“Do you call on Beelzebul?” Paul was beginning to get excited, I could tell, but I was still in the quiet empty place where I rested after the fire had come and gone.
“Beelzebul,” I repeated. “The name rings a bell.”
A memory of Jesus again: some Pharisees accusing him of driving out demons through the power of Beelzebul, the chief demon. He had answered that it didn’t make any sense to drive out a demon with a demon, as a kingdom divided cannot stand. Or so Mary B had explained it to me, because I never did understand the whole business about demons. How I wished she were here now. Let Paul try his little debating tricks on her.
“But I don’t actually know Beelzebul,” I hastened to add.
“Neither do I,” muttered an old woman. “Can’t even pronounce his name. Doesn’t come from the mountain. Must be an outlander.”
“Then do you call on other heathen gods and goddesses?” the apostle persisted.
I don’t call on anyone, I wanted to say. I glanced at Sarah, who had turned to regard me warily. I sent her a speaking glance, which might have translated as: Look, kid, I don’t want to embarrass you in front of this aggravating little man you have decided to hero worship, but he’s getting up my nose. Then inspiration struck, and I recalled an old trick of Sarah’s father.
“Tell me, Paul of Tarsus, where does healing come from?”
When in doubt answer a question with a question. Deflect it. Turn the question back on the one who asks. Jesus had once saved my life that way.
“Healing comes from the Spirit of God through the power of Our Lord Jesus Christ!” It worked; Paul was off and running and went on for quite awhile.
“Well, then,” I said when he had run out of steam. “There you have it.”
It gave me great pleasure to see the look of confusion on his face that gave way to ire as it dawned on him that he’d been trumped.
“You yourself received healing at my hands,” I reminded him and everyone, rashly rubbing salt in the wound. “How could it have come from anywhere else?”
My cleverness really wasn’t much use since I still hadn’t learned to leave well enough alone.
“You are saying then,” the apostle advanced on me, sure now of his victory, “that you heal by the authority of Christ Jesus.”
I glanced past him at Sarah, who now sent me a speaking glare. Translation: don’t blow this, Mother. Don’t ruin everything.
“The words are yours,” I said to the apostle, echoing the words my beloved had spoken when Pontius Pilate demanded to know if he was king of the Jews.
“Do you accept Christ Jesus as your Lord and Savior?”
And suddenly it seemed he was not menacing me, but pleading with me. That he had set aside his antagonism and, for this moment at least, cared only for my soul, winning it for his god, that if I said yes, he would erase from his memory all my error and transgression, just as his god would. His Christ Jesus. Who was—and was not—my Jesus, my lover from before and beyond times in all the worlds.
“Accept him?” I stalled. “But I never rejected him, not really. I mean, sometimes we fought…”
Sarah sent me the look, the I-lay-upon-you-a-geis-of-danger-and-destruction-if you say-one-more-word look, but by now Paul wasn’t paying me any attention. He had what he wanted.
“Another soul for Christ.” He exulted. “Praise the Lord.”
He signaled to Sarah, and before I knew what was happening he was sprinkling me with water, baptizing me in the name of Jesus. Baptism a la Paul no longer required a complete dunking in a cold river (which in the Galatian winter might have killed off half his converts) just a few drops to symbolize immersion in the Spirit. He was in such a hurry to secure my soul for Christ that he hadn’t even asked me to repent first, which was just as well under the circumstances.
And so it came to pass that I was baptized against my will a second time, the first occasion being the time John the Dipper and I nearly drowned each other in the River Jordan.
Since the first baptism hadn’t taken, I wasn’t overly concerned about this one—but it proved to have consequences I could not have foreseen. First of all everyone was now obliged to regard me as a sister in Christ and to treat me with charity, including Sarah. She had not been formally baptized, as far as I knew, but in Paul’s eyes there was perhaps no need; she was so clearly favored by Christ Jesus. Everyone welcomed me and embraced me. When Sarah put her arms around me, she clung to me, as if she had been holding herself apart from me and now at last was free, for a moment, to love me again. If this baptism pleased her so much, I wasn’t about to voice my reservations or remind anyone that I had not consented.
So I tried to be happy that evening as I joined in the communal meal, but I went to bed feeling uneasy and false. Sheep’s clothing is not always comfortable if you’re not a sheep. That night for the first time in a long time, I woke and felt my beloved’s presence. It was not that he was not always with me, in my heart, in my memory—but now he was with me, surrounding me, inside me, his unmistakable essence flowing over me. I felt mine pouring into him and my tears with it.
“Where the hell have you been!” I demanded silently suddenly realizing how angry I was with him. “Did you really appoint this Paul guy to be your apostle and set him apart from his mother’s womb?”
“He tends to overstate the case,” my beloved understated.
“I’ll say! I suppose you know he tried to force my conversion.”
“But he failed.” I could sense in my beloved both amusement and wistfulness.
“Cariad,” I said. “I of all people understand the god-making death. But I can’t accept the rest of it. You know that.”
“Thank goddess,” he said; yes he did. “But Maeve, listen, that’s why the people need you, the ecclesia needs you.”
