The Galileans: A Novel of Mary Magdalene

by Frank G. Slaughter

  Some women wore broad girdles of woven metal mesh, or fine leather chased with a filigree of gold or silver design, but Mary’s slenderness needed no such disguise. The clinging fabric of the stola fell in straight silken folds from her waist to her ankles. Over the stola went the palla, a mantle usually worn out of doors, which she would drop as she poised to begin her dance.

  There remained only to buckle on the light sandals, tying the thongs about her slender ankles, and she was ready. She scorned the cosmetics with which even young girls had begun to paint their faces, for her virginal loveliness needed no such artifice. Picking up an ivory brush from the table, she brushed her hair until it shone like molten copper. Next, she tied over her hair a white silken shawl that she planned to wear while dancing.

  Suddenly the door from the corridor opened and a girl came into the room. At the sight of Mary, she stopped short and frowned. “Who are you?” she demanded abruptly.

  The girl was older and her figure more generously curved, but it was her costume that startled Mary, for she wore a loose robe wrapped around her body with careless grace, cut from the same gossamer stuff Mary had seen hanging from the racks. Beneath this revealing garment the visitor seemed to be wearing only a small girdle of gold held in place by delicate chains of gold drawn about her hips.

  “Are you deaf?” the newcomer demanded shortly. “Or don’t you understand Greek?”

  “You startled me,” Mary said politely, finding her voice. “I am Mary of Magdala.”

  “The girl who is to dance tonight? The nomenclator told me there was a peasant girl here, but you are hardly what I expected.” She came closer and touched the palla. “Why haven’t you undressed? They will be calling for you as soon as I finish.” Without waiting for an answer, she sat down at the dressing table, elbowing Mary unceremoniously aside.

  “I am dressed already,” Mary protested as the newcomer began to paint her lips with carmine from one of the jars, laying on the scarlet dye with a small brush.

  “In that?” The other girl put down the brush. “They will laugh you out of the room. Or maybe not.” She stood up and peremptorily untied the ribbon about Mary’s waist. Skillfully she adjusted the narrow bands beneath the younger girl’s breasts and tied the ends again. When Mary looked into the mirror she saw with startled eyes that the silken fabric now clung intimately to the upper half of her body. Stooping, the other girl also set the folds of the stola artfully, creasing the fabric so that it fell in many tiny pleats from the waist in front, but clung snugly to the curves of her hips. “I was not one of the vestiplica—pleaters of togas, in case you do not know the Roman word—for nothing,” she said with some pride. “That is much better.”

  “You must be a dancer, too?” Mary said.

  “I am a slave,” the girl flung over her shoulder. “They call me Thetis.”

  “Do you dance in—in that, Thetis?”

  The slave girl stood up and smoothed the transparent fabric over her hips. “For a while. When the men are drunk enough they like to snatch at your robe while you are dancing. Look here.” She came closer so that Mary could see how the fabric was held at her shoulder and waist by tiny silver clips, fragile and easy to loosen. “One good pull and the clips open,” she explained. “The garment unwinds without tearing. This bombyx is costly; it can be woven only by experts.”

  “And you dance naked? Before men?”

  Thetis laughed. “Has no man seen you thus?”

  “Never!” Mary cried in horror. “Not even Demetrius, my foster father.”

  “Then you must be a virgin.”

  Rich color stained Mary’s cheeks. “Of course! I am only eighteen.”

  Thetis laughed harshly. “I was sold as a slave at twelve, and I gave birth at fourteen. Listen, little one,” she said earnestly. “This is an evil place. Go back to Magdala and marry some nice Jew and bear him beautiful children. Believe me, the Jews are the only decent people I ever met.”

  “But all Romans are not evil,” Mary protested.

  “All I ever knew,” Thetis said matter-of-factly. “Wait until you know what it is to be pawed by a fat man stinking of wine. Like your King Herod Antipas.” She threw up her head and listened. “That is my music.” And adjusting the golden chains about her hips with a lithe movement, she opened the door to the triclinium and shot through it. A sudden burst of sound greeted her, maudlin shouts, the crash of an overturned goblet, then the door swung shut, leaving the small room unnaturally silent.

