My own life was almost as devoid of human companionship. As The Three we soon became a legend, but no one wanted to know our stories, where we had come from, why we had come to the mountain—which was the point, of course, to be unknown, hidden, in a word: safe. But I hadn’t reckoned on how disconnected I would feel without a past, without people who knew me in a particular way. Sometimes my own memories seemed as ephemeral as dreams. I couldn’t grasp them; they did not seem real. Hadn’t I always been here, living in this vertical world, with its rushing torrents, and its brief noon light and long, deep morning and evening shadow? Hadn’t I always known the whoosh and howl of the wind, ricocheting off the mountains, swooping into the hollows?
Ma and I, of course, shared some memories, but we had known and loved Jesus so fiercely and particularly, we did not speak of him much. Ma talked more to the angels than to me anyway. And Sarah communed with the animals in similar manner. She loved me and her granny and took us absolutely for granted, as any well-loved child does. She had known no other life than this one of happy freedom on the mountain. For a brief time, that to her was no different from eternity, her life was perfect and complete.
Until she noticed that her father was missing.
CHAPTER TWENTY
WHERE IS MY DA?
SOME FAMILIES SEEM TO run to girls, others to boys. The parent of the opposite gender marries into the line, plays a part in procreation, and then makes do with minority status. Our family, that is to say Ma, Sarah, and me, ran to odd paternal circumstances. Like her mother before her, Sarah had no father present in the flesh. But the peculiarities—and similarities—do not end there.
Consider the case of Ma, the daughter of Anne and Joachim until some Pope came along and issued a papal bull declaring that she was conceived without sin, i.e., sex. This same church insisted that Miriam followed suit and bore Jesus as a virgo intacta. So it could be argued, if logic were part of Roman Catholic doctrine, which it isn’t, that Miriam and her son share the same father: God, for lack of a better term, which would make them also…all right, let’s not go there. Whether Jesus’s father was divine or not, the locals had always referred to him as “Son of Miriam”—a polite way of saying bastard. To my knowledge, no one but Ma, not even Jesus, knew the exact circumstances of his conception—the Gospel of Luke notwithstanding.
As for me, I suppose I was a bastard, though illegitimacy wasn’t even a concept on Tir na mBan where my eight mothers assured me I had been begotten on my womb mother by Manannan Mac Lir, the god of the endless sea that surrounded our island. I had no trouble believing my mothers’ stories—(I still have a hard time using the word “lies” in connection with my mothers. But in fact they did lie to me, and great grief came of it.) But I did mind not seeing my father, and I did not understand why he would not rise from the world under the wave and visit me or take me with him to see his kingdom.
Now there was Sarah, another “strangely fathered, over-mothered child” to borrow a phrase the druids once used to describe me. Was her father a god? Of course many children have been and continue to be born after their father’s death. But how many are conceived posthumously? Or to put it less clinically, after their father has died and risen again? Well, there’s Horus, of course. The child conceived by the dying/rising god does usually seem to be a son, whose identity sometimes merges with his father’s. But none of that helped me very much when it came to what to tell my daughter about her father, how to bring him to life for her.
So I said nothing—until she asked.
One bitterly cold day, not long before Sarah’s fifth birthday, a couple brought their sick son to me, a child of about Sarah’s own age and size. It was the father who held the child in his arms as I scanned his body with my hands and found a blockage in his bowels. The mountain diet, especially at the end of winter, was poor, consisting of rough, near indigestible grains. This kind of problem was not uncommon, especially in children, who often died of fever or starvation. The fire of the stars, flowing through my hands, loosened the blockage and lowered the fever at once. After the boy passed the obstruction, I gave him some broth of boiled roots to build his strength and soothe any lingering inflammation and told his parents how to prepare it at home. As they got ready to leave, the boy, much restored, but ready to sleep, reached up his arms to his father.
“Carry me, Da,” he said, and the father gathered him up, weeping with relief.
Sarah, who had been playing at Miriam’s feet, winding—or more accurately tangling—the yarn Miriam was spinning and crooning songs to herself, fell so suddenly and intently silent, that I turned to look at her. Her golden eyes were fixed on the father and the son with a wary, wondering expression.
It’s coming, I thought, the question is coming, and all the answers I thought I knew lifted from my mind like a flock of winter birds and flew away. It took her several days to actually form the question; I could almost feel her thinking, trying to grasp something that was by its very nature elusive—an absence.
“Where is my da?” she asked at last, as I bent to kiss her goodnight.
For a moment I thought the wind had risen to answer her, but then I realized it was Miriam, rocking and making a high, sighing sound. The hairs rose on the back of my neck, but Sarah seemed to take no notice.
“Your da—” I began.
To my dismay, I was weeping, undone by the word da. I had only ever thought of him as my beloved, and yes, the father of my child, but not as a little girl’s da. I wept as silently as I could, but Sarah did not appear to be disturbed by my tears as some children are when a mother cries. She regarded me gravely, even patiently. Then she took a corner of her blanket and carefully wiped my face, which made the tears start fresh.
