Magdalen Rising (33 page)

“Maeve! Maeve Rhuad. It's me, Yeshua. Esus.” Even in the dark, I could hear him grinning. “Got you back!”

Now you may have missed the reference to the alley in Jerusalem, but I did not. I tried to halt my flow, but I couldn't. So I let go completely and started to laugh. I laughed and laughed. Yes, hysterically. And pretty soon I was sobbing, standing there with my feet rooted on either side of the trench, the night wind drying my crotch. I might have howled, alerting the night watch and everyone in Caer Leb to my hysterics, except that Esus got to me first, braving the stench (and uncleanness!) of the trenches and pulling me to him, so that my cries were muffled in his neck. I wept and wept into that warm, pulsing place. One of his hands cupped my head and the other circled beneath my arm and held the small of my back, pressing me close.

At first my own sobs shook me so violently that I was aware of nothing other than his containing me. As I began to quiet, I noticed the heat in his hands, heat that was paradoxically cool and soothing. It was as if the softness of starlit mist flowed from his fingers into my veins, and the stars themselves with their own burning cold, sparks of it, like the
bubbles in certain waters or wines when they burst in the back of your throat. As the cooling fire spread through my body, I let go and leaned my whole weight against Esus as if he were all of my mothers rolled into one.

After a time, Esus took my hand and led me away from the trenches to the embankment. On the way, we passed the night watch snoring peacefully.

“He'll wake up if any real danger threatens,” Esus assured me, and I understood that the scourge of Hebrew school had struck again.

We sat down close together, looking towards the straits. The mountains looked like a wave rising against the stars, a black wave forever about to break. I was glad the moon had already set.

“Maeve, tell me what has hurt you.”

Instead of answering him—I didn't know the answer—I tried to think why this conversation sounded so familiar. It was the same as trying to recall a word or name that you know you know, but it just won't come. At first you strain after it, frantically. Finally, you give up, let your mind meander. Minutes or hours later, you'll spy the word bobbing along, right on the surface.

“Oh, Maeve.”

His voice was so sorrowful. I shut my eyes tight against tears, and behind my lids I saw the green light under the yews. I remembered the feel of Esus's hard skull under his springy hair, the fire of the stars pouring through my fingers. That time it was me saying: are you hurt? It was not that long ago, but that moment, indeed my whole life, seemed separated from me, left behind on the other side of some huge divide. No toss of a caber could bridge that chasm.

“I tried.” I began to speak, not sure of what was coming next. “I tried to be there at Bryn Celli Ddu. I wanted to meet you on the third morning.”

I stopped myself, feeling confused. Had the horrible dream been about going to Bryn Celli Ddu? I couldn't remember. It still wouldn't come clear.

“Viviane got sick. I had to help her.”

My words felt heavy and furred, as if I were talking in my sleep. Maybe this was another dream, Esus being here with me. Well, if it was a dream, I would make the most of it. I leaned closer to him and breathed the scent of him, spices from another world still clung to his hair, mixing with peat smoke and salt, wet leaves.

“Then the Crows made me rest. I wanted to be there—”

“But you
were
there.”

What did he mean? What did he mean? I broke into a sudden sweat, and a wave of nausea hit me.

“Somehow you were there with me, at least part of the time, inside the mound. I saw terrible things, Maeve.”

I held my breath, as if that could stop everything. His words. The scream in my throat.

“You weren't there the whole time, but when it was so bad, I thought I would lose my mind, you came to me. Then, ” he paused, “then it was as if we changed places. I was you. You were me. I can't think of any other way to say it. I can't help wondering if that's what hurt you so badly.”

I didn't answer. I was remembering that first dream, the first night. If that dream were true, then how could it be that we were nothing to each other?

“I'm ashamed,” he said. “Ashamed that you took the pain for me.”

“Why shouldn't I?” I blurted out. “I'm the one who placed you under a geis.”

“ No, Maeve.” He put his hand on my arm. “The pain wasn't because of the
geis.
Or if it was, then the geis had to be pronounced. What I saw when I was inside the mound, what I saw is my life, what I'm meant to do.” It

“Tell me, Esus.”

“I can't. I don't understand it yet. But you saw, too, didn't you? You were there. At the end.”

The blasted tree. The cracked lips. The dissolving bones.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”I started to weep again.

“Is that what hurt you?” His voice was tight, almost angry. “Tell me, Maeve. I have to know what I've done to you, what I'll do.”

