The Fourth Mary
CHAPTER 1
We lived in a house by the North Wall of Jerusalem. It was not a great house although my mistress was rich and very powerful. More powerful than most people knew, because she ruled the thieves’ quarter, and all the thieves and the assassins. She herself was a thief, and a blackmailer, and an extortioner of money. All things that could be squeezed for profit paid it to her. The tax gatherers, the money changers in the Temple, the sellers of animals and doves for sacrifice, the thieves themselves who were subject to her, the receivers of stolen goods, the bandits who had taken refuge in Jerusalem when the Roman authorities began to control the hills, all these and many others paid her tribute. Her lovers; rich Greeks and Romans who told her secrets or simply gave her money and jewels and gold and silver ornaments. Money flowed to her as rivers flow to the sea.
Nevertheless, we lived in a modest house surrounded by a high wall, and I will tell you what the house was like so that if you never saw Jerusalem before the Roman Titus destroyed it you may understand our life there and how it all seemed to me as a young servant, Mary’s handmaid. I was not truly a servant, but almost a friend, and above the other girl servants. But first, the house. It lay four square, with the great gate of the courtyard facing south. As you entered the gate you found yourself in an arched entrance with a roof above, and the courtyard in front of you. The servants’ quarters, for Philip the Eunuch, and Olympias the housekeeper, who was my mother, and the two servant girls Euphrosine and Anna, lay on your right hand. On your left was the ante room, and the entrance to the real house. Beyond the ante room one turned right to find store rooms and such things, or one passed along the loggia surrounding the courtyard, and came to the bathing rooms, first the hot room, with its heated pool, and then to the cold room, almost the same in shape and size, but where the water in the pool was cold. Each pool was made out of one solid block of green marble, six feet long by three feet wide, and three feet deep, and my mistress would spend hours there, while I attended her.
Beyond those rooms one turned right along the loggia. This was the north side of the house and if you turned to your right again you would see the entrance archway across the courtyard. But on your left was the great room of the house, the room of the Fresco as we called it. Here my mistress spent the most of her time, and I would be with her singing or playing the flute or listening to her talk, or sitting silently with her while she thought of the God whose picture was in the Fresco. She was His High Priestess, and I was His initiate, and then His priestess, before all came to an end. But I go before myself.
The Fresco filled one wall of the room, almost twenty feet long. The room itself was sparsely furnished because my mistress liked it so. Polished woods, and carpets both on the shining floor and as wall hangings on the other walls, or on the pillars that supported the roof. Glowing carpets from Persia and eastern cities, and the nomad camps. Caravans brought them to her as tribute and she changed them often.
There were silver and gold ornaments on low tables, and trays and drinking cups and jugs of silver and in the winter a brazier burned by each pillar, with incense on the charcoals to make the room sweet smelling. But the Fresco was the true ornament of the room. It was of Dionysus and the Frenzied Women, hunting a faun. I say "It was". Perhaps it still is, perhaps it survived the Romans, and someone else lives in that house now, and thinks the painting beautiful, or ugly. Perhaps they have covered it. The God Dionysus, who was our God, was crowned with vine leaves and He was playing a pipe, sitting cross legged on a moss covered rock among the trees of a forest. While he played the women ran half naked, mad with the God's playing, dressed in leaves and faun skins, their faces hideous, or if you believed, then beautiful with madness, but I no longer believe in Him, or in that sort of beauty. Their hair was tangled like writhing snakes and their eyes started from their heads. Their fingers reached out like claws to catch the faun they were hunting, and you could see the faun's terror in its eyes, the writhe and wrinkling back of its poor lips, the hunched effort of its hind quarters as it strove to escape. But their hands were already touching it, while the God played for them, and for the faun's death by being torn apart and eaten.
Some of the women carried lit torches, that glowed red and yellow among the night colours of the wood. Sullen browns, dark greens, and here and there a sudden flash of vividness where torch light fell, bright green of leaves, bright brown of a tree bole or a branch. It was a powerful work. And more powerful than you might think if you were not an initiate. It glowed with power. It had been painted under the inspiration of the God and it controlled the house. When visitors came who should not see it I drew dark red velvet curtains over it They ran on rings and hung heavy and still.
At the far end of this Fresco room. farthest from the bath rooms, there was a part where my mistress ate. and I ate with her, served by Anna the serving girl Anna and her sister Euphrosine were not much more than children, Anna fifteen, and Euphrosine fourteen Tall, thin, pale girls with fair hair Greek from one of the towns of the Decapolis, and always homesick and pining for their mother I despised them very much . But then, I was eighteen, and a grown woman, and superior to them in the house and in every other way. They are not very important in this story, except that sometimes I played with them, or punished them, and they amused me a little, as I think now I amused my mistress.
Beyond the dining part of the room one entered the kitchens through a curtained doorway. The principal kitchen was a square room with a cooking pit in the middle of the floor. Roasting spits lay across the pit, and there were chains and pulleys above it to hang kettles on and bronze cooking pots. There were also tripods with charcoal braziers for grilling meat and toasting cakes. Beyond the main kitchen were other places for the immediate stores, and wine and such things, and places to wash the dishes. I did not concern myself with any of that. All of this was ruled by Olympias my mother, the housekeeper. She had once been nurse to my mistress's mother, Berenike, and then to my mistress. She it was who taught my mistress's mother to steal and become a thief and a receiver of stolen things. She did it because she herself liked stealing, and money, and all things that money can buy.
She was short and fat and greedy and breathless and I did not like her much Nor did she like me although I was her child. She dyed her hair black and clacked about the house and the courtyard in old leather slippers, and prevented me from doing what I liked with Anna and Euphrosine. Or as often as she could she prevented it. The only person in the world she had ever really loved was my mistress. As if my mistress was her true child and I was just a stranger imposed on her by destiny. She did not even know who my father was, except that he was a Greek like herself. And she did not believe in the Cult, although she knew about it. She disapproved of it, and would have prevented me from becoming an initiate if she could, but she was afraid of my mistress, who was of course also hers. She herself believed in Zeus, and all the Greek gods, and prayed to them as she went about in her slippers.
Under Olympias the kitchen matters were seen to by the Greek cook, Georgiakis. He came every day at dawn, and left at sunset. For helpers, beside Euphrosine, he had two small boys, Greek children of eleven or twelve years old. I think I remember that they were brothers, but I never had any dealings with them, nor with any of the kitchen arrangements. I was not really a servant as you understand the word. I was a handmaid, an attendant.
But I am telling you about the house. By now you have travelled most of the way round the courtyard, and are coming back towards the entrance gates. Beyond the kitchens lie the servants' quarters, where Olympias and the two serving girls sleep, and Philip the Steward is supposed to sleep, although he never does. I sleep with my mistress, upstairs in the turret room, at the north west corner of the roof. The stairs to this room rise up from the courtyard on the north side, outside the loggia and the Fresco room.
So, that is the house, except for the courtyard. And of course in the pleasant weather the courtyard is part of the house and the best part of it. It is not large - Simon interrupts me to say that I have changed tenses from past to present, and that this is not right in a book. But I was never an educated woman, and I do not care about tenses. As I reflect about the past it becomes like the present for me, and all comes back as if I was young again, eighteen, and small and plumply made, with dark vivid eyes, and black curling hair that my mistress loved to play with and run through her hands like silk, although it was much stronger than silk, and shining black. Now as I have told you I am old, and my hair is white, and I have grown thin from fasting. But it is well for old women to fast, especially if they have sinned very greatly.
But the courtyard. It is not great. Perhaps it is twenty feet from side to side, and end to end. A square, with a fish pond four feet across in the centre, with a few ancient carp in it, grown white as I have now. Carp live to an enormous age and it could be they are still alive, as I am. But they were old then. Their pond was shaded by an old fig tree. In the north west corner of the courtyard were the stairs, as I have told you. In the north east corner, near the kitchens, there was the well, very deep, with pure water. Euphrosine's task was to haul up the water in a leather bucket, and fill the house-hold jars, and the kitchen pots and all that sort of thing. She hated doing it, because her arms were so thin. But what are servants for?
In the south east corner there was a tall plane tree. It rose up high above the flat roof of the house, that had a low parapet to prevent one falling off the roof into the streets below, and the pigeons we kept circled round and round the tree all day long, cooing and bubbling the way pigeons do. Their dovecot was on the roof near to it, above the servants' sleeping quarters. The dovecot is made of stone, with little arched windows in it so that the doves can enter and leave at their will. There are about a dozen of them, and they are sacred to Aphrodite because they love so much. Not the cool Aphrodite of the Greeks, but Pandemos, the Aphrodite who makes men and women burn with lust, and who is herself the Bride of Dionysus. Or was. I think that now they are both dead, and have vanished into nothingness, both she and Dionysus, who was my God.
In the south west corner of the courtyard there was an enclosure for the sacred cockerels, six black ones, sacred to Dionysus, exactly like the ones for the weekly sacrifice, at the Ceremony each Friday. But my mistress would not let these cocks be killed. There were always six, which is the right number. Every morning, as soon as she got up, which was not as soon as it should have been, my mother Olympias would feed these cockerels, and the pigeons, and the carp, feeding all of them with grain soaked in wine. My mistress blessed the grain the night before, or when she felt like it. A stranger coming into the courtyard would have seen only an old woman feeding birds and fish But of course it was much more than that. It was a ceremony, and it helped to protect the house.
Elsewhere in the courtyard there were stone tubs of flowers, and flower beds, and these were attended to by the gardener. Enoch, older brother to Georgiakis the cook. He was thirty four years old, and very handsome, with curly, dark gold hair, and a golden beard. He had grey green eyes, and was tall and very strong. The two servant girls worshipped him, and they used to try and touch him when he passed them and they would tremble and dream about him. They liked Georgiakis too, but not so much, because he was not so big or so handsome, and was fattish from being a cook. I liked neither the one nor the other. I did not dislike them, but I was never made for loving men. Like Georgiakis, Enoch came every day at dawn, and went home at dusk with his brother and the two small boys. After dusk my mistress liked the courtyard to be empty, and free for her. She would sit on a stone bench under the plane tree sometimes, on velvet cushions, and listen to the doves and the cockerels, or simply dream about riches.
I think I have told you now about the whole house, except for my mistress's bedroom, where she slept and made love, and I slept at her feet. Or at least I did so at the beginning of what I am about to tell you. It is good to know how things look, and what the people were like and who they were, so that you can understand everything perfectly. So. The bedroom was not a great room. No more than fifteen foot in each direction, and all it contained was a huge bed, made of ebony and ivory, five feet across and six feet long, with rugs and cushions and silk covers, and satin pillows, and white furs that were more for luxury than warmth. She liked to make love with such things round her, Her clothes were kept downstairs in cupboards. The only other things in the bedroom were my pallet at the foot of her bed, and a table with a strong iron box on it, always locked, that held her personal jewels. It was a big box, and very full. I could lift it, but only just. She liked to play with precious things, pouring the stones onto the white furs. Red rubies, emeralds, opals that glowed like fire, diamonds, dark saphires, every kind of precious stone, set in necklaces and ear rings, finger rings and bracelets, anklets and girdles. They were worth a ransom, the contents of that box, a great fortune. I know, because I stole them in the end, and have lived on them ever since. They made me a rich woman, although not a happy one. But who can be happy in this life, and when they have seen such things as I have seen? And done such things - but that belongs much later in this story.
Now that I have told you of the house, and of some of the people who lived in it, let me complete my account. First, Philip the Steward. who had been bought by my mistress's mother, Berenike, when he was already made a eunuch. He was an Egyptian, a eunuch from his childhood, although of the kind that can still give and experience pleasure. Only he could not have children. Which was no loss to him because he did not like women, only boys. When he slept with women, which he did almost every night. it was for business and not for pleasure. He controlled some prostitutes in the thieves' quarter of the city that lay very near to us. Each night when he was supposed to go to his own bed in his Steward's small room in the servants' quarters, he would slip away from the house about his own business as a pimp, and Olympias my mother, or I, would bolt and bar the great courtyard gate behind him, just as someone, usually my mother, would let him in in the morning, at the same time that Enoch the gardener and Georgiakis the cook and the two small kitchen boys arrived. My mistress pretended not to know that this happened, but of course she did. She drew money from the prostitutes herself, in different ways, but it amused her to pretend to be deceived. A great many strange things amused her.
