You may judge my choice, right or wrong, as you will. All I can do is to tell you the truth.
“Peter,” I said at last. “I have no control over what you do or say. But beware of lying.”
“Editing,” Peter said, or the first century equivalent. “And isn’t it you who is always saying: a story is true if it’s well told?”
Low blow, Peter.
“That’s my mothers’ saying. But believe me, Peter. If you leave me out of Jesus’s story, you will ruin the plot.”
“I’ll risk it.”
I decided it was time to end this encounter before it degenerated any further. I got to my feet, and so did Peter, though I still blocked his way.
“I will be gone before Purim, Peter. I will send word by Judith. You must promise to depart from Temple Magdalen’s gates without harming anyone or anything within those gates. In Jesus’s name, I ask you to make me this promise, in Jesus’s name.”
Peter stood facing me, clearly struggling.
“If you don’t promise, I will kiss you right now.”
That did it.
“In the name of Jesus, I Peter, called The Rock on which the ecclesia is founded, promise to depart from the gates of Temple Magdalen without harming anyone or anything within those gates.”
“Say, Amen, Peter.”
“Amen. Now Mary, please let me go.”
I stepped aside to let Peter pass.
“Mary?” he stopped and turned back to me. “And…and, well, the peace of the Lord be with you.”
“And also with you, Peter, and also with you.”
And I watched him disappear in the darkness.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
OUR LADY OF EXILE
WHEN I SLIPPED BACK into Temple Magdalen everyone was in a dither over where I was. Lucius was there, too, minus, thank Isis, Paulina, who was sleeping it off back home. He’d been about to send out a search party for me. Now he stood by quietly, looking relieved, while everyone else took turns scolding me, hugging me and demanding where I had been without allowing me to answer. Then Sarah woke in Ma’s arms and demanded loudly to be fed.
When I was settled with Sarah at my breast, everyone else seemed to relax, too, as if they shared in the blissful sweetness and rightness that suffused my whole body when she suckled. We sat around the fire, all of us worn out, and many of us with black eyes and cuts, and Reginus with a broken nose. I loved them all; I loved them so much. I could hardly bear to think of the parting that would come. It didn’t seem real yet, and as long as I didn’t speak of it, I could hold it at bay.
“Tell us, Red,” Dido spoke at last, my friend, my high priestess.
And so I told them what had passed between Peter and me, what we had agreed must happen, what we had both promised. Maybe we were all too exhausted, not just by the day’s events but by the long siege, but my friends skipped over outrage, denial, desperately trying to figure out some other solution, and went straight to grieving. Berta came over and buried her face on the breast Sarah wasn’t using and soon a flood of her tears was flowing down its slope into the valleys. One of the younger whores went to fetch the vial of tears and we passed it round and round. Only Ma sat serene and dry-eyed. She knew: I wasn’t leaving her—or rather she wasn’t leaving me.
“When?” Dido spoke when it was quiet again. “And how? Peter promised no one would harm Temple Magdalen. I hope he has the power to keep that promise, but you forgot to insist that he make sure no one follows you.”
“Dominae,” said Lucius, “if I may speak?”
“Lucius, you need no permission,” said Dido. “Your counsel is always welcome.”
“The caves, you only use the ones big enough for chambers, but I think there is a passage—a bit cramped but not impossible, if I remember correctly—that will bring you out some distance away, certainly out of sight of the camp by the gates. Give me a day or two to make sure it’s safe and passable, to clear away the rubble, and then I can arrange an escort to take you out of the country.”
“But where, liebling?” Berta was ready to wail again. “Where will you go?”
I closed my eyes and saw again that stark mountainous country and realized I had no idea where it was, how we would get there, how we would feed and shelter ourselves. But Jesus had sent me the image; I had to trust that it was real, that we would find the way, his way, in our own way.
“Far away from the Followers of the Way. That’s what I promised Peter. Some place where no one has heard of Jesus.” How desolate that sounded, how could I bear it? “Some mountain place. Where there are more goats than people.”
