Lais lies in her bed. But she does not sleep, nor does she lie in stupor. Both my sister and her bed shake violently. It is as if another earthquake, one so personal it seeks only Lais, has seized her. As I stand rooted to the floor, her back suddenly arches, so high it seems she stands as the Goddess Nut, balanced only on the heels of her rigid feet and the top of her rigid head. Her neck is stretched so far it seems it might snap, her jaw clenched so tight I fear for her bone. Her arms are flung out from her body, her hands clenched, her nails dug so deep in her palms, she bleeds.
I would scream. I would shout out her name. But Minkah is all at once beside me, pushing me away from Lais. He has taken hold of her, meaning to try and force her spine to straighten. But it does not straighten. What possesses her is strong enough to hold up both Minkah and Lais.
It is now that I scream.
Not until all seems over does Father arrive. Weak now, trembling, he leans on Jone. Jone, who knows his heart, endures supporting a father who has never supported her. All for love of Lais, the servants cluster near the door, only parting for Olinda to pass through.
Although Lais appears to rest, it is not over but merely progressed as it will. No one of us moves, nor makes a sound as Olinda gently opens my sister’s eyes. Both are rolled up in their sockets. What should be white is red. She runs her hands over the body of my poor sweet lamb, her neck, her breast, her wrists. We wait, each of us lost in our own pain, our own helpless horror, until at last, Olinda turns not to Father, but to me. “The masses grow faster. Fluid fills her. I must open her belly.”
Our father suddenly and quietly cries, his tears dropping one by one onto the shoulder of his youngest child. He speaks. “Is there nothing else?”
Olinda, washing the sweat from my sister’s face—asleep now, or unconscious—looks up. “I have seen wonders in my time, cures where there should be no cure, recovery from certain death without treatment, operations which should have killed.”
“I would do anything,” I say, “see anyone, go anywhere. Where do I find wonder?”
“In Siwa.”
Father turns to me, his eyes drained of Theon. “You must go immediately. You must come back immediately. You must save your sister.”
~
The oasis of Siwa is so distant and so difficult to reach, it would take the whole of two nights and one day to go and return—and this, only if Desher and I do not stop but keep up a brutally fast and constant pace. If this would not kill me, it would surely kill Desher though she is as yet young.
It is late Spring. The days are hot. In the desert they are hotter still.
I will do it in two days and three nights. One day only will I give myself at the temple. If possible, less. But not one hour more.
My sister sleeps. Sleeping, she looks as she has always looked, as if no more perfect thing lived. I beg Olinda to ensure Lais does not die before I return. Olinda, a truth-teller, replies that Lais will live as long as she will live. She has been given a potion, but that does not mean a healthy sleep. It means that rather than dying quickly, she dies slowly.
I am a mathematician, a philosopher, an astronomer. The people believe what they are told. I believe nothing, consider everything. All I have ever seen, all I have ever thought, each magical shape and numinous number has told me that life is governed by something. Born into this world for the joy of it or merely as adventure, no matter how brief or how brutal, the greatest minds have believed divinity underlies all.
I do not speak of some separate being, some singular masculinity that judges us, and is sometimes pleased and sometimes angered. How like a demanding father this, and how like cringing children we are made by such fearful imaginings. Nor do I speak of an ultimate plan in which we, like pieces on a gaming board, have no say. But I do speak of intention, by which I mean each man’s unique and perfect destiny, crafted from his own proud, self-directed, divinity. We each of us intend the way of our life, no matter it seems cursed or blessed. It is neither. It is the Self experiencing the self.
Divinity resides in All, Desher no less than myself, the scorpion on a stone no less than Desher, the stone no less than the scorpion. But had I never read the philosopher Iamblichus, never absorbed Plotinus, never found my mind moved by the “Idea of ideas” of Philo Judaeus, never mastered Euclid, if Pythagoras and the wife of Pythagoras and Hermes Trismegistus did not flow through my veins like blood, my sister could have shown me this.