Philip himself was a sour kind of man, perhaps because of being made a eunuch, and known to be one. People despise eunuchs, which is an unjust thing since they had no fault in the matter. But people do, as you know yourself. Philip had also been a slave, and was now a freedman. An Egyptian by birth, with a shaven head, now more bald than shaven although he was not as old as my mother - Simon tells me again about my tenses, but what do they matter? I have never understood grammar. And by interrupting me he makes me forget where I am. Yes, he was an Egyptian with a bald head, tall and rather stooped and thin with bowed shoulders and a yellowish skin and scalp. He was sly and scornful, despising everyone, even my mistress, whom he had seen grow up. He worshipped Isis and felt She would protect him against everything, as perhaps She did. I do not know what happened to him in the end. I suppose he died. He was a thief as well as a pimp, and feared in the thieves' world of Jerusalem. He thought that this was on his own account, but of course it was not. It was because of my mistress, who was also his mistress. If she had breathed a word, or even smiled that she was tired of him, he would have been killed.
Next of the household that remains, and he was truly of the household, and not just a dog, there was Shaitan the Guardian, the watch dog, chained up to a marble kennel under the stairs leading up to the roof and my mistress's bedroom. No one could go up to her when she lay in bed without passing Shaitan. And no one could pass him if he did not permit it to be done. He was the largest dog I have ever seen. He too came with me in the end, like the jewels, although I was always afraid of him. He was black from nose to tail tip, and stood higher than my waist when he was on all fours. If he rose up on his hind legs he was as tall as a man. It was he who tore Judas's arm. My mistress fed him with raw meat, sometimes with pig meat that she brought from the Ceremony, or with market meat. Anna and Euphrosine would not go near him, and even my mother and Philip were afraid of him,
Finally there was Baruch ben Isaac. You could not say that he was of the household, and yet he was in a way. He was my mistress's chief lover. He was a Jew, although not of the Orthodox kind, a long way from it. He belonged to the Cult, and was a priest in it and a Celebrant. Twenty six years old, and handsome enough, smoothly fleshed, and full fleshed too as I was in those days. He had shining dark eyes like pools of oil and rich red lips that shone through his black curling beard, and his hair was thick and soft and a duller black than his beard. He was quite tall, about five foot six inches, the same height as my mistress. I am only five feet. Less now, that I have shrunk a little with age.
By profession he was a doctor of medicine, of Roman medicine as they call it today, although it was really Greek medicine. Most right things come from Greece. It is the last pride that I have left, being Greek. There are no Greek here in this village. But where was I?
He was a doctor of medicine, as I said, but he did not practise as a doctor. He was an official in the Roman Treasury, which he found more profitable than curing people of aches and fevers. He stole a great deal of money, and enjoyed it. He met my mistress in the Cult, at the Ceremonies, and soon became her lover in bed as well as on the Stones as all the Celebrants did. But I will tell you about the Stones in their place. He would call to the house every day, officially as a doctor, if he was ever questioned about it, to look after Mary's health, although that was perfect. I would let him in and he would take supper with my mistress while I sat with them and both served them from the dishes and ate myself. What happened afterwards I shall tell you in a little while. But first I must tell you about my mistress.
At this time she was over thirty years old, which is already old for a woman who wishes to be loved. But she was as perfect in her beauty then as she could ever have been. Indeed, I think she must have been more beautiful at that age than when she was a girl. All men said so. When she walked in the City even though her face was covered men followed her at a distance. Until they learned who she was, and if they were wise hurried away, or treated her with great respect. Her name was Mary, as I have told you, just as my name is Mary. She was Mary the mistress, and I was Mary the handmaid. Her cousin, who was also Mary, was known as Mary of Magdala, in part to distinguish her from my mistress. But I will tell you of that Mary in her place. Except to say here that both were born in the town of Magdala which is in Galilee, near the lake. But my mistress had been brought to Jerusalem by her mother Berenike when she was ten years old, and had lived there ever since except for her travels as High Priestess, and Dancer for Dionysus.
To look at she was a tall woman with red hair like dark fire and green eyes. and very supple as she moved. But she was not a woman whose appearance mattered. It was the force in her, the power of the God. She was His High Priestess and she belonged to Him, and to be near her was to know it. It was frightening to be her handmaid, and wonderful. All her power came from the God, and He burned and glowed in her like fire. Even those who did not know all about her, who saw her only as a beautiful woman, felt this power. Those who knew more, who knew her as Mary the Thief the mistress of assassins, they feared her for their lives But those who knew all of her, and Who she was, they feared for their souls.
Her mother Berenike had been a High Priestess before her, for the district about Jerusalem. There were many of the Cult thereabouts, many Jews too, and Greeks, and foreigners. It was a powerful thing. All the thieves who wanted to get on in the world belonged to it, and the prostitutes, and many respectable people like Baruch. It was a way of life, not just a belief like my mother's that there are gods and goddesses. Our God was real.
But Berenike, who died when I was still a small child, many years before this story, she did not want her daughter to belong to the Cult. There were many reasons for that I suppose. Perhaps she was never truly one with the God. And she never loved Mary. She only wanted her daughter to make a rich marriage with a Greek family, a respectable one of position in the Decapolis, or something like that. Perhaps she even knew what would happen in the end. How can one tell? But the God was too powerful to be denied. Mary my mistress had no wish for any such life. She made love to the slave boys in her mother's house as soon as she was able to receive them, and by the time she was fourteen she was pregnant by one of them. It was a terrible thing, and Olympias my mother had to abort her, and she nearly died. But she became pregnant again the following year, by another slave, and Berenike her mother realised that there was no help for it, that she belonged already to the God.
She had her trained by another priestess. She herself would not have any part of it. And as soon as Mary's training began she proved to all that she would be a priestess such as they had never known. They could not hold her back for the steps of initiation. As if she knew beforehand all she must do and say. She began to glow with her power, as I shall describe to you later.
When she was eighteen everyone knew that she must be High Priestess, and that her mother must go to join the God. On her birthday she was chosen, and that friday she celebrated for the first time, and her mother killed herself an hour or so afterwards, as she had to do, cutting her throat with her own moon knife on one of the Stones. There cannot be two High Priestesses for one place, as you probably know. Then Mary set to work to make her authority greater than her mother's had ever been.
She was a dancer as well as other things, having been trained to that by her mother, because a woman should know how to dance. And she formed a company of dancers, all of them Initiates of the Cult, about twenty women and girls, and another forty servants and flute players and other musicians. She could afford this, because her mother had become rich as a thief and as a receiver of stolen goods, and she herself had made money in the same way. Money always flowed to them. Both to mother and to daughter.
So, taking Olympias my mother, and myself as a child of five years old, and Philip the Eunuch who was then newly freed after Berenike's death, and other slaves and servants. Mary the High Priestess set out on travels that lasted for five years.
She came back to Jerusalem of course, to see to her money affairs, and to the Cult in Jerusalem, that others looked after while she was away, but most of the time she journeyed with her dancers. She went as far north as Smyrna, in Asia Minor, and as far west as Cyprus across the sea, Aphrodite's land, and beyond that to Athens, although she always feared the sea and was sick until she thought she would die when the boat heaved in storms. In the East she was in Babylon that was once a great city, and saw the River. And in the south she travelled as far as Egyptian Thebes, and Alexandria that the God Alexander built for himself. That is a country of Gods. Isis lives there. And Her Son. And Her Enemy. Philip told me about them.
On these travels she gave dancing shows, bringing costumes and scenery by the cart load, and on pack mules, all the dancers and musicians riding in hooded carts, while the servants rode on asses, or walked, and the guards rode on horseback, carrying spears. You needed guards in those days, she used to tell me, the caravan trails were not safe. No more they are now of course, and things grow worse. But what does an old woman care if every traveller is murdered? I am not going travelling.
Where was I? The light is going, and Simon is complaining, but I must complete my story very soon and he must write by lamp light if need be. I have the feeling that I have not many days of daylight by which to tell it. I have left it very late. The journeys. Yes. She travelled very far, north, west, east, and south, returning after each journey to Jerusalem both richer and more powerful than when she left. She made money from her theatre shows. From lovers that she and her dancers took in each foreign city. She always made money. But she also made it as High Priestess. For that was why she travelled in reality. To make herself mistress of all the areas of the Cult that she could reach. Dionysus is worshipped throughout the world, or He was once, and each country, and each province in a country, has its own High Priestess and High Priest, its own priests and priestesses and initiates, and no lathering of believers has authority over any other, unless there is some especial reason. Mary's power was such a reason. No High Priestess had ever had such power, and she wished to demonstrate it.
This she did first in the theatres. The ordinary people, the common audience, they saw only a dancing show, with Mary as its greatest attraction. She would dance at the end, the dance of the Seven Veils. But for initiates, who knew what that dance was and meant, it was infinitely more than a show. It was a Ceremony, and one of great power, the greatest they were ever likely to have seen. They would have seen her as she really was, they would have seen her aura, the dark violet light that surrounded her as she performed the friday Ceremony. As the veils fell one by one they would have seen that light pulse stronger, until it reached out and fastened them to their seats in the audience, and they could not breathe for wonder.
After the theatre show was done, those who had recognised her would bring her their submission, and that of their fellow believers. And money they would bring her gifts of money, and gold and silver, and jewels. She became very rich. By the time she was twenty five years old she was the richest woman in Jerusalem, by far and far. And the most powerful High Priestess in the known world. They say there are other worlds, on the other side of Ocean, but who knows if that can be true? In this world she was the Great One, the bride of the God, His chosen. All others were pale beside her.
So, at twenty five years old she settled in Jerusalem, and a year later bought the house I have described to you, and gave up travelling. From then on she allowed others to travel to see her. They came often, still bringing gifts. I tell you, all the things that men value flowed to her as water flows down hill.
Philip, and my mother Olympias, came with her of course, and as for me, I came back to Jerusalem as if it was a strange place. We had seen so much of the world, and of foreign peoples, and of my mother's own Greek nation. But I was happy to come back. I was ten years old, and already I loved my mistress as I had never loved my mother. In Jerusalem I knew that I would see her every day, and be close to her, as had not been possible while we travelled and she was busy with her theatre affairs and all that had to be done for them, and for the journeys.
And I not only loved her already, and feared her, and was drawn to her by the stirrings of my body, that even a child of nine or ten years old can feel. I knew that she and I were bound together by something else. That we belonged to the same Spirit Clan, or so I thought of it then. Those Clans that the Egyptians call Totems, and that others call a Binding together of Souls.
We belonged, she and I, as our mothers both did, to the Hornet Clan. It is an old, old belief. Older than Dionysus. Older than Aphrodite of the lusts, or any Cult or Religion that I ever heard of. It is not a Cult, indeed, it simply is. The fact that most people no longer believe in such things does not make any difference to its truth. If a people should cease to believe in the sea because their forefathers had long ago gone to live in the midst of the desert, it would not make the sea untrue. It is living in cities, among crowds of people, that has destroyed belief in the Spirit Cans. But it has not destroyed the fact. Perhaps one needed simplicity of soul to believe, and gain protection and perhaps my mistress and I once had that, and the Mistress of All Things took pity on us even when we lost our innocence, and kept Her protection round us. For that is one of the purposes of the Clans, to have the protection of the Mistress, and some of those creatures that She commands.
