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

  I would not answer that, and Didymus knows I would not.   “You will teach.   You will be greater than any.   You will not falter nor will you fail.   As said Heraclitus of Ephesus: ‘Character is Destiny.’   To fail is not in you.”
    I am surprised when I weep.   I weep so suddenly and so deeply and for so long we are both of us shocked.   Didymus listens to me cry.   He makes no soft sounds to soothe me.   He does not touch me.   He waits.   But crying, I see that I am afraid.   I am so afraid.   How does he know I shall not fail?   With the best will, any can fail.   Any can fall.   To see my sisters in the street, my father, our faithful Ife, even that Egyptian person…to lose our home, our books, our horses, I could not bear it.   But who am I to stop it?
    Now I no longer weep, I sob.   And still Didymus waits.
    And when I am done and sit sniffling and wiping my snotty nose, he says this, “You cannot teach here, of course, but you can teach.   And I know the very place.”
    In an instant, my back is once more straight, my face wiped with the hem of my tunic.   “Where!”
    “It can be done with the penning of a single letter.   He thinks to hire another, but he shall hire you.   Oh, I had forgot!   If this does not cause Theon to leap from that wretched bed, nothing will.   Tell him we have counted the books.   Some are lost, this is true, but most are not.   Those who did not flee the siege secretly removed almost all.”   My cheeks, already pink with tears, redden.   We both know Father was one of those who fled.   “All we need do now is—”
    I am out of my chair to kiss his knot of a nose, to pull his scant beard.
    He finishes.   “—decide what else we need do.”

    Driving my grays home, I am reminded how small the world that is mine, how rare.   I am reminded too how rare is Didymus the Blind.   Of all who call themselves Christian, is it only Didymus who hears the true voice of their Christ?
    I stand between a new and violent faith that would remove all but its own beliefs from the world, and an old and violent faith with many faces, but all blooded with sacrifice.   Passing through the Street of the Glassblowers, I am witness to a sight that is seen not by the week or by the day, but by the hour.   Naked save for a leather pouch to cradle his scrotum and penis, a man holds a knife to the throat of a calf.   His chest like a bowl, yet with a belly in which a full term baby could fit, he is calling out to a god, demanding that god accept the blood of this poor trembling creature in payment for something he desires.
    Between these forces of ignorance, where is there room for the graceful Bast and the loving Hathor?
    Who hears the voice of Lais?

Minkah the Egyptian

    I am called Minkah, but who has named me this, I do not know.   I say I was born in the city of Alexandria, that it was here I first entered this realm of pain and of sorrow, but I would not swear this is true.   And no more than where, do I know when.   This only I know: I am a true Egyptian.   Was I not born poor?   Have I not been, for most of my wretched life, homeless?   If any I could call by name, were they not toothless or lacking an arm or a leg or in some other way afflicted?   If work I could find, was it not menial and when I held out my hand for pay, was I not beaten?
    Yet what is so on one day may not be so on another.   Egyptian I am and Egyptian I remain.   Yet for eight years and more I am as well Parabalanoi, one of the Christian brotherhood.   I am fed and I am clothed and I am sheltered, but I took no holy orders and swore no solemn vows.   No need even to be a cklus of aChristian—a good thing, for if god I have, it is Horus the Elder, god of suffering and poverty—but I am protected in all that I do by a Christian bishop who has use for me and my kind.   The people are told we are merciful, that we bury the dead and care for the sick—and we do.   But in truth we