“Needs me for what?” I bridled.
“To tell the story as only you can. To tell our story.”
He knew how to get to me, even after all these years of being dead or resurrected, or whatever. Or he thought he did, but things weren’t so simple on this side of the veil.
“Have you forgotten the deal I struck with your pal Peter? Let me remind you. I agreed to disappear from the country, from the story, in exchange for keeping Sarah, for being able to raise her in peace. For Isis’s sake, you were there that night or Peter and I never would have come to terms. You sent me a vision of Sarah safe on the mountain.”
“I know, cariad, I know.”
“You know? You know?” I refused to be soothed. “Does being a god make you omniscient? Then tell me, why has everything gone so wrong? Do you know that Sarah blames me now for keeping her from your disciples? As for telling my story, Sarah has begged me not to. And now everyone thinks I have accepted you as my savior! What have you saved me from? That’s what I’d like to know.”
I waited for an answer from him, but I could only feel him, his tenderness, his sadness.
“Why weren’t you with me when Sarah almost died?” I finally got to the heart of my anger. “You were with him. He healed her. In your name. But me you left alone; even the fire of the stars failed me.”
“She lived. Sarah lives,” he rebuked me gently. “Does anything else matter?”
“No,” I acknowledged. “No, it’s true. Nothing else matters.”
I rested in him for a moment, and I felt how weary I was, too weary to fight any more, with Sarah, with Paul, with my beloved.
“Is that why you sent the apostle here? To save Sarah?”
Save, that word again, that loaded word. I would almost say that my beloved sighed, except he was not so incarnate. Still I had a sense of winds moaning, circling. I had a momentary glimpse of everything, all our chaos and strife, as if I looked at it from a vast distance.
“Don’t go,” I said, back inside myself again.
I will never leave you, I felt rather than heard him say.
“Tell me what to do,” I begged as his presence ebbed, and against my will, sleep began to over
take me.
I had a sensation of lightness that I took for laughter, but it was followed by a gust of wind full of warm tears.
You will know, were the last words I heard; or thought I heard. When the time comes, you will know.
CHAPTER THIRTY
REVELATIONS
I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING feeling calmer or maybe just resigned. I was not in control of what was happening, so why not just go along with it. If people wanted to think I was saved, let them. Saved, lost, there didn’t seem to be that much difference to me. If salvation gave me back my daughter’s trust and affection, then bring it on. So for a while, I managed to be part of the newly formed Galatian ecclesia. If I paid little or no attention to the preaching, no one was the wiser. I could not help noticing that people began to turn to Paul for healing instead of to me, but then, I reasoned, I was now just one of them, accepted as a member of the community, and there was a certain consolation in that after years without the camaraderie that had once been a part of my daily life.
Winter started to wane; tips of trees swelled red; the stream thawed and roared, the goats and sheep began giving birth. Celtic people, and the Galatians were no exception, celebrated the return of the kindly goddess Brigid at this time of year. The Blue Hag of winter was departing, taking with her starvation and sickness. Under the waxing sun, seeds were beginning to stir; the ewes and she-goats were in milk. The people would live.
My mothers had called me Bride’s Flame when I was a child, and when I’d had to declaim my lineage, I always named this goddess as a grandmother. Sarah had learned to love the holiday, too. Each year we fashioned a Brigid doll, and, with Ma, we made a procession to a mountain spring where we sang songs to the snakes emerging after their winter sleep, greeting the snakes being Sarah’s favorite part of the rite.
Although men also celebrated Imbolc, it was very much a woman’s holiday, for Brigid—like Artemis, also revered in the mountains—protected women in childbirth and made sure their milk was abundant. Despite Paul’s many sermons on the One God, and Christ Jesus’s unique (and rather confusing) relationship with him, it did not occur to the mountain women that making offerings to a spring sacred to the goddess would be a problem. No one had thought to ask or tell Paul about the rite. And so the day began, as it had for as long as any could remember, with the women rising at dawn, singing and processing with Bride, a large wooden doll with a painted face, dressed in white and bedecked with ribbons.
It was a bright, mild morning; women from several villages had gathered, and Sarah was especially happy because some of our neighbor women had brought Ma with them, and so we Three were reunited after our first separation since before Sarah’s birth. Ma linked arms with both of us, humming like a drunken bee, not bothering herself with the tune or the Celtic words.
Early on Bride’s morn
Shall the serpent come from the hole.
I will not harm the serpent
Nor will the serpent harm me.
This is the day of Bride.
The Queen shall come from the mound.
Then Ma leaned in close and sang in the same rhythm in Aramaic;
There’s going to be trouble this morn.
Listen, just listen to me.
There’s going to be trouble this morn.
Trouble is what I see.
This is the day of the Lord.
Trouble will surely abound.
“Ma, stop.” I protested. “We’re all here together. Tell the angels, no worries, I am saved now.”
“Trouble,” she sang again. “Trouble is what I see.”
And of course she was right.