But as I say, in these recent times, and for long before I was born, few people still believed. I was blessed that my mother was among those few, and I think that Mary was blessed too that her mother kept the old truth alive, despite what happened in the end. It did not make much difference to their lives, neither to Berenike, Mary's mother, nor to my mother, Olympias. But they did believe, along with Berenike's faith in the Cult, and my mother's in Zeus, and all the pantheon of the Greeks. They belonged. And thought it natural that their children should be brought to the Mother when the time was correct, which is at puberty. Mary was brought to Her when she was twelve, or even less. And I when I was thirteen. I was brought out into the desert and presented to the Hornets, because they are the Messengers, and it was in their shape that we saw our Clan, and our Mother and Mistress. The Lady of the Hornets. So I saw Her then, at least.
I had to kneel in front of a hollow tree that contained a hornets' nest, and thrust in my hands, and put my face close to the tree trunk, and stay like that for an hour, praying to the Mother, while my mother Olympias watched over me. I was very frightened, I can promise you. The hornets crawled on me, over my arms and body, my breast and my throat, because I was naked to the waist, and I felt each moment that I was going to be stung, and that I would die of it, of a hundred stings that would burn like fire. But my mother told me that the hornets were only acquainting themselves with my smell, and that I must not fear them or they would be offended. They would in my adult life be the messengers of our Great Mistress, and theirs, Who controls all things that creep and fly. And more besides, much more, as I have discovered since. But then I only knew of Her as the Mistress of the Hornets, and of our Spirit Clan.
Of course I knew before this Presentation, long before it, that I was of Her people, and that I would one day be brought to Her, and that my worldly mistress, Mary the Thief, also belonged, as my mother did. I knew that we three shared this secret, so that from as long ago as I can remember, since I was first told the beginnings of such matters,. I knew that more bound me to Mary than could bind ordinary servants. That in this matter we would be, not equals certainly, but like sisters, I younger and she older. And afterwards, after my Presentation, she sometimes acknowledged it, and even called me Sister.
For instance, in the summer, in the courtyard, wasps and bees and hornets would come buzzing about the fig tree and the ripe fruit, or about the honey jar that I would set out for them, and she and I would call them to us. We would hold out our hands and they would come and settle on our palms. and even allow us to close our fists on them as if we meant to crush them. Then we would open our fingers and they would shake their wings a little and fly off gladly. Olympias my mother could do it too, if she wanted, but she never did, and was impatient with me for doing it. She said to me that we should not allow such things to be seen by others. But both Mary and I liked doing it in front of people because it frightened them. And made them afraid even of me. Georgiakis the cook, for example and Enoch the gardener. Even Philip the Steward was a little afraid when he saw such things. They all thought it a kind of witchcraft, and spat over their thumbs at it. Baruch ben Isaac hated to see us doing it, and told us that one day one of us would be so badly stung we might die of it.
But of course we were never stung. Still today I can pick up a desert scorpion by her tail, or one of the little vipers of the rocks, and kiss it, or let it crawl on my body, and it will not injure me. Instead it shivers with a kind of pleasure and gratitude that I have noticed it. Because we both belong to the same Spirit, the same Great Mistress. Only for Mary it was different, as you shall see. But that is to run far ahead of this story.
Where was I, Simon? Of course, of course. I was telling you of our coming back to Jerusalem when I was ten years old, and of how glad I was. Am I not right? And of how I loved and feared my mistress, Mary. Yes, that was it. Go on, Simon, go on. Write all down as I tell it. About my mistress and myself. I was ten, and we were returned to Jerusalem. Two years later I became her servant, and two years after that again, when I was already her Sister in the Clan, she made me her handmaid and attendant, and so I remained until the end, as you will read, if you do read this book.
At that time she was already doing in Jerusalem, among the thieves and murderers, the prostitutes and the tax collectors, the inn keepers and the pimps and the brothel keepers and receivers of stolen goods, what she had done throughout Greece and all our part of the World, among the members of the Cult. With the force of the Cult and the God behind her, like shields and weapons, she made herself mistress of the underworld of the City. And made herself feared throughout it, not only in the underworld and thieves' quarter, but wherever she wished to be feared. In the matter of our house, for example. She bought it from a Jewish merchant at half its proper value.
One day she saw it, and liked it, and told the owner that he must sell it to her, and at such a price, and not a shekel more. Half the price it should have been, as I have said. He almost died of apoplexy, but he sold to her, and was glad to escape with his half weight of shekels, and his throat uncut. That was how she did all her business. She threatened. Or merely smiled. And those who knew her feared her smile more than her threats. And hastened to do as they were told. Some of them for fear of the Cult and its members, some for fear of the assassins she could buy for the price of a goat skin of cheap wine. And some because they knew that she had such power that she did not need assassins, or help from the Cult members, or from anyone. But whatever the reasoning behind their fear, they feared her, and gave to her with trembling hands, whatever she asked.
And all the while she lived in our modest house as if she was not rich or powerful at all, but merely a woman who had made money as a dancer, and had retired comfortably off to enjoy her middle age, and her lovers and her leisure. So the Jewish authorities thought of her, if they thought of her ever. So would the Romans have done, even her Roman lovers, who saw the proofs of her wealth, or some of them, in the gold and silver of her ornaments, in her bearing, in the bearing of those who spoke to her while they, the lovers, were in hearing.
That kind of pretense of secrecy amused her. Indeed secrecy of any kind amused her. She did not long to show her power to the world, only to possess it, and use it. Just as she did not care to show her wealth and her treasures to the world. Even the place where she kept her real wealth was a secret. The iron strong box of jewels in her bedroom was nothing, it contained only her toys. Her treasure was buried deep in the thieves' quarter, in a low, unnoticeable house. It was dark, and squalid looking, and I know nothing more of it, because she never brought me inside it. I imagine that there were cellars underneath it, and perhaps they spread out far beneath other houses, and she owned them all. Who can tell now? Even my scribe Simon, who is the son of Bar Abbas, does not know anything of the matter. How should he? He was not even born then.
And for myself, as I say, I was never in the house. She would leave me outside in the alleyway, to wait for her, and go in with Bar Abbas and a mute Nubian slave of his, or perhaps of hers, I never knew that either. The slave would carry in the sacks of coin and precious things that she wanted hidden away and would come out after a time to sit with me in the shade. A time more, and my mistress and Bar Abbas would come out, and he would go one way, and we another, and she would say nothing about it to me, of what was in the sacks, or what she had done with them, or anything about the squalid house and what lay inside it, or beneath it. Although she would quite willingly talk about Bar Abbas. For a long time, almost two years in all, he was her chief helper and captain in the City's underworld. But I shall tell you about him at another time. Now there is only one other thing to tell you about her past. And that is something so strange that it frightens me again as I prepare to tell it. Truly there is only one God.
I have told you already that her mother Berenike was a thief, and a receiver of stolen things, before Mary was born, and for long after. Olympias had taught her to steal as a child, and she liked it, and made it her way of life, although her own parents had been respectable people, merchants I think. She stole for the joy of it, as well as for gain.
In any event, one day when Mary was six years old, Berenike her mother went travelling on thieves' business, accompanied by Olympias my mother who was still quite young herself then, and by Philip the Eunuch, and by Mary. They came to a town called Nazareth that is north of Samaria, in Galilee, between the lake and the sea. They stayed in an inn, where they had business with the inn keeper, and Mary went out into the streets as a child would do, and looked for someone to play with. She found a boy. He was five years old, and he was playing in the dust outside a carpenter’s shop. He was drawing signs in the dust and was very quiet, my mistress told me. Not at all like most young boys.
She knelt down beside him, and began to teach him how to make pies out of the dust by wetting it with water, and shaping it with her hands. The boy laughed and was very pleased, and began to make shapes himself, and decorate them with chips of wood from the shop behind them, so that his shapes looked like small animals, with heads and tails, or like birds with wings.
And then his father looked out and saw his son playing with a strange child, and called him in very hurriedly, in case he should be defiled by her. Because the father was an Orthodox Jew, and Mary was clearly a Greek, from her dress. The father called his son "Joshua", which in Greek is Jesus, although that meant nothing to Mary then, nor for long afterwards. It was only in the last year before her death that it came to her who the child had been. And that the man was not his true father.
As he went in to obey the man, he turned for a moment and said very solemnly, as some children will: "I thank you for playing with me, but I must go in now. I pray that we may meet again."
She forgot about it for a long time.
CHAPTER 2
Yesterday was the Sabbath, and Simon did not write for me. Instead, I sat under my plane tree thinking of what I should tell you today. The plane tree reminds me of that other plane tree in our courtyard in Jerusalem, and I had thought I would tell you of our life there, and what we did every day. But it came to me in the evening, as the dark fell, that I should tell you first about the Cult. About Dionysus, and Aphrodite of the Frenzies, and my mistress as High Priestess. I have already told you a little, but now I must tell you more, so that you may understand what follows.
Dionysus is - or was - the greatest of the Gods. He controls - my tenses are mixed up again, Simon tells me. Let you be quiet, scribe, and write all down as I say it. He controlled men's appetites, their lusts, their hungers for food and drink, for strong liquors, for wine. He burned in them like fire, as Aphrodite burned in women. Yes, it is better to say all this in the past tense, I give you your argument there, Simon. They did burn us, men and women. They drew us to them, and drove us with whips of passion. But it was not evil. It was not good perhaps, it has always been better to be chaste and temperate. But young blood burned then as it does now, and Dionysus and His Bride called and called, whispered in the night. Come to me, you who cannot sleep, and I will give you passion, and at the end rest.
Out of this passion, out of this hunger for love, for flesh and wine and the heats of lust, came the Cult. Men heard the God and the Goddess calling them, and ran to Them. They came out of Asia to us, out of the burning deserts and the mountains, and the snow; out of the forests where there are wild beasts with fierce eyes and hunger for man's blood. They brought us wine to make hearts leap and minds drunk and bodies run naked to one another. They brought us the secrets of release. And in the beginning that was enough. The God and the Goddess walked with men and women, led them into the hills, into the hollow places that are the wombs of the earth, taught them to lie with one another in all the ways of pleasure that men had never known before, or never dared to use. They taught us to drink of passion as we drink of wine. They taught us that here is a path to the Great God who is passionless, and Who waits for us beyond all time.
As I have said, perhaps it was not the finest path, or even fine, but it was a path. Since then - but I must discipline my story. and tell it as it needs to be told, in order.
This beginning of the Cult that I have described to you was long ago. Before men wrote books, I think, although not the oldest time. Not nearly so old as my Lady of the Hornet. But She was before the Beginning. She is from Eternity and belongs to it. Dionysus and Aphrodite belonged to time and died in it, for what they did. Or rather, for what we did, my mistress and I. God be merciful to her soul, wherever it lies now.
You will find stories of the Cult in legends that Greek poets have written down. They did not know much about it. I have heard some of their poems. But they knew a little. Of the maenads who ran in the hills and tore wild beasts with their hands and drank their blood. Of King Pentheus, and the women who murdered him, thinking he was a faun. But all that was long ago, and since then the Cult had become different, and organised as Cults must be if they are to survive. So I will tell you about that now, before I come to ourselves.
The Cult has - or had - believers across the world, as far to the West as Ocean, and the Pillars of Hercules, and to the East, farther than I can tell you, because no one has been there and returned to tell about it. There are high mountains that touch the sky, where the snow never melts they say it you can believe it. And men with slanting eyes who dress in wild beasts skins. What does it matter? The whole world knew Dionysus and Aphrodite, and those whose passions stirred in them believed, and if they were chosen, belonged. Berenike, Mary's mother, was chosen, by a lover of hers who was a priest of Dionysus. That is how Mary came to the Cult, and I in my turn My mother never belonged to it. Her passions were different, for food and money and sleep. But again I am straying in my thoughts. The sun is growing hot, and we must draw back into the shade.
The whole world I say, knew the Cult, and those who were destined for it were chosen, and belonged. To belong, one had first to become a novice under the instruction of a priest or priestess. This instruction was sometimes very long. Three, four, five years. It was not enough to give one's body. One had to learn how to give one's soul. How to see. That was not an easy thing I do not mean seeing as you see the hand you hold up in front of you. That is only illusion. That is all shadows, as the Greek Plato said. You see, Simon although I cannot read or write like you, I have had books read to me, and have understood them, what is more. To be a scribe and to know how to write words down does not necessarily mean that you understand what you write, or what you read.
