She leaned against me now, and I held her, comforting her.
“It did happen, Priscilla.”
“And then you all traipsed back to Jerusalem. I was so angry, Mary, angry with you, too, going off with them, free as a man. Well, never mind. I don’t pretend to understand anything.” She drew herself apart again. “I don’t know what to think. Now Peter claims that Jesus is coming again, and we must prepare the way. After all this time, of following Jesus wherever he went and leaving me on my own, Peter wants me to come to Jerusalem, bring Gabriel with me, join the ecclesia.”
“And will you?” I asked.
She was silent for a time.
“Mary, do you think that is what he wants? Is he calling me? Peter says he is. If I don’t go, am I denying him, failing him?”
“Oh, Priscilla.” I took her hand and squeezed it. “I’m afraid I’m not a very good person to ask. Haven’t you heard? I mean did Peter send word to you….”
“That you ran away without telling anyone where you were going? Yes, of course he did. That’s the reason I didn’t come see you sooner.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“I didn’t want to have to tell him that I definitely knew you were here. Don’t you see? I figured you must have had your reasons for disappearing.”
I just nodded, not wanting to tell her I had bolted because her husband was striking people dead.
“Yet you’re here now,” I said after a moment of increasingly awkward silence. I was touched yet puzzled by Priscilla’s attempt to protect me. Surely the apostles knew by now where I’d gone, whatever Priscilla said or didn’t say.
“Yes, I’m here now,” she said slowly. “Peter asked me to come. No, he told me to. Peter and Jesus’s brother James and some of the others arrived in Capernaum last night. I’m sorry. I should have said so at once, but I, I just wanted to talk to you first, for myself.”
“So.” I placed a hand on my full-term belly. “They can count. Who knew?”
“Mary, this is serious.” She frowned at my joke, which I admit was a bit tactless.
“If they have something to say to me, why didn’t they come themselves? Not that I’m not happy to see you, Priscilla.”
“You know why.”
Of course I knew, but all at once I was angry.
“Jesus was healed at Temple Magdalen when no one else would touch him. And his mother prefers living here to—”
“So Miriam is with you. They’ve all been worried sick about her.”
“I’m not sure I believe that,” I retorted. “She’s been missing three months. If they were so worried about her, why didn’t they send someone here a long time ago?”
“Don’t ask me,” Priscilla said, irritably. “I’m not privy to their counsels. I’m just a messenger. By the way, they told me, if I found her, to bring her back to Capernaum.”
“Good luck,” I snorted. “Tell me the rest, Priscilla. You’re not just here to retrieve Miriam.”
“They want the baby.”
“I already know that, Priscilla, and I believe I’ve made my answer clear.”
We sat for a moment, listening to the sound of the spring welling up and trickling down to the Gennesaret, quietly, calmly, sure of its course, its purpose.
“I haven’t offered you food and drink,” I changed the subject. “When Judith finds out, she’ll be appalled.” I started to roll over unto all fours, so I could get up.
“Don’t, Mary. Let me finish first. It’s so hard to say it.”
“You’re just the messenger,” I said lightly as I could. “Go on.”
“They say there’s danger to the child’s life. You must consider his safety.”
His safety. For men, every child presumed male until proven guilty of being female.
“They’ve hired a wet nurse and they’ve found a safe, remote place for the child to be raised.”
“I’ve heard that argument before, too.” I made my voice sound calm, though I was starting to shake. “I don’t buy it. I don’t see why they’d be any better able to protect the child than me. I have powerful friends—”
“They said you’d say that, and if you did….”
She stopped and looked away from me.
“Spit it out.”
“They asked you to consider what Jesus would want for his son. They ask you to put aside your own selfish desires for the child’s sake, for Jesus’s sake.”
For Jesus’s sake. At the invocation of his name, I felt a tremor that seemed to come right up out of the earth into my body, squeezing me so I lost my breath. And then it passed, and the earth was quiet again.
