Secret Magdalene (31 page)

In all this time, from Japhia to Cana to the Via Maris to the salt-fish city on the Sea of Galilee, I have kept my distance from Izates. From time to time, he casts upon me black and hateful looks. From time to time, I think him tempted to expose me for the sweet pleasure it would give his kingly stomach. But what is worse is that in all this time I have also kept my distance from Yeshu. When he would be in one place, I would be in another. When he would speak to me, I would have found something important I need say to Seth. And when we would bed down for the night, I would feign sleepiness rather than sit and talk with Yeshu as the stars faded one by one. I do this so that I might not cause pain. He does not force my hand.

It is like to break my heart.

But Seth is with me, and I shelter in him as a sun-struck creature would seek shade in a world of shifting sands.

A boat awaits us, bobbing at anchor a short distance offshore, as it has done these past few days. In it, we are to cross over the whole of the width of this Galilean sea, west to northeast, from Taricheae in Herod Antipas’s Galilee to the city of Bethsaida in Herod Philip’s Gaulanitis. Once there, it is no more than an hour’s walk to the place where the tribes await Yeshu. This sea is fresh where my wilderness sea is salt; it is also less than half the size. The journey across should go swiftly.

Eio must be brought along, for neither Yeshu nor I would leave her. But to bring her, Yeshu must pull, and Jude must push, and Ananias must aim a good hard kick at her backside. Struggling, Yeshu laughs, “An ass is wiser than a seer for was it not Balaam’s female ass who saw the Lord—Eio, will you move!—and not the sage Balaam himself?”

To which Izates replies, looking straight at me, “Better to bring the she-ass than a woman, for a woman speaking is like the Lord opening the mouth of a donkey.”

Both Thecla and I flush, she with fury at the insult, and me with the fear of exposure, though I would be insulted if I had the luxury of it. But Yeshu, still pulling Eio, looks only at Thecla when Izates says this thing, thinking her his only target, and says, “Could it be as Addai once said, that woman was God’s First Thought, and that man is an afterthought?”

Thecla gifts him for this with her rare and handsome smile, and I would as well, and I do, but Ananias bursts into noisy back-slapping laughter at such an idea. I hear him thinking how Yeshu can say the most outlandish things and bring light where there was only dark. Izates laughs as well and as heartily, but he never takes his eyes from me, and his eyes do not laugh at all. Moments later we set sail in the boat of the fisherman Joazar who is brother-in-law to Simon Peter and to Andrew. Izates and Jude keep a tense and watchful eye on the receding western shore, the one governed by Antipas, for if so many await us in Gaulanitis, surely news of this has reached more than one important ear? Herod Antipas must know how many eyes and hearts turn east and south toward the Fortress of Machaerus where at this very moment he stands embattled against his mortal enemy, King Aretas—and where in this same moment John lies chained. No doubt Herod has doubled his military wherever he senses trouble, or at least as many as can be spared from his defense against the Arab king.

But nothing more happens than Eio trying to jump overboard—once as we leave land, the second time as we approach it.

And by and by, we come on Bethsaida in the land of Herod Philip, whose wife Herodias is now the wife of his half brother, Herod Antipas, a thing that incensed John the Baptizer—who denounced the “fornication” of Herodias and Herod Antipas from one end of the Jordan to the other. This place is much of a piece with Taricheae, hidden now over the sea, save for Taricheae’s distinct and distinctly ruined tower, and for it being two cities: a citadel on a high rock and a humbler village by far on the shore of the lake. The land itself is greener yet, fed by the fresh water sea and by the Jordan and by its many springs that have formed deep and quiet pools, around which stand trees that would die of thirst in Judaea. Bethsaida also smells like fish. There are people here who note our passing, and some point and some stare. We hurry by them for the hour grows late. If we linger, the Sabbath will be upon us while we yet travel, and though Yeshu cares little for the Law, there are those waiting to whom the Law is above all other things.

But as we leave behind the last house of the lower city of Bethsaida where the poor live, a woman quickly steps out to bar our way; Jude has barely time to draw his knife. But she is unarmed and can mean no harm, save that we would hurry and she delays us. Jude keeps his knife in his hand but puts his hand behind him.

“Master,” the woman says, and by this she means Yeshu, not King Izates, “I have heard, and I believe, that you can raise the dead, but can you also cause the blind to see?”

