“Wait until she gets a good look at his face,” his friend callously observed. “She’ll run for the shelter of your outstretched arms.”
“They’re both broken, you bastard!”
Hypatia ignored them and knelt down by the suffering man, whose dark eyes stared at her pitifully. Tears rolled down his raw cheeks.
Hypatia offered the cup, wondering if salt from his weeping would worsen the pain from his ravaged face.
“Drink this,” she said. “It will help.”
He greedily drained its contents, thanked her in a hoarse whisper, and began crying again, much to the obscenely vocal delight of his fellow patients.
Hypatia looked around angrily. “Be quiet!” she ordered. “Or I shall be forced to ask Gaius to immediately send you all home, even if you have no homes to go to.”
The trio looked at each other and then resumed awkwardly throwing knucklebones on their pallets, pointedly ignoring Hypatia. The man with two bandaged arms protested bitterly that his friend had not shaken the bones enough to his liking before throwing them for him.
“Thank you,” the young man said again. “It’s hard to be helpless.” He glanced over at the players and clenched his fists. “As soon as I am well, they will pay mightily for their behavior.”
***
By the time Hypatia emerged from the hospice, the foul atmosphere in the city streets seemed fresh by comparison.
She stood in the middle of the great expanse of the Augustaion, pulling in big mouthfuls of salt-tinged air. She would have to change her tunic as soon as she got home, for the stench of the hospice had clung to it. She feared it also lingered in her thick hair, but she would have to forgo the baths for now.
She had an urgent errand.
Dill. She must find dill.
Peter had obviously taken the notion to torture himself over its absence. Doubtless his friend’s death had made him unlike his usual self. She hated to see his grief exacerbated by the lack of something so minor.
She walked down the Mese. Most of the emporia gracing its colonnades were closed, protective grates pulled down and locked to rings protruding from the concrete walkways. The ripe, overpowering odor of spoilt produce assailed her.
So many hungry in the city and food going to waste.
Gaius had kept her out of the plague wards, away from most of the hospice in fact, even though he claimed no one had fallen ill simply from nursing victims. She had therefore spent her time there treating patients with more usual and tractable conditions, applying poultices and ointments or administering painkilling potions.
Even after all the wounds and infirmities she’d witnessed that day, the face of the pitiful burnt man clung in her memory.
When she arrived in Constantinople from her native Egypt she had entered a new, alien, and harsher environment. She suspected the young man, so changed in appearance by his terrible injuries, would find himself in a far different world than the one to which she supposed he had been accustomed.
She had looked in on him just before she left. He had been mercifully sleeping, his rest brought about by Gaius’ potion.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a boy who darted out of an alleyway, calling to an unseen friend. “Quick! I found one! Back here! See, I told you so!”
The friend emerged from another alley further down the street. “Aw, you’re always finding them. Why do I never get there first?”
“That’s four for me and only one for you.”
“You always get the best alleys,” his friend grumbled.
“Shut up and come and see this one. It’s really horrible! All puffy and smelly, with worms and everything.”
The two boys scurried out of sight down the narrow way.
Searching for bodies? To rob them, Hypatia wondered, or simply because they were young and foolish?
She kept walking and arrived at the long hill leading into the Strategion. She started down, allowed her strides to lengthen. On a sudden impulse she decided to run. Her hair lifted back over her shoulders and flapped out behind her. She felt as if she were flying.
Those over a certain age did not usually race through the crowded capital. The streets were not thronged today, however, and in a city where children made a game of searching for corpses, there no longer seemed to be such a thing as a recognized standard of appropriate behavior.
The sound of women wailing, accompanied by the mournful sound of flutes and snatches of song, floated from the side street Hypatia was approaching, and she came to a halt behind a pair of men who stood on its corner.
A funeral procession moved slowly down the hilly byway toward them, led by three musicians ambling in front of a pair of singers whose melody was largely drowned by the lamentations and weeping emanating from further back in the shuffling line.
A dozen men-servants, Hypatia thought, or perhaps slaves newly freed-trod proudly along after the singers, and behind them came the departed, a richly dressed and bejewelled woman lying upon a narrow couch carried on the shoulders of four bearers. A dozen adults dressed in mourning followed the couch of death. The women beat their breasts and ululated their sorrow.
“They’re burying their dead in the old Roman style,” a florid-complexioned man near Hypatia gasped in horror. “And it’s a woman at that! They’re obviously pagans! Pagans, I say, and parading their foul practices around the city at a time like this!”
“And where’s the Prefect’s men when you need them? This should be stopped immediately!” declared his companion, a pale man with scanty hair and even less flesh on his bones.
“Yes, well, when you get down to it, nobody in authority particularly cares how the dead are buried, with rites or without them, Christian or pagan, just as long as they’re not in the way when they go about the streets,” his friend remarked.
“The household have obviously all lost their senses,” returned his friend.
“Nonsense! They’re just taking advantage of lack of civic order, that’s all! They should be punished!” The man picked up a stone as the musicians drew level with the small knot of onlookers.
Hypatia stepped back a few paces, offering a prayer to the gods of her country for the departed woman.
Just as the outraged pedestrian prepared to hurl his missile, a man in a filthy, hooded cloak erupted from an alley a short way up the street, dashed past the musicians, and grabbed the woman from the couch.
With a discordant clash of music and even louder screams and curses, the procession immediately halted. Several men leapt forward to grab the interloper, but the cloaked figure whirled around out of their grasp with a clumsy, dancing step.
The dead woman’s head lolled backwards, her heavy, golden necklaces bouncing on his chest as the man began to sing a mournful hymn and continued to dance, forcing the woman clasped to him to move in a mimicry of life.
The onlookers stood frozen in place, uncomprehending, faces aghast as the blasphemous scene unfolded.
Hypatia stared hard at the dancing man, but the hood drawn over his head allowed only the merest glimpse of a face that was brown and criss-crossed by a myriad of lines that reminded her of cracks on a sun-baked mud flat along the Nile.
“Demon!” one of the women mourners screamed.
“Blasphemer!”
“Kill him!” one of the musicians shrieked.
The few passing pedestrians began to gather on the corner, shouting imprecations at the dancing man and his pitiful partner.
“Desecration!”
“Stop him! Do something!”
“What’s the matter with you, you fools? There’s only one of him!”
Just as it appeared to Hypatia that the small crowd were preparing to attack the man, he dropped his victim, swayed, and toppled forward. He hit the cobblestones face down with the crack of a shattering amphora and lay there motionless.
A few brave souls sidled over to look at him.
“Take care,” someone whimpered. “It’s a demon.”