Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria

by Ki Longfellow

  Minkah, his head and ear bandaged, pale green stalks of aloe poking out either side, stands behind Father. He looks ridiculous. But as Lais smiles on him, and Father keeps him near, I say nothing.

  I cannot sit, nor can I simply stand, but must do as I have done since waking: pace—and with me paces Paniwi.

  “Sit down,” says Father. I sit. Paniwi jumps into the lap of Lais.

  Beato of Sais is even more ancient than Didymus. He arrives with a Gothic slave, one strong enough to carry a large wooden box, and before anyone can speak, holds up one tremulous hand. “In the city of Sais, under the Temple of Naith, there are secret halls and in these halls are kept records of Egypt nine thousand years old. I have seen these things and so know my art to be older than Egypt. Older, even, than those who built the temples of Anatolia before Jericho knew its first stone.” As he speaks, he has crept closer to Father who has lowered his bedding. Father’s nose is smeared with soot. As for his eyes, they are as big as the eyes of Paniwi hunting in the dark. “You!” Father and the half-hidden Jone jump, but Beato is addressing his slave. “Lay out what is needed.” The slave, one of those northern creatures covered in hair as an ape is covered in hair, immediately opens the box. I slowly stand, slowly sidle closer to them, the better to see for myself the tools of a true astrologer. As an astronomer, astrology is well known to me, but I have never practiced the art…though I mean to. Father loves divination. He has written a book on Hermes Trismegistus and I have memorized every word of it.

  Beato stares at Father as Father stares at him. Beato is tapping a curved yellow nail on a curved yellow tooth. Lais strokes Paniwi who purrs loud enough to wake one of the many things she has killed. I struggle to resist rummaging through Beato’s wooden box. Especially as in the box is a second box already opened and in this second box resides a mechanism I have only read of. A thing of shining brass gears and pointers and cogs and wheels and balls that describe the movements of the golden sun and the silver moon and the five wanderers and in this way locates their zodiacal positions at any given time. Described by Archimedes, first devised by Poseidonius of Rhodes, now in rare variations possessed only by the rich—Beato of Sais must be a very successful astrologer.

  Beato is saying something to Father, no doubt asking him questions so that he might adjust his machine and construct a view of the heavens on the day and time of Father’s birth in the year 335, when suddenly I hear my name. I look up to find that while I have been studying Beato’s machine, Beato has been studying me.

  I move away from his wonderful machine, prepared to assist if I can.

  His white beard, crusted with spittle, is orange around his mouth. To me, not to Father, he says, “I have no need of a date for you.”

  “But…you have come for my father, not me.”

  “Theon’s course is set and he knows it as well as I do. I waste my time here. But you! By the star that fell from the sky at your birth, you have life yet to choose.”

  I glance at Father, who shrugs, saying, “But such a small star and only one, not a night-sun, or a javelin of evil omen, or a horned star, or a torch or a horse star or one that threw off sparks…”

  Beato cuts across father as a comet across the sky. “No fire that falls from heaven is small. None that comes alone is less than sacred. And this one came with a sound of singing. A great destiny awaits her, a great destiny. It is hers, yet it is not hers, for she as Hypatia shall not see it. All she will know is blood and fire. But before this, she will be greater than any man.”

  I must be making a face as he speaks, as who would not make a face hearing such words, for he quickly turns back to me, adding, “You need not accept your destiny. The stars hint, they do not command. As one called ‘sage’ what say you?”

  What say I? I have no idea. In this moment, I notice Jone. What do I see in her strange little eyes? A feeling: sorrow or a slight or perhaps nothing more than some small digestive pain. In her own way, Jone is as much a mystery to me as is Lais. But where there is a joy to Lais I cannot attain, there is a sorrow to Jone I cannot fathom. I say, “I am no sage. I do not claim such wisdom nor would I want to foretell the future. What great destiny?”

  “One that will engrave your name on the pillars that hold up the sky, that will write it over and over in the patterns made by waves, one that will encode it in the veins of those to come for a thousand years, even more. But the cost will be high. How much would you pay for such a destiny?”

