“John, love, I am not the Ark of the Covenant, for Jesus’s sake, I am not the Holy of Holies.”
“Oh, but you are!” he wept. “That is exactly what you are.”
I drew him closer to me, refusing the distance he meant to put between us.
“John, listen to me. I am a woman, just as Jesus was a man.”
“That’s not very reassuring,” he said after a moment.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Jesus isn’t a man, not just a man, not anymore. He rose from the dead, and you—the Most High forgive me, for he knows I am no pagan idolater—but you, well, you must be some kind of a goddess. And frankly, Mary, that scares the shit out of me.”
I wished I could say, don’t be ridiculous; or, how much did you have to drink, but he had stumbled on some truth, or mystery, that I could not deny. I hadn’t even told him about finding the robes of Isis in the tomb (that no one could see once I left the garden) or of hearing Jesus sing a hymn to her, that is, to me.
“John, listen,” I began, not sure of what I would say. “If what you say is true of him, of me, then it is also true of you, of all of us. Why else would anyone be here, struggling and loving the way we do? Isn’t that what he came to show us?”
“What? How to become gods?” John was wary.
“No,” I said, “how to be both, to be divine and human, to go between the worlds.”
“I don’t know, Mary,” he said. “Maybe I am too simple. As far as I’m concerned, he called us to follow him. He said he was the Way.”
“The way,” I repeated, remembering Jesus speaking those words and what I saw when he did. “The way the moon makes a path on the water, the way a flower tracks the sun, the way the grass bends to the wind. The way the beloved opens to the lover, the way inside becomes out, the way outside becomes in.”
“Mary,” he said after a silence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s all right, John,” I lifted one hand to his face and traced its shape. “I don’t either. I only know this: if I am—or was for one moment—a goddess, if I am some holy of holies, you must not turn away from me. Don’t let me be some desolate shrine, some dried up spring. If some miracle happened inside me, then love that place. Worship there.”
Boldly, I reached for his hand, and placed it between my legs. With my own fingers, I parted the folds for him.
“Mary,” he moaned. “Oh, Mary.”
Then I touched his cock and felt his courage rise in my hand.
“Come in,” I said. “The way is open.”
And we made love with more intention and intensity than ever before. Afterwards, we lay together, peaceful again, ready to share our sleep—or at least I was.
“Mary, I’ve been thinking—”
“You’ve been thinking! Is that what you call what we just did?”
He ignored my interruption. “We have to tell our stories.”
“We have been.” I yawned. “All winter.”
“To someone who can write them down.”
My resistance to the written word kicked in immediately.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“It is,” he said. “Trust me. Jesus. Jesus told me. He’s been telling me for some time.”
“He talks too much,” I fumed. “Can’t he mind his own business for once?”
“It is his business.”
“John, I’m too tired to talk about this now. We can talk in the morning. Let’s get some sleep.”
But John’s words had jolted me awake. I lay wide-eyed till almost dawn, listening to John snore and hearing not one word from my beloved.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
MUST IT BE WRITTEN?
WE DID TALK IN THE MORNING, and noon, and night, and of little else for days.
“Don’t you see, Mary?” He’d start in, and more often than not I would close my eyes and put my hands over my ears, but that didn’t stop him. “You know how when Peter or Paul or anyone learned teaches, they are always quoting scripture—”
“Yes, I know,” I would say. “I hate that.”
“Well, Jesus’s story has to become scripture.”
“Why must it?” I would ask again and again.
“Because if it doesn’t, how will anyone know him, the way we knew him.”
“Why can’t it just be a story then, told from one to another, passed down from person to person, generation to generation. That’s always worked for my people. People say, I heard the story from my mother, who heard it from hers, or they trace it back through the bards. A story has a lineage, a life. My people don’t say, “It is written, the way your people do, as if that makes your story truer than someone else’s. Besides, if Jesus is a god, people can know him for themselves, in their own way.”
“The way Paul knows him.” John would then head for my weak spot.
“Paul doesn’t tell stories about Jesus. He doesn’t tell stories at all, except about himself and how many times he was imprisoned, beaten, stoned, run out of town for the sake of Christ Jesus.”
“But he tells them who and what Jesus is, what people are to believe about him. How they are to worship and behave. And more than that, Mary, he writes letters to the churches about Jesus; he is constantly writing or employing a scribe to write. I tell you, Mary, he has more influence among the followers of the Way than anyone.”
“So this is a competition now? Between you and Paul? Who’s the biggest apostle of all?”
Here John would sigh and looked pained, as well he might. I was fighting dirty. Then he would play his trump card.
“You told me the first day we were together that you’ve failed Jesus, because you haven’t told your story, haven’t told people what you know.”
“But now I have.”
“To a few poor shepherds on the mountain.”
“The kind of people Jesus spoke to. Your followers. Why don’t they count?”
“And you haven’t told them your whole story.”
“I’ve told you. You tell the story if you think it’s so important.”
