“I don’t understand.” I finally find my voice, and as soon as I do, Ma vanishes. “I don’t understand!” I call after her. “You told me that you would be worshipped and that Sarah would be worshipped, but people would not know who I am.”
“Bright One,” she sings in the darkness, inside my bones. “A dark madonna you will be, cloaked as night is cloaked, hidden as night’s radiance is hidden. Where is your place, bright dark madonna, where is your place?”
Then I am alone again in the cavern with the statue of Black Sarah, who is now my own Sarah, in her preferred garments of a loose tunic and bricae, wild hair coming loose from her braids. But she still wears the crown of marsh flowers.
“Don’t worry,” Sarah says, reaching out and touching my cheek. “I’ll come and find you in your cave when it’s time.”
I woke with the light of the waning moon in my eyes. You don’t know what to do with yourself, Sarah had said.
Now I did.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
SAINTED
“YOU MUST BE CRAZY!” Mary B exploded.
“Crazy? Of course, she’s crazy,” said Martha much more calmly. “Did you just now figure that out? And by the way, it’s a bit much coming from you.”
“Look, I may have run away to a monastery—when I was very young—and passed as a man, but I lived in a community, in a warm place. She is talking about going to live in an isolated cave in wild mountains with winter coming on. Couldn’t you at least wait till spring?”
Martha, Mary, Lazarus, and I were all gathered together with Maximinus in his comfortable Roman-style house, not quite a villa but a far cry from the wattle and daub huts of the Pretannic Celts.
“Mary dear,” said Maximinus, and he patted Mary B’s hand soothingly. “If it is the cave I think it is, there has always been a hermit living there. So the story goes.”
In fact, I had heard the story, too, and I had thought it might be a good idea to visit an experienced cave dweller. A shepherd I met in the valley pointed to what looked like a sheer cliff and directed me to a path that zig-zagged up a steep slope through an oak forest. When I had scrambled for nearly an hour, thoroughly winded and drenched in sweat in the still air of an overcast late summer day, I heard the sound of flowing water, and I found the rise of a small stream. I had quenched my thirst and walked on until I came to a ledge—wide enough not to be unnerving—before the cliff face. I kept going, running my hand along the rock until I found the opening, a generous entrance with no need for stooping.
I called out a greeting in the local dialect, then in the other dialects I knew, then in Greek, then Latin. No one answered. Perhaps the hermit had gone on some errand. I did not want to intrude, so I sat and waited for awhile, gazing out across the lush valley to another range of mountains, also full of white rocks. I could not be absolutely sure of the directions, because the sky was dark, threatening a storm, but judging from the other mountains and from the shape of the valley below, I reckoned that the cave faced west. The ledge was sheltered to the north and opened to the south. A breeze sprang up from the south and the sky turned green-yellow. A lightning bolt forked into the valley, and then the rain came—what I call a wet rain, with fat heavy drops. I trusted the hermit would have offered shelter, if the hermit had been at home. I stepped inside the cave.
Well, it was dark. Of course it was dark. It was a cave. The hermit appeared to have no hearth or if he or she did, there were no smoldering coals anywhere. I took a tentative step and another and another. Then the lightning flashed, and I got an impression of a vast space. But when it flashed again, I saw something else: a skeleton.
It seemed the hermit was home after all.
By the time the storm passed, night had fallen, and I did not want to risk a steep scramble down the mountain in the dark, so I stayed the night in the cave with the bones. You might think I would have been afraid or at least uneasy, but I wasn’t. You have to remember I had once spent the night in a sealed tomb and that had turned out all right—more than all right, you might say. Also, on the very day of my menarche I had found a skull in a sacred spring and painted it with my first blood. I had what the Cailleach called “nice instincts,” and I did not feel any menace coming from the skeleton. From what I could see by the lightning, it appeared to be lying on its side comfortably curled into a fetal position. I wrapped myself in my cloak, imitated its posture and fell into a sound and peaceful sleep.
The day dawned bright and clear. I was sorry the cave did not have an eastern aspect, but I reckoned I could find a place to climb to watch the sunrise. Without fully realizing it, I had already claimed the cave as mine. By the daylight coming into the entrance, I could see that the cave was spacious, and, except for one end where some water pooled, it was dry.
The hermit did have a hearth after all, where there appeared to be a natural chimney; I found the remains of a wood fire. When I knelt down to have a closer look, wondering if I might find a spit or a pot anywhere, I got a shock much greater than the discovery of the skeleton.
Someone had made an inscription in the ashes, and in ogham, the ceremonial alphabet of the Celts. I closed my eyes, and saw the dust of another world, another time. My beloved bending over and writing in the dust with his finger. I opened my eyes again, sure that I had been seeing things, but the inscription in the ashes of the hearth remained.
Maeve.
I turned to the skeleton again, but of course it kept its secrets. But it didn’t matter; I didn’t have to understand who had inscribed the ogham or why.
I had found my cave.
“There was a hermit there,” I told my friends. “I found the skeleton.”
Mary B paled, and Martha lost her composure and shrieked.
“Was there any sign of violence or foul play?” asked Maximinus, reasonably enough.
