Down on the oasis floor we come to a small lake of clear water caused by a spring bubbling up from under the earth. Desher rejoices by rolling on its reeded banks, stinking of green. Isidore’s stallion would rejoice in Desher but by my quick hiss, nothing comes of his expectations—as well it should not. Desher was born, as was Ia’eh, in a cold desert far from this heated place, one high and windblown and harsh. Isidore’s horse is thick of neck and of leg; his head coarse and his rump huge. A mating between two such as these would offend Epona, the Goddess of horses. It would offend even the ass of Apuleius.
My feet in cool water, I look up at the Temple of Ammon clinging to its rock as a lizard would cling. Simple in shape, small in size, humble in aspect, it stands some distance from the mountain of mud dwellings, surrounded on all sides by palms and the dusty debris of palms. My history tutor said the oracle existed before Egypt, but about the Temple itself, she confessed she did not know. Too many stories told, too many beliefs to unravel, and each, like Isidore’s gospels, a contradiction of the other. Now that I see for myself—ignoring the fluted columns added so much later to make it “Greek”—it is old indeed.
There is a second temple sited in a second grove, not of palms but of date and olive trees. This one, attaching itself to the first by a precarious causeway two thousand years ago, is covered with graffiti.
Andromeda came to the Temple of Siwa only to be cast into the sea where sea serpents found and ate her. Hercules once came to make sure of his chances before fighting Bursiris. Perseus came before he took the head of Medusa. The Spartan Lysander came twice. Who would come twice if he were disappointed the first time? Here as well came Hannibal. Pindar wrote of this strange and lonely place. Hidden inside the temple is said to be the only copy of his poem.
Is it any wonder Alexander sought it out, or that Olinda offered it as hope?
Since Isidore has yet to speak to me, I say nothing of this, content that my heart quickens. This is what I have come for. If by coming here, my sister’s life is saved, the journey which has lost me precious time at her side is worth every moment it lasts. Light fades from the day. Shadows grow and stretch. There is only now, and tomorrow, and then I rush back to Lais. If she means to die, she will not die without me.
Leaving our horses tied so one cannot reach the other, we make the long climb up narrow stone stairs and the whole way I cough out palm dust. The top is flat and on it the Lotus Eaters have built their mud houses, abutting them against the sides of the temple. Above the door of the temple is carved the face of Medusa, worshipped by the women of Libya as a serpent goddess. And this we also find: the temple door is shut and barred.
Banging on the door produces nothing but noise and an indulgent smile from Isidore. Nothing in Alexandria is as old as this temple. It was ancient when Alexander stood here. Did he too bang on the door?
No time to waste, I must get in. There are no windows. I think to circle the building. There is no circling the building. The sides facing north and west are merely extensions of the sheer rock rising up from the palms far below. To follow the wall south from the columned front door takes me to another wall that extends to the southern edge of the rock.
So here we are, come all this way, and other than a few poor feathered Libyans peering from the doors of their homes of mud brick and rock salt, there is no one to greet me, to allow me near the oracle, not even to collect the “donation” which of course I brought, as much as might be required.
“Someone will come in the morning,” says Isidore, who has spoken only when he must since becoming silent. “So unless you mean to batter down the door, or somehow slip through the openings high in the wall, you must be content to wait this night.”
He is right. I cannot batter down the door. I look up. By Thoth! Far above are two narrow openings over the door. Could I scale the sheer wall, slip through the slits? I calculate the possibility. The rope Desher carries is too short. But were it not, though I am slender, the slits are more slender still.
“Come,” says Isidore, “There must be a caravansary. We will eat and we will rest. At first light, we will return to the temple. If there is still no one to allow us entrance, then we will break down the door. In one way or another, you shall see your oracle.”
Isidore speaks to me! How glad my heart. And how sad. I do not wish to care. I have only so much left to give now that I give all to Lais.
