The Woman who Loved an Octopus and other Saint's Tales (9 page)

My friend. Nesmut – the one who came with us from Rome.

Yeah, the dark one with the big eyes.

She's not stuck up – she just doesn't understand what people are saying. She only speaks Latin and Greek and Coptic, and that's not going to do her much good here, is it?

What?

Marianism. How do you know about that?

Did I? Oh. Yeah, I think I did. When I was telling you about that godawful circus we went to...

No, I'm not upset.

Yes, OK, I am. It's just... Oh, all right, I'm going to tell you.

I knew one of the people there.

One of the people in the arena. One of the gladiators.

Abra.

I couldn't believe it was her there. I'd known she was training to be a gladiator, but the way she'd talked about it, I thought it was all for show. Like dancing, she said it was. Beautiful movements. Skill. A trained body. She said she'd always wanted to be a gladiator.

I sat there and saw her fight and die. And then I was sick and we had to leave.

Oh, Arddun, it was terrible. I sat there and saw her die, and I couldn't do anything.

I still have nightmares about it. I'm there in the arena holding a knife, and she's on the ground with all her wounds and I try to run to her and kill her to stop the pain but I can't move. I can't move. And I wake up and think, Why do I want to
kill
her? She was my friend, she was only a few years older than me. She was my favourite slave in the house and I shouldn't want to kill her in my dream, I should want to save her; but I always want to kill her.

Every time.

After that, I became a Marian. It's a new religion from the East. Mary is a great prophet. She is travelling and preaching all over the Roman empire. She used to travel with another prophet called Jesus, but he was killed. Like Abra.

He hadn't done anything. He was just a good man. A carpenter.

Some of the slaves in Nesmut's house were Marians; they told me about it first. Marianism is about justice and wisdom.

Well, for example, Marians say that
all
people have a spirit. The spirit is the most important part of you. It's the light of Sophia in every one of us that goes back to the sun after we die. Sophia means wisdom. So if everybody has a spirit, it's not fair to keep slaves, right? Because they're the same as you. That's what Junia says, only she puts it better than that. Junia's a sort of friend of me and Nesmut – she's an apostle and a preacher in Rome. An apostle is somebody who follows the path of Mary and Jesus. I want to be like her, and like Mary.

Mary's not from Rome. She's from a place called Magdala in the province of Syria. Look, I'll draw a map in the sand for you. This is Britannia, and Germania and Gallia and Hispania over there, and Italia here. The sea is called the
Mare Internum
. Syria's right at the other end of that, there. That's where Mary comes from. She is from a people called Jews, and most of those who believe in her and Jesus's religion are Jews too, but you don't have to be one to be a Marian.

Well – me and Nesmut and Junia for example – we call ourselves ‘Marians', after Mary. And others call themselves Christians, after Jesus. Because he is also called Christ. Some believe that he was a god.

No, I don't think so. I think he was the same as Mary – a prophet. She wants to change things, and so did he. To make the world better for everybody.

Well, for example, I think if Abra hadn't been a slave she could have become something other than a gladiator.

Yes, I know, she
did
want to become one, but gladiators are mostly slaves. There are very few free ones, and even fewer free women gladiators. So if she'd been free, she could have done something else. She could have been a bodyguard or a farmer or a market trader.
Something
else!

She wouldn't have needed to die like that.

So what if she was a slave? She was a
person
! She was my friend.

I
was a slave when we first came to Rome. Me and Gwladus and Einir and Gwyn and Mother and Father and Grandfather – we were
all
slaves. We were paraded round Rome in our chains to show that the emperor'd defeated the barbarians.

Oh, don't be so dense, Arddun. What do you think?
We
were the barbarians! To the Romans, we're barbarians.

They could have killed us at any moment. Sold us. Raped us. Anything. We were lucky that nothing happened. And then we were really lucky when the emperor and empress set us free after a few years. We didn't
know
they were going to let us go. One moment, Einir and me were being the empress's little pets – she showed us off to guests the same as she did her monkeys and that leopard she kept. And then the next minute it was: you're free! We didn't know what to do. We were so used to obeying commands. That was about three years ago, and I'm sort of beginning to believe that I'm really free now – you know, forever?

It's just so weird, all of it.

I mean, to begin with, I'm a princess in Prydain, right. You know, with my own slaves and clothes and jewellery and stuff. Then suddenly, I'm a captive and I get carted off halfway across the world and become a foreigner and a barbarian. And then I'm a slave. A nobody with nothing. No past, no future. And finally, the most gracious emperor and empress set us free and then I'm a freedwoman, get that,
and
a foreign princess again. And I'm sort of like half a Roman now, but I'm also still a barbarian. Or, you know, people think I am. I mean – that's what makes it so weird. In Rome, they think I'm a barbarian because I'm from Prydain. And here, they think I'm a barbarian because I'm, like, half a Roman, with my clothes and my accent and my hairstyle and stuff.

And I don't know what I am.

I don't even know if I want to stay here or not. I get really homesick for Rome sometimes.

Yes, I know that I said that it can be really horrible there, and there's lots of things wrong with it, and the Romans aren't always that great... but there are people from all over the empire in Rome, loads of different sorts of foreigners; I like that. And all sorts of religions – like Marianism. And for example, we have a
woman
prophet, and priestesses. They're independent. Free. They do what they like. That's unusual.