“But honey,” Reginus’s voice was as broken as his nose. “You can’t just, you can’t just set off into the wilderness!”
But he knew I could.
“Why not some place civilized where they speak Greek, at least. Alexandria, maybe.”
“Alexandria is the first place they will look,” Ma spoke for the first time, then smiled to herself, as if the idea of the apostles on a wild goose chase tickled her fancy.
“Domina,” Lucius spoke again, this time to me. “Before I was posted to Caesarea I made a trip overland through the Taurus Mountains to the north in Anatolia. The region is under Roman rule and there are a few troops posted at the Cilician gates, but the mountains themselves are sparsely populated. The people who live there are called Galatians, and I believe they are remnants of the tribes that now live in Gaul and Pretannia. The same people the Greeks call the Keltoi. Your people, I think. No one would trouble you there, and you could probably make yourself understood.”
I closed my eyes, and again I saw the rocks, the sky, my wild, dark daughter running free.
Is that the place, beloved? I prayed silently. You want me to go to the Taurus Mountains? The mountains of the bull? To live among the Galatians? One more Celt who got left behind?
I have not left you, he spoke inside me. I am with you, Maeve; I am always with you. Don’t you know? There is no where you can go that I am not.
I said that to you once, Jesus. About your awful god. Remember?
I remember. That’s why I am saying it to you. The god-making death has to be good for something.
“Red?” Dido prompted me.
I opened my eyes, and saw Sarah gazing up at me with her eyes the color of the tree of life. I looked up and found Ma looking at me, too—not through me, as she sometimes did, but into me. I suspected her of eavesdropping. Finally I turned to Lucius.
“Thank you, Lucius. You helped us build this home, and now you are helping me to leave it. Thank you. Thank you for the beginning and for the ending.”
That was all I had to say, and all I could say.
“We’ve still got a lot of wounds to tend. Good thing there’s an inexhaustible supply of whores’ tears. Pass the vial around again.”
We did. Again and again.
I was no stranger to leaving behind everything I knew. Hadn’t I left my mothers, standing on the beach at Tir na mBan, knowing far better than I did that I might never see them again? The druids had exiled me from all of the Holy Isles, casting me beyond the ninth wave with no sail, no oar. I had left Rome more happily, freshly escaped from crucifixion, newly freed from slavery in the company of friends and benefactors.
But this leaving was different from all the others. Always before, I had been searching for Jesus. No matter what Jesus said about being with me always, everywhere, so that one place was as good as another, I would be leaving behind forever any ground where his feet had walked.
Just before our midnight departure, I climbed the stairs to the tower one more time. Here I could look at the lake where Jesus had spent so much time in Peter’s boat and I could look down into the courtyard, seeing again the gaunt, wounded man the Samaritan had brought to our door as we laid him by the spring and washed his wounds. Here on this tower roof I had made love with Jesus countless times, fiercely, tenderly. Here I had stood with him, feeling his resurrected human form begin to ebb. Here I had given
birth to our daughter.
I stood, turning slowly in all directions, remembering, as if I could absorb the memories through my feet, through my senses. I wanted to take Temple Magdalen inside me and carry it with me wherever I went.
“Red, it’s time,” Dido whispered to me from the stairs.
Really, there is never enough time to say goodbye. In the end, you just have to go.
All my friends crawled through the tunnel after us, a slow business, especially with Sarah bound to my breasts. At last we were up and out, the starry sky vast and the air fresh and bracing. Lucius and Paulina waited with a small caravan of donkeys and servants hand-picked from his household. He had wanted us to go by horseback, but Ma wouldn’t hear of it, and in the end Lucius conceded that donkeys would be better in the mountains.
I think you can imagine the tears, kisses, embraces, murmured blessings, and how nothing anyone can say ever says enough, so at last we all fell silent. Lucius boosted Ma onto one of the donkeys; I decided to go by foot into the sea of dark land that stretched before us. I turned once to look at my friends still standing, arms stretched starwards invoking for us the protection of Isis, Our Lady of Exile.
