Magdalen Rising (20 page)

Then we are swallowed, the three of us, and everything is dark and wet, hot and slippery. Naked limbs slide and twine into intricate knots. I have no idea now who is who, where I or anyone else begins or ends. Whatever remnant of me there is, I surrender, as I surrendered in the cave between Bride's breasts to the snakes. This time the pleasure is even more intense. As I swim the churning darkness, I see the green mound again, I am the mound, and my hollowness is filled to overflowing.

All the next day the dream stayed with me, more vivid than than my surroundings. I went through the motions of the daily round, attended classes, sang over my lessons, but all the while the dream worked on me, making me restless to the point of desperation. I wanted to fly out my skin into the sheer sky. At the same time, I wanted to wallow in my senses, roll naked in heather, coat myself with hot mud. Clearly, I had to do something. When the seemingly interminable day drew near its end, and a plump moon rose, three days shy of the full, I knew I had to act now. If I could not reach Esus during the day, I resolved I would go to him at night, this night. I would creep into his hut at Caer Idris and haul him out to face me by the light of the moon and stars.

So I plotted, as I sat silent during our evening meal (something resembling haggis: various obscure animal parts ground to anonymity, and remember we had no ketchup then, or salsa). The usual repartee
went on around me, but I paid no attention, letting friendly and not-so-friendly insults pass without a retort. As soon as I'd finished eating, I wandered off in a cloud of preoccupation to sit on the embankment overlooking the mountains beyond the straits. There I watched the changing light and rising moon as impatiently as you might watch a clock.

“Is something wrong, Maeve?”

I started and turned to find Branwen sitting next to me. Her eyes were so large and liquid, I could glimpse myself in them, a salmon flash in dark pools. Branwen was not only my first friend but my closest. We slept beside each other in the hut, often snuggled together for warmth and comfort. But at the moment her concern irritated me. I didn't want anyone, even Branwen, observing me too closely.

“Nothing's wrong,” I said a little sharply.

Branwen turned her face towards the straits and kept silent. That was one thing I appreciated about Branwen. She never pushed or probed. If my mothers thought I was holding out on them, they'd hunt my secret down like a pack of ruthless bloodhounds. It was little short of a miracle that I'd kept from them my vision of Esus. They doubtless would have had the whole story out of me if I hadn't been hustled away so abruptly after being admitted to college.

But Branwen was different, I reminded myself. She'd never force a secret, and I was certain she could keep one. Did I want to tell her about Esus? I considered for a time and discovered that I was afraid, not of telling Branwen, but of exposing my life's secret, so deeply embedded in me, to the uncertainties of air.

“Shall I go away?” asked Branwen presently.

“No,” I said, putting my hand over hers. “No, please don't”

The truth was, I had almost forgotten she was there. She was one of those rare people who know how to be quiet. With Branwen, it was possible to be both solitary and companionable at the same time.

“I've got a lot on my mind,” I explained. “It's not that I don't want to tell you, it's more that I can't. Do you know how it is when you begin to make a poem? There's maybe a picture in your mind, a few lines. But you don't know how they fit together or where they're going. You can't say it to anyone yet.”

“Oh, yes,” said Branwen. Though we both still looked out at the straits, I could feel her growing animated. Poetry was her passion. She was far and away the most promising first-year student. “Yes, I call it
the dark time. It's like the seed underground or the child in the womb. If you speak a poem too soon, the light and air kill it.”

“How well you put it,” I said.

And how peaceful the kinship between us, unlike as we were. But with my twin, my Other, I sensed the potential for cataclysm. Think of tectonic plates colliding, volcanoes erupting, tidal waves rising. Forces that change landscapes, make and mar worlds.

At last the day ended. The hut was filled with the soft, surf sound of rising and falling breath. I waited until I heard Nissyen's signature rattle and wheeze, then slowly, so as not to disturb Branwen next to me, I eased out from under my blankets. Just then, I heard someone else moving about the hut. When whoever it was lifted the flap over the door, I recognized Viviane by her cloak of hair, the red faintly visible in the moonlight. I waited for a moment after she let the flap fall behind her, then I followed just in time to see her tiptoe to meet someone in the shadow of the eastern embankment. Ciaran of the blue-black hair, no doubt. I had seen them together several times since “the incident.” He did not seem to hold her brawling against her. No doubt he just thought she was high-spirited.

