Written in the Ashes (57 page)

“My lady?” The voice of the servant girl called softly from behind the door.

“Yes, come in,” said Hypatia, her attention still focused on her work.

The girl entered with a tray that held a bowl of unspiced barley and a pot of tea. Hypatia did not look up. “Set it there.”

The girl hesitated. The table already held four trays of empty teapots beside bowls of untouched food that she had brought over the past few days. There was no more room for another tray. She looked back to Hypatia, her eyes asking what she should do.

“Clear them,” said Hypatia, more curt than she intended. “And please send for a messenger.”

The girl nodded and began to stack the trays.

Hypatia bent her head and went back to her writing. She worked steadily for several more minutes until another knock came at the door. She answered without looking up. “Come.” When the person she presumed to be the messenger entered she began giving orders. “I want this manuscript delivered promptly to the Church of St. Alexander. It is to be seen by no one but the bishop, do you understand?”

“Perfectly,” said the figure, chuckling.

Hypatia looked up in surprise. “Good heavens, Orestes, what are you doing here? I thought you were the messenger I sent for.”

“Perhaps I am,” he said, taking a seat on the chair in front of Hypatia’s desk and setting his cane beside him, a heavy codex cradled in his lap.

“Here, let me help you,” said Hypatia, rushing to his side, but he shook her off.

“I am not dead yet.”

She apologized and sat before him, attentive, as her favorite student had never come to visit her study, even in the years before he was attacked. The manuscript on his lap looked intriguing, but she would wait for him to offer more about it.

He looked around, seeing that the rumors were true. The entire room was in disarray. Pages of geometric equations once tacked to the wall had been blown down by the wind that rushed in from the open window and were laying about the floor, fluttering like so many dying fish. Hypatia’s desk was overflowing with scrolls containing astronomical data, parchments that documented the library’s annual accounting, and numerous smaller codices that held Hypatia’s lecture notes that had been transcribed for her over the years. If there was any order to the chaotic mess, it was completely unapparent.

Hypatia brushed a wisp of hair back from her forehead with her ink-stained fingers, leaving a black smudge over one eyebrow. She looked exhausted. Her cheeks were sunken from loss of appetite, making her eyes appear even larger, but her skin had a glow of health that was derived perhaps more from meditation than her abstemious diet. Orestes, unlike most of Hypatia’s staff, was unconcerned. He knew that when inspiration comes, it is best to flow with it, for the suffering that the body endures in the presence of that holy gift cannot equal the excruciating inner turmoil of a creative mind abandoned by the muse.

“You have finished it then?”

Hypatia shoved the manuscript across the desk in his direction. “See for yourself.”

Orestes leaned forward and took the pages in his hands. The title on the first page read:
Mary, Mother of God
. He scanned through the stack, letting his eyes glance over the pages. It was a small treatise, perhaps fifty pages altogether, unlike most of Hypatia’s work, which tended to be extremely long-winded. “Will you sign it?” he asked.

Hypatia shook her head. “I am not decided.”

“But it bears the seal of the library,” Orestes protested. “Cyril will certainly guess who sent it.”

“Perhaps,” Hypatia said. “I only seek to open him to the possibility that the Christians and our Great Library are not an incompatible alliance. And besides, I am waiting for Alizar’s pardon. I am certain it will come now that you are well and can influence the votes.”

Orestes raised one eyebrow and set the manuscript back on the desk, impressed. “I must admit it is worth a try. Here, I have something for you, actually. It is by our old friend Augustine of Hippo.” He reached out to hand her the heavy codex bound in dark vellum.

She turned the codex in her hands. “Augustine? Have you seen him?” Orestes nodded. “
The City of God: Against the Pagans
. What is it?” she asked.

“You know better than anyone how the pagans have felt after Rome fell.”

“That the fall of Rome was a punishment for abandoning the Roman gods. What does this have to do with Augustine?”

“Augustine has left the teachings of Plotinus for Christianity. His treatise is powerful, Hypatia.”

“He has always been imbued with the spirit. I am not surprised he found Christ.”

“Augustine writes that the City of God will ultimately triumph, even after all our wonders crumble, and we ourselves.”

“His eyes are fixed on heaven then?”

Orestes nodded. “Yes.”

“I will read it at once.” Hypatia set the manuscript down and regarded Orestes. She had not forgiven the bishop for what the Parabolani had done to her friend. Though his stuttering had improved over the years, Orestes was still half-blind. It had been a cruel way to gain the favor of the populace, and sadly, it had worked. The people began to view Orestes as weak. The emperor had even appointed a new praetorian prefect, though he allowed Orestes to retain his title of governor. Orestes, however, seemed quite at ease with his losses. The injury had slowed his mind and his speech, but this annoyed his friends far more than it bothered him. For the first time in his life he felt at peace, studying philosophy and taking long walks on the beach. His grief over Phoebe’s death was behind him, but he had chosen never to remarry.

Orestes let his eyes sweep out the window and across the harbor to the island of Pharos. The Christians had almost completed their new church on the west shore. Through his one good eye he could see the white lime-washed walls glowing in the winter sunlight. They had completed the restored Heptastadion bridge across the harbor just before the previous year’s flood, and begun shipping jungle hardwoods to Alexandria from the upper Nile to complete the church, harvesting what stones they needed from the fallen Serapeum. “You know, it is more beautiful than I expected it would be. I have to give them that,” he said.

