Hunger's Brides (39 page)

As we came through the kitchen door, I asked Xochitl, wasn't ten terribly early?

“I'm almost eleven,” Amanda said.

Xochitl didn't pretend not to understand what I meant. “Early, yes. Only by a year or two.”

“Will my time be soon?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Your sister Josefa was twelve.”

“Xochita, how do you know these things?”

“This sorcery, Ixpetz, is called doing laundry.”

“What about María, then?”

Xochitl shook her head. “I should not have told you Josefa's secret.”

“Xochita, please. Don't make all the secrets here from
me.”

Her eyes widened slightly at this—she looked not so much startled as stung. “There is no reasoning with you when you are like this.”

“Like what?”

“Moyollo yitzaya.”

Your heart turns white with hunger
.

I told her I didn't need another proverb, I wanted an answer.

“Three months.”

“Ago?”
María was
sixteen
. I might be five years away?

It was unthinkable.

T
hat night I read until tears of rage streamed from my eyes. I had hardly slept in days and yet as I read now, it felt more like dreaming.

Heresy. This new thing was in some way that still escaped me the collision of Egypt and Rome, and Alexandria was where they met. I thought I understood that in Rome treason had become heresy, but now in Alexandria heresy was being made treason. Of all places,
Alexandria
, a crossroads for all the faiths of the ancient world, a city much like Mexico. Heresy—it made no
sense
, for what could Xochitl's parable of the trout have meant but that all faiths, all visions of god, were only the masks of what cannot be known?

I could not understand this hateful book, much less how it was making me feel. But perhaps I had begun, in some small way, to blame Ixayac. There, too, everything was changing, everything verged on transformation. Coming upon us so swiftly, it had overtaken even Amanda. It shimmered all about us, and the magic of stopped time no longer felt so sovereign. Late that night there came to me the idea of making some ritual to mark the changes. I knew a lot about rites and initiations into secret ceremonies but I didn't
know
any, or they wouldn't be secret after all. I did know that the Eleusinian mysteries had five levels. Purification was the first, knowledge was only the second. Next came the riddles of a third level, then a fourth, where there was nothing more to know except through silence. And that was all I knew.

Well, then Amanda and I would have to make up our own ritual. Surely that was better anyway. It should be like a coronation, a rising into loveliness through holy fire, a secret theatre of sacred gestures. In the hours before dawn the magic lantern of my mind swirled and smoked with the
possibilities—rites of the Maenads and Corybantes, ox blood and
hippomanes
. I would bring the
Metamorphoses
and mark all the transformations—but no, that would be the whole book. We'd read just the stories of Thetis and Proteus who changed bodies as naturally as the flooding Nile redrew the shapes of the fields. Indeed this was the message of the Egyptian Hermes: that the flow of god's truth plunged all around us in a swift flood, and that to bind its meanings into a single form was to dam that flood and incur the most terrible violence. Such a torrent must be touched only in tangents—riddles, enigmas, proverbs and chants. Secret initiations.

We didn't have seven hundred thousand volumes to choose from, or the painted books of Ocelotl, but I had Exodus and Proverbs. In Proverbs I found lovely lines.

Doth not wisdom cry? and understanding put forth her voice? She standeth at the top of high places, by the way in the places of the paths …

… hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother: For they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head…
.

Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird
.

With just such incantations as these might Amanda and I deflect the tides of events into channels of our design, just as we had done all around our house the day of the forest fire. At first light, I marked the passages with green strips of ribbon to show Amanda. I went to meet her, and there coursed through me a tremendous flood of energy. As we reached the far end of the cornfield a half-dozen deer leapt the fence just ahead of us. I chased them a little way up the path shaking a fist in mock threat, then turned and waited for Amanda. I began talking about our ritual, and tried not to take her silence for disapproval. It wasn't so unusual for her to be quiet. But how very awkward talking was while in the lead—on narrow paths, head turned to trail a kite-tail of ceaseless patter, glancing back every so often to gauge the effect only to lurch over some tree root risen up to trip me.

Today she truly looked tired. Had she slept? I asked. No, not very much.

We were sitting quietly on the flat rock beside the little waterfall. “Aren't you going to swim?” she said after a while.

“Not if you're not,” I said. She shook her head just perceptibly. “Did Xochita tell you, you shouldn't when …?”

“No, she said it would be all right to.”

“Well, if you don't want to that's fine.”

She looked down a moment and smoothed her skirt over her knees.
Then she glanced up slyly and asked if I still wanted to see the cloth. For a moment I thought she meant the one she was wearing, so I tried not to look disappointed when she brought three out of her satchel instead. They were pretty much as I might have imagined, but three?—four, counting the one she wore.

“Mother said today there'd be a lot.”

We decided to climb to the upper bench to check on the falcons. She had always been swift, always graceful, but had rarely seemed delicate—and clumsy, never. As we probed next to the waterfall for our handholds and footholds, I heard from below me a sandal scuff as her foot slipped. When she reached the top after me, her right knee was scraped.

We set down our satchels and took up station at the lower end of the teardrop pool. The sky was a pale, clear blue. The first wisps of cloud gathered at the lip of the volcano. The falcons, all five of them, far, far above us, gyred at their leashes like slow-swung lures. From time to time the faintest cry reached our ears.

We picked a little at our lunches. For the second day in a row I'd lost my appetite, not from annoyance this time but from excitement, though I tried not to let on. Since getting the idea for a secret ritual I could hardly contain myself—within me I could all but feel the ingredients stirring, churning, as in the mortars of the Moorish alchemists.