Before Yeshu can answer, she points to the side of the road, and there under a tree, and as ragged as its bark, sits a blind man. At the man’s feet there is a begging bowl, and on the man’s body, a bit of shabby cloth no more than would cover a suckling child, and around the man’s head, flies. His mouth is encrusted with ancient spittle, the folds of his body are embedded with ancient scum, and his sightless eyes, oozing with yellow matter, are the flat and lifeless white of bird dirt. I shudder, for I have never seen a filthier thing, and I would step back but remember that Yeshu would not. Instead, like Yeshu, I move closer to the blind beggar. The man hears us. He pushes his bowl forward with a hopeful toe and smiles where he determines we should be. The tooth that is left him is as broken and black as his toe.

The woman pulls at Yeshu’s mantle. Both Jude and Izates bridle at this, would push her away, but Yeshu stops them with the smallest gesture. She is saying, “He is blind from birth, Master, and cast out. Now I would know the truth of it, who did sin? This man, or his parents, that he was born blind?”

“Neither,” answers Yeshu, “for God would not punish that which is loved.”

The woman’s eyes widen, her thoughts plain on her face. This man has said that God would not punish that which is loved? What, then, does God love? For it seems all are punished in one way or in another way. Her way of saying this is, “But he cannot see, Master!”

Yeshu leans down to scoop up a handful of dirt, saying, “There are some things that cannot be undone, being intended for one purpose or another, but there is this thing that can be done, and it is greater than eyes that see. I can give him the sight that is within him.” Spitting into his hand, he makes a paste of dirt and spittle. I have seen Tata do this. I have seen Yeshu watch Tata do this. With the paste he has made, Yeshu anoints the old man, first tenderly rubbing the lid of one poor eye and then of the other. “If you would
truly
see, old man, go, wash in a pool of Bethsaida.”

And then, once more, we are on our way, moving quickly before the setting of the sun. But as I am quite the last, and as I do not concern myself with whether we break the law of the Sabbath by our movement, I think I am the only one to hear the woman answer the blind man when he asks who has touched him. “Yehoshua of the Nazoreans, old man. It is said he can raise the dead.”

At this, the blind man cries, “Is he a prophet? Is he a magician? Is he a
gazer
? He must be one of these! Help me up, woman, for I would wash my eyes!”

The last I see of him, he is struggling up from his place in the dirt and stumbling away. I am sure he makes his way to a pool; Bethsaida has no lack of pools. But such a thing holds less interest for me than what it is Yeshu has said, which has long been said in one way or another by Seth: “There are some things that cannot be undone, being intended for one purpose or another.” Again, the word
intend.
I know Yeshu does not mean “intended by God,” nor does he mean “intended by the Fates.” He means “intended by the Self,” which is the
Daemon.
But who will believe they would intend themselves blind or crippled or poor? Who could knowingly shoulder such a responsibility? Yehoshua would ask a man to know he is entirely free, that he is not beset with demons, nor is he a victim of circumstance, nor even of the gods. He would ask a man to know that his life and all it consists of is a thing of his own making.

Who can face such freedom?

Soon enough, as the fiery boat of the sun sets sail toward the sea of night, we are climbing a wooded rise, passing through a stand of fig and walnut trees, and then, coming at last to the top, we see spread out below us in the last of the light a wondrous sight. There are not hundreds here but thousands. Thousands upon thousands, perhaps as many as five thousand in all. The whole of the valley floor is tented and cameled and peopled, and the stream that runs through these runs brown with their presence. The sight and the smell and the sound of them come up as the din of approaching thunder. It is a daunting sight.

As we stand looking down on this, I find I am between Ananias and Seth. Yeshu is halted a distance away with Jude and Izates and Thecla. Perhaps they too are struck with wonder, for I would swear they have come to a sudden halt at the sight of so many gathered below. But we three, who have known each other in other times and in other guises, stand apart. And as those with Yeshu talk of the astonishing number below, how he shall manage to be heard by them all, and of what the more fiercely lawful will make of his speaking on a Sabbath, and how so many are surely proof of the strange and dangerously volatile mood that has come over every kingdom in Palestine, Seth and Ananias and I fall into talk as easily as we once did. For did we not travel to Egypt together, and did we not together set eyes on the fabulous city of Alexandria, and did we not, after many and many an adventure there, travel back to Judaea together?

Looking away from the great spectacle below, I note that Ananias has grown more chins, two more of them, and I tell him how I admire them.