PART THREE
MOUNTAIN SONG
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE THREE
Mountain Song
The mountain is high and the valley’s so low
and only the river knows where to go.
Wrapped in the clouds or bare to the sky
my heart is so lonesome, at night I still cry.
So mourn you doves, sigh your sad song,
mourn you doves, low, sweet, and long.
I once had a lover, so deep and so true.
He says he is with me, so why am I blue?
My arms are still empty, he’s sure hard to hold,
his spirit is willing, but my bed is so cold.
So mourn you doves, sigh your sad song,
mourn you doves, low, sweet, and long.
I have a small daughter, so sweet and so wild,
and all of our love still lives on in that child.
I watch her grow taller, a straight mountain pine,
one day she’ll leave me to seek what she’ll find.
So mourn you doves, sigh your sad song,
mourn you doves, low, sweet, and long
Until that day comes on the mountain we’ll dwell,
my tears with the snow melt the river will swell.
His mother, his daughter, his lover, we three
we’ll bide with each other, so lonesome and free.
So mourn you doves, sigh your sad song,
mourn you doves, low, sweet, and long.
HEAR THAT SONG WITH YOUR INNER EAR, maybe with a dulcimer or a banjo as accompaniment. If you are thinking: bluegrass, you’ve got the right idea. Taurus Mountains or the Southern Appalachians, Galatians or Scots-Irish immigrants, what we have here is a Celt singing her plaintive lament. The song also neatly sums up how I spent the next dozen years of my life before everything changed again, suddenly and drastically. I’ll come to that part soon enough. For now, come and bide a spell with The Three, as we came to be known in the region.
The villages in the mountains above Derbe, the nearest town of any size, were tiny. Just a few clusters of round wattle and daub huts, like the ones I remembered from the Holy Isles. But here there were no druid colleges, no wealthy merchants, no roving warrior bands raiding each other’s cattle. The Galatians, once upon a time the invaders, had since been conquered themselves several times over: Persians, Greeks, and now Romans. Those who weren’t enslaved retreated to the inhospitable heights. Our neighbors subsisted on rug weaving, goat and sheep herding and what little food they could scratch out of the rocky dirt. Traders passed through, but few newcomers settled in the mountains. There was even a local saying: You have to be born to the mountain to live on the mountain.
Until The Three arrived.
Remote as the villages were, our hut was even more isolated, in its own little holler near where a stream rushed over sheer rock to a gorge far below. (When Sarah began to toddle, Ma must have arranged to have angels attending her every step to keep her from pitching over some precipice to her death.) We laid claim to our home one desolate stormy night as we trekked deeper into the mountains.
At my insistence, we had left behind our Roman escort at the Cilician gate just beyond Tarsus, to go on alone with only one donkey. That way, no one returning to Galilee would know exactly where we had gone. Also, if the Galatians were like the Celts I had known, they’d be more likely to ambush a Roman caravan than a couple of women with a baby. Although we saw no one as we climbed into the mountains, I sensed our presence had been noted as soon as we stepped away from the Roman road onto the narrow, winding path. Whenever I wasn’t too short of breath, I sang songs in all the Celtic dialects I knew, and I recited my lineage several times as well. Ma’s humming made an excellent drone, and Sarah lifted her voice and made lovely, liquid cooing sounds. And so we announced our presence and our pedigree.
Near dusk on our third day of travel we came to a fork in the path; one direction led down to a small village, the other continued sharply up and looked more like a goat path than one used for human traffic.
“Maybe someone will shelter us for the night,” I said. “There’s a storm coming.”
“The sky is perfectly clear, Maeve of Magdala,” Ma said.
“I can smell lightning,” I answered. “The air is changing. Storms come suddenly in the mountains.”
“You’re the weather witch,” she shrugged, acknowledging and dismissing my talents at once. “But our place is not down there. It’s up yonder.”
