Magdalen Rising (10 page)

Perhaps sensing my distress, my foster brother begins slowly raising his hand. I can feel its heat as it nears my breast. Ah yes, this is what I want: to be cupped in that hand. Yes. But the surrounding chaos and the tension of anticipation overwhelm me. (And I am, after all, a bird. I really can't help it.) As they say in the
Song of Songs,
my bowels are moved for him. That's right, I shit on his head. Well, anyway, his yarmulke.

There is something about shit. (In this case, guano.) No one really outgrows scatological humor. Now there is no more ooh-ing and ah-ing over the descent of the dove and its possible significance as a sign. Everyone simply cracks up, even Rabbi Judah. They're all laughing, laughing at him whom my soul loves. I can feel his head growing hot, and I cannot bear it that I have humiliated him. I am mortified. I can't think what to do.

My wings think for me. Soon I am flapping (none too gracefully, I fear; I'm new at this) over the assembled who make a great show of ducking and shielding their heads. Believe me, if I had control over the matter, which clearly I do not, I would spatter as many of them as I could.

I am flying randomly about, wondering where to go when a whole flock of my kind swoops down from some high place and swallows me
in its numbers. I find myself soaring willy-nilly over the wall of colonnades. I catch a dizzying glimpse of the city sprawling on hill after hill. Then we are diving again, half falling, half floating to a garden set in the hillside that climbs to what I now know is the Temple of Jerusalem. The garden smells sweet and spicy. I hear the sound of running water as a stream spills into a pool. Amidst a white storm of wings, I hit the ground with too much momentum and turn a couple of complete somersaults before I stagger to a stop.

Someone is laughing, a woman. When the world stops reeling, I see her, looming over me, so much larger than human beings look when you are one yourself. (I am still a small bird, remember.) At first I think she's the Cailleach; the lines of her face seem so familiar. Then I see the differences: her skin is darker, her eyes almost black. She wears a black tunic and a cloak that covers her head. The only touch of color is a purple shawl draped on her shoulders. There are teeth missing from the smile she gives me. She's singled me out from the other doves feeding on crumbs around her. I wonder does she know each one and recognize me a newcomer? She beckons to me.

“Come, little dove. Come to Anna,” she croons in Aramaic. “You're all in a tremble. Don't be afraid. Come. I have matzo for you. I know all about what happened. They don't know how I watch and listen. Women are not supposed to know anything. But I know everything. Well, almost. Can I help it if Sophia herself has blessed me with wisdom? Or should I say cursed, maybe. Come, little one. Don't grieve. Not yet. There is time enough for that.”

It is such a relief to hear a woman's voice. Soon I am tottering towards her on spindly bird's legs and fluttering into her hands. She feeds me crumbs of some bread I've never tasted before, but it's just what I want. In a woman's hands, however bizarre it is to be a bird, I feel safe. Then I sense a shift in her attention. Her fingers stop stroking my breast. Her body tenses with alertness at the sound of feet running down the path.

“Yeshua!” she calls. “Yeshua ben Miriam.”

I don't know yet how unusual it is to call someone the son of his mother, how it can imply illegitimacy and be taken as an insult—even though a child must be born of a Jewish mother to belong to the tribe of Israel.

“Yeshua, stay your steps and listen to the words of Anna the Prophetess. I alone can speak the words you must hear.”

No one could disobey this voice, and he doesn't. From Anna's lap
I gaze up at my foster brother with my doves' eyes, drinking him in. From where I sit, I can't see the splat I made. I wonder if he recognizes me as the dove who shamed him before all the hairy men. Right now his attention is fixed on Anna.

“You do not know me, but I know you,” she tells him. “You don't remember when your mother came to this Temple forty days after your birth to be purified. I saw her walking across the Court of Gentiles to the Court of Women. In one arm she carried you, the tiny daystar, whose light my eyes alone could see. In the other, she carried a wicker cage with two turtledoves and two young pigeons, all she could afford as a thank offering for the male child that opened her womb. (Never scorn the birds, Yeshua. They've shed their blood for you and for many.)

