“Angels?” Aquila and Priscilla looked at me and then at each other, a look that plainly said: the daughter-in-law is mad as well.
“I think we are out of our depth here, my dear,” said Aquila. “Look. The baptisms have concluded. We ought to at least go and introduce ourselves to Apollos.”
“If you will excuse us,” said Priscilla, as her husband helped her to her feet. “And do please come to our salon just off Courete Street by the Hermes gate. There you will hear the true message of our dear Lord Christ Jesus and when you are, that is to say, ready, you may receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which is the only true baptism.”
“Thank you.” I stood up politely. “We’ll remember.” And make sure never to go there, I did not say.
Ma only smiled and hummed a few bars of Stella Maris.
“Apollos is said to be a skilled exorcist,” Aquila was saying as they walked away. “I wonder if we ought to speak to him about them.”
“But my dear, he has the wrong baptism,” Priscilla reproved him. “If only Paul were here, he would know what to do!”
Wouldn’t he just! As her voice trailed off, I looked around and wondered which way to run.
“Help me pack up the rest of these cakes,” said Ma. “We’re heading for the hills.”
Ma was not just speaking metaphorically about the hills. We made our way back through the city and left by the upper gate, following a road that began in Ephesus and wound its way over range after mountain range, connecting the Anatolian and Syrian Antiochs and eventually leading all the way to Jerusalem—a road that even now Paul of Tarsus walked in the opposite direction, visiting his churches, quarreling bitterly with Mary B and the ingrate Galatians, inexorably making his way towards Ephesus.
But neither of us thought of him then, or turned our sight or second sight in his direction as we slowly climbed, the grade steep, even though the road zigzagged back and forth. We toiled upwards as the sun lowered, its slanting rays still fierce. Apart from shepherds crossing, moving their flocks from one slope to another, the road was not heavily trafficked at this hour. Peasants who had brought goods to market would wait till the city gates were closing and the evening cooled the air to make their way back to the wooden hovels we saw here and there. Children played in dusty yards, with old women watching them, leaning in the doorways with a drop spindle or standing in the yard stirring a cooking pot over a dung fire, for wood was scarce, most of it commandeered by the Roman city dwellers to heat the perpetual baths. The women waved to us in a friendly manner, showing no fear of the stranger.
More than once we were offered drink and food, and even hospitality for the night, which Ma politely refused, pointing up to indicate we had further to go. The peasants spoke a dialect of Greek mixed with something older and more indigenous, and we made ourselves understood more through smiles and gestures than words. One thing was very clear to the old women: Ma was in charge of where we went and when. They beamed their approval of my deference to her wishes and sent us off with blessings.
On and up we went, pausing frequently to rest and look back. After a couple of hours, I could feel a change in the air, cooler, sweeter, fragrant with thyme, hyssop, lavender. Now we were high enough to see the city, bright and small below, and the harbor winding its way to the Aegean, the islands shining in the late light, the water wavering between blue and rose. We were much too far away to see boats as even tiny specks, yet I sent my sight flying out, diving down, searching the paths of the sea for the brave little boat with the Amazon flag.
“Ma,” I said, and my voice felt small in the vastness, as mournful as the doves that were calling and calling. “Sarah.”
“We will not lose sight of Sarah,” Ma assured me. “We will not lose sight of the sea. Only a little further now.”
“How will she find us way up here? How will we find her? You said all roads lead to Ephesus. Ephesus is down there.”
“This is greater Ephesus,” Ma said, and then again. “Greater. Ephesus. Ephesos. Apasas,” she spoke in an old language I did not recognize. “The place of the bees. Come.”