“It was a very peaceful skeleton,” I said. “It looks as though he died in his sleep quite some time ago, no decaying matter left.”
“Ugh.” Martha covered her ears.
“Or it might have been a she,” I added, not sure how to identify the gender of bones.
“Surprising that no animals would have preyed upon the flesh,” mused Maximinus. “But perhaps the cave is protected by charms and incantations—”
“Maximinus,” Mary B interrupted. “You are now a follower of the Way. We don’t believe in charms and incantations.”
“Of course not, my dear, I was only saying—”
“And we do not need to encourage Mary to go off and spend the winter in a cave with a skeleton.”
“I don’t need encouragement,” I said. “I am definitely going. The question is, will you help me bring up some supplies? Also, I want at least one of you to know how to find the place, so you can tell Sarah.”
“I will help you,” said Lazarus.
“Lazarus you always take her side,” complained Martha.
I looked at Lazarus, and he nodded almost imperceptibly. Neither of us ever talked about the time we spent together on the shoal of the river between life and death. But we both remembered, and it was a bond between us. Lazarus had no fears for me.
“And what about that skeleton?” Martha went on. “You can’t set up housekeeping with a skeleton.”
“I know!” said Maximinus.“ We could baptize it, and give it a proper burial.”
“You cannot baptize the dead!” pronounced Mary B.
“My dear, are you sure? Is it written?”
“Well, now that you mention it,” Mary began, “in the book of the prophet Ezekiel—”
“You can bury the bones any way you like,” I broke in before a full-blown theological debate ensued. “Except the skull. I am keeping the skull.”
Hands were thrown up, groans resounded.
“I am a Celt. We collect them, you know. This would be just the one. I promise.”
Lazarus was the only one who laughed.
In the end, all of them helped me move into the cave, La Grotte de Marie Madeleine, whe
re, according to legend, I lived for thirty years as a penitent, naked and weeping. (Although in some versions I am wafted up to heaven three times a day for my meals. In the painting on display in the Basilica of Saint Maximin, I look as though I put on quite a bit of weight.)
Now picture this instead; I am dressed in a warm woolen tunic and cloak—as caves tend to keep the same temperature all year round. Let’s say it’s winter and a storm is raging outside. I have plenty of firewood gathered from the forest, and I’ve got a lentil stew simmering over my fire. I am drinking some delicious wine. On a ledge nearby, where I can see it by the firelight, sits the skull, wearing an evergreen wreath on its head in honor of Yule. Skulls figure heavily in my iconography. I am supposed to be contemplating mortality all the time. I know plenty about mortality and more than most about immortality and all the ambiguous states between. I don’t spend a lot of time contemplating it. My relationship with the skull is more companionable than anything else. Sometimes I talk to it, and I often sing. The acoustics in the cave encourage vocalization. If you think I am going mad with loneliness, you would be wrong.
I am, quite simply, happy.
It didn’t happen all at once, I will admit. At first I was tired. It was as if all the tiredness of all my life that had never exacted its due had been biding its time, and it hit me all at once, hard, heavy. As long as I resisted it, I felt sad or bored or anxious, I worried that I had made a mistake in retreating to the cave. Then I surrendered. I slept all I wanted, whenever I wanted. I thought: no need to worry how to get through the winter, I will just hibernate. Then one day, while it was still only late fall, I woke up and went outside; it was just before dawn; the sky still spiked with stars. I decided to find a place to wait for the sunrise. I went back into the wood and climbed higher on the mountain, above my cave to another ledge that opened to the east. Here I sat and watched the morning star rise above the pale line on the mountain horizon. When the rim of the sun cleared the earth, I saw it as flame, the source of all fire. The birds went wild at the first touch of light, and the sky came alive with wings.
And it came to me: this is all I have to do now. This is why I am here.
This is my place.
I spend my days exploring the mountain or just sitting on the ledge, watching the light and weather change, and the birds and animals and plants respond. Every day, I become more like them, more like the mountain, more like the cave. It is not that I never think about the past or the people I love. That is what the nights are for. I have intensely vivid dreams, and it may well be that I am traveling to different times and places. So I don’t miss people, exactly. They are not missing. All that time I spent losing and finding and losing my beloved again, and after him, my daughter—all the yearning, the relentless searching that has consumed most of my life, then I come to the cave and find that they are with me. Not just Jesus and Sarah, but everyone I have ever loved. They are with me, and I am with them. That saying of my beloved that always annoyed and comforted me: I am always with you, turns out to be the simple truth.
Winter passed, the storms abated, and spring crept slowly up the mountain from tree to tree. Birds returned, and in the valley below people plowed and planted. Then something unexpected began to happen. I would come back from a ramble or wake in the morning and find offerings left on the ledge outside the entry to the cave, a bouquet of flowers, a loaf of bread, a basket of eggs. No one ever called out to me, or waited to see me, no one came in search of healing, or weather magic to help the crops, or stories, or whatever wisdom (I was getting old) I might have had to dispense. Yet the offerings continued, and seemed to arrive when I was asleep or out walking. I began to wonder if the hermit was traditionally regarded as someone fearsome or dangerous who had to be propitiated. Finally I resolved to stick close to the cave until I could actually catch someone in the act.
