Azazeel (19 page)

The days in the Church of St Mark passed monotonously, except for the noisy Sundays. Little by little I submitted to the will of God. Yoannes the priest took care of me from
afar and always recommended that I avoid mixing with the Alexandrian monks, especially those who called themselves the Lovers of the Passion. There was among them a monk advanced in years whom they
greatly feared and some months later I discovered why I stayed clear of his cruel gaze. The old monk was originally from Upper Egypt but none the less he did not like those who came to Alexandria
from there. He came across me one day in the nave of the church, when I had been there about a year. He summoned me with a wave of the stick with which he supported his seventy years. When I
approached him, he whispered, ‘Go back to your country quickly. Alexandria is not the place for you!’ His voice was most like the hissing of a viper and his tone was as sharp as a
scorpion’s sting. I did not understand his intent and when I told Yoannes the priest about it, he advised me to stay away from the old monk. Some days later the servant in the guest wing,
after looking around carefully, told me a hidden secret. ‘That old monk is a Lover of the Passion and one of the heroes of the church. In his youth he was part of the group which assassinated
the bishop of Alexandria, George of Capadoccia, and cut him up with cleavers in the streets of the eastern quarter.’ The servant added in a whisper, after looking round again, ‘That was
forty-eight years ago, in the year
77
of the Martyrs,’ meaning the year 361 of the Nativity.

I asked him, ‘Why did they do that to the bishop of the city?’

‘Because he was imposed on us by Rome, and he was a renegade sympathetic to the views of the accursed Arius.’

In the tedious years I spent in Alexandria I attended classes in medicine and theology regularly, and I was known among the people of the church as someone who prayed often and
spoke little. They had a good opinion of my righteousness and piety. As the days and months passed I forgot what had happened to me in my first days in the city and no longer heard news of Hypatia
or anyone else until those critical days in the year 415 of the Glorious Nativity when murmurs reached the men of the church that the dispute between Pope Cyril and Orestes, the governor of
Alexandria, had flared up. Reports spread that a group of church people had blocked the path of Governor Orestes and thrown stones at him, although he was originally a Christian and in his youth
had been baptized in Antioch by John Chrysostom, and although Christ at the start of his mission forbade the Jews from stoning the harlot, on the famous occasion when he said: ‘He that is
without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.’

But at the time this dispute between the bishop and the governor did not interest me in the least, and I was distracted from it by my daily concerns, my prayers and my tedious studies. I had no
desire to listen to rumours or follow the news, until the name Hypatia started to come up in most gatherings when people talked. I thought I had forgotten her completely but whenever I heard her
name I found myself troubled, and my heart raced at the memory of her.

I hankered to find out what was happening beyond the walls of the church, and I started to follow the stories and the latest developments. I started by asking Yoannes the priest, who rebuked me
and told me to attend only to my purpose in coming to Alexandria. A few days later I repeated my question delicately and he advised me to stay away from the subject and to take an interest only in
what I was in the church to achieve. I asked others and from them I did not obtain any news that was reassuring. But from the gossiping of the servants who came back and forth between the city and
the church, I established that the bishop’s hatred for Hypatia had reached a peak. They said that Governor Orestes had thrown a Christian man out of his council, and the pope was angered.
They said the governor opposed the pope’s desire to expel the Jews completely from Alexandria, after Bishop Theophilus had expelled them to the Jewish quarter on the eastern side of the city,
beyond the walls. They said the governor was supposed to be an ally to the people of our faith, but the devil Hypatia was pushing him in the other direction. They said she operated by magic and
made astronomical instruments for astrologers and charlatans. They said many things, none of them reassuring.

The days that passed were charged with tension until that inauspicious Sunday came, inauspicious in every sense of the word. On the morning of that day, Pope Cyril went off to his pulpit to give
his weekly sermon to the crowds, but his looks were downcast. He did not view his audience with his usual pleasure at seeing them. He bowed his head for a long while, then rested his golden sceptre
on the balustrade of the pulpit and lifted his arms to heaven until his wide sleeves fell back and his thin arms were visible. His fingers were splayed in the air like the tines of a fork, and in a
thunderous roar he started to read the prayer recorded in the Gospel according to St Matthew: ‘Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on
earth as it is in heaven.’

