“I don’t know. Months and months, maybe. I’m not paying attention. I don’t get my woman’s blood any more, so I can’t tell.” Under a big stone beside the cave, buried to her nose in the cool sand, a frog shifted, waiting for the night.
“Our mother Mary talks to you, and you’ve been out here for years, and you neither eat nor drink,” said Zosimus. He threw himself to his knees. That must have hurt. He bowed his head down to the sand. “Holy Lady,” he muttered into his chest, “please bless me.”
Clearly, he wasn’t going to be any help. “Oh, just get behind me, Zosimus,” I said irritably. “Over there, where I can’t see you.”
He turned his face up to me, blinking like a slow and stupid snake. I waved him away. “Go, I said. A little further off. And try to keep quiet for a while. I need to think.”
He went! That big old man, he did what I told him to! I’d have to try that on Tausiris when I got back.
But I did need to think. Judah was quiet again, sleeping. Zosimus’s raspy breathing and ragged heartbeat distracted me for a while, but soon they settled into a rhythm, like the beats that Nefer would play when we danced. I closed my eyes and settled deep within myself, hunting for the whispering. The words were coming clearer.
“Are you ready to hear me now?” said the voice from within. It seemed I could hear the water running deep beneath the desert sands, could hear the fluttering flames of the sun.
“Yes, I think so,” I replied.
The words were coming clearer. “I’m ready to hear you now,” I said to the whispering voices. I settled in the flowing aetheric, and calmly paid attention.
First, an egg rolled to my feet, sealed and perfect. I tried to pick it up. It weighed as much as the universe. I let it be, rolling in a tight circle around its smaller end. Lightning cracked and thunder roared, delivering two people to stand in front of me. A woman and a man. They looked like my cousins, and they too had more echoes than I cared to number.
Voices, millions of them echoing, telling me what I had done. I strained to hear, to make myself sit so lightly on the sand that my body wouldn’t rasp against it and drown out their words.
My/I sisters were all there too, of course. An old man, a peasant man, came limping on a crutch. He wore a battered hat on his head. He smiled at the company gathered, and they welcomed him in, patting his back and greeting him like a cousin.
I had been a good friend to Neferkare Little Doe, and to Drineh and Cups and Judah. I had loved my mother and my father. I had desired to see some of the world, and I had done it. And what else, I asked them? Light, so light I made myself, to hear them better.
A man stepped out of a ship, which had borne him on the belly of my Lasirèn self. A giant snake traced its infinity sign path in the aether as it approached. As they saw it, all the women, even me/we, went to our knees, our breasts in our hands, and made reverence.
I had carried that child in the blood of my belly, like a ship on the sea. I had made it a home, even though I hadn’t known it was there. Is there more? I couldn’t feel my body on the sand, so hard I was listening.
A power of disease oozed towards us, in the leaking sores of smallpox. He could ravage worlds.
The child wasn’t built well, couldn’t live, so its spirit went back between the worlds. There will be other children in the world. Not my fault! My soul leapt with joy.
A thickly muscled man with a mad smile came running heavily into the circle. His selves brandished an axe; a machète; a sword. I matched his grin. “Husband,” I greeted him.
He laughed. “Wife. You know us now?”
I knew it now. I had done no wrong. My name is Meritet, and I had been pregnant, and I was no longer. I could think that now, and be at peace with it.
“I know you,” I tell him. One of his echoes is Makandal, hale and still full of fight. I smile at him/them. “I don’t fight this fight alone, do I? I can be water and anger and beauty and love, but there is also iron and fire, warfare and thunder and storm.”
“And sickness,” says the smallpox one.
“And family,” says our cousin in his battered hat.
“And death, and change,” says one I didn’t see before, for he never keeps still.
“There’s healing, and mothering, and age.”
“And youth,” say a pair of beautiful twin children, brown arms about each other.
“There’s infinity,” hiss the snake and the egg.