“Yonder?” I repeated. “Did you actually say yonder?”
“The angels said yonder.”
Well, fuck me. The angels. Of course.
“And besides, Maeve of Magdala, I am never going to live in a village again. In Nazareth everyone thought I was crazy and gossiped about me at the well. Exalted and mysterious, a bit terrifying, hard to find, that’s what we want. Let them sweat to see us.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I grumbled, as I scrambled after her; she hadn’t waited for me to agree.
It turned out Ma and the angels were right—about the hut being there, a hut abandoned because it was too inconvenient even for goatherds. And I was right about the storm, which blew through the cracks of our hut and pointed out the leaks in the roof all during our first night there. (I have since learned how to call and calm mountain weather, but that night I was glad just to have a semi-dry place to collapse and nurse Sarah and myself to deep, exhausted sleep.)
Ma was also right about the virtues of inaccessibility. We had enough food to keep us for a while, so we simply set up housekeeping and waited for our neighbors’ curiosity to kick in. It didn’t take long.
As soon as she had an audience, Ma went to work as a soothsayer, rocking on her heels and making oracular pronouncements. (If you care to picture her smoking a corncob pipe or spitting chewing tobacco, be my guest: the anachronism is apt.) Ma did not possess the gift of tongues, so I had to be her interpreter. (I picked up the local dialect quickly, having perfectly natural linguistic talents and needing no help from the holy spirit who stole my iconography as the dove, thank you very much.) The people thrilled to Ma’s singsong Aramaic and revered her as their very own sibyl. And they loved it even more when precocious Sarah, at age three, took over as translator for her granny. By that time, I was busy as a weather witch and a healer.
If you are wondering how we outlandish outlanders could be accepted so quickly by an insular people, remember the Galatians were Celts. Three is a magic number, and three females with magical talents appearing mysteriously was strong magic indeed. We were clearly not Roman, so I believe they assumed we were beansidhe, fairy women from the Otherworld, an incarnation of the triple goddess. As time went on, I found it lonely and irksome to be revered as a divine being. But Ma reveled in her divine
status. And as for Sarah, who could help but worship her? Not least her own mother.
Sarah, the dark-skinned, the golden-eyed baby, grew into a strong, beautiful child with a tangle of thick black curls that gleamed red in the sunlight. She had a wild, fey quality that sometimes made her seem more like a young animal than a human. Even in stillness—and she could be amazingly still and intent—you could feel her coiled and ready to leap or run. It would not have surprised me to see her fly.
Every mother of a toddler knows how quickly a child can come to harm; we all wear ourselves out following our children everywhere. Many mothers have experienced that dropping away of their insides when they look away for a moment and turn back to find their child has vanished. That happened to me more than once. Sarah, as noisy as any child much of the time, could move as silently as a cat when she chose. The first time she disappeared, I searched frantically and finally spotted her in an aerie, literally. An eagle had hold of her. For an awful moment I thought the eagle must have plucked her from our yard and taken her off to devour her. In an anguish, I wondered how I would safely wrest Sarah from those talons. I stood still, petrified to make a sudden move and startle the eagle. Then Sarah saw me and smiled and pointed at me, as if identifying me to the eagle. All at once, I understood that the eagle was holding her gently, protectively, until her human mother could come and claim her.
That was only the beginning of Sarah’s uncanny—or perhaps I should say canny, since the word derives from ken or knowledge—connection with animals of all kinds. I had my own close relations with doves and snakes, but besides these, Sarah also numbered among her companions goats, of which there was an abundance, owls, hawks, wolves, mountain lions, and for a couple of seasons, a bear. Here’s the uncanny part: In Sarah’s presence, the passage from Isaiah about the lion lying down with the lamb became a literal truth. That is, no one attacked or ate anyone else. Picture a couple of grey wolves and three or four tender kid goats trotting after a wild-haired, barefoot child, and you will have a glimpse of Sarah’s early life.
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