“Mary.” Here he would often put his hand on my cheek, and make me look at him, and I would see how intent he was, and how humble; it unnerved me every time. “I can’t tell your story the way you can.”
“John,” I would say, on the verge of relenting. “Did he really tell you that our stories need to be written down—exactly that? Written?”
“It is what I understood, Mary. Ask him,” he urged. “Ask him for yourself.”
I took many walks in all kinds of weather along the ridge where Jesus had last appeared to me, but I heard nothing, had no sense of his presence. One blustery day I shouted at him, competing in volume and ferocity with the wind.
“So! You set me up with your pal, and then you abandon me? Well, get this: I am not letting you off the hook. And if you want me to tell my story, our story, you tell me yourself. Don’t make John do it. It’s not fair—and debating about it all the time interferes with our sex life. It was your idea for me to take a lover, so why don’t you just leave me alone to enjoy him!”
I shouted in this vein until I was hoarse.
And then, I heard it quite distinctly, even through the gale winds, his laughter.
“Maeve, when did it ever work to tell you what to do? You have to decide for yourself. Tell John from me to give it up.”
“But did you tell him? Did you tell him our stories need to be written ? Did you?”
No answer but a blast of wind that nearly knocked me of my feet.
“Right. I get it,” I muttered. “None of my business what you told him. You are still so annoying. I am going to go talk to your mother. Why didn’t I think of that in the first place?”
When I got back to Meryemana I found Ma alone for once. It was lambing season, and our neighbors were busier than usual. John was often called to help. I found her sitting near the fire. The cup she had held seemed to have fallen from her hand onto the floor. She was
so still. I was suddenly terrified.
“It’s all right, my duck, I am still here.”
“Did you just call me my duck?” Ma wasn’t ordinarily given to endearments.
“I did,” she admitted.
“You sound like Salome.” John’s mother, whose speech had consisted largely of random endearments strung together.
“That’s because her boy is with us. Lovely boy, better manners than I remember him having. Better manners than my son.” As usual, by her tone, she managed to make her son’s faults sound like cardinal virtues. “I am glad John is with me. He will take good care of me till my son comes.”
“I thought that was my job.” I felt a bit miffed. “You said so yourself when we first came here.”
“Well, Johnny’s here now,” she said complacently.
I wondered why I had thought Miriam would be any more helpful to me than her precious son had been.
“Give it up!” she said sharply without warning.
“Give what up?”
“Give up thinking that you have any control over the stories. ‘Seeing his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing near her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, this is your son.’ Then to the disciple he said, ‘This is your mother. And from that hour the disciple took her into his home.’”
She quoted from the as yet unwritten Gospel according to John.
“What are you talking about!” I demanded. “You know perfectly well you stayed with me! And you invited yourself along when I ran away from the ecclesia to Temple Magdalen. What happened to ‘thy people shall be my people and thy goddess, my goddess’?”
“Sorry. That’s not going to be in the story, let alone on the placard.”
“The placard?”
“The placard before the entrance to my house,” she said, as if it should be obvious, as if it was already in place. “People will stand and read it. Their hearts will be touched and opened; their eyes will mist over. They will think of their own mothers. No harm in it, for in the end it will be true. John will be with me in this house he built for me.”
“But where will I be?”
“Do I have to tell you everything?”
“Yes!”
“Well, I’m not going to,” she said airily, and then she reached for my hand and motioned me to sit on the stool beside her. “Daughter of my heart, you are a mother, too, and when the time comes, you must go.”
I raised her hand to my cheek and let my tears fall on it. I did and did not know what she meant. I opened my mouth, and then found I could not ask her anything more.
“I will tell you this,” she said, speaking as if it were an effort. “Don’t be afraid to go with John to find a scribe. Yes, I’ve heard you arguing. It’s been very distracting. I’m trying to learn to fly, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We thought you were asleep.”
Her response was an attempt to expectorate.
“My mouth is dry. Fetch me some mead.”
I sat back down and helped her lift the cup to her lips.
“So you agree with John. Our stories should be written?”
I took the cup from her hands, and she seemed to have gone back to sleep or back to her flying lessons.
“You are afraid,” she spoke at last. “And you don’t know why. You think it’s your distrust of the written word. But it’s not that. Not only that. What is it? You don’t need me to see for you. You’ve grown much too dependent on me for that. I’m tired now. Look for yourself. Listen.”
I did as she said, resting my head against her lightly. I saw dark cavernous spaces, lit with candles. I saw effigies of my beloved in agony on the cross. I heard a story of Jesus in sonorous, rhythmic phrases, in Greek, Latin, languages I could not identify. I heard long theological discourses about The Father, of which I had no memory, though it is possible that I did not pay attention: “No one can come to me, unless drawn by the Father who sent me…The Father and I are one.” The Father, the Father, the Father. Just as relentlessly the narrator excoriated the Jews for unbelief, at every turn they were about to stone him. The Jews this, the Jews that, the Jews, the Jews, the Jews—accusation, condemnation, as if Jesus himself was not a Jew. Then I saw terrible persecutions, repeated over and over, in different places, different times, in his name, in his name.