Hypatia scowled. “With the empire’s purse at their disposal, how could it not be beautiful? They could have built an entire city for what he allotted. No church should ever be wed to government. Our freedoms will become extinct.”

Orestes’s face fell, the deep creases beside his mouth deepening, his one good eye, black as the iron sea, moistening. “Indeed.”

Hypatia lifted a cup of tea to her lips and took a slow sip.

“Have you considered my offer?” Orestes asked, bringing the subject around to the reason for his visit. He wanted her to be accompanied everywhere by a bodyguard, and offered to personally pay the guard’s salary.

Hypatia leaned back in her chair. “No, I must refuse,” she said, feeling a little guilty. Her chariot was the last pleasure that she allowed herself. Since the trip to Greece, she had given far greater consideration to the austerities that Plotinus had recommended in his writings. Though she had long ago ceased eating meat, she had now given up milk, cheese, and eggs, rarely even seasoning her simple meals; she had given up drinking wine entirely and no longer slept on a mattress, but lay on the hard floor without even a pillow. She had been attempting to purify her soul of all bodily associations and had come to despise the workings of her womb, only to be delighted that with her strict new regiments, her monthly blood had ceased altogether. Her mounting obsession with purification had prompted her to discard her grey philosopher’s
tribon
in favor of a pure white one, a fashion that many of her students were now adopting. Orestes wondered if she was not taking things a bit to the extreme, but what could he do? It was Hypatia’s nature. She seemed to be the living embodiment of Plotinus’ philosophy, and her students adored her even if she offended the masses with her eccentric elitism.

“Hypatia,” he pleaded. “You must be more careful.”

“Orestes, you worry in vain. Things are precisely as we need them to be. Cyril will read my manuscript and his thoughts toward the library will soften. Christ’s mother will offer us an opening into the hearts of the Christians; I have seen it in my visions. An alliance will be possible. I am certain of it.”

“You are playing with fire, my dear,” Orestes warned. “Am I not enough of an omen for you?” He slowly stood from the settee and took three slow steps across the room, dragging one leg, and lifted the Celestial Clock of Archimedes from Hypatia’s desk. “Let me take it,” he said.

“Take it?”

“Yes. If anything were to happen. We must conceal it outside of Egypt.”

“But Orestes, you must think the library will not stand! Alizar has convinced you.”

“You must trust me, Hypatia. I have only your interests in mind. We are the last bastion, and the soldiers will not stand with us if the Christians turn against the library.”

Hypatia stroked the instrument in Orestes’s hands with affection. “Will you put it on a ship?”

“I know a certain priest in Greece who would be an ideal guardian. He is a friend of Synesius.”

“A Christian?”

“A trustworthy fellow.”

Hypatia sighed with frustration. “Take it if you must.”

Orestes set the instrument in its fitted brass case, a covering that would travel with it for the next thousand years. “We will give it to Gideon to carry. He has confided to me that he longs for the sea. This would be a good opportunity. I have a magnificent ship that I confiscated from a pirate. I think I will give it to him in thanks.”

Hypatia nodded. “Now you must leave me to my work. I have a public lecture in three days.”

Orestes’s remaining eyebrow shot up, the other side of his face covered by a bandage worn so as to not frighten people with the discomfiting scar where his eye and brow had been. “Why a public lecture all of a sudden?” he asked.

Hypatia smiled. “Lent.”

Orestes was now thoroughly confused. “Since when do you observe a Christian holiday?”

Hypatia did not answer him directly. “I am speaking about the Virgin.”

Orestes shrugged. “You are divinely mad, you know. A shame I am not Alizar. He is the only one capable of restraining you.”

Hypatia smiled, unaffected. Then she picked up her stylus. “So you will attend?”

“I would like to,” he said. “But you have forgotten the meeting of the city council on Antirrhodus and Alizar’s pardon.”

She laughed, realizing her mistake. “Then come afterward with good news,” she said.

“I will.” Orestes turned back at the door. “Take the Nuapar guards with you in precaution, Hypatia.”

Hypatia nodded, unconcerned.

36  

Hannah awoke from a vibrant dream and sat up. “I know what happened,” she said.

“When?” asked Gideon, rubbing his eyes.

“To the Emerald Tablet. These years it has been haunting me. I know now.”

Gideon, who had been perturbed at such an early arousal, sat up, all irritation discarded.

“Gideon, I want you to try and remember something. When you escaped from the Church of St. Alexander, when Alizar was captured, who in the house was there when you returned?”

“Leitah and Jemir, certainly.”

Hannah nodded. “Yes. But what of Tarek?”

“I cannot remember.”

“I remember that I returned from Pharos to find everyone packing. Tarek was readying the barge down in the catacombs. But how would the Parabolani know that you would return to Alizar’s house and not to your ship in the harbor?”

“Cyril probably sent men both places.”

“Gideon, it was Tarek. I know it in my blood. He stole the Emerald Tablet. He knew that Alizar had been imprisoned before you even told him, do you recall?”

“Surely Tarek would have used the tablet for his own aims if he had such lofty ambitions.”

“The tablet pieces were not out of our sight except for when we returned to Alizar’s and found the house had been raided, do you recall? We separated and searched the house. We left Tarek to unpack the camel.”