Between the Marks

by Numenius of Apamea, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The rolls came up from the lower room in a cedar box with a broken hasp, and Zenodoros carried it against his hip because he needed his other hand for the stick. He set it on the copying table, sat down on the bench by the wall, straightened his left leg in front of him with both hands, and only then spoke.

"Numenius," he said. "Six rolls. The bishop has been through them."

Abibos lifted the lid. The smell that came out was the smell of the lower room in winter, of old size and mouse and the sea getting into everything. Each roll had its label tag on a thread, and the tags had been written by different hands at different times: one in a round book hand, one in a cursive so quick it looked like a row of fishhooks, one with the title spelled wrong and corrected above the line. Noumēniou peri tagathou. Of Numenius, on the Good. First to sixth. A seventh roll, thinner, had no tag at all.

"Whose is that one?"

"Ask Origen. It came up from Alexandria with his." Zenodoros said it the way he said most things about the lower room, as if Origen had put the roll there himself last week and might yet come back for it. "You copy what is marked. The notary has counted you out two quaternions and you will not need more. If you spoil a leaf, you bring me the leaf."

Abibos unrolled the first book a hand's breadth at a time, holding the read part loosely in his left hand and letting the unread part lie in his right. The papyrus was brown at the edges and paler in the middle, where fewer fingers had been. In the left margin of the third column, beside the line where a sentence began, there was a small sign in fresh black ink, two strokes meeting at a point, like the beak of a bird opening: the mark the grammarians in Alexandria had used to say look, here is something. Eleven lines down was a second sign, the same beak turned to face the other way. Between them the bishop wanted every word. Before the first and after the second he wanted nothing.

He ruled his leaf with the lead disc, pricked the margins with the awl, and wet the reed.

---

It was a short passage, and he had it done before the light reached the table. A man who has spoken on this point, Numenius wrote, and sealed it with the testimony of Plato, must go back further and bind it to the teachings of Pythagoras; and then he must call on the nations of good repute, bring forward their rites and doctrines and their institutions that agree with Plato's, whatever the Brachmans and the Jews and the Magi and the Egyptians have established.

Abibos copied it without moving his lips, which was how Zenodoros had taught him: the lips run ahead of the hand, and the hand follows the lips instead of the page. When he had finished he read the column again against the leaf, letter by letter, his finger under each line, and found nothing wrong. Then he read it a third time, not against anything.

"What are Brachmans?"

Zenodoros had his eye shut. The other one, the right, had been shut for seven years, under a lid that the irons had sealed to the cheek in a fold like wax that has run and set. "Indians," he said. "Naked ones. They live on fruit and argue about the soul."

"How does anyone in Apamea know what Indians argue about?"

"Apamea is on the road. Everything is on the road." Zenodoros opened the eye. "Pantaenus went to India, the bishop says, and found the Gospel of Matthew there before him, in Hebrew letters. Bartholomew had left it. So the Indians had it before we did, and in the wrong alphabet." He seemed to find this pleasing. "Your mother would read it before the bishop could."

Abibos's mother could not read anything. But she spoke the language of the villages, which was not Hebrew but lived next door to it, and on the nights his father had been late from the vineyards she had said the same word every time she went to light the lamp, a word that was not the Greek one. Shragha. The Jews in the lower town, Abibos knew, said ner. He had heard a Persian dyer in the market call it something else again, and had not kept the word.

He did not say any of this. He found the next beak.

---

The next beak was not until the eighth column, and the seven columns between were his to roll past.

He did not roll past them quickly. The papyrus had been glued in sheets, and at each join the fibres had gone stiff and dark, and he had been told never to bend a roll at a join. So he took the columns slowly, as he would have done for any roll, and because the columns were in front of him he read them, as he would have done for any roll.

They were about a man who had asked Numenius something. Abibos did not learn the man's name, only that Numenius called him you and seemed to like him, and that the question had been simple and the answer was not. In the fifth of the seven columns Numenius stopped answering and told a story instead, about a ship's carpenter in Seleucia who would not let his apprentice plane a plank until the boy could tell him which tree it had come from. Then the story stopped, and the answer went on, and three lines later Abibos understood why the carpenter had been there.