We are all here, all the powers of the Ginen lives for all the centuries that they have been in existence, and we all fight. We change when change is needed. We are a little different in each place that the Ginen have come to rest, and any one of is already many powers. No cancer can fell us all, no blight cover us completely.
I shouted out loud with the joy of it. Zosimus exclaimed in fear. Judah woke, banged his head on the cave ceiling as he sat up to run to me. I laughed. I was light. “I still have my doll with me,” I told them. They were in front of me now, gazing up at me, thunderstruck. “I have the doll Daddy made,” I said.
Zosimus stared at Judah crouching there, Judah’s tawny bush of hair and beard, the fuzz that had covered his thin body since he hadn’t been eating so well. The many hairs glowed in the sun. “A lion,” Zosimus whimpered, and backed away.
I ignored him. “The first few nights here,” I told them, “I clutched it to me when I slept. But it’s not my baby. I never even wanted a baby. I’ll bury it tonight. I’m grown now. It’s time to let it go.”
“Meri,” said Judah quietly, as you would to calm a wild beast, “you’re floating.”
I was. Sitting on the air like on a pillow. Wonderful. Zosimus made the sign of the cross again, and started praying for all he was worth. “Mary, Mother Mary, bless me,” he was saying. He was looking right at me. The silly man was praying to me.
It was nice up here. I could see so far!
But Judah looked frightened. So I climbed down from the air, went and stood beside him. He reached out and touched my shoulder, my hair. “Oh, don’t look at me like that,” I said. “I’m better now. Want to go find this uncle of yours I keep hearing about?”
Judah made a small sound in his throat. His face had changed too, in our time in the desert. He looked older. Slowly, his eyes began to see me, not the crazy girl who floated. “You do?” he asked. “You really want to go? Now?”
“Yes, I do. It’s boring here.” I was already in the cave, rolling up the rugs. I threw Judah’s clothes out to him. “Come on, let’s leave.” I found my doll, hugged her to me, then tucked her under my arm. I’d bury her tonight, wherever we were. I stepped back outside. Judah was still standing there. I could hear Zosimus paternostering away somewhere off to my right. Judah was still looking at me like he didn’t quite know me. “Thank you,” I said to him quietly. “I’ve been just sitting here moping all this time, and you’ve been really kind and patient.”
“How’re we going to pay our way to Uncle Lev’s?” he asked.
“The way we know best, Judah. On our backs.”
He laughed then, and some of the old Judah came back into his face. He picked up one rug. I got the other, tucked my doll into it. He said, “We’ll have to clean ourselves up first, though. We look awful.”
“We can wash in the Jordan. That’ll be good enough.”
Mary of Egypt lived alone there in the desert for forty years, eating only herbs and green beans. One day a monk, a holy man named Zosimus who had come to pass the month of Lent in the desert, heard Mary of Egypt call out to him by his name. She begged him to lend her his cloak so that she might cover her nakedness and accept a blessing from him. She told Zosimus the story of her previous dissolute life, and they prayed and conversed together. She had received no teaching in the scriptures, yet through prayer and fasting had been able to hear the word of the Lord. She begged Zosimus to meet her at the river Jordan the following year and administer to her the Blessed Sacrament.
Zosimus returned to the monastery, and a year la
ter, came back to the river Jordan bearing a small portion of the undefiled Body and precious Blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. When he arrived at the spot that he and Mary had chosen, she appeared on the opposite bank of the river. She made the sign of the cross upon her body, and thereupon walked upon the waters to meet Zosimus on the other side. He gave her Holy Communion. She raised her hands towards the heavens and thanked God for her salvation. She asked Zosimus to come to her again in a year’s time, to the spot where he had first found her, where she would be in whatever condition God ordained.
Zosimus went away again. When he returned a year later to the spot where he had first found Mary of Egypt, he discovered her corpse, guarded by a lion, and miraculously uncorrupted. Scratched into the ground beside her was a note that she had died on the same night a year before that Zosimus had given her communion. The note requested that he bury her body in the desert.
