“The story,” she said, wary again.
“My story,” I said. “My truth.”
The others began to shift and exchange glances.
“Maybe it’s better if we leave you two alone now, Sarah,” suggested Alyssa.
“Stay,” Sarah said. “You are my kin, as much as anyone of my blood.”
“I for one am staying, Mary, whether you want me to or not,” announced Mary B. “I have never heard the whole story of what happened on the druid isle. I never wanted to. I was so angry and jealous that you had a part in his life that excluded me. I blamed you for how tormented he was for so many years. I know we have been closer than sisters since, and yet I know I never completely let go of that old grudge.”
“And to my shame, I have never heard the whole story, either,” acknowledged Joseph. “I have known Maeve longer than the rest of you. I know the world she came from; I know the druids. Maeve, I knew something terrible had happened to you there; Jesus hinted at it. Yet I never even asked.”
“Don’t reproach yourself, Joseph. At the time I met you, I had decided never to tell my story again. And I never did, except once, when someone needed to know it.”
“I need to know it,” said Sarah. “I’ve needed to know it for a long time.”
“We will all stay and bear witness,” said Lazarus.
“I suppose the girls” (Martha called the pirates that, though some were nearing forty if they were a day, Sarah being the youngest) “are old enough to hear what horrors may await them among these savage people,” agreed Martha. “Just let me fetch more food and wine. We may need to fortify ourselves.”
“Good idea,” I said. “This could take all night.”
It did. I began at the beginning, and spared my listeners nothing. Soon I was not on the ship anymore. I was not an aging woman with grey hair. I was Maeve Rhuad again, young, fiery-haired and headstrong. I told them about growing up on the Isle of Women (Sarah had told the pirates this part, but they were enthralled anew) and my initiation with the Cailleach, the terrible and beautiful visions I had. And I horrified Martha by admitting that when I first had a vision of Jesus in the well of wisdom, he had been pissing in an alley. I recounted my journey by sea with two of my mothers to the isle of Mona and how the birds’ wings spelled the names Esus and Maeve in the sky. Then I told about the first time I saw the red-bearded druid Lovernios, how he terrified and fascinated me from the start.
“I didn’t know, Sarah,” I paused, and looked directly at her. “I didn’t know he was my father, and he didn’t know I was his daughter.”
She held my gaze for a time silently, steadily, her expression impossible to fathom.
“Mother,” she said at length. “Maeve Rhuad. Tell me the rest.”
I took my time, lingering on the parts she knew and loved, how her father and I stinted on our studies to meet under the yews, how we argued and laughed. How I rashly determined I would trespass in a forbidden grove to keep vigil during his dread initiation in Bryn Celli Ddu. Most of the time I could hear my own voice, the words were familiar. But when I got to the rape, I don’t remember words. I don’t remember the rocking of the ship or the faces of my listeners.
I can’t see this anymore. Behind my lids the world is bright and pulsing. A spiral tunnel made of fire. Then I am not in my body anymore. There’s a girl lying on the ground. A huge man heaves himself onto her, into her. Now. You. Look at the sky. See a long, jagged gash in the stars. See the full moon weeping like a great sow’s tit. The spiral pulses and burns. Then I am back inside my body again. The ground is hard and cold. Something warm gushes on my thighs. I’m wetting myself, I think. I am so ashamed.
I must have fallen silent for a time. I heard the sound of someone weeping. Someone was holding my hands. Branwen, I thought, Viviane. But when I opened my eyes, I saw Mary B on one side of me and Martha on the other. Across the circle, Sarah wept in Alyssa’s arms.
“I’m sorry, Sarah. I’m sorry.”
For telling her? For not telling her? I didn’t know.
Sarah pulled away from Alyssa and sat up straight to look at me.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Go on.”