“I followed behind your mother. And when Simeon the priest raised you on high, I spoke a prophecy over you. Of course, I have to admit, Simeon beat me to the punch and said his piece first, but still I had my say. Shortly after that, Simeon departed in peace, just as he said he would (though he was a good twenty years younger than I am.) So he'll never be held accountable for his utterances. The Eternal One often gives a sweeter deal to men, I've noticed. No doubt you still think life is sweeter than death. Well, maybe it is, but it doesn't do to forget the bitter herbs. That's why we make you taste them when you're young, even though you don't understand what they mean.

“Stay, Yeshua. I know—though you don't say so; Miriam's brought you up too well—that you think I'm a raving old woman who runs on at the mouth, because she's more used to talking to birds than men. (At least the birds listen.) But I'm coming to the point. No, don't even ask. I'm not going to tell you the prophecies. I've learned a thing or two since those rash days that you would do well to remember: prophecy always loses in the translation and gains in the interpretation. But gain can be as dangerous as loss. Remember that, if you remember nothing else I say. This is the voice of wisdom speaking here. Now, listen. I'm going to give you some instructions. It's up to you whether you follow them or not.

“Leave. I don't just mean the Temple. I don't just mean Jerusalem. I don't just mean Judea and Galilee. Leave all you know. Step outside your world.”

“Why would I want to do that?” My foster brother is wary. “And even if I wanted to, how could I? You call yourself a prophetess. How do I know you are not a sorceress?”

“Sorcery's beside the point. Listen. When you come back, you will see your people with new eyes. You will love them with a new love. You will find beauty in the despised; you will find secrets in the cracks between the stones.”

I watch him listening to her. He is not used to the windings of old women's speech. He resists being drawn into the labyrinth. Yet something holds him there at wisdom's gate. At the river's rise.

“The world is a big place, Yeshua. And it's small. Small as a mustard seed, small as a hazelnut.”

A hazelnut? Did they grow in this world?

“You need to know this. Trust me. Don't waste time asking questions. The questions you need to ask, you don't even know yet. But the people need those questions, the way the earth needs rain to plump the grain. Go find them. Go.”

“Go where?” he asks, reasonably enough.

“Go to Egypt. To Alexandria,” she instructs. “Your parents have friends there. Tell your mother: ‘Anna says,' and she'll help you set out. She won't like it, but liking it is not what her life is about. Her name means bitterness, sweet Yeshua. Surely you know that.

“When you get to the seaport, find the people the Greeks call the
Keltoi
. You speak Greek, don't you? Take ship with the
Keltoi.
They'll take you where you need to go. Now go with my blessing. Go!”

Suddenly she is speaking not just to him, but to me. She is tossing me into the air, and I am forced to remember my wings.

“And don't despise this shitty little dove when you meet her again, though you may not recognize her. You may not think so, but she did you a favor today by disgracing you in the Temple and driving you out to me. And someday you may need her again.”

He is looking perplexed as I balance my wings and rise into the air. Then the tense lines in his young face ease. He relents and holds out his beautiful brown hands to me.

That was my last glimpse of him in that dream or vision or whatever it was. Nothing fluttered but my heart, back in my human body in the earth shelter in the Valley between Bride's Breasts on Tir na mBan. You might think I'd be relieved not to be a bird anymore. But I didn't care who or what I was. I'd been so close, so close to his touch, I could hardly bear the loss.

D
O YOU REMEMBER WHAT I told you about the number nine? The magical three times three? The Greeks named nine muses. The Hebrews revered nine for its pleasing quality of returning to itself whenever multiplied by adding the digits in the answer: 9 x 9 = 81; 8 + 1 = 9 and so forth. Try it yourself, if you haven't already. You'll like it. As you know, there are nine hazelnut trees growing around the Well of Wisdom. As well there might be. Nine is the number of wisdom. Nine is the number of completion. Nine is the number of this chapter, the last chapter of my childhood. Soon there will once again be nine women on Tir na mBan.