As she named the bees, I could see them, hear them, spiraling in the last light, their wings translucent, shining, gathering the last sweetness of the day. Ma and I turned and walked on for another hour. Just as the stars began to appear and the moon rose high enough to clear the hills, Ma turned from the road into a hidden fold in the hills, where olive, cypress, and cedar trees grew wild and unmolested. The wind moved through the branches softly, as if it loved to be here in this quiet, secret place. The ground was cool and moist under our tired feet. In a few moments we heard the sound of water, not a stream, but a spring bubbling up from underground, here where the slopes of three hills came together. Ma knelt and cupped her hands in the water. Before she drank, she turned and raised her hands to me, offering me the first sip.
“Welcome to my house, daughter.”
There was something about her gesture, about the place itself that undid me, unloosed all my sorrow. I wept as I knelt and drank the water from her hands. It tasted like earth and stars all at once, like all the sorrows of the world distilled into peace. Then I dipped my hands into clear, cold spring, and she drank the water I held for her. When we had our fill, we walked a little way uphill from the spring till we found some dry, level ground. Then we wrapped ourselves in our cloaks and fell asleep watching the moon and the stars drift over the trees.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
MERYEMANA
WHEN MA FIRST WELCOMED ME to her house, there was no building there, but she knew it was her home, just as I had recognized Temple Magdalen by the sound of its spring, and the scent of wild roses and lake water, just as Sarah would one day claim the wild marshes and shores of another country as her own. Sometimes there is an alchemical marriage between a person and a place—each one transmuted by the other---that is so strong, people can sense it for centuries afterwards. Something indelible happened between Ma and that fragrant, hidden fold in the hills. Meryemana, the house of Mary, is still there in your time, and though you will find a chapel there over what are supposed to be ancient foundations, the House of Mary is still not a building.
Since it was summer, for a time Ma and I simply lived outdoors. Ma seemed content to wander her small domain, moving from sun to shade according to the temperature. We ate very little, the spring water being extraordinarily sustaining, so our supplies lasted quite awhile. We didn’t talk much, and I thought I sensed a new quality in Ma’s silence, as if even the angels had quieted and stepped back and she listened to silence itself, her eyes often closed, whether she slept or not. Sometimes when I sat with her, a sense of peace would come over me. It seemed then that the wind would still, and bees hover motionless over a flower. Though we were too high above the sea to hear the surf, I would find myself listening for the brief, breathless moment just before the tide turns.
“Do you remember how we came to this place?” Ma asked me one day when we were sitting in our favorite morning patch of sun.
“We climbed up from Ephesus,” I answered, not sure of what she meant.
She did not answer right away. Then she smiled and shook her head.
“I think we have always been here,” she said, gently, firmly.
I did not know what to say, so I said nothing.
“Do you think my son will come soon?” she asked, not anxiously, almost conversationally.
A small wind came into Meryemana, rocking the upper branches of the pines like a cradle; far below the waves began to slip away.
“I am sure he will come, Ma. He will come when it’s time.”
I put my hand over hers, and we sat till the sun moved, and Ma asked me to help her up to follow the warmth. The shade had a chill to it today.
“Ma,” I said. “It’s time I built us a shelter of some kind. Will you be all right here for awhile alone?”
“I dwell in my house, the house that is most high, that is green and pleasant. The angels are round about me,
but I have told them to sit over there and not bother me, unless I need something.”
“All right.” I felt a bit dubious; she was herself but something had changed. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back.”
“You will be back,” she repeated. “You will stay with me till he comes.”
I worked off my sense of vague anxiety by cutting saplings and wild vines, hard work with only a knife. Then I wove them together into a small shelter that would not keep out more than a light drizzle. What I needed were some skins. I decided that the next day I must go in search of a neighbor or shepherd. In the morning, I found myself reluctant to leave Ma, and the peaceful seclusion that she called her house. I had a niggling fear that she might wander and become lost. She had always been fey, but since we had come to the mountains, there had been a sudden yet subtle change in her. She had claimed this bit of earth as hers; she seemed content. She was not lost, and yet I could not shake the sense that I was losing her.