“Harm,” I cried out to Ma. “Great harm will come.”
“Yes,” she acknowledged sadly. “Now look again.”
This time I saw things I did remember: Jesus changing the water into wine at our wedding; his meeting with Susanna at the Samaritan well; all of us together at the house of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus; Lazarus coming forth from his tomb. But some of the sequences were confused. Here Mary B anointed him with spikenard instead of me. And it was an anonymous woman who stood before him accused of adultery, while he knelt and scratched our names in ogham in the dust. At last I saw the garden again, the golden tree and the shadowy gardener that I did not recognize as my beloved until he called my name.
“Maeve of Magdala,” Ma called me back from my visions. “I tell you again: You cannot control how the story will be told. Neither can John, though he believes he can. He means well. Still, you must tell your story as best you can. Not much of what you say will come down through time. But it doesn’t take much to fill the sky with bloom enough for the birds to nest. What is it my son used to say about mustard seeds—or was it Anna. She’s been pestering me lately….”
Ma’s voice lulled me into sleep. And we dozed together hand in hand, till John came in with a load of wood for the fire. I opened my eyes, as he stoked the fire till it blazed again. Then I laid Ma’s hand in her lap, rose, and went to him.
“I will go with you, John, to tell our stories.”
He gathered me into his arms and held me for a long time.
The next day, John and I rose before dawn. Leaving Ma in the care of some of the neighbor women, we took the donkey and made our way down to Ephesus to search for a scribe, neither of us having the least idea how to go about finding one.
“We should ask advice of Paul of Tarsus, if we can find him,” said John.
“John, do you really want to start another argument? So soon? Paul has no reason to help us. He doesn’t want my story told any more than Peter does. And by the way, I will be breaking my agreement with Peter, though I suppose it’s moot by now. Never mind all that. Let’s enjoy the morning.”
It was a lovely day in early spring. The sun had just cleared the mountain. In the distance the sea was changing from rosy silver to blue. The new lambs were in pasture now, bleating as they followed their mothers, still so clean and fleecy it was hard to understand how they could ever grow up to be sheep.
“You’re probably right,” he said agreeably. “I don’t always think things through. Paul’s clever. He would probably send us to some hack with no skill. It’s just that I don’t know how to judge someone’s skill myself.”
“Well, if you’re right that Jesus wants us to do this, and Miriam seemed to think we might as well, I expect we’ll be directed in some way.”
But even I could not have predicted how—and by whom.
CHAPTER FIFTY
IT IS WRITTEN
WHEN WE ARRIVED in what I called Ephesus the lesser, that is, the walled city, the town was in full morning swing, streets lined with open shops, vendors from outside the city setting out their wares in the open squares. Slaves of the rich were doing the daily shopping, sometimes with the matron of the house overseeing the purchases. Though I had been young, Sarah’s age now, I remembered only too well trotting after Paulina on her exhausting and exhaustive shopping sprees in Rome.
“Well, John,” I said. “If you were a scribe, where would you be?”
“Probably not on Harbor Street,” he admitted.
For that’s where we had ended up in our meandering fashion, flowing like the water in the gutters downhill to sea level. John and I had both spent a lot of time in ports. Before we turned around, we walk
ed along the docks, John calling out to fisherman he knew, and me pointing out ships I had sailed.
“There’s the Astarte, probably in from Tyre with purple dye and spices from the east,” I observed idly.
The port was too loud and bustling for more conversation than that, which was just as well. I did not want to admit to John that I was still hoping—absurdly—to catch a glimpse of Sarah.
“Shall we go to the Temple of Artemis?” I suggested; for it occurred to me that if Sarah and her pirate company ever made land, it would likely be further up the coast, away from the city. Perhaps, if the pirates were a remnant of the legendary Amazonian tribes that had once lived in the mountains and plains of Anatolia, they might still visit Artemis at the temple their foremothers had were said to have founded.
“I don’t think so,” said John, for of course he had our stated quest in mind. “Let’s go to the synagogue. We might find a scribe who is already a follower of the Way.”
“Then he might have his own ideas about how the story is supposed to go,” I cautioned. But I had no other suggestion to make, so I followed John, who seemed to know where to go. Perhaps I could slip away to the Temple of Artemis later.
We arrived at the Synagogue, just off Courete street near where Aquila and Priscilla must live, to find a crowd overflowing onto the street, all jammed as close to the door as possible.
“What’s going on?” John asked one of the bystanders.
“Shh, I can only just hear,” the man answered. “That gentile-loving Jew Paul from Tarsus debating with some woman. It’s better than a wild beast show. Listen, they’re going at it chapter and verse!”
“Jesus said…” I heard a voice, low and authoritative, but distinctly female. “’Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. In truth I tell you, till heaven and earth disappear, not one dot, not one stroke, is to disappear from the Law until all its purpose is achieved.’”
“Holy Isis!” I said to John, clutching his arm. “That is Mary, our own Mary of Bethany.”
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