“Is there any message you want me to take back, Mary?”
Be wily as a serpent, I heard my beloved say, gentle as a dove, my dove.
“Tell them I will pray about the matter.”
And the earth shook again, and the spring gushed warm and easy from inside me.
“Is that the whole message?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s it. Priscilla, I’m sorry. I think I need to rest. Help me up, and we’ll go find Judith and you can talk to Miriam….”
The wind suddenly picked up on the lake; some doves roosting on the walls startled and spiraled into the air. Rain fell down between my legs and spattered dark on the dusty ground.
“Mary,” Priscilla said to me, as if from a long way off, though she was right next to me. Then she called out. “Berta! Dido! Judith!”
From all directions women came toward me. Priscilla gently handed me to them, as if I were a precious gift.
“May it be well with you,” Priscilla whispered in my ear. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell them your time is come. I won’t. I’ll stall them as long as I can.”
And she turned to go.
CHAPTER TWELVE
BLACK DOVE
“COME ON, LIEBLING, come to the birthing cave. Do you hear that wind? I think it’s going to storm.”
“No, no, not inside. I can’t go inside.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my friends exchanging glances, wondering if I was going off my head, as some women did in labor. But I was already heading for the tower roof.
“Mary,” said Judith sharply, “it’s not seemly to give birth out in the open, like some wild animal, where any passer by might hear you screeching.”
“They won’t hear anything over this wind,” said Dido grimly. “Red, be sensible. Must we all be fetching and carrying hot water and linen up and down the stairs?”
I kept going. The pains were bringing it all back, the other birth inside the stone cairn. It was dark and smoky, and outside a storm raged, a storm I’d called to stop the druids from crossing the Menai Straits in pursuit of Esus. I’d called a tidal bore, too. My father had slipped from his horse, and walked into it. I had watched him disappear under the wave. That was the last thing I’d seen before the priestess dragged me to the cairn. I wasn’t going inside this time. I needed the sky; I needed to be alone.
“Don’t come yet,” I said to my friends at the foot of the stairs. “I’ll call when I need help.”
I stand on the roof, looking out over the lake that has turned black and white with cloud and wind, wild as the day the twelve had almost drowned with Jesus calmly asleep in the bow. I hardly feel the cold, and the wind exhilarates me, blowing away the image of the cairn, the sharp crow-like faces of the priestesses, well-meaning and ruthless. Up here on the roof the labor pains take on the quality of the elements—clouds uncoiling to take up the whole sky, waves rising and breaking, smashing against rock, and the wind with its beansidhe shrieking. I hardly register the labor pains as pain; they feel like power, as if I have taken the force of the storm into my body. I ride that power the way I rode the wind in my dove form when I went to the rescue of Peter’s tossing ship.
Someone is singing; or is it only the wind. Someone is singing, a woman is singing, her voice is strong as earth, fierce as the storm, her breath fills my lungs, her song rings in my bone
s. There are no words, but the song is a call; she is calling and calling. At last he answers. He is with me; he has my back, he circles me round. I am the curved prow of ship and he the mast, and we sail on together, plowing the waves, as our child kicks strongly, swimming to meet us.
The storm moves over the lake, over the mountains, and the sun rolls after it, leaving stars in its wake, and a late rising moon on the wane. My beloved holds me, even as my friends come and hold me, too. They join their voices with mine, and we sing the strange, sweet song of the stars with its piercing harmonies and dissonance. The song changes as I squat for the birth, and sing a song full of long O-O-O-O s, a song to open the way for the one who is coming, the one who is riding the red waves into dawn.
There is the head, black and sleek as a silkie’s. As the body slides free, so easily, so easily, I catch the baby in my own hands. Cries flutter up from my friends. The doves wake and add their tender, yearning sounds. Then comes the baby’s first cry, more like a bellow, full of power and purpose. Dido and Berta help me turn her over and lift her into my arms.
My daughter.
