PROLOGUE

       IN THE NIGHT

      This story begins in the night. There will be a dawn, I promise.

      I will also tell of mornings when I didn’t want to wake and noons full of harsh light and judgment. Sometimes there will be shade and ease in the afternoons, camaraderie and rest, even pleasure.

      There will be passion, I promise. Morning, noon, and night, season after season. Passion that breaks time open wide so that you can taste the mystery inside.

      This story begins in the night. It begins in the middle of the story. In the middle of the night. When the thief comes, when the bridegroom comes. When the bride has long since given up hope. When the foolish virgins are snoring. When only a whore is awake.

      The last stranger has gone home. That’s what we call the men who seek the priestess-whores at Temple of Isis Magdala—Temple Magdalen for short a.k.a. the hottest holy whorehouse in the Galilee. Magdala is the place for nightlife on Lake Gennesaret, The Lake of the Harp, as it’s called because of its shape. Many of the towns along the shore are fishing towns, but Magdala, sitting pretty under the cliffs of Mount Arbel, is right between two opposing worlds—the swanky new Roman spa city Tiberias and Capernaum, a Jewish stronghold. Romans come to Magdala to slum; Jews come to get out from under the noses of upright neighbors. Native gentiles from the region of the Gerasenes across the lake find their way here, too. Magdala is the place where all the clashing elements in this country of crossroads mix it up. A honky-tonk town full of juke joints, bars, and street brawls. Where else will you find Roman soldiers and Jewish guerilla fighters gaming together?

      At Temple Magdalen, on the outskirts of town, we welcome them all, because we remember what most religions teach but people prefer to forget—the stranger could be a god or an angel.

      Now the last stranger is gone for the night. Reginus has barred the gate. We need time to rest in these times of unrest. The priestess-whores are heading for bed. There’s a storm rising on the lake. I decide to go to the roof of what I call the tower. I lived so many years inside high narrow walls, I love the roof and sleep there every night I can. It’s too wild tonight to stay out, but I will watch for a while. The huge living darkness of the lake moves below me. Mount Arbel has my back. Even through the wind I can just hear the sound of our spring rising and flowing through the Temple towards the lake—the spring that called me to this place so far from the tiny island where I was born.

      “Red!” Reginus calls up the stairs. “There’s someone at the gate. I told him we were closed for the night, but he won’t go away.”

      “Is he a suppliant?” our other term for the stranger who comes seeking the goddess (even when he thinks he’s just looking for a whore).

      “No.” Reginus climbs the rest of the way up. “He says he has a sick man with him. That’s what makes me suspicious. It could be a trick. They might be robbers. It could be even an ambush. It’s so dark tonight I can’t tell if the thing slung across his donkey is a man or a sack of grain.”

      “I’ll go speak to him,” I say.

      “Domina,” says the man at the portal, using the Latin word for lady, but he is no Roman.