Azazeel (20 page)

I won’t write another word, no.

Lord, still my hand. Take me unto You. Have mercy on me.

I’ll tear up the parchments. I’ll wash them in water, I’ll...

‘Write, Hypa, write in the name of the truth, the truth preserved in you.’

‘Azazeel, I can’t.’

‘Write and don’t be a coward, for what you have seen with your eyes, no one but you will write down, and if you conceal it no one will know of it.’

‘I told Nestorius about it, in Jerusalem years ago.’

‘Hypa, that day you told a part of it. Today write it down in full, write it all now.’

When Peter took the long rusty knife, the driver of Hypatia’s carriage saw him. He leapt like a rat and ran to hide between the walls of the houses. The driver could have
driven his horses into the main street and no one would have been able to catch up with the carriage. But he ran away and no one tried to catch him. The two horses walked around confused until
Peter stopped them with one arm as he brandished the knife. Hypatia leant her royal head out of the carriage window, her eyes terrified at what she saw around her. She scowled and was about to say
something when Peter shouted at her, ‘We’ve come for you, you whore, you enemy of the Lord.’

His hand grabbed at her and other hands grabbed too. It was as if she were floating on a cloud, held up on their hostile arms, and in broad daylight the horror began. The sea of hands attacked
like weapons: some opened the carriage door, others pulled at the trail of her silk dress, others grabbed Hypatia by the arm and threw her to the ground. She had her long hair tied up like a crown
on her head, but the hair fell loose. Peter dug his fingers into it and twisted the braids around his wrist. When she screamed, he said, ‘In the name of the Lord, we will purge the land of
the Lord.’

Peter pulled her by the hair to the middle of the street, surrounded by his followers, the jubilant soldiers of the Lord. Hypatia tried to stand up but one of them kicked her in the side and she
crumpled. She did not have the strength to scream. Peter pushed her back flat on the ground with a violent tug which pulled out some of her hair. He threw her down and brushed her away from him,
stuck the knife in the sash wrapped around his waist, then grabbed her hair with both fists and dragged her behind him. Behind him, too, the soldiers of the Lord started to chant their exultant
chant, as he pulled his victim along.

At that moment I was standing transfixed on the pavement. When they came level with me, Peter looked in my direction with the face of an enormous hyena. Beaming with euphoria, he said,
‘Yes, holy monk, today we will purge the land of the Lord!’ As she writhed on the ground, Hypatia turned over and faced towards where I was standing. She looked at me thunder struck,
her face inflamed with blood. She examined me for that moment and I knew she recognized me, even though I was wearing church clothes. She stretched her arm out towards me and cried out for my help.
‘Brother!’ she said. I took two paces to the middle of the street until my fingers almost touched her fingertips as she reached towards me. Peter the reader was panting in elation as he
walked towards the sea dragging his prize. The others were gathering around their prey like wolves around a baby gazelle. Just as Hypatia’s fingers and mine were about to lock, a hand
stretched out and grabbed the sleeve of her dress, and her hand was flung away from me. The dress ripped and the man who grabbed it raised a strip of it in the air and waved it around, shouting out
Peter’s slogan: ‘In the name of the Lord, we will purge...’, the slogan that became that day the anthem of cheap glory. From the distance a woman approached, her head uncovered,
shouting as she rushed towards us in terror. ‘Sister! Roman soldiers, save us, Serapis.’

Her dress and her hair streamed behind her. We had moved further towards the sea and the woman started to run towards the crowd and then threw herself on Hypatia, in the belief that she could
protect her. Then the unexpected happened. People thrust their hands and arms towards her, pulled her off Hypatia and threw her violently to the side of the street. Her head hit the pavement and
her face was grazed, streaked with blood and dust. The woman tried to stand up but one of the crowd struck her on the head with a hefty piece of wood studded with nails. The woman staggered and
suddenly fell on her back, right in front of me, with blood bursting from her nose and mouth and spattering her dress. When she fell at my feet, I screamed at the shock of the surprise. I knew her
but she did not recognize me. She was shuddering as she breathed her last breaths. And so died Octavia on the day of terror, at my feet, without seeing me.

I stepped back and leant my back against the wall of an old house. I could not take my eyes off Hypatia’s body. The attack on her had raised pandemonium and the soldiers of the Lord were
raving with that fever that possesses wolves when they b ring down a quarry. Their eyes protruded like the eyes of madmen and in their passion they hungered for more blood, more hunting. They
gathered around Hypatia as Peter stopped to catch his breath. One of them laid a hand on her again and others joined in, pulling at the front of her silk dress, which was torn and soiled with blood
and dirt. They took hold of the embroidered dress at the seams and pulled but it did not give way. Peter pulled so hard so suddenly that he almost fell on top of her, but soon he regained his
balance and was back up. He resumed dragging his victim along, while his followers bent down behind him, trying to get hold of Hypatia’s dress. Hypatia, the Savante of the Age, the pure and
holy, the lady who suffered the torments of martyrdom and in her agony transcended all agonies.

