NOW AS OUR BIZARRE COMPANY—pirates, postmenopausal women (respectable and other) aging men (one of whom has been called back from death) lions, horses, and hyenas (no elephants or camels, alas, but we do have an eagle with us I haven’t yet mentioned)—makes its way out of Ephesus, we leave behind canon, doctrine, holy writ and history and head back into the realm of apocrypha, legend, myth. Let it be so. Don’t try to pin us down with demands for the real truth about the holy grail, the holy family, the holy (or unholy) bride. Give us the wide open spaces. Don’t fence us in.
Not that I was thinking any of that. I wasn’t thinking at all. I was too full of wonder. I also felt strangely shy in the presence of my grown daughter. But I did experience a burst of euphoric relief as we left the city behind and headed for the Artemesian plain. Joseph had arranged for the ship to meet us some miles up the coast in a hidden cove rather than in the harbor where Sarah and the pirates might be recognized and reported. The temple and its environs were almost deserted. Not only the silversmiths, but all the vendors, tourists, and temple officials had de-camped to the theatre. The Great Artemis of the Ephesians was left behind in lonely splendor until we arrived.
“But surely, we don’t have time for visiting heathen temples!” Martha protested when she saw that the pirates headed toward the vast marble steps.
“She is our goddess,” explained Alyssa—a lovely young pirate, whose beauty was marred or enhanced, depending on your taste, by some deep, jagged scars on her face. “We must give thanks to her for our deliverance.”
“Artemis had nothing to do with it,” Martha insisted.
“You could argue,” Mary B said thoughtfully, “that she did. The riot is in her name.”
But it did not matter what anyone said, the pirates were already mounting the steps, with the animals in attendance. Sarah, who had gone ahead during the procession, turned to me and waited. I hurried to catch up.
Walking hand in hand with Sarah, I remembered leading Ma, her eyes tight shut, up these same steps only months ago. Ma who might be dead right now, although dead seemed far too heavy a word for her lightness. How do you say dead about a leaf caught on the wind, spiraling higher than the tree that released it?
“Sarah,” I said, realizing I hadn’t told her anything yet. “Ma—”
“Hush,” she said gently. “I know. We’ll talk later.”
Inside the temple, Sarah let go of me, just as Ma had, and began to make her way towards Artemis. The other pirates walked slowly and singly, too, the beasts pacing beside them. The light from the open part of the roof came down in shafts, golden with pollen. Doves and other birds made their brooding calls from atop pillars. Sometimes, if I blinked or looked slantwise, I could see the wings on the beasts (or were they women?) and their crescent horns. All the carvings teeming on Artemis’s crown and skirts had come to life, warm, golden, honeyed life.
When Sarah stood before Artemis, just as Ma had, she, too, appeared to be alone, though I was dimly aware of the pirates and animals standing behind us. Also, like Ma, Sarah wept. But unlike Ma, her tears had everything to do with grief. I stood aside, not wanting to intrude, and turned my attention to Artemis, her face impassive and composed, and to me heartbreakingly empty of Ma, despite their encounter, despite the dream I’d had only the night before. Maybe Paul was right. Maybe stone was only stone.
“Ma?” Sarah called, and I wondered if she had found her grandmother’s face in the statue. “Ma!”
Then I looked at Sarah, and it dawned on me—and I mean dawned, like the dawn that comes after a long dark night—Sarah was calling to me.
We held each other and wept, and when we drew apart again we were on the plain, with the spring and the oak tree humming with bees, wind soughing in the reeds, and the pillar crowned with a stork’s nest. From behind the pillar came an old woman in widows’ weeds. No, it was a girl, younger than Sarah, with eyes and skin almost as dark, no, it was Artemis herself with her intricate crown and skirts, no, it was—
“It doesn’t matter. I am all those things. Can’t you see?” she asked a bit impatiently. “It’s me!”
And it was, and for one blissful, poignant moment we were The Three again, holding each other’s hands.
