Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria (22 page)

Minkah speaks through my awe.
 
“Choose where to place the poems of Lais.”

“But who did this?
 
Who painted these things?”

Shrugging, Minkah removes the jars from his basket of reeds.
 
“Who can tell who?
 
Or when?
 
Or even why?”
 
The earthen containers now sit on a flat bit of rock that shines in the light of my lanterns.
 
On each glazed jar is painted a rose of five petals, and under this white rose of innocence and wisdom is written the name of Lais, all done by the finest hand.
 
And where shall they now spend what might be eternity?
 
By that grouping of poets, or that one?
 
There are too many and our time here is measured by the oil in our lanterns.
 
Lais will decide.

The moment I think this, my eyes alight on a small cave within this large cave.
 
There!
 
The three small jars of Lais will rest before a grouping of nine, the number of eternity, making the twelve that is divine balance.
 
Caring not which poet is in which jar, I know only which poet lives in the jars newly placed here, and that is knowing enough.

As we turn away, beginning the difficult climb back up the rope, I speak this last thing to Lais, my voice echoing.
 
“You will be found, sister, for nothing of beauty is ever lost.”

~

Riding out of the desert, Minkah and I follow a path through the catacombs in the City of the Dead towards the gate in the southern wall of Alexandria.
 
Near it flows the River Draco, no river at all, but a sharp turning north from the Schedia Canal.
 
Near the canal and the gate there is a small shrine to Bastet, gentle protector, the cat-headed daughter of Ra, now forced to honor a Roman soldier, Adrian of Nicomedia, so moved by Diocletian’s Christian martyrs he too was martyred.
 
This I know because of Jone.

Before leaving our house, Jone quoted her choice of scripture to Father, to me, to Minkah, to Ife who of us all listened with interest, to my much valued Jewess Rinat who though offended still smiled, to the lads in the stables and the women in the kitchen.
 
As in any teaching, there is that which is taught those few who can “hear,” and that which is taught the many who cannot “hear.”
 
If there comes a time Jone has ears, so far as I know, it has not come yet.

Jone heard no word of farewell from Father.
 
To compensate for what could not be excused, I babbled, treading on her heels as she left, only to see a small gathering of women awaiting her as they stood on a celestial map—Father had retiled the atrium floor with tesserae of colored stones to honor Lais who well loved his stars.
 
And just as our father had no word for Jone, these had no word for me.
 
My sister, our little mouse, now lives in a house for Christian women near the school Didymus once led.
 
All are either widows or virgins.
 
What it is she does each day I do not know, nor how she supports herself, for we see her so seldom and she asks for so little.
 
Though I receive no reply, I dictate one letter a week.
 
In it, I recount all that occurs in the house of her father, sign with both my name and his, and send off a grateful Ife as messenger.
 
Is my use of Father’s name an error?
 
To commit an error is the root of the word “sin,” a word that lives in the mouth of Jone as a bell lives in a bell tower.
 
If I “sin,” it is with all good intent.

Minkah and I pause in our return from the distant caves to water Ia’eh and Desher.
 
As we too need water, we have both dismounted to drink from the well near the shrine of Bastet.

I breathe into Desher’s soft nostril; telling her of my love in this way.
 
She breathes into mine.
 
Minkah, speaking to Ia’eh as I speak to Desher, touches my arm as he passes.
 
It horrifies as well as thrills.
 
Long asleep, my body awakens.
 
When there is time, I shall think about this.
 
But not now.
 
Not now.

Near the well—set in the shade of a misty-leaved tamarisk tree, one that grows more in stone than dirt—a sound comes, faint as allusion, yet I know it instantly.
 
It comes from the shrine and does not repeat, yet I am away from the well, making for the door of the stolen shrine.
 
Behind me follows Minkah.

A cat has birthed her kittens in this dark deserted place, but only one of five lives.
 
Colored as grasses in summer, striped as the lake through reeds, this last life wobbles far from its siblings, calling for its mother, bumping its nose on the cold stone walls.
 
That four are dead, that one will not live out the day, means the mother too is dead for no cat would abandon her kits.
 
I sweep up the last alive, hold it in the palm of one hand, coo to it.
 
Its eyes are unopened, its open mouth makes only a squeak.
 
Its ears have yet to unfurl.
 
It is frightened and lost.
 
It starves.

This kitten is mine.
 
It has waited for me in the shrine of Bastet.
 
It knew I would come.
 
I know this as I know my name.
 
I know it as I know the name of the kitten that will become the cat who called out to me.