With the help of the lion, Zosimus dug a grave. He buried the body of Mary and prayed for her soul. He returned to his monastery to tell for the first time the wondrous tale of Mary of Egypt.
—Adapted from various Catholic texts about the life of Saint Mary of Egypt, the “dusky” saint, patron saint of sailors and prostitutes
Zosimus gave us some of his drinking water for the trek. My keen hearing was fading, but I could hear the great huge stories he was inventing to tell about me and Judah when he got back to the monastery. Me, a pious Christian saint, repentant of her wanton ways, expiring as she achieved the pinnacle of her holiness. Judah, a fierce lion guarding my miraculous unrotting corpse. Zosimus was as bad as Antoniou. When Judah and I set off towards Capitolina, Zosimus was still kneeling in the sand, staring at us.
I hoped we’d get there quickly. Damn, I was hungry.
Acknowledgements
They say that it takes a village to raise a child. Sometimes it feels as though it takes a village to make a book. In the years during which I’ve been writing this novel, a veritable colloquium of friends, colleagues, and strangers have provided me with critique, historical references, research, information, shelter, food, money when I had none, and introductions to people who could help me. I cannot thank them enough for their immense generosity and the incredible gift of their time, which more than ever, I recognise as precious. To the names I’ve remembered and—mea culpa—the ones I have not, boundless gratitude and thanks to you all, including: Ibi Aanu, Patrick Barnard, Shelley Bates, Isobel Bedingfield, Judith Berman, Jihane Billacois, Jayme Blaschke, Jennifer Busick, Richard Butner, Rich Bynum, Susan Casper, Ted Chiang, Austin Cooke, Myriam Chancy, Candas Jane Dorsey, Gardner Dozois, Andy Duncan, Sudharshan Duraiyappah, Suzette Haden Elgin, Carol Emshwiller, Karen Joy Fowler, Robert Frazier, Greg Frost, David Findlay, John Garrigus, Gayle Gibson, Molly Gloss, Lyn Green, Peter Halasz, Rebecca Handcock, Liz Henry, Russ Howe, Peter Hudson (who may well have gotten me started by sending me an article that got me thinking), Ethan Joella, Jim Kelly, Judith Kerman, John Kessel, Ellen Klages, Sarah Leslie, Jonathan Lethem, Jaime Levine, Kelly Link, Donald Maass, Nancy Mayer, Nathalie Mège, Farah Mendlesohn, Betsy Mitchell (who first said “yes”), Nadine Mondestin, James Morrow (O, long-suffering soul!), Kathy Morrow, Pamela Mordecai, Bruce Myer, Marie-José N’zengou-Tayo (respé!), Roland Ottewell, Kevin Quashie, Renée Raduechel, Juan Rodríguez, Kris Kathryn Rusch, Penina Sacks, Ita Sadu, Jason Schmetzer, Les Shelton, Delia Sherman, Midori Snyder, Maryvonne Ssossé, Jennifer Stevenson, Bruce Sterling, Pat York, Ryan Williams, Walter Jon Williams, Betty Wilson, Marlene Ziobrowski, the students, faculty and staff of the Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill University, the incredible knowledge bank of the folks on the listservs of fem-sf, the Writers’ Union of Canada, and the “research” and “ask-the-expert” boards of sff.net. Blessings and thanks too to the institutions that preserve history, among them: the Toronto Public Library system, with its Reference Library and its Black History/West Indian collections, and the Royal Ontario Museum. I want to particularly thank writers Joan Dayan (Haiti, History and the Gods), Ron Eglash (African Fractals), F. W. J. Hemmings (Baudelaire the Damned: A Biography), and the late Angela Carter (“The Black Venus”) for their inspiring words, and John Garrigus, whose translation of the words of Moreau de Saint-Méry ended up not being used. Much appreciation to the many lives, from the oldest ancestors to the youngest, whose stories gave me the material with which to make this story. I’ve done you justice as best I could. I beg your understanding. And, as ever, much love and respect to my mother Freda and my brother Keïta, always steadfast in their enthusiasm and encouragement.
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