And so it follows that the divine Desher and I go in hope of hearing Lais intends to live by riding to the Temple of Ammon in the oasis of Siwa where the Libyan people live, where they have lived forever, and where no Christian has yet to set foot.
Minkah would go with us, but cannot. Who is there to entrust my sister to other than Minkah and Ife? I will leave at first light. I will allow myself two hours of rest, an hour to prepare what I would take, and the rest I will spend with Lais.
Paniwi lies along the length of her mistress. She does not purr nor does she sleep. She has grown thin. I had not noticed how thin, or how ragged her fur. She does not hiss at me. By this, I know Paniwi grieves as I grieve.
As did Lais while Damara died, I now do. I lean close and whisper into the perfect ear of my perfect sister. “When I return, you will write a poem about Desher and me. Next year, when I am twenty-four and you an old woman of twenty-six, we shall read this poem and laugh. We shall read it once a year, and each time we shall laugh all the more. There will be made copies for every person of worth in the world and they will read your words and slap their learned foreheads for not being as wise as you. But I shall make one more copy and that copy I will place in its own jar which I will take to the caves, and there it will remain until it is one day found in some unimaginable future. And the finder will read your poems and will know that once there lived a being of such beauty and such wisdom she will weep she can never know her.”
I hold my sister’s hand. It is warm with life, yet as motionless as death.
“But she can know you, Lais, by your words she will know you.”
~
Minkah the Egyptian
I wait without rest outside the door of one disguised in body as a woman, but is as Hypatia says: a being of light so bright we are blind to her. When Hypatia is gone to Siwa, Theon must do without Minkah the Egyptian for I shall tend Lais as if she were mine, which she is not; as if I were hers, which I am.
There will come no other time she is in need and I not here, even if I must risk my skin. As for my oath to the brotherhood, pah! Theophilus can keep his money. What I am paid should buy him the skull of the martyred Apostle Mark and even the rope he was dragged to his death with…that is, if there ever was a Mark and he ever showed up in Alexandria, which I fucking doubt.
I have done my self-appointed task. Theon’s map is safe and will not be found. I watch the old infant carefully, withering away under his covers, suckling at his wine. Each day he forgets more. By now the map is a chimera. I have paid Olinda her fee, swearing all other fees will be met. Olinda promises to tell Hypatia she requires no fee, not for one such as Lais. If Theophilus could do as his Christ is said to have done, I would compel him to call Lais back from the Underworld. But Theophilus holds no power other than fear. That he himself fears is the source of the Parabalanoi.
Does the man Hypatia rides with, wretched Isidore, creature of a guileful bishop, tell my darling who he is? I think not. But then, do I?
Listening outside the door, I sense that with one more step, Lais will fall into the Duat. Or fly. It does not matter which. Either way, she will be gone from this place—and that I could not abide.
Hypatia
Even Alexander knew doubt. Seeking Siwa and the shrine of Zeus Ammon, he crossed these same fine sands, this same hard clay, the same red mud that clings to Desher’s hooves. He would find the People of the Oasis whom Homer called the “Lotus Eaters.”
From the back of my red mare all I see are low lying ridges shimmying in the heat and a white sky above
a white land. Staring at Desher’s bright red mane and her bright red ears, I imagine red mud on the immortal hooves of the white-starred black Bucephalus. I imagine the bones of five hundred Persians scattered by jackals like the clay shards of a shattered pot. I do not allow myself to imagine Lais.
Alexander sought Siwa to be proclaimed a god by the oracle…for if god he was, and not a mere Macedonian youth dressed as a general, how easy to conquer a people—especially the people of Egypt.
Alexander was given what he came for. Olinda of Clarus said only that I might find solace there. Father, who seeks divination by mathematics, urged me on though he’d seen no sign. Even so, I would crawl to Siwa. I would ride Desher to the head of the Nile, sail the Irisi, my one small boat with its one small sail, out through the Pillars of Hercules, following the sun down into the sea if by so doing I could catch in a silvered net my sister’s life and bring it home.