No, the hand you look at is illusion, as is the body to which it belongs. What is real is the soul, and that is what we had to learn to see. It is like the body, but it glows with light, and the soul is surrounded with light like the edge of the world when the sun rises, before you see His disc, and the horizon flames and burns with coloured fire. It people had such souls as that, like the sunrise, there would be no need for time, and Eternity could come. Most souls burn like lamps with dirty wicks and old, evil smelling oil. A guttering pallor of yellowness that is scarcely worth looking at. When we novices first learned to see, dimly and by moments, losing our sight again a moment later, that is how we saw ourselves. Lamp flames flickering and guttering in the dark.
As we progressed, so our sight grew stronger and steadier, and our own souls brighter. If brighter is the word, for all of us gave off dark light if you can understand how light can have darkness in it. You know how colours are, bright shades, and dark ones? That is how we were. Dark shades of colour. Dark reds, dark crimsons, violet, dark blue. I think - indeed I know now - that there was a meaning hidden even in those sombre lights, but I did not know it then, nor did anyone, and we rejoiced to see ourselves and each other, and longed to show off our new power at a Ceremony.
These Ceremonies took place every friday between dark and midnight. Friday is Aphrodite's day, and the dark is Her time, and Dionysus's. We would gather in a certain place outside the City, at the beginning of the third hour of the night. We novices, perhaps thirty or forty of us, collected in the background. And in front of us the initiates, the priests and priestesses, standing quietly, watching the Celebrants prepare. There were six of these Sways. A High Priestess, who was the essential one, without whom there could be no Ceremony. And a High Priest, if one could be there, and four others, priests and priestesses. Ideally, in pairs, two men and two women, but it did not matter if there was one woman and three men, or the other way round. What mattered was their power.
What they prepared first was the Consecration, praying that the Ceremony might be right and holy. Praying to the God and the Goddess to come. Praying for strength, and new power. Praying that the Sacrifice might be accepted. Praying that all present might prosper. For that was another purpose of the Cult. It was not only passion that drew us to the God, but the things He gave to us, Material things. Money, lovers, all sorts of benefits, Which drew to us men and women of every kind who love this world, and its means of pleasure. Thieves came to the Cult, and prostitutes, although neither of those sorts were often called to be novices. They came only as onlookers, seeing nothing but a Ceremony of men and women, and a sacrifice. They did not know the inner realities. They would stand far off on the hill side, far behind even we novices, like poor people at a theatre show, on the cheapest benches, from which it is difficult to make out the masks or hear the voices and all one can see is movement. I do not truly count them as part of the Cult at all. Thieves, prostitutes, assassins, tax collectors, shop keepers who liked to cheat their clients, workmen who liked to cheat their masters; servants who longed to seduce their mistress or rob her storerooms; soldiers who dreamed of a rich widow and escape from service. Scum. When one boils fruit, scum rises and floats. There is no more to it than that.
We of the inner Belief were a different kind. We might love money, as Mary my mistress did, but as a holy thing, a thing that gives power and that controls the world. Not to spend on whores or sausages or a night's debauch. We loved the God most of all, and the Goddess, and the shivering of the soul that comes from that kind of love. A trembling, and fear, a pricking of the inner self like gooseflesh on the skin, a terror of death and a longing for it, if death comes with passion. I feel it now, even in my old age, and I am near eighty years old and half blind, and have not known a man or a woman in lust since my mistress died. God forbid that I should have done. God forbid. But I can still remember it, that shivering of the soul.
Our meeting place was as I have said on a hillside outside the City. Every group, every centre of the Cult from the world's end to the world's end, had such a meeting place. By day it would seem ordinary, there would be passers by, no one need feel that it was a holy place. But at night, those who knew would avoid it. A hollow in a hillside, such as ours. A narrow valley. A clearing in woods. A field closed in in some fashion, so that it had a privacy, an intimacy for gathering. Like a womb.
But our meeting place had a special gift in it. It had the Stones. These were - still are if one went to see them there which I shall not, at least in this life - these were six great stones shaped by men a thousand years ago, or long before that, perhaps, when there were giants who could lift such things and set them in their places. Each Stone was ten or twelve feet long, and squared and shaped by tools, and I think that once they had stood upright with other stones, in a circle on top of the hill. So Mary my mistress told me, and perhaps the God told her, although they were not His stones, nor had it been His temple that the circle made. There were Gods before our Gods, and others before Them. Only the One God is Eternal, Blessed be His Name.
This circle had stood on the hill until the Jews came and threw them down as abominations, because they did not understand them, and feared their power: They had great power those Stones. They drew it from the earth, because the hill was a Holy Place, and the top of it the holiest of all, prepared from the Beginning for holiness, and what would happen there, I think. But there are many holy places in the world, where the earth's lines of power meet and cross. At such crossing places men in the ancient times planted their standing stones and circles, and placed their stone graves. And the earth's power filled the stones.
Even when the Jews threw these Stones down, and broke up most of them for rubble and building stuff, the power remained in them. And our six Stones that lay scattered in the hollow of the hillside had such power that you could feel it with your hand. If you tried to lay your hands on them too long they would throw you sideways like a doll, unless it was at the time of our Ceremony. Even then, the Stones trembled under us when it was our turn to lie on them. And during the Ceremony they glowed with their own light not dark like ours, but golden. Pale gold. like gold so ancient it has lost its colouring, and is the ghost of gold. I do not know what they must have been in their own time of power, for their own people.
It was by these Stones that our ceremony took place. Imagine the dark hillside, the City not far off. And the stars, and the moon if it was the moon's hour, or else pitch dark. The onlookers, the froth of the Cult, whispering half-remembered, half-understood prayers, and shivering and afraid without knowing what they feared. There might be two hundred, three hundred of those. Five hundred at a great Ceremony, every eighth friday, when the Celebration lasted not one hour but three, from the end of the third hour until mid-night. But on ordinary fridays there were enough of onlookers to make a crowd and a murmuring, and then a stillness of waiting. People who did not belong to the Cult at all, or even believe, avoided the hill at such times. They said because of the assassins among the onlookers, but in reality because they knew they must not come near. As for the Orthodox Jews, they were at their Sabbath preparations, and had no business abroad on Fridays after dusk.
So, the hillside, and the dark, and the onlookers. In front of them, trembling with a different kind of fear, we novices. I say "we" in this fashion because I became a novice in my sixteenth year, brought to Dionysus by my mistress. And a year later I became a priestess, an initiate. Although not a Celebrant as yet. That you shall hear of later.
There might be forty or fifty novices, some of whom would never become initiates. Most of whom, probably. I have said, it was not an easy thing, learning to see. And in front of us again, the initiates, the true congregation. Only twenty or so, except at the great Ceremonies, when there would be more; when every initiate who could come would do so no matter what the cost or the distance.
And in the hollow, the Celebrants. High Priestess, High Priest, four others. A brazier burning, glowing dull orange, crimson. A black cockerel, its legs tied, lying on a stone. A black pig, or a young piglet, but black, black. Not a white hair on it. Lying also tied by the side of the cockerel. Both lying quiet, knowing that they must die. On the ground, a pile of white linen, the Celebrant's clothing, linen robes that they wore as they came there, and took off before they began to pray. Because they must be naked for the Ceremony. Except for the High Priestess's necklace of white shells, each shaped like a woman's secret parts, and hanging down to her groin, and her mount of Venus And for the girdles of the others, the High Priest and the priests and priestesses.
These girdles were no more than threads, woven of red cotton from the East. Dark red lines about their waists, if one was close enough to see them. For the rest, they must be absolutely naked, from foot to head. Even in the snow of midwinter, and the Gate of the Year. But it was not a hardship, as I used to think before I became an initiate. The heat of their bodies melted the snow where they stood, and on the Stones when they lay on them. This was the heat of the God, and of the Goddess, and the power in them.
I see that Simon is smiling. Why do you smile like that, scribe? Do you think that I am telling old woman's tales and fancies, and am gone wandering in my mind in my old age? I shall tell you to set down more wonderful things than this before you are ended with this writing. Do you think that men's bodies are like clay pots, fashioned out of earth and water and fire only, and that they have no secrets in them? They have the Breath in them also, and can do many things that most men never imagine they could do. Have you not heard of the Fire Walkers, Simon, who can walk across pits of burning coals, and take no harm? Have you not heard of - But why should I convince a Jew? Go to your own Holy Books, and read of Elijah. Of Elisha. Of Abraham and Isaac. Of Moses in Sinai. Let your eyes be opened, Simon, do not smile. Set down what I tell to you, and believe.
Prayer first, calling the God and the Goddess. They do not take long to come. The Celebrants begin to glow with their dark lights, very faint at first, like candle flames behind thick curtains of darkness. That is the sign that the God and the Goddess are pleased, and that They are already there. Then the sacrifice. It is very swift. The High Priest lifts up the black cockerel in both hands, twisting back its head for the knife. The High Priestess cuts its throat, and then she opens it, splits its breast with a stroke. The knife she uses is her own, the moon knife, with a silver sickle blade like the blade of the new moon, and a carved ivory handle. The handle is the body of Aphrodite, her hands behind her back, offering Her love. When the old High Priestess kills herself, she does it with her knife.
Out of the split breast of the cockerel the High Priestess tears the heart and liver and throws them on the brazier. This is the true sacrifice. Before they are burned she plucks them out of the fire and eats them, the blood running down her chin. There is the God in her, and her light grows stronger, begins to burn.
Next the pig is killed in the same way, squealing, to represent the wild boar, and its flesh and limbs torn off the bones and charred in the brazier, before the Celebrants devour it. Again, the heart and liver of the piglet, and its offals and those of the cockerel, are the true Sacrifice. The flesh is only a feast. And they drink wine, which is the blood of the God whom Aphrodite has now slain. They drink it out of silver cups, heavy, massive, shallow cups, with the face and body of Dionysus moulded on them in solid silver, and vine leaves, and vine branches, and the God's bull horns that He sometimes wears to show His power. These cups belong to Mary, six of them, and during the week days we ourselves drink from them at home. It was something that gave me great power, and brought me to Initiation very quickly.
This eating and drinking of wine and flesh is the Agape, the feast of Love, and when it is finished the bodies of the Celebrants glow so strong that the hollow is filled with light pulsing and shivering, and there are no longer Six, but Eight. The God and the Goddess have made Themselves visible to those whose eyes have been opened. To the onlookers, the scum of the Cult, there are only six of course, and there is no light.
Then the High Priestess takes her bull whip, made of a black bull's hide, and supple and heavy with oil, with its silver handle shaped like the body of Dionysus, horns curled hack, hands folded across His chest; she takes her heavy whip to draw blood from the High Priest. He lays himself face down-wards on one of the stones and she draws blood from his back with a single stroke, cutting the skin and flesh. He must not flinch, nor cry out, nor move.
When that is done, she must lie there in her turn, for him to draw blood from her. And when my mistress did this she lay down like a woman lying down for a lover, shivering with joy. She loved pain, and the fear of pain, as I did. It brought her to ecstacy as no other kind of lovemaking ever could. And when I was an initiate, and stood close enough to see her face, and her body, as she laid herself on the stone, I shivered with her, and longed for the God's stroke, longed to feel the whip bite into my flesh.
You think that strange, Simon? For a learned man you are very ignorant of the world. It is the commonest of lusts, to love pain, and the fear of it, and the excitement that it brings. The blood runs quick, and the heart beats faster, the breath closes up the throat. The body trembles at the tread of the Beloved, of the Terrible, of the One who is to be feared. One's knees turn to water, and one lies shivering and waiting, praying that the moment be delayed, and that it may come swifter. Praying for the pain, and for release from it. No man can reach so deep into a woman's body as pain does.