“And NibbleTooth you can make a dance for us and I'll try hard to learn it.
I
know—we'll throw the corn grains to read our destinies. What else … no need of holy water—we have that here. We'll take an extra long
temazcal
, then hold ourselves in the hot spring longer, deeper, than we ever have. We can even cook some eggs in the spring for luck. What do you think of that?”
Still no answer
. “Then we dip ourselves three times under water, like people do against the evil eye.” I realized that I knew so many of these things from lists of practices banned by the Inquisition. What else had they banned?
Chickens
—the drawing of spirits with hens. The African
curanderos
only ever used a black hen, which they would then rub hard on the victim's body. If the bird didn't die right there from the influx of spirits, its throat had to be slit. So maybe a chicken. “We don't really have any caiman's teeth, either, or stag's eyes. But we can check under the falcon's nest for bird bones and claws—come on! Or … all right. Later if you like.”

She just sat there, her legs folded under her, looking out over the valley, not joining in at all. I so wanted to offer her the perfect gesture.
“What should we
do
, NibbleTooth? This is the place of women's secrets, isn't it, for the women of your family?
This is the Heart of the Earth
. We'll be doing it for Xochita too—I'll bet she told you she would have liked to bring you here herself. Didn't she.”

“Yes.”

She had picked up a pine cone, was studying it intently as she turned it in her hands.

“We'll bring chocolate, and tobacco, and flowers. What else?”

She shrugged.

“Should we stay the night? Should we bring
peyotl?”
I was not entirely sure what
peyotl
was—she glanced away from me now—but one needed rare ingredients for secret potions. She was always picking herbs for Xochita, so why shouldn't she do it for us? “That's it—jimsonweed!”

Staring vacantly down at the lake she had begun plucking bits from the pine cone. After a moment she said, “Mother's teaching me, already.”

“Teaching you what?”

“The ceremony.”

The
ceremony. The real one.

My frustration chased my temper through bright spirals behind my eyes. I waited until I could trust myself to speak. “No, Amanda, we need something of our
own
. Or do you just want to sit around up here all day doing nothing all the time? No wonder it's become boring.”

“It's boring for you?” she asked, startled.

“We hardly read anymore. We don't swim.” I knew I was being unfair now. “You're not even interested in the falcons. You just sit around staring off into the sky.”

“That's not true.”

“So we'll get jimsonweed, no? We could go down right now, try to find some.” I started to wrap our tamales back up. “What does it look like?”

“I can't say.”

“You don't know or you won't say?”

“I can't.”

“So you do know.”

“I can't Ixpetz. I promised.”

I was getting sick of Amanda's secret knowledge. Had I not been telling her all about Alexandria? Did she care nothing for finding a destiny all our own?

The fledglings had come back to the niche. The adults were nowhere in sight. A chill mist of tiny prisms drifted round us. Without our swim the sun was especially hot.

“I'll learn your dance. I'll work hard to learn it quickly. And I'm writing a poem to teach you. I've already started. Listen …”

I recited what I had written. She gave no sign of having heard my little verse, not nearly so impressive as the one for the newborn girl.

“Of course, it's not finished yet….”

Her eyes had settled on the city on the lake. Something in her face then looked defeated and helpless, unbearably sad. I thought I was the one who was sad. At work in Alexandria now was something that I could not quite grasp and yet that could not be stopped. The Christians had begun destroying the temples of Mithra and then the synagogues. By the command of a Bishop named Theophilus the temple of Dionysus was pulled down, and after it the Serapeum in Memphis—though he dared not touch the temple of Isis there. When the other peoples of Egypt still did not rise against him, he sacked the temple of Serapis and the daughter library in Alexandria and took control of the Nile-gauge. And when he died, the new Patriarch, Saint Cyril, the nephew of Theophilus, carried on his uncle's heart-sickening work.
Saint
Cyril? These barbarians were
Christians
. Theophilus meant
beloved of god
, but how could that be? What sort of god was this?

Flying back with a teal in its talons, one of the adults hovered now and tumbled the body into the nest. The young falcons set to quarrelling over their meal with the most terrible screeches. For some reason their squabbling made me furious. I was on my feet, casting about for a stone to throw at the nest. There were only a few pine cones.

“Ixpetz, you can tell me what's wrong.”

Amanda sat there watching me, her hands still, shards of pine cone patterned on her skirt. There was such a chord of resignation in her throat, it was almost as if she'd been afraid too, was asking even now to hear anything save what I needed to tell her. But I was no longer sure what that was—what was it I was afraid to say? Or was I more afraid there was nothing left to say?

Hypatia's private classes were banned now by Cyril the Patriarch, and only her Academy lectures on mathematics were to be tolerated—no more classes at the homes of leading citizens. And then something happened that I could not bear. The details were few, and horrible. I
could tell her in the hateful words of John of Niskiu. No, for us, I had to find words of my own….

Hypatia began to take long rides south along the Nile by chariot, making short forays into the desert. South of Alexandria were the Natron lakes, whose salt waters had since the most ancient times been used for embalming. In the desert lived five thousand warlike hermits, assembled now by Cyril and roused to a fury against Hypatia. One day as she had almost regained the safety of the city, the monks of the salt marshes pulled her down from her chariot and carried her to a church called Caesarion.

The Nitrian monks stripped her, tore off her philosopher's robes, then battered her to death with heavy pottery jars. To her chariot they hitched the naked body and dragged it through the streets to a place called Cinaron. There the monks took the one who had been Hypatia and scraped the flesh from her bones with oyster shells and pottery shards.