You have to hand it to the Celts. They appreciated savagery in a woman. Just look at the goddesses. They all have animal forms: mare, sow, crow. So why didn't I find a nice Celtic boy, with antlers sprouting from his head, who would appreciate my finer qualities? Because Esus was my destiny, damn it.

Bother Viviane. Not only did she have the effrontery to have red hair—I couldn't help feeling that she was trespassing on my territory—but she appeared to be way ahead in a game I hadn't even begun. Now she and her little friend were scrambling over the embankment, which meant I could not take the direct route to Caer Idris, without the risk of running into them.

I stood for a moment feeling peeved. Then I decided to head for the straits instead. By walking along the shore, I could find the path from the water's edge to Caer Idris. It would take me more than a mile out of my way, but the route had several advantages. Anyone who chanced to see me would not suspect my final destination. It would be that much later by the time I arrived, and that much more likely that the inhabitants of Caer Idris would be sound asleep. And since I'd be walking for
awhile along the shore, it occurred to me that I just might pick up one of those round flat stones my mothers had mentioned.

Casting one glance around the Caer to make sure no one was lurking in the shadows, I made for the southern embankment. Soon I was running barefoot as fast as I could across the fields to the shelter of the hedgerow and the woods beyond. After keeping still all day and containing the turbulent feelings the dream had churned up, movement exhilarated me. I took in lungsful of moonlit air, rich with the scent of damp night earth. As I ran through the thick woods near the straits, the sweetness of the new leaves mingled with the salt tang of the tidal marsh.

When I reached the straits, the tide was turning. I caught my breath and watched the moonlight catch the intricate patterns, swirls, webs, and crosshatch, where the conflicting currents met. After a time, I waded into the gravelly shallows and bent over feeling for stones. Almost at once my hand closed on one that was smooth and round and fit perfectly in my palm. Well pleased with myself, I turned back to the shore. And then I got one of the shocks of my life.

Standing before me was Esus.

I
T WAS A GOOD thing I was standing at the edge of the water instead of the edge of a cliff. I was thrown so off balance that I might have pitched over it. As it was, I lost my footing on the slippery rocks. Esus put out his hand and gripped my arm to steady me, a swift, spontaneous gesture. As soon as I regained my balance, he withdrew his hand, but the warmth of it lingered. It was the second time he'd touched me, the first being when he'd hauled me off Viviane, unless you count —(but who's counting? Well, okay, I am)—the time he'd almost placed his hands on my dove's breast in our dream encounter.

Now my human breasts were within inches of his chest. Neither of us moved or spoke for a time. Just looked. There was something almost resigned about his expression, as if he'd fought it but finally accepted that he had to face me. I managed not to smile. Perhaps I even scowled a little. Still, I could not help noticing that the moonlight on his face brought out a hidden tint of gold on the brown.

“Orange,” he said out of the blue.

I did not know why he said it, but it struck me that he'd been standing there searching his P-Celtic vocabulary list to come up with the word.

“Orange?” I repeated.

“Even in the moonlight, I can see the orange.”

He reached out his hand and lightly touched my hair, just barely grazed it. I might as well have been struck by lightning. That touch sent a shock from my crown right through my toes. Speaking of toes, my hand opened and I dropped the stone I'd been holding onto his foot. He bent to retrieve it and held it out to look at it in the moonlight.

“A good skipping stone,” he pronounced. “I don't know if you can skip stones on the straits with all these cross currents. May I?”

Speechlessness is not one of my afflictions, but I felt unequal to explaining the use I'd intended for this stone. I made a vague ambiguous gesture, which he took to mean: go ahead.

He moved a couple of steps away from me in order to take unobstructed aim at the straits. It was a pleasure to watch him curving his arm and body, his energy concentrated in the strong, supple movement
of his wrist. There it went: the perfect round stone, a miniature moon, spinning out over the straits, skimming the water, skipping once, twice, six times altogether before it disappeared with hardly a splash beneath the surface.

So much for contraception.

“Not too bad,” he said. “Though sometimes I've skipped a stone as much as twelve times. I always think, if only I knew how, if I could put the right spin on each step, I could walk on water.”

“You mean, they haven't taught you that yet?” I said, as if water walking was elementary—which I suppose, literally, it is.

He glanced at me curiously, as if not sure what to make of me. Then he gestured with his head, “Let's go,” and he started to walk. Awfully damn sure of himself. Instead of following—let's get one thing straight right now, I am not and never was his or anyone's follower—I stood gazing, coolly I hoped, at the moon. In a few moments, he turned around and came back.

