It had been made clear to her then, that she was coming down to earth, and she had understood what she must give up.
That had been six months ago and now as she cast a glance at her husband, the young carpenter with the soft brown eyes and hair like charcoal from the fires, she knew her descent was near complete and she put her trust in Joseph. He saw to all her needs and pulled the animal gently on the road, so as not to cause her unnecessary discomfort, he toiled over the frozen hills and mountains with his feet blue and blistered and his hands callused and frigid, though he made no complaint as others did, of the Romans and the census.
For Joseph did not squander his words.
She remembered his face when he had seen, upon her return from Elisabeth’s house, how she was grown with child. No memory lived in his heart of the union brought about by the ministering of the priests and yet, in his dream-full eyes, she had seen no recrimination; from his mouth no harsh words had come. When the township had gathered to call her to account and she feared the people would stone her, Joseph remained steadfast in his love for her, refusing to shun her, making it possible for the priests to keep to themselves their workings.
She looked out of her thoughts and realised they were nearing Bethlehem. Darkness was fast descending over the highland wilderness of Judea and only a red outline remained in the west where the road to Hebron made a thread through the valleys and hills that separated Bethlehem from Jerusalem. The last of the sun was touching the pinnacles of a mighty palace. She looked to the east, to where a star-like moon was rising behind purpling clouds; a strange moon, a moon unlike any moon she had ever seen. At that moment, the howling of a wolf was heard and it filled her with dread. She was glad they had arrived at the outskirts of the town.
It was cold, but the fields that continued upwards to the heights along which the city stretched, were rich with terraced vineyards and gardens well tended. Lights flickered in the houses, full with guests. The sound of merry talk and laughter reached them even here. All of it cheered her heart, which until now had been heavy with the bitter knowledge that she was homeless and may not have a warm place to bring forth her child.
She bent over to hold her belly for the pain that came then, and she told her child – not yet!
Her husband, having heard this, grew concerned. He hastened through the ruined gates of the city, going from house to house in search of accommodation, but no one had room. Joseph asked those on the crowded streets if they knew of any small space wherein they might spend the night, since his wife, he showed them, was great with child and her hour was at hand. They told him the little town was much burdened by visitors come from near and far to be counted. Every house was full. Perhaps they should try the Inn?
The Inn was also full to the brim, but the innkeeper took pity on them and told Joseph of a rocky grotto outside the city walls. He warned him that it had once been a place of sinful ritual. Part of it was now being used as a stable because Bethlehem was so full that even those places usually reserved for animals had to be used as lodgings.
The young couple, having no other choice, made their way there. And thus it was that Mary entered into that grotto where two years before Herod had performed a black ritual with the blood of the children of Bethlehem. And in that dark space surrounded by animals, fragrant with dung and straw, she sat. Above her, a cleft in the rock allowed a little of that sun-like moonlight to enter. It brought her peace. Here she could make herself comfortable. Here she could wait for the onset of the more painful contractions that would soon come. In the meantime, her young husband would go and find help.
When he returned he was accompanied by two women – a midwife and her young attendant Salome, whose dark round face and clear eyes made a gladness in Mary’s heart. The midwife told her the girl had a withered hand from birth, but that this deformity would not prevent her from collecting the water and folding the cloths and cleaning the knife with wine.
It was many hours later, as Mary lay exhausted with her child suckling, that the old midwife sent Salome to fetch more water. When she returned Mary noticed that the girl’s malformed hand was now made well and Salome, following her gaze, noticed it also.
Salome dropped the water vase and fell to the ground and gave thanks.
By and by Mary fell asleep and the midwife, seeking her own rest, made a way out of the cave and called for Salome to follow. But the girl refused to go. She would remain with Mary until her dying day.
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‘But what happens to the other child, Lea, the child that was sought by Herod and escaped the Romans?’ I asked her when she paused.
‘That is what I shall speak of next...’
5
MARIAM
Lea told how Mariam woke with a start.
‘The dream had come again and as always she could not remember it very well. In it, she woke to the howling of a wolf and found herself not in her husband’s tent but in a house among a number of sleeping women. In her heart there was always a feeling of despair and horror for something that had not yet come to pass, and a longing to be with someone – someone she did not yet know.’
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Awake now she searched the darkness for her child and found him sleeping soundly on his rush mat in their tent. On their journey to Egypt three years ago, fleeing from Herod and his madness, she had taken to dreaming such a dream but upon coming to Heliopolis – that island of green calm in the middle of the barren desert – the dreams had made a pause. They had only come again upon this return journey to her homeland, and she did not know what it meant, though it seemed to her to be a portent of peril.
She lay in the darkness listening to her husband’s soft breathing and recalled those years in Egypt with a fond eye. She saw Yeshua walking in the ruins of the fallen temples, his skin browned by the sun; she saw him bathing in the cool waters of the oasis for the holy ablutions, or sitting in the shade of the sycamores eating dates. She longed for the peace and safety she had felt then.