Oh yes, Simon, I have heard you boasting to the servant girls of what you would do to them if you got them in the dark. You would do less to them with that poor thing of yours than I could do to them with a thin supple stick and a few words. But God forbid it. God the Eternal One preserve me from it. I have seen where it leads. I have been brought to the edge of the Pit and bade look over, and down into the fire, where such Pain is as no man can understand unless he has felt its breath. I have seen worse than that, and the lusts were burned out of me as leaves are burned in a fire.
But then I knew nothing. Nothing. Although I thought that I knew all things. As you think you know them, Simon, because you have read in books. I have read books too, my friend, or had them read to me, and they do not tell very much. This book will tell more than most if I can reach the end of my story. I feel my time coming on me, and the dark is growing near.
My mistress would lie down on the stone, I say, like a bride submitting to her husband. Joy and fear. And the whip would fall and the welt run blood and I would shiver with the pain of it, and the joy of it, as if my own back was torn. How I longed for that pain! I never longed for a man in all my life, and although I longed for a woman, one woman. Mary my mistress, it was in that way that I wanted her most. To be scourged by her, killed by her love, although I did not think of the killing, only of the love. I was very blind.
When the High Priestess had suffered, the others suffered in their turn, some loving their suffering, some submitting only because they must. It would be the High Priest who would draw blood from the others. While the God and the Goddess watched, and then lay down on Their Stone and took one another. That Stone was tilted up, lying at a slant in the ground so that we could see Their lovemaking, fed by blood. They glowed dark purple, a mass of purple like a cloak, so that it was hard to make out their individual shapes. But one should not look too closely at too much Power as it reveals itself. That too I learned later. And more terribly.
And while the God and the Goddess knew one another, so the High Priestess and the High Priest, and the others, each pair on a fallen Stone, knew one another, turn and turn about, the High Priestess and the priestesses underneath their lovers, submitting to be loved. If the four others, the priests and priestesses, were not evenly paired, man to woman, then the ones left out need only wait their turn. The men had such power in them at that moment that each could have served a dozen women. For they were possessed by Aphrodite, as the priestesses were possessed by the God. And High Priest and High Priestess so utterly possessed that I have seen their intercourse like a death struggle, and heard my mistress scream with the pain of it, and of her back driven and torn against the Stone.
When it was done, she and the others healed one another with their hands, the one lying face down again, and the lover passing his hands, palm down-wards, over the bloody mark of the whip, an inch or so above the skin. After a minute or so the pain would leave, although the mark would remain. And even the mark would fade very quickly, until the next day it was no more than a red line on white flesh, and the day after that it would have vanished. The men healed the women, and then the women the men. That was the Ceremony’s end. The light faded from the Celebrants’ bodies as light dies from a lamp when the oil is finished. It faded down and down, and vanished.
A sigh would rise up from the initiates, and those of us novices who could see, and all was over for that friday. The God and His Bride were gone.
The crowd would break away, silently, only the onlookers talking, and even they in low voices, nervously, unsure of what had happened, and what might happen if they showed disrespect. The Teachers led their novices away, except for me, who went to join my mistress, Mary, the High Priestess, and to take the cups and the whip, and the moon knife, and wrap them in a cloak. Someone put out the coals of the brazier and trod them into the ground. The Celebrants put on their linen cloaks, the bones of the cockerel and the pig were taken up carefully and wrapped in cloth, to be buried, and all was done. We went away to our houses, filled with the God's joy, quietly.
The days of the maenad frenzies of the dancing women of the wild hunts were long, long in the past. For us of the Cult our frenzies were secret things and we kept the God in our hearts.
I would walk home to the City and our house with my mistress, or if Baruch ben Isaac was with us they two would walk together and I would follow them a few steps behind as a handmaid should. This happened often, because Baruch was one of the Celebrants, and whenever he could, he came to us. Sometimes of course, his duties with the Romans kept him away, or he was travelling, as happened later when he was travelling for several months of the last part of my story. But usually he was with us.
That was how he met my mistress, and became her lover, when he was twenty five years old, and very handsome. She was already above thirty years old then, and looking I think for a new lover who would give her some sense of permanence in love. Someone who would be quiet, and restful, and not demand too much, and would be always there when she wanted him. It did not prevent her taking other lovers, of course it did not, and she might leave Baruch aside for days, or weeks at a time, or he might be forced to go away on journeys, as I have just said did happen. But he was there, a little like a husband of the right kind. And I think she loved him a little, and he loved her more than that, and was hurt and sad when she neglected him, or let him see too clearly that he was not the only man she took to her bed.
Of course in the Ceremonies all lay with all, as they must. He could not mind that, it would have been blasphemy to be jealous of another priest or the High Priest himself. But in the house he did not like it. I knew he did not, and guessed that he must truly love her, although I did not understand that kind of love then. Perhaps I do not understand it now. All is in God's hands. If I do not know it I shall be shown.
So we would walk home, the three of us, and Olympias would let us into the courtyard, and go back to bed. That would be between nine and ten at night, of course, and the two servant girls asleep, and Philip the Steward out already on his secret business. Or what he thought was secret. But nothing was secret from my mistress, at least of that kind.
In the Fresco room Anna would have laid the great round table for our supper, with wine and fruit and honey cake's and cheese and bowls of dates and all the things that Baruch and Mary liked to eat before they slept together, and I would kneel at my mistress’s side, between the two of them and serve them both, pouring the wine and holding the dishes on my palms for them. And I would begin to feel the lust gathering in my mistress like a scent, like a great cat that gives off muskiness and heat as it comes to its mate. Not because it was Baruch, but because of what he would do to her while they made love, and before and after. She wanted not his love, but his cruelty.
Although he was not a cruel man and his cruelty was only play compared to another who was to come and eat there with us at that table. And run a dark finger on the ivory inlays, the white Signs of the Zodiac inlaid into the brown surface of the wood. I wonder the ivory did not blacken as he touched it. But Baruch was not that kind of man, although their destinies bound them together in the same enterprise, before the end. I think in reality Baruch's heart was as soft and gentle as his smile, and he would have been quite happy to make love to a woman as most men do, lying beside her in a bed. But my mistress had no pleasure out of that kind of love. She needed to feel pain, and she forced him to inflict it on her, and to come to enjoy doing it.
So I would kneel between them, serving them, and feel the force of desire gathering, and tremble with it myself. I longed to go up with them, and lie beside her, and let him beat me as he would beat her, with the long cane that he used, or a leather slipper, or his hand.
When they themselves went up to the turret room on the roof, up the stone steps from the courtyard outside the loggia, my hands would shake as I cleared away the dishes, and I could not swallow. I would try to drink a cup of wine, and spill it down my white linen tunic, I would drop fruit as I picked it up to put back in a dish. And I would listen. And imagine. After a time, when I knew it would be safe, I would creep up the stairs to listen out-side the door of my mistress's room. Kneeling in the dark, or the moonlight, my ear pressed against the wood, my heart beating. I would hear him striking her, hear her crying out, not for pain but for more pain, for him to strike harder than he wanted to. Hear the cutting of the cane and imagine it was my body lying there. Until I could bear it no longer, and I would run down the stairs in my bare feet, and go to the servants’ quarters where the two sisters lay, Anna and Euphrosine.
I would wake them up and tell them that they had done wrong things during the day, and that if they did not submit to be punished I would tell my mistress and they would be truly whipped. Then I would beat each of them with a cane I kept there for the purpose, and threatened them with worse if they cried out and woke my mother, Olympias. If they were good, and stayed silent long enough, I would stop beating them and get between them in their pallet bed on the floor, and be kind to them, as girls are kind to one another in bed, in the dark. Of course, sometimes Olympias heard me, and woke up, and drove me away. But she did not threaten me, because she knew that my mistress would only laugh, no matter what I did to the two girls. It would have amused her to know of it.
So my mother would only scold me, and drive me away. But often enough she slept through everything, and the two girls would stop crying, and let me be kind to them, and I would lie with them for an hour or two, until it was time to go back to the stairs and wait for Baruch to leave. I would sit there in the dark with Shaitan for company, his eyes shining like red fire. I got to know him in those hours and nights. He was much nobler than most men I have met. Nobility shone out of him like that fire from his eyes I feel ashamed often when I think of him and of how his dignity of heart was so great, and mine so little. May the Eternal God forgive me in the end as He has promised. And may my true Mistress have Shaitan in Her keeping and by Her side.
About four o'clock in the morning, that darkest time. Baruch would come down the steps softly, shivering a little with the night air, and tiredness, and spent force. It is not a good way to love, and leaves the lover shivering. I would let him out of the gates, Shaitan growling softly, as if he knew all that had been done, and scorned it in his soul. Then I would go up the steps again to the roof, and my mistress's bedroom where I too slept. But before I lay down on my pallet at the foot of her bed I would hold up the night lamp and look at her, lying face down and naked, her hair dishevelled, clinging to her head and the nape of her neck with love-sweat. I would look at the marks on her body, and trace them with my finger tip, not quite touching her skin. Her skin like ivory and amber, amber shadows between her legs, between her body and her arm, here in the hollows of her waist, beneath her hair. I have never seen so beautiful a body.
Far more beautiful than the pictures of the Goddess woven into the tapestries downstairs in the Fresco room. I did not know then that such beauty comes only from God and must be treated as a holy thing. I would stand for a quarter hour on end, gazing down at her. Longing to love her, to be loved by her, to suffer the love ecstacies that she enjoyed. I did not know what would come. I did not know anything.
Then I would lie down and sleep, and dream that Dionysus came to me, and scourged me with the bull’s hide whip until I screamed in my sleep with the pain of it, and the joy of it, and died the God’s death.
CHAPTER 3
This is the third day of telling my story, and it is now time I think to tell you what my days were like, and the days of the house where I lived with Mary my mistress. Days other than the Fridays of the Ceremonies, I mean. Once you know what we did each day, then you will know all the personal things that matter about us, and I can tell you what happened to us in the sureness that you will understand how and why it came about. Although as I tell that for Simon to write down, that "why" comes back to me. How a thing happens, that is easy to tell. But why? Oh, that is a different thing. Why should my mistress of all the High Priestesses of Dionysus, of all the thieves that there are and have been, why should she have been singled out? And I for her handmaid and accomplice? Why? But to ask such questions is to question the meaning of the world, and the plans of Eternal God.
So, to our common days. The household woke at dawn, to the clatter and outcry of the cockerels. Indeed, their uproar began long before dawn and would have woken most households before sunrise. But Olympias loved her bed, and Philip was usually not there, and the two servant girls, the sisters Anna and Euphrosine, they would have slept through a tempest at sea, and drowned still yawning. While my mistress and I, asleep in the turret room - well, it is servants who are supposed to wake early, not their mistress, or those set over them. I have told you, I was not truly a servant in that house.
But by sunrise Olympias my mother would be up and dressed, and she would rout out the two young girls by stripping off their coverlet and cuffing their ears, and they too would begin shuffling about in the courtyard, and pretending to wash themselves in buckets of water drawn up from the well. Often enough when I came down they were still smelly from sleep, the way young girls are, and I would make them wash again, pouring the water over them naked until they screamed. I always believed in cleanliness. But that would not be for several hours. Then, at sunrise, as soon as they were dressed, they had to run and open the gates so that Enoch the gardener, and Georgiakis the cook, and the two young slave boys for the kitchen could enter and begin their work. And if Philip the Steward had been out on his pimping he would slip in as well, with a sly smile, and a purse of money hidden under his tunic.
My mother would be feeding the birds, the cockerels and the doves, and then the fish, as I have told you already I think, feeding them with the wine-soaked grain that Mary my mistress had blessed. There would be a scrabbling, and a fluttering of wings, and the courtyard would be full of bird sounds, cooing and squabbling and fighting over morsels. Very like mankind. The grain is there to be eaten, and yet men fight for it, and try to drive each other away from what God has given. Blessed be the Sacred Name. Blessed be the Mother.
