a devil,” his mother answered with pride. “Let me tell you about the time he struck the neighbor’s boy dead. Well, he raised him again, of course…”
And she’d be off and running, her audience completely enchanted.
I was wary about telling my own stories. When I was first in Rome I had told my saga in installments every day at the whores’ bath. And when it was done, I had felt bereft, as if I had given the story away, and it was no longer mine. My sister whores had regarded it as no more than a romantic tale, and they all believed it was over, that I would never find my beloved again. Yet against all odds I had found him, and my friends who had sighed (or in some cases scoffed) as I held forth in the bath had danced at our wedding. And the story had gone on to its strange end—if it was an end. I was still here, and though I missed him, he was still with me.
One night I lay awake and prayed for him to come to me in that way that was so close, so intimate—so bodily and disembodied at once.
What do I do with our story, cariad? Do I hold it inside? Do I give it away? Do I tell it now? Do I wait?
I felt his warmth inside me, surrounding me, dark and absorbent as earth, loam to soak up the tears I couldn’t hold back, but no answer came, at least not then, or if it did, I had already drifted into deep sleep.
The next day I went to fetch water at a nearby well, and Tomas was trailing me as he often did. His nickname had been the twin or the shadow, because he had stayed so close to Jesus. When Jesus wasn’t available, he had attached himself to me. He was the only one of the Twelve who had been unabashedly happy when I came back to Jerusalem. Lately Tomas had taken to repeating obscure sayings of Jesus that no one else remembered. He would utter them spontaneously, without context, and it wasn’t clear if he understood what he was saying. The words would just pop out in a singsong voice, beginning always with, Master said. No one paid very much attention to him, and some of the other disciples occasionally tried to shush him.
As I balanced the water jug on my head and started back to the house, I wasn’t listening either; the words he repeated over and over came through as background noise, like the sound of our feet on the paving stone or the cries of the street vendors. Just before we got back to the house, Tomas grabbed my sleeve, and the water jug I’d been balancing on my head nearly tumbled off. As it was, some of the water spilled and sluiced down my neck.
“Tomas!” I protested.
But he kept hold of my sleeve.
“Master says,” he brought his face close to mine, our noses almost touching “bring forth what is within you, and it will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you.”
“Of course, I’m going to bring it forth,” I said, thinking of our child.
“Master says.” Tomas sighed with relief, as if unburdened, and then he loped away, leaving me in peace for a few moments.
Later that day, a number of women approached me as I stood struggling with the drop spindle. (I had been assigned only household chores, and had been excused, or excluded from, all public ministries—supposedly because of my delicate condition). One of the women gently took over the spindle from me.
“Will you tell us about the master?” she asked.
“How did you meet him?” another prompted.
“Is it true you were possessed by seven demons?”
“Was it love at first sight?”
Bring forth what is within you, I heard the words again, this time in my beloved’s voice, and it will save you.
“Actually,” I said, sitting down and leaning back against the wall, “It was love at second sight.”
And I told them about glimpsing my beloved in the Well of Wisdom on Tir na mBan. The next afternoon, a larger group had gathered, and so it went, each day more people coming, mostly the women from the community, but a few outsiders also, including some street whores I knew from my days of backsliding. The storytelling became an unofficial daily event—unofficial, because none of the apostles knew about it; they were too busy exorcising and evangelizing, ducking and courting trouble with the Temple officials. One day I went on longer than usual. I had gotten to the part where Jesus, then called Esus, was chosen, or pre-selected by a rigged lot, to be a druid sacrifice. My listeners would not let me stop there, so I kept on with how we had managed his escape (by her magic, I had traded shapes with the old witch Dwynwyn and infiltrated the druid rites). Then came the moment when we had to part. I was nine months pregnant and could never have managed the dash by horseback across the Menai Straits into the mountains.
“But he would never have left you!” protested one of my listeners.
“No, he didn’t want to go. In the end, I forced him. He cried out,
“‘Maeve, we are lovers.’
“‘You are lovers,’” Dwynwyn said. “‘But not just of each other. You are the lovers of the world.’
‘We can’t love if we’re apart,’ he said to me.
‘We can’t love unless we part,’ I told him, and then I called on his god, ‘Yeshua Ben Miriam in the name of the unnamable one, the god of your forefathers, the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I command you to go.”
Oh,” one woman wept. “Oh. He had to go then. He had no choice, poor lamb.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “He had to go. And it was many years before either of us understood what Dwynwyn said to us about being the lovers of the world. I still don’t know if I understand.”
“Well, I do,” spoke up one of the seediest looking whores; I’d seen many women like her during my career, past their youth but still on the street, bad skin covered over with make-up, and my healer’s sense told me she might be sick as well. I wondered if she’d let me have a look at her later. “I understand. It means he’s our lover, too. He’s the lover, you know, the one we dream about, that one who looks at you and doesn’t see what everyone else sees. He knows you from the inside.”
“Oh, come on, Gert, they all know you from the inside,” snorted her friend.
We were so intent on the story that we hadn’t paid attention to the evening shadows falling across the courtyard, nor did we notice the men coming home and standing in the gloaming at the edge of our circle.
“I’m not talking about the inside of a cunt, you old cunt, and you know it. I’m…I’m talking about…what am I talking about?” she appealed to me.
“I don’t know if I can say any better than you just did,” I said. “That Jesus is the lover, who knows us from the inside out—and isn’t that what lovemaking is? I mean, really? You can talk about god as a father or a lord or a goddess as mother or a queen. You can call your god the maker of all things or the ruler or the judge. What if god is also our lover, our secret, passionate lover? What if that’s who Jesus is, who the Christ is—now that he has suffered the god-making death? And if he is our lover, then we—”
“That is enough.”
We all startled and looked up to see Peter, James, Matthew, John, Mary B, and others standing over us.
“Mary of Magdala, you are not authorized