The way she fits the curve of my arm, the way she latches unto my breast, so surely, so fiercely, my body remembers, and for a moment I am back in the cairn, cradling the bright head of my firstborn. Someone wipes my tears away, so that I can see this new one.
She is dark, darker than her father. The tufts of hair on her head are black, too. But it is her eyes that arrest me, hold me still, so I can hardly breathe, hardly know where I am. They are golden, as golden as the leaves of the tree in the garden of Tir nan Og where I stood with my beloved. Her gaze is as strong and insistent as her mouth on my breast. Where did you come from? I almost ask her out loud. Who are you?
“Colomen,” I hear myself murmuring. “Colomen Du. Colomen Du.”
“What is it, honey?” asks Reginus, a little anxiously. He is always present at women’s mysteries. “What are you saying?”
I look up and smile at everyone in turn, Dido and Berta, kneeling beside me ready to deliver the afterbirth, Judith who is hovering, waiting to wash and swaddle the baby, Ma who is silent for once, all here, as if no angel could ever distract her again.
“Colomen Du,” I say again. “That is her name. It means Black Dove.”
There is a brief silence, and then everyone tries, without much success, to pronounce the name.
“Is that Celtic?” asks Reginus suspiciously.
I nod and return my gaze to Colomen Du.
“Don’t you think a nice Greek name would be a little easier for the kid? Everybody speaks Greek. How about Phoebe, or something, since she was born at sunrise.”
“She is a little princess!” Ma pronounces, and she bends down and coos over the baby as if she were an ordinary grandmother. “We will call you Sarah.”
“Her name is Colomen Du,” I protest. “She is my daughter.”
You see? It is beginning already.
“Of course,” says Miriam as if there is no contradiction. “Every divine child needs a name, secret like the name of the Most High, that no one can pronounce. We’ll call her Sarah.”
“Sarah,” everyone murmured happily.
“Sarah,” I sigh in surrender, too happy, too tired to fight.
After a breakfast feast and hymns to Isis, I was ready to go inside to the inner temple to rest. I curled up with Sarah in the very same chamber where we had laid Jesus the night the Samaritan merchant brought him to us, half dead of exposure and wounds. I had held him in my arms all night long, the fire of the stars flowing through me, restoring him to life. Now as I fell asleep, I felt him with me, holding me, as I held our child. And if you never understood the trinity before, maybe now you do.
When I woke—or perhaps I was dreaming—I saw Jesus, saw him with my eyes, for the first time since he walked through the Beautiful Gates. He was gazing at us and weeping silently. I wanted to go to him, but somehow I knew I could not.
“I am sorry,” he spoke at last. “I didn’t know how hard it would be.”
Maybe you are accustomed to picturing the ascended Jesus seated at the right hand of the father, all knowing and supreme, just biding his sweet time till he comes again in glory or whatever it is his followers still expect him to do. Maybe it is hard for you to imagine him grieving for the loss of his human life, the loss of a human love he would not have the chance to know, but I am here to tell that you he did grieve. He does.
“I want to hold her.”
“Can’t you?” I pleaded. “Can’t you, can’t you just come back and be with us, stay with us?”
“No, I mean, yes, I mean, I’m here. But not…not the way I want to be. Oh, Maeve, please will you hold her so I can see her face.”
I sat up and, resting Sarah in the crook of my arm, I turned her toward her father, and she opened her fathomless, golden eyes and looked straight into his. I don’t know how long I watched them take each other in, deep to deep, but I swear the close warm air filled with the scent of spice and dawn, and a few golden leaves fell from that other world into the cave.
“Beloved.” It was hard to speak through whatever connected us, through whatever separated us, but I knew I had to. “The apostles asked me to consider what Jesus would want for his son.”
He frowned for a moment, then he brightened.
“But I don’t have a son.” It seemed to strike him very funny, and he laughed as if he still had a belly.
“Which technically means you don’t have an heir. The levirate is so amusing.”
