Bright Dark Madonna - Elizabeth Cunningham The Maeve Chronicles

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      Of course I knew, but all at once I was angry.

      “Jesus was healed at Temple Magdalen when no one else would touch him. And his mother prefers living here to—”

      “So Miriam is with you. They’ve all been worried sick about her.”

      “I’m not sure I believe that,” I retorted. “She’s been missing three months. If they were so worried about her, why didn’t they send someone here a long time ago?”

      “Don’t ask me,” Priscilla said, irritably. “I’m not privy to their counsels. I’m just a messenger. By the way, they told me, if I found her, to bring her back to Capernaum.”

      “Good luck,” I snorted. “Tell me the rest, Priscilla. You’re not just here to retrieve Miriam.”

      “They want the baby.”

      “I already know that, Priscilla, and I believe I’ve made my answer clear.”

      We sat for a moment, listening to the sound of the spring welling up and trickling down to the Gennesaret, quietly, calmly, sure of its course, its purpose.

      “I haven’t offered you food and drink,” I changed the subject. “When Judith finds out, she’ll be appalled.” I started to roll over unto all fours, so I could get up.

      “Don’t, Mary. Let me finish first. It’s so hard to say it.”

      “You’re just the messenger,” I said lightly as I could. “Go on.”

      “They say there’s danger to the child’s life. You must consider his safety.”

      His safety. For men, every child presumed male until proven guilty of being female.

      “They’ve hired a wet nurse and they’ve found a safe, remote place for the child to be raised.”

      “I’ve heard that argument before, too.” I made my voice sound calm, though I was starting to shake. “I don’t buy it. I don’t see why they’d be any better able to protect the child than me. I have powerful friends—”

      “They said you’d say that, and if you did….”

      She stopped and looked away from me.

      “Spit it out.”

      “They asked you to consider what Jesus would want for his son. They ask you to put aside your own selfish desires for the child’s sake, for Jesus’s sake.”

      For Jesus’s sake. At the invocation of his name, I felt a tremor that seemed to come right up out of the earth into my body, squeezing me so I lost my breath. And then it passed, and the earth was quiet again.

      “Is there any message you want me to take back, Mary?”

      Be wily as a serpent, I heard my beloved say, gentle as a dove, my dove.

      “Tell them I will pray about the matter.”

      And the earth shook again, and the spring gushed warm and easy from inside me.

      “Is that the whole message?”

      “Yes,” I said. “That’s it. Priscilla, I’m sorry. I think I need to rest. Help me up, and we’ll go find Judith and you can talk to Miriam….”

      The wind suddenly picked up on the lake; some doves roosting on the walls startled and spiraled into the air. Rain fell down between my legs and spattered dark on the dusty ground.

      “Mary,” Priscilla said to me, as if from a long way off, though she was right next to me. Then she called out. “Berta! Dido! Judith!”

      From all directions women came toward me. Priscilla gently handed me to them, as if I were a precious gift.

      “May it be well with you,” Priscilla whispered in my ear. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell them your time is come. I won’t. I’ll stall them as long as I can.”

      And she turned to go.

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      BLACK DOVE

      “COME ON, LIEBLING, come to the birthing cave. Do you hear that wind? I think it’s going to storm.”

      “No, no, not inside. I can’t go inside.”

      Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my friends exchanging glances, wondering if I was going off my head, as some women did in labor. But I was already heading for the tower roof.

      “Mary,” said Judith sharply, “it’s not seemly to give birth out in the open, like some wild animal, where any passer by might hear you screeching.”

      “They won’t hear anything over this wind,” said Dido grimly. “Red, be sensible. Must we all be fetching and carrying hot water and linen up and down the stairs?”

      I kept going. The pains were bringing it all back, the other birth inside the stone cairn. It was dark and smoky, and outside a storm raged, a storm I’d called to stop the druids from crossing the Menai Straits in pursuit of Esus. I’d called a tidal bore, too. My father had slipped from his horse, and walked into it. I had watched him disappear under the wave. That was the last thing I’d seen before the priestess dragged me to the cairn. I wasn’t going inside this time. I needed the sky; I needed to be alone.

      “Don’t come yet,” I said to my friends at the foot of the stairs. “I’ll call when I need help.”

      I stand on the roof, looking out over the lake that has turned black and white with cloud and wind, wild as the day the twelve had almost drowned with Jesus calmly asleep in the bow. I hardly feel the cold, and the wind exhilarates me, blowing away the image of the cairn, the sharp crow-like faces of the priestesses, well-meaning and ruthless. Up here on the roof the labor pains take on the quality of the elements—clouds uncoiling to take up the whole sky, waves rising and breaking, smashing against rock, and the wind with its beansidhe shrieking. I hardly register the labor pains as pain; they feel like power, as if I have taken the force of the storm into my body. I ride that power the way I rode the wind in my dove form when I went to the rescue of Peter’s tossing ship.

      Someone is singing; or is it only the wind. Someone is singing, a woman is singing, her voice is strong as earth, fierce as the storm, her breath fills my lungs, her song rings in my bones. There are no words, but the song is a call; she is calling and calling. At last he answers. He is with me; he has my back, he circles me round. I am the curved prow of ship and he the mast, and we sail on together, plowing the waves, as our child kicks strongly, swimming to meet us.

      The storm moves over the lake, over the mountains, and the sun rolls after it, leaving stars in its wake, and a late rising moon on the wane. My beloved holds me, even as my friends come and hold me, too. They join their voices with mine, and we sing the strange, sweet song of the stars with its piercing harmonies and dissonance. The song changes as I squat for the birth, and sing a song full of long O-O-O-O s, a song to open the way for the one who is coming, the one who is riding the red waves into dawn.

      There is the head, black and sleek as a silkie’s. As the body slides free, so easily, so easily, I catch the baby in my own hands. Cries flutter up from my friends. The doves wake and add their tender, yearning sounds. Then comes the baby’s first cry, more like a bellow, full of power and purpose. Dido and Berta help me turn her over and lift her into my arms.

      My daughter.

      The way she fits the curve of my arm, the way she latches unto my breast, so surely, so fiercely, my body remembers, and for a moment I am back in the cairn, cradling the bright head of my firstborn. Someone wipes my tears away, so that I can see this new one.

      She is dark, darker than her father. The tufts of hair on her head are black, too. But it is her eyes that arrest me, hold me still, so I can hardly breathe, hardly know where I am. They are golden, as golden as the leaves of the tree in the garden of Tir nan Og where I stood with my beloved. Her gaze is as strong and insistent

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