I supposed twelve-year-olds were given to dramatic pronouncements. Living in such isolation, I didn’t have a lot of experience to go on. I might have done my best (I thought I had!) to prepare Sarah for her blood, but no one had prepared me for this sudden change in her. What had become of my child?
“Oh, cariad,” I said, trying to make my voice, at least, a caress. “You feel that way now. It’s all so new, and I know it makes things awkward with the boys. You were almost one of them, almost, and now you’re becoming a woman.”
“I don’t want to be a woman! I am not going to be a woman.”
Her vehemence silenced me. That’s why she’s angry with you, some part of me understood, but not clearly enough to explain it to the rest of me. How could it be that a daughter of mine didn’t want to be a woman? What was so terrible about me that she would hate the idea so? I was no Mary B who burned with rage against her gender and felt trapped in her body. Would Sarah end up like that? Sarah who had always been so at ease in her own skin, like the animals she loved, so free in all her movements?
“You’ll get used to it, Sarah,” I reassured her. “You’ll grow into it. It’s not so bad being a woman. I like it. There are lots of amazing things about being a woman that you’ll find out in time. Like being able to have a baby—”
“No!” she shouted. “I don’t want to have a baby.”
I made myself remember how shocked I was when my mothers suggested that I might have a baby in my turn and life would go on, with me just part of some endless, boring, repetitive cycle, nothing in myself. No adventures of my own.
“I understand, Sarah. I do understand.”
“You don’t understand. I am not like you. I never want to be like you. I don’t want to have a life like yours, all alone, telling the same stories over and over…” and her voice trailed off into sobs.
Oh! That hurt. I took a breath and told myself she didn’t mean it. She was just upset.
“Colomen Du!” I called to her, mustering what was left of my tenderness. “Come down now. Come down from the tree. Just let me hold you.”
“No!” Her sobs ceased for a moment, her voice became cold. “You never say the right thing. You don’t know how to comfort me.”
Those words went in, right between the ribs, straight into my heart.
“What do you want me to say?” I discovered to my dismay that I was crying, too. “What do you want me to do!”
Dear gods, why couldn’t I see it then: That’s why I couldn’t comfort her, because I thought I could. I thought it was up to me. I thought I could make everything all better. After all the sorrows of my life, all the things that could not be fixed—how could I have failed to understand that my beloved daughter simply needed to grieve?
“I told you what to do. Go away! Leave me alone.”
To tell the truth I wanted to go away; I wanted to go away and weep as bitterly and hopelessly as Sarah. But dusk was falling fast, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just leave her raging and shivering in a tree. I thought to myself, perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly, when people say: ‘Go away!’ they mean: stay! They mean: love me, even though I hate you. So I sat (or sank) down at the foot of the tree, leaning back against the trunk.
For a long time neither of us said anything, the air became still, as it often does just before nightfall. I could hear Sarah’s ragged breathing grow more even; I could even hear the doves tucking their heads under their wings. In a little while the nocturnal creatures began to rustle in the fresh fallen leaves. Then I felt a drop of something land on my hand, I looked up, wondering if clouds had moved in, but the sky was clear, the first stars just beginning to appear. I felt another drop, and registered that it was too warm to be rain. So I raised my hand to my face, sniffed the drop, and yes, I admit, tasted it: salty, metallic. Blood.
“Sarah,” I broke the silence. No answer. “Sarah, are you bleeding right now?”
A pause the length of a heart beat.
“Yes!” she said in such strange tone, at once exultant and defiant.
“Sarah, come down. On the way back home I’ll show you the best place to gather the moss to staunch the flow.”
“I know where to find it.” Stupid, she did not say, but I could hear it, feel it.
“Oh” was all I could manage for a moment. “Well, come down anyway. Ma will be wondering where we are.”
“She knows where we are.”
In one afternoon, I had lost my authority and my brains. I was stupid, stupid and ineffectual. Now what? How was I going to break this stalemate?