Late one fine afternoon, when I would rather have been outdoors, I finally saw a woman, of about my own age, with a small boy in tow (a grandchild, I felt a rare pang of envy) venture into the ledge with an offering of spring onions and violets. The day was warm, and she looked winded from her climb.
“Won’t you come in to the cool of the cave and have a drink?” I called, stepping out of the cave.
It is a good thing the ledge is as wide as it is, for both she and the boy startled and nearly lost their balance. The boy hid behind her legs and peered out at me. The woman made something like a curtsey and began to back away.
“Wait, I want to ask you something,” I said to her. “Are you able to understand my speech?”
She nodded cautiously.
“Why do you bring offerings to me?”
“You are here,” she said simply. “We smelled it.”
I resisted the impulse to sniff under my armpits. I didn’t think I smelled too badly. I did bathe regularly. Then it occurred to me maybe they had smelled the smoke from my fire.
“Do you mean the smoke?” I asked.
The woman shook her head.
“Roses,” the boy whispered, and then he shouted. “Roses.”
I looked around confused. It was still too early in the spring for roses, and I hadn’t seen any around the cave.
“When you are here,” the woman explained at last. “We smell roses in the valley.”
“Am I gone sometimes?” I asked.
It was a strange question, I realized, but the woman did not expect me to be normal.
“You always come back.”
“Am I a goddess?”
“We call you the Bright Dark One.” She eyed me curiously, maybe a little critically. Perhaps I looked a little drab.
The boy began to pull at his grandmother’s skirt.
“I want to whisper you something,” he said to her. She bent down, and he spoke into her ear, and again I had a sense of homesickness for the ordinary, for something I might never experience.
“No,” scolded the grandmother. “No, we are going home now.”
“Would you like to see the cave?” I guessed his question.
“Oh, no,” said the woman. “No one has ever been inside the cave.”
“Just a peek then.”
I extended my hand to the boy, who bravely took it and walked with me to the entrance of the cave. The afternoon light shone straight in and illuminated the skull on the ledge with its crown of wild flowers. The boy gasped with fright and pleasure and ran back to his grandmother’s skirts, and they turned and made their way back down the mountain.
There was nothing I could do but send a blessing after them. When they had disappeared from sight, I sniffed to see if I could smell the scent ascribed to me, the odor of sanctity, if you could call it that. But if my presence in the cave somehow emanated roses, I could not detect it.
Perhaps that was the beginning of my life as a saint, though the term had not yet been coined. I try to regard it lightly. If miracles occurred because of my residence here, no one told me about them. Apart from the scent of roses that indicated my presence. Maybe sainthood just happens if you live long enough and take yourself off somewhere, become identified with a cave or an island, become a feature of the landscape, become an heir and progenitor of a legend. There were hermits who lived in the cave before me, and surely many who came after, but the lore surrounding the cave is mine. People still seek me here in La Grotte de Sainte Marie Madeleine.
And I suppose you could say that the skull—which now resides in the crypt of St Maximin encased in a rather tasteless gold wig—is, in a sense, my skull. Or at least it was mine for the years I lived in the cave, more like three years than thirty. Someone just added a zero somewhere along the way.
Towards the end of my time in the cave, though I did not know it was the end, I had three troubling dreams on three successive nights. In the first I see the black-robed priestesses of Holy Isle, standing on the cliffs, scanning the sky, as they had when I arrived there long ago, but in this dream I am oppressed with a sense of foreboding.
In the second I s
ee my father, whom I rarely meet in dreams, riding out from under the wave that had swept him away, coming to search for me, to accuse me. I hide in the cairn with my newborn baby.
“Where is she,” my father cries. “The misbegotten child of a misbegotten child. She must prepare. I must warn her. They are coming.”
In the third dream I see a woman, with long bright hair as red as mine used to be, in full battle gear, standing and looking out at a field full of corpses. Then Dwynwyn stands before me in her blood red tunic. “There’s going to be trouble, Little Bright One. There’s going to be trouble.”
I woke in a sweat, trembling, hardly knowing where I was.
“Jesus,” I said out loud. “Jesus. Tell me what I need to know.”
And he was with me, there in the cave, his arms wrapped around me.
Then I dreamed again.
My beloved and I are together in the garden outside the tomb. We are standing under the golden tree whose leaves shine with their own light. We are naked and as radiant and glad as the morning.
This is what you need to know, my beloved says without words. This is what you need to know. Remember.
For the next few days, I am more silent than I have ever been, even in my solitude. I do not talk to the skull or sing. I listen attentively to every sound, the drip of water from the ceiling of the cave, the doves calling in the morning and evening, the breeze moving from tree to tree. At night I think I can hear the fire of the stars, the silent call of the moon.
When she comes, I hear her footsteps away down the mountain, her scrambling in the steep places, stopping for breath. I hear the splash of water when she washes her face in the spring. Then she is there on the ledge, walking towards me.
Sarah, my daughter.
Coming to find me, coming to tell me that it’s time for us to go.
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