Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria (16 page)

Synesius, now released, rushes away as Jone rushed away.
 
Not knowing I was gone to Siwa, he had come merely to ask me yet another question, only to find his young strength needed for Lais.

His goodbye is given quickly and from behind his hand.

~

Father is back in his bed, Jone back in her school.
 
Our Egyptian once again tends Father.
 
Ife would be lost without him.
 
And so should I.

I go back to my teaching and my studies, and as I have had greater and greater need of doing, I have hired an amanuensis.
 
Rinat comes to me through Meletus, taught by him in his schul for rabbinical Jews.
 
A daughter of the daughter of one of his friends, she is younger than Jone and is in all things her opposite: quick, slender, open-hearted, dainty in her habits.
 
Rinat is a treasure.

Lais lies attended by Olinda.
 
Minkah is there every moment he can be.

I live in a workroom of books, devices for measuring the positions and movements of the stars, my geometer’s tools, my alchemical apparatus, my counting board.
 
My workroom is reached through a door over which sits a bust of Thoth, god of knowledge and inventor of number.
 
Thoth is a trickster, which is as it should be: numbers are sly.
 
Near him stands an altar to his sister Seshat, Goddess of archives and writing.
 
I write on a table made of stone as green as emeralds, Damara’s table, or make drawings of the device Minkah will create when Lais is not so needful of him.
 
But no more than an hour passes that I do not run to Lais to smile at her, to see her smile at me.

As the oracle of the oasis foretold, Lais lives.

~

On this day at dawn, I allow myself to leave our house for other than lectures.
 
On the back of the fast moving Desher, I pass over the Draco Bridge and under the Moon Gate, then away from the City of the Dead along a road that will not take us out into the desert but along the edge of the lapping sea.
 
I am not filled with death or the hiding of books, not even of the mathematics I must teach this afternoon in the public gardens—as it was Father’s, it is my duty to give free lectures; without a library or secular schools, the poor cannot hope to learn even their letters—I am filled instead with what Father spoke of last night over Chaturanga, an Indian game of war.
 
Tapping his finger on the back of his piece, a war elephant, and eying the piece that stood in its way, my piece, no more than a foot soldier, but a dangerous foot soldier, Father had noted that Aristotle had implied not only an actual infinity but a potential infinity.

Lost to all but the rhythmic pounding of Desher’s hooves and the whoofs of air forced from Desher’s lungs, I think: potential infinity?
 
Infinity there
is
, or infinity there is
not
.
 
If it is, it is actual.
 
If not, how is it potential?
 
I ask as Parmenides of Elea asked: “What would cause it to be when it was not?”
 
And then, what is meant by infinity?
 
Though number itself is inherently a limitation, there is no limit to the number of numbers.
 
Can number therefore describe infinity?
 
Euclid would laugh at such a question.
 
He would say that infinity is not a numeric conclusion we never reach.
 
But I would say: like number, the infinite has no limits of any kind, not of size or shape or duration.

A thought suddenly strikes me, one so fundamentally obvious, I bring Desher out of a full gallop into a dead stop, sending up a spray of sand.

If there is infinity, then all we know must be infinite which would include time and space.
 
Being infinite, neither would have ever begun nor would they ever end.
 
And by this, the world simply
is
.
 
Without a first creation, what need for a first creator?
 
What need to placate or fear that which does not exist?

Desher’s wet red neck mapped with pulsing veins, her huge red nostrils flared wide to gulp air, I sit on my mare in quiet wonder, oblivious to all else.
 
Even Plotinus believed in some sort of generation by virtue of the contemplation of what he called “a prior,” by which he meant that which was before, or outside, reality.
 
But what if there is no “before,” no “prior,” no “cause,” no “inside,” no “outside,” no “end”?
 
What if there is only the now and the experience of now, without beginning, without end, existing only in Mind forever and forever?

A voice, close and deep and intimate, says, “How fortunate I am this day.”

Spun away on the instant from infinite Mind, I come back to the world of turn and turn again.
 
And there before me, mounted on a roach-maned high-tailed beauty dressed in golden blankets with a bridle and reins woven through with gold, sits Theophilus, Alexandria’s Christian Bishop.
 
If Scythians still swept out of the North bringing terror to all, how they would applaud him.
 
As Isidore did not, Theophilus rides what Persians name
wind foot
, a mare.
 
Stallions stop too often, piss where they stop, are given to hubris and sexual excitement and betraying their presence.
 
But mares are subtle.
 
This one has dropped her ears, at the same time pointing them backwards towards Theophilus.
 
She tells me what she thinks of him.
 
He is cruel to her.
 
She is afraid of him.

I look beyond Theophilus.
 
Glance at the cliffs above him.
 
Off towards the endless sands.
 
He seems as alone as I, yet he has brought his god with him, a huge cross of gold set with precious stones, each one as big as a coin.
 
On his gold cross hangs a silver man, the nails in his silver hands small red rubies, the nails in his silver feet a larger red stone.
 
I am made churlish to see Theophilus.
 
I am made churlish to see that he wears around his neck a man tortured by rubies and silver.
 
I ride to be alone.
 
I ride to celebrate that I
can
ride, that Lais is not left at home alone and dying.