“Go, child,” she shooed me away. “I suppose you can’t see the fat angels with the flaming swords standing watch over my door, but I can. They know who to let out and in. Have you noticed? The terrible one is not here. I have not invited him.” She smiled almost smugly. “So you see, I will be quite safe.”
As I left the fold in the hills for the road, I thought I could feel the heat glancing from those invisible swords.
We had more neighbors than I had realized on our first ascent. After the turn off for Meryemana, the road sloped downward, and led to some pleasant caves inhabited mostly by shepherds and goatherds. When they understood that we were two widows, without protection, they would not accept payment for the skins.
“We must be kind to widows and orphans, and to the stranger in a strange land,” a grizzled old man explained to me.
“Because you were once strangers in Egypt?” I asked, recognizing phrases from the Hebrew Scriptures even in local dialect, which I did not fully understand.
“Egypt?” the man repeated. “I was never in Egypt. I have lived always in these mountains.”
“I only wondered if you were Jews, because of what you said about being kind to widows, orphans, and strangers.”
“It is what our teacher tells us.”
“Your teacher?” I was beginning to feel uneasy. “What is your teacher’s name?”
Was there no refuge from Paul of Tarsus, even here in the caves of the poor? Surely this was a far cry from Aquila and Priscilla’s salon. Yet, as I knew as well as anyone, he had spent a winter among the Galatians who were just as poor and lived in mountains more remote than these from any major port.
“John,” the man answered. “He lives by the sea, but he comes to us from time to time. He tells us about the teachings of the man Jesus. Here, widow woman. Take these skins for his sake, for inasmuch as we have given these skins to you for your shelter, we have given them to Jesus.”
“And to his mother,” I said before I could stop myself.
“His mother?”
“Theotokos,” I felt my tongue was possessed. “Never mind. Thank you in Jesus’s name.
I turned and fairly fled back to Meryemana.
I did not tell Ma right away about my encounter with the shepherd, who followed the teachings of her son, or about my own inexplicable outburst. I busied myself with making our shelter waterproof and secure against strong winds. It occurred to me that if we were to spend the winter here, we might need someone to help us build a more permanent dwelling, perhaps for Jesus’s sake. But this tent-like structure would do for another month or two. That evening, as if on cue, a light rain began to fall. I put our bedrolls and meager supplies inside, and made a fire just at the opening.
Sitting silently with Ma, after all my bustle, listening to the flames hiss and watching them put out bright tendrils as if seeking their source in the stars, I found myself overcome again with such huge sorrow that it felt like release—something you had to yield to, bigger than reason. So I just wept and wept without trying to understand, with no need for comfort. Ma rocked as if riding the rhythms of my sorrow.
“It does not need to be a secret,” Ma spoke when my tears were spent.
“What doesn’t?”
“Who I am. Who. I. Am.”
I shivered, remembering the word theotokos springing from my lips, taking me and the shepherd by surprise.
“Who are you, Miriam of Nazareth, Mary of Apasas?” I suddenly asked. “Who are you really?”
“I think you know, Maeve of Magdala, Maeve of Tir na mban, Maeve of places you have not even dreamed yet. I think you have always known.”
I nodded. I did not need to speak for her to hear me. Wholly human, wholly divine. Holy, in a way that had nothing to do with meekness or submission. Holy the way the spring was holy, the way the mountain was holy. As terrible as the terrible one, yet merciful in her wildness. How her names and nature would be come to be distorted and misused. Did she suspect that, even then? Did she trust that she would triumph?
“We will let the people know me,” she pronounced. “We will invite them to come to my house. One day there will be a huge temple to me in the city below, but this is my house that will be here long after the city is dust.”
We sat in silence for a time. I rested my head on my knees and gazed at the flames, thinking of Sarah, wondering if she was out on the seas tonight, and if she would find her way to Meryemana. Ma seemed so certain and serene. She and Artemis had come to some kind of terms. She knew who she was and what to do, while all my certainty seemed to have died with my beloved—who had risen again while I lay low.
