surrounded her, came to perch on me. “Always so impulsive. Well, since you’re here, little one, prophesy. You might not get another chance.”
“The Kingdom of Heaven,” I began, “is at hand.” And I stretched out my hands. “My hands, your hands, our hands. The Kingdom of Heaven is small, small enough to hold in your hand, small as a mustard seed whose blooms spread over the hills making a home for the birds, small as a hazelnut with all the wisdom of the world held within, and it is also huge as the sea that flowed from my beloved’s side. If you want to see the Kingdom of Heaven, just turn, turn and look. That’s what repent means, turn, like a flock of birds on the air, like the tides….”
“The woman is raving!” someone shouted.
The crowd, agape at first at the sheer spectacle of a gentile woman daring to preach, exploded all at once. John and Andrew rushed to Peter’s side, shouting.
“Stand back, make way. The woman is demon-possessed. Don’t worry. We have the authority to exorcise her.”
Peter caught on then and advanced on me:
“In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to come out of her!”
The crowd was completely out of control by now, first a cripple rising up to walk and now an exorcism. But the excitement wasn’t over yet.
“You will disperse at once!” A loud voice barked a command. “Or be arrested!”
The Temple guard had arrived. At that point I did the only sensible thing a woman in my delicate condition (not to mention my dicey circumstances) could do:
I fainted dead away.
When I came to myself again, I was lying on a pallet in the upper room. Or so I assumed; the shutters were closed, and it was dark. The air should have been stuffy, but a breeze stirred now and then, scented with roses and garlic, and now and then a whiff of water and fish. There was a drone in the air that made me think of bees. For a moment, I didn’t remember how I had come to be lying there, and then it all came back. I had caused a near riot in the Temple, and Peter had tried to exorcise me.
In the Name of Jesus Christ, I command you to come out of her.
In the protective gesture of pregnant women everywhere, I put my hands over my belly. I felt no cramping, but just to be sure, I reached between my legs to check for bleeding.
“Mary of Magdala.” The breeze lifted and the scent of roses grew stronger. “Your baby is unharmed.”
Miriam of Nazareth, mother of Jesus, was sitting with me in the dark room.
“And your secret is safe,” she added. “For now.”
CHAPTER TWO
MY THREE FATES
“FOR NOW” WERE THE operative words. People say there is no such thing as being “a little bit pregnant,” but I say you are a “little bit pregnant” when the changes in your body don’t yet show, at least not to the casual eye, which my mother-in-law’s wasn’t. “For now” everyone concluded I had come unhinged by recent events (that was the charitable alternative theory to demonic possession) and they all agreed I needed a rest, which is another way of saying I was put under house arrest.
“For now” I didn’t much mind when the disciples packed me off to Bethany and put me in Martha and Lazarus’s custody; I had always liked their house and land, how ample and well-tended everything was without being luxurious or ostentatious.
You never hear much about Lazarus after he came forth so dramatically from the tomb. I can tell you he did not at all enjoy the notoriety that attends being brought back from the dead. Here is another unknown part of that story: I was the one who waited with Lazarus all those days in the place between life and death, a pebbled shoal in the great river, and I can tell you he would just as soon have crossed the river to join his ancestors, but he could not refuse his friend Jesus. It is my belief that Lazarus is the original for all the merciful fathers and vineyard owners in my beloved’s parables. And being called forth from the grave was just one more thing Lazarus had to forgive Jesus.
At least Lazarus’s life was sweetened now by Susanna, the Samaritan woman of the many “husbands” who quite frankly stalked Jesus after their encounter at the well. I tried to unload her at Temple Magdalen (where her talents could have been put to use) when she flummoxed me by announcing that she had decided to become my follower instead of his. Having or being a follower is not something I’ve ever cared for. So I was pleased that Susanna had left me, so to speak, for Lazarus. He married her quietly, in the wake all of the recent drama, so quietly most of the disciples politely pretended not to notice. (I have never fully understood the hatred between Jews and Samaritans; they worship the same bloody awful One God, but I gather that’s the problem. A case of collective sibling rivalry.)
Jesus loved Lazarus, not because he was a disciple or, as some people speculate, an initiate into Jesus’s esoteric mystery cult, but because he was a refuge. He didn’t talk much and preferred the company of plants and animals to human society, though he reluctantly performed his inherited service as a temple priest when his term came round. I felt that sense of sanctuary in Bethany, too. It is true that Martha never liked me, but her pride in her own hospitality kept her civil, and I had never taken her animosity personally. Who could blame her? And I suppose I gave her some comfort by taking her younger sister’s place as a source of irritation and bafflement. Mary B remained in the thick of things in Jerusalem, while Miriam, who drove Martha crazy for different reasons, retreated to Bethany with me.
All things considered, the odd household got on well enough. I settled in peacefully, doing whatever small tasks Martha gave me to keep me out of the way. (My chief duty was to remove Miriam if she went into a trance, as she was apt to do, in the middle of the kitchen or anywhere Martha was trying to work.) If you’ve ever been pregnant, you may recall the dreamy inward pull of the first three months. I gave myself over to that placid bovine state, eating and sleeping, staring into space, ambling slowly if I had to go anywhere, managing not to think about much at all.
Then, abruptly, this respite came to an end. One afternoon, shooed away by Martha, Ma and I took a walk, a little farther than usual. It was hard to say who was leading whom, but eventually I saw that we were heading to the olive grove that overlooked the Kedron Valley, the place Mary B had taken me the first night we met, demanding that I prophesy as the sun rose and turned to gold the Beautiful Gates of the Temple. Below us in the valley was the fig tree he had blasted in those fierce, desperate days of preaching and prophesying, the fig tree I had restored. The spring that had sprung into being that day still welled up, dark and cool, by the tree.
It was too hot to walk down into the valley today, so Ma and I headed for the shade of an ancient olive tree, and I recognized it as the same one we’d sat under a year ago, just before my beloved’s infamous ride into Jerusalem on a donkey (in fulfillment of the scriptures, a phrase I was coming to detest). Before he upended the moneychanger’s tables and started a riot. Before the beginning of the end. That was the day I had found out that Anna the Prophetess, Miriam’s old friend and rival, was dead—though as Ma had put it, even death couldn’t shut Anna up. On that day, Ma had been the one to prophesy: “The Messiah will enter Jerusalem through the Beautiful Gates.”
As Miriam and I sat down, each of us finding a place to nestle in the lap of roots, I closed my eyes. I found I did not want to gaze across the valley toward those Beautiful (Terrible) Gates. On the day that he left us, ascended if you must, I had watched Jesus walk through them—but not into Jerusalem, though his
