Magdalen Rising (23 page)

“They are like the rivers,” he said, “the rivers flowing from Eden.”

Then he began to speak slowly, rhythmically, in a language I did not understand but which I knew from the depths of my soul, a language a little like Aramaic but rounded and liquid, tender as the speech of doves. I closed my eyes and drank in the voice of my beloved. His hand played over my breast, warm and subtle as sunlight. There are not many times in a life when you can simply weep, without your face contorting, without a sob rising in your chest. But this was one of those times for me. My tears were warm as his touch; they tasted like the sea. My vision had been true. The vision I'd had beneath Bride's breasts had come true.

His voice stopped and his hand rested on my breast. I could feel him bending over me. The light slid from behind my closed lids as his head blocked the sun, but the heat intensified. The air was on fire. I could feel his breath on my lips, and then—

Suddenly he drew back. The sun struck my face again, but all the warmth was gone. It was as if the sun had retracted its rays, turning into a bright, cold ball. Esus was speaking, muttering to himself in harsh, hurried tones. With a sickening jolt, I recognized the rhythms of Yahweh's
geasa.

I am Yahweh, your God: You must not behave as they do in Egypt where you used to live; you must not behave as they do in Canaan where I am taking you, nor must you follow their laws. I am Yahweh.

None of you will approach a woman who is closely related to you and have intercourse with her. I am Yahweh.

Could that mean me, I wondered? Then Yahweh got more specific, beginning each injunction with: “You will not have intercourse with.” Let me see if I got it all straight. You will not have intercourse with your mother, your father, your sister, aunt, granddaughter or son; or a man if you're a man; or a woman and her sister; or a woman and her daughter. (Oddly, there didn't seem to be any prohibition against a man having intercourse with his own daughter.) Oh, yes, and you must not have intercourse with any kind of animal.

“Why not?” I interrupted, remembering the snakes and some of the animal forms my father had taken in my mothers' conception tales. Besides which, I'd had enough of Yahweh and his stupid list.

I had the momentary pleasure of seeing Esus completely nonplused. But I'm afraid I undermined my own cause. My moral obtuseness put me completely beyond the pale, outside of Yahweh's jurisdiction altogether, though doubtless if Yahweh had known about me he would have added to the list: red-headed hussies from the Pretannic Isles. But he didn't know about me. I was none of his business.

“Because,” Esus continued citing Yahweh, “you would become unclean by doing so. Nor,” he added, still quoting, “will a woman offer herself to an animal to have intercourse with it. This would be a violation of nature.”

This struck me as splitting hairs, something Yahweh spent a lot of time doing.

“Is that all?” I asked.

Esus frowned and considered. Imagine having to hold all those prohibitions in your brain. It's a wonder he had any room for his own thoughts. It's a wonder his skull didn't split.

“I think so,” he said slowly.

My heart beat and breath quickened. A wave of heat washed over my body. Why would he be considering who he could and could not “have intercourse with” unless he wanted to have it with me? Yet he made no move. He sat with his face turned away from me, staring through the branches towards the straits. I sat up and moved closer to him.

“He didn't say anything about not having intercourse with girls your own age who aren't your father's wife's daughter,” I mimicked Yahweh's awkward phrasing.

He turned his gaze on me. It was so tender, my eyes welled again.

“Aren't you my sister, Maeve?”

“Is your father Manannan Mac Lir? Is your mother Grainne of the golden hair?”

He didn't answer. He just kept looking at me, his expression a disconcerting mix of sweetness and sadness.

“Why do you supposed Anu sent you here anyway?” I snapped, fighting back tears.

“Anna,” he corrected. “To learn what I could learn in the poorest quarter of Jerusalem or at the gates of any heathen temple? I don't think so.”

One day I would know both the slums of Jerusalem and heathen temples well. At the time I knew only that I had been insulted past bearing.

“Moreover, it is written—”

“Listen, Esus, I've had enough of your god and his
geasa.
Moreover, the reason all his
geasa
got written down is because they're too ridiculous to remember.”

“They are not really
geasa,”
he quibbled. “They are divine laws that the Most High gave to his chosen people through his prophet Moses, so that we should remember him and honor him in all we do.”

