The atmosphere of Meryemana reminded me a little of Temple Magdalen, but it was quieter and more contemplative. More than once, amidst the shared peace, I would find myself remembering things Jesus had said in the early days in Galilee, mysterious and homely sayings, like “the sower plants the seed, and it grows in the night, he knows not how.” Or “you are the salt of the earth, the leaven in the bread.” And most of all, “come to me all you who travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Sometimes, I would speak or sing the sayings aloud, adding some of my own words. And people would nod and listen and often take up a song and continue it. I felt closer to Jesus, to the life I had shared with him, than I had since he died or went wherever he went. It was for that I wept the most often, both the loss and the restoration of him.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
ADVICE
YET EVEN AS MERYEMANA EASED ME, I also felt a restlessness I could not explain to myself that was more than worry or longing for Sarah. On the full moon of the grape harvest—the time of year when Jesus and I had married—I woke in the night, and knew I could not go back to sleep.
“I’m going for a walk,” I whispered to Ma through her musical snores, trusting that some part of her would remember, if she happened to wake.
Keeping my cloak wrapped around me, for the night was chilly, I headed up the shoulder of one of the hills that sheltered Meryemana. Unlike the lush fold, the hilltops and ridges were bare. In the bright moonlight, I could see the mica glittering in the small stones that made up so much of the soil. The sea glittered, too, so strangely still and silent at this height and remove. As I walked along, my footfall the only sound, in the vast still night, I became aware of warmth to one side, as if the moon had borrowed more than the sun’s light.
“Is it you?” I said out loud.
No answer came, but the warmth remained steady.
“Why don’t you materialize for once?”
“Is it necessary?”
At last I heard his voice inside my mind, my body. I wanted to laugh and cry at once, hug him, hit him.
“It’s been so long.” I spoke silently now. If I had not, I think the longing in my voice would have made the stones weep. “Where have you been? You said you would be with me always, but I hardly ever feel you there.”
The silence lengthened, and I feared he had gone again wherever he went.
“I am with you always, beloved. Closer than you think, so close you don’t know I am there most of the time.”
If you can harrumph silently, I did. I could feel his smile, tender and somehow sad.
“We are one, did you forget?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered, without knowing what I meant.
I reached the top of the hill and sat down, the hills and the sea unfolding, spreading out below me forever, all the way to all the places I had been and gone.
“Yet it is still true,” he said. “Before and beyond times in all the worlds. Remember how you used to say that. It is still true.”
“Used to,” I repeated. What a sad phrase. “Jesus, maybe where you are there is no time. You are still as young as you were, as we were, but I…I have changed.”
His warmth became more solid; I leaned into him, rested against him.
“Tell me, beloved.”
“I am old,” I blurted out. “Or almost old, I think. I hardly know. But it’s not just that. All these years that have passed since we stood beneath the tree of life, since you rose from the dead and sang to me, as if…as if I were Isis herself, all these years, I have failed.”
“Failed more than I did? Nailed to a cross, so young?”
“We are talking about me,” I said, irritably. “Can we leave you out of it for a moment? Listen, I ran out on Mary B and your disciples to protect our child, and in the end I lost her. She’s a pirate now; I suppose you know that.”
“I ran out on everyone,” he said quietly, if a silent voice can be said to be quiet.
“You became a god,” I said sharply. “And you triumphed over death and reconciled people to your awful father—or whatever it is your apostle Paul goes on about; I can’t really follow him. For better or worse you have become the center of a new cult. But no one knows who I am at all or that I even exist. No one knows what I know about you, or through you, what we knew together, what we were together. I was trained as a bard, and yet so far I have told no one the whole story.”
Jesus said nothing to accuse or exonerate me, but he stayed with me, his presence like the earth itself, able to receive all my bitterness, filter it through layers till it became clear again, dark, pure.
“You raised our daughter well,” he said at length. “And you are taking good care of my mother.”
I accepted his words with a kind of bewildered detachment, not so different from what any middle-aged woman might feel when it dawns on her that she is not the central character of the story any more. Maybe that was the biggest change. I was the widow, the mother, the daughter-in-law. A bit player. Maybe that was not so bad, maybe that’s what we all discover, if we stay long enough.
“As to that, cariad,” Jesus interrupted my thoughts. “Remember what Dwynwyn said to you long ago. ‘You’ll have to live your story before you tell it. It will be a long, long, long time before anyone will believe it, even if you try to tell it.’”
“How do you remember that?” I asked, that long ago Samhain swimming up to the surface of my consciousness. “You weren’t even there that day.”
“As you said, I am not in time anymore. I finally know more than you do, almost as much as the old women who used to tell you everything.”
“Your mother doesn’t tell me much,” I said, relaxing into the almost domestic ease of our encounter, as if he had not left, as if he were here with me, sharing the changes. “By the way, she asked me if you were coming to her soon, to her house.”
“Soon,” he said, and with that word he seemed to grow more distant. “Soon.”
All at once the meaning, his and hers, became clear.
“Then I will have no one left,” I said aloud. “No one.”