At the corner of the street, running parallel to the sea, stood an old woman with grey hair, waving a cross. ‘Skin the whore!’ she cried. It was as if the old woman had uttered a
divine command. Peter stopped suddenly and his followers stopped a moment too, then they resumed their shrill screams. I left Octavia’s body behind me and, aghast, I caught up with the
others, hoping that Hypatia might escape them, or that the governor’s troops might come and save her from them, or that some miracle from heaven might occur, or... I wasn’t far from
them but not too close, and I saw the result of the old woman’s inspired suggestion. They fell upon Hypatia’s dress and ripped it. They fought over the silk dress until they pulled it
off her body. Then they pulled off her underclothes, which were tight around her body, and took pleasure in ripping them up as they hollered. The old woman was shouting at them like a hysteric,
‘Skin her!’ And Hypatia was shouting, ‘People of Alexandria!’ Those too far away to reach her body were shouting, ‘The whore, the witch!’ Alone, I was
silent.

Hypatia was now completely naked, and completely crumbled in her nakedness. She had abandoned hope of deliverance, completely crushed. They brought a rough rope from I know not where and tied it
around her wrist, paid out two or three yards and then started to drag her along by the rope tied to her wrist. Thus I learnt that day what the old woman meant when she inspired Peter the reader
and his followers to skin her.

The streets of Alexandria are paved in stone to stop them getting muddy from the rain in winter. The stones are carefully fitted but not without gaps, and the edges are sharp because of the
hardness of the stone. They tear to shreds anything dragged across them, and if it has a skin they peel the skin off. If it is a human, they skin him. In this way they skinned Hypatia at the end of
their rough rope, shredding her skin off and ulcerating her flesh.

Among the scattered rocks at the edge of the eastern harbour, behind the Caesarion church which was once a temple and then became a house of the Lord where Peter read the gospel every day, there
stood a pile of seashells. I did not see who picked the first one up and brought it over towards Hypatia. Those I did see were many, all holding shells and pouncing on their victim, and with the
shells they scraped the skin off her flesh. Her screams reverberated in the skies above the unhappy city, the city of Almighty God, the capital of salt and cruelty.

The wolves grabbed the rope from Peter’s hand and pulled Hypatia off. She was now a piece of red lacerated flesh, or rather many pieces. At the door to the abandoned temple, at the edge of
the royal quarter or Brucheum, they threw her on a large pile of wood, and when she was dead they set fire to it. The flames rose and the sparks flew. Hypatia’s screams had died away. Her
wails of pain had reached the vaults of heaven, where God and his angels and Satan watched what was happening and did nothing.

‘Hypa, what’s that you are writing?’

‘Shut up, Azazeel. Shut up, damn you.’

SCROLL TEN

I
remember well how I stood, broken and ashamed, at the gate of the abandoned temple. The crowd was breaking up and the tongues of flame from the
wood around Hypatia’s dead body were dying down. The rest of her body, like the rest of the wood, was just charred fragments.

I came out of my stupor to realize I had no idea where I should head. Should I go back to the Church of St Mark, which had been my refuge and my shelter for the past three years, and join my
brothers there in their ecstatic celebrations of conquest and victory over the last symbol of a dying paganism, and declare with them that we rejoiced that the true faith had been proclaimed and
had achieved complete control of the city? Or should I throw myself on the dying embers around the body of Hypatia and embrace it, in the hope of catching a remaining spark of that fire which had
burned inside her, and die with her, making amends for my second act of cowardice? The day my father was killed I was cowardly because I was young and powerless. So why did I shy away from coming
to Hypatia’s aid when she reached out towards me? Octavia tried to protect her, and invoked the help of the god of Alexandria called Serapis, and she ended up a lifeless body cast on the side
of the street, with her innocent blood for a shroud. My father did not call for my help, but Hypatia did... The woman caught in adultery did not ask Jesus for help but he saved her from the
hard-hearted people who wanted to stone her. And me, I did not save the sister of Jesus from the hands of my brothers in Christ, but they are not my brothers, and I am not one of them, nor am I my
old self.

I felt my heart melt like water between my ribs and then turn to air. The sky, the sea, the houses and the embers at the entrance to the burned temple, all turned in my head, and I fainted. When
I came to at sunset, terrified, the cold sent a shiver through my body. The front of my cassock was soaked with water, which those around me said they had splashed on me to bring me back to
consciousness. There were three of them surrounding me – an adolescent boy, a black woman in middle age and a monk advanced in years. I looked around and found myself lying in front of a
small house in the street which runs from the Caesarion church to the burned temple. I did not ask how they had carried me there. I staggered to my feet, and when I stood up my head throbbed with
the sound of Hypatia’s screams, which still filled the sky for me and mixed with the sounds of the sea nearby, the sea from which I once thought that life began and which I later found out
was the end of everything, when I learnt that a time will come when the salty sea will cover the whole world and the colour green will die and life will disappear.