“Is my da dead?” she asked matter-of-factly. In this harsh mountain place, Sarah already knew about death; she had heard people keening. I wished I could answer as simply. While I waited in vain for inspiration, Miriam began to chant.
He is not dead, he is gone before us
gone to his father’s kingdom
to his terrible father’s kingdom
to his awful father’s kingdom
to his horrible father’s kingdom.
“Ma,” I spoke sharply. “Stop it. Stop.”
The tension between Miriam and me troubled Sarah more than the idea of having a dead father. We tried to keep our occasional rivalry and resentment towards each other to ourselves—or at least I did. As you may have noticed, Ma is not very censored.
“I’m his mother,” Ma said, in a mild, almost conciliatory tone; nonetheless, she was undeniably pulling rank. “I will always be his mother, forever and ever. I will be back sooner than he is. Oftener. Lots of appearances,” she concluded as if she were a celebrity planning a comeback, which of course she was and is.
Sarah regarded her grandmother, but it was my lap she climbed into, nestling herself as deeply as she could.
And I am Sarah’s mother, I said to myself, silently, fiercely. I will be her mother forever and ever. I won’t have to come back; I will never leave her.
“Where is the kingdom my da went to? When can we go there?”
This time I jumped in before Miriam could do any more damage.
“Cariad,” I held her close, “Colomen Du. Your da always told me that his kingdom, his own kingdom, is here.” I touched her heart, and then I brought both our hands to my heart. “Your da told me that no matter what, he would always be with us.”
“Why can’t I see him, then?” she asked reasonably enough.
“I don’t know,” I found myself telling the truth. “Maybe you can, maybe you will. You can ask him. You can talk to him.”
“Does he have ears?” she wanted to know.
“Those who have eyes to see, let them see. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear,” declared Miriam. “Of course, he has ears, duck. So do you. Just listen.”
Sarah sat up and listened hard.
“I only hear the moon,” she sighed. “Talking t
o a pine tree.”
“What’s it saying, Colomen Du?” I stroked her hair.
“The same thing as always,” she shrugged, as if I were a stupid, silly grownup not to know something so obvious.
I pulled her closer and when her head began to get heavy, I laid her in her bed again.
“Story,” she said. “Story about my da.”
What to tell her? Where to begin? At druid school the story cycles began not with the creation of the world, not with conceptions, but with invasions—though in Miriam’s case the two were possibly one in the same.
“Your grandmother knows the first part best.”
“You tell, Mama.”
I knew a moment’s exultation. Ma and Sarah had a deep wordless bond that I sometimes envied, but as storyteller Ma could not compete with a former bard-in-training and the daughter of eight tale-spinning mothers. Still I looked to Miriam for permission. There was a little rustling commotion in the corner, as if the angels were in a bit of a flap.
“You tell, Maeve of Magdala,” Ma conceded, and she settled in to listen, too.
“All right, then,” I said. “I will tell you the part I know. I will tell you about the first time I saw your da.”
“Once upon a time,” prompted Sarah, who knew how stories should begin. “Long ago, in a land far away….”
And I took up the story of the well of wisdom on Tir na mBan where I had first glimpsed my beloved across the worlds. I left out a few details—that I had run away to the well and made my mothers frantic. That I had found a skull in the water when I plunged in my hands to try to touch the vision—that I had later painted this same skull with my first blood. Later, I promised myself, when she’s older.
“Maeve of Magdala,” Ma was querulous. “You never told me about seeing him in the well. Come to think of it, you’ve never told me anything at all.”
“You never asked,” I pointed out. “Besides, I would have thought you knew all about it, anyway. Did your informants fall down on the job?”
“Ah,” said Miriam, ignoring my dig at her angels. “I know when you saw him. That must have been the time the little brat gave us all the slip and went back to the Temple on his own.”
“Don’t call my da a brat!” Sarah sprang to her invisible father’s defense.
“He was a brat,” said Miriam fondly. “A dreadful brat, and I loved him with all my heart, for I carried him beneath my heart, and he was the child of my heart. My heart.”
“What did he do bad?” Sarah was curious now.
“No more stories tonight,” I said firmly. “Tomorrow we’ll tell you more.”
Though I hoped Miriam would not tell Sarah about her father’s hobby of striking people dead, for the fun of raising them—or worse (for Sarah might try it) turning other children into goats. I did not know if those stories were “true” or apocryphal; I did know that Ma didn’t care about boring old facts any more than my mothers did.
Yet what I knew of the truth was not boring at all, and I promised myself that I would tell the whole story—in good time. When Sarah was old enough, I would tell it all.