Suddenly the loss of Miriam seemed unbearable to me, and I wept again.
“I am with you, I am with you always.” His voice was less a sound than a rocking motion, a boat on the sea, a cradle in the tree top.
“Don’t give me that,” I railed. “You’re not with me, not the way I need you, not the way I want you.”
The rocking went on but I felt the warmth ebbing, following the moon over the mountains.
“Beloved, take a lover.”
“What?”
“You heard what I said.”
It is hard enough for most people to believe that Jesus had a wife, but that he should urge his widow to step out? At the very least I should have been chaste ever after, though I had already blotted my record with that unfortunate encounter with the apostle. And was that to be my last brush with the pleasures of the flesh? I shuddered.
“I am old,” I whispered, getting stiffly to my feet.
Then for one beautiful moment I saw him, standing in my path, young but not young, ageless, his gaze as deep and bright as the night, infinitely more loving.
“You are a goddess,” he said.
And then he was gone.
My moonlight encounter with Jesus shook me in the way that you might shake a kaleidoscope. All the pieces were the same, but they had shifted into a new pattern that made me notice everything more, colors, scents, the changes in the air, the seasons, but most of all I became aware of my own body, how it moved, how it felt. I began to inhabit it again after an absence so long I had not even known I was gone. Now I was back, and I felt all my parts, connected and separate. I bathed slowly and with more attention. I felt my skin come alive to my own touch; I combed out my sometimes snarled hair and felt how it rose from my scalp. I wondered at the generous, determined roundness of my breasts, and I remembered the hidden part of mys
elf, and knew the underground spring only needed to be tended and cleared.
I paid more attention to Miriam’s body, too, oiling her dry skin, working her joints with my fingers until they opened and eased. She relaxed and leaned into my touch, catlike, and yet she still seemed to grow lighter—not thinner; our neighbors saw to it that we ate well—but lighter, literally as though she was turning into light, her substance falling away leaf by leaf. Sometimes that sense of impending loss would overwhelm me and I would bury my face in what was left of her lap. Her hand would lie on my hair, autumn light receding into shadow.
“You are doing what he did!” I sat up one day, almost accusing her.
“My son.” She caressed the words with her voice. “What did my son do?”
I didn’t answer for a moment, the sense memory of those last days with Jesus all at once so vivid, so intense.
“After he died and came back, when he was here with us, for that little time. At the end, I could feel him turning back into light, turning back into…into everything. You’re doing it, too. Aren’t you? Aren’t you!”
She just gazed at me for a moment, and then she smiled—I have to say—almost smugly.
“You could put it that way,” she said. “Except I don’t have to die first. So much less fuss and mess.”
“But it is dying,” I felt suddenly belligerent. “It is leaving.”
Ma shrugged as if to say, details, I needn’t trouble myself.
“When?” I demanded.
“Now you’re being rude. And nosy.”
“It does affect me, you know.”
She didn’t answer. Her gaze drifted out over the valleys to the sea; I felt her follow and then circle back, practicing, like birds before migration.
“Make a trip down to the city,” she said. “Get what we’ll need for the winter. Some salted fish, onions, rutabagas, raki.”
“Raki?”
“Oh dear,” she sighed. “My sense of time gets so muddled. It hasn’t been invented yet. Bother. Now and then I really do crave strong drink. Anyway, go. Tomorrow. See what you can find.”
I eyed her suspiciously, afraid that she might slip away while I was gone.
“I won’t. I won’t just disappear when I disappear. I don’t think,” she added. “I haven’t actually done this before. But my son will be there.”
“Yes,” I said, “he will.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
OLD AQUAINTANCE
AFTER NEARLY TWO MONTHS at Meryemana, with its strange Otherworldly peace, it was a shock to my system to be in Ephesus again. Harbor Street was noisy and crowded and smelly, after the clear mountain air with its scent of water, earth and trees. Here there were people, sweaty and perfumed. Though water periodically sluiced the marble streets, you could not help knowing that sewage flowed in pipes underneath emptying into the harbor. I spent some time at the docks, walking around, finding ships I recognized, for I had sailed on scores in my days as a wind whistler. And of course, I was hoping against hope for a glimpse of the small ship with the bright yellow flag, though if Sarah was sailing with pirates, it was highly unlikely they would enter a major well-policed port.
“It’s the Grey One!” A man aboard a Cretan vessel called out. “Grey One, are you looking for passage? We’ve need of a fair wind to Corinth, sailing at sunset.”
“You don’t need me for that, Andros,” I remembered the man’s name, a youngish man with dark, oily curls, and a wandering eye, literally. “The wind is in your favor.”
“Captain would take you anyway,” the sailor answered. “You always brought us luck, got us out of some tight spots. We heard from some sailors on the Ariadne that you called up a mighty wind and outran some pirates a couple of months back.”
“And how many skins of wine had they emptied,” I tossed back. “You know how sailors like to spin a yarn.”