“What about me, Ma? Who am I? Do the people need me, too?”
Ma’s silence deepened, even as the wind rose and circled, and the clouds swirled and parted here and there, giving us glimpses of black sky and stars fierce in their brightness.
“My daughter, I will tell them who you are, but they will not hear me.”
The tears rose again, but stayed in my throat so I could hardly speak.
“The beloved. You are the beloved and the lover. But they will think I mean someone else, they will think I mean something else. Bright One, for you it is the dark time of the dark moon, a dark madonna you will be, cloaked as night is cloaked, hidden as night’s radiance is hidden.”
I did not understand her, but I did not doubt her.
“And Sarah?” I didn’t care how cryptic her pronouncements might be, I just needed something, anything, an image, a phrase, something to guide me through my own darkness.
“She will be worshipped,” Ma pronounced at length. “But no one will know who she is. Even when they stumble on the truth, they will get it wrong. She will have to find her own people. She was not born to them.”
I felt stung.
“She was born to me! She is of my people, as much as his or yours.”
But even as I spoke I remembered my beloved saying, “She is herself.” I should give up fretting that I had stolen her from the followers of the Way, from those who wanted her to carry on his lineage. Sarah had given us all the slip.
“You asked,” yawned Ma. “As my son would say, let those with ears hear.”
I fumed quietly for a moment.
“So only you of the Three—remember when we were called that?—only you will be known for who you are?”
“Now that you put it that way, perhaps I misspoke.” An unusual admission for an oracle. “Not known, not fully known. But needed. The people will need me,” she yawned. “It can be quite tiresome, you know.”
With that she curled up in her warm, dry bedroll. I sat up watching, stirring the embers long after her snores had mingled with the sounds of the night, till the peace of Meryemana stole over me and I let my fears and bitterness rest.
It happened slowly, simply, without any effort on either of our parts, that people round about began to visit Meryemana. Some of them were followers of the Way, some of them not. It did not seem to matter. They came quietly in twos and threes to sit with Ma, to fill
jugs with spring water, to bathe in it. I learned from one old woman that the spring had long been venerated and the trees in this fold of the mountains protected. Yet no one seemed to mind that we had taken up residence here, Ma and the place were so at one. For the pagans, it was as if the goddess had returned to her house. For the followers of Jesus, it was much the same. They took great joy in tending his mother.
Strangely, it did not occur to them to question her identity. I puzzled over that for a time. Were these Anatolian peasants just more credulous than other people? For so much of her life Miriam had not been recognized for who or what she was. As a girl she was crazy Miriam, who, rumor had it, was no better than she should be, mother of a trouble-making, ne’er-do-well son. At times that son had treated her none too kindly, either. And his resentful siblings had made heavy weather of her care. Then she had disappeared altogether in the company of her disreputable gentile daughter-in-law. During her time among the Galatians, she had been revered as a sibyl, but now people seemed to adore her, not for her oracular powers—indeed, she seldom spoke—but for her presence. I cannot tell you how many times I saw people sit down beside her and weep, just as I had when I first entered Meryemana. While they were with Ma, people laid down whatever burdens they carried, and then left refreshed and calmed. Ma never did anything but receive them.
Me they treated kindly, accepting me as Ma’s daughter who cared for her ancient mother as a daughter should. The distinction daughter-in-law made no difference to them. As she had said she would, Ma told everyone I was her son’s beloved. People would nod and beam at her, but they seemed neither shocked nor curious. And I did not feel compelled to press the matter of my identity—for what did it matter, really? In Meryemana, by some grace or miracle, no one was debating the correct baptism, whether circumcision was necessary for conversion, the significance of the Torah, or if it was taboo or compulsory for gentile and Jewish converts to eat together. Whether Jesus was man or god or both, or might have had a wife and child didn’t enter into the conversation at all.
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