The rest was harder to tell. The rape happened in an instant. But the pregnancy was another story, and I had never told Sarah about that either—the months of not knowing, Dwynwyn’s revelation, my beloved’s anger and then his bravery, shielding me before the druids. Dawn was breaking when I got to the end of the story, the rigged lots, the rescue, my beloved racing across the Menai Straits at my command. And then the part Sarah never knew: the tidal bore I raised, my father riding to his death under the wave, just before I gave birth to my first-born in a cairn.
“She’s crowning! Bear down once more, Maeve Rhuad. There!”
The hard head slides free, and the body slips after it. Before I see, I hear the robust squalling of a tiny, new storm.
“Praise be to Bride.”
Moments later that strange, purple, undersea creature, the afterbirth, is born. The priestesses ease me back down. Then in my arms Dwynwyn places the little flame, the little flower, red, wrinkled, utterly lovely. My daughter. Mine.
“Don’t,” a priestess hisses. “Don’t let her nurse the child. It will only make it harder for her.”
“Let them have this moment,” Dwynwyn countermanded. “Let them drink deep of it. There will be more than enough thirst to come. Let this memory be a secret spring.”
I barely hear her words; I don’t consider their meaning. I am stroking my daughter’s fiery hair. She latches fiercely onto my breast as if she will never let go. I whisper in her ear her secret name. As she suckles, we fall into a deep sleep.
“And when I woke up,” I heard myself saying. “When I woke I was alone. They took my baby. I never saw her again.”
Someone began to weep.
It was me.
Mary B and Martha had their arms around me, and I had my face in my hands. I couldn’t look at Sarah.
“And then Maeve Rhuad was put on trial,” Sarah took up the narrative, the part she knew, how I had been found guilty of interfering in high mysteries and endangering the combrogos, how I had been sent beyond the ninth wave.
“In a small boat without sail or oar,” Sarah recounted the story that has since passed into the legend of my journey to France, but no matter. “She might not have survived except for the dolphins. They came every day and tossed fish into her boat. And in return she told them the story of Maeve and Esus, which the dolphins apparently loved to hear. But I don’t know if she told them the whole story—or only the parts she thought they should know.”
She paused and I finally looked at her huge eyes, golden and inexorable as the dawn.
“You never went back,” Sarah said. “You never went back to look for her. You looked for me for seven years, but you never went back to look for her.”
“I think that is enough for now, Sarah,” said Martha, who had never in her life spoken up on my behalf.
“I want to know why.”
“Why, child,” said Joseph, “Your mother was exiled and excommunicated. Not long after that, she was captured and enslaved, then tried for her life again, and further exiled. Then at long last she found your father. Then she had you.”
Sarah kept her eyes on me unblinking, as Joseph neatly summed up my life.
“The priestesses told me that my child would be raised among the Iceni,” I said slowly, not wanting to sound as though I was justifying myself, “a wealthy tribe, rich in horses, known for their strong, beautiful women. When I was in the boat, I had a dream or vision of my baby in her foster mother’s arms; I knew the woman loved her. I knew she was all right. A better fate than might be hoped for a child begotten by incest and rape, for the daughter of a mother who had imperiled her whole people.”
For another endless moment, Sarah did not speak.
“You never told me,” she finally said. “You never told me I had a sister.”
Before I co
uld answer her, she got to her feet and bolted for the hold.
I tried to get up to go after her, but both Martha and Mary B kept hold of me. None of the pirates got up, either.
“Let her be, Mother of Sarah,” said Alyssa. “We’ve learned that’s the best way with Black Sarah. She comes to her own terms in her own time.”
I nodded, grateful for Alyssa’s kindness and appalled that everyone else seemed to understand my daughter better than me.
“You,” Martha said to me, “You will rest now. I’ll give you a draught, and you will get some sleep.”
“We all should,” said Joseph. “The captain says we will make landfall in Massilia tomorrow.”
“What’s there?” asked Mary B.
“The biggest port in Southern Gaul. Founded by the Greeks, of course.”
