Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria (31 page)

Finding I achieved some part of the house I have never before seen, I hold my side from the stitch.
 
Praise Mary.
 
Praise Jesus.
 
Praise Theophilus for not being discovered at home
.
 
For now, when I speak of Minkah, and I
will
speak of Minkah, it will not be to complain of my own hurt, my own sorrow, my own shame, but because in so doing I shall save him.
 
Praise God
.

“
Misella landica, nay?
You here again?”

Yet another monk who guards yet another door makes a noise down his long hooked nose.
 
I do not understand his noise.
 
I do not understand Latin.
 
But I understand who it is who has spoken.
 
I turn slowly towards Cyril of Alexandria, my eyes lowered, my hands folded, slowing my breath, slowing the beat of my heart, reining in my wild and shameful needs.

“Yes, sir, I am here.”

The Bishop has not given Cyril the position left vacant by Isidore, turned traitor with the monks of the Nitria, those who love Origen.
 
I do not love Origen.
 
Origen once wrote much as my sister speaks now.
 
Instead a man named Timothy is Archdeacon.
 
I imagine Cyril, who is only a lector, a mere reader and not even a priest, knows why.
 
Surely his own uncle will offer him some greater post…although the only greater post I can think of is the throne of Saint Mark upon which Theophilus already sits.

Aside from the snorting monk, only Cyril and I occupy the place I have come to.
 
He grows no better looking as the years pass, though he seems to grow shorter and stouter, but I begin to understand that the outside of a man is not the inside of a man.
 
I learn this lesson as I have learned all my lessons, with great and lasting pain.
 
Cyril walks round and round me, rather as Hypatia walks round a horse before buying, or Lais once turned a scroll before reading.
 
So young and so wise.
 
So imperious.
 
I am silent before his inspection.
 
“How opportune you should come here today.”
 
I force myself not to turn with him, but to stand quietly awaiting an explanation.
 
“My uncle visits a certain Augustine of Hippo.
 
Your sister knows this man.
 
They exchange letters.”

“Yes,” I say, eager to show off my knowledge, “I have copied as many of them as I could, brought them to…”

I am waved into silence.

“And I am left to govern his daily affairs, a task I find myself well suited for.”
 
He is behind me now.
 
I cannot see him and when I cannot see him there seems a different quality to his voice.
 
It is harsher.
 
Or louder.
 
There is certainly a hitch in it.
 
It seems the kind of voice half-remedied of defect.
 
I know this, having been forced to attend more than I could stand of Hypatia’s classes in oratory.
 
“He has taken with him the best of his servants until his return late in the autumn leaving me with the dregs…”
 
From where I stand I see that the monk whose nose curves towards his mouth does not move so much as a hair.
 
“…which I would rectify.
 
And you, little mule, would, I believe, serve me well.
 
I confess I had not thought of you at all.
 
But now that I do, the choice is perfect.”

How grateful I am he stops going round and round.
 
His circling has unsettled my stomach.
 
But how should I serve him?
 
I have so much to do.
 
I pray.
 
I weave.
 
I visit the poor offering salvation.
 
I weave and I pray and I seek out the unwanted children, all girls, so we might raise them up in God.
 
I weave.
 
Actually, most of my time is spent in weaving.
 
Our priests need robes.
 
Our altars need clothes.

“You will now gather what little you own and move into my house.
 
In the morning you begin as my handmaid.”

“Me, sir?
 
I have…few skills.”

“You are the sister of Hypatia.
 
That is skill enough.”

My thoughts turn to chalk on my skin.
 
I will miss the small cell I have come to love.
 
I will not miss weaving.
 
What a terrible changeable disagreeable day.

What is a handmaid?
 
Why do I ask?
 
I do not speak Latin but I know what
opus mulierum
means—woman’s work.

BOOK FOUR

“I am the Invisible One within the All…I am immeasurable, ineffable, yet whenever I wish, I shall reveal myself of my own accord.
 
I am the head of the All, I exist before the All, and I am the All, Since I exist in everyone.
 
I am a Voice speaking softly.
 
I exist from the first.
 
I dwell within the Silence…And it is the hidden voice that dwells within me, within the incomprehensible, immeasurable Thought, within the immeasurable Silence.”
—Trimorphic Protennoia, The Three Forms of the First Thought

Aboard the Blue Raven,
a Roman grain ship sailing the Great Sea

Winter, 409

Hypatia of Alexandria

I have lost Lais, mother, father, Jone, Rinat, Ife, my well loved Companions who grieved over my unexplained leaving.

I have lost Minkah.

To Synesius, I said I should return, perhaps in a year, perhaps less.
 
I said I would write him, constantly.
 
But it has been more than a year.
 
Four years have passed and Alexandria is still a week away.

Where have I been?
 
Wherever my cheerless whim took me.
 