  Now I find something to say, a thing I truly mean. “I would pay nothing, for I have no desire to know my name will live in this way.”

  “You!” Beato of Sais again shouts at his slave. “Close the box. I am done here.”

  And Beato is gone, but not before a glance at Jone, a second glance at the Egyptian, and a third at Lais. At sight of Jone he frowns, at sight of Minkah he seems puzzled, but at the sight of Lais, he sighs. “Child, I offer my pity.” There is one more glance for me and a sigh deeper than his sigh for Lais. And then we are alone, my sisters and my father and I—along with the scorched lover of fanciful tales, the youth who has not only followed me home, but seems intent on staying.

  Suddenly Father cries out. There are no words, only the one cry.

  “Father!” says Lais, immediately on her feet. “What is it?”

  Waving his arms so that his bedding falls away, he wails, “What have I done? What have I said? What fate awaits my children as it waited for their mother? Damara, poor Damara!” And with that he has snatched once more at his bedding, this time throwing it not only over his face but over his head.

  Lais is rounding his bed, coming towards me, and as she does, she commands, “Jone. Fetch a bowl of hot water. And a root of valerian. A large root. Minkah! Bring your sleeping mat. Father should not be alone.”

  Minkah is off on the instant. As is Jone.

  And now it is me to whom Lais speaks, but quietly so that Father does not hear. “He has spoken her name aloud, Miw.”

  What Lais means is that on the day of our mother’s death, a deaf mute was found in the garden. He asked nothing of us. He ate nothing. He did nothing. At the end of three days and three nights, he was gone. Father declared it an omen that Mother would have us remember her only with silence. As for the three days and three nights, Father quoted Nicomachus of Gerasa who declared the triad the form of completion.

  “Father forgets himself. He is ill but we shall make him better.”

  Lais nods. “And the astrologer?”

  Here, too, I know what she means. She asks what I think of Beato of Sais with all his sighing, as well as what he calls my “destiny.”

  “Did you see what was in his box?”

  If my sister is not diverted, she pretends to be.

  Hypatia

  How to explain Lais? Beauty is not enough, for many are beautiful. Graceful, yes, but grace can be found in others. The sweetness of her voice enchants, and the tenderness of her concern for all who meet her is felt by the hardest heart. But no, it is not that which can be seen or heard of Lais that matters, though what can be seen and heard is lovely beyond anything written of the seventh Cleopatra or of Nefertiti, even of Helen held captive by love in Troy. It is that which resides within Lais that cannot be held or touched or, by most, if any, understood.

  My sister is made of air. She is a poet of pure ecstasy. To read what she writes shames me for all my gifts.

  Father, who thinks me sage as do his students, knows nothing of the mysteries if he does not know Lais. And he, like they, do not. None mention her trances; all are embarrassed by them. As for me, I long to learn where she goes, for if not “here,” where then is she? I think if I desire anything, I desire this: to know what Lais knows.

  ~

  Sitting at table this evening, there are only my sisters and me and Paniwi. There is also Jone’s book for Jone has ever a book no matter the circumstance. Throughout the past few days she reads The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius Platonicus.

  Four days and four n
ights have passed and still the streets cry out with rage and with pain. Those who attack, attack from faith, not from “knowing.” They know nothing, as Socrates could have proved to them, but have faith what they do not know is so. This faith in the proclamation of others is so strong, as is the faith of those who defend, that both sides would die for what they do not know they do not know. It is piteous. It is pathetic. It is distressing beyond the work of Palladas which is full of bitterness and gall.

  The Serapeum has not yet fallen, but is besieged on all sides. By order of Bishop Theophilus, what happens here, happens as well in Canopus, a city sited a day’s ride away at the marshy mouth of the Canopic Nile—their temples also burn.

  As good as his word, Father will not leave his room. Beato of Sais said that Father knew his course. If so, his course is no course at all. He lies in his bed. And there, he has informed us, he will stay until the Council of the Ogdoad appears before him so that Set, who is the god of disorder, can explain why such as the Christian Emperor Theodosius through his agent the Christian Bishop Theophilus is allowed to bring so much sorrow to Alexandria.

