Hunger's Brides (38 page)

So, progress on refraction; and tonight we would just see about light and time. I had in mind some tests with candles and as many mirrors as I could connect in a line….

By noon Amanda and I were already on the upper bench, sitting on the dry stone on the south side of the teardrop pool. The view to the west was clear. We could see to the lake's north shore and to the villages beyond. The parent falcons had returned, but rather than bringing food they had been roosting quietly atop one of the pines rising from the lower bench. Aside from the crash of water, which we hardly heard anymore, it was
quiet. A cool spray drifted around and between us as we picked at the great mass of tamales
con rajas
we had brought all this way up for lunch.

Amanda wasn't a bit hungry. What was
wrong?
We were very close to quarrelling. She hadn't wanted to swim in the lower pool for two days now. Or take a
temazcal
.

I was reading the
Pinakes
by Callimachus. So I'd brought her the
Argonautica
, a book by his student. But I could see she wasn't really reading. It couldn't be that she was bored—not now, with the falcons. We had everything we needed here. And what could be more fascinating than Jason and the Argonauts? And yet I felt it. High in my stomach a nettled sensation.

Alexandria was making it next to impossible to keep Greece and Egypt safely apart—the forms and the riddles, the now and then, the parallel lines of our mornings and my afternoons—to keep them from converging. It had even crept into the books I was picking for us to read. Callimachus and Apollonius, though they wrote in Greek, were librarians of Alexandria. I so wanted to tell Amanda of this white hunger that had awoken in my heart, this thing like hope, pushing to be born in me, to join in the great work of deciphering the emblems of universal knowledge, tracing its forms, charting its equations, its infinitesimal changes. In Alexandria the signs had been so hopeful, a revival that was like a foretelling of our own: Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Bernouilli, Torricelli. Even now, this very day perhaps, Magister Kircher in Rome was adding new wonders to a universal museum not unlike Alexandria's, and so resurrecting the dream of the Ptolemies. The great work was happening right now and yet an ocean away, in the studios of the artists and physicists of Italy, the mathematicians and philosophers of France. How could I even begin to tell Amanda of this, and yet how could I not?

Very casually I started in with Alexandria's librarians, the poets Callimachus and Apollonius, the grammarian Aristarchus. Already Amanda was wrinkling her nose. Grammar was her least favourite subject.

“Seven hundred thousand
volumes,”
I put in hastily. Could it even be imagined, such a sum? What was our library here, next to that? With so many books coming in, another library was set up in the temple of Serapis. This new repository, they named the Serapiana—
the daughter library
. I asked Amanda if she did not find this lovely. She made no comment. Scholars began streaming in from all over the world to Alexandria,
so the Academy of Athens founded a daughter Academy there too, under a librarian named Theon. Not a poet, this one, but a powerful mathematician, who taught astronomy and divination.

“Magic, Amanda. He must have been a wizard, like Pythagoras, like Ocelotl—”

She suggested we go down.

Was she even listening? Because this was the best part—this Theon had a
daughter
, Hypatia. He believed she could become a perfect being—
a
girl
, NibbleTooth. Barely eight and she was already helping her father study an eclipse of the sun. I knew I'd caught Amanda's interest, yet she was adamant about not staying. I felt a flush of anger but tried to calm myself by thinking thoughts that, if not altogether wise themselves, were about wisdom.

And then as she started to her feet there erupted a din of screeching falcons such as we had never heard. On the lip of the niche two fledglings were jostling to spread their wings and wildly crying out as if their wingtips were raw nerves in agony. An even greater commotion came echoing back from the uppermost branches of the pine opposite—swaying under the weight of two—but no
three
screeching falcons. A second of the fledglings vaulted now from the niche and came crashing awkwardly into the boughs. Only by clutching desperately at the branch with its talons did it keep from toppling backwards to the ground. The third, still back at the niche, flapped and lunged without letting go until at last overwhelmed by the sheer pitch of urgency of the other four beckoning with shrieks. No sooner had it leapt off the ledge but the parents launched themselves, soon followed by one, then two, then all three.

Amanda and I had come to a crouch, breathless, stunned and all but deafened as they wobbled then swooped screaming back and forth over the bench.

It was dusk when we came down.

In the morning I took the lead and kept it all the way up, with her straggling behind. We worked our way along the river towards the bracelet of stones where we crossed over. A flock of white pelicans was wheeling and diving at the trout pool ahead. From a trot I broke into a run. Each pelican following the next, they dove and rose again, dripping like the paddles of a waterwheel. Gaining height they merged a moment against
the snowfields, then broke into the blue just in time to fold again and plunge to the water like spatulas after their handles.

I spotted an otter where it stood on the pool's far bank, one forepaw raised delicately, muzzle uplifted to sniff the air. I could not have said whether in contempt of their proficiency—for not one pelican in five ever needed to break formation to actually swallow a fish—or in resentment of these interlopers fouling his larder on their way from the lake back to the sea.

By early afternoon we were close to quarrelling once more.

With Amanda refusing yet again to swim or take a
temazcal
, we'd spent the whole morning on the upper bench at flying lessons. She sat, distracted, hardly watching at all as the adults hovered above the fledglings, dipping and turning at the merest tremble of those beautiful wings. Wings the very shape of loveliness and power, tips tapering to an archer's bow, to a single pinion of grace. I watched them now as if to save my life. I watched them with falcon's eyes. As the adults led, all five soon dove and swooped and swept in widening relays and volleys. Wild shrieks like the clash of steel. What were they feeling? Was it joy? If so, how wild the heart to give such voice to joy. Shrieks and shrieking echoes—one after the other—terror, terror to wild exuberance, fierce exultation, to a joy like rage. Their echoes crashed against the face, careened off the water. Tears started from my eyes. I blinked the chill into my lashes. I was the one exalted, exulting in these echoes.