~
It is the men of Siwa who wear woven cords around their heads and through them place long thin feathers. It is the men who curl their beards and simper as they hide behind doors. But it is both men and women who are varied in race. Long banished here are Romans, Greeks, Persians, even sky-eyed men of the north. The women of whatever race are bold, and strangely lovely. Though I am without stature here, and Isidore’s robes and cross mean nothing, all at the inn greet us with smiles and bows as deep as would be granted Alexander. They tell us the guardian of the Temple of Zeus Ammon lives on the far side of the oblique mountain. She shall be summoned this night.
The room we are then offered is communal, there is no other kind. Dozens sleep on pallets scattered over the floor. Isidore and I cannot stay in such a room for all who spend the night are male. So yet again, we make our beds under a grouping together of palms.
Isidore might be asleep. He might not. I am awake and sorely tired of our silence. One who believes is like a lover; he would hear nothing ill of his beloved. Isidore is such a lover whose beloved is Christ. “Isidore,” I whisper, “I have a thoughtless tongue. Forgive me.”
He is awake. I hear him turn on his mat to face me as I continue flat on my back. I hear him say, “I forgive you. The brotherhood is not what you think.”
“It is not?”
“It is much maligned.”
The brotherhood is what I think it; all know this. But Isidore is archpriest, and shielded by Theophilus. He would know only that part that does good in the world. Did he not rush away to help the suffering on the day of the shaking of the earth? Again my reasoning soothes me.
In an oasis far from where Lais lies dying, I would solace myself by speaking of stars, of the nature of man, of the mind, of the Divine Proportion described by Pythagoras. Is it not, I would say to Isidore, a beautiful symmetry that a line divided according to Euclid’s mean and extreme ratio will prove the larger segment to be in the same proportion to the smaller segment as the line itself is to the larger segment? And should one fold the smaller segment onto the larger segment: two more segments with this same ratio will appear, and so on and so on forever! Adding word to word, I would rush on. To look on the human face or to hold a human hand, to lay one’s head as a bride on another and listen to the beat of their heart, to gaze at the wings of a moth or the petals of the lotus, to behold the shape of a shell or be transported by the flow of musical notes—if God has spoken, surely this is that language. In short, I would hide in a tangle of words. But Isidore has so moved his divinely proportioned hand that it now touches mine. I do not move. He lifts my hand to his lips. I allow this. He kisses my palm. This also I allow. And within me something stirs. It is not mind. It is not heart. It is the heat of the body, and it speaks to me the way hunger speaks and its speaking grows louder until it becomes a drum in my ears. Isidore touches now more than my hand. He has raised himself from his side so that he leans over me, pushing the folds of my haik away from my shoulders. And still I allow this. In truth, I raise my body towards his, my mouth towards his, my sex towards his. And when I feel his naked mouth on mine and his sex through cloth on mine, I understand what I feel. I understand what it means. Reason no longer controls what I do. It is feeling that compels this allowing. I feel more than I have ever felt, save grief as my mother died so that Jone might live, or horror as Lais arced over her bed as the Goddess Nut arcs over the earth.
Isidore’s smell is as pepper, his beard tastes of salt, but I allow him even this. What more shall I allow? All that I believe of myself is fading and all I did not know of myself
becomes blindingly bright. How long before what I allow goes so far that I cannot disallow it? I want what comes. I want it. But who is the “I” that wants this thing that animals do, that is done from the highest to the lowest? Where is the “I” that does not want this, that has never wanted this, that knows what will come of it?
Isidore lies atop me now, his length against my length, and his clothing has come away as has mine. We glisten in the heat we make. My skin slides over his—and I will give myself to him. Isidore’s mouth is as near my ear as mine was near to the ear of Lais. “As I have vowed celibacy,” he whispers, “my vows have proved easy. With you, I deny them all. This is the true reason I followed.”
Can I say the same to him?