“I have to go now,” the goddess said. “My son is here.”
And suddenly he was, in the light, in the hum of bees, in the stork unfolding its legs and lifting into flight, in the lightness we felt. Sarah and I turned to each other, and instead of weeping burst out laughing and held onto each other to keep from falling down.
“I am afraid they are both coming unhinged,” Martha whispered loudly.
And Sarah and I found ourselves back in the temple with the others.
“It’s all right, Martha,” said Sarah. “We’re ready now.”
She gave some kind of pirate ululation to call the others, and we made our way out of the temple, through the wild marshes, which the pirates seemed to know well, towards the ship, hidden in a cove, waiting to take us over the sea.
Picture us, Sarah and me, standing in a ship’s prow, double mermaids or wind sprites, a storm of black and grey hair flying behind us, our clothes billowing, straining to become wings. How often in all those years of searching had I stood in the same spot alone, scanning every passing ship and port, keeping a weather eye out. And now to stand next to her, not looking for her, not even looking at her, just knowing she’s there and letting my happiness be as huge as the sea and sky before us.
We were sailing to the other end of the Mare Internum, all the way to Gaul where Joseph had connections and where he insisted I would be welcomed as the foster-daughter of the legendary King Bran whose fame extended far beyond Pretannia (and whose end I alone knew, and whose tale I could tell to his honor, nor would one eye remain dry when I did). Though Gaul was under Roman rule, Joseph felt reasonably confident that Sarah and the other pirates would not be recognized or hunted there—especially if they retired to terra firma for awhile.
Mary B, who had learned the Celtic dialect of the Galatians, was mightily pleased to be heading for virgin ground—that is, a land where none of the other apostles had ever gone, as far as we knew. Martha’s resignation was sweetened by having Sarah and the pirates to fuss over. You would think with a sister like Mary B and other troublesome friends like me, she might have had enough of unconventional women, but she seemed to welcome the challenge. Lazarus just sat back peacefully, quietly, watching his prophecy unfold in whatever strange way it would. When you have been called forth from your own tomb, nothing on this side of the grave ruffles you much.
As to the animals we had freed, before we boarded the ship Sarah walked among them, stopping before each one. She didn’t speak—not aloud—but some kind of communication passed between them. The lions and hyenas took off for the mountains, and so did the eagle. But three horses and a few temple doves would not be parted from Sarah, which caused consternation and a bit of delay, because feed had to be found and purchased. Luckily the ship was largely empty, having just delivered a load of marble and other building materials. (Joseph must have paid dearly for our passage on the empty ship.) Sarah tended the horses and often slept near them in the hold.
A young warrior woman with her own horses might be admired among the Gallic Celts. She could probably marry, if she chose, and marry well. But I was not sure she had any such inclinations, and I felt hesitant to ask her. Eight years of separation is a long time. She had grown up without me. In the deep places of blood and bone and dream, I knew her and loved her more than anyone living. But in the day to day, I did not know how to know her or where to begin. So we stood, silent, connected by the horizon, riding the swells of the sea.
Oddly enough, it was during our communal meals that Sarah and I heard each other’s stories. If the weather was fine, we all ate together on the deck, simple delicious fare of bread, cheese, fruit, oil-cured olives, fish, and always plenty of wine. One night Mary B told the story of how she had recognized Sarah and tried in vain to pr
otect her from the other apostles. Then Martha, whom I had never thought of as a storyteller, told about the night I had turned up on her doorstep after being undercover as a laundress in the ecclesiastical house, and how I rashly ran off to confront Sarah’s abductors against Martha’s better judgment.
“I still can’t believe what you did, Mary of Magdala!” said Martha.
“What did she do?” pressed the pirates. “Tell. Tell!”
“The maternal instinct is rather savage,” Martha sniffed, and regaled us with the story of how I held Peter, Paul, and James at knifepoint and tied them up together, all the more shocking for being told in Martha’s disapproving tone.