  Mary felt a sudden, almost overpowering urge to take herself away from this place as fast as she could go. Tales of Roman orgies, heard second- or third-hand, were only juicy bits of scandal. But now she was face to face with reality; in a few moments she must go into the next room and dance before shouting, drunken men. Only the thought of the thousand sesterces that had practically been promised her kept her from running away then. She could not deprive Demetrius, she reminded herself, of the things tonight’s purse, and the others that would inevitably follow if she succeeded here, would mean to him. But she could not and would not compete with naked slave girls in sensuality, she decided firmly. Her dance must stand or fall upon sheer beauty.

  Mary went to the door leading to the triclinium and cracked it open cautiously until she could see into the room. Its size startled her; she had never seen a room for dining so large. At one end were the couches upon which the banqueters reclined, arranged around a table like the spokes of half a wheel. The other end of the room was cleared for the entertainment, and here Thetis was dancing to music played by musicians hidden in an alcove.

  The triclinium itself was beautiful, the ceiling inlaid with colored marble, the walls painted with scenes of a bacchanalia at whose frankness Mary blushed and turned her eyes away. Five couches were arranged around the marble table, from which the food had been removed now, leaving only wine goblets. Two boys moved about with wine jugs, filling the goblets as soon as they were empty.

  The procurator’s nephew, Gaius Flaccus, lay on one of the couches. Beside him was a heavy man with a weak, sensuous face whom she judged to be Pontius Pilate. The three other guests were older, and all quite obviously drunker than the host. One, a fat man with little eyes, Mary recognized as Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee.

  Gaius Flaccus, strangely enough, did not seem to be as drunk as the others. He was watching the dancer with bored eyes, occasionally sipping from the goblet in his hand. Once more Mary was struck by his beauty. Reclining there, he might have been Apollo descended from Mount Olympus to revel with the mortals. But there was something repulsive about him, too.

  Thetis was dancing to the throbbing rhythm of the music, and as she spun on the marble floor the diaphanous stuff of her costume stood out from her body like the petals of a flower. Dipping and swaying in voluptuous rhythm, she moved closer to the banqueters, then as they laughed and eagerly clutched at her dress, she leaped gracefully away, teasing them deliberately again and again. Once she came close to Gaius Flaccus, darting away as he reached negligently for the spinning hem of her costume, then moving in closer again with what was, Mary thought, deliberate intention, as if she were flirting with him, daring him to seize the hem of her garment. He grinned impudently at her, but waited until she was almost touching his hands. Then with a quick movement like the striking of an adder, he seized the filmy cloth in his fist and jerked. As Thetis had explained to Mary, the clips came loose, but the force of the jerk tore the fabric too. When Thetis darted away in mock surprise, the bombyx unwound itself from her body. Halfway across the room she posed, fingers over her eyes in pretended embarrassment, her body unclothed except for the girdle about her loins.

  A roar of laughter and a spatter of applause rose from the reclining men. Then as the music changed to a slower measure, Thetis lowered her arms and began to dance once more. Now she scarcely moved her feet. The expressive movements of the dance were li
mited almost entirely to her torso and to her arms and hands. It was the oriental dance of love, a voluptuous poem of amorous adventure, graphically portrayed by the body and arms, both repulsive and yet fascinatingly beautiful in its picture of animal passion, the age-old story of courtship, conquest, and fertility.

  The drunken revelers were beating on the table as the dance rose to its inevitable high point. “The girdle! The girdle!” they shouted. On a crash of sound, the dancer’s hands flashed down across her hips and came away bearing the fragile girdle in her fingers. She posed for an instant, then tossed the golden bauble directly at Gaius Flaccus, who alone among the men seemed not to be sodden with wine.

