“Do not smite me,” he pleaded.
This situation was getting entirely out of hand. I might be from an island in the Otherworld; I might have raised my beloved from the dead, if you want to look at it that way, but right now we all needed to get back down to earth.
“Stranger,” I addressed the man, holding Sarah closer, savoring her willingness to lean against me. “Our neighbors found you in a valley near our mountain, your body broken and nearly crushed. They brought you here, and we took you in. If you will tell us your name and where we might find your kin, we will do what we can to help you home when you are able to travel.”
The man frowned again; it seemed to be his primary expression.
“My name,” he said. “My name. My name….” He stopped and his fierce eyes turned opaque as stagnant pools. “I…I don’t remember my name.”
He looked to Sarah again in mute appeal, but she remained silent.
“The angels know who he is,” announced Ma.
“And?” I prompted after a few moments.
“They are not telling,” said Ma with maddening calm. “No words. They are swishing their wings, swirling the darkness with light. There is something shining bright as a sharp blade and something dark and tangled.”
Sarah let out a whimper
“Oh, for the love of Isis, Ma!” I burst out. “Come, Sarah. Come sit outside in the sun and rest. You’ve done well. I will bring you some oatcakes with honey.”
And I hurried her out of the hut, away from the man, away from some danger whose name I did not know.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
IN HIS NAME
OVER THE NEXT COUPLE of days, Sarah continued to help tend the nameless man, and I tried to quell my fears. He was gentle with her and clearly appreciative, and she appeared quiet and thoughtful—if a bit wan. It occurred to me that the stranger was the first grown man who had ever spent time with her. I wondered if she might be regarding him as a sort of father, and wished he was as hearty and straightforward as had been my own foster-father, King Bran of the Silures.
I was not the only one to speculate about Sarah’s attentiveness to our guest. The men who had rescued him came to see him daily, feeling a responsibility for him that I found admirable. They brought us extra food, and even fresh meat. They also tried to help the man with his memory, describing to him the place where he was found and the towns nearby, but nothing seemed to register.
One day I was in the woods just below our hut gathering hickory nuts, when the two men left after a visit. They didn’t see me, and I overheard a snatch of their conversation as they walked back down to the village.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter who he is or where he comes from. The Three are Outlanders, too. That wild lass has gentled since he’s been with them. Maybe best he never remembers who he is. Maybe best he bide with them.”
“The Healer Woman needs a man before it’s too late,” said the other. “She keeps herself to herself. You have to give her that. Never tried to steal anyone’s husband. Still she misses it, I reckon. You can almost smell the want. My wife won’t let me anywhere near the Healer Woman alone. A handsome woman she must have been once.”
Once?
“She may be a bit long in the tooth—but her paps, man! Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed them. Still round and rising as the full moon. Creamy as new milk....”
Their voices drifted out of range, and I stood still, too stunned to know if I wanted to laugh or weep or rage. Slowly I registered a burning in my face and my belly that I recognized as shame—an emotion I have rarely known. I had never felt ashamed of being a whore, only of being a slave. And I had never felt ashamed of desiring or being desired. “Long in the tooth…you can smell the want in her.” These men made my longing sound pathetic, even hideous. Yet my breasts they had praised as rapturously as the Celtic warriors who once fought over me long ago on the druid isle.
I ran my hands over my breasts, remembering the boy Esus tracing the veins with his fingers, naming them for the rivers of Eden. The breasts Jesus had caressed, held, the place where the son of man—who had no other home—had rested his head. The breasts that had fed his daughter, and once—and only once—long ago, another daughter. Breasts no one but me had touched in years. How many years? I stopped still, my hand still resting on their roundness, realizing that I had lost track of my age. I began to count from his death, from Sarah’s birth. I must…I must be forty-six years old, almost forty-seven.
A bit long in the tooth. The Healer Woman needs a man before it’s too late.
How had I come to be so old? How had men become such a scarcity in my life? I, who was named for Queen Maeve of Connacht who always had one man waiting in the shadow of another? I who had been a whore-priestess at Temple Magdalen where I had men all night long? I who had at last married my soul’s beloved. I had been so rich in love, that I had turned away two men who would have cared for Sarah as their own. James I did not regret, for he would have taken her from me, but Joseph, Joseph who had loved both Jesus and me, who had understood our love…Had I made a terrible mistake?
“Jesus,” I spoke aloud. “Does Sarah need a father? Is that why this man has come to the mountain? I don’t know if I can love him. Maybe that doesn’t matter. Jesus. Jesus. Tell me what to do. Tell me what to do for our daughter.”
I closed my eyes and listened. Sometimes in autumn the air is so still, it is as if the whole earth is holding its breath. You can hear when a leaf lets go—for no apparent reason. You can hear its slow spiral fall, its soft touch down on the earth it will become again. And that is all I heard. Let go. Stop struggling. Let go.
Both Sarah and Ma went to sleep right after supper. Sarah seemed unusually tired, but I told myself it must be common for girls of her age to need extra rest. The stranger, on the other hand, seemed increasingly restless as he convalesced. He was able to hobble about some, though the terrain was too rough and steep for him to manage more than a few steps outside.