“Way to go, Mother of Sarah!” chorused the pirates—they all still called me that—high fives were exchanged all around. Best of all for me, Sarah positively beamed, and there was a shine in her eyes that might come from tears gathered there.
“Now,” said Alyssa. “Let us tell you about the first time we saw Black Sarah.” (Her formal name among the pirates.) “We had just boarded a fine merchant ship en route from Tyre to Rome, loaded with spices and dyes, and of course the crew is defending itself, though not very well. We’ve already slit a few throats—sometimes you have to; it’s just self-defense—and tied up some of the others. There’s this young boy fighting more fiercely than any of the men. No one can get near him, but I also notice that he’s trying not to inflict any more damage than necessary—which I appreciate, don’t get me wrong. The rest of their crew is pretty well disabled by now, and our girls are swarming the hold and getting ready to toss the cargo to our ship. The boy disarms Phoebe. I move in, try to knock his sword from his hand, but end up ripping his shirt in two (I was being careful not to kill him, you understand) and out pops—”
“Do you have to say it that way?” Sarah protested.
“It’s my story.”
“It’s my story, too!”
“Well, I’m telling it this time. Out pops the most adorable pair of titties you ever saw on a sailor boy. ‘Girls!’ I call. ‘Forget the frankincense and myrrh. There’s one of our own here in dire need of rescuing. ’ Not that she appreciated it then, Mother of Sarah. I’m afraid we had to get a little rough, and it took four of us to wrestle her down and tie her up—”
“They kidnapped me,” interrupted Sarah. “And I had just been made cabin boy, which is moving up in the world when you start out as a stowaway.”
“Mother of Sarah, we have never heard the end of how we ruined her brilliant career as a Roman merchant sailor. No doubt if it hadn’t been for us, she would be captain of her own ship by now.”
“You have all long since indoctrinated me about the economic and political evils of the Roman empire, so now I don’t want to be captain of my own Roman vessel, which I certainly would have been, if I hadn’t been carried off by a bunch of female pirates who fancy themselves the last, lost tribe of Amazons.”
“Fancy!” objected several of the pirates, and a good-natured argument ensued.
I leaned back against some pilings and closed my eyes for a moment. It was soothing to hear women trading colorful insults; my mothers’ tongue, and now my daughter spoke it fluently, as I had spoken it in the brothel in Rome and at Temple Magdalen. I hadn’t seen my mothers since I was just a little older than Sarah had been when she ran away. I felt a sudden pang for them. Had they waited and waited for me to come back to them? Were they waiting still? So much of my life had been spent in longing and searching, first for my beloved, and then for my daughter. Yet there were so many other losses, my mothers, my first-born child, my friends in Rome, Berta, Dido, Judith, Paulina, Temple Magdalen itself, and now Miriam and John. That was the way of life. You lost people or became lost yourself. Maybe it was because I had finally found Sarah that these other griefs could finally stake their claim.
“Are you all right, Ma?” Sarah came to sit beside me and touched my arm. It still startled me to be called Ma, but I liked it. I wondered if I would grow used to the title, grow into it.
“I’m all right, Sarah,” I said. “I’m just a little homesick.”
I opened my eyes and was struck again by her beauty, her hair a black halo, her gold eyes reflecting and magnifying the light of the moon and stars. Though she met my gaze, she seemed to be looking into some vast distance.
“For where?” she pressed me. “Where is home?”
The others kept up their lively banter, giving Sarah and me a moment I realized I had been waiting for since I had found her.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just that listening to you and your friends made me think of my mothers. And of my own friends.”
“Dido and Berta and Judith,” Sarah named them. “I met them, you know. I went to Temple Magdalen.”
“I know,” I said. “I followed you there. That was the last time I saw them.”
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said.
I didn’t know if she meant that she was sorry I never saw my friends again or sorry that she had run away, so I just nodded.
“Temple Magdalen was exactly the way you described it in your stories. I think,” she hesitated. “I think that is when I stopped hating you so much. I started to miss you.”
