Red-Robed Priestess

by Elizabeth Cunningham

  Kinswomen. Surely she knew our lineage, and yet she rightly called us his kin.

  “Yes, Madrone,” said Aoife, slipping her arm around the woman who had sheltered my kinsmen here all those years ago.

  Sarah came and knelt on the other side of Joseph and held his other hand.

  “Joseph,” I tried to speak aloud but my throat was too thick with tears.

  I laid my head lightly on his chest, so that he didn’t have to bear its weight, and I listened to his heart, beating so slowly, the last little wavelets before the tide is all the way out.

  Joseph, I’m here.

  Maeve.

  Perhaps I fell asleep listening to his heart, perhaps I had a vision, or perhaps we dreamed together between the worlds.

  We are standing together on the roof of the Temple Magdalen tower, looking out over the water just before dusk. The fishing boats are making for the harbor, and we can hear the sounds of their voices carrying over the water, singing in Greek, in Aramaic, and other languages, too. Flocks of birds lift from the water, circle, settle again. Behind us rise the voices of the priestess-whores, singing evening hymns to Isis.

  “I was happy when I visited you here, Maeve,” says Joseph, whether aloud or mind to mind I don’t know; it doesn’t matter, “especially that night…this night.”

  I do not need to ask which night he means. I remember it, too, the night he came to me as the god-bearing stranger and I received him as the goddess. For that brief time, all his sadness, that I would not be to him what he wanted me to be, went away along with all my regret.

  “Not a brief time or not a brief time only,” he speaks to my thought. “It’s eternal. Plato was right,” Joseph goes on, this renegade Temple priest turned philosopher and adventurer. “You remember, Maeve. I taught you about the Ideas, though I don’t think you paid much attention. Temple Magdalen is an Idea. It will always exist, even when this place returns to dust and wild roses.”

  As he speaks, I remember when I first came there and heard the sound of the spring rising, flowing to the lake, and knew that I had found my home.

  “But Plato didn’t know everything.”

  Joseph turns me toward him and gathers me in his arms. I can hear his heart beating again, so slowly, so slowly, gentle as the lake water lapping at the shore.

  “He didn’t know how sweet it is, all of it, even the bitterness. You taught me that, Maeve. You.”

  Then night falls, so swiftly, the way it does in Galilee, and it is quiet, so quiet. Someone lays a hand on my head, steady, warm. Then gone.

  When I sat up again, Sarah and I were alone in the room. She still held Joseph’s hand in both her own.

  “Should I call the priestesses?” she asked.

  “Let’s just sit with him for a while,” I said.

  She nodded, and after a time she spoke again.

  “He was here, you know.”

  “Joseph?” I asked, not sure of what she meant.

  She shook her head.

  “My father.”

  And I hadn’t known? I tried to hide my dismay. Sarah saw it anyway.

  “He didn’t want to disturb you and Joseph. He was waiting. He talked to me for awhile.”

  “What did he say?” I couldn’t help my longing.

  Sarah didn’t answer right away, and I was afraid I had intruded.

  “It’s all right,” I told her. “I don’t need to know.”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s just when I say he talked, I don’t mean he used words. It’s hard to translate.”

  I nodded.

  “He’s glad we’re here,” she attempted. “He showed me a lot of pictures. Some of them were terrible, but at the same time I think he was trying to get me to see them from some other place, from his place, where things don’t look quite the same. Am I making any sense?”

  “As much as anyone could,” I assured her.

  “Good.” She fell silent again, relieved.

  And I fell into the silence, strangely comforted and at peace, sitting beside the body of my friend who had befriended both me and my beloved when we were so young and tormented and who had cared for us always as tenderly as he could.

  “Here now is the center of the world.”