With that, we all went to our bunks.
I didn’t think I would be able to sleep, even with Martha’s potion, but I did. I plummeted into sleep, exhausted as if I had just given birth. For awhile I didn’t dream, just rocked in the darkness. Then the darkness took on shape and substance and held me close, my beloved.
“I am with you, cariad,” he whispers; the dream is so tactile, I can feel his breath in my ear. “Search no more for a little while. Let yourself be found.”
All the things I want to say, all the things I need to know, fall away, drift down the darkness to some depth far beyond me.
When I woke, it was bright midday, a warm breeze, fragrant with land scents, lazily filled the sails. The coast was in sight, coves, islands, cliffs, and beyond them mountains. Sarah and Lazarus stood together in the prow, close but not apparently speaking. As I watched them, Mary B came up beside me, and handed me a piece of bread and cheese.
“Come sit with me,” she said.
We settled ourselves on the bare boards of the deck.
“Mary,” I said, “what are we going to do when we get to Gaul? I mean, what are we doing? Do we know? Do we have any idea?”
“Of course,” Mary said with an odd mixture of calm and excitement. “We are going to teach and heal. We are going to start our own ecclesia in Gaul.”
“We are?” I said dubiously. “You know I’ve never been much good at that sort of thing.”
“I will teach. You just have to tell the story.”
“Which story?”
“The story of Jesus, what he taught us, how he lived and died and returned to us.”
“Am I going to be part of the story this time?”
“Yes. I know. I know. I’ve resisted your story, not as viciously as Peter, but I wanted to censor you, too. I wanted to make you over in my own image, just the way people do to Jesus. Now we have a second chance, both of us, in a place where no one has ever heard of Peter, Paul, or James or any of them. I want you to tell the story, the story of Jesus the lover, your lover, and the lover of the world. What that old Celtic witch prophesied over you just before you commanded him in the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to leave you and escape across the straits.”
Here she sniffled a little bit, and I touched her hand before she balled it into a fist and wiped her eyes.
“Mary, I am not sure there is any equivalent of that prophecy in the Hebrew Scriptures.”
“There’s the Song of Solomon,” said Mary. “Anyway, you just let me worry about the Scriptures. Stick to storytelling and healing. And weather magic, when necessary. You never know when a storm might need to be calmed.”
“What about Sarah?” I said.
“What about Sarah?” Mary sounded evasive.
“Are you supposing that she will be with us, running around and founding ecclesia and telling everyone she’s the daughter of the messiah, that sort of thing? Or making a marriage and carrying on some priestly line, like James wanted her to do?”
“Well, as to that….Oh, hell,” she said. Yes, she did.
“Don’t worry, Mary. We don’t have to decide. Sarah is herself. Her self.” I repeated the words my beloved had spoken to me. “What I wonder is what she wants from me, what she needs from me. I think she feels I abandoned my first child. What if she wants me to go and search for her?”
Mary didn’t answer right away.
“What do you want?”
“What do I want?” I repeated, as if I couldn’t quite comprehend the question.
“Yes, you. I know what I want you to do. Sarah might know what she wants you to do. But what do you want to do?”
I was flummoxed. I shook my head, and then closed my eyes for a moment. The wind was warm, scented with gorse and what I now know to be lavender. I saw a path winding up a mountain towards a cliff, not a sheer cliff, but a cliff with a narrow ledge in front of it and a dark opening in its face, a cave. I could hear the sound of rock doves calling and calling, and of water flowing. Then the image dissolved, and I opened my eyes again, my vision traveling over the water to the white rock of the mountains in the distance.
“What do I want to do?” I said. “Nothing. Nothing.”
And Mary and I were both shocked by my answer into silence.
Sarah came and found me later that day when I was alone in the prow watching the young crescent moon set in a clear sky where Venus shone as the evening star. We stood in silence for a time, and then Sarah began to sing a song I had taught her when she was a very young child, the song the combrogos had sung when I was sent beyond the ninth wave, the song she had sung to me in a dream. I sang with her.