He rolled back to the carpenter and read him again. He was still reading when the noon meal was called in the court below, and Zenodoros got his leg off the bench with both hands and stood.

"You have not moved," Zenodoros said.

"It's the joins. They're stiff."

Zenodoros looked down at the roll from his height, at the seven unmarked columns lying open, and at the clean leaf with nothing on it after the first passage. He did not say anything about it. He went down to eat, and his stick and his left foot made their two different sounds all the way down the stair.

---

In the afternoon there were more marks, and Abibos copied them. Some rolls had only one. In another the bishop had marked a long passage on the god who is first and simple and keeps company only with himself, and a second god who makes, and Abibos's quaternion filled with them. In the later books the marks came close together, sometimes two in a column, as though the bishop had been reading faster there, or more hungrily.

He copied the helmsman. A pilot, driven along in the open sea, sits high above the helm and steers the ship by the tillers, but his eyes and his mind are strained up at the sky, at the things aloft. So the maker of the world, Numenius said, holds matter together and steers it, keeping his eyes on the god above him.

He copied the lamp. All the things that are given, Numenius said, pass to the one who receives and leave the one who gives: money, a cup, a coat. But the things of the god are not like that. When they are given they come across and are still there, and the giver has lost nothing and the receiver has gained. Just as you may see a lamp lit from another lamp, shining with a light of which it did not rob the first, but its own wick has been kindled at the other's flame.

Abibos sat back. Across the court, under the colonnade, the notary who had counted out his parchment was walking up and down with a tablet, dictating something to a boy who followed him with a second tablet, and every time they reached the end of the colonnade they turned together like a yoke of oxen.

"Will it be copied?" he said. "The whole of it. Onto parchment."

Zenodoros was mending a strap on the cedar box with an awl and a length of gut. He did not look up. "By whom?"

"By someone. By me."

"On what?"

Abibos looked at the two quaternions. Sixteen leaves, eight sheets, each of them a calf. The notary had counted them out into his hands as if they were coins, and they were: there were men in the lower town who did not eat for a month on what Abibos was spoiling when he spoiled a leaf.

"The papyrus won't last," he said.

"No." Zenodoros pulled the gut through and bit it. "It has lasted a hundred and fifty years, which is a good deal longer than anyone thought it would when they glued it. It will last perhaps another ten in that box. Less, if you unroll it every day to read about carpenters."

So he had seen. Abibos felt his ears go hot.

"Pamphilus copied Origen," he said. "All of him. With his own hand. You told me that."

"I did tell you that." Zenodoros put the awl down. "He sat where you are sitting, and he copied, and when they took him out and cut his head off in the year after I went to the mines, he had still not finished. And the bishop, who loved him more than anyone alive, has spent every year since then trying to make the Greeks admit that Moses was older than their philosophers, and that what is true in Plato, Plato had from Moses. That is what this is for." He touched the edge of the quaternion with one finger, not the writing. "That is what your Numenius is being kept for. Because Numenius says Plato is Moses talking Attic, and the bishop needs a Greek to say it."

"He didn't say that. Not in anything I've copied."

"Clement says he said it. The bishop has it from Clement." Zenodoros picked up the awl again. "Copy what is marked, Abibos."

---

The light went early. Zenodoros got up and lit the lamp that hung by the door, from the brazier, with a splint of pine, and then he took the lamp down and carried it to the table and tipped its spout to the wick of the lamp that stood there, and held it until the second flame stood up by itself, and hung the first one back on its hook. He did it the way he did everything, slowly, with the leg out to one side.

"I'm going down," he said. "Put the box in the niche when you're done. Don't take it to the lower room in the dark, you'll fall on the stair and the bishop will have to find another Syrian."

When he had gone Abibos sat for some time without doing anything. Then he took his satchel from under the bench and unbuckled it and brought out his two tablets, the ones his father had bought him for school in the year before the persecution: limewood, the wax gone dark from use, a hinge of leather. He laid them open on the table beside the roll. Each face would take, in his smallest hand, perhaps fourteen lines. Four faces. Fifty-six lines.

He unrolled the first book to the seven columns.