And with me came Nildjat Miw and Desher for neither could be left behind.
 
By land and by sea, though no longer young, they went where I went.

Sailing first to Crete, then on to Athens and all the while I was as Io—seduced by Zeus, so forced by Hera to wander pursued by a gadfly.
 
Travel is hard.
 
What seemed a week on a map became a month on the swelling sea or over a mountainous road.
 
I found my books in libraries, in the homes of prominent men, in schools where they were required to be read.
 
I was feted and praised and asked to speak.
 
And so I did speak, but not with passion and not on Valentinus or Seth, or on my own work.
 
If not for Miw, I would have ridden Desher back to her high cold desert and there lost us both in the wind and the sand.

In once glorious Athens, I stood before thousands in the Platonic Academy of Plutarch the Younger and his daughter Asclepigenia.
 
My subject was Euclid, the greatest of geometers.
 
Developing a system for measuring the surface of anything, he began with points and lines.
 
A point, he taught, has no dimension of any kind and a line is nothing more than the shortest distance between two points.
 
“Which,” I said, gazing down at the usual rapt faces, “brings us to an interesting problem: without dimension, does something exist?
 
And if a point does not exist, does the line a series of points makes exist?
 
And if neither point nor line exists, what does?”

And so forth and so on.
 
My own voice on my own ear was no more than a distant irritation.

Then came the cities of Neopolis, Pergamum, Ephesus, Tarsus, and more and more…until each was blurred in my mind as the sky is blurred by the horse-driven dust of the ceaseless, countless, barbarians who ride against the empire, both east and west.

For a time, we breathed the fetid air of Rome, a city like its theater: bloody, foolish, and filthy.
 
It is also as its politics: dangerous, complex and personal.
 
It has no library, no central collection for scholars—only the rich owned books which they did not read.
 
We arrived to find it besieged and starving.
 
The poor ate roaches.
 
They ate dung.
 
They gnawed on the corpses of neighbors, for the dead were as numerous as rats.
 
And outside the Aurelian walls, the Visigoths ate and drank and pissed and shouted, taunting Rome’s despair.

As I was who I was: of no interest and no threat to the Visigoth king, Alaric allowed me past.
 
Once in, my hosts, kin to Synesius, said the Pope of Rome would have called on the ancient gods to drive away the Visigoths, but as no one could be found who remembered the rites, no god, Christian or “pagan,” lifted a spectral hand.

We spent, my cat and horse and I, less than a week in that dreadful place.
 
Any longer, and we should have been eaten.

Meanwhile, far to the north, the Emperor of the West, Honorius, was building a chicken coop.
 
Invited to a private audience in Ravenna, city of marshes, I declined, pleading ill health, so was sent a sketch of the coop—an astonishing thing.
 
As large as the triple-decked ships on which we sailed, it could have fed and housed the poor of Rhakotis.
 
As Rome suffered, Honorius tended his chickens.

Along with the sketch came a letter suggesting I rest in his country villa.
 
There, a mile from the camp of the Visigoths, I met a delight of a girl I shall ever call friend.
 
Aelia Galla Placidia was half-sister to both Arcadius, Emperor of the East, and Honorius, Emperor of the West.

Deep in a winter’s night, Miw in my lap, I unburdened myself to the daughter of the man who would destroy my world.
 
I saw nothing of Theodosius in Galla.
 
I saw only great delicacy as she listened in silence until I had exhausted myself.
 
And then she spoke.

“You love a man of the streets, a man of violence in the pay of your enemy, and he loves you…shall I tell you something?
 
I love a man of violence, one who starves and kills my people, worse, he is already married.
 
He has not said he loves me but I would flee with him at a word.
 
We are the same you and I.”

I, in the midst of self-pity and complaint, stopped as if a cliff rose before me.
 
“Who is it you love?”

“Athaulf, brother-in-law to Alaric, King of the Visigoths.
 
I am safe because he keeps me safe.
 
This villa is untouched because he decrees it so.
 
He visits when no one sees.
 
Should I not be ashamed?
 
But love does not know shame.”

I am called wise.
 
Before Galla I felt foolish.
 
She loved who she loved and, as I did not, accepted what she loved.

And yet I did not set sail for home, but in shame and confusion traveled on.

The Imperial summons came in the Christian city of Antioch, called by its citizens “Rival to Alexandria,” but called by me “Capital of Earthquakes” for under my bare feet the ground rumbled as a stomach grumbled, hungry to be fed.
 
I was called to appear before Theodosius II, Emperor of the East.
 
Theodosius II, nephew of Honorius therefore nephew to Galla, was eight years old.
 
Easy enough to again claim illness—but as the true emperor was Flavius Anthemius, the boy’s Praetorian Prefect, and as it was Flavius Anthemius who had commanded me, and as Anthemius was considered by Synesius and Augustine to be a worthy man, I accepted his demand.