When that task was done, Olympias and Euphrosine the kitchen maid would break their fast very quickly with a cup of wine and some bread, and would go to market to buy what we needed for the day. Georgiakis would begin to light the fires and prepare my mistress's breakfast, and Anna would prepare breakfast for him, and the slave boys and herself, and Enoch. It was not an important meal for them. Thin wine, and thin gruel. It is not good to feed servants heavily. They grow fat, and will not work, and become insolent. Mark that Simon, and tell the others. A servant with heavy flesh is no good to any mistress. Mary the Thief never made that mistake. Only Olympias grew fat in our household, and that was because it was her nature, and she was very privileged, having been nurse not only to my mistress, but to my mistress’s mother before her, as I have told.
So the day’s work began. Enoch doing what gardeners do, which never seemed to me to be very much. What could he have found to do in a court-yard, with a fig tree and a plane tree and a few stone vases of flowers, and some bushes growing in great tubs, and a fish pond with water lilies and old carp in it? I never yet saw a gardener hurry, or sweat, and you may tell that to our gardener, Simon. I see these things. I have other matters on my mind to occupy it, so that I may not speak about them. But I see them, and note them down.
So, the day begins. A clatter of cooking pots in the kitchen, the sweep of a besom broom in the yard, the doves circling overhead, the cockerels contented for a while, the sun growing warm, then hot. Anna polishing the great round table in the Fresco room, and dusting and cleaning, and doing what house servants do. She would also eat the remains of my mistress's supper, although she was not supposed to. I used to count the pieces of fruit, and the honey cakes left over, and there were always some missing, although she swore by Zeus and Hera that she had never touched a morsel. That was among the things I used to beat her for, and her sister with her, because I think she stole cakes for Euphrosine, as well as eating them herself.
At ten o'clock, Anna would come up the stairs to wake us, my mistress and I, with our breakfast, of wine - good wine this, well warmed and spiced - with fresh baked sweet cakes, and honey, and perhaps some figs if they were in season, or other fruit, and I would get up and serve Mary on my knees by the bed. And serve myself. Or she would feed me. She liked to do that, putting morsels into my mouth and closing my lips with her fingers. And I would feed her. It was a good time of the day. and she was always her happiest then, as if sleep had washed unhappiness out of her. She was not always happy, far from it. But at breakfast we laughed together. When I think back on my life with her it is those quarter hours I remember with most joy, if I may use that word for anything about our lives then.
When we had eaten she would sometimes pull me into her bed and play with me, making love to me as women do with one another, or pretending that she was angry and that she would beat me for it. I longed for her to do that, and was always disappointed. She was not cruel, you see, not in that way. She would kill if need be, for profit, or to protect herself, or anything dear to her. But she would not do it in a cruel way. She liked to receive pain, but not give it, and she often said to me that cruelty was a sin, almost the only true sin that there is. What neither she nor I thought of then was that no one can receive erotic pain for the lust of it unless someone else delights in giving the pain to others.
If I had known it then, that was a key to many secrets, that interchange of cruelty and submission. The one who submits is as guilty of the cruelty as the one who inflicts it. It is like - no, not "like" - it is a calling of evil into existence, into the world, and feeding it until it grows monstrous, and takes on a life. There are evil spirits that surround us, longing to be fed. And such things feed them. But I did not know, and Mary my mistress did not know it.
Why were we born like that? That "why" again. All the wisdom of books could not answer it. I think to myself that each of us has a temptation bedded into our hearts. For one it is gluttony, like my mother, another perverse lust like Philip's lust for small boys, and sodomy with his harlots that he kept and robbed and exploited. For another laziness, like Anna and Euphrosine. For another drunkenness, for another greed for gain. And for me it was that love of pain, of terror, that longing to submit to something which my soul could know for evil, and did not, would not recognise.
I think again that each of these sins, and mine above all, is the mirror's image of a virtue. These lusts for the things of this world are the Perverse image of the lusts we ought to have for Eternal God, and the service of our Mistress. It is at Her feet I should have lain, Her tenderness I should have wept for, not my mistress's cruelty.
But I am telling too much of my own heart, and delaying the story. So to our breakfast again, and our love-making perhaps, and then down to the bathrooms below. The cold room and the hot room, and the two marble baths which were already filled and the one of them heated by the furnace below the floor. It was Anna's task, and Enoch's, to see that both baths were ready. I think I did not mention about the furnace when I was describing the house? Simon nods, and tells me that I did not. In a Greek or Roman house it was so ordinary a thing, and still is. I have no doubt, that I could not have thought it worth mentioning. Here, in this village, and even in Babylon, they have scarcely heard of such things. But we were Greeks. Every good house had its hypocaust, and heated pool, and in winter the whole house was warmed in that way, at least the mistress's parts of it. Servants should keep warm with their work, Simon, and then go to bed.
In the bathing rooms I would take off my mistress's linen gown and she would step down into the water, sometimes the cold first, and then the hot, running from one room to the other. Or she might bathe the other way about, hot first, then cold. And I would kneel beside the pool with big white towels to dry her. There would be scents and ambergris and ointments and herbs spilled into the water, and the rooms would be filled with perfumes like a garden, or a bedroom for lovers. Sometimes she pulled me into the bath with her and we would play together and she would pretend to drown me like a kitten. She was very strong. Or else she would simply lie in the water, floating like a white water lily, her legs stretched out, her hair spread on the water in a dark red mass, her eyes shut. Until she would shake her dreams away, and I would help her out of the bath and bring her to one of the couches.
There she would lie down and I would massage her body, beginning at her feet. Rubbing oils and ointments into her skin, freeing out her beautiful, supple flesh. Legs, hips and thighs, her smooth rounded body, her arms, her neck. Turning her over and massaging her breasts and her loins, scenting her secret parts for her as she loved me to do. Until she was satisfied and sat up, and I dressed her hair for the day.
It did not take so long, all this, on ordinary days. Only an hour or so. Before midday I had dressed her for the day's business in the City, and dressed myself, and we were out in the streets. She would have talked to Olympias, returned from market, and to Philip, giving her orders for the day, and to Enoch too, because he was handsome and she liked to talk to him, I think, rather than for any need to tell him about the flowers and the fish. And we would be out and walking fast towards whatever part of the City she had business in that day.
Often enough it was the Temple, where she had business in the colonnades with the money changers, and the tax collectors, and some of the priests of the Temple, and the animal and bird sellers. Often it was to the Praetorium and the Roman Treasury where Baruch was an official. Both were near us in the North of the City. Sometimes it was to shops in the heart of the City, the fashionable streets, not to buy as rich women do but to look over stolen goods, hidden in the back quarters of the jewellers shops or the silk merchants’, or the covered booths of the dealers in gold and silver articles or precious rugs.
The owners would make a sign to her, and we would go through to a private room where things would be spread out, or set on tables for her to examine. She would know in an instant whether she wanted to buy. She would make a sign to me and I would open the money bag that we had filled in the Temple or at the Treasury, or from another shop where she had extorted blackmail money from some fool in her power, and I would count out gold. She never troubled with silver coins. Gold from Greece, or Rome, or Persia, or Alexandria. She knew the values of every coin that ever was, and could weigh them in her hand to within half a barley grain, and know if they were true weight.
Twenty gold pieces for that, ten for this. Five or fifty for another piece. If the shopkeeper, the small receiver of thieves' gainings of the night or the week before, the receiver of bandits' stuff - if he protested, she would either sweep up the coins and pour them back into my bag, or else she would look at him. If she did that he would begin to stammer and offer her the goods at any price she liked. She never argued, or haggled about a price. And most of the receivers knew it. If they forgot they soon learned again. Nor did she ever write anything down. All was in her head. After an hour or so of buying in three or four different places she knew to the grain what she had spent, and what she had bought. Woe to the imbecile who tried to cheat her, substituting one thing for another, after she had bought it and before it was collected. He would never cheat any one again. A thief's throat is as easily slit as a fool’s.
Again, none of this took very long. She might sit ten minutes with a favourite receiver, if it was near midday, or one o'clock, and take a cup of wine and some sweetmeats with him. Otherwise five minutes did her business. And she would go on to another place. Until about two o'clock we would come to Bar Abbas's house in the depths of the thieves' quarter. I have told you already that he was her chief helper in the quarter, her lieutenant or captain, and he thought himself much more. He did not know much about the Cult, and imagined she needed his strength and that of his bandit followers, as well as his loyalty and friendship. Did I tell you that he had been a real bandit, out in the Judaean Hills? Until the Romans brought too much peace to them, and drove the robbers into the City? He never cared for City life very much, and robbing houses at night instead of travellers by day. He liked to sleep a lot and to use his strength rather than his cunning. But he loved Mary, and was proud to serve her.
I hated his house. It was dark, and ill smelling, and there were always vicious-looking men loitering about, who frightened me. Not simple murderers, but men who looked as if they enjoyed murdering, which is a different thing. When Mary went inside I always stayed in the street, squatting down by the wall and covering my face with my shawl. But Mary seemed not to mind the smells. She would go upstairs to the roof and make love with Bar Abbas up there. I know it, although she never told me. I think she was even a little ashamed of it. She would come down looking full-eyed, her eyelids swollen, and her gown disarranged and her hair tumbled. Not everyone might have noticed it, but I did, because I dressed her, and dressed her hair. No matter how carefully she rearranged herself, I noticed.
And I noticed the smell of Bar Abbas on her. His true name I might say here was Simon, like my scribe's, and I see that you do not like to write these things down about your father. I am sorry for it. I do not want to offend anyone, even a scribe. But the truth must be told. His name was Simon, and he was called by everyone Bar Abbas because that was true of him. The son of the Father, meaning the Unknown Father. Do not mind it, scribe. What man knows his father, except his Father who is God?
He had pale, pale blue eyes, and a flattened nose like a sickle blade, broken across the bridge by someone's club, long ago. There was a knife scar down his right cheek from the outer garner of the eye down to below his mouth, curving in to the chin. It showed up thin and white in the glossy blackness of his beard. Women have told me that they found even the scar and the broken nose wonderful, promising great pleasure in love. He smelled always of sweat and dirt, and he wore a leather jerkin that had a tannery stench from it and shone with hard wear and grease. In body he was a tall man, near to six feet tall, but for a couple of inches, and broad and powerful with it, very dark and hairy, the hairs curling over the edge of his jerkin and like black fur on his bare arms. He made me shudder.
The men hanging round the house who saw Mary go up to him used to laugh about what would happen to her. "Like a sword" they said of Bar Abbas’s member, "only much thicker. He'll split her in half." Until they knew who she was, and then they kept heir jokes very quiet, in case they were overheard. No one made jokes about my mistress in her hearing. As I have told you, when she walked in the streets people drew away from her respectfully, or fearfully, unless they were ignorant of who she was. That used to make me very proud as I walked behind her. But to the story of our day again. From Bar Abbas's house we would go with Bar Abbas and that mute slave of his (as I said, perhaps the slave belonged truly to Mary, I never knew. I did not even know the slave's name, if he had one. He was a Nubian with a shaved skull and body, and very strong and strong smelling and purple black, and deaf as well as mute.) - we would go, I say, back to the shops where she had bought, and collect her purchases, already baled up for her, or put into strong sacks.
She never looked to see if all was as it should be. She did not need to. And we would go then to another part of the thieves’ quarter, near the Market, to her treasure house. This was as I described it to you yesterday, and I need say no more of it here. The stowing away of her purchases never took very long. Within a few minutes we were on our way home, Bar Abbas and the slave leaving us immediately. By three o'clock we were in our house, and sitting down to a meal of roast meat and wine, and iced fruits, and cakes, and goat's cheese and fresh bread, and whatever else Georgiakis had prepared for her. She always ate very greedily at this meal, until she could eat no more. I shared it with her of course, and then she went up to bed and slept until dusk, while I watched her, or slept myself. But if it was hot I must sit by her bed and fan her with the great winnowing fan that I used to cool the room. And watch her asleep.