  Father’s calling out to the gods of Egypt might once have amused. When he was yet young, his god was Thales of Miletus and the god of Thales was water. Water underlay all, not divinity. But Thales saw only what he was looking at. What he was not looking at was invisible to him—which explains how he could be walking in the desert at night, counting the stars, and fall directly into an open well. In time, Father came to concern himself with Platonic form. Woven through and through his work is the seven crystalline heavens and each is a heaven of mathematical precision proving the divine in all. Water has been replaced by heavenly ether.

  But Father’s demand to see the gods of Egypt does not amuse, and it does not amuse us because it does not amuse Father. He is more than serious, he is adamant. Lais and I peek hourly in at him. Where is the father we knew? Where the man who spoke before eager crowds, who enthralled students come from everywhere to hear him, who stood higher than any in the halls of learning, who came home each night to preside at table and laugh…so much that even Jone might smile.

  He has, at least, allowed the Egyptian to undress him, to wrestle him into a sleeping robe, and then to be covered. As soon as the covers touched his chin, he pulled them over his head. To speak with him, we must raise a corner and whisper. He seldom answers. He must also have allowed Minkah to shelve his rescued books for they no longer litter the floor.

  Lais picks at her food, feeding most to Paniwi. I merely stare at mine. Reading, Jone has eaten two sweet buns and a bowl of soup.

  And how shall I describe Jone?

  She cannot sail. She is made ill by the sea. She cannot swim. She sinks like a slab of cement. She will not ride. Horses frighten her. She refuses to walk or to climb in the heat or the rain or the wind. In truth, if she need not, she barely moves a muscle. If she has friend at all, it is the African Ife, first among servants in the House of Theon, a house she runs calmly and precisely. Jone reads. She will sit for hours, rooted deep in the earth like a tree, devouring whatever she finds, preferring the epic poets and the novelists, and in the midst of the text, will stop and think about what she reads until one assumes her asleep, an assumption often correct. She has no taste for mathematics but even these texts she samples. Other than reading and eating and sleeping, Jone does nothing unless forced to do so.

  Lais once said: “I have too much imagination, Jone too little.”

  At this, I asked, as would anyone, “And I?”

  “Just enough.”

  I pondered her answer for days. I ponder it still.

  Father is tall. Lais is tall. Even I am tall. But Jone is short and soft and round. Our mother, who was neither short nor tall, was not round. Or was she? I have one memory and one memory only. At two, I clutch at Lais, who is four and clutches me. Ife holds us both as we watch our mother die. Even then, Lais was Lais. All throughout, she whispered in my ear, slow sweet sounds to keep me from rushing away, to keep me from climbing into our mother’s bed. Her room reeked of blood, as hot and as thick and as red as the shrieks of her agony. On the third and last day, by the light of guttering candles, Jone was cut from our mother’s lifeless body.

  Her shrieks have receded from my mind, her size and her shape and her voice, but I shall never forget the sight and the smell of my mother’s dying.

  Though Father has never said so, he would never say so, to lose his wife for Jone was so terrible a blow, even now he finds it hard to look long at his last child.

  Does Jone know this is the cause of her father’s disregard? Perhaps. Perhaps not. We are born who we are. What we birth ourselves into can touch us and turn us but it cannot make us what we are not.

  And who am I?

  If Father had had a son, just one son, instead of three very different daughters, it would be this son he spent his life trying to make “perfect.” But fate delivered him—me. This, it is true, discouraged him, but it did not stop him. Founded on the ideal forms of Plato—all “above” is perfect; all “below” a copy—Alexandria’s great mathematician insisted on rendering one of us ideal.

  Lais would not do. She was already perfect with a perfection he did not understand and could not train. Jone was no choice at all for numbers bored her, languages other than Greek did not interest her, and she refused to do other than read what she and she alone chose to read.