Now he sat by the fire, staring into the flames, not dreamily but intently as if he could impose some order upon their erratic pattern. It was the first time we were awake and alone together. I pondered how to strike up a conversation with someone who has no memory. I couldn’t ask about his family or his country or his work. I hadn’t reckoned on him asking about mine.
“Who is the child’s father?”
I felt immediately antagonized by a question that seemed to have dogged me all my days.
“A man I loved,” I answered shortly. That I love, I added silently. The lover of the world, whose story I have failed to tell.
“Loved?” The stranger might have no memory, but he was still sharp. “He is dead then.”
I paused for a moment, wishing I had not sat down without a drop spindle. I needed something to do with my hands. I needed somewhere to look beside this man’s face that suddenly seemed alive with a penetrating intelligence.
“Love is as strong as death,” I answered.
The man looked startled. His eyes strained upward to the right, as if the phrase had jogged his memory, and what he needed was just out of reach in some recess he couldn’t quite see. Then he shook his head, as if giving up again.
“Your daughter is an extraordinary child,” he said. “Her father must have been an extraordinary man.”
It irked me that it did not occur to him that she might also have an extraordinary matrilineage. She is Sarah, daughter of Maeve, daughter of the eight warrior witches of Tir na mBan, daughters of the goddess Bride….
“She never knew her father,” I said a trifle sharply. But that was not true, I realized, remembering the stories Sarah had told of her father appearing to her in myriad animal forms. “Anyway, he died before she was born. The old one is his mother.”
Why was I telling this man so much? He regarded me again.
“So you are a widow, and you did not forsake your mother-in-law to return to your own people.”
He made it sound as though I had a choi
ce. Well, why not let him think of me as heroic and virtuous?
“I seem to remember a story about that….” his voice trailed off.
“Ruth and Naomi,” I said before I could think better of it. “Does that sound familiar?”
There was a flicker of recognition in the man’s eyes; then it faded. The man was Jewish. I had tended his body and helped him with his bodily functions, so I already knew that. Perhaps I could help him recover his memory, and as a healer it was my duty. But—I suddenly realized—I must not reveal my identity. Not until I was certain he knew no one in Galilee or Judea.
“You are lonely,” the man stated.
“Yes,” I said, too taken aback to deny it.
I wondered if he was about to make me a proposition. As far as I could remember, according to the Law, widows were fair game, or at least it was not a terrible sin to sleep with them. If a widow didn’t want to be considered a whore she had to be very careful. But since I actually had been a whore, the epithet had no power to shame or deter me. The question was: did I want to bed the stranger?
I regarded him as discreetly as I could. He was ugly, but in a compelling way. He had so much energy and intensity, even as a convalescent amnesiac, the heavy brow and the nose too large for his face didn’t seem to matter. He caught my gaze and looked at me for a moment, then abruptly looked away. He wants me, I decided, but he’s awkward.
“You must be lonely, too,” I ventured. “Not knowing who your people are.”
“That is no matter,” he said, his voice low, harsh. “But there is something, something I am meant to do, something I must do. And I can’t… I can’t remember.”
I could feel the man’s anguish. As a whore-healer, I had absorbed the deepest anguish of so many men—not least my beloved’s. Not least at all; for I had received all men as if they were my beloved. It was how I had loved him during the years we were apart. And here was my beloved again in this broken stranger, if I looked deeply enough.
I rose and went to the man and wrapped my arms around him; at once he stiffened and drew back.
“Woman, what are you doing!”
I answered without words, touching his crown, his face, his throat, his heart.
“Is this healing work?” he asked dubiously.
“Yes,” I answered truthfully; for was I not still a whore-healer?
And I touched his belly, and then his sex, still small and curled back on itself.
“Will it help restore my memory?”
“I don’t know,” I hesitated.
This wasn’t going well. Maybe the stranger preferred men in his bed. Or maybe…I felt suffused with shame again. She must have been handsome once ….A bit long in the tooth. Maybe the thought of sex with me repelled him, though surely he wasn’t much younger than I was. And surely I still had some allure. Breasts full and rising as the moon. Well, I decided, I wasn’t about to force the man (as my mothers had forced my father in order to get a child….me. There. Now you know my beginnings).
“You must rest.” I rose to my feet, and helped him get to his. “Your memory will return in its own time.”
On my own pallet, I could not sleep. Tears hot as shame scalded my eyes. I willed myself to be silent, hardly breathing. Just when I thought I was done weeping and might disappear into sleep, the stranger called out in a strangled, almost angry whisper.
“Healer woman, Healer Woman. Come here.”
I reproach myself still that I did not ignore him or tell him to shut up and go to sleep. The whole world might have been a better place—or might not. Who knows? I only know that I got up and went to his pallet, slid under his covers where I was met with almost an assault. Not just his sex but his whole body was rigid. Without touching me or kissing me, he went into me full bore with more strength than a man in his condition should have had. It didn’t last long. When it was over, he collapsed, sobbing like a baby. Maybe I should have been angry, but all I could think was how sad, how sad that he had so roughly taken what I would have given freely. In some kind of misguided mercy, I held him and soothed him, the fire of the stars letting down like milk—just because he needed it, my own wants having little to do with it. Then abruptly he rolled over. I lay still for another moment, not certain what to do. At last I got up and went back to my own pallet where I leapt into sleep as if off a cliff.