I wanted to believe it was only that. Then everything would be clear, simple. I would die for him. Any time. Simple. But I had been called back into myself. I remembered that. I could still hear my own voice calling to him: Come back! Come back! But I hadn't been there on the third morning at Bryn Celli Ddu. I had failed. It wasn't just the Crows keeping me away. I remembered now. They had all gone away, and the old Crow had gone off in a flap. And then? And then? I saw myself walking beside the stream. An owl screeched and fanned my face with its wing. And then? Some huge chunk of that night was still missing. Without it, nothing cohered. The night lay in jagged shards.

“I don't know,” I whispered. “I don't know.”

“What don't you know?”

“I don't know what happened. I don't know what hurt me. I only know that you are good, and if anything bad happens to you, it's my fault. I thought I was like you. I thought we were the same.” The words rushed on a torrent of tears. “You told me it wasn't true, but I didn't want to believe you. Now I know I was wrong. I saw my other face, and it was ugly, ugly, ugly!”

I covered my eyes with my hands, but I couldn't shut it out: the bird mask being ripped off, the naked hatred underneath.

It hadn't been a dream.

“Ssh, ssh.” Esus put his arms around me, cradling me, murmuring the liquid, dove syllables of Hebrew.

When my sobs subsided, he stood up. For one sickening moment, I thought he was going to walk away. Instead, he took his cloak and spread it out. With gesture and touch, he guided me to lie down. Though he was gentle, my body cringed, remembering in every bone and muscle a harsher meeting with the ground. I lay rigid, staring at the sharp stars. Esus knelt so that my head was between his knees, then he placed his hands on my crown. The heat that came through his hands before had come spontaneously. Now he was deliberately opening himself to the fire—and opening me.

I closed my eyes and watched blue flame race through my every vein and capillary. I saw tight swirls and whorls of knotted muscle loosen. Light played on the sinews as if they were fluid as moving water. My bones glowed—not like the moon but like molten rock. I was that close to melting, and I didn't care. Let me be hot earth in his hands, let him make me like his god made dirt into a man.

Then he lifted his hands from my head and moving to my side began to make his way down the length of my body, touching me, not with his hands, but with their fire. I did not need to open my eyes to see where his hands floated like a bird's wings. His hands rested over my heart for a long time. I felt it grow huge and empty as a sky. No, not empty. There was the new moon and the star. I could look at them now. When his hands reached my womb, I felt a tiny flutter that made me think of hummingbird wings or a tiny spring bubbling underground.

Then his hands moved lower.

Someone was holding a burning torch, there at the crux of me. I cried out and tried to claw my way out of my body.

“Don't fight,” a voice said. Esus. Esus. “Let the pain consume itself.”

I had no choice. The pain exploded, so fierce and bright it obliterated all other light. Then it was over, swiftly, silently, the way a falling star comes to earth. Esus was holding onto my feet with his hands. His hands were warm, not burning, but warm, brown, human. He moved his hands to my ankles and pushed up my knees so that he could plant my soles on the ground. Then he covered my feet with his hands again.

“Come back, Maeve Rhuad,” he said softly. “Come back to yourself.”

I sat up slowly and looked at Esus. Behind him the sky began to brighten. It was almost morning.

“I'm here, Esus,” I said.

And I was.

A
LL THESE CENTURIES, PEOPLE have been arguing about his words. What did he really say? What did he mean? What must we believe? What must we force other people to believe? And all the while we've been arguing, not to mention torturing each other, all we really wanted was his touch. Only we don't know it. We can't allow ourselves to face the loss. The spirit is a consolation prize. We want his hands.

Love one another, he said. That's how it got written down. But love is so vague, and we have given it such monstrous meanings. This is for your own good. Whack! The snap, crackle, and pop of burned flesh and wracked bones.

Listen! It wasn't what he said that mattered, although I'll grant you, he had a way with words. He mattered; he was matter, the word made flesh. Touch one another, he should have said. Touch one another as I have touched you. It's that touch we're crying for, and we don't even know it.

His touch restored me and awakened me. I wasn't sleep walking any more. Now I could remember the night in Bryn Celli Ddu, though it retained its nightmare quality. No doubt, like the best and worst dreams, that night held a hidden meaning, but I couldn't crack the code.

You could argue that the clues were all there, the stage set for a disaster between me and this strange, tormented druid. If you knew the precise course of both the Titanic and the iceberg, you could have predicted that, too. Every plane crash has its logic. Unlike a plane crash, my disaster was still secret. There were no teams of investigators trying to reconstruct what had happened, what went wrong. I was my only witness. For all my prescient visions, Foxface's attack seemed to me to have come out of nowhere, the act of some angry, arbitrary god.

The memory of that night took up residence at the outskirts of my consciousness, a derelict neighborhood I didn't visit very often. Foxface had left Mona soon after
Lughnasad
to travel among the tribes, and so far he hadn't returned. Instead, Esus had come to find me. He had
planted my feet on the earth. I was here, present to the present. That was enough.