I do not know whether it was because of Bar Abbas, although I used to think that it was, but at that time she always lay with her mouth open, ungainly, spread on her back, and snoring. And her face grew almost ugly, or as near to it as was possible for so beautiful a woman. Ugly. Thinking back, seeing her face again in those hours of day time sleep, I think I saw not only ugliness there, but wickedness. I did not want to see it, and I would close my eyes against it. And have to open them again, and look again, to make sure what I had seen. I never liked those hours, and was glad when I could sleep through them, and not look at her.
About six o'clock, as dusk fell, we would wake, and go down to the court-yard. That was a pleasant time. We would sit on the marble bench under the plane tree, on the purple cushions with their golden fringes, and the doves would come and peck round her feet. Or the hornets and the wasps and the bees that I have already told you of, that had been feeding at the honey jar and flying lazily about the fig tree as if they were waiting for us, they would come to us and settle on our fingers. We would play with them, as I have said, and talk to Enoch as he prepared to go home, or to my mother Olympias about the day’s gossip, that she had heard in the market, or about old times with my mistress's mother, when they lived in Magdala in Galilee, in the north, beside the lake.
Enoch and his brother the cook and the two slave boys would go home, and the birds would quieten with the darkness. The stars would come out, and Mary would sometimes tell me of things she knew about them, of the great Signs of the Zodiac that the Magi read like books, and of what they foretell. Olympias would be preparing our evening meal, and at about seven o'clock, or an hour or so after dark, we would go in to eat and as soon as he arrived Olympias would let in Baruch ben Isaac, who always came to share our meal with us before he and Mary went up to bed to make love.
Before that I served them as usual, kneeling between them, and when the meal was finished - and it was only a supper of goats' milk and bread and honey and cheese cakes - when this brief supper was over I would play the flute for them. It would be late enough by then, if we did not eat immediately Baruch came. Often he and Mary had business to talk of, of the Cult, or the Treasury, or some blackmailing that they were both concerned in, and it might be nine o’clock before we went to the table, and the tenth hour before we were finished and I had begun to play.
Sometimes I would play for a few minutes, and sometimes for a quarter of an hour, while they talked, or fondled one another. And then Mary would make a sign to me, and I would lay down the flute and begin to dance a dance that she had taught me. The love dance that is like the Seven Veils but is not meant for Power. Only to rouse passion. Slowly uncovering my body, and offering it now to Mary, now to Baruch, tempting him to touch me, until I could see his hands trembling and Mary would bring him away to the loggia and the stairs, and her bedroom.
I have already told you of how they made love, of the kind of love she wanted from him. And of how I would creep up to their door and listen, and then run down to beat the two young girls and make love to them. To get up from their child-smelling pallet and sit in the cool dark by the stairs, by Shaitan’s kennel, listening to his low rumbling and growling, and looking up at the stars and wondering what they might foretell for me. Riches? Love of the kind I longed for? Power? I read them all in those stars. But never the truth.
Until Baruch came softly down to me, and I let him out of the courtyard and barred the gate behind him, and went up to my mistress and to bed, and sleep. To dream of lying with Baruch, and my mistress, offering myself to both of them, and to the God. Or lying dreamless, until I half woke to hear the cocks crowing, and fell deeper asleep until Anna woke us at ten o’clock, and our new day began.
Until one of those new days brought us to the Temple, as was usual, and nothing was ever as it had been before. Never again.
Did you ever see the Temple in Jerusalem? In the days before the great war? If you did not, imagine a vast courtyard, five hundred yards from end to end, or more. Six hundred, perhaps. And four hundred broad. All of it surrounded by a colonnade, roofed in and pillared, to make a shadowed walk fight round. In the middle is the Temple itself, and the Gate called "Beautiful" that leads into it, covered by the Veil. No one may go past the Veil who is not a priest. The Veil is a great tapestry, twenty feet high and forty feet long, hiding the Gate, and the front of the Temple. The Temple Maidens weave the tapestry, and it takes twenty years to weave it, many hundreds of women working on it when they are called to that duty because of their descent from the Jewish King, David, father of Solomon the Wise. The mother of the man we saw that day once worked on it, so I was told, because she too was descended from King David. And when the new Veil is finished, the old is taken down and stored away, because it is a Holy thing. It is always dark green in colour, and worked with symbols of the Jews’ God, Jehovah.
I tell you all this in case you never saw Jerusalem and the Temple, before the Romans destroyed the City. It was a great sight to see. And so was everything about the Temple. and the Temple Courtyard. As I have said, only priests of Jehovah might go behind the Veil, but anyone, man or woman, Jew or stranger. might go into the Courtyard, and look at the sights. You could change money there, or have letters written by the scribes who sat at desks in the Colonnade, or consult a lawyer, because there were always lawyers there, both of Roman and Jewish law. And there were Rabbis, teachers of the Jewish Holy Scriptures. There were Orthodox Jews with phylacteries bound to their foreheads, praying to their God as they walked about. Praying aloud, because that is how they pray. There would be Pharisees, which is one sect of them, or was; and Saducees, who do not believe in the soul, or that there is any life after death; and Zealots who would like to fight the Romans; and country Jews come up for the Passover, and to make a sacrifice in the Temple. And men selling pigeons and doves and goats and lambs and oxen to be sacrificed, and making a fortune out of it. And priests who would perform the sacrifices, again for money. (The place stank of money. That was why we went there.) Indeed, very often the priests gained both ways, for they would take the money and carry the sacrifices behind the veil, saying that they were going to kill the animal or the bird in the ritual fashion, and then burn its body, and instead they would do nothing of the sort, but after a time would come out and say it was done. When the country people went away satisfied the priest would fetch the sacrifice, still alive and squealing or lowing or cooing, and sell it back for half price to the dealers in such things. It was quite a trade, and Mary had her share in it. Any priest who did not want to share found himself denounced to the High Priest of the Temple, and the authorities.
Everyone shared with Mary. The money changers who gave false weight. The lawyers who gave false advice. The animal dealers who sold blemished animals, or dying birds, or who bought the sacrifices back again, unsacrificed. The tax collectors who collected the Temple dues and pocketed half of them. They shared with Mary. We never left the Temple Courtyard without having filled our leather money bag, and it only took a quarter of an hour. Except this day.
It was near the Feast of Thanksgiving, only a few days before it, and the Courtyard was full of people. It was always full enough, but now it was packed, with visitors and foreigners, Jews from the Cities of Exile, students of the Jewish Law, followers of great Rabbis come to hear their masters preach in the colonnades. Such an uproar as made it difficult to think, let alone speak or hear.
Temple Guards were hurrying about, trying to keep order, and failing wretchedly. One could see them trying to arrest thieves and pickpockets and blasphemers, but because one could see them so easily they always failed. In all the courtyard and Temple precincts they alone were bareheaded, and as soon as a pickpocket saw a bareheaded young man in a white tunic, with a sword belt, and a sword at his side, he left off whatever he was doing, and ran and hid in the thickest part of the crowd. The guards might have done better if they had watched the priests and the officials instead of the pick pockets and the whores.
But all that was everyday stuff and nothing to be noticed, except that there was more of it. Until in one part of the Courtyard there rose a tremendous outcry, over by Solomon’s Porch, where the animal sellers and the money changers were, not far from the great South Gates. Everyone tried to see what was happening, and crowded towards that corner, and we with them. Even in such a crowd people made way for Mary, and I followed her, burrowing among tunics, and men and women, and sweat and shouting, and priests and Levites and Pharisees and students and whores and thieves and bumpkins and Temple Guards, until I could see what was happening.
A man was driving away the animals. He had unfastened the cattle and the lambs and goats and let the birds out of their wicker cages. He had overset the tables where the dealers in animals for sacrifice sat counting their money, and as I watched him he came to the row of money changers’ booths and overset those as well, so that coins rolled on the marble pavement, and there was such an ugly scramble to pick them up that I was almost swept off my feet. Men were cursing and fighting over the money, women screaming as they were knocked down and trampled, the money changers and the animal dealers were yelling for the Temple Guards to come and arrest the maniac who was driving away their stock and overturning their money tables and scattering their money to be stolen. The Guards were struggling to get through the crowd to see what was happening. I doubt if anything like it had ever happened in the existence of the Temple, or since the first Temple was built by Solomon the Wise a thousand years ago. I am sure it had not.
And strangest of all he was not a big man who was doing this, not someone like Bar Abbas, a bandit who hated the Orthodox Jews and the Temple, and everything to do with God. He was very small. And he did not look like a bandit. He was dressed in a brown robe, like a man from the north, with a rope girdle, and rough sandals. I saw him as clearly as I see you, Simon. Clearer, for my eyes were young then, and very sharp. A small man dressed in a brown robe. And driving away the goats and lambs and calves, as they lowed and bellowed in amazement at what was happening. Even they seemed to know that it was an astonishing thing.
The man had a thin beard and long black hair, and when he stood still for a moment I saw that his shoulder, his right shoulder, was hunched up, although he was not a cripple. I found out afterwards that he was a carpenter, and that hunch of the shoulder came from using a heavy plane on timber when he was young. But it made him look strange. And he stood still for a moment and looked at Mary, my mistress, who alone in the crowd went near to him. Everyone else, for all the fighting and the surging of the crowd, kept back from him, making a clear space round him and the fallen tables and bird cages. Even the men he was insulting had got out of his way, and were shouting at him from a few yards off. Perhaps they thought he was going to strike them, but as I have said, he did not look Bar Abbas’s type of man, although he was very angry, and you could see it in his eyes. He had great dark eyes, very great and dark, and they showed his anger.
I heard him shouting, "Take them away, take these things out of my Father's house! You have made it a den of thieves!" He had a great voice for a small man, and you could have heard him if there had been twice the up-roar that there was. Then my mistress went close to him, and said something. In all the crowd she was the only one who dared to go near him. He looked at her for a second, but I do not think he answered her. Instead he went on driving the cattle and the sheep in front of him up the long porch towards the gate that gives on to the road to Bethphage and Bethany, and the Sea of Salt.
I do not know what happened after that. I think the Guards were too stun-ned to arrest him, or else he slipped away before they could catch him. I have said they were not very clever. The crowd followed, watching to see what would happen, and I stayed by one of the pillars of the porch, waiting for my mistress to find me. She came to me after a few moments, and her face was white with rage.
"He is a madman" she said. "Worse than a madman. We can do no business here today." So we went down to the Thieves’ Quarter, and to Bar Abbas's house.
CHAPTER 4
We heard a great deal about that carpenter during the following year. The whole City talked of him and what he had done, and what he was doing. It was difficult to believe anything that people said. You know what City rumours are. A man makes any sort of name for himself and people will say anything. They told that this man healed the lame and the blind merely by touching them. Less, by saying, "You are healed, go home." And men who had been paralysed for twenty years were supposed to have got up and walked, and men who had been blind from birth saw the world for the first time. He was even supposed to have raised the dead, which made educated people laugh, but impressed the poor. As for the unclean, the lepers, he cured them by the dozen by all reports, nine and ten at a time, and their skins turned white as they had been before they were afflicted, and they were able to make the sacrifice that Moses laid down for such happenings.
And here was a strange thing. My mistress had a distant cousin, named Simon like you, scribe, a Jew, and he had been afflicted. He was an easy going kind of Jew, not orthodox at all, and the Orthodox said that that was why he was struck down by God. You know what religious people are. They have a strange idea of God. This cousin of my mistress's lived in Bethany, and was married. Newly married I think when he was afflicted, and he had to leave the town, and his wife, and his house, and go and live in the caves among the other unclean ones. And the man I am telling you about, the carpenter, healed him.
I know more about it now, and I am not surprised by such a thing, but I was surprised then and did not really believe it although I saw the man with my own eyes. He came to visit us in Jerusalem with his wife Hephzibah to make the sacrifices of thanksgiving I never saw him when he was unclean but he swore he had been and so did his wife and my mistress knew it for a fact. And we saw him clean again not a trace of the disease
"He is the Messiah" Simon said. "He is the Son of God." Which is what all the poor were saying. We told Simon about the uproar in the Temple when the carpenter cleared out the animals and overturned thc money changers desks and their cash boxes, and he laughed as if he had never heard anything so fine.
