Unburning Alexandria (2 page)

"Come with me," Synesius repeated. "You will be safe in Ptolemais. Under my protection. I will care for you."

Sierra reminded herself that, in this age, bishops were not celibate. "No," she said. "The Library requires – and deserves – my attention." But it wasn't just Synesius's desire that she wished to avoid, nor the dwindling holdings of the Alexandrian library that she yearned to protect, nor the possible cure for Socrates that she wanted to find. Alcibiades was long overdue in Alexandria.

"Very well." Synesius lowered his head in acceptance of Sierra's decision. "I will spend the night with my brothers – at quarters generously provided by Marcellinus – and leave for Ptolemais in the morning."

"Marcellinus of Carthage? Your importance has grown since the last time we met. That makes me happy." Marcellinus was not only Proconsul of Africa but speaker for the Emperor himself. But she also knew that Honorius ruled only over half an Empire now, and the weaker, crumbling half at that–

"If only my importance were enough to convince you." Synesius reached into his robe, and extracted a small bundle of scrolls. "These were recently recovered in a house that the Nitrians set on fire. They were written by your father."

* * *

Sierra looked up at the pastel ceiling of her bedroom in the Library late that night, and shook her head, slowly. . . . But if Alcibiades was coming here, why wasn't he here already?

Where was he? She asked herself this question every night, as she lay tossing and turning, waiting for sleep. She could put it out of her mind, barely, sometimes, during the day, but not in the night. She looked at the little digi-locket she had picked up in the future and now kept by her bed. It was a painting – by Jean-Baptiste Regnault from 1791, "Socrates Dragging Alcibiades from the Embrace of Sensual Pleasure". A stern Socrates dragged a young fair-haired man from a blonde woman. Nothing about the picture was right. Socrates of course looked nothing like Socrates, Alcibiades bore no resemblance to the real man, and she in all her disguises had never been blonde. But someone, something, had dragged him away from her. . . .

Was he waiting for the time closest to her advertised death – the time of Hypatia's murder as recorded in history – so that he could show up at the last minute, and be sure she, Sierra playing Hypatia, was here?

A very dangerous game, but she was playing it, too. Attracted like some fluttering insect to this hot Venus flytrap of a place and time. And why?

For Alcibiades? Yes.

For finding the elusive cure for Socrates, if it ever existed – even though Theon, its reported author, was gone? Yes. Even though the
biblia
Synesius had given her today had proved to be another dead end, containing nothing new, at least on her first, heart-thumping read.

She thought about those scrolls – and then about all the scrolls still left in this Library. She picked up a scroll she had left near the side of her bed. It was by Alcman of Sardis, a seventh century BC Spartan. He and his poetry were known in her future age, but this work was not. It would not survive the final destruction of the Library by the Caliph Omar some two hundred years from this past.

But Alcman and his world of potential readers were the lucky ones – at least some of his work had endured. Most books that survived into the age of the printing press in the West – the world of Gutenberg in the 1450s and the mass copies it would produce – were home free. Certainly everything that had made it into her digital age in the twenty-first century would likely be available to please and inform and infuriate readers for as long as there were humans on Earth and other planets.

But what of those ancient authors whose very names became soot in the burnings of Alexandria? She had encountered many of their scrolls back here. She thought of another poem – Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" from the 1700s – and its paean to the "mute, inglorious Miltons" who were buried in the graveyard, great poets and thinkers whose works had never made it to the light of day and publication. How many mute, inglorious Homers and Platos lay in the halls outside her room, not mute and unknown now, but soon and irrevocably to be?

No . . . nothing was irrevocable when it came to time travel. . . .

* * *

She heard familiar footsteps in the hall as she perused an unknown variant of Aristotle's Politics early the next morning – who knows, it could have been a copy of one of the scrolls from Aristotle's famed personal library itself, said to be the seed of this great Library of Alexandria.

The steps were too slow to belong to Synesius. She carefully re-wound and returned the scroll to its compartment.