He could not have the carpenter without the question, and he could not have the question without the answer, and the answer ran on for two columns after the carpenter and had something in its last part that he did not understand but did not want to lose. That was too much. He began to count lines with the end of the stylus, column by column, and to drop things. He dropped the opening, where Numenius greeted the man and complained of the weather in Apamea, which Abibos liked very much, because it was the only place in six rolls where he could hear Numenius being cold. He dropped two sentences in which the argument turned back on itself, though he could see they were doing work. He kept the carpenter whole. He kept the plank and the tree. He kept you will say, and the answer to it. He did not keep the last part.

When he had his fifty-six lines, more or less, he began to cut them into the wax, small, with the stylus held very upright, the way you hold it when you do not want to be asked to rub it out and begin again. It was full dark outside. The lamp Zenodoros had lit burned down a finger's breadth and he trimmed it with his nails.

On the fourth face he ran out of wax four words before the end of the carpenter. He sat looking at it. Then he turned the tablet over and, in the frame of the wood around the wax, where the school tablets have a raised edge for the thumb, he scratched the four words into the limewood itself with the point, small, at a slant, and they were there.

He rolled the first book up and put it in the cedar box with the others.

---

On the second morning there was one mark left, in the fifth book, and it was the last thing the bishop wanted from Numenius.

A man sitting on a watch-tower, Numenius wrote, who has caught a quick glimpse of a small fishing boat, one of those solitary skiffs, left alone by itself and caught in the troughs of the waves, sees the vessel at one glance. Just so must a man withdraw far from the things of sense, and keep company alone with the Good alone, where there is neither man nor any other living thing.

Abibos copied it and checked it and checked it again, and wrote the bishop's heading above it in red, as he had above all the others: Of Numenius, from the fifth book On the Good. At the end of the quaternion there was a leaf and a half unused. He gave them back.

The notary came for the quires in the middle of the morning. He was a short man with good boots, and he turned the leaves over with the tips of two fingers, glancing down each column the way a buyer glances down a row of jars, not to read but to see that nothing is cracked. He stopped at the helmsman and read that one, and his mouth moved slightly, and he nodded.

"Good hand," he said to Zenodoros, not to Abibos. "The bishop will be pleased. He is in the eleventh book now, and he has Numenius going on and on about being and becoming, and then Plato saying the same thing, and then Moses saying it first. It goes very well." He tapped the stack square on the table. "And the rolls?"

"Back in the lower room," Zenodoros said.

"Will he want them again?"

"He has what he wants from them."

The notary nodded again, and went out with the quires under his cloak against the rain, and Zenodoros got up and took the cedar box against his hip and went to the stair. At the top he stopped and leaned on the stick and looked back.

"The tablets," he said.

Abibos had not touched the satchel. He took them out and gave them to him.

Zenodoros put the box down on the top step, opened the tablets against his chest, and read them, all four faces, with the one eye, holding them close to it and tilting them toward the door to get the light across the wax. It took him a long time. When he came to the end he turned them over and found the four words in the wood and read those too. Then he closed the tablets and held them out.

"He was cold in Apamea," Zenodoros said. "You should have kept that."

He picked up the box and went down. Abibos heard the stick and the foot, the stick and the foot, all the way to the bottom, and then the door of the lower room, which stuck in the wet and had to be lifted on its hinge before it would close.

---

It was not raining by the afternoon. He went home along the sea wall, because it was longer, with the tablets in the satchel and the satchel held under his arm against his side so that the wax would not knock.

Below the wall the old harbour lay where Herod had built it, most of it now under the water, and the line of the great mole showed only as a long pale seam in the sea where the waves broke on stone that nobody could see. Beyond it there was a boat. It was a small boat, a fishing skiff with one man in it, out on its own past the seam where nobody else had gone that day, and it went down into the trough of a wave and was gone and came up again further along, and Abibos stood on the wall and saw the whole of it at once, the hull and the man and the one oar, before it went down again.

He waited for it to come up. When it did, he shifted the satchel to the other arm and went on toward the town, where his mother would be lighting the lamp about now and saying the word for it.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Numēniō Apamēnsī per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Numenius of Apamea, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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