The moment Lais died, Paniwi leapt through her window.
 
“The Bringer” belonged to Lais and she left with Lais.
 
With the passing of these six years, I am now called by a cat of my own.
 
Whether male or female, I cannot tell, but to find it when it would die is an omen of great import.
 
The omen suckling the tips of my fingers is Nildjat, meaning “the contemplative cat who peers into the realm of the spirit.”
 
It is Miw for the name Lais once called me by.

There is written on a Royal Tomb in Thebes: “
Thou art the Great Cat, the avenger of the Gods, and the judge of words, and the president of the sovereign chiefs and the governor of the holy Circle; thou art indeed…the Great Cat.
”

My great cat will be as a cat and speak for the gods.

Slipping my gift into the soft leather bag that hangs from Desher’s saddle, I mount quickly.
 
“Hurry, Minkah.
 
Nildjat Miw must eat.”

~

Spring, 400

If Minkah is away, Father calls on me.
 
Having lived so long in bed, his arms and legs have shriveled.
 
His back has weakened.
 
Olinda, who now comes for an hour once every week, tells me an unfading redness covers those parts of his body touching his bed.
 
If only he would rise again, dress again, walk again—but he will not.

Of Father’s sixty-five years, full nine have been spent on his back.
 
He continues to work, but produces nothing of worth for his mind seems as his back.
 
I cannot force him to do what he would not, but I
can
make him move in his bed.
 
The papers I would show him, I place just out of his reach.
 
The new inks I bring him, the books he calls for, the food he would eat, all these are just far enough away so he must sit up to snatch at them.
 
Olinda instructs me, saying even these small movements do much to keep him in health.
 
I would keep him in health.
 
My mother is gone, Lais is gone, Jone is gone.
 
I would not lose my father.

Today I bring him my cat.

“Ah,” he says, “what is this?”

We watch her make her way up to what there is to see of him: his grizzled head.
 
Female, Nildjat Miw grows quickly, remains yellow, seems to acquire more stripes with the passing of each day.
 
As for her voice, it is extraordinary.
 
It is loud and it is varied.
 
She talks as she climbs.

“She found me, Father.
 
She called out.”

“How fortuitous for you.
 
Listen to her!
 
She is as you were.
 
As a babe, our house knew no silence.”

“Surely not!”

“Hah!
 
There was never a babe like you.
 
Lais was born in grace and had no need to speak.
 
Jone,” and even now, he cannot hide his distaste, and even now I pretend not see it, “barely spoke a word at any age.
 
Who knew what went through her mind?
 
Who knew if she had one?
 
But you!
 
From birth you expressed yourself unceasingly.
 
Your grasp of words increased as drops of rain increase in storms.
 
By one, you spoke in both Greek and Latin.
 
Six months later you added the Egyptian of our servants.
 
Your mother saw the genius that guides you.”

Transfixed not only by what he says, I sit silenced as memory rushes back like water flooding a field.
 
I remember my cradle.
 
I remember my mother’s warm breast.
 
I remember that I could think and that my thinking was wordless but full of images, vibrant and filled with import.
 
I remember I caught at the words I heard, hoarded them for the day I would speak.
 
Though I could not form words, I could wordlessly sing, knowing melody before I knew speech.
 
I remember believing all could do this, and as I learned month by month, year by year, that they could not, I remember fear.

Father is tickling the belly of Nildjat Miw.
 
How shameless she is.
 
“Damara saw the spirit which fills you, the single star that fell as you were born.
 
Reaching out for you in your cradle, she saw, hovering near, a being made of clouds.”

“You have never said this before.”

“Have I not?
 
I thought I had.”

Nildjat has reached Father’s beard and there she bats at it as she bats at balls of fluff she finds on the floor.
 
Father laughs.

A letter awaits me from Augustine which includes a finish to what he first gave me, his
Confessions
, but so long as Father laughs, I would not leave here.

Autumn, 400

Minkah the Egyptian

Theophilus summons me.

This day was bound to come.
 
I am still
Parabalanoi
.

Pah.
 
I see he has given himself a finer house than the one he’d stolen before it—in Alexandria, it is never wise for the rich to draw notice.
 
Also not good to find it sited three streets away from the House of Hypatia.
 
It sits at the edge of the canal and all day long ships from the Great Harbor seeking the lake, or ships from the lake seeking the harbor, come and go.
 
He can’t miss a thing.
 
The floor is tiled with fish.
 
The ceiling is painted with birds.
 
Medusa covers a wall.
 
