Bright Dark Madonna. Elizabeth Cunningham

She’s a pagan in sheep’s clothing, she’s a wolf among the lambs, she’s….”

      “Hush, Dorothea,” commanded Mary B. “She was the wife of our Rabbi; she’s going to have his child. She and his mother are no doubt making a thank offering.”

      “We’d better open the cages now,” said Miriam.

      And so we did. For a moment the disoriented doves perched on our hands, and then we tossed them into the sky.

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      BRING FORTH THAT WHICH IS WITHIN YOU

      THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY, THOUGH it was not yet called that, was by no means my first experience of communal life. I had grown up in the small all female clan of my mothers. I had been a student at the famous druid college of Mona. I had lived with a Celtic tribe in the fastnesses of the Iberian mountains. When I ran away and got captured by a Roman slaver, I was sold to a Roman brothel, and sold again into a wealthy Roman household as big as a small village. Temple Magdalen had been my home for longer than any other, a loose (in every sense of the word) community held together by whore-priestesses who worshipped Isis and welcomed all comers in her name. Finally I was one of the companions of Jesus, a footloose, sometimes footsore band, now scattering, now gathering, seldom knowing where we would eat or sleep next. But there was something about this Jerusalem community that was unlike anything I had known in my diverse circumstances. I sensed it, but I could not at first fathom what it was.

      Despite our rocky start, Ma and I each attracted a following. Many did regard us askance after the incident with the doves, but more were curious. The curious managed to evade the censorious and seek us out.

      “Was he a precious little angel?” I overheard one woman asking Miriam.

      “He was a devil,” his mother answered with pride. “Let me tell you about the time he struck the neighbor’s boy dead. Well, he raised him again, of course…”

      And she’d be off and running, her audience completely enchanted.

      I was wary about telling my own stories. When I was first in Rome I had told my saga in installments every day at the whores’ bath. And when it was done, I had felt bereft, as if I had given the story away, and it was no longer mine. My sister whores had regarded it as no more than a romantic tale, and they all believed it was over, that I would never find my beloved again. Yet against all odds I had found him, and my friends who had sighed (or in some cases scoffed) as I held forth in the bath had danced at our wedding. And the story had gone on to its strange end—if it was an end. I was still here, and though I missed him, he was still with me.

      One night I lay awake and prayed for him to come to me in that way that was so close, so intimate—so bodily and disembodied at once.

      What do I do with our story, cariad? Do I hold it inside? Do I give it away? Do I tell it now? Do I wait?

      I felt his warmth inside me, surrounding me, dark and absorbent as earth, loam to soak up the tears I couldn’t hold back, but no answer came, at least not then, or if it did, I had already drifted into deep sleep.

      The next day I went to fetch water at a nearby well, and Tomas was trailing me as he often did. His nickname had been the twin or the shadow, because he had stayed so close to Jesus. When Jesus wasn’t available, he had attached himself to me. He was the only one of the Twelve who had been unabashedly happy when I came back to Jerusalem. Lately Tomas had taken to repeating obscure sayings of Jesus that no one else remembered. He would utter them spontaneously, without context, and it wasn’t clear if he understood what he was saying. The words would just pop out in a singsong voice, beginning always with, Master said. No one paid very much attention to him, and some of the other disciples occasionally tried to shush him.

      As I balanced the water jug on my head and started back to the house, I wasn’t listening either; the words he repeated over and over came through as background noise, like the sound of our feet on the paving stone or the cries of the street vendors. Just before we got back to the house, Tomas grabbed my sleeve, and the water jug I’d been balancing on my head nearly tumbled off. As it was, some of the water spilled and sluiced down my neck.

      “Tomas!” I protested.

      But he kept hold of my sleeve.

      “Master says,” he brought his face close to mine, our noses almost touching “bring forth what is within you, and it will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you.”

      “Of course, I’m going to bring it forth,” I said, thinking of our child.

      “Master says.” Tomas sighed with relief, as if unburdened, and then he loped away, leaving me in peace for a few moments.

      Later that day, a number of women approached me as I stood struggling with the drop spindle. (I had been assigned only household chores, and had been excused, or excluded from, all public ministries—supposedly because of my delicate condition). One of the women gently took over the spindle from me.

      “Will you tell us about the master?” she asked.

      “How did you meet him?” another prompted.

      “Is it true you were possessed by seven demons?”

      “Was it love at first sight?”

      Bring forth what is within you, I heard the words again, this time in my beloved’s voice, and it will save you.

      “Actually,” I said, sitting down and leaning back against the wall, “It was love at second sight.”

      And I told them about glimpsing my beloved in the Well of Wisdom on Tir na mBan. The next afternoon, a larger group had gathered, and so it went, each day more people coming, mostly the women from the community, but a few outsiders also, including some street whores I knew from my days of backsliding. The storytelling became an unofficial daily event—unofficial, because none of the apostles knew about it; they were too busy exorcising and evangelizing, ducking and courting trouble with the Temple officials. One day I went on longer than usual. I had gotten to the part where Jesus, then called Esus, was chosen, or pre-selected by a rigged lot, to be a druid sacrifice. My listeners would not let me stop there, so I kept on with how we had managed his escape (by her magic, I had traded shapes with the old witch Dwynwyn and infiltrated the druid rites). Then came the moment when we had to part. I was nine months pregnant and could never have managed the dash by horseback across the Menai Straits into the mountains.

      “But he would never have left you!” protested one of my listeners.

      “No, he didn’t want to go. In the end, I forced him. He cried out,

      “‘Maeve, we are lovers.’

      “‘You are lovers,’” Dwynwyn said. “‘But not just of each other. You are the lovers of the world.’

      ‘We can’t love if we’re apart,’ he said to me.

      ‘We can’t love unless we part,’ I told him, and then I called on his god, ‘Yeshua Ben Miriam in the name of the unnamable one, the god of your forefathers, the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I command you to go.”

      Oh,” one woman wept. “Oh. He had to go then. He had no choice, poor lamb.”

      “Yes,” I agreed. “He had to go. And it was many years before either of us understood what Dwynwyn said to us about being the lovers of the world. I still don’t know if I understand.”

      “Well, I do,” spoke up one of the seediest looking whores; I’d seen many women like her during my career, past their youth but still on the street, bad skin covered over with make-up, and my healer’s sense told me she might be sick as well. I wondered if she’d let me have a look at her later. “I understand. It means he’s our lover, too. He’s the lover, you know, the one we dream about, that one who looks at you and doesn’t see what everyone else sees. He knows you from the inside.”

      “Oh, come on, Gert, they all know you from the inside,”