The trek west from Antioch in Syria to Constantinople on the land route from Europe to Asia, was long and hard, but my way was paid, a villa was promised, Desher need not walk the whole of the stony spine of Anatolia but could at times, like Nildjat Miw, be carried in a cart bedded with finest straw.
 
The road chosen was seldom troubled: our guard a mere
contubernium.
 
Of the eight legionaries and two servants, I knew by name only their
Decanus,
who was, of all things, an Ostrogoth.
 
Tall and thin as an obelisk, his hair was as wild as Desher’s straw, his skin as pink as Ia’eh’s nose, his name Gundisalv.

Only Gundisalv spoke, and then only to grunt.
 
Such speech soothed me as I need not reply.

We climbed up through the Cilician Gates, the high and narrow pass through the Tarsus Mountains, walking on bare rocks and early snow.
 
Beyond that, we were to drop down again to a fertile plain, and from there ferry over the narrow Bosporus, its inlet Keras, and a “Golden Horn” thick with ships and shouting.
 
Gundisalv conveyed all this by gesture and growling.

In all my travels, I had yet to see so desolate a land…the cold was more a chill of the spirit than of the skin, though the skin was cold enough.
 
Huddling into myself, I dreamed of the color of number, trusting Desher to pick her way through the endless grey rocks under an endless grey sky—when, at a crossroads somewhere in Galatia, she suddenly shied, stepping violently sideways, and I, unprepared, slipped from her back.
 
From one moment to the next the world was a rampage of color.

“
Bagaudae
!” shouted Gundisalv, whose first thought was to scoop me up and dump me into the wagon of straw where hid Miw—but immediately I vaulted back onto Desher, knife in my hand.
 
A knife was not useless, but it was far from enough against bandits who’d appeared on all sides, each waving a sword.

We were only eleven.
 
Those who would solve by theft the problem of poverty in a declining Empire, were twice our number.
 
A thing of hair and rags came at Desher with a
gladius
meaning to take her down at the leg with its long narrow blade, but I was over the side of my saddle, swinging close to the ground, and caught the fellow under the ribs with my knife, so it was he, not Desher, who fell, and while falling, I swept up his sword.

Like baboons, each bared its teeth, each screamed as a wild thing.
 
Gundisalv, cutting away at two who would unhorse him, paused only once at the sight of me fighting beside him.
 
We were fewer but also fitter, faster, better trained, and we rode.

It was over in moments.
 
Those who survived us fled faster than they came.
 
And we were left with one dead and one grievously cut.
 
This one we placed in the wagon with Nildjat Miw who surprised me by curling herself against his blooded shoulder.

All shook their heads with wonder that we lived.
 
To live made them merry and we jogged away as soon as they’d buried their man beneath a pile of stones as high as the belly of his horse.

Gundisalv jogged beside me, exposing black teeth in a stretch of a grin.
 
Staring; he shook his head so that his beard became caught in his cloak and he freed it by hacking off some with his knife.
 
For days, he had said nothing.
 
That day?
 
“A woman who fights.
 
I have heard of women who fight.
 
Far to the north on an island there are women painted blue who fight more fiercely than men.
 
But I have never seen this, I have only been told.
 
And there are women far to the east who come out of the mountains of snow and these women no man would want to meet even if he rides with a hundred men, but again this I have only been told.
 
Not once have I seen for myself.
 
But now I see you and I would cry out with the wonder of it.
 
I saw you mount and ride your horse as the best of our riders…and such a horse!
 
I would pay much for her.
 
I saw you fight with knife and with sword and I, who have never seen such a thing, will never forget it.
 
A woman warrior!
 
I, Gundisalv, could die now and I should be happy to do so for I have seen something worth the dying.”

We rode down from the ridge on which we had been so exposed and into a defile whose sides were steep rock.
 
Bagaudae
were foolish to attack us on the ridge for in the defile our horses would have been less able to turn and to kick out and to rear.
 
But when a man is hungry, these things are harder to see.

We were nine with one dead and one wounded.
 
But the men were easy and talked of stopping soon and eating well, for nothing is as good for the belly as a fight well fought.

The second attack came with no screaming, no baring of teeth.
 
There was only a silent rising up from behind rock of men made desperate by need and I saw our first battle had been only a way to take our mettle and a life or two.
 
Having done both, we were now set upon by not twice as many as we, but four times as many.
 
Desher moved again with the grace of youth, and I with the skill learned from observing Minkah who knew the sword as I know my knife.

And we lost one and we lost two, and I slashed at all who came near and more came and more.
 
If they had taken our mettle, they did not take Desher’s.
 
If I cut down one, she took another with the flash of a hard hoof.
 
If I leapt from her back and under her belly to hamstring one who would hamstring her, she took the neck of some other between her teeth and shook him until he was senseless.