He raises himself on his arms, arms that are twisted with muscle. He looks down at me, at my face, my neck, my breasts, my belly, the maiden sex his own strength pushes against, and with a groan he pulls me over on top of him so that I now lie looking down at his face. He is beautiful. Even the strong smell of his sweat is beautiful as is the blank need in his eyes. I desire what he would do to me. I desire what I would do to him. But the answer is no, I cannot say the same to him. And there is this: I do not trust what he says. I do not trust what he does. He wants nothing more of me than his stallion wants of Desher.
“Stop, Isidore.”
But he does not stop, rather he raises his face to my neck and I feel his teeth just as I feel the tip of his member begin to slip inside my body.
“Stop!”
The teeth and his phallus dig deeper. The slightest push, and my maidenhead is gone.
“As you are my friend, you will stop.”
But he will not.
The knife that is as hard as he, as long as he, the one I’ve slipped under my mat is in my hand. It rests now against his throat. “I will kill you, Isidore, I swear this. If you take from me what I would not willingly give, I will take your life from you.”
“You lie to me as you lie to yourself. You are not unwilling, merely afraid. And you will not kill me.”
With a quick movement of his arm, a movement I would be prepared for if not for the tumult of my senses, Isidore twists away my knife, and with one mighty grip of his arms, he flips me over and under him, and then he is fully inside me. I gasp with pain. I gasp with a feeling that is not as I expect it to be. I am filled with what is not me, is not welcome, is not pleasurable. As he has nipped me with his teeth, I sink mine in his shoulder so he might pull away in pain, but he does not—not until he goes rigid with some strange sensation, a sensation I do not share, not until he shouts out in private ecstasy and I am suddenly on my feet staring down at him, my sex wet and dripping with what is him, not me, and I know that although he is one who can listen for hours as I speak, he is also nothing more than a man who wants what a man wants. I see now why he is Parabalanoi. It is in him, this taking away.
Staring up at me, he smiles. Staring down at him, I say, “Is this yet another teaching of your Christ, one I have not read?”
His smile does not fade; it drops as rock from a high place. He rolls away from me. His heart may not be, but his body is warm and sated.
I do not return to my mat, but to the small lake where I wash myself, and wash myself. I scrub until I would scream with pain. And then I return to sit up against a palm, and there I remain awake. I no longer follow the tracks in the starry night. My mind is dark. It is chaos. I am Socrates. I know nothing.
~
When we awake, Isidore and I are again silent. But this silence is as the lowermost tomb in the City of the Dead. Yet we rise and we dress and we mount our horses so that side by side we ride to the foot of the rock on which stands the Temple of the Oracle.
A woman awaits us. She is not old. She is not young. She is not interesting. Her hand is out for my “donation” before ever a thing is said and in it I place more than is needed, for I see her eyes widen at the sight of the coin I bring. For this she unlocks the temple door and walks inside. She does not wait for me, but merely assumes I will follow. Thankfully, Isidore does not.
Inside is as simple as outside: a stone courtyard, a small first hall, a smaller second hall, and then the stone sanctuary, smallest of all. In the sanctuary there is nothing more than a short wide pillar seated on the sanded stone floor. The top of the pillar is shaped as a pine cone. The pine cone is an omphalos, said to allow direct communication with the gods. Not well fashioned yet the pillar and the pine cone are most certainly old. The stone they are made from is black, not as obsidian is black, but as sacred black stones are black, stones that have fallen from the sky.
There the woman who holds the keys to the Temple of the Oracle turns and faces me. We stand, she and I, in the small cold sanctuary of timeless stone whose only light comes from the two slits high in the wall. The walls to either side are inscribed with the aged markings of kings. I pay them no heed. The night has entirely changed me. I feel somehow less, somehow more. I have grown older in one night. I am not defiled as the Jews or the Christians would have me. I am not spoiled for my life as a woman, for I do not have a life as a woman. If I had lost an arm, would I not be still Hypatia? When I grow old, will I not be still Hypatia? I am what I am, mortal among mortals, and nothing defiles save what I might do to myself. My body is mine, and with it I shall do as I wish. That which I did not wish for does not defile me. It defiles Isidore.
