Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria Read Free Page B

heart burning?”
    My demands are as they would be, for I am yet young and the assumptions of youth are cruel.   Her answer is as it would be, for this is Lais.   “What was so, will be so again, Miw.”   She calls me “Miw” which means cat, just as she calls our little sister Jone “Panya” which means mouse.   I watch as she rises, as she lights candles, one by one.   “What seems lost, is never lost.   Though it appears not, life is as the Goddess Ma’at, harmonious.”   And here she turns and I see the fire in the streets reflected in her eyes.   “As my Miw forgets nothing, remember now that birth and death are as a play watched over by the sisters Uadjet and Nekhebet.   To live is to act a play, a clever ever-changing never-ending play, and no actor is ever other than hero…”
    “Hero?”   My voice is as an ill-played flute.   “But the Christians of Bishop Theophilus mean to burn the work of minds so much greater than their own.”
    “So it seems.   But each is hero to himself.   In life’s play no theme is neglected.   To us, for now it seems tragic—”
    “But it is tragic, Lais!   The books!   The books are burning!”
    “And to those who burn them, life seems triumphant.   Who is to say which play is the truer?   Ours or theirs?   All are true.”
    “We are the truth.   We are the lovers of wisdom.”
    “And the others?”
    “They are the haters, the ones who fear.”
    “Do they?   Or do they merely fear we will hurt what they love?”
    “But what do they love?   How do blood and pain and horror and burning come from love?”
    “What they love is not this life, Miw, but the one that follows.   If you were they: poor, ignorant, suffering, without privilege of any earthly kind, might you too not listen to this new faith which promises so much after death?”
    As ever, my sister astounds me.   Not Father and not Father’s friends who are all Alexandria’s greatest living scholars speak as she does.   Lais is no scholar.   She seldom reads other than poetry.   She attends no lectures save, on occasion, mine.   She is an authority on nothing others count as reasoned or logical or organized into one system or another.   They would not see her thoughts as worthy or even as sane.   My sister is theodidactos ; God-taught.   Lais writes poems and only I am their reader.   I take them in as I take in breath, and by so doing, I realize I know nothing.   In their reading, I am reminded over and over that Lais knows something I do not know and do not know how to know.
    Gazing out over a proud Alexandria whose face is red with fire and whose ears are filled with screams, I press my head against hers.   If I press hard enough, I too might understand…although the “understanding” of Lais often seems cruel to those who cannot understand—a truth I daily feel.
    Is it because my head rests against hers that I remember the words of the Jewish rebel Akiba ben Joseph, who lived far away and long ago?   “The paper burns, but the words fly away.”
    Until this moment I had not noticed the tablet that rests in my sister’s lap.   Leaning over, I read:
    I am the Luxurious One
Losing all to gain All.
I am She, alone, who wanders in Darkness.
The deeper I fall, the closer come I to Light.
    Lais frowns at her words.   “I have not finished this…”
    My sister, who cannot or will not speak ill of any, does not or will not speak well of herself.   But I can.   “Beauty is never finished.”
    As reward, Lais kisses my mouth.
    ~
    My shutters are closed not for the noise—though the noise is as great today as it was yesterday—but for the smell.   I cannot bear the stench of burning.
    The siege of the Serapeum goes on.   The killing there and in the streets is as great as it was.   Do I act as if it is no more than any other day?   Do I return to my work on the Elements of Euclid?   The papers cover my desk.   The tools I use are scattered nearby.   At the far