“Well, he didn't choose me or my people. So we don't have to obey his silly rules.
I
don't have to obey him. What's more, I don't see why anyone should. He's overbearing and bossy.
Our
gods mind their own business. Around here, gods don't have the corner on pronouncing
geasa
. Anyone can do it.”

“Anyone?” he queried. “I thought that was the prerogative of the druids. I thought that was one of the things that made the druids so powerful among the
Keltoi,
that they control all forms of sacred speech, the geis as well as the
glam dicin.”

He was certainly paying attention to his lessons at druid school, heathen or not. What he needed to learn was to pay attention to
me.

“Ha!” I said. “They'd like you to think so. They'd like us all to think so. But they ought to be more careful about the stories they make us memorize. Ever hear of Grainne and Diarmuid?”

“There's a story about your mother?”

That threw me off for a second. It was hard to connect my quiet womb mother, sweetly submitting to the good-natured bullying of her seven sister-mothers, with the willful Grainne of the story who had forced Diarmuid to become her lover.

“No. That is, I don't know. I don't think she's the same Grainne.”

“You know, Maeve,” he shook his head, “it just doesn't make any sense to me: the things you do know and the things you don't know. You know Aramaic. You claim to have seen me in an alley in Jerusalem....” Here he cleared his throat. “You also claim to have seen the Temple of Jerusalem from a bird's eye point of view. You claim to have a divine father, but you have never seen where he lives. Now you're not sure whether or not your mother is the same as a character in one of your interminable Celtic stories, which, thank the Eternal One, I've been spared from committing to memory, and which could not possibly be true anyway, judging from the ones I've heard.”

“Oh, right! And your stories are, I suppose.” I was furious. “Burning bushes that talk. Angels, which you deny are gods, interfering with
human sacrifice at the last minute. If I was your Isaac, I'd never let my father near me again. I'd rather have Manannan Mac Lir for a father any day. Let's see, what else? Oh yes, the sun standing still at Jericho. A women turning to a pillar of salt just for looking over her shoulder. Our stories couldn't possibly be more far-fetched than those.

“I know what's really eating you,” I pressed on. “In
our
stories, women get to do something besides giggle when they conceive after their blood has stopped. In our stories, women get to lay down the
geasa
from time to time. Do you know what Grainne said to Diarmuid? Do you? Well, do you!”

“Obviously, I don't.”

We were both testy. (Note: testy has the same root as testosterone.) Sexual frustration doesn't lead automatically to sublimation. It's more likely to make you very cranky.

“She said—”

Suddenly, I was on my feet. I was towering as befitted my rage. Esus wasn't about to take anything lying down, so he stood, too. We were face to face, within spitting distance.

“She said: ‘I place on you a geis of danger and destruction, 0 Diarmuid, unless you take me with you out of this house tonight before Fionn and the chiefs of Hibernia wake from their slumbers.' And I say unto you, O Esus—” I borrowed Yahweh's syntax; I was speaking Aramaic. “I say unto you that I place on you a geis of danger and destruction unless....unless you take me as your lover!”

We stared at each other, the color draining from his face and flooding mine, both of us scared out of our wits. For a long time, neither of us spoke. We just stood, breathing the
geis
-charged air.

Maybe you think I should have taken back my words, laughed, and said: Sorry, just kidding. That's because in your time the spoken word has no power, hence, your obsession with tapes and paper trails. To us the spoken word was not only real; it created reality. I could not unsay what I had said, any more than I could have closed a fissure in the earth or put back the spilled contents of a cauldron. I was appalled at the potential horror I'd invoked.

Despite clay tablets and scrolls, Esus, too, knew the power of the spoken word. His god had called the world into being with words. Esus lived by “every word that proceeded from the mouth of God.” You have to understand that to know how brave he was, and stubborn, too, when he finally answered me:

“You cannot force me with word magic, Maeve.”

Of course, now that I had tried to do just that, I knew that I did not want him to be my lover because of threats or tricks. I wanted him to want me. It was supposed to happen, our lovemaking, just happen by itself, because it was inevitable. But Esus wasn't allowing it to. Or Yahweh wasn't. So I was furious—or had been until I scared myself so badly.

