Secret Magdalene (24 page)

Yeshu sits up as a desert Arab would sit, cross-legged, with his elbows on his knees. In my sight, Glory now rises from his whole body as steam rises from boiling water. “As you have come to hear me, then I shall tell you, and when I have told you, you may do as you wish.”

There are puzzled looks, mouths that turn down, beards that stiffen as the chins beneath them stiffen. No one knows what he means by this, and they are made apprehensive in their not knowing. Of all, John looks neither puzzled nor apprehensive. Yeshu looks from each to each. “I tell you, of those born of woman, none is greater than John.” Hearing this, Simon Magus could not be better pleased than if the emperor Tiberius himself had said this thing. But Yeshu has more to say. “I ask you, who is our true king?”

There is much mumbling and a host of sidelong glances, Salome’s chief among all. Does Yeshu test them? John is rising from his nest of sand so that he stands before all as the very king they would make him, but it is Jacob who answers. “As Issa, the first Nazorean, taught, God is our true king.”

To which Simon bar Judas eagerly adds, “It was the battle-cry of my father, ‘No ruler but God!’”

Jacob bar Judas flushes that his brother would speak. But Yeshu smiles and as he smiles, he says, “Then it is God who would rule us.”

There is much looking around at this, each man checking to see what the other man thinks.

“True, Yeshu’a,” replies Jacob when all is again still, “God is our king. But as men have need of God, God has need of
one
man, so that he might rule through him.”

There is much approval at this.

Yeshu replies, “Each man rules himself.”

There is more than confusion now; there is dismay, and Jacob’s is spoken: “How so, Yeshu’a? You know and I know that men cannot and do not rule themselves. Have we not spent our young manhood taking the part of those who cannot, or will not, take it for themselves?”

“Yes, we have spent our youth in this way. Tell me now, what has come of it?”

“What has come of it!” Jacob cannot believe he hears this. “It has brought us to this moment! It has made the people ready for their rightful king!”

All eyes turn to John, who does nothing more than listen, nothing more than stand as tall and as thin as an obelisk. He seems a very Caesar, yet to me, this is as nothing compared to Yeshu. Yeshu is the perfection of man, not coming, but
here.
Can these men not see this? Can they not see that though he walked away from them one man, as small as most men believe themselves to be small, he has come back another: a man as large as man
is
? Jude is looking up at Yeshu, and I know the hair rises on his head. He does not know what Yeshu has done or what he has seen, but he knows there is a change in his twin. All his life, Jude has been as a shadow to this one. And though he has done as is expected of all the men of Palestine: married and fathered a child, still, the path Yeshu walked was Jude’s path. Jude is who Jude is: the one quiet as the other talks, the one somber as the other laughs, the one who remains earthbound as the other soars into flights of fancy or wit or passion. As Sicarii, he fought at his brother’s side for the weak and for the fearful and for those who could not fight for themselves. Or thought they could not. Jude knows well what it is that his other brother, the righteous Jacob, means by saying, “Men cannot and do not rule themselves.”

But it is I who finish this thought, though I finish it only to myself: For if they could, they would. Father would say, and I would say it a truth, that the strong rule the weak.

“These things are so because we allow them to be so,” I hear Yeshu say again, as on the day he and Jude together first visited my secret place. “The men of resignation have made all this.”

I hear Jude prepare himself to grieve. I feel him full of fear that he does not know his brother and if he does not know Yeshu, there is nothing to know at all. My heart goes out to him. He is a great heart and has great pity. I think of Salome, and by this I know what it is Jude faces. I would reach out and touch him if I thought he would not scorn me. But the truth is, he would shake off my hand. He does not loathe me as do the others, but he does not love me.

“I would do more than make the people ready for their rightful king, Jacob. I would show them what I have seen.”

I see how all listening, yearn to understand him.

“For I have seen the Kingdom of God.”

How do they hear this? What is it they think he says to them? Quickly, I reach from one to another. There is one who is made eager; this one wonders if Yeshu returns from a place he himself might be shown? There is one made anxious; he imagines Yeshu become poetic, by which he means weak. But among the rest, only a few have the least idea what might be meant. Jacob, who understands least of all, has the wisdom to remain silent.

But there is one who knows what is meant. “There have been others who would do this, cousin,” says John of the River, “and among these others, I count myself. None have succeeded.”

Yeshu does not lower his gaze. “I must try.”

“Then our paths diverge, as I knew they must.”

“Yes,” replies Yeshu.

I find I understand John. He knows he has tried and he has failed to bring people to gnosis, to know directly the God in themselves. Once he cajoled, he urged, he did not threaten. But the people could not hear him. Now he rages at them, pleads for their very souls. And this, at last, they hear. The noise he makes, the lamentations, brings them to the river in their thousands. Yet even now he fails. For instead of knowing themselves, they look to him to save them from themselves. Only the Few seek within; the many seek without, and the many are counted as legion. So that now he seeks a third way to teach. He will allow the many to make him king. If he is king, then perhaps he can teach as a king. Perhaps they will hear a king.

Yeshu must also try. He is suffused with the need to show others what he has seen, to have others know what it is he knows. By this, he believes their suffering will end; for, by this, they will see themselves free. And not merely from the yoke of the Romans, or the despair of their secret hearts, but from Yahweh and his Laws.

By all the stars, if Jacob or Simon Peter knew Yeshu’s heart, like caged lions they would roar in their rage! Yehoshua the Nazorean will not lead them to Jerusalem to make John king. Yeshu will walk among the people to make them all kings in the Kingdom of Heaven.

John is right. The path of the cousins diverges.