  The handsome tribune was forced to dodge lest the golden shell strike him in the face. But he made no attempt to catch it, and it was Herod who scrambled on the floor and came up holding it triumphantly. “I have the girdle!” he bellowed happily. “The girl is mine for tonight.” Then Thetis turned and ran from the room.

  Mary jumped back from the door to escape being bowled over as the angry slave girl stormed in. “You were looking!” she cried, panting with anger and the effort of dancing, her eyes darting fire. “Did Gaius Flaccus try to catch the girdle?”

  Mary shook her head. “It would have hit him if he had not moved.”

  “You!” The dancer turned suddenly to face Mary, feet apart and hands upon her full hips. “He refused me because of you.” In her anger Mary thought the slave girl would strike her. “You with your clinging robes and your talk of being virgin.”

  “You are wrong!” Mary protested. “I came only to dance.”

  Before Thetis could continue her tirade, a crashing chord of music came from the triclinium. In it Mary recognized the tones of the great cithara played by Hadja as the introduction to her own dance. Now that the reality of entering the banquet hall was upon her, she felt herself grow faint with fear and excitement and swayed momentarily, unable to force herself to enter the other room. Were it not for the wine of mandragora Joseph had given her, she knew that one of the fainting spells would be upon her. And right now she would have welcomed anything that freed her from the necessity of going on. Then with a strong effort of will she forced herself to be calm and put her hand to the door.

  “A thousand sesterces! A thousand sesterces!” The words rode to her upon the rhythm of the great cithara, calming her fears and giving her strength.

  “I will do this for Demetrius,” she told herself. “I must, I must.” And proudly confident, she opened the door and stepped out on the marble floor of the banquet hall to face Pontius Pilate and his guests.

  VIII

  As Mary dropped the palla, one of the Romans laughed. Remembering what Thetis had said, she stiffened and flushed with anger, but as the music took hold of her body, she tossed her head defiantly and launched herself into the dance.

  This was no dance of provocation to inflame the beast in men. With the subtle instinct of an artist, Mary had realized that she should not try to compete with the unsubtle posturing designed to stir up base emotions that formed the stock in trade of the professional dancing girls. Instead, her body was a vibrant poem in praise of the beauty of the Galilean country.

  Now she was the wind storming through the mountain defiles to roil the waters of the lake and send the fishermen scurrying for home, the roll of summer thunder, and the majestic flash of lightning heralding the storm. Again, she was the rain of Marheshvan, swelling the taut skins of the grapes and wetting the freshly-tilled soil in preparation for the falling seed from the hand of the sower, greening the grass and adding new life to the olive trees and the rich harvest of fruits and melons on the Plain of Gennesaret.

  Next the scene changed under the merry lilt of the pipes and the glad song of the strings, whose tones were better suited for such a mood than the stirring blasts of the trumpet. Her body in its silken draperies now began to tell the happiness of children playing on the rain-wet grass, reveling in its coolness after the shower, their feet almost taking wings with joy and abandonment in the caress of the sun, freed once more from the prison of the clouds. The listeners could both see and feel the things her body and the music were saying, and even in their drunkenness they could not but share some of the emotion she was portraying. Only Gaius Flaccus seemed bored, for he stirred restlessly upon his couch as if anxious for the dance to end. Herod Antipas had raised himself upon his elbow and was watching Mary intently, his eyes soft with some memory of his youth, while even Pontius Pilate lost for a while the look of bored disdain that seemed to be his usual expression.

  Now, so softly that it could hardly be noticed, the mood of the dance changed again. The sun was setting over the lake, and in the benign protection of the shadows a boy and girl, lovers, were meeting. Shyly at first, then with increasing boldness as hand reached out to hand and heart to heart, they told each other the story of their love, portrayed in ineffable beauty through the movements of the slender form upon the dance floor. The beat of their pulses rose with their newly-awakened awareness of each other; the elation of their spirits was in every graceful step, every breathtakingly lovely posture. Mary’s head was thrown back and her lips were parted, her mouth tender and soft as she portrayed without words the story of young love, its reaching out, its fears, its sweet encouragement, its tenderness, and finally its gentle surrender as the boy drew the girl into his arms and found her eager lips waiting for his own. As softly as it had begun, the music ended on that first sweet kiss, and Mary stood, lost in the mood she had created, poised like a delicate flower nourished by love itself and newly burst into bloom.