“I am not one of the superstitious gentiles, like the
Keltoi,”
he added, taking refuge from fear in rank arrogance.

I was terribly relieved. Now I could be angry again.

“I am a Jew. My people have a covenant with the One True God. ‘The Lord is my protection...' ”

With protection like that, you could argue, who needs a
geis
of danger and destruction?

“Let's just leave your god out of it,” I said instead. “That's how this fight got started.”

I brightened momentarily at the idea that it was all Yahweh's fault that I'd laid a
geis
on Esus.

“Listen, Esus, I have an idea. Couldn't you just choose to, well, I mean,
choose
to love me. Then I wouldn't have forced you, and we wouldn't have to worry about danger and destruction. We could forget all about that silly old
geis.”

“But I do love you, Maeve.”

For an instant everything changed. The green air warmed to a throbbing gold, and we stood beneath the Tree of Life.

“But I can't, well, you know, be your lover now.”

“Why not?” The gold seeped away. I felt cold all over.

“Don't you see? We'd never know. We'd never be sure whether I was doing it freely or because I was afraid of the
geis.
The
geis
would always be between us.”

Here you get a glimpse of the mind, schooled by the Pharisees, that drove the Pharisees crazy. Pharisees scrutinized behavior, but Esus went after motive, the secrets of the heart, the adultery thereof. Only, whoever heard of an unadulterated heart?

I suppose I could have pointed out to Esus that since he claimed not to believe in the power of the
geis
—or anyway believed that Yahweh's power superseded it—he could not, therefore, act under its compulsion. But I lacked Pharisaic training and was, moreover, beyond reason, quite a bit beyond it. I was stunned. The gates of paradise (and I use the
Biblical imagery deliberately) had just slammed in my face. And like Eve I'd been told (more or less politely) that I was to blame. I was not capable of conjuring clever arguments on my behalf, and so I went straight to the unadulterated heart of the matter.

“You know what, Esus?” I said. “Sometimes you are really full of shit.”

Seizing the consolation prize of the last word, I turned and stalked away from the yew grove without a backward glance. If Yahweh wanted to turn me into a pillar of salt, he'd have to find another excuse.

But I hadn't gone more than thirty paces before plenty of salt came pouring from my eyes.

H
AVE YOU LOST ALL sympathy and patience with me? Are you thinking: If she's so damned sure of destiny why'd she have to go and try to force the hand of fate? Consider this. Maybe Grainne (of Grainne and Diarmuid) and I were fated to pronounce those
geasa.
The druid Cathbad prophesied over Deirdre of the Sorrows at birth, declaring that she would bring ruin on the land and disaster to her lover Naiose and his two brothers. What choice did she have?

Listen, some people are born to cause trouble. No doubt I was one of them, but so, for that matter, was Esus. Don't get me wrong. I'm not asking you to excuse me for laying a
geis
on Jesus Christ. No one told me to take Grainne as a role model. I suppose you could argue that Grainne's story is a cautionary tale—except the Celts were never big on caution, and their stories had no morals in any conventional sense.

Anyway, whether it was fated or whether I was jumping the gun, as usual, I did it. I uttered those words. Now you know about the geis. Certainly throws a curve into the story, doesn't it? (The curve is a major component of Celtic design. Look at the Celtic cross.) His life story, as told in the official canon, and elaborated over the centuries, is already a mishmash of the Hebraic tradition and the Greco-Roman. So why not add a Celtic twist? I'll leave it to you now, to dismiss the geis factor as preposterous or to incorporate it into your theology (supposing you have one). I'm just telling you the story.

For awhile, pride prevented me from so much as looking for Esus. It is not that I felt no remorse, but I was still angry and very confused, as people are when they invoke more power than they can handle. One afternoon, thick, glaring haze blotted the mountains from view. The air was uncannily still. Even when it stirred, it was so hot it brought no relief. It felt like the breath of some poor, panting animal. Everyone was on edge. I could stand it no longer. In the late afternoon, I high-tailed it to the yew grove. The air was so saturated with moisture, it couldn't absorb one drop more. My sweat streamed and spattered the ground as
if I was a walking rainstorm, or an ocean uneasily contained in human bounds.