In the reflecting pool stands a statue of Hestia, Goddess of the hearth.

What excuse was used for
this
theft?

Houses are not all he steals.
 
How long before Hestia is repainted and called “Mary, the mother of God”?
 
But what will he do with Medusa?

I wait in an antechamber.
 
There is a monk robed in brown who stands outside the door.
 
There is a brown-robed monk who stands inside the door.
 
A third monk in brown guards the entrance to the room where Theophilus holds court.
 
In pose, they are as Roman sentries, though they carry no weapons I can see.
 
This does not mean they carry no weapons.
 
One has a face like jackal-headed Anubis, another like the bottom of a pot, the last is as lovely as a cherub.
 
Each is a man of faith, but I would be loath to disturb them, not all three at once.

Someone else, no doubt also summoned, is with the bishop.
 
I hear now and again a word exchanged, now and again the thump of a fist on a desk, or a wall.
 
Whoever Theophilus is with does not please him, nor is he who visits, best pleased.
 
I cannot hear what they say, but I can easily sense how they feel.
 
Anger, frustration, threat.
 
But who threatens whom?
 
It seems first one, then the other.
 
Suddenly the bishop’s door is thrown open, and this is so unexpected, the pot-faced monk drops his knife.

Isidore of Pergamon.
 
I might have guessed.
 
Come from money, well-spoken, well-read, well-liked by some, nicely made in body and face, though no beauty, like me, he is
Parabalanoi
, as brutish as the worst of us.
 
And yet his hands are never bloodied.
 
Many mutter against him.
 
Does he think himself too good for such things?
 
Or is he a coward?
 
I choose coward with a weak stomach.
 
If not for Theophilus, Isidore would long ago been found in an alley, his testicles stuffed in his mouth.

Because we are both
Parabalanoi
, I am given a curt nod of recognition as the angry priest strides past, though his robes of high office are whisked away in case I defile them.

“Minkah!”

Theophilus is recovered.
 
Certainly he seems not to mind that his “favorite” strides from his house.
 
When I come near, he grasps my arm, turning it over to expose the scar that runs from shoulder to elbow.

“I do not forget this was done in defense of me.”
 
I demur.
 
It is true, of course.
 
I
did
save his life when a maddened priest of the Goddess Isis would take it.
 
But best not to preen.
 
Preening is the privilege of power.
 
“Enter.
 
Sit down.
 
Wine?
 
Water?
 
Whatever you’d like.
 
You!”
 
He yells at an Egyptian slave who brings me both water and wine.
 
“It’s been too long.
 
Tell me what have you been doing?”

“If anyone, you know what I’ve been doing.”

I make him laugh.
 
He snaps his fingers.
 
“The spies I have now.
 
A miserable bunch.”

“Indeed.”

“Tell me of the house of Theon.
 
All goes well?”

“Well enough.”

“The old man grows young again, too young.
 
I hear if he grows any younger, he shall need swaddling and a cradle.”

I merely nod at this.

“And Hypatia?
 
She is surely healed of her sister?”

“She will never heal.”

“Women.
 
Too weak for this world.
 
And yet this one is not precisely a woman, is she?”

Though he may not intend me to see what he has revealed, I do see.
 
He means she is so much more than he, he can scarcely comprehend the leap from where he sits to where she stands.

“She is a woman.”

“Only a woman?”

Does he ask if she is subversive?
 
I must be careful.
 
“Only a woman.”

He pretends to think about this.
 
He crooks a finger, heavy with gold, so that his waiting slave pours him wine.
 
“Yet on this day, she is given Alexandria’s chair of philosophy and mathematics.
 
Aside from fanatics and fools who wear at me as stone is worn by water, there is none to doubt that in all the world Hypatia of Alexandria is a queen of mathematics, of astronomy, of philosophy, even of theology.
 
There is a celebration.
 
I am surprised we cannot hear its wretched beginnings from where we both sit.”
 
He pauses.
 
There is nothing to hear but the breath through his nose.
 
He sounds as a winded horse.
 
“Tonight I attend her banquet though some advise me to make my excuses, saying mathematics is no more than divination and divination the handiwork of a tireless demon.
 
Mark my words, bishops from Jerusalem to Dijon to Thebes to Nisibis will ruin this church we build, though it takes them years.”
 
Listening, I can only hope he is right.
 
“Especially that vacillating fool now installed as the Bishop of Constantinople.
 
You have heard of him, called John of Antioch?”
 
At the name, Theophilus stands abruptly, knocking a vase from a table which his slave rushes forward to rescue.
 