"Hello," a kind voice said to her. William Henry Appleton looked worn. This was the third trip the great publisher had taken back to Alexandria. But he was here, Sierra knew, on behalf of friendship, not business or scholarship. He was probably the best friend she had, in this or any time.

"When you go back to your family and home on the Hudson this time, you should stay with them," she told him, tenderly.

"I wish I had better news for you, my dear. There is no sign of Alcibiades anywhere. It is as if he entered a realm of invisibility when he left the Hippocrates Medical Center that morning in the future."

Sierra nodded. The unhappy news was not unexpected. "Have you eaten?"

"Yes," Appleton replied. "One of the Library staff was good enough to fetch cheese and fruit for me." He patted his stomach. "I think your staff are getting to know me! The food was quite good!"

"I'm glad," Sierra said. "Why don't you rest?" She gestured to her suite of rooms, which included a sleeping chamber for guests, which Appleton used on his visits. "We can talk more, later."

"Yes, I could do with a little nap." Appleton kissed her on the cheek. "It's funny how I feel so at home with you, even with your new face," he said softly. "Spirit does triumph over flesh, I guess." He retired to her room.

Sierra returned to her scrolls. She looked again at several of the papyri Synesius had provided. Nothing about a cure for any illness of the brain, just
scholia
by Theon on mathematics.

This cure was like Alcibiades. Neither seemed to exist in this Alexandria.

Where he was now? Dead somewhere in a time that was not his?

The world, of course, still thought that Alcibiades had been murdered in Phrygia, a few years before the death of Socrates. Little did the world know the infinity of alternatives that time travel afforded. . . . Alternities, she thought that some science fiction writer in the future had called them.

The complexities of time travel still taunted her, as always. Mr. Appleton here three times, Alcibiades none – could that have been just another accident of an imprecise time-traveling chair that Alcibiades had attempted to take back here to some time in the past three years? Would he arrive instead a week, a month, a year from now?

She had become accustomed to this world. As Hypatia, she had developed quite a reputation as a logician, a mathematician, a neo-Platonic philosopher. That part had been easy. She had after all already conversed with Socrates and with Plato. She already had had an interest in Pythagoras, Euclid, and the ancient theorists of numbers, inherited from her mother, a professor of mathematics. She already had read many of the relevant ancient treatises and commentaries in her younger days in the distant future. The mathematics were child's play to her, just as the realities of time travel so exquisitely were not.

She even had written several scrolls under Hypatia's name. She wondered: might some of those have been among the treatises she had read years earlier? Maybe that's why she had been attracted to them. Maybe Benjamin Jowett had been right, after all, that it didn't matter who got the credit for your accomplishments.

She returned to Theon's scrolls. Her father of sorts was an optimistic man. He looked for hope. He had no idea he was glimpsing the first grey rays of what would become the deep, Dark Ages. He would have been delighted to discover a cure for any illness. But none were in these writings.

She rubbed her eyes, and wearily picked up another scroll. This one had been badly damaged by the Nitrian fire. It seemed more of a diary than a scholarly commentary, and she had quickly discarded it last night. It apparently had been written a few years prior to Sierra's arrival. It spoke of Theon's boundless love for Hypatia, his fatherly pride in her great work and potential, and–

Sierra slowly unrolled the scroll further. She reread a section that now caught her attention. She traced the words with her index finger, in the ancient style of reading that she had adopted and now often employed without conscious decision:

"A visitor from the East. We had wine by the harbor. We spoke of the brain, and his belief that it was the seat of the soul. We spoke of an illness that could extinguish the soul. How it might be reversed."

There were no further entries like that in the charred scroll. She flicked the black from the tip of her finger.

A thin reed to hang hopes upon, but better than nothing.

* * *

She awoke the next morning and thought about the scroll. Synesius had given it to her. She needed to question him. Her best chance was to try to meet him at his boat in the harbor – possibly it had not yet left for Ptolemais.