  I heard myself speaking the words of the old archdruid as I planted Joseph’s walking staff on the fresh earth of his grave. We stood in a circle, the priestesses, Sarah, and I. Bele and Alyssa had joined us on this breast of a hill to the southeast of the mist-ringed Tor. People from the villages all along the aestuary had also gathered to honor Joseph. They seemed to know him not just as a trader, but also as someone who could tell a good story—the story of Maeve and Esus, though perhaps because of my grey hair and weathered face, they appeared to believe I was Jesus’s mother and seemed inclined to venerate me. I decided to let the case of mistaken identity slide. And so the church Joseph is supposed to have founded is dedicated to my mother-in-law.

  We had all said or sung prayers in various tongues and traditions, with Sarah surprising me by offering one in Hebrew. Perhaps Miriam had taught it to her when she was a child or perhaps it came directly from her father. Now wordlessly we began to build a stone cairn over the grave to mark and protect it. Burial was not such a common practice in these watery parts, but however widely Joseph had ranged in his travels and convictions, he was still a Jew, and I felt his body needed to rest in the earth.

  I walked back and forth carrying stones, my fingers numb with damp and cold, my eyes seeing only the ground. Where had the rest of Joseph gone? Had Jesus come, as Sarah said, to take Joseph to Tir nan Og where everything shone with its own light? Except that it was all here, really. There is nowhere else, Anna the prophetess had said. It’s all mirrors and shapeshifting. Now you see it, now you don’t. Mostly I didn’t. I was grateful now to have a simple task to perform, to carry stones in my hands, not to have to think or see further than this moment.

  “Look!” Sarah called out. “The staff.”

  I stopped and straightened up. Rising from the cairn was a thorn tree in full, fragrant flower. Now you see it. And there it still blooms. I cannot tell you if the Holy Grail is in the Chalice Well or if Joseph really carried a vial of Jesus’s blood and sweat to this green and pleasant land. Nor do I know if he converted one person to Christianity, let alone the 18,000 of legend. But I can give you this much: his staff became a blossoming thorn tree, and some remnant or descendant blooms there still.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SPIRAL PATH

  IN A BRIEF SPAN OF TIME, I have rashly embraced a new lover who could be a dangerous enemy, and I have lost an old friend and ally to death. I am a returned exile, still not sure of her official welcome to a divided land that shape-shifts in and out of time, between this world and the other, a place that has not yet made its reckoning with history. If I could have, I would have postponed that reckoning indefinitely, biding my timelessness in Avalon, drifting on the still waters in hidden marshes, letting both memory and foreknowledge become a forgotten dream.

  “Now what?” asked Bele as we walked back to the boats. “Is there anything more you have to do in this place, Mother of Sarah?”

  “I think it would be a good idea to ask directions,” said Alyssa. “Something a little more specific than heading east.”

  “What about that path,” put in Bele, “you know, the spiral path to the Otherworld where all things are revealed? Could be useful.”

  “You probably need to be initiated into their order or something like that,” cautioned Alyssa. “I doubt they’d let us walk it. And I’m not sure I’d want to, thanks very much.”

  “What do you think we should do, Mother of Sarah?” Bele turned to me.

  I didn’t know what I thought, only what I felt, a sense of dread at the thought of pursuing this quest any further.

  “No vision can direct us or protect us.” Sarah did not wait for my response. “We need clear sight, not second sight. I say we leave as soon as possible.”

 
I looked at Sarah, trying to read her face, which she seemed determined to keep unreadable. If Sarah had no premonitions, why this edge, this urgency?

  “We have to say goodbye, at least,” I said firmly. “The priestesses have given us hospitality. Aoife traveled for days to meet us and days to bring us back.”

  We had reached the water’s edge, and it occurred to me that as we had no boat of our own, we were more or less at the mercy of the priestesses, like it or not. Priestesses all around us were stepping into boats, gliding away on the smooth water, seeming to take no notice of us. Then Aoife approached us. She stood beside Sarah for a moment without speaking, and I could almost see her silence envelop Sarah, ease her restlessness. Then Aoife turned to me.

  “There are two druids here to see you, Maeve Rhuad. They have traveled all the way from Mona.”

  My stomach lurched and my hands began to shake. I reminded myself that I was full of years, and perhaps even wisdom, but it was useless. I was fifteen again and in deep shit.

