Magdalen Rising (22 page)

I stared after him for a moment, then walked on alone. Night and its magic went out with the tide, leaving me stranded in the light of day, like a jellyfish on the rocks.

There was something I hadn't told Esus about the treasures in my father's crane bag. They form the last five ogham in the alphabet. When the moon is full and the tide is high, you can read the ogham in the waves. So really, my father did spread out his treasures on full moon nights. But I wanted more than ogham.

I wanted words made flesh.

S
O. WHAT DO YOU think should happen next? No, this isn't one of those adventures stories or CD Roms where you get to choose. I'm the storyteller here. We are apt to be adamant about that, those of us brought up in the oral tradition. As I've explained before, we couldn't write something down, then forget it, trusting to the page to preserve our knowledge. We had no back-up disks. We had only memory with all its tricks of time and change. What we forgot was forgotten. So we were strict about stories, singing them over and over, learning not with mind alone but by heart.

Not that I am telling you this story in the don't-change-one-word-or-inflection style I learned at druid school. This story is not that refined, although it's old, ancient as earth, the ground you stand on, the substance you're made of. It is also new, molten. No one has told this story quite this way before. That's because they've left
me
out, the hot lava flow that changes the shape of everything you thought was permanent, immutable.

No, I'm just asking because I'm curious. Do you picture us meeting again and again? Dating, so to speak. Going steady. People begin to recognize us as a couple. Maybe we exchange tokens of some kind. We progress from holding hands to kissing, and more. Or do you want to go on thinking of him as utterly singular, physically and psychically unable to couple? (Except with the Church, of course, his mystical bride. Only at the time, remember, the Church wasn't even a gleam in anyone's eye.) Does it upset you to think of him having something so sweet—even silly—as a high school sweetheart?

Relax. (But not too much.) Things were never so simple.

The Crows arrived on schedule, three of them: Morgaine, Morgause, and Moira. Crows tended to travel in threes. They liked that triple-headed effect. It made them more formidable and Otherworldly. All of us found it difficult to distinguish between them. Unlike my mothers, who kept their edges (and tongues) sharp, the Crows' boundaries blurred. Not that they were together every second. But when you saw a
Crow without her sisters, she looked strange and incomplete, like someone without her glasses or some essential item of dress.

Our dormitory arrangements remained unchanged. The Crows had their own hut, as far from the others as it could be within the confines of Caer Leb. The Crows added herbcraft—or what might more accurately be called psycho-botany—to our course load. I did not mind the extra work, because they were teaching the same course to the ovates, which made me feel more on a par with Esus. Their teaching methods differed from the druids. They relied less on memorization and more on trance. We learned not only to identify plants but to identify with them. The Crows believed that only by entering the plant's state of mind (or matter) could you know its properties and inclinations.

Of course, as agreed, they took charge of Women's Mysteries. The blood mysteries were in fact an extension of our herbcraft course. They had many botanical uses for our blood, and they threw lots of ceremony into the bargain. Their rites weren't as freewheeling or as much fun as finger-painting with my mothers, but they were preferable to bleeding discreetly and doing your best to pretend you weren't. To my satisfaction, the Crows had no patience with Viviane's disdain of “savagery.” Insofar as they were capable of displaying anything as human as approval or disapproval, the Crows looked upon me with favor—at least in the beginning.

The Crows also took us into custody at the full moon when our hormones rose to flood tide levels. Though there was something nun-like about the Crows, you would be mistaken if you imagine them as guardians of our chastity in any conventional sense. On our first full moon with them, the Crows took the seven of us on a seven mile hike to the sand dunes of Caernarfon Bay where the Menai Straits widen to embrace the Hibernian Sea. We walked along the shore till we came in sight of a small tidal island, a dark swell of land against the moon-bright sky and sea. I was struck at once by how the island's form resembled a woman's, not a woman lying on her back, gazing skyward as Tir na mBan did, but a woman lolling on her side, sensuous, enticing, with full curves and hidden folds. I assumed the island was our destination and skipped ahead eagerly.

“Maeve Rhuad!” a Crow called after me.

I turned and saw that our company had come to a halt. One of the Crows struck up an irresistible beat on her drum.

“But aren't we going to the island?” I asked one of them, Morgause, it may have been. It was so close to the shore, I didn't see why we couldn't have waded out.

Morgause shook her head. “That is Dwynwyn's Isle.”

“Who's Dwynwyn?” I asked.

But Morgause didn't hear me. She had begun an eerie wailing song that sounded not like a human voice but like a pipe, not the high bird cry of a bagpipe, but something low, earthy, sultry, more like an animal in heat. For you, that music, the wild, wordless songs and those rich, complex rhythms, would have conjured images of belly dancers, navels flashing with jewels, tits hung with tassels. And, indeed, the small, dark ancient peoples that settled the Holy Isles long before the Celts might have come from the Mediterranean. As if we could feel that southern heat, we shed our tunics. The Crows drummed and sang, and the seven of us circled and spiraled, hips rotating, bare feet slapping wet sand, bare breasts swinging in the breeze. Several times, as I turned round and round in the dance, I glimpsed someone in the distance dancing alone, long, white hair floating on the wind, above a black cloak and—even in the moonlight you could see it—a blood-red tunic.