  This left him only me. I would know all the sciences from mathematics to astronomy, would speak in a dozen tongues, write as Sappho, orate until men wept with the beauty of my thoughts. I would be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom for its own sake, a historian who would know that nothing ever changes, but instead follows a simple repeating pattern of human need or greed. Father decreed also that my body would be as well tended as my mind. He saw me as Zenobia, Queen of Syria. A century before I was born, Zenobia led the men of Syria and Palestine and Anatolia into the Black Lands, and when Rome would seize Egypt back, she had its prefect beheaded for such impertinence. The woman could walk for days, even if she must scramble up one side of a perilous mountain and down the other. She could ride hot-blooded horses without bridle or bit, using only pressure of knee and hand, or by a soft voice close to a soft ear, knowing them intimately by caring intimately for them.

  Father would have me do more. I would row and I would sail, sensing my way by the winds, by the currents and by the stars.

  There would be no one like the person he and the best tutors in the world would make of me. Or such was his plan, for Father hated the material and emotional chaos of this world and longed for the pure, immortal, and unchangeable world of the ideal form. Like Plato, he believed that harmony of shape would reveal the sublime.

  But a mind is not clay, and though Father was, is—even in bed hiding his head—a master mathematician and a master astronomer, he was not a master potter. A mind cannot be formed into whatever shape a man might choose. A mind has a mind of its own. Certainly mine does. My mind seems often too small for all it contains. There are times it seems too large. And when I ride or sail or stare at the stars or wander in infinite number I become afraid of who, or what, I am…as if I were a wild thing, a mistake.

  Damara should have lived. She should have given him his son.

  Lais, who would normally leave the table as quickly as I—for we each are fond of solitude and even more fond of our work—does not leave. Instead, she scratches Paniwi’s arched back, and speaks. “What if Father remains, as he swears he will, in bed?”

  I know immediately what she means. She means that with the loss of the Serapeum, so too is Father’s position as Head of the Library lost. Lost as well is his public funding. If he does not form his own school or join others like himself to teach privately—and how shall that happen from bed?—who then will pay the servants and our taxes and the upkeep of our garden and the hundred and one other expenses that keep us in our fine house in the Royal Quarter? Only a few streets away, under the Ptolemaic walls, the
once rich Bruchion District is in ruins. This is the doing of the Emperor Aurelian. That Zenobia should capture Egypt so enraged him, he destroyed every park, every building, the whole of the royal docks, even the tomb of Alexander, and no one, not for the whole of a hundred years has rebuilt it. But here on the Street of Gardens between the Street of the Soma and the deep water canal cut from the Port of the Lake to the Royal Harbor, sits the house that has been ours for close on two hundred years. We cannot lose it now, not while Father lives.

  Chin propped in my hands, I watch Ife offer Jone a third sweet bun. So much older, yet as small as Jone, Ife openly favors Father’s youngest child, a thing which delights my heart. But it is Ife who makes me ask: who will keep us fed? From outside comes the sound of stable lads bedding down our horses for the night. These sounds should comfort, but who will pay them? Who will buy grain for the horses? And what of the scribes we hire? Who will copy our books?

  Lais lifts one perfect hand, opening its soft white palm; how empty it is, how languid, how useless for practical effort. The sight of her tender palm puts seal to my fate. If destiny I have, it is to care for Lais. “Could I sell my poems? Would anyone buy?” For pity, I could open my veins.

  Though Lais is first to speak of such things, I have already considered them. As well as having become “perfect,” among us I am also the most practical. Not for a moment do I imagine, as Father cleaves close to his bed waiting for the gods to explain themselves, such thoughts have entered his head. “If Father does not get up, I shall take over all of his classes.”

  At this, Jone, slowly chewing, actually raises her head from her book. “You? But you are barely twenty and one. Who would listen to you?”

  “Ah, Panya, at seventeen, Cleopatra ruled Egypt and Origen was head of the Catechetical school Didymus heads now. At sixteen, Alexander was regent of Macedonia, and by scarcely twenty-three king of Egypt. Didymus teaches that his Jesus argued with scholars when he was but twelve. They will listen. And they will pay to listen.”