Well – in Rome, they have different ideas about women. Very strange ideas. Like, they have an emperor and an empress, but it's only the
emperor
who has the power.

I don't know. She just sits there and looks pretty. I think empresses do a lot of secret scheming though, you know? I heard some stories about an empress who had her husband poisoned and then had her little son crowned emperor. And then while the son is small, she is the real ruler; only officially it's him, even if he's only a baby.

No, I'm not making this up! They were so
rude
to Mother! Even after they'd set us free, they only ever addressed Father as Ruler,
never
Mother! She was
so
cross. She nearly beheaded a couple of guards from the imperial palace. Do you know, they found
us
peculiar, because we always paid homage to the emperor
and
the empress.

But now, most of my friends there are Marians, and they're different. We're all different. Junia, and Nesmut and me. And Tryphaena and Tryphosa – they're missioners. They go about and preach the gospel to people who don't know about it yet. In between their trips, we all meet up. There aren't any Marian temples in Rome or anywhere else; nothing like that. We meet in people's houses. Junia has a flat in a tenement, so we often met there.

Oh, Arddun, I miss those evenings. We'd be all sitting there in the big room, with the shutters open and the noise and the food smells from the street coming in. Junia can read, so she would be reading out letters from other sisters in the church; or people would come with questions and then we'd have a discussion.

Oh, you know – about the sayings of Mary and Jesus and what they meant. For example, Jesus said that the best thing you can do is to give away all your things and money to the poor and be free to travel about the country like he did. And Mary says that having a free spirit and striving for wisdom is the best thing. So we'd discuss that – can you own things and be free in spirit? Can you give away everything but still have a spirit that's not free? And what do you do if you have to look after children or your old parents and can't just give it all up and go away? Or when you're a slave?

Stuff like that. Philosophical questions. Junia said that talking like that was a way of achieving wisdom. Other times people would come and tell us about their problems, like when someone was ill or they were worried about something, and then we'd all talk about that and try to help. Or sometimes sisters would come from other parts of the empire and tell us what it was like there...

Do you know what I'd
really
like to do, more than anything else in the world? Be a missioner with Nesmut, like Tryphaena and Tryphosa are. I'd love us to travel all through the empire together, see all the different countries and people and learn their languages and tell them about the message of Mary and Jesus. I want to tell people who own slaves why I don't think it's the right thing to do. And I want to tell the slaves that they have a spirit like everybody else. That we should all be free, but that at least in spirit, they can be as free as anybody.

I think that's what life is about. Being as free as you can, and striving for wisdom and justice. For everybody, everywhere.

Indeg

Ninth century

Indeg was the daughter of a Viking chieftain of the Isle of Man. Like her mother before her, she became a Christian in secret. When her father found out, he had his wife killed and made their daughter choose between God and death. Indeg, a martyr to her faith, declared that she would never abjure.

She was put in a boat and set adrift on the sea. The waves carried her miraculously to a spot near Abersoch on the Llyn Peninsula, where she lived as a hermit in a hut on the cliffs. On old maps, the place is still called Llanindeg.

The Christians had come to my mother when she was young. They were wandering monks, two of them, over from Ireland in a tiny boat. They didn't know anything about sailing.

‘The Lord guided us to you,' they told her as they landed on the shore at her feet. She was sixteen and impressionable, but it is true that their coracle was washed up on the only bit of sandy beach on miles and miles of rocky coastline.

‘The Lord guided us to you.' It would make you feel special, wouldn't it? It did her. She converted on the spot and was baptised in salt water. She would dedicate herself to the new Lord the two strangers had brought. She was already married and pregnant, too late now to give her life to religion in the way they told her was best: pure and virgin. So she decided to do the next best thing and bring up her children in the faith.

There were two sorts of tales my mother told me as I grew up: stories from the Holy Book; and the account of her conversion by the sea and the sayings of the holy Fathers. Of all the children she bore, I was the only one to survive; that made me all the more precious. Mine was the life she was going to give to the Lord; in secret if necessary. My father, who worshipped the old gods, wanted a good marriage for me. He had his eye on a chieftain in the Hebrides, an important man. Family ties with him would be desirable. So I was to make myself useful.

But my mother had other plans. She knew that there was no arguing with my father. She schemed and planned, and finally bribed a fisherman to spirit me away at night to a convent in Ireland. She liked the thought of giving me to Ireland whence had come her own salvation. She never asked me, or herself, whether I would like it. There never was an alternative. I had known all my life that I was going to be given to the Lord. She was an obedient wife in everything but this. Perhaps the idea of martyrdom appealed to her, because of course, once it was done, there was no hiding the deed from my father.

I didn't learn about her fate until later. For the time being, there I was on the boat in the middle of the night, the sea calm, the moon making a bright path on the dark waters, guiding us to Ireland, to my future in the bosom of the Lord. I knew what awaited me: a clean, unsullied life in prayer, no distractions from the world. I was to be luckier than my mother, who had had to sacrifice her virginity to do her parents' bidding. Unlike her, I would be able to keep my maidenhead intact. No husband for me but the Heavenly Bridegroom for whom my mother had yearned all those years, ever since that encounter with the holy Fathers on the beach.

So I came to Ireland and the convent, my salvation. I was welcomed into the community of devout women, marvelled at as a prized gift of my mother's giving. My mother had dedicated the most precious thing she had to the Lord: her only child.

I learned to bend my head and move my lips as if in constant prayer to escape the stares and the whispers.