“Oh, Sarah, I am sorry, so sorry for all the ways I failed you, for driving you away—”
“You had to,” Sarah said. “I blamed you then, but I think now that you had to. You had to be who you are. I had to be who I am. And I—I am sorry I hurt you.”
“You had to,” I said in turn.
We were both silent for a time, not gazing at each other now, but at the sky, while the others got to their feet and said goodnight.
“I always knew you would find me one day,” Sarah said at length. “My father promised me you would.”
“He was with you,” I said, half statement, half question.
“Yes,” she said simply.
“Is he with you now?” I asked.
“He’s with us. Listen. Look.”
I looked, and I saw the stars. I listened, and I heard the wind and beneath the wind, the softness of Sarah’s breath, the beat of my own heart.
This is our child, I heard, our beloved child. Be well-pleased, beloved. Be well-pleased.
Sarah and I fell asleep together against the piling. I half woke when Martha and one of the pirates came and tucked blankets around us.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
MY STORY, MY TRUTH
EVEN WITH FAIR WEATHER and fair winds, a sure thing with two weather witches aboard, the journey across the Mare Internum was a long one. We kept track of time watching the changing moon roll around the sky. Every night there were more stories. Alyssa told about the secret tribes of warrior women, some in the mountains, some on the coast, always in small numbers, always on the move; she herself had been more or less kidnapped when she ran away from a forced marriage. Piracy was a fairly recent innovation, and some of the elders didn’t hold with it, because it drew too much attention to the tribes.
“And it seems they were right,” Alyssa acknowledged. “But thanks to all of you our contingent will have a chance to make a life in a new place, and maybe we can live the way we want and not have to hide. Tell us more about the Keltoi, Mother of Sarah.”
“I only know—or knew—the free tribes of the Pretannic Isles. The druids there considered the Gallic druids geldings. In fact, my father was a druid, a specialist on resistance to Roman incursion.”
“Your father? You never told me your father was a druid.”
I turned and looked at Sarah, who was staring at me. Suddenly I saw not the grown woman, but the child for whom I had spun stories, taking out all I did not want her to know, just as my mothers had before me. Your father was a god, they said, the god of the sea. My father was a god, I had told Sarah, the god of the sea.
“Sarah, I told you the story my mothers always told me. It seemed the right thing to do at the time.”
“Why?” she said flatly.
Everyone around us had grown quiet an
d wary, the way people do when they find themselves inadvertently witnessing a confrontation they don’t understand.
“Why would you lie about your father being a druid?”
The word lie was so harsh and uncompromising. For all her weather witchery, Sarah was still her father’s daughter. I came into this world to bear witness to the truth, he said. And I had lied, lied to our daughter.
“And if you lied about your father, how do I know you did not lie about everything else?” she persisted..
And that, of course, is the trouble with lies, especially lies told to protect someone you love. Or is it always yourself you are protecting? From losing the one you love, from their judgment, from your own shame.
“Sarah, do you remember the story I told you about the druid who rigged the lots against your father to make sure he was chosen as the sacrifice?”
“I remember the story,” she said, and I realized too late how charged that word had become.
“That druid was my father,” I said.
I looked around the silent circle, my friends who did not know about that part of my life, Sarah’s friends who knew me only as the mother of Sarah, the mother she had run away from, the mother who had found her. The ones who knew the secrets of my youth were dead or far away. Would that story never end? Must I bear it over and over? Bear it literally. For all at once, I felt heavy with it. Gravid.
“I still don’t understand,” said Sarah, her voice still angry but now with another note. “Why would you not tell me that? The shame of the rigged lots is his shame not yours. And if he really was your father, you were all the braver for defying him.”
And all the tears she’d been fighting, spilled against her will. What was it she wanted from me? I did not want to fail her again.
“Sarah,” I looked at her. “I didn’t think you were ready for the truth,” I said the word deliberately, “when you were a child. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I wasn’t. Judge for yourself. I will tell the whole story to you now, if you are willing.”
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