Branwen and Nissyen were visibly relieved to have me back, but they didn't want to jinx it by saying anything to me directly. The Crows had noticed the change, too, but they seemed less trusting of it. Now when I went to meet Esus at the yews, I had the unshakeable feeling that I was being watched. I'd scan the sky for wings the way a sailor might watch for storm clouds. Out in the open I felt as vulnerable as a rabbit or mouse under a hawk's eye. Still, I refused to scurry and managed to saunter instead. No one had
said
I could not meet him at the yews. No one stopped me. Why did it never occur to either of us that we were being set up? We were too full of ourselves, I suppose. Too full of each other.

If I am giving the impression that, having been restored, I was unchanged, let me amend it. You can be made whole again, but it is a different, more complex whole than if you had never been broken. There are new fault lines, new weaknesses, new strengths. At the time, I did not reflect much on changes in my character; I was more intent on my body, which for reasons I did not understand, felt as though it did not quite belong to me any more. Its center of gravity had shifted subtly, throwing the rest of me off balance. And I was hungry all the time. No, hunger isn't the right word to describe the yearning I had for food, more like love-longing than mere appetite. Even the simplest food, unflavored stirabout, astonished me and moved me, the beauty of it, the generosity. I particularly liked to forage and spent any free time I had picking the last berries and gathering nuts to hoard like any squirrel. Starting the day after
Samhain,
no one was allowed to pick anything.

On the day of
Samhain,
the students were given a holiday from classes. All the teachers and many of the advanced students were busy preparing for the night to come, the most important—and dangerous—night of the year. The gates were wide open between the worlds. It was all too easy to slip out of the familiar world and wander timelessly in another. The tribe needed to hold together, huddle with the cattle who would be driven from the far pastures to winter in the byres till
Beltaine.
Tonight was the night for prophesy, too. Halloween, as you call it, is a hologram. Look at it one way, you see one image; squint or blur your eyes, and you see another. To those with the seer's gift, past and future opened their vistas. Later, the tribe would gather to hear the predictions for the new year, who would marry and bear a child, who would sicken or die.

The seven female first formers (seven, like the stars in the Pleiades that would rise that night) had their own ideas. We had gone to the wood near the straits to gather hazelnuts for love divination, some complicated system—unfamiliar to me growing up on Tir na mBan—turning on whether the nut jumped, exploded, or burned in tandem with another nut. I hadn't paid too much attention. I wasn't about to trust my precious love luck to a bunch of nuts—however much wisdom they supposedly contained. I was going to eat them.

By early afternoon, having gathered more nuts than we needed, we emerged on the other side of the wood and sat down by the straits. Those wearing shoes took them off and cooled their feet in the water. It was a warm day. Summer was letting out one long, last, sweet breath before winter began to blast. It was so rare for us to have time off from our studies. None of us wanted to go back to the caer yet. It's hard to say who had the idea first, but soon we were daring and double-daring each other to go to Dwynwyn's Isle to consult the oracular eels that lived in her well. Rumor had it that these slippery creatures were the last word in love divination.

You remember Dwynwyn, dancing in the distance on the night of our full moon rites? The Crows, consistently inscrutable, had never told us anything more than her name, but we had soon discovered that she was a local legend. Before we knew it, we were laughing and shrieking as we raced each other along the shore.

Predictably, the journey was much longer than we remembered. Maybe the Crows took a more efficient route or made the trip shorter by magic. We fought our way through midge-ridden thickets, trudged endlessly over the dunes, and arrived at the beach tired and sweaty. The sea wind chilled us and the warmth of the day began to ebb. The curving shadows of Dwynwyn's Isle stretched toward us. The sandy neck joining the island to shore lay exposed. We'd be able to cross, but the tide was turning. We could hear the rush of currents meeting and crossing in the straits. We glanced at each other uneasily, but we all knew we'd come too far to turn back. Wordlessly we joined hands and went on.

Though the isle was small, it was easy to feel lost among its dips and rises. Some of the hillocks were grassy, some rocky. Late wildflowers grew in abundance, and spicy smelling sea-roses bloomed alongside the rose hips. Animals roamed free: two black goats, several spotted pigs, and some sheep with horns that looked like celtic knots. Overhead,
birds wheeled and cried. We had no idea where to look for the woman and her well.

“As soon as we get to the end of the island, that's it, we're turning back no matter what,” one of us said.

“We don't want to get stuck here overnight,” another agreed. “Not on
Samhain.”

We all shuddered at the prospect. When we came to the island's tip, we stopped for a moment and gazed at the mountains. A few gauzy clouds settled just below their peaks as if they were shawls to keep off the evening chill.