The priests had sequestered them for some years and at the appropriate time had begun to instruct Yeshua in the cool, dark, depths of their sacred places. He was taught many things: how to listen to what wafts on the warm breezes; what resounds in the songs of birds; what lives in the harmony of growing grass; he was taught how to see behind the shapes of twigs and branches; and what lay behind cloud, sky and storm: the thoughts of God!
She knew this because she was always with him, and she was with him again on the day the priests took him to see an old anchorite.
The anchorite lived on a limestone hill not far from the great city of Alexandria. He had retired to a contemplative life and now spent his days in a holy room, a sanctuary wherein he celebrated all the mysteries of the holy life. He never admitted anyone to his house and yet he had wanted to see Yeshua.
On the appointed day Mariam and her son sat before him. Mariam felt anxious for what the anchorite would say. But the old man said nothing for a long time. Instead, he inspected Yeshua from below his wrinkled brow, making soft noises to himself. When it seemed that he would never speak, he smiled suddenly and began to laugh with merriment, as if relieved of some great burden.
Surprised, Mariam said nothing, but watched and waited for it to stop, knowing that old sages were known for having a peculiar wisdom. When he addressed her then, his face was as unwrinkled as a child’s might be and his eyes were as clear as a stream.
‘Long ago,’ he told her, ‘there was a teacher whose name was Melchizedek. Old Melchizedek had a favourite pupil to whom he taught all the mysteries of the Sun. This pupil, my dear, was destined to incarnate many times, and a long line of ancestors had to be prepared to make a body suitable for him. So Melchizedek tutored another pupil, Abraham, and he taught him all the secrets of the Moon, the secrets of the blood and the creation of the perfect body. His task was to prepare the forty-two generations of your ancestors for the birth of that favourite pupil, that first pupil. And it is due to Abraham’s faithfulness that you
are here today with the fruit of your loins. My favourite pupil is come again, and I am rejoicing! For my task is near done, and I must now remind him of his past and bring to him all that he has left behind, in order that he might perform a special task.’
He reached out and passed both hands over Yeshua’s eyes and immediately her son fell asleep in her arms. The old man closed his own eyes and uttered many prayers over her boy. When it was over and her son was returned to his senses, the old man looked at her with kindness and familiarity.
‘Soon you will give birth to another child,’ he told her.
Instinctively she moved a hand over her flat belly. Not even Joseph knew that her bleeding was late.
‘Herod is dead; soon you will be too big with child to travel. You must go. Take your child and husband and journey by way of the Sinai desert in the direction of your homeland, but do not go to your Temple in Jerusalem for the hope of your priests will nurture your boy towards earthly and not heavenly ends. There is a safe place to which you can go, called Nazareth. The people who live there are not so different from us, they are called Essenes and you may live among them untroubled, until the time comes.’
She wanted to ask him when that time would be and what Yeshua was destined to do, but could not bring herself to say anything.
He told her, ‘A mother must love her son, but you must love the Son of God, even as you love your own son…for the love of a mother can make all things taste sweet.’
Now as she lay upon the rush mat, she wondered what he had meant and scolded herself for not asking the questions that continued to plague her. What was to be her son’s task? When would it come? And how must she love the Son of God as her own? Her vexation with herself made the child in her belly give a kick that took away her breath. The child reminded her that by the time they reached Nazareth she would be a mother twice over.
She did not know what she would find in Nazareth among the Essenes, the pure ones. She only knew what she remembered of her Temple days, that these ascetics were more strict than the Therapeutae of Egypt, more strict than the Nazarites, for they wore only white and sequestered themselves in their Mother Houses for fear of defilement. What would become of Yeshua’s task in such a place as Nazareth? Could the heir of David be made a king of Israel in such a place, among men whose faces were turned away from Jerusalem? Nothing good had ever come out of Nazareth – that was the saying and she worried that it was true.
She turned over to hug her husband, who seemed to be older by the day. In truth, the memory of her former life at the Temple in Jerusalem had become more and more distant to her eye and the details had lost their clarity and distinction. She remembered how she had been taken to the Temple as a child and how the miracle of the greening staff had proved the eligibility of an ageing Joseph as a choice of husband. She had not wanted to marry, but the priests had reminded her of the duty of every person of sovereign lineage to further their ancestral lineage. She had consented only as a service to her people and yet in time she had grown to love him, and if the love she felt was not a young love such as she had seen in others, it was weighty and costly and she was glad of it. She only hoped Joseph would live long enough to see his son’s task accomplished.
Outside, the night deepened. Tomorrow would be another long day’s march and she put away her thoughts and fears and resolved to sleep.
She closed her eyes and sleep did come, but it was not peaceful.
6
YESHUA AND JESUS
Two boys sat on the grass. The priestly child, Jesus, was only twelve springs and fair, for he was a Galilean of mixed blood. The older boy, Yeshua, was fourteen springs and from the lineage of kings. As a Judean of pure blood he was of darker of complexion.
Yeshua watched Jesus play a plaintive song on his flute. One moment, the song wafted downwards over the ridge of the mountain, floating over the Nazirite town-ship below with its rows and rows of houses scattered among figs and pomegranates and grape vines, and another moment, the song soared upwards to the sun’s jewel, whose gleaming fell over the world and came to rest on the squat fig tree beneath which they sat.