“Will you walk with me?” he asked. “We have things to talk about.”

“All right,” I said, and I fell into step with him.

Despite or maybe because of all there was to say, neither of us spoke. The silence lengthened as we walked the shore well past the path that led to Caer Idris. The shore rose to a small cliff crowned with a grove of yews. Just at the edge of these, Esus sat down abruptly. I stumbled and landed in his lap.

Which was pretty much where I wanted to be, except that now that I was there I did not know what to do. Neither did he. So we sat, his arms tentatively around me, our faces close, but mine a little higher. I could see the top of his head, so dark and curly I couldn't help thinking of black fleece, but his hair was shinier, glinting with moonlight. Though I was scarcely breathing, I took in the scent of his hair. How to describe it? It was a concentration of sun, sea, salt and some kind of earthy sweetness. I wanted to bury my nose in it, get that scent all over my face. But I didn't move, just stared at his head as he stared past me at the mountains beyond the straits. His lap was so different from a mother's lap, no comfy layer of fat, just bone girt with muscle, ribs barely contained in skin. But I liked the hardness, the tautness, even if it was not quite comfortable.

“Um,” he said after a time, “my leg....”

I probably weighed almost as much as he did. I shifted myself from his lap and sat cross-legged next to him, my right knee and his left almost touching.

“Why did you come out tonight?” I asked.

“I couldn't sleep, so I came out to walk. Don't you think it's strange that we both chanced to be walking the shore at the same time?”

“Maybe strange, maybe not so strange,” I hinted.

When was he going to get it? Chance, destiny. What did it matter what you called it? Did the moon intend to draw the tides or did it just happen to be passing by?

“Everything looks so different in moonlight. I like to watch it on the water. Do you?”

“Yes,” I said, at a loss for more words.

He sounded like a foreigner, making polite conversation from memorized lessons, which I suppose he was, being new to P-Celtic. Still, I wondered why this conversation was not more momentous. I did not understand then how difficult it can be to close the gap between the mystical vision and the mundane, what a hell of a job it is to make anything fully incarnate. I could hardly have imagined a more romantic scene, being alone with Esus, an almost full moon beaming on a swelling tide. But fancy leaves out the pins and needles in a cramped foot; midges feasting on exposed flesh; the awkwardness of knowing someone's soul—or believing you do—but almost nothing else about him.

“When I was a child,” I found myself saying, wanting to shape the air between us into words, “I used to sneak out when the moon was full and the tide was high and wait for my father on the cliffs.”

“But why would you sneak out to see him?” Esus was puzzled. “Was he an outlaw or in some way unclean?”

“Of course not!” I said. And I remembered that though I had heard almost the entire story of Esus's people on the night of admissions, he knew nothing about my lineage, having waltzed off before it was my turn to be examined. “My father is a god.”

“I'm afraid my Celtic still isn't very good. I didn't get what you just said. I thought you said your father was a god,” he laughed.

“I did,” I assured him. Then I remembered that Esus had some bizarre notion about there being only one god. “And my father is not just any old god,” I went on. “He is Manannan Mac Lir, son of the wave, god of the sea.”

Esus was silent for a moment. I stole a glance at him. He was pondering. I knew the look: the sucked in cheek. Though I couldn't see them in profile, I knew he'd drawn his brows together so that they made a continuous line.

“When he came to the cliffs where you waited in the moonlight....”

“At high tide,” I added.

“It had to be high tide?”

“Details like that are important.”

“Well, how did he come? How did you know he was there?”

How, indeed? I had only told Esus I'd waited. He had jumped to conclusions.

“By the way,” he said, “I think your Aramaic is better than my Celtic. If you don't mind, could we speak in Aramaic? I want to understand exactly what you're saying.”

I certainly did not mind at all having his full, probing attention. So in the language of the Jews, of whom at the time I knew almost nothing, I told Esus the story of Manannan Mac Lir and his magical crane bag where he kept his treasures (to refresh your memory: the king of Caledonia's shears, the king of Lochlainn's helmet, Goibne's smithhook, the bones of Assail's swine, Manannán's own shirt, and a strip from the great whale's back). All these treasures were visible only when the moon was full and the tide, high.

Now you must remember that I was not only at druid school for the express purpose of studying the art of storytelling, I was the daughter of eight mothers who raised me on their own homespun stories. My standards of truth were quite different from Esus's and perhaps from your own. Facts were nothing in themselves. You used them or discarded them according to whether or not they served your narrative of the moment.