Jesus, I prayed, help. No, forget him; I distracted myself with anger. Jesus is the one who got me into this mess in the first place. Isis. No, Forget her, too. Who cared about her fishing pieces of Osiris out of the river? What did Isis know anyway? Like Ma, Isis had a son. I needed a goddess I could relate to, a goddess who had a daughter.
Demeter.
Suddenly I felt cold all over. I wanted to throw up.
I pushed the thought away so forcefully, I found myself on my feet.
“Sarah!” I said sharply. “We are going. Now!”
Before Sarah could answer or refuse to answer, I heard the sound of footsteps rapidly approaching, then voices shouting:
“Healer Woman? Healer Woman, are you there?”
“I’m here,” I answered without thinking.
And two men holding torches came into sight. At least it was not a delegation this time.
“The Old One pointed us this way.”
“I suppose she’s worried,” I said vaguely. “All right. We’re coming.”
“Yes, come,” said one of the men. “As quick as you can. There’s a wounded man near death. We brought him to you.”
“I have a wounded man near death,” the man had pleaded, standing outside the gates of Temple Magdalen long ago. I grabbed hold of the tree to steady myself. Are you coming back to me this way, Jesus? I asked silently. Are you coming back to us?
“Are you all right, healer woman?” asked the other man anxiously.
I let go of the tree and followed after the men. For a moment—a moment I regretted for years to come—I forgot about Sarah.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE LEAST OF MY BRETHREN
NOT JESUS. THAT WAS MY FIRST THOUGHT, as I looked at the man lying so still on a pallet in front of my hearth. Not Jesus. And I returned abruptly from that moment where past, present, and future interlock like Celtic knotwork to the mere present and its necessities. Not Jesus, just one of the least of his brethren, as he used to put it, and in terrible shape—or shapelessness. One glance told me that almost every bone in the man’s body was broken. His face was purple with bruises, and even if he had not been unconscious, I doubt he could have opened his eyes, they were so massively swollen.
“What happened?” I asked his rescuers as I knelt and began to scan him with my hands. “Where did you find him?”
“Near Lystra.” one of the men named a village not far from our mountain. “We were on our way back from trading carpets and saw buzzards circling something, but not landing. When we went to look, there he was lying in a small holler pretty near dead. We didn’t know if we should move him or where to take him, so we went looking for his kin, but no one would claim him. Not the Greeks, not the Romans, nor the Jews hereabouts will have anything to do with him. They outright refused to help. We figured if all the lowlanders hate him, he can’t be all bad, and we couldn’t just leave the man there.”
“I couldn’t leave him there,” the Samaritan had said. “I’ve been traveling for two days now. But no one will take him in. They don’t know who he is—a Jew, a Samaritan, an outlaw, a demoniac?”
“Looks as though someone threw him off a cliff and rolled a boulder onto him,” said the other man. “We think it might have been a stoning.”
Stoning. I knew all too much about stoning, the punishment for Jews who blasphemed—and for wives who committed adultery. Jesus had been a candidate for stoning more tha
n once, and by a brilliant turn of rabbinical wit, he had once saved me from death by stoning when by law he ought to have condemned me. So this man probably was a Jew or had outraged the Jews. But who he was or wasn’t didn’t matter now. The light surrounding him—light that I could see when I used my healing senses—guttered, about to go out. I directed my vision inside his body to his spinal cord. His well-meaning rescuers should not have moved him. Yet if they hadn’t, the buzzards would have been feasting by now.
“Can you save him, Healer Woman?” one of the men asked.
Save him, I thought blankly, not knowing how that question would resound in the days to come.
I needed to go deeper into this broken man’s body, stop internal bleeding, begin to mend the breaks, discover if his brain was swelling. My focus would have to be singular and absolute.
“I will do what I can.” I made no promise, but I could feel the fire of the stars beginning to pour through my hands. “Leave me now. Come back tomorrow. By then we will know.”
