how the sky’s doors open to your beauty,” I had sung a hymn of Isis the morning he disappeared. “Look how the goddess waits to receive you. This is death. This is the life beyond life.” In that moment, singing in her voice I had known everything I needed to know. Now I knew nothing, except that he was gone. I had been left on this side of the gates, and I didn’t know why.
“The child, of course.” Miriam answered my thoughts. “What else?”
“Would you please stay out of my head?” I said as politely as I could.
“Maybe I will,” she retorted, “when you begin to use it again.”
“What should I use it for?” I asked. “Arguing with Peter and the rest? That’s what Mary wanted me to do, but look what happened when I tried to speak at the Temple.”
“From what I heard, you weren’t using your head, you were losing it.”
“Yes, well,” I more or less conceded. “But I was trying to tell people what I knew about him, what I loved about him. What I love,” I corrected myself. “Was that wrong? I’m so confused, Ma. Mary says we must carry on his work, deliver his message, save the House of Israel, meet in his name. She says I am supposed to be a leader, but I don’t know how. I just…I just miss him. Am I failing him?”
I lay down and put my head in her lap. She wasn’t my mother; in many ways, I’m sorry to tell you, she wasn’t very maternal, not in the conventional sense. But my own eight mothers were so far away. I didn’t even know if I could find their island again. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, in this world. How ironic that my beloved might have found the Shining Isles, a place he scarcely believed in, and here I was stranded just outside his Holy City.
Ma did not cradle me or reassure me or tell me what I should do, but she did begin to hum, and the sound seemed to call to the honeybees, and stir the still air. It was Anna’s voice that answered me.
“Little dove!”
And with my dream eyes I saw her, not here in the Kedron Valley but in the valley between the mountains called Bride’s breasts, on the woman-shaped isle of Tir na mBan. She sat gazing into the well of wisdom.
“Anna, Anu!” I called her the name of the Celtic goddess. Perhaps they were the same after all. “Is he there with you? Has he sailed to the Shining Isles?”
“He who?” she said dreamily, tossing crumbs to the salmon of wisdom as she had once fed the Temple doves.
“You know,” I insisted. “Him whom my soul loves. I sought him, but I could not find him, I called, but he did not answer. I charge you, daughter of Jerusalem, if you should find my love—”
“Give the Song of Songs a rest, honey.” Anna looked at me across the worlds. “You did seek him, you did find him. Remember?”
It was true. I had spent my life doing little else from the time I first glimpsed him across the worlds in that same well.
“Well, he ran out on me again. He disappeared through the Beautiful Gates.”
“Did he now?” said Anna mildly.
“His disciples think he’s coming back. To rule the world as the Messiah—after it gets destroyed or something. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but if he’s coming back, I wish he’d hurry up.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Anna muttered.
“What?”
“I said don’t hold your breath. That’s just between you and me. The boys are being too literal minded, as usual. Remember how hard it was for them to understand a simple parable?”
“Then he’s not coming back?” I kept to my point.
“Little dove, he never left. There’s nowhere else to go. You should know that, daughter of the Shining Isles. It’s all mirrors and veils and shapeshifting. Magic wells and ways between the worlds. Now life, now death, now you see him, now you don’t.”
“Well, right now, I don’t.”
“You have to see with new eyes, love with a new love. The questions you need to ask, you don’t even know yet. But someday people will need those questions, the way earth needs rain to plump the grain.”
“You said that before. You said that to him.”
“Long ago and not so long ago,” she said in a sing-song voice. “When he was a boy and you were a dove with no control over your bowels. None.”
In the Bride’s valley where Anna sat and crooned, the light was so thick and golden. I wanted to touch it; I wanted to taste it. I wanted to feel it settling heavy on my shoulders, a mantle of warmth. I wanted to go home.
“Not yet, little dove, not yet. Your story isn’t over. Not that anyone wants to hear your story. You have to live your story before you tell it. You have to live.”
“But my story was always about us. Him and me. Finding and losing and finding each other. Standing together under the Tree of Life. I don’t know any other stories.”
“The druids wouldn’t like to hear that, lamb chop.”
I recognized Dwynwyn’s comestible form of endearment even before she appeared beside the well wearing her blood red tunic with its girdle of skulls, white hair floating on the wind, looking just as she had on the day she helped save my beloved from becoming a human sacrifice, much good it had done him in the end.
“There are many more stories. Have you forgotten about Invasions, Cattle Raids, Elopements, and Wonder Voyages?” Dwynwyn prompted, reeling off some basic bardic curricula.
“I don’t seem to recall any stories about pregnant widows who live on after their husbands have died and become gods or saviors,” I said stubbornly.
“Forgive her, Isis.”
A third voice spoke, and I found myself looking at a pair of ancient feet that seemed to have planted themselves by the well like roots, all textured, twisted, and knotted. When I looked again, the feet were young, golden as the light in the valley. I lifted my eyes till I had to close them against the brightness.
“Bride,” I murmured,” Bride.”
When I looked again, I saw the Cailleach of Tir na mBan, her knobby bare feet, peeking out from under her grey cloak, as she stood spinning with her drop spindle. My own three fates together in one place, one timelessness.
“She’s not herself,” added Anna. “She’s had some dreadful shocks.”
“So back to the story, pigeon pie,” said Dwynwyn. “Posthumous pregnancy. Not a traditional tale among the combrogos perhaps but not a bad storyline, if you can manage to keep yourself alive and your child out of danger, though danger is always good for a story, gooses the plot—”
“There’s often danger to innocents in Hebrew stories,” Anna observed. “Hiding babies in bulrushes to avoid slaughter and whatnot.”
“I’m not putting my baby in the bulrushes,” I objected.
“No,