I didn't know it then, but I know now: I had a great childhood. I wonder if people whose childhoods are tragic or just plain miserable know it at the time. Maybe childhood, happy or sad, is simply something you survive—if you're lucky. If you do, it survives, too, becoming an entity in itself. In a sense, you own it. You get to add the adjectives to it. But it also owns you. As Anna said of prophecy: memory gains in the interpretation. After awhile it gets a little heavy, that old battered suitcase you drag around with you. Maybe you'd like to leave it somewhere, accidentally on purpose. The bathroom of a bus station. Or perhaps you should bury it under a thorn bush like the pot of gold it is. Good or bad, it's your source material. Buried or discarded, you still take it with you. You have no choice.

The gift of my childhood, the lasting impact of being adored by eight warrior witch mothers, both imperiled me and stood me in good stead in the years to come. To put it bluntly, I exited my childhood cunt-sure of myself. Well, why shouldn't I say cunt-sure instead of cock-sure? Does assurance require a protrusion; or a proclivity for crowing at dawn, if you insist that cock in this context refers to a rooster? Did a rooster ever lay an egg? Now, there's something to brag about. As far as my mothers were concerned, I was the egg, the golden egg, the golden apple of all their eyes. I was one of the wonders of the world—though the world didn't know it yet and wasn't exactly prepared.

But we are concerned here with my preparation for the world. Early in the month of Shoots-Show, what you would call April, the Cailleach held a Commencement Day for me, never mind that she'd told me zilch about what I was commencing next. In the morning, my mothers arrived in the Valley Between Bride's Breasts. They listened gravely and without comprehension as I addressed them formally in Greek, Latin, and Aramaic. They exclaimed over the
ogham
inscription I had carved on the flat edge of one of the menhirs (single standing stones) that littered the island.

I would like to tell you that I made some profound remark on this stone, some pithy expression of the meaning of life in this cosmos. Carving in stone is not easy, so I was brief and to the point: “Maeve was here.” At least I asserted my presence in a more durable medium than spray paint.

In the afternoon, we played games and had contests of strength and skill usually reserved for our celebration of
Beltaine
—which made me wonder where I would be then. In the evening, we feasted on roast pig. Afterwards we lolled outside around the fire listening to each other's digestion and watching the stars come out. In my memory of that night, the stars look as tender as new grass, soft as the fleece of new lambs, impossibly young in an ancient sky.

“We have built the boat,” Fand spoke from the silence.

“It might even be seaworthy,” Boann added.

“What boat?” I demanded. I had been curled with my head in Grainne's lap while she stroked my hair. Now I sat up. Though our shoulders barely touched, I could feel her arm go rigid.

“Have you told her nothing?” wondered Liban.

Within the shadows of her grey cloak the Cailleach might have passed as a menhir herself. Still, all eyes turned toward her.

“I find it advisable to keep the very young firmly rooted in the present for as long as possible. Nor has the next step of Maeve's journey been entirely clear to me or to any of us. Until now. Now I believe we are agreed.”

“Or resigned,” sighed Etaine.

“Wait a minute,” I objected. “Don't I have any say in this?”

“No,” said the Cailleach without apology. “The time is coming when you will confront terrible choices. For now we will make them for you. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

I attempted to sulk, but I was bursting with excitement. Something was going to happen at last. It didn't much matter what. I knew I was going to find
him.
Anna had as good as said so.

“Maeve Rhuad, I have taught you all the tongues I know,” the Cailleach continued. “With them, you can travel across lands more vast than you can imagine. You are now equipped to talk yourself into and out of trouble in several languages. But there is more to language than talk, and more to learn than I can teach you. We are sending you to the forge of language, where you may learn to be a wordsmith. You will have a chance to become one of the
Aos Dana,
the gifted people.”

“What do you mean?” Surely I was gifted already.

“We are going to present you as a candidate for admission to the Druid College on the Isle of Mona. If you are admitted, you will begin training as a bard. If you work hard and stay the course, you will learn by heart three hundred and fifty stories, becoming a poet of the Golden Branch. That is what it means to be one of the
Aos Dana.
You give yourself to the people. Your mind becomes a treasure house, a storage chamber for stories.”

