I opened my arms to her as I stepped off the ship, and though she held hers out to me, I had an odd sensation that she wasn’t seeing me. When she embraced me, I could feel warmth, as though I had stepped into a shaft of sunlight, but I also felt as though I could not hold her—any more than you can hold a dry leaf or a butterfly or a seed floating on the wind. My eyes filled, and then I could not see either. I turned with relief to Mary’s fierce, strong arms. We clung to each other and pressed our cheeks together, so we couldn’t tell our tears apart.
“Thanks for meeting me here,” I said when we released each other. Hardly a profound or adequate remark, but where do you begin after so many years, so much change and loss. “It will be easier to go to Ephesus by ship than land.”
“That’s what we figured,” Mary nodded towards Ma, who stood calmly, as if she had grown there, in the noisy chaotic port. “She predicted you’d be here today, and I’ve long since ceased to question how she knows what she knows. I wanted to come to Antioch anyway to meet with the leaders here. It’s time the ecclesia in Galatia was recognized.”
“And time that Mary be recognized as an apostle,” added Ma, who despite appearances to the contrary, was listening. “She’s fighting again, this time with You-Know-Who.”
“Miriam,” reproved Mary. “That man fights with everyone, not just with me. Besides, it’s not a fight, it’s a theological dispute, and the outcome is of the utmost importance to the future of the Way—”
“Fighting, fighting,” Ma sang almost mockingly. “You took them away, took them over. His first converts. You sorceress, you idolatrous Torah-loving witch.”
“Hush, Miriam,” said Mary B sharply. She looked at me and made a gesture that I took to mean, she’s all yours now. Good luck.
“Paul of Tarsus?” I said; my stomach tightened and turned over. “Is he here?”
“Here, there, and everywhere,” Mary B sighed.
“Have you been fighting with him about the foreskins?” I couldn’t help asking.
“Don’t you start!” she protested. “That’s all anyone ever talks about. And if you’re wondering, and I’m sure you are, yes, I have performed circumcisions. But only if they ask—and only the foreskin, for Jesus’s sake! Why is it that when any woman is in a position of leadership, men must assume she’s after their testicles? Frankly, I am not interested in their equipment at all except as it pertains to the Law of the Covenant.”
“I love you, Mary,” I laughed—the first time I had laughed in a long time. “How can I ever thank you for all you did for Sarah, and—”
“Tried to do,” she cut me off abruptly. “Come. Let’s find some place to rest and eat. We don’t have long. Miriam has foreseen you a ship sailing west at dawn.”
It was not hard to find the ship, a merchant vessel heavy with olive oil, wine, spices, and fine cloths from the east. The captain was someone I’d sailed with before, and he was glad enough to have me what with the red dawn sky predicting rough weather.
“If Sarah comes back to the mountain…” I said to Mary just before we boarded.
“I will tell her how to find you. Of course I will. You probably should have settled in one place a long time ago. Very likely you’ve been chasing each other round in circles.”
I didn’t answer. That same thought had occurred to me. Believe me there was no self-reproach I’d left unturned.
“And if you find her, send word to me and to Martha and Lazarus. We’ll come. Those few days we had with her. We all want to see her again. We need to see her again. There is something about her. She’s….”
“Her father’s daughter?” I said softly.
“And yours, my friend, and yours.”
“She is herself,” I said, remembering Jesus’s words. “Her self.”
Mary and I embraced one last time, and I boarded the ship with Ma, a tiny Galilean widow who had lived all her life in the hinterlands bound for one of the most sophisticated cities in the world, a peasant woman from the hills whose feet, unlike her son’s, had never left dry land.
Ma was seasick before we left the port.
“Rafael, Gabriel,” she moaned to her angels from a bunk in the hold; she had never called them by name before, “Uriel, Michael!”