Paul was waiting for us at the spring with the men from each village whom he had appointed as elders of the ecclesia. They looked uneasy, caught as they were between a goddess and a hard place, and they kept their eyes on the ground. Paul stood holding the staff Sarah had made for him, and I remembered the archdruid on Mona, planting his staff as the world tree and declaring: here, now, is the center of the world. I stifled a laugh as I pictured the apostle leading us in a druid rite. Then I caught site of the snake he had crushed with his staff, and I almost lunged for him, but Ma dug in her nails. On the other side of Ma, I heard Sarah’s sharp, indrawn breath as she took in the murdered snake, and I confess I was glad. I will win her back from the apostle once and for all, I told myself, I will win her back.
“Moses could turn his staff into a snake,” I challenged the apostle. “You have killed the snake with yours. Why?”
Paul glared at me fiercely, but a glint in his eye told me he relished the chance to fight..
“Woman!” He no longer called me Healer Woman. “If you know the scriptures of the Jews, then you must know that the serpent is the seducer, the father of all lies, and you stupid Galatians, you women, you have been seduced by the snake, just as Eve was. You worship the snake, you worship animals and idols.” He pointed to the Brigid doll. “You pray to your goddess to ease your pain in childbirth, pain that was meted out by God as punishment for disobedience. Have you learned nothing from me, nothing in all this time that I have labored over your souls as tenderly as a mother? How can you backslide so easily into your old ways? Now I know how Moses felt when he came down from the mountain and found the people worshipping the golden calf.”
Not enough his assertion that God had revealed his Son in the apostle, now he was our mother and our Moses.
“You only said there was one god,” the old cud-chewing woman spoke up. “You didn’t say there was no goddess. How can there be no goddess? Who’s god’s mother then? Who’s Christ Jesus’s mother?”
“My soul doth magnify the Lord,” Ma began to sing what became the first line of the Magnificat.
People were used to her odd bursts of singing, so no one paid her any mind. Yet she foresaw, as Paul could not, that the Church would spread over the earth, because of her, that the old goddesses would morph into her or, in Brigid’s case, become her friend, her midwife, wetnurse to her son, as the Celts would tell the story in another few centuries. All this Paul could not foresee; in fact he could not see much further than a few feet where a herd of confused and belligerent women waited for him to make some kind of sense.
“Do you not understand? With the blood he shed from the Cross, the blood in which we are washed and made clean from sin, the blood in which we are reborn, Christ Jesus has freed us from the blood of our first birth Don’t you see that he has come to free you from slavery to this temporal body, with its lusts, its imperfections.”
“And my spirit shall rejoice in God my savior,” Ma sang.
Whose side was she on? I peered around her to get a glimpse of Sarah, whose dark skin was as pale as I had ever seen it, who was biting her lip till it bled. If only she would turn and meet my eyes, I would give a sharp nod of my head towards the mountain. Let’s get out of here, I’d say. I could picture us running, crying, laughing, free again, running all the way back to before. But she kept her golden eyes fixed on the apostle.
“Do not ask me: who was Christ Jesus’s mother!”
“For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden,” sang Ma.
“Do not ask who is my mother or your mother,” Paul continued loudly. “For all of you are the children of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus, since every one of you that has been baptized has been clothed in Christ. There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freemen, there can be neither male nor female—for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And simply by being Christ’s, you are the progeny of Abraham, the heirs named in the promise.”
The apostle paused for breath and to mop his brow, for he had worked himself into a lather.
“Who’s Abraham?” someone nearby whispered.
“He’s a Jew, I think.”
“Is he saying we’re Jewish, then?”
“He just said there aren’t any more Jews or Greeks, thank Christ Jesus for that.”
“For behold,” sang Ma, “from henceforth all generatio
ns shall call me blessed.”
“My sisters in Christ!” Paul spoke over Ma’s song, which was beginning to alarm him, not least because she was singing in Aramaic, a language none of the Galatians spoke. “Come away from this place of idolatry and abomination, and I will instruct you in soberness, godliness, and righteousness.”
“For he that is mighty hath magnified me!” Ma went on. “And holy is his name.”
But Paul had picked up his staff, and at a signal from him, the elders had stepped forward, and the women began to back away, and finally they turned and walked back toward the nearest village. All except for the Three. Paul lingered a moment, waiting for Sarah, extending his hand to her, but she shook her head. With uncharacteristic meekness, the apostle turned and followed his flock back to the fold.
“He hath showed strength with his arm,” Ma sang, “he hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their hearts.”
So sure was I that Sarah had spurned him, once and for all, I almost felt sorry for him. Almost. Then Sarah went and knelt by the dead snake, her hand hovering just over it. I waited a moment, and then went to her, putting my arm around her. There was so much I wanted to tell her that I hadn’t told her yet about her father—how he had risked himself to protect me on a Brigid’s day long ago, how he had been the only one to confront the man who raped me, how he had not defended himself when the druids still thought he had fathered my child. But I had never told Sarah about her half-sister; there was so much I had never told her. Maybe if she knew, if she understood....
“Your father,” I began.
“Don’t!” she shook me off and sprang to her feet.
And she began to run towards the village.
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