That’s the last thing I remember before I slipped between the worlds where all things are made and unmade, where one thing becomes another.
I woke near dawn in this world, cold and cramped, for I had slept beside my charge on the bare floor, but in a moment I was drenched in the sweat of utter panic. Sarah. I had left her sitting alone in a tree. Left her. I got up and went to her sleeping pallet. Empty. Yet close by, Ma was sleeping peacefully, wheezing musically, the nighttime counterpart to her humming. Sarah must be all right, I told myself, or Ma would have been awake, keeping vigil, if nothing else. Sarah must be all right. But I wasn’t. I felt all wrong, more wrong than I’d ever felt in my life.
I forced myself to check on the stranger. The lights around him were weak but steady. He still looked ghastly, but the swelling in his face had diminished. The fire had re-forged vital connections in his neck and spine; the rest of the breaks were ordinary, to be healed by ordinary means and time. I could leave him resting for now. Without bothering to get a cloak, I stepped out into the cold dawn.
Most of the stars had faded, but the morning star shone bright, rising over the rim of the gorge. I could not help looking at the star (or looking to the star, for comfort, for guidance) so it took me a moment to see Sarah, huddled nearby with her back to me, gazing in the same direction. My relief was so great, I held onto myself to keep from dissolving, and then I held tighter, to keep myself still. For I had the sense that if I made too sudden a move, she would run away like any wild creature. So I waited while the sky paled and the small birds flew up to catch the first light. Sarah did not lift her head to watch the birds, but kept it on her knees.
Walking softly, I went to sit beside her. She did not acknowledge my presence, but she did not move away either, so I pressed my luck.
“Sarah.” I waited, and when she didn’t answer I went on. “I am so sorry I left you alone in the tree.”
The sun shot its first strong rays over the gorge, and flock after flock of birds flung themselves into the sky. Everything would be all right. The sun was rising again.
“Why?” Sarah spoke at last.
“There was a wounded man,” I began.
“I know that,” she cut me off. “Why are you sorry?”
I was taken aback by the question. Before I could answer, she went on.
“I told you. I didn’t need you. I didn’t want you.”
But I needed you. I wanted you, I answered silently.
“Sarah,” I spoke her name, and no words followed.
“Ma is awake,” she announced abruptly, at once dismissing me and reminding me of her psychic bond with her grandmother, apparently undisturbed by Sarah’s coming of age. “I will make her some stirabout. You better tend to the man.”
She is growing up, I told myself. See how she is taking charge of breakfast? Don’t worry so much. Be proud of her. And if I noticed that she walked a little stiffly and wrapped her cloak around her tightly (she who used to resist whenever I tried to get her to wear one) I put it down to her unfamiliarity with her changing body. She’ll get used to it, I told myself. She’ll be all right. It’ll be all right.
All that day and the next, I was busy with my patient, setting his bones, changing the dressings on his wounds, rousing him to enough consciousness to get some broth into him. To my relief, the crisis with Sarah seemed to have passed—or at least to be in abeyance. Maybe one of the boys’ mothers had spoken to her after all, for she didn’t wonder at her comrades’ absence or go seeking their company either, nor did she wander off alone to her own haunts.
Maybe I should have been more worried that her habits had changed so abruptly, but I was happy to have her where I could see her. Sometimes she sat with Miriam, winding the lumpy wool that Miriam continued to spin as unskillfully as ever, but I noticed she kept an eye on the still-mute stranger, pondering him from a distance, as if he were a new animal beyond her ken and one worthy of her study. In the afternoon of the second day, she surprised me by asking if she could help change his bandages. I hesitated at first to expose her to the marks of such violence, but then I decided it was a good sign that she wanted to help—and to help me.
I watched with pride as she cleaned and bound the stranger’s wounds without a trace of squeamishness. But then, she had been caring for wounded animals since she was a small child. Still, her touch was so deft that the man kept dozing, seemingly unaware of her attentions.
