CHAPTER ELEVEN

       SAVED?

      Life is a hard choice. You say you have no choice? Life is all you know? I don’t believe it. You remember the restfulness of not being, of no pain, no yearning. We may fear death, but we don’t always know if we can make it through life. It’s the suspense that keeps us hooked. We want to know what happens next. Of course, there’s a reason we don’t know. Because if we did, we might say forget it, just forget it. I’m not signing on for that.

      If you want to find out what happens next in my story, I’ll give you fair warning: the next part is tough. But if you persist, you may recognize your own story of times too hard to bear that seemed as though they would never end. You may find the hidden gifts of those times. You will know that I know all about it. And I won’t give you any crap. I won’t say things to you like god—or goddess—never gives us more than we can bear. I won’t lie. Sometimes life is just too much. When you want to lie down and die, I won’t judge you. I’ll sit and howl with you. Just remember: I am still here, I am telling you this story. And it’s not over.

      “Yes, Isis loves you, yes, Isis loves you,” crooned Old Nona. She had been my attendant since Succula left me. “Yes, Isis loves you, she tells you—”

      “Spare me,” I snapped, irritable as any convalescent.

      “Oh, she has, dearie. She has.”

      If spared meant lying on a pallet somewhere in the back of the Vine and Fig Tree instead of drowned or dead of fever, then yes. How I had even come to be here I did not know. The last I remembered, Domitia Tertia had publicly denied any knowledge of me. Old Nona wouldn’t or couldn’t answer any of my questions, and Succula had not returned. Nor had I seen any of the other whores. No doubt I was being punished. Maybe Domitia Tertia intended to demote me to sweeper or latrine cleaner. I didn’t know. And worse, I hardly cared. I rolled over, covered my ears and escaped into sleep again.

      I woke to the touch of someone’s lips on my cheek. A man’s kiss. I kept my eyes shut for as long as I could, wanting it to be him, the one I searched for in all my dreams.

      “Maeve,” the man said softly; the name was right, but not the voice.

      “Joseph?” I opened my eyes, and caught the look of tenderness that he quickly covered as he drew back from me. “Where have you been?”

      “You’re the one who needs to answer some questions. Why did you do it, Maeve? Why? Why! If only you had waited.”

      He was practically wringing his hands. What did it matter to him? I looked at this man, who had walked on the same ground as my beloved, this man who had the power to come and go, who traveled from Pretannia to Rome to Jerusalem whenever it suited his purposes. I wanted to rage at him, but I couldn’t summon the strength. I felt powerless, as I did in the dream, my feet tangled in the weeds.

      “You know why,” was all I said.

      He turned his face away as if I had struck him a blow; then, very deliberately, he looked at me again.

      “I deserve your reproach.”

      “No, Joseph,” I said wearily. “You don’t owe me anything.”

      “Except the truth.”

      Now he had my full attention. “What do you mean? When have you lied to me?”

      “I didn’t lie, I just didn’t tell you what I knew or rather what I suspected. Now it’s too late.”

      “What do you mean, it’s too late? What’s too late? Tell me.”

      “Listen then.” He sighed, and he sat down next to me on the floor; I could feel him wanting to touch me, but he wouldn’t let himself. “Do you remember you asked me if I had a son? I did once, a son and a wife whom I caused great suffering; they are both dead now, but that is another story.”

      “I’m sorry, Joseph.” I touched his arm lightly; he brushed it away without noticing as if a fly had lighted on him.

      “When I met you my interest was aroused. A Celt in Rome is not unusual, but one who knows Aramaic is highly unusual. I couldn’t help wondering…” He broke off; he was having difficulty with his narrative. “Let me start again. Some years ago on a trip to the Pretannic Isles, I met a young Jew in the company of three Hibernian women. I would have been curious anyway, but he reminded me of my son—”

      Joseph stopped again or maybe he didn’t. Maybe I just couldn’t hear him over the roar of surf in my ears, the whole salt ocean pressing behind my eyes. I clutched Joseph to keep from being utterly lost.

      “He’s alive,” I spoke without knowing I spoke. “He’s alive.”

      “Yes, Maeve, he’s alive, if we are talking about the same person. When I first saw him, he was distraught, beside himself. It was hard to make sense of what he was saying. A crazy story of being chosen as a human sacrifice, then being rescued by a woman he kept insisting was a prophetess in the Temple of Jerusalem. I was sure he had lost his mind.”

      He hadn’t lost his mind; or anyway his account was true insofar as he understood what had happened. An old woman had rescued him—me in disguise. When he had mistaken me for Anna the Prophetess in his drug-induced delirium, I had not contradicted him. I had borrowed her authority. “I sent you here, Yeshua,” I had said in Anna’s voice. “Now I’ve come to send you home.”

      “I felt responsible for him,” Joseph went on, “a fellow Jew, and the Hibernian women were clearly anxious to be shed of him.”

      In my hag form, I had also rescued them, political prisoners in rebellion against the druids. They had paid their debt to me by taking him with them across the Straits, just before the tide turned, and I raised the tidal bore that forced their pursuers to retreat.

      “They’d brought him to Glastonbury to dump him on the priestesses there, so, of course, I said I’d take him with me back to Palestine. But he didn’t want to go. He kept saying over and over, ‘I’ve got to go back. I should never have left her. How could I have left her?’ He couldn’t eat; he couldn’t sleep. He was ill and feverish.”

      I felt sick, just as he must have felt sick, wracked with guilt to think that I had caused him such anguish when I only meant to set him free.

      “The priestesses kept him under watch—under guard really. Finally, he begged them to use their arts to find out what had happened to the young woman he had left behind.”

      Joseph paused as if waiting for me to tell the other part of the story. I just nodded for him to go on. I couldn’t yet speak.

      “I don’t know if you can understand, being a Celt and accustomed to divination, what it meant for him to ask that. We have a story of a king who went to a witch—”

      “Saul,” I put in.

      “Ah, you know our stories. Yes, Saul. And so you know that after Saul went to the Witch of Endor, the Most High abandoned him.”

      My beloved had finally chosen me over his jealous god. When it was too late. When it could not help either of us. Oh, Esus, Esus.

      “What did they tell him?” I spoke so softly Joseph had to lean closer, close enough