I am young, as young as I was on Tir na mBan when I was the child of my mothers and no harm had ever come to me. I wander downhill into the Valley between Bride’s Breasts where the light is thick and golden, aware of how light and lithe I am, how unbowed by anything, There are the nine hazel nuts clustered around the well of wisdom where I first saw my beloved. Time must be turning backwards. I will find him again; this time the water will open to take me in.
When I bend over the well of wisdom, I see only my own reflection. Then the image shifts, and it is not me gazing back but Sarah, her smooth dark face, her eyes as golden as the light. She is reaching into the water for something. It glimmers white, and I see the skull that my own hands grasped long ago. Then the skull becomes a flower, a white, many-petaled flower. Sarah’s dark hands reach down to pluck it. Suddenly she cries out, a terrible cry that splits the earth, the sky, my heart. Then nothing. Nothing.
I sat up awake and terrified, listening with my whole being, straining to see in the grey dawn light. Something was wrong. Sarah. Where was Sarah? My relief at finding Sarah in her bed was short-lived. Before I even touched her, I could smell her sweat; she was burning up with fever.
“Ma,” I called. “Help me. Sarah’s sick. I need cold, wet cloths. Now!”
There was no time to reproach myself—or Ma and her angels—for not knowing, for having missed the signs that had been right in front of our eyes. I pulled back the blankets and reached for her tunic, intending to lift it over her head, but I found it was sticking to her legs. As gently as I could, I eased the fabric up, and then it was my turn to cry out. Sarah’s thighs were covered with deep jagged wounds, the infection was spreading in long terrifying streaks and greenish pus oozed from the openings.
What had happened to her? When? Then I remembered:
Sitting under the tree feeling drops of something, warm, metallic tasting.
“Sarah, are you bleeding now?”
“Yes,” she had said, her voice exultant, defiant.
She had cut herself, her legs, and her upper arms. Dear goddess, if she had cut any deeper, she could have bled to death. And now—
“Ma, hurry! We’ve got to get her fever down.”
When Ma returned from the spring with wet cloths and she saw Sarah’s legs and arms, she dropped the cloths on the floor and began to keen, as if Sarah was already dead. I was too busy tending to Sarah or I might have slapped her. Then the stranger intervened.
“Hush, woman,” he said. Moving Ma aside, he picked up the cold cloths and helped me place them on her fever-blistered body.
“I am going to have to open the wounds again to clean them,” I told the man. “I need a clean blade. Help me.”
“There is no time for that,” he told me. “She is very close to death. Hold her in your arms.”
Hold her in my arms? I thought stupidly. Hold her my arms while she died? No, I would hold her in my arms, and she would live. She must live.
I sat down on Sarah’s pallet, and the man helped lift her limp weight, so that I could cradle her against my heart. I opened myself and called the fire of the stars, but the fire of Sarah’s fever was so hot, it felt as though nothing could stop it. It spread into my body, burning everything in its path. But there was no light in this fire, no lightness. Everything turned dark and heavy as earth, earth that was closing over her, closing me out.
“Sarah,” I heard my own voice wailing as if from a great distance—as if it were the wind, the ocean howling with desolation. “Sarah, Sarah.”
And then I felt strong hands, grasping her, pulling her, pulling her away from me.
“No!” I cried out. “No!”
And the man prayed on and on in my beloved’s name, his voice fierce with passion and authority. I was too stunned to think what it could mean. I only knew that Sarah grew lighter and cooler. At last the man fell silent, and Sarah opened her eyes and gazed steadily, deeply into mine just as she had when I first held her newborn. Then she closed her eyes again, and went to sleep peacefully in my arms.
I wished I could stay like that forever, holding her, her sweet, trusting body resting against me. Are you surprised that this moment is the one I would want to make eternal? What about the moments with my beloved? Standing under the tree of life at dawn? Finding him again after all our years apart? Coming together again after we had nearly destroyed that love with our willfulness?
Ah, but those moments are already eternal. I had lost my beloved to death, and I could never lose him again. But children must be lost to us. It is in the nature of things. Even the gods are not spared this merciful grief, this terrible joy. For no matter how far they go from us or how near they stay, no matter what peace we make, no matter what pride we may take in who they become, some part of us still longs to hold that child against our breast.
Well, the moment passed. I eased Sarah, still sleeping peacefully, back onto her bed. Before I covered her again, I ran my hands over her arms and legs. The wounds had healed: cleanly, completely. In fact they were not wounds anymore, but faint scars that resembled the bark of a tree or the current of a swift river. I was more startled by their curious beauty than by the miracle healing. In my time I had seen paraplegics rise and walk, the blind see and the deaf hear. Many healings had flowed through my own hands. But, suddenly I was confused and a little alarmed. It hadn’t been through me that Sarah was healed. Slowly I turned to face the man who continued to keep vigil beside her bed, his arms still in an aspect of prayer.
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