Magdalen Rising (16 page)

“T
HESE ARE THE NAMES of the Israelites who went with Jacob to Egypt, each of them with his family: Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Judah, Issachar, Zebulon and Benjamin, Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher. In all, the descendants of Jacob numbered seventy people. Joseph was in Egypt already. Then Joseph died, and his brothers, and all that generation. But the Israelites were fruitful and prolific; they became so numerous and powerful that eventually the whole land was full of them.”

Esus paused and I translated, somewhat haltingly at first. As you doubtless recognize, he'd picked up the story at the beginning of Exodus. None of us had any context. On the other hand, in those days we had much longer attention spans and much higher tolerance for long, detailed narratives full of hard-to-remember names and complicated relationships.

“Now there came to power in Egypt a new king, who had never heard of Joseph.” (Never mind that we hadn't either.) “ ‘Look,' he said to his people, ‘the Israelites are now stronger than we are. We must take precautions to stop them from increasing any further, or if war should break out, they might join the ranks of our enemies. They might take arms against us and flee the country.' Accordingly, they put taskmasters over the Israelites to wear them down by forced labor.”

He paused again. Soon we established a rhythm. As I grew more accustomed to his narrative style, my translations became fluid, almost seamless. Have you ever translated for someone? If you have, you know it creates an intimacy. The speaker is trusting you with his words, his meaning. You take those words inside yourself, your own mind. Then they are reborn from your lungs and throat, rolled about on your tongue, issued from your lips. What could be sexier? He poured Aramaic into me and out of me flowed P-Celtic, though, sensitive to nuance, for songs and poetry, I shifted to Q.

When you imagine this feat of storytelling and translation, don't just think of the linguistics. Remember, words are not just things-in-themselves, though they are that, too, each one a story. Words are magic. An
invisible power. With his words a whole world passed through me and shimmered in the air of the druid isle. Picture them, these forest dwellers, leaning against each other for warmth as they listen. Soon they forget the chill of the grove. They can feel the harshness of Egyptian noon, the dry dust coating their skins, parching their throats. They suffer with the Israelites the pain and indignity of the lash.

And in this exotic tale of a faraway place, the
Combrogos
also hear their own favorite stories: the life-giving waters of the sacred river, the divine child borne there. Though the narrative omits the details of his training, Moses is clearly a druid, with his snake staff, his conversation with the burning bush, his power to command the elements. We are past worrying about Esus's lineage now. We want to know what happens next.

I must admit some things may have been lost—or altered—in translation. Neither I nor any of the listeners grasped the gulf between Moses and the Great I-Am. We had no concept of monotheism. Clearly Yahweh was an elemental force that Moses mediated. We didn't worry too much about Yahweh‘s—or anyone else's—motivation. It was enough that wonders were occurring. Rivers turning to blood, day to night, plagues of frogs and locusts all held plenty of interest. The parting of the Red Sea was more of the right stuff. But the subsequent drowning of the Egyptians in their chariots caused a bit of consternation. Chariots were a key feature in Celtic battle, and audience identification suddenly swung from the fleeing Hebrews to their pursuers.

“What does it matter if they escaped?” The same man who'd objected before piped up again. “They were slaves. And did they buy their freedom with gold? Did they fight like honest warriors?”

“Second warning!” noted the grey-bearded druid. Then he turned to Esus. “Well? Is there more? How many generations between these escaped slaves and yours?”

“Quite a few.” Now Esus began counting on his fingers.

“More than nine?”

“About thirty-six, I would say.”

“Oy gevult!” The druid threw up his hands.

(No, he didn't suddenly break into Yiddish, but that is the best translation I can render.)

The druids, to put it bluntly, were floored. Maybe for the first time in their professional lives, they did not know what to do. Standard operating procedure was stalled, and they had a grove full of candidates yet
to examine. Still, they were curious and impressed. The foreigner appeared to have a tribal memory that stretched back—according to some swift mathematical calculations—at least 2,000 years, far longer than the
Combrogos
had been in the Holy Isles. The stranger's memory was as old as the hills where the
Sidhe
dwelled.

“Look here, Esus ab Joseph, these subsequent generations, were they all freeborn?”

“Well, that's a long story.”

“Why don't you just ask him about the last nine, for the love of Don. We haven't got all night!” shouted the same man.

“That's three!”

At a nod from the druids two armed guards—bouncers, you might call them—advanced on the outspoken man.

“Hey, no fair,” he protested. “That wasn't heckling. That was just a suggestion.”

“When we want suggestions, we'll ask for them,” snapped the druid. “You were warned.”

“Hey, leave off!” The man struggled to get at his sword, but his neighbors grabbed him and held him fast, while the two warriors sliced his cloak off at the waist. A standard penalty, I later learned. Druid crowd control, and perhaps (though I know I'm on shaky linguistic and historic ground) the origin of the word embare-ass-ment. In any case, that was the effect, literally and figuratively.

“Remove him from the grove,” ordered the druid.

“Hear me, you druids,” the man shouted, putting up an impressive resistance. “I have as much right to be here as anyone. I've paid the penalty. My best
sago
ruined and the ground hard and cold beneath my bare ass. But no way am I leaving until the proceedings are over. It's my right, I tell you. And besides, I want to hear the rest of the story.”

At that the tension broke. Laughter rose and roared like surf. Even the druids laughed, including, to my obscure relief, Foxface. Maybe it would be all right, I thought vaguely, not at all sure what I meant.

“Well, then,” said the Greybeard, “it seems we do have all night, if need be. Make yourselves comfortable. If anyone has a flagon of wine, let him be free with it. And whoever has an oaten cake, let him share it with his neighbor.”