“Then I am not to be a warrior?” Despite what Queen Maeve had said about finding my own way, despite my mothers' doubts that the warrior's life was right for me, I still found it hard to comprehend that I would not grow up to be like my mothers. “I am to be a...bard?” I tried out the concept.

“If you stay the course. A bard's training, which is the first part of a druid's training, is longer and more stringent than a warrior's. But then, it's the stories of a people that give the warrior something worthy to defend. It can take twelve years to attain the Golden Branch. And to become a full-fledged druid takes almost twenty years.”

Holy shit! Do you know how long that sounds to a fourteen-year-old? Still, the idea of being a druid held some allure. In the stories I'd heard, the druids were the ones who called all the shots. They could start or stop battles. Kings and heroes had to heed them—or else!

But there was one thing that puzzled me. Just who were “the people”? The Cailleach kept repeating this phrase. Anna had used that expression, too, and my foster brother seemed to know what she meant by it. But I didn't. And I wasn't sure I wanted to give my mind to anyone for any purpose.

“Who are the people?” I asked.

“Don't you remember anything of your lessons, Maeve? The tribes spread out from the Holy Isles through Gaul, parts of Iberia, all the way to Galatia. There are many tribes, each with its own name, and each one warring with another. It's the stories and druidic law that make them a people. Where you're going, they call themselves the
Combrogos,
the companions.”

“But am I one of them?” I still wasn't satisfied. “Are we?”

“That's a matter for debate!” snorted Boann.

“Don't let's start again, sisters!” warned Liban.

“We've been arguing for months,” Dahut explained to me.

“All while trying to build that damn boat,” put it Etain. “More than one finger has gotten mashed in the process, I can tell you.”

“Enough!” The Cailleach knew the signs of my mothers warming up for an argument as well as I did. “Let me put it this way, Maeve Rhuad. If we are not precisely one of the
Combrogos,
we are, without question, one of the stories they tell themselves.”

The profundity of this remark silenced everyone for a time. I wasn't so sure I wanted to trade in being a story for memorizing another three hundred and forty-nine. But I was eager to start my journey, and I had other more pressing questions.

“Are there men on the Isle of Mona?” I ventured

“Are there!” exclaimed Fand. Then she clamped her mouth shut.

“There are,” said the Cailleach.

“Do they speak Aramaic on the Isle of Mona?”

“No, child.” The Cailleach gave me a penetrating look. “Don't you remember your geography at all? The Isle of Mona is just off the coast of Albion looking out to the Hibernian sea. The people there speak one of our languages.”

“Then I don't get it.” I threw up my hands. “Why did you teach me all those languages, if I'm going to be stuck on one of the Holy Isles for twenty years memorizing stories in a language hardly different from the one I've spoken all my life!”

“I thought it best to prepare you for any eventuality.”

That might be true. But there was more she wasn't telling me. More that everyone knew except me. I could practically smell it.

“A ship can be blown off course. I'm speaking metaphorically here. Because of course the boat that's taking you to the Isle of Mona won't be diverted.”

She didn't need to add: and that's an order. You could hear it in her tone. I looked around the circle at my mothers, who all seemed particularly intent on star-gazing. All except Grainne, who looked down the length of her arm to where our fingers just touched.

“You might end up anywhere,” the Cailleach went on. “The world is a big place, Maeve Rhuad. And small, small as a mustard seed, small as a hazelnut.”

Anna. That's what Anna had said. And Anna had said something else, too. “Take ship with the
Keltoi.”
Suddenly everything snapped into place.

“On the Isle of Mona, the people there, the
Combrogos,
are they...are they what the Greeks call the
Keltoi
?”

“Yes,” said the Cailleach.

Our eyes met across the fire. She looked straight at me, into me and beyond. Her eyes glimmered gold. Then in their depths I caught a glimpse of a dark grove of trees with leaves so thick there was no sky.

The Cailleach had not told me the Isle of Mona's other name: Ynys Dewyll, the Island of Dark Shadows.