The Passion of Mary Magdalen. Elizabeth Cunningham
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in Aramaic.
“Please, there is nowhere else. I found the man naked and bleeding on the Jerusalem-Jericho road. He’d been beaten and left for dead. What was I to do? I couldn’t leave him there. I’ve been traveling for two days now, but no one will take him in. They don’t know who he is—a Jew, a Samaritan, an outlaw, a demoniac? I can’t keep caring for him myself. I don’t have the skill or the time. I’m just a merchant on my way to Tyre to meet a shipment. I’ve heard you welcome the stranger here. I’ve heard there are healers here.”
“If it’s a trick, it’s a trick,” I say to Reginus. “We’ll have to risk it. What you have heard is true,” I say through the portal. “In the name of Isis who welcomes all, I welcome you.”
Reginus and I open the gates, and the merchant leads his burdened donkey inside. It is a man and not a sack. That much is clear by the torch in the wall.
“Help me, both of you. The rain hasn’t started yet. I want to examine him first by the spring, and wash his wounds there. The water has healing properties,” I explain to the Samaritan. “I’ll get a lamp while you move him. Carefully.”
Even though I am a seasoned healer, I am taken aback by what I see. This man hasn’t just been beaten. He’s starving. I can count all his ribs. He is covered with sores; his hair is matted and thick with dust. The Samaritan has done his best to bind the man’s wounds, but he has bled through the bandages. I kneel down and place the lamp at his head, so I can get a better look at his face.
His face. My heart knows before my eyes; my eyes know before my mind. All I know is I am lost. There are lines here that go on for miles, for years. I am looking at his face, and what I see are his feet, brown as earth, beautiful, lost. I see the sun wheeling out of control, and the stars trying to find him. The moon flinging the ocean after him. And he is lost. No, I am. We are. From each other.
“Maeve, we are lovers,” he pleaded on another shore in a terrible dawn after a long night long ago.
“You are lovers,” said the old woman, “but not just of each other, you are the lovers of the world.”
“We can’t love if we’re apart,” he said.
“We can’t love unless we part,” I answered him.
I didn’t know then what I meant. But now here I am, here we are in this moment, and all the loss is lifting, changing, like leaves turned by the wind before the storm.
“Red, honey,” says Reginus. “Why are you crying? What’s wrong?”
“Whore’s tears,” I say. “Cure anything.”
I soak them up with the hem of my garment, and begin to wash his wounds.
And my own wounds.
By our wounds we are healed.
Here is the story, of my lost years and what I found, of our found years and what we lost. Stories unfold in time, backwards, forwards, every moment changing the meaning of all the others. This is a passion story—my passion, his, ours, yours. Passion breaks time open.
Come. Taste the mystery.
“What am I bid for Red here?” the pug-faced slave dealer harangued the thinning crowd. “Last lot of the day. Who bids for Red?”
“My name,” I said one more time, “is Maeve Rhuad.” I wasn’t sure if I was speaking in Celtic or Latin or Greek or even if I was speaking out loud. But that didn’t stop me. “I am the daughter of the Warrior Witches of Tir na mBan, daughters of the Cailleach, daughter of the goddess Bride, daughter of—”
“Put a sock in it, Red,” muttered Pug Face (or the first century street Latin equivalent). “How many times I gotta tell you, you ain’t got no lineage now. You’re property. Mine. Until I unload you. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep your mouth shut and look pretty.”
Immediately I opened my mouth again. Then I thought better of it. Confrontation and defiance hadn’t gotten me anywhere—except shackled and displayed on a slave block at the southwest corner of the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the heart of the Roman Forum.
Not that I knew the exact address then; I wasn’t even certain I was in Rome, but I had strong suspicions. All my life I had been taught to hate all things Roman. Only Rome could be as hellish as this place appeared to me. You must understand; I had never, ever been in a city before, unless you count the port at Ostia where I was captured. Until now my knowledge of architecture was limited to round wattle and daub huts. You may think I’m an ignorant barbarian. The Romans certainly did. In fact, I had been kicked out of one of the finest schools in the world, the druid college on the Isle of Mona, where I had been studying literature, medicine, and law. So there. Not that I appreciated the opportunity when I had it. Not that I could ever go back. Not only had I been expelled and exiled—sent beyond the ninth wave as the druids so poetically put it—they were also mighty particular about their students bearing no taint of slavery.
Now here I was in the heart of the first century’s Evil Empire—on sale.
“A fine female specimen, no more than fourteen years old.” In fact I was closer to nineteen, but false advertising is nothing new. “In prime condition. Good breeder, would make an excellent wet nurse.” Here he slipped his hand into my rag of a tunic and whipped out a breast, aiming it at the crowd as if about to demonstrate. “What is more, the merchandise in question is a novica.” Translation: a first-time slave, a desirable commodity especially when young. “Fresh from Sardinia,” he added for good measure. Everyone there but me knew that Sardinia was a penal colony; to be a slave in Rome was definitely a step up.
“Or so you’d have us believe,” said a balding man, swathed in complicated folds of white fringed with purple that I would later come to know as a toga worn only by men of senatorial rank. “Along with all the other lies you’ve written on that plaque around her lovely neck.”
I had wondered about that. Though I speak five languages, I read only ogham, the sacred druid alphabet.
“I’ve a good mind to set the aedile on you for misrepresenting your wares,” the man continued wagging a threatening finger. “If that girl has ever seen Sardinia it was only on the way from Gaul—or worse. I know a Celt when I see one. They are useless as slaves, untrainable and some of them are downright treacherous.”
I considered loosing one of the battle cries for which my people are famous—the kind that make Roman knees rattle and Roman testicles retract, but then I thought better of it. Anything would be preferable to the holding tank, a lightless back room of a fish shop where I had woken bound and gagged after having been raped, beaten (carefully so as to leave no marks) and drugged into a reasonable facsimile of submission.
“Now, now, now, there’s no cause for that. You got no right to drive away a man’s custom, sir. Red here is no savage. Why she speaks Latin like a senator. Go on, Red, say something for the gentleman.”
He smiled for the benefit of the crowd and yanked my chain hard enough to remind me who was shackled and who wasn’t. Like I didn’t know. Still, I found, I couldn’t resist. I turned to him.
“Your father,” I said in my sweetest, clearest voice, “fucked a sheep, and your mother did it with a donkey.”
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