“Now.” The druid once more turned to Esus. “Tell on. But—er—leave out the boring bits.”

Now you all know how interminably long the Hebrew Bible is. In writing down what began as an oral tradition, people have tried to make some order of it by dividing it into various sections and genres: the Torah (and we were only halfway through that!) the historical books, the wisdom books, the prophets frothing at the mouth for pages and pages with scarcely a pause for breath. A wintering bard could have plucked tales from the Hebrew store of stories every night from
Samhain
to
Beltaine
and still have plenty left over for next season.

I didn't know that then. But I did know that his confidence, so crucial to his success, not to mention his survival, was wavering.

“What's the problem?” I whispered in Aramaic.

“There are so many stories.” He held out his hands helplessly, as if rushing cataracts of words tumbled willy-nilly through his fingers. He didn't know how to contain them, how to fashion a vessel that could hold a manageable portion.

“Just pick a few of the most exciting ones. Did your people have any cattle wars?”

“But I can't separate one story from the others. It would be like separating one thread from a garment. All the stories are one story. Just as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is one God.”

I stared into those deep brown eyes, hoping for a salmon-flash of illumination. I didn't have a clue as to what he was talking about. Sure, there were stories of gods, lots of them. Our gods literally littered the landscape, inhabiting trees, rivers, wells. You could hardly take a step without tripping over one of them. And if there were lots of gods, there were even more stories. But there was no time for literary or theological debate. The crowd was getting restless. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a flurry of frantic nose ogham.

“All right,” I said, “so there's one story. Listen, don't think of each story as a separate thread. Think of each story as containing all the rest, the way each piece of an oaten cake contains all the ingredients.”

Light dawned, as they say, in those dark eyes. I had obviously said something very profound. I pressed my advantage.

“And remember, what they care about most right now is your lineage, that you come of freeborn people, nine generations. They're the ones that count. You understand that much, don't you?”

“But what is freedom? Is it only a matter of whether we labor for ourselves or for another?”

Perhaps you begin to understand why the elders in the Temple were so exasperated with him. He couldn't take anything at face value, couldn't let conventional wisdom go unchallenged.

“Esus.”

(It was the first time I had spoken his name. It was sweet in my mouth. Have you ever noticed that? How your mouth loves to say your beloved's name? How even the most ordinary names—Sam or Susie—become ambrosia when you love? But I didn't have time to savor those syllables now.)

“Esus, stop thinking and start talking. Fast. If there's another slavery part, tell about that.”

“I can't just start there. I have to say something about what led up to it.”

“Okay, but make it snappy.”

He's right, of course. You can't understand Jewish history without knowing something about Mosaic Law. Or rather you can't understand how the people understood their story: their sacred (and often onerous) covenant with an invisible, rule-making god, whose name could not be pronounced, who mooned Moses but would not show his face.

One thing was certain: if he was invisible most of time, he certainly wasn't inaudible. In fact, you could say he was a compulsive talker. Not one detail of his people's lives had escaped his attention—or comment. As Esus's self-appointed editor, I did not let him get that deeply into Leviticus. Most of what I learned about the Law I learned later from Esus and from the years I spent living among the Jews. To the listeners in the oak grove on Mona, the distinction between things clean and unclean was an alien concept, prohibitions against eating pig positively incomprehensible. Also Yahweh seemed to have something against the
Combrogos,
since he not only forbade worship under spreading trees or among sacred stones but ordered his people to destroy such places.

Esus didn't go into fine detail, but I got the gist. If Yahweh had punishing powers as advertised, Esus was in trouble, but at the moment, it wasn't Yahweh that worried me on his behalf, it was the druids. I signaled to Esus: Enough already! Then I translated simply:

“The Hebrew god laid a whole lot of
geasa
on the people.”

A geis, you may remember, is a cross between a taboo and a curse. “I lay upon you a
geis
of death and destruction, if you....” Fill in the blank. I admit my translation was not exact, since a geis was generally laid on one person. That a god should lay upwards of six hundred
geasa
on a whole people required a great stretch of the imagination, but the audience seemed capable of it. As a consequence of breaking
geasa,
the Babylonian captivity made sense.

Way before we got to Babylon, Esus told the story of David. Here was a hero after a Celt's heart: a boy-wonder who starts his career by killing a giant, and goes on to become not only a warrior King but a legendary lover and a bard to boot. Esus obliged with a few of David's compositions. The audience was won over, not to Yahweh, who remained incomprehensible, but to a heroic people and their dramatic reversals of fortune. When Esus finally told the story of the fall of Jerusalem and raised his voice in lamentation: “How deserted she sits, the city once thronged with people!” there was not a dry eye in the house (at least of the eyes that were still open).

There are some great stories from the Babylonian exile—Esther's, Daniel's—but it was getting on for midnight. Despite Esus's gift for narrative—and my sensitive, not to mention poetic, translations—there were a few snores floating on the still air of the Grove. Boann had her head in my lap. The grey-bearded druid, who should have had more self-control, was nodding. Just before he keeled over, he jerked awake. After taking a moment to focus, he asked yet again:

“How many more generations?”

“Fourteen,” Esus answered, certain this time. “From the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem to my birth.”

“So your people did return from exile?”

“Yes.” Esus was speaking Celtic now. “When King Cyrus of Persia captured Babylon, he set my people free, because he knew it was our God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who had given him his victory.”

“So, from that time forward, your forebears were all free?”

“Well—”

“I know, I know,” said the druid. “It's a long story. Listen, you're coming down to the wire. That is, the last nine generations. Are you or are you not the son of slaves?”

“To serve the living God, that is freedom.”

“You must answer the question.”