“Makes a good story, anyway,” said Andros. “But it’s true about the pirates. There’s been a plague of them on the Southern coast. More than one ship, they think. Nobody can seem to catch ‘em. They’ve got fast little vessels, slip in and out of those treacherous narrows between islands. Some people swear they’re manned by women. Hard to believe, but there have been strange goings on, sudden fogs and squalls whenever any of the police ships goes after them.”
I confess my maternal bosom swelled with pride and it was hard to not to smile hugely. There’s sang real for you, if you want to look at it that way, the royal blood of the warrior witches of Tir na mBan, though my mothers were never pursued by an imperial fleet. That did cast a pall of anxiety on my pride.
“Mark my words, Grey One, if those pirates are witches, captains will be fighting over your services.”
Part of me wanted to go aboard right now and commandeer the ship, sail straight for the pirate-infested waters. But pursuing Sarah had never worked, and there was Ma to care for now. Yet how would Sarah ever find us?
“I’m afraid I’ve retired to the hills, Andros. Just came to town for supplies.”
“Sure I can’t persuade you to change your mind? A shame to waste talent like yours, though it looks like the landlubber’s life suits you. You’ve put on some flesh, got some color in your cheeks. You look, you look…”
He paused and stared as if he was seeing me for the first time.
“Damme, if you haven’t gone and found yourself a man! That’s it, isn’t it? Now why didn’t I ever think of that all those nights I shared a deck with you?”
He looked genuinely puzzled.
I smiled, enigmatically, perhaps even alluringly. If bicycles had been invented then, I might have said it was like that. You never forget how to ride them.
“I’ve got to go do my shopping, Andros. Any tips on who sells the best salt fish or the strongest wine in this town?”
With more recommendations and directions than I could remember, I turned away, conscious of Andros’s eyes on me as I headed down the dock.
By mid-morning, I had filled the sacks I’d brought with dried fish, fresh and dried figs, oil-cured olives, and I had filled wine skins with some extremely heady mead. It would be a long, heavy-laden climb with me as the beast of burden. As I made my way through the crowds towards the upper gate of the city, I decided to stop and rest next to one of the fountains in the civic agora.
It wasn’t exactly the place for women. Here was where the important men about town came to strut their stuff as politicians, civic leaders, philosophers, teachers. Ephesus was the sort of town Joseph would have loved, more Greek than Roman, with a well-integrated, sophisticated Jewish population. I wondered that he had never taken a villa here. Or for all I knew, maybe he had. It had been so long since I had seen him, since before Sarah was born. I didn’t even know for certain if he was still living.
Here in this city where I had no ties or memories, I suddenly felt overwhelmed with the loss of so many people I had known and loved, and of the places that had given our lives context. If I had known how alone and rootless I would be for so long, how I would lose everyone but Ma, would I have given Joseph a different answer all those years ago? Would Sarah still be with me, if I had accepted Joseph’s generous protection? I bent my head and hid behind my shawl, an invisible widow once more, brooding over inevitable but futile questions that have no answer.
Intent on my own thoughts, I did not at first notice a larger than usual crowd gathering in the center of the square, until a hush fell, and a voice I could never forget rang out.
“Brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus, whether Jews or Gentiles, you are now one in the baptism of the Holy Spirit and heirs through Christ to eternal life. I, Paul, called from the womb to be apostle to Christ Jesus, adjure you to come forward with the emblems of your old reliance on sorcery and magic, from the time before you knew Christ Jesus, when you relied on charms and potions to work your own sinful will and satisfy your selfish desires.”
No one could ignore the strident, commanding voice of Paul of Tarsus. I looked up and saw passersby stopp
ing and standing at the edge of the crowd.
“What does he think he’s doing?” complained one wealthy looking citizen to another. “It’s one thing to rent a hall or preach in a synagogue. Ephesus has always had room for every of school of thought. But these Christians impose themselves in public.”
“That’s right!” Paul’s voice rose. “Here in the central square of this enlightened city. Bring them forward. Lay them down.”
“By Jove, those are scrolls!” said the onlooker. “Some of them damned expensive. What’s he doing?”
I was curious now. Wrapping my widow’s shawl around me as a cloak of invisibility, I discovered that I still had my youthful talent for weaving my way through a crowd. No one paid much attention to me. They were all too intent on the public spectacle Paul was creating. And a spectacle it was. There, in front of Paul was a growing pile of scrolls, what were then called books, of all sizes and quality but every one of them costly in days when all writing was by hand. The equivalent of fifty thousand silver pieces was piled up in the square.
“Come forward and confess to your brothers and sisters in the Lord how you have used spells and practiced magic and how you now renounce all such foolishness and wickedness, having been redeemed by Christ Jesus through the baptism of the Holy Spirit.”
With their basic script provided for them, the new believers began to step forward and give details, sometimes lurid but mostly mundane, of their dabbling in magic and sorcery—to conceive children (or abort them as one brave woman admitted, before her husband yanked her off stage) to divine the future, to heal from sickness, to clinch business deals, to triumph over enemies, or get revenge. All the things people have always tried to control, whether through spells or appeals to gods and, yes, saints. Some people were enjoying their moment center stage while others looked bullied and shamed. Either way, there was something about the whole display that was getting on my nerves.
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