The grove was empty of him. It was eerie standing alone among the death-life trees, and I fought off a sense of foreboding. I told myself it was just the threat of rain that kept him away. The damp, dense air brought out the midges, and they feasted fiercely. I tried to summon anger, but fear was too strong. Fear and something more: an underlying grief, the premonition of some intolerable loss. Then the wind picked up and the rain started. I ran back to Caer Leb, dodging the lightning bolts that dogged my heels.

By dusk the storm had passed. The first stars shone, bright and sharp-edged. It was impossible not to feel better. After our evening labors under the stone, I asked Nissyen if I could speak alone with him. Both he and Branwen had been eyeing me anxiously for the past few days, but I hadn't wanted to tell anyone what I had done—not even Branwen—for fear of making it more real. Now Nissyen and I left the confines of Caer Leb and walked towards the field of the two great standing stones. They are not a matched pair in size or shape; one is squatter than the other. They appear to incline towards each other as if in deep, brooding conversation. If you stand and look through them towards the caers and groves of the college, the stones echo the shapes of the mountains, the gap between them corresponding to a dip in the range. I was relieved when Nissyen stopped at a distance I judged—however absurdly and anthropomorphically—to be out of their hearing range. I did not want the stones standing in judgment on me.

“Now then, Maeve Rhuad,” said Nissyen, spreading out his cloak and settling himself cross-legged on the grass. “Tell old Nissyen all about it.”

“I wanted to ask your advice,” I began tentatively. “On a literary matter.”

“Ah, to be sure,” he said, his tone both kindly and skeptical.

“It's just this.” I took a deep breath. “Are there...well, do you know of any stories about someone removing a
geis
?”

“And why would you be wanting to know that, if I may ask?”

“I need to know, um, for a poem I'm composing. I mean, are there precedents or would I be breaking a literary convention?”

“Maeve, what have you done?”

“Please, Nissyen, just tell me.”

He obliged, pondering for a time, no doubt cross-referencing geasa in the vast library of his mind. I bit my lip and waited.

“I cannot recall any accounts of
geis
removal,” he said at last.

“But does that mean it can't be done or just that no one ever tried it, as a plot device, that is?”

“Well now, as a plot device
geis
removal would present problems,” Nissyen considered. “You don't want to set up conditions and consequences, then unmake them. The listener would rightfully feel that you're cheating. Take the geis laid on Cuchulain against eating dog meat. (Though why he'd want to I never did understand unless there were no pigs left in Hibernia.) You don't want to further point up the absurdity of a
geis
by removing it. I mean imagine someone announcing to Cuchulain: ‘It's okay. I've removed the
geis.
From now on you can eat dog meat three times a day.' ”

“But what if, say, Grainne wanted to remove the
geis
she'd laid on Diarmuid?”

“Why would she want to do that?” demanded Nissyen. “The poor girl had a hard enough time even with the
geis
getting that high-minded booby into bed. Even after they ran off together, he wouldn't lie with her for the longest time, remember. She had to taunt him and tell him how the mud that spattered her thighs was bolder than he was.”

“But then he found out that he really did love her,” I said. “And that's the whole point.”

“Is it?” queried Nissyen. “I'm not sure it's wise to assume that a story has a point, per se, Maeve. After all, Grainne and Diarmuid were still in a mess. Fionn never forgave Diarmuid his treachery,
geis
or no
geis,
and in the end Fionn tricked Diarmuid to his death.”

“So he met danger and destruction even though he honored the
geis
!”

“Well now that's difficult to say. Remember that Diarmuid broke his word to the one-eyed guardian of the magic rowan berries. He took those berries at Grainne's urging. Then there were all those
geasa
laid on him in childhood, such as never refusing a companion's request. Without all those
geasa,
Fionn never could have snared Diarmuid.

“You see, Maeve, when you're a hero,
geasa
come with the territory.” Nissyen warmed to his subject. “They're essential, really. You don't want a hero growing old, garrulous, and flatulent. That's the druid's fate, alas. A hero has to be too skilled a warrior to die in ordinary battle. He's got to have
geasa
to trip him up so that doom can befall him in a
suitably poetic and memorable fashion. That's why the geis, as a plot device, is so terribly useful—”

“But what do you think would have happened if Grainne hadn't pronounced the
geis
?” I persisted.