None of the angels, I noticed, was holding the basin for her, or wiping her mouth and brow. That was during the ordinary swells of relative calm. Soon we found ourselves in the midst of the storm that had been gathering on the horizon, and I had a time of it running back and forth above and below deck, calming the winds and calming Miriam as best I could. Effective weather-witchery takes single-minded concentration, and I have to admit I was not at my best. In my profession, you can’t afford to have an off day. Whenever he had a moment to spare, the captain glowered at me balefully. Many sailors believed having women on board was bad luck. If I didn’t get matters in hand soon, Miriam or I or both of us could be tossed into the drink and no one would ask any questions.
“Jesus! You calm the winds already. Do I have to do everything around here?” I bellowed the words he had once shouted at me on the Sea of Galilee. “I’m going to bring your mother topside. The fresh air might help.”
In the lull that followed, I hauled the wretched, wretching mother of god to the deck and propped her up against the prow.
“I’ll take over now,” I said to Jesus, a bit crossly.
But I didn’t have to concern myself. As soon as Miriam’s eyes met the sky, a fresh fair wind began to blow, the clouds thinned and blew away, and the evening star shone bright in the west.
“Is your stomach better now, Ma?” I asked.
“Stella Maris.” She spoke so softly I wasn’t sure what she’d said, probably talking to some angel in charge of sea voyaging. Then she began to sing in a high tuneless voice that somehow managed to be melodic.
Ave, Maris stella,
Dei mater alma
Atque semper Virgo
Félix caeli porta
While it was not at all unusual for Ma to sing to herself, I must tell you that she did not know even rudimentary Latin. And Gregorian plain chant would not be invented for several centuries. Unperturbed by improbability or anachronism, the Star of the Sea continued to sing this once and future hymn of praise to herself. Her voice rose high and clear and pierced the hearts of sailors—who began to sing with her—or anyway hum, those who did not speak Latin, and if you don’t either, here’s a translation.
Hail, Star of the Sea,
fostering Mother of God,
Ever Virgin,
Happy door to heaven.
I don’t know who really calmed the storm, me, Jesus, chance. But there was no doubt about who was getting the credit.
For a few days after that our journey was calm and uneventful. Whenever Ma felt seasick, she would add another verse to her song. Sometimes I sang with her and suggested a word or phrase here and there to help with the meter. (After all, I had been in training as a poet.) If I had known that for millennia she would continue to be hailed as the Star of the Sea, patroness of sailors, while my fame as a wind whistler and storm soother would vanish as if it had never been (I mean no one sings: Hail to thee, Mary Magdalen, lover of god, not very virgin, happy door to sensual bliss, do they?) I might have felt a bit more jealous and competitive.
We’d been at sea about a week and were beginning to weave our way through the myriad islands of the Aegean., when one day, just as the sky began to lighten, the watch cried out:
“Pirates! Pirates! Coming round the back of that island. Rouse the Captain!”
The boat tilted dangerously as everyone, including Ma and me, rushed to one side to see a ship gliding free of a small island, making straight for us, a small, unobtrusive ship that could almost have passed for a fishing boat. I wondered why the watch assumed we were being pursued. What if she were simply a vessel in distress?
“Pirates!?” the captain also seemed skeptical. “But these seas are patrolled. There’s been no trouble with them since Julius
Caesar got ransomed and took his revenge—”
“Captain! You don’t understand, it’s not just any pirates. It’s them! Look at the flag.”
We all saw it as it rose—a blood-red flag emblazoned with the double-headed axe. Then I heard a sound that raised the hairs on my neck in a shock of recognition—women’s voices in high, wild battle cry, more birdlike than human. To a man, the pirates were women!
“To oars all oarsmen. Ready the sail!” shouted the captain.
“Do you seriously think we can outrun them, Captain?” cried the first mate. “They’re lighter, and the wind is in their favor. We must prepare for battle.”
“All sovereign Isis save us. We’re a merchant ship. We have only half a dozen armed men. Those bloodthirsty Amazon hell bitches will slice us up and fry us for breakfast.”