Before them plump, white sheep stood silent and obedient in the grass. From the wide spaces there came a sharp breeze, herb-scented and cool, carrying the sound of a flock of doves flapping their wings in time to the dying and becoming of the soulful tune.
Yeshua was restless.
He held a stick in his hand. He made figures with it among the cyclamen and the anemones and in a moment he threw the stick away and fell to watching the rustling leaves of the small tree.
He told himself,
I see all created things because they are; and they are because God sees them, and because God sees them I see them in the world, and because they are perfect, I see them in my heart.
But this thought did not content him.
He looked beyond the sky, to where the clouds melted into the heavens. The flute’s song should have calmed him enough to make him sleep except that a dream in the night still lingered in his heart and filled him with puzzlement and concern. Jesus would know its meaning but he was taken with his flute and so Yeshua would have to wait, for he did not wish to interrupt him.
Years ago when Yeshua and his parents had arrived in Nazareth, Jesus’ family had been the first to befriend them. Discovering a shared lineage had added to their kinship and soon the two households seemed to have no distinction between them. This meant that he and Jesus passed season after season in each other’s company and thereby developed a particular understanding between them.
From the beginning the Essene teachers had singled them out from the other village boys, and had sent for the Chazzan, the officer from the synagogue to instruct them on the Torah, the Mishnah, and the unity of the Law and the Faith. But the teacher soon discovered that a great gulf had divided the two boys.
Yeshua loved reading, singing and praying. The rituals of the festivals and all that could be learnt from papyrus and from the word resounded in his soul and gave clarity to his mind. In truth, the older he became the more he felt one with the destiny and the trials of his people upon whom he knew lay the destiny of all peoples of the world.
Jesus was different.
He was not one for the things of the world. His mind could not take up the teachings that the rabbis prized so highly, for it was flown away with the song of birds or the flight of a butterfly or the angle of the sun as it fell on a leaf. There seemed to be no space in his memory for knowledge and his vision of the world seemed, to Yeshua, like a soft-spoken dream, dusted with the pollen of heaven.
The rabbis were knowledgeable but they were not wise, for they could not fathom Jesus’ soul. They could not see his capacity for love with their hardened minds. They did not realise, therefore, how with one touch of his hand, one look from his far-seeing eyes, one word spoken soft and rounded from his lips he could awaken truth and undo all manner of harm, illness and worry. They could not see it, and so they thought him ‘addled’, a child that could not be taught and concentrated on Yeshua instead, letting go their training of Jesus and allowing him to spend his days as he would spend them, with his sheep and the playing of his flute song.
Now the flute-song came to its end and the silence of afternoon invaded the empty spaces of the day. Yeshua looked at Jesus and Jesus in turn let his eyes – not blue nor green nor brown, but all three in equal measure – meet Yeshua’s dark ones.
Feeling like a boy and forgetting for a moment that he was more knowledgeable than the priests in their synagogues, he said,
‘I wonder what the sheep are thinking?’
Jesus wiped the spit from his flute and looked the sheep a moment.
‘Sheep do not have thoughts, Yeshua,’ he said, all matter of fact.
‘Maze!’ Yeshua said, surprised. ‘No thoughts?’
‘None.’
‘What do they do?’
Jesus gazed out at the sheep, measuring, or so it seemed to Yeshua, what lived in them.
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‘They feel…they long for warmer days and greener grass…also,’ His face lit up in a smile, ‘they do not have sympathy for the goats…’
Yeshua smiled himself. ‘They do not like the goats?’
‘The goats annoy them and they smell bad.’
Yeshua nodded. ‘Yes, they smell bad and they are stupid!’ He looked at Jesus, ‘So, what am I thinking then, what do you see in my head?’
Jesus’ gaze touched upon Yeshua’s face a moment and then turned away. ‘Your thoughts are too complicated for my reckoning,’ he told him. ‘They are knotted up, one with the other, and made of sharp corners.’
‘Well…if they are made of sharp corners,’ Yeshua threw a clump of grass at Jesus, ‘how can they be knotted? Knots are rounded!’
More grass was thrown, and soon the two boys were covered in dirt and laughing like anything.
They fell on their backs then and Jesus turned over on his belly, contented, cupping his chin with his hands.
Yeshua observed the leaves on the tree, chewing on a blade of grass. ‘Last night I dreamt I was an eagle,’ he said.
Jesus gave him a sideways glance, ‘How high did you fly?’
‘I flew so high I reached the sun, that’s how high! Then, something strange happened. The sun turned into a beautiful woman, who stood on the moon and wore a crown of stars. She told me her name was wisdom and she showed me things in a deep well: strange things, terrible wars, fearful sights! She told me it was the future, and that it would be grave but that I would perform a task that would save the world, but first I had to remember something that I had to forget again! But I can’t remember what it was!’
‘That is because you have already forgotten it!’
‘That is true!’ he said, with a sigh.
‘What happened after that?’
‘The woman moved her hand over the well and showed me something more…she showed me an image of you.’
Fifth Gospel: A Novel (Rosicrucian Quartet) Paperback Page 4