So I did not tell Esus that I waited until the moon set, or until I fell asleep and some mother found me and carried me home in her arms. I told him what I wanted to have happened: how my father would rise, splendid and gigantic, from the sea in his green cloak with a finely wrought circlet of gold on his head. With the help of Goibne's hook, he would scale the cliffs. Then he'd sit down, take me onto his lap, and empty his bag of the treasures, spreading them out in the moonlight for me to see.

The more I elaborated, the more I believed my own story. As I spoke, I could see the gleaming bones of the swine. I knew that Manannán's
shirt was the color of moonlight and softer than the feathers of new-hatched birds. In contrast, I could feel the bristled roughness of his cheek against mine. I could breathe the seaweed scent of him.

“Then he is just a man,” Esus interrupted, almost rudely.

“Why do you say so?” I demanded.

“Because you saw him and touched him. You said he had whiskers.”

“Well, why shouldn't a god have whiskers?” I demanded.

“God is not a man.” Esus had not yet grasped the concept of incarnation. “What I mean to say is that God does not take form. He certainly doesn't smell, and you can't sit on his lap.”

“Well, maybe
your
god can't take form—”

“I didn't say
can't.
I said
does not.
Form is too finite, too limited—”

“But your god sure has a big mouth.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, in your stories he talks all the time.”

“That's different,” argued Esus. “A voice can be, well, a voice can speak in many ways. The voice of God can speak inside your mind so that nobody else can hear it—which can be awkward at times. But these days the Most High doesn't speak as plainly as he did in the days of Moses, or even of the great prophets, like Isaiah and Jeremiah.”

“Does your god talk to you?”

Esus didn't answer for a moment.

“He does.” Esus spoke so quietly that I leaned closer. “But I'm not sure what he wants. It's hard to understand him sometimes.”

“That's the trouble with gods,” I said sympathetically, but insisting on the plural. “I guess that's why you have to study divination.”

“I am studying divination.” He sounded pensive. “I just hope I'm not breaking any commandments.”

I sensed he was speaking to himself now. I thought of the six hundred
geasa.
I could practically hear him ticking them off in his mind. But then I remembered I had concerns of my own.

“It's not fair!” I burst out. “It's not fair, the druids promoting you to ovate studies while I have to memorize endless poems about cattle raids and not even get to fight any battles the way Queen Maeve of Connacht did. The druids ought to know, your
god
ought to know: we were meant to be together, you and me. We're the same!”

Until now, except for the occasional glance, we'd mostly been looking towards the straits. I don't know who turned first but suddenly we were eye-locked. His eyes were so dark, so deep. To stare into them was like
gazing into the pool between Bride's breasts. I swear, once again, I saw the salmon leap.

“Tell me what you mean.” His voice was almost angry in its intensity.

“You
know
what I mean. This time you tell me.”

“I only know that I feel as if I know you.” The blaze went out of his eyes and voice and he looked away again. “From the moment I saw you at Llyn Cerrig Bach and you shouted to me in Aramaic. And by the way, how do you come to know Aramaic? Now that I've been here awhile I see how strange it is that you do. Lots of druids and even some of the students know Greek, but no one else knows Aramaic. Who taught you?”

“The Cailleach taught me, the same as she taught me Greek, Latin, and P-Celtic.”

“Who's the Cailleach?”

“The old wise one. A goddess, I suppose. She lives between Bride's Breasts on Tir na mBan where I come from.”

“The Land of Women?” he translated, sounding puzzled, though clearly the name did not have the same effect on him as it did on the
Combrogos.
“Only women?”

“Unless you count the male animals. You can't rely on gods for everything.”

“You were born there?”

“Yes.”

“And there are no men? Are you sure your father doesn't live there, in hiding, maybe?”

“I told you. He's the god of the sea. He has his own place.”

“So how did the Cailleach come to know Aramaic?” He abandoned the subject of my paternity once again.

“Before she came to Tir na mBan, she had a long life, full of strange adventures and places and tongues. She taught me some geography, too.”

“But why did she teach you these things?” he probed. “For what purpose?”

“What do you mean for what purpose!” I was indignant. “Haven't I already helped you by translating? If it hadn't been for me, you probably never would have gotten into college. You would have been lucky not to be a human sacrifice!”

“Jews do not believe in human sacrifice,” said Esus almost primly. “We have not practiced it since before the time of Abraham. I refuse to believe such enlightened and knowledgeable teachers as the druids would allow such barbaric practices. Even the Romans have outlawed it.”