“Oh.” He sobered up.
“Well, I told them I would pray about the matter. So I am.”
“What?”
“Praying. Doesn’t talking to you count as prayer? You know, because of the god-making-death?”
“I’m still getting used to that,” he sighed. “But all right. Go ahead.”
“Dear Lord Jesus Christ. What is thy will concerning the raising of this child?”
“Maeve, that is not an honest prayer,” he said. “You never lied to me in life; don’t start now.”
“You’re right. How’s this then? Dear Jesus, there is no way in hell I am letting them take our daughter away from me.”
“That’s much better,” he acknowledged.
“Good, then I will tell Peter, James and the rest that you spake unto me and said to leave your wife and daughter the fuck alone! Or better yet why don’t you tell them to bugger off yourself?”
“Beloved, are you going to make a habit of using foul language around our daughter?” he asked mildly enough, but I was getting worked up.
“Probably. And I’m going to raise her in a pagan whorehouse, looks like. If you have a problem with that, you should have thought twice before you went and got yourself crucified. It’s bad enough I’ve got your mother on my hands for life—who has already renamed our baby. Did you know that? I am not about to take orders from—”
My baby’s (dead) daddy, I choked back the words, and I burst into tears as weepy and unreasonable as any exhausted new mother plug full of postpartum hormones. Sarah soon joined in, her wails way more piercing than mine.
“Cariad,” I thought I heard Jesus say over the din. I felt a hand caress my cheek.
By the time I looked up, after guiding Sarah, flailing and squalling, to my breast, I was a single mother again.
“Red,” It was Dido with a plate of food and a wineskin. “The others didn’t want me to tell you, but I thought you should know. They’re outside the gates. We haven’t told them anything, of course. But they are refusing to go away till they’ve spoken to you. ”
A single mother with a custody battle on my hands.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SIEGE
WHAT WE CAME TO CALL the Siege of Temple Magdalen began on a small scale: Just Peter, James, Andrew, John, and a few of the other disciples who came from the area standing, almost politely, outside our gates. They might even have been mistaken for suppliants seeking our usual services—(Oh the shame
of it! That’s how determined they were)—except that they refused our invitation to come inside. To step foot in a pagan temple whorehouse would clearly render them instantly unclean. God only knows for how long and what they would have had to do to become clean again. Nor did they invite me to come out. According to the Law, a woman is unclean for forty days after the birth of a male child and for eighty days if the child is female. But clearly they wanted to know if I had given birth yet, and if so—to a son or a daughter? There was debate within the walls of Temple Magdalen as to what and how much to tell them.
“Personally, I don’t see what’s wrong with lying,” said Reginus.
Everyone was having an indoor picnic in the inner chamber where Sarah and I remained tucked up. Now I could scarcely comprehend my insistence on giving birth on the roof. With Sarah out of the shelter of my womb, I craved containment for us both.
“What do you mean by lying?” Berta wanted to know. “You can’t mean—”
There was a flurry of gestures and utterances as all the women present warded away all evil from lovely, healthy Sarah, who had gone to sleep again for the time being. Infant mortality was all too real a specter. No one wanted to speak of it out loud.
“Nothing terrible. Just, well, how about I claim paternity? Or Timothy could. Or better yet, both of us could. We could stage a loud, public argument with name-calling and fist fighting and everything. Couldn’t we, Sweetie?” He appealed to his lover. “It would be fun.”
“Honey, everyone on the lake knows we’re together,” pointed out Timothy.
“Well, we could get a few of the regulars to join in the brawl, just to add to the confusion.”
“But what about Mary’s reputation?” objected Judith. “She is or was a respectable married woman. The widow of our beloved rabbi.”
“Respectable might be a slight exaggeration,” I said, gazing at Sarah, asleep with her perfect little mouth twitching now and then. “Haven’t you heard that I was tried for adultery in Jerusalem? If I have a reputation, you may assume it’s bad.”
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