Bright Dark Madonna. Elizabeth Cunningham

across the room to Ananais. Did he intend to blast Ananais clean of sin? Baptism by laser beam?

      Then, abruptly, Ananais dropped to the floor, and there was dead silence in the room. No one made a move. Everyone waited for Peter to do or say something, but he stood transfixed, staring at his finger. Finally I stood up and started for the crumpled heap in the middle of the floor.

      “Stop,” Peter commanded. I was prepared to ignore him; I was heartily sick of the proceedings, and as an unregenerate gentile, I considered that Peter had no authority over me. “Mary,” he appealed to me, and I turned to him and there, for an instant, was the old Peter. “Mary, I…I think he’s dead.”

      “Dead?” I turned from Peter to the body of Ananais, for so it was. I didn’t need to take his pulse to see that Peter was right.

      “I…I didn’t mean to,” he said to me. “It wasn’t me.”

      I looked back at Peter, who for a moment appeared as frightened as anyone in the room. I watched as he got hold of himself and remembered his role as the preeminent apostle. It wouldn’t do for the rock on which the ecclesia was founded to turn to jelly just because he had struck someone dead.

      “Indeed, it was not me—I mean I—it was not I who cast judgment upon him, for it is not for I—or me—or any of us to judge.” Peter addressed the assembled. “For as our Lord and Master taught us, judge not lest ye be judged. No, my fellow followers of the Way, it was the Holy Spirit working through me. God is my witness. You,” he gestured in the direction of some younger men. “Uh, take care of this.”

      I did not stay to see the men wrap the body and carry it out. Nor was I present when Ananais’ wife Sapphira (whom the Bible ultimately blames for the swindle) showed up a few hours later and suffered the identical fate. Instead, I bolted from the room into the street, heaved what was left of my lunch, and took off before Ma or Mary B could follow me.

      I had no idea where to go, so I just walked. It was not the first time I had been at loose ends in Jerusalem. I had run away from Jesus after the fig tree incident and within hours I had found myself turning a trick. (If you are supposing that I returned to whoring as a way to punish him, or myself, you would be wrong. It was a deeper, more mysterious impulse that I remain at a loss to explain.) Anyway, it doesn’t matter to this part of the story except to serve as a contrast. When I disappeared before I had only myself to consider. It was simple enough to survive as a whore, and if I didn’t survive, who cared.

      Now the full implications of my condition dawned on me as never before. Any woman who has ever had a baby will know exactly what I mean. I was not a free agent; I was carrying a child. I needed food, some kind of shelter, a clean place to give birth. Temple Magdalen was several days journey away on the other side of rugged, bandit-infested mountains. I couldn’t just take off on my own. I would be raped, murdered, robbed or, since I owned nothing of value, sold into slavery, or all of the above. I had no money to buy a place in a caravan.

      As for whoring, my fallback position, I was now quite visibly pregnant which tended to put most men off and the ones it didn’t, well, I didn’t want to go there. Perhaps I could manage to get back to Bethany on my own. Lazarus would take me in. Here in Jerusalem, I might also approach Nicodemus, a kindly, maverick Pharisee who was a friend of Joseph’s from the Sanhedrin. But would either man be willing or able to fight off James and Peter and the entire ecclesia, if they tried to marry me to James—or worse.

      I stopped still at the thought of what worse might mean. The traffic flowed past me, jostling me like a stick that’s gotten lodged in a stream. People were carrying palm branches, masses of grapevines, for the autumn festival of Sukkoth was just starting, and pilgrims thronged to Jerusalem to line the streets with the temporary booths. The whole city would go on an eight-day bender. It was the drunken riotous Sukkoth crowd that had hailed Jesus as the son of David and strewed palms in his way a year ago just before he started a riot at the Temple. Maybe I could find some Galileans who would take me home with them out of kindness, though it seemed unlikely that any Jews would want to lumber themselves with a pregnant Gentile. God (yes, God) knows I could pass myself off as a proselyte if I had to, and for Christ’s sake (see, he was right?) I had been married to the Son of David. No, I couldn’t mention that, not if I wanted to escape the apostolic posse.

      Help, I prayed, help. (Help, help is one of the best prayers I know. You just have to be prepared for some bizarre responses.)

      I walked on, beginning to feel hungry again, now that I’d gotten over my initial shock at—what to call it—the Pentecostal execution? It couldn’t be more than an hour or so till sundown, when the shofar would sound and all work would cease. Women were doing their last minute errands, and some of the pilgrims were cooking over charcoal braziers. I tuned my ears to try to catch a Galilean twang. When I turned into a street of meat vendors where the shopkeepers were beginning to close up, I heard another accent altogether, Roman-flavored Greek spoken in a strident, imperious voice that rose above all the others.

      “I expressly ordered strangled meat, and at the last minute my cook comes and tells me there is none to be had in all of Jerusalem. But I know you’ve procured it for me before. Bona Dea, Jerusalem used to be a sophisticated, international city where you could get good bloody rack of lamb if you required it. And I do require it. I will expect a delivery before you all go home to your bloodless dinners. What? No, of course, I don’t care if it’s been sacrificed to an idol. I don’t care if it’s been offered to Beelzebub himself. I have fifty people coming to dinner. Just do it.”

      Gathering up her stola and preparing to flounce away, the Roman arch-matron turned in my direction. Whoever would have thought that godless Paulina, my former owner cum benefactress, could ever be an instrument of the Lord, so to speak, for clearly here was the answer to my prayer.

      “Paulina!” I ran to her and flung myself into her arms, with such force that we both narrowly escaped falling into a gutter.

      “Red!” She was the only one who still called me by my Roman whore name. “Thank, Isis. I have been looking for you everywhere. Joseph sent me word that you’ve gone off the deep end, and he begged me to come to Jerusalem and check on you. Lazarus was quite incapable of directing me to this…this commune you’ve joined. And everyone in Jerusalem pretends they don’t know what I’m talking about when I ask for your late husband’s followers. I’m beginning to think it’s a conspiracy.”

      “Well, the Roman governor did crucify him,” I reminded her, a little huffily. “No one is going to tell a Roman anything.”

      “It wasn’t my fault they crucified him. I came to warn you.”

      “I know you did, Paulina,” I acknowledged, and then I lowered my voice. “Listen, can we go to wherever you’re staying. I don’t want to be seen.”

      “Are you implying that you’re embarrassed to be seen with me?” she raised her voice and narrowed her eyes. “Because if you are, take a look at yourself, wandering around in unbecoming widows weeds, six months gone. Just because your husband is dead is no reason to let yourself go. Au contraire.”

      “No, shh, Paulina, that’s not it. I need a place to hide.”

      “Oh, you’re in trouble. Of course, you would be. That’s all right then,” she said. “Here, cover your head, stulta, and walk behind me. Let me see….Carry this.” She handed me a bolt of fine purple linen. “We’ll pretend you’re my slave. It’ll be just like old times.”

      CHAPTER NINE

      WHITHER THOU GOEST

      IF YOU BELIEVE I should have gone back to the ecclesia and given Peter what for and changed the course of Christianity single-handedly, well, I did warn you this story begins with a failure. For better and worse, the ecclesia’s radical communist phase didn’t last that long, anyway, as you may have noticed. Being struck dead for withholding a pledge is a far cry from feeling obliged to place an envelope or toss some change into the collection plate.

      When I fled, I wasn’t thinking of the ecclesia’s future