They were close enough now that I could see he was right. They were armed—swords and double-bladed axes flashed in the sun, and some of them wore chain mail over bright yellow tunics. The merchant oarsmen pulled with all their might, but we were still in the lee of the island, and they had sailed clear of it, ready to cut us off from the open sea and force us back. I found myself trembling not with fear but excitement. Warrior women, like my mothers, my mothers.
“Hoy, Wind Whistler!” The Captain spied me. “Do something. Call a wind. Drive their ship against the rocks. I swear if you don’t, I’ll have you crucified when we get to Ephesus.”
If we ever got to Ephesus, I thought, feeling giddy. Still, I did as he asked and whistled for the wind, more to make my mothers proud and show off to the warrior women as from any desire to escape. If they wanted a chase, I’d give them one. Then a strange thing happened. The wind answered my call to shift course and come from behind us and then it shifted back. I whistled again, and the same thing happened, the wind bounding back and forth. After two or three reversals, I felt it: there was a weather witch among the pirates, and we were playing tug-of-war with the wind. If we kept it up we’d have a twister on our hands. Already the water was beginning to whirl. Seasoned sailors were heaving their breakfasts over the sides, and Stella Maris could not manage so much as snatch of her song.
“What in Hades are you doing?” roared the Captain.
“There’s a rival wind whistler on that ship!” I shouted. “What do you want me to do!”
“Win!”
“All right, then. By the eight warrior witches of Tir na mBan, I will!”
At this invocation of the power of my lineage, the wind abruptly filled our sails with undivided force. But whether I wrested the wind from my opponent or she had, for some unknown reason, tossed it back to us, I could not tell.
“We’re going to make it!” shouted the captain as we flew over the water. “Oarsmen pull to the right!”
Meanwhile I moved to the left side of the prow, dragging a queasy Ma with me, straining to get a good look at the pirate witches, before their ship fell back too far.
At the closest point, we passed within a ship’s length. In the prow of the pirate ship stood a young woman. She was supple as a young tree; thick black braids unraveled and rode the wind. Against her bright tunic her skin was dark. As our ship drew near, she turned her head, and looked across the water, straight at me.
Her eyes were gold, golden as the leaves on the tree of life that shone their own light.
Sarah! I called her name but no sound came out, as if I were calling through dreams, through water. “Sarah!” My voice broke surface only to disappear into the wind. “Sarah.”
I reached out my arms to her, as her ship slipped into the distance. If Ma hadn’t been sitting beside me on the deck anchoring my legs, I might have jumped and tried to swim.
“They could still come after us, but they seem to be dropping back,” said the Captain coming to stand behind us. “I suppose they are afraid to come too much into the open. Really, Wind Whistler, you should have disabled the ship, drowned the lot of them.”
“You don’t know what you ask, Captain,” I said sharply. “I’ve saved your ship. Be satisfied.”
“I will have to make a report when we get to Ephesus,” grumbled the Captain, turning away. “But who will believe me? Female pirates. It’s like something out of an old story—or a bad dream. With any luck I’ll wake up soon.”
I kept my eyes on the receding ship. She was so far away now, I could not be sure, but I think the young pirate raised her arms, too, whether she reached for me or beseeched the sky I do not know.
“Ma,” I whispered, “It was Sarah, Sarah.”
And I began to weep.
“Hush now, daughter of my heart.” Ma managed to haul herself upright, and she slipped an arm around me. “All roads lead to Ephesus and away again and away again.”
“Roads?” I repeated, looking at the horizon, empty again.
“And all paths of the sea,” she added. “All the paths of the sea.”
The scion of Jesus Christ, the fruit of the Holy Grail (aka my womb) the child destined to carry on the sacred kingly line, Merovingian or otherwise, is a neo-Amazon pirate? Has this story gone too far? Well, why not? The canon has loosed us—Ma, Sarah, and me—and so our stories have become loose cannons careening on the pitching decks of our respective vessels.
If you believe my story (and belief is not requisite) Sarah is the child of the Resurrection, of her parents’ (brief in my case) apotheosis. By some quirk of fate or genes, she is as dark as I am bright, darker than her father, whose lineage is royal, obscure, or divine, depending on your preference. On her mother’s side, she is descended from warrior witches who live on an island in the Celtic Otherworld.