“Let's walk back along the shore,” someone said.

No one argued, and we fell into single file. No one cared about the eels or love luck anymore. We only wanted to get back to Caer Leb before night overtook us. Then, suddenly, as we rounded a rocky point, she was there. Or rather, we were the sudden ones. Clearly, she had been there forever watching the world take shape around her.

She sat on the ground, legs crossed, bare feet peeking out from beneath a tunic that was red as a fresh wound. She wore a black cloak and her hair was white as we'd remembered and so long that it pooled on the ground around her as if she sat in spilled milk or moonlight. Between her and the sea, a blackened cauldron hung suspended between three braced sticks. A fire that she prodded from time to time blazed beneath it, the flames leaping to reveal the cauldron's carvings: a confluence of fish and snakes—or were they eels?—birds and bees. Beneath the crackle of flames was another sound: the rhythmic roar of the sea washing in and out of a cave. These sounds alone—fire, water meeting earth, the wind moaning over the rocky point—were enough to put us into a trance. She didn't have to lift a finger. We would stand there forever if she wanted us to. We would dive unresisting into her pot if she commanded it or sink to all fours and graze on the sparse grass for the rest of our days.

Then without warning, she turned her head, the way an owl does, without moving any other part of her body. She fixed us with her dark eyes—or I should say eye. One eye was clear as a cold, starry night; the other veiled with a milky sheen.

“What have you brought for my pot?”

None of us had thought to bring an offering. We had only an oatcake (it had been mine) crumbled and shared between us. The eel divination
required crumbs. Then I remembered the hazelnuts. I reached into my pocket and held out a handful. The others followed my lead.

“Hazelnuts!” she scowled. “What? Not a fish or a rutabaga for an old woman? Something to slide easy down the throat? I suppose you expect me to crack all those nuts, hard as they are. Hard as a young man's head, though with more wisdom inside. Hard as a young girl's heart, though with more sweetness inside. Don't give me that dewy, doe-eyed look. Of course you have hard hearts. All hearts are hard till they're broken. Then they're a bloody mess! Though not bad tasting if you cook and season them properly.”

Abruptly she turned her head from us and poked at the fire again. We stood and gaped, our hard hearts pounding in our mouths, in danger of being snatched and roasted.

“Save your hazelnuts for the
Samhain
fires,” she said. “Though for all the good you'll get of them you might as well stuff them up your pussies and let them pop there. Such a waste of wisdom. No one ever asks for wisdom, I've noticed. Just: what's going to happen? Will he, won't he be true to me-he,” she warbled. “All depends on how frisky the eels are feeling, my dears. Yes, I know that's why you've come. I knew it was only a matter of time before you girl-druids learned the fame of my eel-infested well. I only wish the locals had thought to tell you that you're supposed to bring something substantial for the pot,” she sniffed. “Perhaps they thought that went without saying. See? You're overeducated already. So busy cramming your heads, you've forgotten your stomachs—or rather you've forgotten mine. You can eat your heart out forever, but it doesn't stop the hunger pangs.”

Far from forgetting my stomach, I was getting hungrier by the second listening to her. The growls from my stomach rose to compete with the surf.

“I must say, the thought of eel pie is awfully tempting,” Dwynwyn sighed. “But I have my living to get and a legend to perpetuate.”

With an agility that belied her poor-little-old-lady act, she suddenly got to her feet, with no help from her hands, and stirred the cauldron with a long-handled ladle.

“We're sorry about having nothing for the pot,” said one of us. “We could bring you something another day. But we did bring crumbs for the eels.”

“Overfed little sods,” she muttered. “It is a shame not to eat them. I'm sorry, my dears. But you won't be seeing the eels today. Never mind
that you've neglected my pot, the eels are wanted at the bottomlessness today. They can't be bothered with raw girls. They have business with the Other Folk. Don't you suppose for one minute that paltry mortals have cornered the market on love trouble. Still, let me have a look at you girl-druids before I send you on your way—that is, if I do. I could turn all of you into swine,” she considered. “Though it's sheep you most resemble. Good eating in that and wool besides.”

Dwynwyn laid aside her ladle and approached us as we waited, standing in a semi-circle like the curve of the new moon. On this side of the island, in the shadow of the hillocks, it was already dusk. A ground mist began to rise and swirl at our feet. Even in the shadow, we could see, now that she faced us, that she was wearing a necklace of small skulls. I could feel fear emanating from the others like radiant cold. I was wary but not unduly alarmed. This woman was surely kin to the Cailleach. And after all, my mothers were prone to overstatement and partial to the preposterous. They had always taken pleasure in a well-turned insult, even if they were its object.