As he would speak with Yeshu as an inner Nazorean, John sends all others away, save Addai and Simon Magus and Dositheus. Yeshu motions for Jude and me to stay. All others go quietly, but they each go with deep misgiving; they now know that Yeshu will not be leading them as they walk with John to Jerusalem. And if there is no Yeshu, there will be no Jude. Jude is the rock that Simon Peter would be. Who else might abandon them? Simeon? The Sons of Thunder who are devoted to Yeshu?

Tonight, there will be much grinding of teeth in the wilderness.

High above us, the sun is hung from the white roof of the sky, and there seem no shadows. John and Yeshu are still; Yeshu lost to
makarismos,
which is the blessed nature of one who has seen the Mysteries. John and Addai seem simply to wait. Jude has not moved from his chosen spot. Salome and Dositheus use stubby bits of palm leaf to write each to each in the dirt. I am watching tiny brown ants pulling and pushing the great bulk of a bright green beetle toward the door to their underworld home, such a single-minded struggle.

It is John who pulls me from my ants. “Soon I will leave this place, Yeshu’a.”

Yeshu does not open his eyes. “I know.”

John sighs at this. “As I know that you will not travel with me.”

Yeshu says nothing, and I watch John quietly accept what is not said. He lifts his hand in small supplication. “But tell me, cousin, as I have depended on your advice, I ask that you advise me now, and perhaps for the last time. If I should go up to Jerusalem, if I should do what is asked of me, what is it you see coming to pass?”

Yeshu looks now at his cousin, a man it has been his duty and his pleasure to follow all of his life, and his eyes are full of what he sees coming to pass: he sees a man who will die for pity. Yeshu has no need to reply, for over the face of John comes an acceptance of what Yeshu would not say aloud, and by this I see at last how worthy John is of Salome’s love.

John too knows he will die for love and for pity. He turns to Salome with a fond and impish smile. “Tell them what it is you have heard your voice say.”

Salome darts a glance my way. Does she too see her favorite die? All her life, Salome has seen further and faster than I—does she still?

“I heard a voice,” says Simon Magus, whose own voice sounds out firm and confident, though I know the truth of it, and the ring of it causes the birds to cease their babble, “and the voice came to me not at night from out of the darkness but at the height of the day, and the voice said that the name of John the Baptizer would ring through the ages with a mighty sound.” And there he stops.

“And?” urges John.

By the moon, Salome fears to speak. Is it because I hear her?

“And?” John urges once more.

Simon Magus is left without choice; he must continue. “And the voice said that where John led, a people would follow.”

John slaps a hand on his knee. He turns back to Yeshu and smiles a child’s smile. “You see! How could I not go when everyone will be following?”

This is what Salome fears, to be responsible for what is to come.

John is still playing the innocent fool. “But as I must follow my own advice and chart my own course, I think I will not go up to Jerusalem.” At this, not only Yeshu lifts his head, we all of us do—not go to Jerusalem? John sees this, and laughs. “Oh, I will go. Have you not heard Simon Magus? It is my fate to go.” Only I know the cost of the smile that stays fixed on Salome’s face. “But first I will make my way up the Jordan, keeping always on the bank of the river ruled by Herod Antipas, for Herod has fewer teeth than this ferocious Pilate.” John shows his teeth, snaps them. “Though Joanna, who serves as my eyes and ears in Herod’s court, assures me Herod’s false wife, the proud Herodias who hates me more than she hates all others, has more teeth.”

I have never warmed to Joanna. Perhaps she will serve also as Herod’s eyes and ears in the court of King John? I look at Salome. Does she still hold a similar thought?

“And the people will hear that I do this, and they will come, and when it is right and when it is proper and when it is time, I shall turn my face south again. And then, we shall all walk up to Jerusalem.”

“And there,” exclaims Dositheus, sitting up straighter and straighter as he listens to John, “a miracle will occur!” We each cock an ear to hear how he will finish what is begun. “For what is the history of the Israelites if not a history of miracles, and the promise of greater miracles to come? Is scripture not a record of God’s intervention in the affairs of his people? That being so, it follows that a people who are steeped in the miraculous expect no less than the miraculous. Expecting this, they will simply assume what is said will be so,
will
be so, and by their very numbers and by their very faith, they will have their miracle.”

Now I too sit up. The people
will
flock to hear him; they always do. How will the priests and the rich stand against them if they come in such numbers? I shiver; am I as deluded as all those who clamor to make John of the River king, or has Dositheus caused me finally to see a thing?

Brushing sand from his hands, John says, “It is settled then. We leave at first light.” And rising, adds, “Know you, Yehoshua, that a free state of Jews newly exists on the banks of the far Euphrates? Know you that this town of Nehardea is subject neither to Romans nor to the Babylonians nor to the Parthians?”

“I have heard this.”

“If all goes unwell with me, the brothers who have founded it would welcome you.”

Yeshu laughs out loud. “I will remember that, John.”

T
his night, Jude will speak to me, and I am made anxious for I cannot imagine what he would say. We are met in the shallow cave at the foot of the cliffs, and for light there are only stars. So soon as I sit, Jude begins. He talks as I have never heard him talk, it is all I can do to keep up with his flow of words.

“Even as we were young,” says this
didymus,
this twin, “Yeshu was not as I was, nor was he as any other boy. I would watch my brother at play, or at work, or as he slept and I did not, or as he discoursed with learned men as I could not, and I saw that in body I was as alike to him as an egg to an egg, yet as unlike in mind as a peasant to a king. You see how unlike?”

I nod, yes, I see how unlike.

“Yet I knew that those things I could call Jude, and not Yeshu, were the very things he lacked, and by the lack thereof, was in need of them. By this, I knew I was sent to keep watch over him. Was it not a sign to be born so alike and yet so unlike?”

He watches me carefully. Once again, I nod, yes, and this pleases him.