The bishop began to repeat the prayer and the people started sobbing as they repeated the prayer after him. Then his voice turned fiery. ‘Children of God, friends of the living Jesus. This
city of yours is the city of the Almighty Lord. Mark the Apostle settled here, on its soil lived fathers of the church, the blood of martyrs flowed here and in it the foundations of our faith were
built. We have purged it of the Jews, who have been expelled. God helped us to expel them and cleanse our city of them, but the remnants of the filthy pagans are still raising strife in the land.
They spread iniquity and heresy around us, and intrude insolently on the secrets of the church. They ridicule what they do not understand and talk in jest about serious matters, slandering your
true faith. They want to rebuild the great house of idols which was brought down on top of them years ago. They want to revive their abandoned school, which used to instil darkness in the minds of
men. They want to bring the Jews back to the quarter where they used to live, inside the walls of your city. But, soldiers of the Lord, the Lord will never consent to that. He will thwart their
vile endeavours and ruin their sick dreams. He will raise the standing of this great city, through your hands. As long as you are right, soldiers of the Lord, as long as you are right, soldiers of
the Truth, our Lord Jesus Christ spoke truly when he spoke with a tongue of fire, saying, “The truth will set you free.” So, children of the Lord, free your land from the defilement of
the pagans, cut out the tongues of those who speak evil, throw them and their wickedness into the sea and wash away the mortal sins. Follow the words of the Saviour, the words of truth, the words
of the Lord. Know that our Lord Jesus Christ spoke to us his children in all times when he said: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a
sword.”’

The throngs shook with excitement, reaching fever pitch, and in his roar of enthusiasm, Cyril repeated the words of Jesus Christ: ‘Think not I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to
send peace, but a sword.’ The fervour of the crowd intensified, almost to the point of madness. People began to repeat the phrase after him and they did not stop until another voice rang out,
interrupting the chant with a cry like thunder. It was that colossal man who usually brought an end to the fiery Sunday sermons, I mean Peter the gospel reader at the Caesarion church. He sprang
from among the crowd, shouting, ‘With heaven’s help, we shall purge the land of the Lord of the servants of the devil.’ The bishop stopped speaking, and the congregation fell
quiet except for Peter the reader. Then some of them began to repeat his phrase after him, and one of them added this frightening chant: ‘In the name of the living God, we will destroy the
house of the idols and build a new house for the Lord. With heaven’s help we will purge the land of the Lord of the servants of Satan. In the name of the living God, we will destroy the house
of the idols.’

The bishop turned, took up his sceptre, raised it in the air to make the sign of the cross with it. The frenzy of the crowd swept the church and the raucous chants drowned each other out. Reason
had no place and a sense of chaos prevailed, heralding some momentous event. Peter the reader was the first to move towards the door, then groups of people followed him out, chanting a new phrase:
‘With heaven’s help we will cleanse the land of the Lord.’

The nave of the church was almost empty and the voices of those chanting after Peter the reader could be heard from outside the walls. The bishop, followed by priests, came in from his balcony
and I did not know where to go. Should I go back to my room and shut the door on myself, as I always did? Or should I stay in the nave of the church, until it was clear what the Lord’s will
would be? Or should I follow the crowds outside? Without any planning on my part, or any planning of which I was aware, I went out after the crowds timidly and joined them, but of course I did not
repeat what they were saying.

Peter, as leader of the throng, headed towards the big Canopian Way, with hundreds of people chanting behind him. The noonday sun was fierce and the high humidity made it hard to breathe. The
houses shook from the marching and loud chanting of the believers. Some of them had their windows and doors closed up, while on the roofs of others the residents were standing waving crosses. They
stirred up the dust along the street and the merciful angels fled the scene. My heart told me that something terrible was about to happen. I was walking along, pulled by what was happening around
me as though I were in one of the visions in the Book of Habakkuk which warn that the world is ephemeral and transient.

After roaming for some time from one district to another, the number of people chanting and cheering diminished as they dispersed into the side streets. Now they were in dozens, spread around
between various streets, still chanting the same chants. At one moment I thought the purpose of this clamour was to show that the Christians were the most visible and strongest group in the city,
in other words it was an implicit message to the governor, and an open warning to all the inhabitants. But then it changed into something beyond that, something more profound and more horrible.

The rays of the midday sun blazed down, and the air was so stifling it was hard to breathe as I panted after the group of chanters still left behind Peter the reader. I was about to turn back
towards the walls of the church, to my impregnable fortress, when I noticed this thin man with a long head, running from the end of the street and shouting to Peter and those with him, ‘The
infidel woman has mounted her carriage, and she has no guards!’

My heart pounded with sudden panic when I saw Peter shouting and running in the direction indicated by the man with the long head, with the others following him. I ran after them, but wished I
had not. At the small church which is halfway along the broad street leading from the Great Theatre to the eastern harbour, Hypatia’s two-horse carriage came into view, the same carriage I
had seen her mount when she drove away from me three years earlier. The carriage was as it was then, and the horses were the same two horses. Only I was not as I had been. Peter the reader, with
his vast frame, rushed off to catch up with the carriage, shouting as he ran. His followers came on behind, shouting incomprehensible words. A few yards before he reached her, he suddenly stopped
and turned. One of the group rushed to his side with a ghastly scream and pulled out from under his habit a long knife, a long rusty knife.