  “Will you come?”

  She might as well have said: you will come. The question was only a formality.

  “Of course,” I said with as much calm and dignity as I could fake.

  “You other three will go to the feasting,” Aoife gestured towards a waiting boat.

  “I go nowhere without my mother,” said Sarah, and she took a step closer to me.

  Bele and Alyssa couldn’t follow the words, but they got the gist and they moved to flank us, hands on their sword hilts—which to their obvious horror were not there. Everyone who came to Avalon was required to disarm.

  “No harm will come to your mother here,” Aoife said softly. “This is a place of sanctuary. The druids asked to speak with your mother alone.”

  “They can ask all they like,” countered Sarah. “The decision is not theirs.”

  “That’s right,” I agreed. “It’s mine. I will go alone to meet them.”

  Sarah turned to me, ready to protest.

  “It’s all right,” I told her. “I’m not afraid of any druids.”

  Never mind they had tried to make a human sacrifice of her father and sent me off to what might have been a watery doom after stealing my first-born child.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Don’t talk to me that way! I’m your mother.”

  I tried to sound severe, but I started to laugh, and suddenly we were all laughing, giddy and punch drunk. Even Aoife. And after a round of embraces, Sarah let me go. She and the others got into a larger boat and went one way. Aoife and I, in a smaller craft, went another. Soon we were lost to each other’s sight.

  I did not question Aoife further as we moved through the warrens of waterways. And after awhile, I forgot the confrontation awaiting me, forgot all fear. Again I had that strange sense that all of it was a dream, my whole life and all the other lives weaving in and out of mine. I closed my eyes and dozed a bit. When I opened them again, all I could see was green rising, rising. We had come ashore at the base of the protuberance.

  “Do you see that path there?” Aoife asked when I had gotten out of the boat; she herself, I noticed, had not disembarked.

  I looked where she pointed to a narrow strip, a worn green amidst the pasturage.

  “Just follow it,” she directed. “And you’ll come to where you need to go.”

  No point in asking her when she’d be back, even if she hadn’t already started skimming away in her little boat. I was a priestess myself, for Isis’ sake, I knew an Otherworldly place when I saw one. I had little doubt that before me lay “the spiral path.” Just like the druids to make you sweat just to have a word with them.

  There was nothing for it. I began to walk. I walked and walked a path that wound seemingly endlessly around and around the hill. The protuberance was at one end of a wider, more gradual incline. After a time, though I kept my feet patiently on the earth, step after step, my vision rose and I saw with my dove’s eye: I was walking on a great earthen vulva, fold on fold, lip on lip. The protuberance was the pleasure point, erect. This realization exhilarated me, and my walking became more like dancing as I approached the peak. There the path became steeper, a narrow terrace cut into the hill. I noticed sheep and cattle precariously grazing on the almost vertical sides and wondered if they had been bred to have two legs shorter than the others. Then I rose above the cattle line and into a wreath of cloud, cold and clammy as clouds can be, then higher still, into the welcome warmth of the sun, with cloud, land, waterways, river, sea spreading out below all the way to the curving rim of the earth. It was not hard to imagine that from the top, if I sent my dove vision flying, I could see anywhere in the world. But before I reached the summit, a doorway opened in the side of the hill, and the path took me inside.

  I was less panicked than you might suppose. I was born and raised in the Otherworld; for my initiation I had followed a spiral path deep into the earth beneath Bride’s breast on the Isle of Tir na mBan. So I just stood calmly as my eyes adjusted to the relative darkness. A fire burned, vented by some natural chimney, for the room was not smoky. The two druids, for so I supposed they were, sat facing the fire, their backs to me.

  “All right, I’m here,” I greeted them rather rudely. “What do you want?”