  A roar of applause broke spontaneously from the audience as she sank gracefully to the floor, bowing before the couch where the procurator lay. From the folds of his robe, Pontius Pilate drew a small pouch and tossed it to the floor beside her. From its metallic clink, Mary was sure it was filled with coins, perhaps even more than the thousand sesterces for which she had dared to come and dance. With a swift, graceful movement she picked up the purse and, running gracefully to the back of the room where she could see the musicians in the alcove, tossed it to Hadja, who caught it expertly.

  Now the Nabateans lifted their instruments again and Hadja struck his great cithara with a sweeping stroke that set every string to vibrating. It filled the room with a throbbing burst of sound, reverberating from the walls and setting the beat for the other instruments, as the cymbalist crashed his polished metal disks together and stamped the scabella upon the floor, adding their booming rhythm to the sudden rush of sound.

  This was the music of the wild desert dance Mary had performed upon the streets of Tiberias, and with a quick movement she loosened the silken shawl that covered her hair. It poured down upon her shoulders in a cascade of molten beauty against the pallor of her skin and the pure white silk of her pleated stola. Poised there, she was indeed, as Hadja had named her, the “Living Flame.”

  Then, her body swept up by the throbbing beat of the music, Mary began the whirling, stamping dance of the desert people, the wild nomads who rode on the swift winds of the sandstorms and bedded themselves under the palms wherever a patch of green marked an oasis in the broiling wasteland. The dance itself was too strenuous to last long; soon her movements were so swift that the befuddled eyes of the Romans could distinguish them no longer. At its end she posed for an instant to receive the plaudits of the diners, then disappeared through the door into the dressing room.

  Panting, all aglow with the thrill of her triumph, Mary leaned against the door. Thetis had gone, and the room was empty. Nor would she have had it otherwise, for this was a moment to be experienced alone, the heady thrill of triumph that comes to an actress after a superlative performance. Her hair was tossed every way from the strenuous movements of the dance and, seating herself at the dressing table, she began to comb it with a fine ivory comb she found there.

  Intent upon what she was doing, Mary did not rea
lize that the door into the hall had opened, until her startled eyes saw reflected in the mirror the handsome face and tall form of Gaius Flaccus.

  “Do not be afraid, little one.” The tribune smiled reassuringly. “I only came to tell you how well you danced and to bring you this.” He held out another leather purse, also swollen with coins. Without taking her eyes off him, Mary took the purse and thrust it into the pocket of her dress hanging over a chair.

  Gaius Flaccus pulled up a cushioned hassock and sat at her feet. “Your dancing was truly beautiful,” he said.

  “You are very kind.” Her smile was wary.

  “I mean it,” he protested. “You made Thetis look like a cow.”

  “Thetis is very pretty.” Mary’s eyes twinkled. “She was angry when you did not catch her girdle.”

  Gaius Flaccus shrugged. “Who would look at her when he could see real beauty? Thetis has a fine body, but no soul. You have both, and therefore are perfection in itself.” Then he smiled. “Enough of compliments. You must be hungry.”

  In the excitement of getting ready to come to Tiberias, Mary had forgotten all about eating. Now she realized that she was ravenous, but the thought of going into the room with the drunken Romans repelled her, and she drew back from the door.

  Gaius Flaccus saw the involuntary movement. “Not in there,” he assured her. “I have ordered a table set for you in a room close by.”

  “But my musicians. They will be ready to return to Magdala.”

  “They are eating now. I told them you would have supper here.”

  Mary hesitated, but there seemed no harm in staying for a few minutes, and she was very hungry.