I say: “Do not detain me, sir, I have work to do.”
 
And with that, I chirrup to Desher, who leaps instantly forward.
 
Behind I hear the voice of Theophilus, “If you leave, you force me to once again visit your home, for we have business, you and I.”

If any demon I know, it is
this
demon: curiosity.
 
In the year and a half since we spoke in a storage room, Theophilus has kept his word.
 
I am not dead by the hand of some Galilean, as the “pagan” Emperor Julian called his kind.
 
And I have kept mine.
 
I have taught, both privately and publicly.
 
My word was easy to keep, just as I said it would be.
 
Therefore—what business have I with our grand Patriarch?

I am vexed that I would know.
 
But I tap Desher’s glossy red shoulder, wheeling her back towards the blinding arms of the rising sun.

Theophilus is not Greek nor is he Roman nor yet Egyptian.
 
His hair, curled on both head and beard, are like the cliffs that arise from the sand, not golden, not yellow, but the brown of dirt baked hard in the sun.
 
His eyes are not the blue of the sky or the sea.
 
They are the mottled green of small lizards, those who live hidden away in the walls, only to come out at darkest night to call with loud rusty voices.

“You will not visit my home.
 
My sister only now recovers.”

“I have heard this.”

It does not soothe, hearing I am known by this man.
 
But people talk.
 
Events unfold.
 
In action, character becomes clear.
 
I have lived through all the terror he has brought to my city.
 
No doubt I shall live through more.
 
And if I am talked of, so too, is he.
 
Theophilus is ambitious far beyond the word ambition.
 
He would build churches with anyone’s money save his own—but he does not do so to honor the “only begotten son” of his pieced together god who hangs even now around his neck.
 
The churches are monuments to himself.
 
This is not surprising.
 
Few men of ability truly believe what they profess to believe, not even the Emperor Constantine who publicly converted to Christianity, but whose last breath honored the name of
Sol Invictus
through which emanated the radiation of the Cosmic Mind.

My hand ready on Desher’s reins, I wait to hear what he means to say.
 
But I will not ask.

Theophilus does not dally with me.
 
“Isidore is changed.
 
He is harmed in some way.”
 
Isidore?
 
I did not expect this as our subject.
 
“Where once I could trust him in all ways, that trust seems threatened.”

How odd that he and I should feel as one about Isidore.
 
“What has this to do with me?”

“When you went to Siwa, did he not go with you?”

“Did Isidore tell you this?”

“Isidore tells me nothing.
 
He does not need to.
 
Many eyes and many ears and many mouths are mine.
 
Isidore is not the priest he was.
 
He seems distracted.”

“Again, what is this to me?”

“I have plans for my priest.
 
I need him pure.”

I am again under palms on a mat in the sand.
 
Pure?
 
Why do men obsess so over the body and its simple harmless functions, shared by all?
 
Augustine believes the body corrupt, even Empedocles spoke of falling into body.
 
Everywhere the fashion is duality: body and soul are opposed.
 
I do not agree with Augustine or Empedocles.
 
I cannot follow fashion.
 
I am as pure as I think myself to be.
 
If I am impure in the eyes of others, especially this poxed “patriarch,” I care not a fig or a date or a shattered pot.
 
If God, as this one claims, created the world and all that is in the world, how then can anything made by His Hand be impure?

It seems Father’s Beast sees all this in my face.
 
He grows larger.
 
“You know who I am.
 
You know what I can do.”

“I do.
 
My father grows daily more ill from your abundant skills.”

Does this make him smile inside?
 
I think it does, and so thinking, wish I had not given him the pleasure.

“Then you know that only by my word are you allowed to teach.”

I too smile inside.
 
The word of Theophilus is only as strong as the word of Theodosius, Emperor of the East.
 
Eugenius, zealous pagan, ex-secretary, and Emperor of the West, grows stronger, as does his pagan general, Arbogast.
 
And the Western Empire itself?
 
Almost to a man, it desires the return of its gods.
 
What happens there could happen here, for surely Arbogast casts longing eyes on Egypt and its vast supply of grain.
 
Should he prevail, what then could this beast “allow”?

Sitting straight on the back of my noble horse, hoping to appear as noble as she, I say, “Why do you menace me?”

Theophilus too sits upright, maneuvering his mare with his heels so that she arches her glossy brown neck and snorts down her wet black nostrils, causing the golden bells on her bridle and reins to jangle and clang.
 
This is to show me my place.
 
Desher has no bells.
 
She has no tassels or breast collar, no bridle studded with gems.
 
“Only this, schoolteacher.
 
If Isidore appears at your lectures, if he stops you as you would ride by, if he comes to your home, you will not speak to him.”

“And if he speaks to me?”

“You will not listen.”

“And if I do?”

“Then you will be required to cease your teaching.”

I sit for a moment, stunned.
 
It is not that I would see Isidore, for I would not.
 
It is that I am told who I might speak to and who I might not speak to.
 
I would, if I were standing, slap his face.
 
Not by worth but by position, has he power over me.
 
To Kur and its crevasse of dust with his power!
 
And yet, if I cannot teach, how do I care for my family?
 
Physicians, schooling, servants, horses, books, paper, sweets, the services of Rinat…all these are costly.
 
He has left me no choice.