Of course, I thought then that I had time, all the time in the world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BEDTIME STORIES
OUR NIGHTLY RITE OF STORYTELLING went on for a couple of years to everyone’s joy. Ma and I loved remembering Jesus for Sarah, watching her face as her da became more and more real to her. But over time, so subtly that I did not notice, the story became less and less real. Perhaps of necessity, perhaps not. You be the judge. I told the story of Maeve and Esus on the Druid Isle. I included lots of harmless details that Sarah loved and demanded each time—like the cranes’ wings writing our names in the sky on the day we arrived on the island. I made an exciting, even scary, tale of her father’s narrow escape from being a human sacrifice. But—
I never told her that the man who rigged the sacrificial lot that would have killed her da was my own father. I never told her that my father raped me. And I never told her about the child I bore and left behind.
Sarah must have sensed something missing.
“Who was your da?” she asked one day.
“The god of the sea.” My mothers’ story—or lie, if you prefer—slipped out of my mouth. And there it was, on the loose, and I did not know how to call it back.
“Tell me again about the sea,” commanded Sarah, the mountain child. Gods were of much less interest than the vast body of water, with its waves shaped like moving mountains.
“Did your da live under the water?”
He died under the water, I did not say. Or maybe he lives there, truly, in Tir fo Thuin, the Land under the Wave.
“So my mothers said,” I hedged. “But I never visited him there.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t live under water.”
“Why not?”
“It’s time for bed now.”
“You always say that,” she complained, “when you won’t answer a question.”
And it was true; I fell back on that most timeworn, clichéd parental evasion.
“But why didn’t you go with my da?” was another question I did not know how to answer. “Why didn’t you go with him when he galloped across the Menai Straits?”
She knew all the geography by heart.
“Because someone had to stay. Someone had to face the druids,” I said, hoping I was telling a partial truth to make up for this huge omission: I was about to give birth to your sister.
She regarded me gravely, knowing something was wrong but not how to say it.
“Why?”
“Time for bed,” I said again.
I did tell Sarah some of my own story, too. She was always wide-eyed at the part where I was set adrift in the boat and kept alive by the dolphins who brought me fish to eat. We spent entire evenings on the dolphins alone. I skimmed over the Roman part of my story, quickly, lightly. Sarah was too young, I thought, to understand what a whore does. We would hurry on to Temple Magdalen, and her da’s dramatic arrival in the middle of the night, slung over the back of a donkey.
“Like a sack of grain.” She had a habit of concluding well-known sentences and, like all children, was intolerant of deviation from the words she came to know by heart.
When I described his life as a preacher and healer, I told her his parables, too, which she loved and learned by heart. But again I confess I left some things out of the story: the strife between her father and me; my return to whoring; his increasingly violent rants in the porticoes at the Temple of Jerusalem.
The story got very confusing near the end—perhaps because I had left so much out along the way. Perhaps because it still is a mystery. Did he die a sacrificial death for our sins, as the church was to insist? Was he merely a seditious nuisance to the Romans? Did the Temple Hierarchy set him up, because he threatened their power? Was he a god, like so many others, Osiris, Attis, whose death gave life? Or, in the druid way of thinking, a mortal whose embrace of death makes him a god? People are still debating.
“I came into this world to bear witness to the truth,” my beloved said.
Maybe there was nothing else to say. And yet I had not yet found my way to saying to my daughter: if you tell the truth, if you live the truth, if you are the truth, people may want to kill you. But don’t worry, after that you’ll be a god, appearing unto people who will get your message even more muddled than when you were alive.
And, if you’re wondering, I had not told her about the ecclesia. It was a couple of years before it occurred to her to ask why we had left Temple Magdalen. The mountain was the first and only home she could remember. Yet she knew and loved the story of her own birth on Temple Magdalen’s tower roof. Dido, Berta, Reginus, Judith were familiar and beloved characters in the story. So inevitably one day she asked why we had left them behind to come to the mountain.
I tried not to hesitate, for more and more Sarah was sensing my evasions.
“Your da showed me
a picture of the mountain in my dreams.”
“Why?”
“He wanted us to be safe.”
She pondered for a moment.
“Safe from the bad men?”
“Which bad men do you mean, Colomen Du?” I stalled for time.
“The bad men who killed him.”
Close enough, I told myself, close enough to the truth. There was no reason for her to know that I had fled from the men who loved her da, men who thought I was not fit to be her mother, who would have taken her from me by force.
“Yes, he certainly wants us to be safe from the Roman governor and his soldiers,” I said carefully.
And she let it go that time.
One day in late Spring when Sarah was seven years old, everything changed. We had spent the afternoon gathering the first wild berries, and she had strayed from my sight, something that happened more and more frequently these days. I did not worry overmuch, because she always had animals protecting her. The mountain itself seemed to love her, and she loved it in return and knew it as well as she knew her grandmother and me. Maybe better, for Ma and I both had secrets, and the mountain held nothing back from Sarah. But all the same, I called out to her. When she did not answer, I stopped picking berries and began looking around to see which path she might have taken. I was on the verge of alarm when she appeared again, not running or skipping, as she usually did, but walking slowly, reluctantly, her step dragging.
Bright Dark Madonna Page 17