I do not ask if this woman speaks for the oracle. I do not wait for a sign. I make no obeisance. I stand upright before the cone smoothed with age, and the woman smoothed with oil, and I say, “Oracle, I ask for my sister’s life.”
How long do I wait for an answer? I could not say. Nothing moves. Nothing sounds. There is nothing but the walls and the omphalos and the woman who looks like any woman of Siwa. Yet, it seems something gathers around my head, something without form, yet has weight and has heat. It becomes oppressive…until I might shake my head to release it, until I might weaken and stride from this place. I half turn, and by this I see how changed the eyes of the woman. They seem covered by another lid. They seem not to look outward but inward. They seem as the eyes of Lais when last I saw them.
What she says now is said in a voice I must strain to hear. “Lais does not die. She Lives.”
There has been no light without source, no rites without understanding, no sound other than six simple words. But I did not tell the woman my sister’s name.
My heart, which has risen and set, rises again. Lais lives!
Hypatia
The ride back is quick and silent. Isidore does not attempt to explain nor does he plead for forgiveness, nor does he, in defense, reject me. If he is ashamed or angry or penitent or even triumphant, I cannot tell. He rides at my side, rests when I rest, gives his horse, as I do Desher, most of his water.
I grieve for our friendship.
I am a woman now…or so all would say. I was forced to this and I was not forced. I wanted it to be and I did not want it. In return for my ambivalence, we did as Isidore wanted. By his beliefs, he has committed a sin. By mine, I have done no more than experience a thing I was not yet ready to experience. Would I experience it again? It awakens the flesh, it heats the blood. If done in trust, it bonds the body of one to the body of another. In this act certain mystics find a path to revelation. My answer is yes, I will “become a woman” again—but not with Isidore of Pergamon. He has forced his will on mine. I am more than angered, I feel lessened. I would not be less.
I fret to be away from him.
In the few hours Isidore and I truly sleep, my knives are near. He speaks only at the death of a sand viper found coiled near my sleeping feet. Flicking it up with a stick, he stands on its writhing body as he cuts off its head.
As I break camp, he guts my snake, slipping the soft roll of brown mottled skin into a leather bag hung over his saddle. Seeing that I watch, he says, “This snake will remind me of our voyage to Siwa.”
I say nothing in return, for if I did I would say I would not be reminded o
f his part in our voyage to Siwa.
A few miles out from Alexandria, he quietly turns his horse south so that he might enter the city by the gate near Rhakotis. I will pass through the Gate of the Moon in the wall north of Rhakotis. Either way, we must both pass over the Draco River which is in truth the last of the tremendous Canal of Schedia which twice empties into Lake Mareotis as it flows west from the Canopic Nile, and on which ships make their way from the Nile to the lake or to the sea and back again. In our last moment, we make no farewells, merely urge our horses where we would go, but when I think it timely, I ask Desher to pause so that I might gaze upon the last of him. I find Isidore has done the same.
I am mortified.
~
Desher senses home. Though she has traveled far and she has traveled hard, she eagerly nickers and quickens her pace—and there stands our house, just as we left it. No sign of mourning hangs near the great door on the Street of the Gardens. The stable boy who comes for Desher does not weep as we clatter into the stable yard. Isidore is forgotten on the instant.
I stride through the atrium towards the courtyard around which are the rooms for women. I pass the kitchen where all seems as it should save it is empty, past the dining hall, also empty. No matter. Father is in bed surrounded by paper. Ife is at market. Those she orders about in her soft and patient way are at chores. Jone is in school. And Minkah? Where else should he be but tending to Lais? No matter that Father is forever sending Minkah here and there for more ink, more pens, more paper, more of the sweets he favors, Minkah is with Lais.