Says he, “A man needs bulk as a buffer between the world and himself, the more bulk the better. How else to defend against a wife and her litter? By the spit of my camels, how they increase! They spring up overnight like weeds in a poppy field, like evil spirits in the footsteps of Agrath, the Queen of Demons…like customs officials! Not to mention a man’s wife’s brothers and her sisters and her aunts and her uncles and on and on as far as a man’s purse and a man’s mind can stretch. In this, you are wiser than I, Seth.”

“How so?” asks my friend the philosopher, who is so much wiser than Ananias, I almost find cause to smile.

“Is it not obvious? You have never married.”

I think Seth will laugh at this. I think I know full well he will brush away the teasing of Ananias, as he would brush away a troublesome fly. For of course Seth has never married. What need he of such things? Though both Shammai and Hillel, the very greatest of the Jewish teachers, insist that marriage is a sacred act from which no one shall abstain, and though it is true an unwed man cannot be a rabbi, such an uncommon man as Seth is not made for such a common thing as marriage. Therefore, when he replies in all seriousness that he would marry, I am more surprised than I was at the sight of the thousands below us. I snap my head toward him.

Seth holds his beardless and beautiful face as impassively as I have tried to hold mine in these last difficult days. “I would marry,” he continues, “if the woman I would wed would wed me.”

By the ancient stars of Sumer! Who could this woman be? Has she been wooed and lost, far away and long ago, but is yet unforgotten? Is she a daughter of Jerusalem? Or of Adiabene? Is she rich or is she poor, beauteous or plain? As clever as he? She must be as clever as he; I cannot imagine he could bear a feeble or a foolish woman. But how could a woman, any woman, not return the love of my beloved friend? Or not wish to wed him? More remarkable still, how could any father of such a woman not take it upon himself to see her wed to Seth, having once seen she is too foolish to see to it herself?

I look up at Seth with all this alight in my eyes, my indignation and surprise and disbelief and wonder, not to mention my quiver full of questions dying to be fired from my bow of a tongue, and I find he looks down at me with such a look I think my eyes might turn back in my head; I think I might swoon. I know on the instant who the woman is. I know on the instant what I should have known all along. Not because of a thing said, and not because of a thing done, but because I am a prophet and a toucher of minds.
Eloi! Eloi! Eloi!
Isis, Queen of Heaven, how you must laugh at such a one as I. It is all I can do not to fall on the ground and beat my head bloody on stones. I am not a prophet. I am a fool beyond any fool. He means
me.
Seth of the Maccabees, who once ruled Israel, would take Mariamne, daughter of Josephus, to wife!

If ever a thing took away my very breath, it is this thing, and I am not sure, but it seems the body of John the Less stands witless and voiceless and helpless and hopeless, while the mind of Mariamne shies away, shies away, her heart beating as the heart of a poor bird caught stunned in the fine tangles of a fowler’s net. But if I have seen who it is Seth would wed, so too has Ananias. Wily Ananias is not left witless, and he is not left voiceless. For some unfathomable reason, in this astonishing and terrible and long-lived moment, he is delighted. He pats his fat hands together. He licks his fat lips. He wobbles his chins. He winks at Seth. He says, “Hear me, my old friend. Would you have me put in a good word with her father?”

Though I am graceless as an overturned tortoise, though I am as mute in my unbalance, Seth has the grace to smile. He has even the equanimity to answer. “I would rather you put in a good word with the woman herself.”

Ananias opens his hands in mock supplication. “Can you hear this, fair maiden, and not be moved?”

Indeed, Ananias, I am moved. I am moved so that I cannot move and I cannot speak, and I turn my heated face away to hide all that I cannot think I think, and in hopes as well of gathering up whatever it is I might feel, so that I might more fully feel it, and turning, I hear Ananias say, “As you were born a woman, would you not live as a woman? Surely, Mariamne, daughter of Josephus of the very Sanhedrin, even for you must come a time to be wed?” And still I turn away, and as I turn I see what I would hope never to see. The blood in my face flushes red as a poppy petal. The blood in my head roars as the sounding sea. The blood in my heart drains away. For I find myself staring directly at Yeshu who is staring directly at me. I thought Yeshu still engaged in talk of John and of Zealots, of kings and Romans and messiahs, and of a mood on the land that is like unto a great plague, but I was mistaken. My Yeshu moved away from this talk, away from those who still speak of such things, and has come closer and closer to Seth and to Ananias and to me. Has he come close enough to hear what passes between my friends and myself? I cannot take my eyes from his eyes. In them, I seek his mind. Has he heard us? Does he know what it is Seth has said? Has he heard what it is Ananias has said? Does he now know who—and what—I am?