly old.
 
The stone they are made from is black, not as obsidian is black, but as sacred black stones are black, stones that have fallen from the sky.

There the woman who holds the keys to the Temple of the Oracle turns and faces me.
 
We stand, she and I, in the small cold sanctuary of timeless stone whose only light comes from the two slits high in the wall.
 
The walls to either side are inscribed with the aged markings of kings.
 
I pay them no heed.
 
The night has entirely changed me.
 
I feel somehow less, somehow more.
 
I have grown older in one night.
 
I am not defiled as the Jews or the Christians would have me.
 
I am not spoiled for my life as a woman, for I do not have a life as a woman.
 
If I had lost an arm, would I not be still Hypatia?
 
When I grow old, will I not be still Hypatia?
 
I
am
what I
am
, mortal among mortals, and nothing defiles save what I might do to myself.
 
My body is mine, and with it I shall do as I wish.
 
That which I did not wish for does not defile me.
 
It defiles Isidore.

I do not ask if this woman speaks for the oracle.
 
I do not wait for a sign.
 
I make no obeisance.
 
I stand upright before the cone smoothed with age, and the woman smoothed with oil, and I say, “Oracle, I ask for my sister’s life.”

How long do I wait for an answer?
 
I could not say.
 
Nothing moves.
 
Nothing sounds.
 
There is nothing but the walls and the
omphalos
and the woman who looks like any woman of Siwa.
 
Yet, it seems something gathers around my head, something without form, yet has weight and has heat.
 
It becomes oppressive…until I might shake my head to release it, until I might weaken and stride from this place.
 
I half turn, and by this I see how changed the eyes of the woman.
 
They seem covered by another lid.
 
They seem not to look outward but inward.
 
They seem as the eyes of Lais when last I saw them.

What she says now is said in a voice I must strain to hear.
 
“Lais does not die.
 
She Lives.”

There has been no light without source, no rites without understanding, no sound other than six simple words.
 
But I did
not
tell the woman my sister’s name.

My heart, which has risen and set, rises again.
 
Lais lives!

Hypatia

The ride back is quick and silent.
 
Isidore does not attempt to explain nor does he plead for forgiveness, nor does he, in defense, reject me.
 
If he is ashamed or angry or penitent or even triumphant, I cannot tell.
 
He rides at my side, rests when I rest, gives his horse, as I do Desher, most of his water.

I grieve for our friendship.

I am a woman now…or so all would say.
 
I was forced to this and I was not forced.
 
I wanted it to be and I did not want it.
 
In return for my ambivalence, we did as Isidore wanted.
 
By his beliefs, he has committed a sin.
 
By mine, I have done no more than experience a thing I was not yet ready to experience.
 
Would I experience it again?
 
It awakens the flesh, it heats the blood.
 
If done in trust, it bonds the body of one to the body of another.
 
In this act certain mystics find a path to revelation.
 
My answer is yes, I will “become a woman” again—but not with Isidore of Pergamon.
 
He has forced his will on mine.
 
I am more than angered, I feel lessened.
 
I would
not
be less.

I fret to be away from him.

In the few hours Isidore and I truly sleep, my knives are near.
 
He speaks only at the death of a sand viper found coiled near my sleeping feet.
 
Flicking it up with a stick, he stands on its writhing body as he cuts off its head.

 
As I break camp, he guts my snake, slipping the soft roll of brown mottled skin into a leather bag hung over his saddle.
 
Seeing that I watch, he says, “This snake will remind me of our voyage to Siwa.”

I say nothing in return, for if I did I would say I would not be reminded of his part in our voyage to Siwa.

A few miles out from Alexandria, he quietly turns his horse south so that he might enter the city by the gate near Rhakotis.
 
I will pass through the Gate of the Moon in the wall north of Rhakotis.
 
Either way, we must both pass over the Draco River which is in truth the last of the tremendous Canal of Schedia which twice empties into Lake Mareotis as it flows west from the Canopic Nile, and on which ships make their way from the Nile to the lake or to the sea and back again.
 
In our last moment, we make no farewells, merely urge our horses where we would go, but when I think it timely, I ask Desher to pause so that I might gaze upon the last of him.
 
I find Isidore has done the same.

I am mortified.

~

Desher senses home.
 
Though she has traveled far and she has traveled hard, she eagerly nickers and quickens her pace—and there stands our house, just as we left it.
 
No sign of mourning hangs near the great door on the Street of the Gardens.
 
The stable boy who comes for Desher does not weep as we clatter into the stable yard.
 
Isidore is forgotten on the instant.

I stride through the atrium towards the courtyard around which are the rooms for women.
 
I pass the kitchen where all seems as it should save it is empty, past the dining hall, also empty.
 
No matter.
 
Father is in bed surrounded by paper.
 
Ife is at market.
 
Those she orders about in her soft and patient way are at chores.
 
Jone is in school.
 
And Minkah?
 
Where else should he be but tending to Lais?
 
No matter that Father is forever sending Minkah here and there for more ink, more pens, more paper, more of the sweets he favors, Minkah is with Lais.

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.