That night I felt the snakes—remember the snakes?—stir and uncoil from sleep, spiraling up my spine, until my crown burst and blossomed, a fiery rose. It was like the time when the fire of the stars came into my head, only in reverse. Though we didn't talk much about our full moon ecstasies, I know I was not the only one who felt the snakes rise. At the time I had no awareness that the Crows had given us a great gift. I did not know then how rare it is for a young woman to experience sexual power as inherently her own, not just a response to some man's need. I can't claim that this knowledge saved us from grief or foolishness with men. But at some level, we always knew who and what we were.

If the Crows made any mistake, it was that they remained, despite their intimate knowledge of our hormonal cycles, inscrutable and impersonal in their bearing towards us and, indeed, towards everyone. Yes, impersonal is the word. They regarded themselves as voices of the earth, mediums of wind and water and soil. Insofar as they were able, they spoke earth's truths and pronounced earth's judgment. They had deliberately sacrificed personality. In exchange for this death, they became something other than, more than, human. They taught us to see the world from the point of view of a gooseberry bush, say, or a swamp cabbage. We understood the sentiments of the lapwing as she dived into
the air and drew her enemies' attention from her hidden nest, but we knew nothing of what the Crows thought or felt.

And so we did not go to them with our sexual or emotional quandaries or even, very often, with our minor physical complaints. It's not that they couldn't have advised us; it's just that it didn't occur to us to seek their advice in the first place. It would be far easier to talk to a tree; most rocks seemed softer and more comforting than the Crows. Their inner life was a mystery. We knew only what we could observe. For example, though they taught some classes during the day, they tended to be nocturnal creatures. You could not wander abroad at night without risking a disconcerting encounter with one or all three of them.

The Time of Brightness came and went, followed by the Time of Horses, so named because people traveled then, when the planting was done and the herds out to pasture and winter still far away. Esus and I managed no more moonlit meetings, but the late, luxuriant afternoons were ours. The Crows, at that time of day, were pretty well out of it, like the owls and the possums. Nissyen had a sweet habit of nodding off then, too. So off I'd go, trying to make up for the loss of study time by singing over my lessons in time with my running footsteps.

We met in the grove of yew trees where we'd sat that first night overlooking the straits. Yews are one of the sacred Ogham trees. Their thick, down-sweeping branches root and rise as new trees. When the inside of an old yew dies, a seedling springs to life from its decay. That's why the yew ogham carries the meaning of life and death. You still find yew groves sheltering old graveyards. Since death and sex are so deeply linked—(Think about it, you wouldn't have one without the other; and Eve as everywoman is blamed for both)—maybe it's fitting that the yews sheltered Esus and me as we teetered at the brink of death's tandem mystery.

Yes, teetered, because, for some reason that made no sense to me, Esus, the rabbi's bane, the scourge of Hebrew school, had become a serious student. When I arrived at the yews, flushed and breathless from my run, I would often find him scratching ogham in the dirt with a stick. He was fascinated by ogham, the web of meaning woven from each one. We once spent a whole afternoon debating whether or not the ogham that made up a person's name could predict destiny.

Esus was skittish about divination. Yahweh apparently didn't approve of it. The Most High had withdrawn his favor forever from King
Saul, because Saul had consulted the Witch of Endor, a well-known diviner. By then I'd garnered a working knowledge of the Hebrew Bible from listening to Esus. So I pointed out that Yahweh's own priests were in the habit of using ephods—a divining instrument consisting of twelve stones for the twelve tribes of Israel—and I demanded to know why ephods were approved by his god and other methods of divination weren't. Esus both loved it and hated it when I pointed out Yahweh's inconsistencies, which I did every chance I got. I relished the perturbed look on his face. He would pace and chew his cheek and then suddenly let forth a loud burst of laughter that was invariably followed by more argumentation on Yahweh's behalf.

Esus's theological quandaries and what you might call his spiritual identity crisis took up an inordinate amount of our time together. I have to admit that I had rivalrous feelings towards the Unpronounceable One. Not very pretty of me, you say? A good woman does not come between a man and his god. A good woman is willing to sit quietly in the back seat of the chariot (with its flaming wheels) murmuring encouragement, a demure cheerleader (please, no short skirts and thighs here, no pom poms). A bad woman is like Delilah or Eve or any other self-centered, demanding bitch who wants her man to love her more than God or Truth or the Good, or whatever abstraction he holds dearest.

So, yes. While he was pacing or sitting cross-legged examining his conscience and conducting his exhaustive (and exhausting) independent study in comparative religion, I
was
lolling on my side, displaying my hips and breasts to their best advantage—(I'd learned a few things from Viviane)—except when I became so irate that I, too, had to stand and expostulate. But I am here to tell you that categories labeled “good girl” and “bad girl” cannot contain me. And if you think you can make a clear distinction between virgin and whore, read on. You cannot cast me as a mindless slut attempting to seduce him from his lofty purpose, because, as you ought to know by now, our purposes were linked. And if his god thought otherwise, then maybe
he
was the tempter, the seducer.

Did Esus notice the feast stretched out beside him? Yes, but he didn't know what to do with it. It was like his being hungry but unable to eat pork, very like that. Then, one day, he touched my breasts—or at least the considerable portion of them that overflowed the deep V-neck I'd made in my tunic. He was sitting for once, and a silence came over him as the slanting light and the shifting breeze caused a shaft of light to spill over my breasts. In the green dusk under the yews, they shone like
twin moons. Esus reached out with one finger and lightly—so lightly—touched one of the blue-green veins that flowed over the roundness.