“Hadn't pronounced the
geis
?” Nissyen was incredulous. “Why, there would have been no story. Grainne would have married Fionn—and marriage without adultery is inherently boring, Maeve—Diarmuid would have remained a loyal member of the Fianna. And we never would have heard of either of them.”

“Oh.” I was downcast. “You mean you don't think they could have fallen in love on their own?”

I was staring out at the mountains, which looked more than ever, in the dusky sky, like a huge, black wave about to break on Mona. I felt Nissyen's scrutiny and kept my face turned away.

“This is all rather hypothetical, Maeve. Suppose you tell me about this poem you are composing. Though it is my duty to tell you that I don't think it's wise for you to be so involved in original composition when you've by no means memorized the basics. Kindly remember that we are doing
Tales of Unlikely Conceptions
and
Marvelous Births
this semester. I can't imagine why you are so obsessed with
Treacherous Elopements,
although, to stretch a point, you could argue that elopements do sometimes lead to conception and births....”

Nissyen was off and rambling again. I took a moment to consider how to describe to Nissyen my putative work-in-progress.

“In this poem I'm making,” I began, “the woman—I haven't quite decided on her name yet—pronounces the
geis
in a fit of passion.”

“Hmm. In a fit of passion or a fit of pique?”

“Don't interrupt,” I said crossly. “Then the man—”

“You haven't decided his name either, I suppose. Now why is that?”

“Then the man,” I repeated loudly, “says that he can never be her lover because he would never know if he was acting freely or under compulsion. And of course she wants him to love her freely, and she doesn't really want doom befalling him on her account. And well, as a plot device, I think doom's been done to death, don't you? I thought I'd try something a little different. Something fresh and original. Any suggestions?”

“Hmm. She's certainly gotten herself into a pickle,” Nissyen observed.

“Perhaps if I had her seeking counsel from a very wise druid, he could tell her what to do?” I prompted.

“I don't know that he could now. You see, Maeve, she's unleashed certain powers, this nameless young ninny of yours. She's set certain events in motion. That sort of thing gathers its own momentum, like a boulder rolling down hill. I must say the young man sounds unnecessarily scrupulous, but heroes often suffer from an
ideé fixé
and are notoriously inflexible. Let's see....”

“What if—” An idea had suddenly come to me. I saw myself outstripping that rolling boulder, placing myself in its path, perhaps to be crushed or to tumble down with it, but surely, surely I could change its course. “What if she took his doom, the danger and destruction and all that, what if she took it on herself?”

I could feel Nissyen frowning. It was almost dark. Star after star appeared, focused and intent.

“It seems to me,” Nissyen said, “that she is already well out of her depth. Given her inexperience and general recklessness, I would discourage her from attempting anything of the sort, even if it was within her power to do so, and it is not clear to me that it is. Offhand, I can't think of any precedent—at least not in our tradition. You might find that sort of thing among the Greeks—one person taking on another's fate.”

“But what if their fates are entwined?”

“As I remarked, she's in a mess. She's
made
a mess. I strongly advise her to leave fate alone. Remember, sometimes things have a way of righting themselves, especially when those things are young and full of sap. A wave crashes on the shore, but then it recedes. Lightning splits the oak, but, often as not, it grows around its wound. Let your headstrong young woman—and why you need to invent another one when our stories are already full of them, I don't know—let her trust to nature. Nature likes nothing better than to see young limbs entwined, never mind fates. Leave fate to the Mórrígán, bloody old bitch that she is. She's trouble enough. She doesn't need young girls meddling in her business.”

“Yes, but will it work as a plot device?” I teased, feeling much relieved. “Aren't people who mind their own business inherently boring?”

“Maeve, if I asked you to recite the
Conception of Lugh Lamfada
right now, could you do it word perfect? The truth, now.”

“No,” I admitted.

“Then as your nurse maid and academic adviser, I suggest you set aside all other concerns and give your undivided attention to your studies.
Lughnasad
is less than one change of the moon away, and you will be called upon to recite not only for your teachers but for the
Combrogos.
”