  It seemed to me that the two backs shook a little, and I thought I heard a gasp or two. Good, I had unsettled them. Then they rose and turned to me, the silver bells on their poets’ branches jingling, their feathered masks wild and inscrutable. At the sight of the masks, I broke a sweat. My father had worn a bird mask the night he had gone out of his head and raped me. But he was dead. Long dead. I took a deep breath, and sent down my roots, gathering the strength of this earth, sending my branches to gather light.

  “My name is Maeve Rhuad, daughter of the warrior witches of Tir na mBan, daughters of the Cailleach, daughters all of Bride, as you well know if you are druids worth your salt. You have called me here. State your names, lineages, and business or I shall be on my way.”

  “She hasn’t changed,” said one druid to the other.

  “Not one bit!”

  And then they removed their masks.

  But I didn’t recognize them until they held out their arms.

  The beach is crowded with Crows and Cranes. Further back, perched among the rocks and cliffs that rise on either side of the beach, the entire student body of the Druid College of Mona is assembled. No one is saying personal farewells; the occasion is too formal, but I am allowed a moment to scan the crowd. I find Viviane first. Her hair catches the light and glows. She and Branwen are standing together on a ledge partway up a cliff. Nissyen and the other first formers are clustered nearby. I try to catch everyone’s eye, saving Branwen for last. When our eyes meet, Branwen lets go of Viviane’s hand and stretches out her arms towards me. I lift my arms to her in return, and suddenly the cliffs come alive with upraised, outstretched arms as if some enormous flock of huge birds were about to take flight.

  “Branwen? Viviane?”

  I opened my arms and walked into theirs.

  CHAPTER NINE

  CLASS REUNION

  AFTER ALL THE EXCLAIMING and the holding each other at arm’s length so that I could marvel at them and they at me, all of us now more than forty years older than the day I drifted away with the tide, we sat down together before the fire. Branwen handed me a cup of hot mead. Her hair, I noted without envy, was still mostly black, and her eyes as gentle as ever. Viviane, once a redhead like me (and how I had resented her for that) now had hair that was almost white, just a hint of yellowing. Mine was merely grey, and I admit my old rivalry with her instantly revived. She offered me a piece of barley cake.

  “Not a burnt one, I hope,” I quipped, referring to the way sacrificial victims were chosen.

  “How can you make a joke like that?” Viviane shook her head. “After all that happened.”

  “You mean after Lovernios, my father, rigged the lot so it fell to Esus?”

  “The brehon court never accept
ed that version of the events,” Viviane said.

  “I am no longer under its jurisdiction,” I shot back. “What the druids choose to believe or not believe makes no difference to me. As to all that happened to Esus, and to me, after that, you don’t know the half of it.”

  “We don’t know any of it,” Viviane pointed out. “But in point of fact, you are under our jurisdiction, now that you’re back, and what we have chosen to believe may matter more than you know.”

  “Your jurisdiction?” I looked at my old friend and my old enemy.

  “I am a brehon now, Maeve. And Branwen is a renowned bard, and a distinguished member of the faculty of the Druid College at Mona.”

  “Just as Dwynwyn predicted,” I said softly. “And so you have become full-feathered druids. Cranes not Crows.”

  I wondered if they even remembered the irreverent names we cheeky first formers called the druids of Mona and the priestesses of Holy Island who came to the college to perform the thankless task of watching over the girl students.

  “So have you come to enforce my exile?”

  “Oh, Maeve, no!” Branwen was distressed. “We wanted to see you.”

  “Although,” Viviane cautioned, “your presence in the Holy Isles could be considered controversial.”

  “I don’t see why!” Branwen became unusually heated. “I know I am not a brehon, but you said it yourself, Viviane. The sea ruled in her favor. Therefore, she is innocent.”

  “No, Branwen,” insisted Viviane. “What I said is, the case could be argued that way.”

  “Surely my case is long since closed,” I said.

  “There are some druids who still hold that the disrupted sacrifice and the subsequent Roman invasion in the southeast of the Holy Isles are directly linked.”

  Just as I had always feared. No matter that King Bran himself had exonerated me. No matter that I would have made the same choice over again. Part of me still wondered if the druids had been right.