The Amazons, whose network of tribes may have spanned parts of three continents, who reputedly fought the Athenians, vanished into myth during what is called the Golden Age of Greece—not so golden for women, believe me. But who is to say they did not (or do not) still exist—like my mothers. Myths are sovereign in the imagination, a far more lasting and resilient realm than any nation state.
As I stood on the deck gazing back at the ship I could no longer see, I did not concern myself with the history or myth of the Amazon nations. Just as Sarah and I had played tug of war with the wind (surely she was the one!) my heart went back and forth. Joy to have seen her alive and pain as bad as any I’d endured that she was gone from me again. I tortured myself wondering if she had recognized me, if she would figure out how to find me—or if she would want to.
All roads lead to Ephesus, and all the paths of the sea. Ma’s words became my mantra. I bent my mind and heart on Sarah, over and over sending her the message: Ephesus, Ephesus. Come and find us in Ephesus. Mary B was right. It was time to stay put and let her find me.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
THE MEETING
I HAD BEEN IN EPHESUS before during my years of searching for Sarah. It was a splendid Greek city, now with a solid Roman overlay. Built between two mountains, Ephesus cascaded downhill, a torrent of marble, to a busy cosmopolitan harbor. Only the very wealthy lived within the city walls in luxurious terraced villas. Far more people lived in the mountains in crude wooden dwellings, a far cry from the city proper, with its lavish public fountains, temples, meeting places, and extensive latrines. Though Ephesus was impressive, I remained at heart a barbarian, largely indifferent to urban amenities. I had never properly appreciated Greek or Roman statuary, of which there was an excess in Ephesus. Not only did gods and goddesses adorn every gate and temple façade, but statues of prominent (read wealthy) citizens lined much of Courete Street, the main district for shopping.
While I had lived for years in the splendor and squalor of Rome—of which Ephesus was a smaller, more upscale version—Ma’s only experience of a city was Jerusalem, overwhelming enough with the huge Temple crowning it and with holiday throngs crowding it, but, even under Roman domination, a Jewish city with a minimum of graven images. As we stepped off the ship into the pandemonium of Harbor Street, the ground heaving under our sea legs, Ma held tight to my arm and le
t me tow her along. When she stumbled on an uneven bit of marble, I turned to her and saw that she had her eyes closed tight shut.
“Ma, don’t you want to see Ephesus, now that we’re here?” I demanded a bit crossly. “It was your idea that we come.”
She shook her head and stopped where she was, her eyes still closed, and I suddenly felt overwhelmed with weariness and wished I was anywhere else in the world. The sun was nearing its height, and the stones, however white and frequently sluiced with water, gave back the heat ferociously. All around us people jostled and pushed their way to and from market stalls, vendors called out enticements or haggled over prices. And Ma just stood balked and spooked as any of the donkeys—of which there were plenty carrying goods to and from the ships.
“Take me to her,” said Ma with a strange mix of eagerness and resignation.
Anyone who knew anything about Ephesus did not have to ask “her who.” There was only one her here, though some called her Diana, others Artemis, and others still remembered her older Anatolian name, Cybele.
“If that’s what you want.”
I turned Ma around and led her out the farthest of the three harbor gates, for the Temple stood about two miles beyond the walls on a marshy plain, the site of the original city, abandoned because the swamps bred fevers. Ma and I joined other pilgrims, making their way along the shore road to one of the certified wonders of the world. Vendors lined both sides of the road, all of them hawking replicas of the famous goddess in all sizes and all gradations of workmanship and materials.
“No household altar is complete without the great Artemis of the Ephesians! Finest craftsmanship. Made of purest silver!”
There were also vendors of amulets and potions for any imaginable ill or desire.
“Domina, I have for you a cure for blindness. It never fails. Come into my shop,” several called to Ma and me, mistaking her deliberately closed eyes for an affliction. “Domina, lead the old one here.”
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