I had been so intent on tending the man’s individual parts that I hadn’t yet taken in the whole of him before. So I stood back and regarded him. He was a small man, shorter than me, I judged, thin, wiry, uncommonly tough or he would not have survived the recent attempt on his life. His hands looked as though they had performed manual labor, skilled labor, I thought, for the calluses were permanent and in very precise places, as though he had used a specific tool of some kind. He appeared to have been clean-shaven in the Roman style, for the growth of hair on his face was only a few days old; his hair also was relatively short. He was not handsome, but I could not decide if he was ugly. Even in sleep, there was something agitated about his expression. Or perhaps it was merely distorted by cuts and bruises. His eyes were not as swollen as they had been, but something more than a bruising encounter with stones and fists seemed to be affecting them.
I was just about to kneel down and scan them with my hands, when Sarah, finished with bandaging, got there before me. I had never transmitted the fire of the stars to Sarah, as I had to her father, and as he in turn had to his disciples. I had intended to wait until she was older. Now I saw that the fire had already found her; perhaps it had always been with her. It flowed from her hands, golden as her eyes, golden as the leaves on the tree of life where her father and I had stood the morning after she was conceived. My own eyes filled, and the whole world turned golden. This is our beloved daughter, I said to my beloved silently. Be well pleased. It was not for nothing that you came into this world, and that we loved from before and beyond time, that death has parted us. Here is our daughter, dark as night, bright as the dawn.
“Angel,” a voice I had never heard before spoke in Greek. “Angel,” he repeated in Aramaic.
I brushed away my tears and saw the stranger gazing straight into Sarah’s extraordinary eyes. She held his gaze for a moment, then backed away, a young girl again, shy, awkward. Instinctively, perhaps, she moved closer to me. I put my arm around her and kissed her cheek. She was very warm, I noticed, even flushed. But then the fire of the stars had just poured through her to heal this man’s eyes. Dark brown eyes, I noticed. Very intense. Suddenly, I wanted to shield Sarah from this intensity. I stepped forward, not exactly in front of her, but enough to deflect his attention. When he shifted his focus to me, I have to inform you, he frowned. Two deep furrows appeared on his forehead, ending in rather unbecoming ridges above his eyebrows. Then Miriam, silent for once, stepped forth from the shadows to stand beside me.
“Three,” he said, again first in Greek and then in Aramaic
. “There are three of them. Can these be the angels round the throne of the Third Heaven?” He sounded a trifle dubious. Then his eyes fixed on Sarah again. “If not an angel, then who is she?”
“The angels are round about her,” Ma began in a sing-song voice
They will not suffer her foot to slip.
They will not allow the viper to bite nor the wasp to sting.
All the things that creep on the earth or glide on wings align with the angels to protect her.
The birds sing her name at dawn and the stars arise to shine upon her….
“She is my daughter!” I interrupted.
My arm still around her, I could feel that Sarah had begun to shiver. She was a child, not a goddess. I would not have Ma singing hymns to her while she nearly collapsed on her feet, I thought indignantly, forgetting my own silent hymn of praise. I would get her something to eat and put her to bed. Before I could hustle her away, the man addressed me.
“Who are you?” he demanded, almost rudely.
“They call me Healer Woman in these parts,” I answered shortly. “And I have just saved your life.”
As soon as I said it, I regretted it. I had not saved him; the fire of the stars had, but I did not see much point in explaining the mysteries of healing to this man.
“She opened my eyes,” he said, nodding towards Sarah. “She gave me light.”
“Don’t you want to know who I am,” complained Ma, perhaps miffed at being interrupted and ignored.
The stranger turned his attention to Miriam. A breeze stirred in the tiny hut as the angels took their cue and flapped their wings. The scent of roses was a bit overdone, I thought. The stranger looked more alarmed than impressed.
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