Hail to thee, thou new moon,
Jewel of guidance in the night!
Hail to thee, thou new moon,
Jewel of guidance on the billows!
Hail to thee, thou new moon,
Jewel of guidance on the ocean!
Hail to thee, thou new moon,
Jewel of guidance of my love!
“I always loved that song,” said Sarah when we finished. “I always loved hearing about the sea.”
“And now here you are on the billows,” I said. “Do you ever miss the mountain, Sarah?”
“I am the mountain,” she said after a moment. “It’s what I am made of. It goes with me. And yes, I do miss it. Do you miss Tir na mBan?”
“Same answer,” I said.
We were silent for a time, a surprisingly peaceful silence.
“You want me to go back, don’t you?” I finally asked. “You want me to find her.”
Sarah waited so long to respond, I didn’t know if she had heard me.
“They told me not to judge you.”
“Who are they?” I asked.
“My father. Lazarus. They both talk the same way, you know, from inside.”
“Yes,” I said. “I think I do know.”
“But I don’t understand,” she admitted. “I don’t understand why you don’t go.”
Now it was my turn to be silent as I searched and searched for an answer.
“I don’t understand, either,” I said at last. “And maybe someday I will go to find her. When it’s time. ”
“Maybe sometime I will,” said Sarah. “Maybe sometime we will.”
“What will you do when we make landfall?” I ventured, as the coracle moon touched the sea.
“I don’t know. Ma?” she hesitated. “I have to tell you something. I won’t run away from you again; I don’t want to lose you again. But I want to stay with the pirates or whatever we become on land.”
I nodded.
“You don’t mind?”
“Sarah, I love you. Do you have any idea how happy I am to have found you? I never saw my own mother again, but I remember when I was a little girl my mother used to call the sun, she became the sun. I only have to remember that to feel her with me. I want to be like that for you, like the mountain or the ocean. I want to be with you that way. I don’t have to go where you go. I don’t need you to stay with me.”
“Ma,” was all she said after a long time.
We watched the stars glimmer, some of them seeming to struggle to become distinct.
/> “What will you do?” she asked.
“I’ll stay with Mary and help for as long as I can stand it,” I said. “She has ambitious plans. She always wanted me to work with her in the ecclesia, and I ran away instead.”
“With me,” I felt rather than saw Sarah smile.
“With you,” I affirmed.
We continued to stand in the prow, moving now into real night. I think now that we caught images from each other’s mind or from some future neither of us could wholly see. I saw Sarah on a horse riding through sea marshes under a huge wild sky. Then Sarah spoke, whether aloud or inside my mind, I don’t know.
I’ll come visit you in your cave.
I’ll come visit you by the sea, I answered her.
Then Martha called us both to supper.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
VIVE!
IN MOST PAINTINGS OR STATUES, whether I am fat or scrawny, I look depressed, even maudlin—(in fact some believe Magdalen is the derivation of that word). That is not the legacy I would choose for myself. There is one depiction that I like, even find flattering, from a stained-glass window in St Severin, a small church in Paris. I am arriving in Marseille (or Massilia as it was called then) and I look quite jaunty, even sexy, in a red and gold dress. One hip thrust forward, I am pointing to heaven—presumably because I am preaching the gospel to a large crowd gathered to greet me. I appear to be young, and more of a strawberry blonde than a true red-head. What I relish is the attitude, the boldness. There is nothing maudlin about this Magdalen.
Even though I was grey-haired and over fifty when we stepped ashore in Massilia with its hills that rise straight up from the sea, I think that window captures our collective mood—renegade apostles and pirates, ready for a good time in the South of France, where my daughter and I have always been popular, and where the Black Madonna is still venerated. (I have always been connected with her, as have Ma and Isis. Good company.)
Bright Dark Madonna Page 44