I ride again as a nomadic Libyan, dressed in a Libyan haik. I could be man or woman, young or old, rich or poor—who could tell? As well, it protects against the sun which weighs down as a paper-press weighs on papyrus. For Desher, I carry water as the water here, when found, is brackish. There are times when what seems a desert, seems more a shallow sea. There are times when the waters flee until there is nothing left but vast brown ponds slowly turning from thickening puddles to thick red mud. It is this mud we move through now.
I carry two knives. Both are close to hand.
Father would have me perfect? I might ride any horse for any distance. Should my horse fail, I can walk, even run as an Ethiop. My tutors were as varied as that which they taught. One, instructing me in ropes and sails and winds and currents, instructed me also in the use of knives far beyond cutting line or gutting fish. Another, teaching me to climb mountains, taught me what I might eat and what I might drink and how I might keep warm or keep cool under conditions that would normally kill. And one taught me the strange art of the weak man besting the strong. In this, the secret is to use the strength of the stronger, larger, man against him.
So though I ride alone, and am a woman, I am not as unsafe as I might seem. I do not fear my fellow man—I fear the heat. Like the long legged long-tailed cat-dog of the desert, from which was taken the ancient udjat of Egypt, I smear kohl across my top lids and my bottom lids, then down from the corners of each eye along the sides of my nose ending at the edges of my lips. I do the same for Desher. By this we see farther and the sun does not blind us. I eat only dates and only when I must. I rest Desher when I come on a grove of acacias, which are all there is of green growing things, if cheetahs are not resting there before us. If gazelles, we shoo them away. If jerboas, we watch them pop in and out of their burrows, squeaking with delight to see others of their kind, and so to hop madly together about the acacia grove.
But now, as the sun slides behind a high dune of sand as white as salt, Desher and I allow ourselves some few hours of sleep under more acacias. Sponging water over her mouth and her nostrils, exchanging breath for breath, kneeling to clean her hooves of caked mud, I find myself thinking of the sun and of time. She and I have only so much time to do what we do…yet what is time? Philosophers have discussed it until they believe it has substance. They know time as that which is, that which was, and that which will be. But time, having no existence in itself, can only be measured by the mechanics of nature. By the sands in a sandglass, the phases of the moon, by the rising and the sinking of the sun, by the life left in Lais, we count duration. But only by reference to these, and not by any absolute called “time,” do we measure our past, count our days, and estimate our future in the ever present Now.
Something is suddenly here, which Desher knows before me. Raising her head and her tail, she snorts down her nose, as I spin in place, a cloth not a knife in my hand. Far above, sits Isidore the archpriest astride some great blowing stallion, both hard used and both encrusted with mud so that he and his horse are not the coppery red of Desher but the dull red of duller mud huts. I am too alarmed for civility.
“You followed me?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“You followed me or you did not follow me.”
“I learned of your intentions and they became my intentions.”
“Why?”
“You should not ride alone.”
“I am not unaware and I am not unprepared.”
“Even you cannot be entirely prepared for what is overwhelming.”
I study his face, one which has grown dear to me, yet not truly known. “You mean the monks of Nitria who do not love pagans? Or mathematicians? Or women? Who howl at the thought of three in one?”
“I do.”
“These were those who would have me killed?”
“They would.”
“But Theophilus has put a stop to that.”
“Even Theophilus cannot stop a disease. And with things as they are in Rome, many talk against him now.”
“Oh, Isidore. What a teaching you espouse.”
“It is not the teacher or the teaching. It’s those taught. My faith attracts many an unstable heart. Too many.”
“But how should they know I am here?”
“I know.”
“But no doubt you asked and you were trusted.”
“Your house is not as you see it, Hypatia. One or two are not who you think they are.”
“What do you mean? Who do you speak of?”
But he would say no more.