“I am the Bishop of Alexandria.
 
It is my right to choose the new bishop of Constantinople—
my
right!
  
Was I allowed this right?
 
No!
 
My choice was ignored.”
 
His choice for bishop of Constantinople, the archdeacon Isidore, has just left the room, as ignored in going as Theophilus was in his choosing.
 
“The devil himself dug up the old turnip, virtually dragged him by his string of a beard from Antioch to Constantinople.
 
In the dead of night, this was done.
 
In the
dead
of night so the faithful of Antioch would not know they had lost him.
 
Why should they care!
 
But they
do
care!
 
And this sanctioned by the Emperor Arcadius!
 
How dare he!
 
How dare even a son of Theodosius, may God grant him eternal peace, slight my office!”

“I have heard of John,” I say, neglecting to mention I know as well of his ‘devil,’ the eunuch Eutropius.
 
Before getting himself killed by hubris, Eutropius controlled both the feeble Arcadius and his empress, the ferocious Eudoxia.
 
Eutropius had spies as numerous as the spies of Theophilus…in other words as many as maggots on a carcass.
 
To gain John, his own choice of bishop, Eutropius threatened to expose the avarice of Theophilus.
 
But for this, Isidore the pretty priest from Pergamon would even now be seated as bishop in the city of Constantinople.

Back to lolling about on a couch of fat pillows, Alexandria’s Patriarch has spilled wine on the red silk of his pallium, but does not notice.
 
“They say John of Antioch speaks so well he sings, that for this he is called John Chrysostom.
 
Eudoxia adores him.”
 
As if biting into a fetid fig, he spits on the carpet, inhales more wine, and dismisses the subject of singing bishops.
 
”What kind of woman is she?”

I do not pretend I believe he means the cunning Eudoxia, Arcadius’ lowborn barbarian wife.
 
I know he means the brilliant though naïve Hypatia.
 
“A woman so far beyond the pettiness of politics, she can mean nothing to those who are not.”

Only the slight widening of his eyes tells me that Theophilus feels insult.
 
But he is much too clever to worry over trifles.
 
I have answered the question he has asked me: is Hypatia a threat or is she not by her rise to even higher prominence and influence?
 
I have told him she is not.
 
Years ago, by careful wording, I placed in his mind the thought that she was harmless.
 
Years have passed and my words become like daubs on walls.
 
I cannot pretend Hypatia weak or witless or over-rated.
 
But I am as yet free to call her harmless by intent.

Theophilus calls for more wine.
 
I content myself with water.
 
A clear head with this man is more than wise, it is imperative.
 
“Do you know why you are not called to serve me these many years?”

He knows I know.
 
We play some tedious game.
 
“So that I might be your eyes and ears in the house of Theon.”

“And you will remain in that house.
 
By you, I know who visits there.
 
I know what is talked of.
 
By you, I know I might know more when and if I need to.”
 
Here, he leans forward, expressing by look all the power that is his.
 
“Minkah, if not for your use in another’s house, you would have found a high place in mine.”

He is sincere.
 
It’s chilling.
 
If I had not found a place in the house of Hypatia, for it
is
her house—the spies of Theophilus who also spy on me describe well the state of the father—would I have allowed myself a place in the house of Theophilus?

To put it more clearly: how low would I sink for money?
 
I regret that I
cannot
answer, not if the amount would buy me ease from shame.
 
How much would I do to save myself?

Our hope of a return to the old ways died six years ago.
 
Theodosius, father of two idiots: Arcadius, now Emperor of the East and Honorius, now Emperor of the West, marched his army of Visigoths and Syrians out from Constantinople and on through the Julian Alps as far as the Frigidus River, there to meet with Arbogast and his army of Franks and Gauls.
 
Without hesitation, Theodosius launched his men at the defenders of the pagan usurper and secretary, Eugenius, Emperor of the West.

In one day, Arbogast crushed him.
 
Kneeling in blood, even Theodosius believed he had lost his attempt to wrest back the Empire of the West from heretics and demons.

That night, before the decisive battle none thought he could win, Theodosius spoke privately with his Christian god.
 
“Father!” he must have cried, “save my Empire for if I lose, you lose.”

At first light, Theodosius rallied what few troops were left him and attacked again.
 
And lo! a great gale came up and blew in the face of his enemy, and the wind blew so hard it reversed the course of their arrows and blinded their eyes with dirt.
 
By this, the lines of Arbogast broke, fleeing in fear, leaving the field to what all described as an astonished Theodosius.