She checked on Appleton – he was sleeping soundly. She left him a note, written in English. It said she would be back soon. That is what she intended. But the words looked like lies as soon as they dried on the page.

She walked quickly to the water. She could see in the sky that it was about eight in the morning. She got lucky–

"Hypatia!" Synesius called out to her. He was standing by his boat, chatting with several priests. "You changed your mind and have accepted my invitation!"

"No." Sierra walked up to him, smiling. "I just need to talk to you, for a few minutes."

The bishop frowned. He looked up at the sky, as a man pressed for time in a future millennium might look down at his watch. "Very well. How can I help you?"

Sierra produced the charred scroll. "This contains some text that might be of great value to me. What can you tell me about the person in whose burned house it was found?"

"Very little, I am afraid. He was a wealthy merchant, of the Jewish faith. He valued knowledge, obviously. I do not know why the Nitrians burned his home – I do not know if they killed him. They are fanatics, as I told you. Which is why I worry about you." He shook his head.

"How did you come to acquire this scroll?"

"A younger Jew gave the recovered scrolls to one of my priests."

Someone from the boat called out to Synesius that it was ready for departure.

Sierra squinted at the sun. "Is it too late for me to change my mind, and accept your gracious invitation?"

* * *

Appleton woke, read Sierra's note, and knew how easily "soon" could be "never" when it came to her.

He left Sierra's quarters, in search of his bearings and a midday repast. The Library gleamed in the morning light. This wing of it still looked beautiful, a publisher's dream come true. Green vines, pale yellow flowers, sun-bleached walls, and all of that knowledge within, like the cream inside an Easter egg. He sighed. What could one person do against the fall of night? He knew Sierra was doing all that she could back here. She had told him she put pieces of scrolls in the hands of what passed for funeral directors in this age. "Include them in the tombs, give the departed something to read," she advised them.

She had preserved four copies of the Andros text in this way, that bizarre dialogue of Socrates that had started all of this. She had not listed its true author – her part in setting the plot in motion, her part in making that fiction real. And it had worked. After all, was not Socrates now in the third millennium with Thomas, safe at least for a little while? A miraculous result!

And was not Sierra now here, in the fifth century AD, and not safe at all? A no less miraculous but potentially horrendous result.

But both proof that at least one of her manuscripts had survived more than 1500 years, to be discovered in an excavation in the early 21st century. . . .

How many other texts had she saved from oblivion, by commending them to the safekeeping of shrouds and corpses? It was too late, Appleton knew, for many. History said the legionaries of Julius Caesar had set fire to the Library, whether by accident or intent. Many scrolls had been lost. And a branch of the Library had been destroyed by the evil Bishop Theophilus in 390 AD.

Sierra had told him how that had wounded Theon's heart. She had seen the father of the real Hypatia looking up at his beloved stars many times, mourning his departed books. "How can an astronomer fight the lowness of humanity here on Earth?" Sierra had repeated his lament. But the worst, Appleton and Sierra knew, was yet to come, in the Islamic fires that were now just two centuries away . . . the third and final blow, which would extinguish the Library of Alexandria for all time–

"Not if I can prevent it," Sierra had quietly vowed to Appleton many times.

Appleton long had wondered if that devious inventor Heron had played any role in fomenting those fires. No, not likely – many of his books had died, would die, in those conflagrations, too. The world would have been very different had more of his books and inventions survived. Appleton was a publisher, and it was difficult for him to imagine any publisher or author setting so many of his own books, and so many others, on fire. And yet, had Heron at some point decided, after writing all of those books, that the world would after all be better off without them, or, more to his liking? Appleton reminded himself that Heron of Alexandria was far more than an author and inventor. Heron created not just words and devices but worlds.

Or were the fires perhaps instigated by someone who did not want the world as diagrammed in Heron's texts to happen? Some foe of Heron . . . someone who did not want Heron's worlds, real and imagined, to come into being?