And what had been that terror if not the fear they might never fly at all?

By mid-afternoon Amanda wanted to start down.

We still had at least an
hour
. How could we leave even a minute early, with so much for us here? Two benches, two pools—
five falcons
. With her face so closed off from me, it felt as if all the secret shapes and silent tides of the world were trying to divide us. I began to tell her more about Hypatia, whose father had been teaching her about mathematics and stars, divinations in the flights of birds. But there were things even he did not know, so he let her go off to study in Athens, at the Academy, under the direction of Plutarch himself….

Amanda had collected her things in her satchel yet stood hesitating at the ledge where we climbed back down to the lower bench. I stood close behind her, looking out into the valley. Imagine that journey, Amanda. See, that was the Aegean down there—the near shore was Egypt, the
city on the island was Athens. And see that canoe just entering the
chinampas?
—the galley taking her away from home. We had each other, Amanda, but Hypatia was
alone
. She missed her father terribly, but she was following her destiny. And did Amanda not think I missed Grandfather sometimes up here? Did she think I'd never felt bad about always being here, with her?

Still she wouldn't look at me, as if convinced everything I said was only another trick to delay her. Which was true, but it wasn't because of the falcons and it wasn't just so we could stay late. It was because I was afraid. Could it be we no longer loved the same things—or no longer loved what we shared? This was my punishment for wanting to keep Egypt for myself, concealing it from her.

When she started down without another word I wasn't even angry. I only followed her to the next bench, talking all the while, talking as we gathered up our things, and as we walked down the little stream and under the overarching bushes. I slipped ahead of her to slow her down.

“You know, Amanda, Hypatia became a teacher so famous that men came to her from everywhere, and so beautiful half of them grew sick with love of her. But she was a healer like Ocelotl. Like your mother.” Since I could not stop her I was walking backwards, talking quickly, unsure of the remaining distance to the ledge. “She cured one of these men with a therapy of
music
, a medicine of harmony—do you see? And to another of these lovesick men she showed her soiled undergarments—”

Amanda stopped. Suddenly, mystifyingly, I had her full, angry attention. Her eyes narrowed.

“Why would she do that, Juana?”

Were things so bad between us? She seemed suspicious of everything I said or did.

“Tell me why you said that,” she demanded.

“I said it because she did it, that's why! To show him his idea of beauty was not where true beauty lies.”

I stood facing her, my heels at the ledge, the whole Valley of Mexico—Athens and Alexandria—falling away behind me. I was desperate to talk to her and could not find a single thing she wanted to listen to. And now the tears did come.

Amanda looked at me for a long moment. Her eyes shimmered. But when she still said nothing I turned, embarrassed, to start down.

“Wait, Ixpetz,” she said. I felt her fingertips on my shoulder. “The other song. For the girl. Mother is teaching me….”

I turned back, watched her pause an instant to collect herself. On a ledge overlooking the city on a lake she sang me the song for the newborn girl. And still I did not understand yet why.

My beloved daughter, my little girl, you have wearied yourself, you have fatigued yourself.

Our lord, Tloque Nahuaque, has sent you here.

You have come to a place of hardship, a place of affliction, a place of tribulation.

A place that is cold, a place that is windy.

Listen now:

From your body, from the middle of your body, I remove, I cut the umbilical cord.

Your father, your mother, Yohualtecutli, Yohualticitl, have ordered, have ordained

that you shall be the heart of the house.

You shall go nowhere,

you shall not be a wanderer.

You shall be the covering of ashes that banks the fire,

you shall be the three stones on which the cooking pot rests.

Here our lord buries you, inters you, and

you shall become worn, you shall become weary.

You are to prepare drink, you are to grind corn,

you are to toil, you are to sweat, beside the ashes, beside the hearth.
¹⁶

When she had finished she told me how the midwife takes the girl's umbilical cord and buries it in the earth next to the hearth. The girl does not take the cord with her to the fields of battle. A girl goes nowhere.

“No Amanda—it's what my mother says too but it won't happen to us. Look at Hypatia.” Canoes flashed in the sun on the lake and by the landings where we had always discerned vestals going to their altars. “See, she's already reached the dock. Our city is right there. We've
seen
it—it's too late to keep us here. Somewhere down there is the greatest library of
the New World, as hers was of the Old. Our Academy will be the Royal University and—”

“
No
, Ixpetz. It's not that.”

She hadn't told me about the song to talk to me about our destinies. Or our umbilical cords. There was something else. Well then
what?

Le había llegado su luna …
Amanda's cycles had begun.

“But. Let me
see,”
I said stupidly.

She shook her head, and in her shyness I saw suddenly that
this
was why—all this time. She hadn't been bored with us or me at all, or with Ixayac.

She confided that Xochitl had known it was coming even before it happened.

“If
I
didn't know, how …”

“Mother wouldn't say,” Amanda shrugged. “You know what she's like. But she had the cloth ready for me.”

What cloth?—and why hadn't I known? Why couldn't I see? I wanted to ask again—but no. Tomorrow.

Once again Amanda was the faster one, I thought, as we walked ever more quickly back down to the hacienda. So far ahead I might never catch up. I was the only one left. The only one at the hacienda not quite—still and ever almost—a woman.