~
By now, Desher and I are somewhere marked by no rock or rise or baked and brittle mud. Even in this place with Isidore, hot and sore and tired, I am relentless. I cannot and would not stop my mind from its babble. And yet, how seductive to fall into sand and sky and sun and there dream as Lais once dreamed—but I am only what I am, a thing of the mind that feels itself separate from sand and sky and sun, questioning constantly all it sees and all it hears. I believe nothing, not even what my senses assure me is so, for fear that by holding to one belief I lose the possibility of another. I am one who pokes and prods the gods, questing for meaning. When I stare up at the stars, I count them and while counting, wonder: are they as the sun? Around them, are there earths? Do creatures who think and who feel look down, harboring such thoughts as mine?
And then there is this: those who desire absolute certainties are prepared to believe anything. I travel with a man who has, of all possibilities, chosen one belief and one belief only, and he has done so on faith alone. This, to me, is more than curious; it is foolish…though I would never say so, not exactly.
“Isidore,” I ask in a tone as light as the breath I have breathed into Desher and she into me, “was your faith taught you by your mother and your father, or did you come to it by some other means?”
My priest has been nodding as he rides. This awakens him. “It came to me as food comes to a man who starves and in order to partake of it, I left the home of my parents for they would not eat.”
“Ah. And how did it come? Was there a sign?”
“Bishop Theophilus fed me the truth and though he does not partake himself, I know in his belly the truth safely lives.”
“But tell me, Isidore, how is it you know this truth to be true?”
“Because the Christ decrees it so.”
“And when he lived, he wrote his truths for all to read?”
“No. Jesus spoke, he did not write.”
“Then those who heard him, they wrote, and what they wrote were the words of Jesus?”
“Yes.”
“I have read all these testaments, and in each of them the words and the actions of your Christ varies. Which, of them all, are the exact deeds he accomplished and which the exact words he spoke?”
“All of them.”
“All? So at one moment he could say he brought peace to the world and in another he brought only a sword? And in yet another moment, he might proclaim love for all, even the least of us, and in another he would consign a worthless servant to eternal torment?”
Isidore’s face turns hard. I knew this might happen. It often happens when I ask questions. I go too far and have offended his reason for his reason cannot answer. And because of this, he questions mine, by saying, “You do not understand.”
“I understand your gospels were not written by men who knew your savior. I understand that as the years widen between his life and theirs, those who write of him change him word by word. Help me understand your faith in this. Help me understand why you can follow what seems a conflicted man whose life and teaching vary from gospel to gospel, and yet is called loving, while you can be also Parabalanoi.”
I am punished by hours of silence. But by Ananke, goddess of fate, I ask because it is my nature to ask. If what I ask cannot be answered, it is then my nature to trouble myself seeking for answer. I will not apologize. I have asked my questions only to hear his answers. That he does not answer is answer enough. Yet, I am sorry. As we ride, I glance over from time to time. Seen only in profile, he is fair.
The land begins to rise. Sand becomes less and rock becomes more. And life surrounds us. Foxes slink by, hares scatter, I see what seems a white brown-necked goat, yet is not a goat. On its head are two sharp horns as long, or longer, than my arm. They spring up and back, ending in a fearsome tip, though the “goat” is as fearsome as…a goat. I have seen these horns before. They hang on the walls of men who kill them only for sport.
Towards evening, as if standing on the tallest step of a flight of tall stairs, we gaze out over the rim of a sunken oasis—finally: Siwa, “The Land of the Palms,” Sekht-am. Seen through the heated air, Sekht-am seems to jump or shift suddenly sideways, or merely to sit and quiver. It is enormous, many miles long and many miles wide, and within it, stands a small mountain. Alexandria’s mountain made to site the Temple to Pan is a perfect cone; this mountain is oblique. With no seeming pattern or sense, its off-center flanks are dotted with homes of mud and shops of mud each held together with palm tree trunks. Near the top of the mountain is a fortress, ruined now, and round the base of the mountain are the palms that give this place its name and the houses their strength, and up from the palms rise everywhere huge rocks like the heads of gods, like the forked tails of sea monsters, like pyramids, like giraffes, like Pharos, like fists. One rock is tallest of all, and on that rock surely sits the Temple of the Oracle.
Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria Page 11