"He was cleansing his father's house" he said, "just as he cleansed me. Blessed be God. Blessed be the Holy Name."
When they were gone my mistress was very thoughtful. Whatever lay behind it you could not really argue away the cleansing of a man from leprosy. Even she could not do that, She could heal pain, or ease it, on herself or others. But only to a certain point. What Simon had told us was beyond her understanding. Such things belong to the Gods. And this man was a carpenter. From Nazareth in Galilee which made it even less believable. Up there in the North they are as ignorant as barbarians, and even the Jews there are not really Jews, according to the Orthodox. They are more like Samaritans.
It was then that Mary told me of the time when she had played with the little boy in Nazareth, so many and many years before, when she was six years old. He had been a carpenter's son, and she began to wonder if it was the same one. How many carpenters were there likely to have been in a place like Nazareth? This man's name was Joshua, or Jesus in our language. Joshua son of Mary, or Miriam in Hebrew, of the House of King David. Perhaps, we thought, it was his descent from the great king that gave him power.
Among the Jews, of course, royal descent does not mean that the person needs to be rich, and it would be quite possible for the carpenter to be both of the House of David and to be as poor as he had seemed to be, from his clothes and his calling. Joshua son of Miriam. There were stories that he was like Bar Abbas, of an unknown father. Now that I think of it again, and tell it to be written down, there is something very strange about that similarity, be-tween Joshua son of Miriam, or Mary, and Simon son of no one. But of course it did not strike us as strange then.
Some rumours said that the carpenter was the son of a Roman soldier who had violated his mother. But that could scarcely have been true, or surely she could not have worked on the Veil which she is supposed to have done long after Joshua was born to her. Perhaps I should explain there, Simon, for those who read this and do not know Hebrew, that the word "maiden" in the Jews’ Scriptures, as when they call a woman a "Temple maiden", does not mean what a doctor of medicine would mean by it, that the woman has never lain with a man, but that she is a young woman, and fit for certain ritual tasks, like weaving the veil. Miriam the mother of Joshua would have been older than I was at the time I am telling of when she worked on the Veil, and already a mother, as I have said.
But the rumours of his birth. There were some that believed he was the son of Herod, and that Herod had tried to find him and his mother when he was born, and kill him, in case he grew up to claim the throne. And that Herod had killed every new born child he could lay hands on, at the time, in case it was his own bastard. But surely that too was only a story, made up to amaze the ignorant people who like wonders, and stories about kings. I never heard of any kings yet who did not have scores of bastards, and did they go round trying to kill them all? They usually set them up in life and became quite fond of them.
And of course there was the Great Rumour, that this Joshua was truly the Son of God, in the full sense of the term. To us Greeks of course, there was nothing outrageous in such a rumour. Zeus had children by mortal women, more than one, and among the Romans there are families who claim descent not only from the Gods but from Goddesses. Julius the King who reigned before Augustus was descended from the Roman Venus, who was cousin to Aphrodite the Chaste, and all the Julian Emperors became gods because of it.
No, there was nothing impossible to us about even a carpenter being the Son of God. But to the Jews, the Orthodox Jews of course, it was the Blasphemy of Blasphemies. They have only One God, Jehovah, and they will not so much as write down His Name in full, but make special signs to represent it. They will not even pronounce His Name aloud. Only the High Priest may do that, and then only once a year, in the Temple, in the Holy of Holies.
I think now that they were close to the truth in that, although not absolutely. But who knows the Absolute but God Himself? At the time I am speaking of, naturally, neither my mistress nor I thought that the Jews knew anything, the Orthodox, I mean. Jews like Baruch ben Isaac knew what we knew, and he too smiled at his Orthodox brothers, and all their sects.
Yes, yes, Simon, the carpenter. I shall tell more of him now. Where was I? His birth, as the Son of God, or of Herod, or of a Roman soldier. I know now who he was, and what he was, and I believe that he was the Son of God, and I make His sign as I pronounce his name. You see it, Simon? Forehead and heart. Left shoulder and right. The forehead that you may think. The heart that you may feel. The shoulders that you may bear the burdens God chooses to set on them. Amen. Blessed he His Name.
But the carpenter, while he was still a carpenter. We heard the stories, we smiled, we heard Simon the leper's story, and others like it. And then we heard of my mistress's cousin, also called Mary, or Miriam among the Jews. People called her Mary of Magdala, to distinguish her from my mistress who was called Mary of Jerusalem, or Mary the Thief, or Mary the High Priestess, according to who it was who spoke of her. Both she and her cousin were born in Magdala, of two sisters, and they grew up there together until my mistress was ten years old or so, and her mother Berenike brought her to Jerusalem as I have told, twenty and more years before the time I am describing.
But the mothers kept in friendship and cousinship with one another, and visited one another, now in Magdala, which is a nothing of a place near the Sea of Galilee, did I tell you that, Simon? and now in Jerusalem, when my mistress's cousin would be brought to the City for the Passover or another festival, because her father was a Jew. Not Orthodox, of course, or he would not have married a Greek woman, but he still kept the Festivals.
And as my mistress's cousin grew up, she became beautiful. Not as beautiful as my mistress, but still an astonishing kind of beauty, rather frail, like a flower, with the same red hair and green eyes and pale skin that my mistress had, and almost as tall. She had some of the same lusts as well, although not for suffering. Her lusts were for men, and for ordinary love, and she gave herself to almost any one who pleased her eye. She made money out of it. Her mother saw to that once she saw also that there was no help for it, and that her daughter was born to be a harlot. She kept her away from stupid, penniless lovers, and arranged things with rich Greeks and Romans and Egyptians. Some of these men kept Mary of Magdala for weeks and even months together, so it is not proper to call her a simple harlot. A hetaira. A courtesan. But it comes to much the same thing in the end. Down dark alleyways for a denarius a time, and a pimp to take even that from her as soon as she had earned it. There is no good in giving yourself to men. Mark that too, scribe Simon. I know you. I know how you look at the servant girls, and what you promise them. And what your promises mean.
No, no, no protests, no lies. Write down what I say. Mary of Magdala. A courtesan on the way to the end of all fools of women, with seven devils of lust between her legs to drive her faster towards it. Real devils, too, because she had the falling sickness, and would go rigid and cataleptic in the middle of making love, sometimes, or she would fall down in front of you, foaming at the mouth. And she had another devil, too, of giving her money away. So soon as her mother took her eyes from her, she would give money to any one. Friend, beggar, slave, lover. Men had only to ask her and she gave. It must have come from her father, it could not have come from her Greek blood. All in all she was not a cousin my mistress could be proud of, although she could have been rich enough if she had not been such a fool.
And then everything about her changed. Because of the carpenter. She was visiting Simon the leper in Bethany, who was her cousin too, naturally enough, and there she saw the carpenter, Joshua son of Miriam. And fell in love with him. Or something of that kind. God Eternal knows. She fell at his feet in one of her falling fits, and he stooped down, Hephzibah the wife of Simon told us, and laid his hand on her hair.
"Get up, woman he said. "Your devils have come out of you."
And Mary was healed. She was healed of the falling sickness and the catalepsy. Healed of her lusts, or so Hephzibah swore. The only thing she was not healed of was from giving things away. The first moment she was healed she ran to where she was staying in Bethany, the inn I suppose, and fetched a jar of ointment that some one had given her - it must have been worth a silver pound, Hephzibah said, it was pure nard - and she rushed back with it and broke the jar on the floor and smeared the ointment all over the carpen-ter's dusty feet. Then she wept so much that she practically washed them with her tears, Hephzibah told us, and dried them with her hair. It did not sound to me as if she was cured at all. I thought she sounded worse, but Hephzibah was tremendously impressed, and told us that from that day Mary of Magdala never went with a man. but followed the carpenter wherever he went, listening to his teaching, and serving him. As a lot of women did, apparently.
My mistress laughed at that, and so did I.
"I know that kind of Teacher" my mistress said, "that has a company of harlots to look after him. I might listen to him myself if I had the time."
Hephzibah was so angry that she went away without saying another word, even farewell, and we went on laughing. I think now it was as if we were hoping to find something to laugh at, to find out that it was all lies about him, and that he was no more than the kind of trickster who heals people at Fairs and juggles with fire and things like that, in order to cozen money out of imbeciles.
But soon we heard so many stories, and so many bore one another out, about his healing the lame and the blind, the sick and the paralysed, and even of his raising the dead, that it was no longer possible to laugh, even though most of the stories came from the North, beyond Samaria; from Galilee, and Trachonitis on the east side of the lake, and from farther north still, in Phoenicia, round Tyre and Sidon and Zarephath. You could not laugh them all away.
Even the Orthodox Jews were no longer laughing, and they became very angry at what they heard, although they still claimed that it was no more than tricks, or else that it came from the Devil, and not from God. They began sending men north to trap him into blasphemies, or to show him up for an ignorant workman who had learned some conjuring, or some spells. We heard of all this in the market, or through Olympias, or in the thieves' quarter, or in the Temple. Even the Romans cocked an ear to listen to the stories, Baruch told us, because they liked to know everything that was going on, that might lead to trouble. As this might. A man claiming descent from the great king, David, and gathering a following in the north; that could be quite an alarming thing for the Romans, who kept a very small garrison in the City, and almost no soldiers at all elsewhere in Judaea. The times of the Maccabees, and the Jewish Wars, was not so long ago. The Romans remembered, and the Jewish leaders, the far sighted ones, were as anxious as the Romans. They wanted no trouble with anyone, and above all they wanted no more Roman soldiers brought into the City, or even into Judaea. If the carpenter was going to make trouble, they wanted to put a stop to it before it was well begun. People still talked of the way he had cleared the Temple of animals and money makers that day. (Of course, the dealers were all back in their places in the Temple courtyard the day after, but what had been done once could be done again, and last longer, and no one was more aware of that than the dealers themselves, and the money changers and the tax collectors, and all the gang of holy thieves who dealt there, and exploited the people. )
The poor were already saying that the clearing of the Temple was only a beginning, and that the rich, and the Romans, had better look out. That a day was coming, that Joshua son of Miriam, the descendant of King David, was the Messiah the Holy Scriptures prophesied about, and that he would make himself King and restore Israel. It was not a kind of talk to please the rich, who also wanted the restoration of Israel, but not for a long time yet, and they would dearly have liked to take every beggar and thief and louse ridden labourer who chattered about such things in public, and have him scourged, if not crucified by the Romans as a trouble maker against the Emperor.
The difficulty was that the Jews' Scriptures did tell that a Messiah was to come, and that he would become King and restore Israel, and there was no blasphemy in saying you expected it to happen, or even that it had begun, and the Messiah was come. And until the Messiah did something positive to claim his kingdom, there was no treason against Rome, either. The Romans believed in what people did, not what they said. Over by the Dead Sea, at Qmran and their other centres, the Essenes were always talking about the Messiah, and the Teacher of Righteousness, and what the pair of them would do when they arrived. The Romans never troubled their heads about the Essenes.
But then of course, the Essenes never raised anyone from the dead. And if the Romans were not troubled about Joshua the carpenter, my mistress was, and more and more as she heard more about him. Not for herself, and that nonsense of the Temple. Whatever she lost that day she made up the next. It was not that. It was a feeling that she had, that he was an enemy, not hers, but of the Cult. Of the God. And she told me she began to pray against him at the Ceremonies, and to speak about him to Dionysus.
"The God has warned me against him" she said one night, it must have been a year or so after that day in the Temple. "It is as if the God was - not afraid of him but - perhaps He is afraid for us, who love Him?" She was saying this to herself rather than to me. Baruch ben Isaac was away travelling, and she had not replaced him with a regular lover for the nights. Bar Abbas was enough, I think, during the day. So that we often spent hours of the evening together, after supper, and she would play with me, or talk to herself, or even both together, as if I was a doll, and not really there to listen.
"But I am not afraid of him!" she said suddenly. And did talk to me then. "He is coming south, I know it, he is coming to Bethany, to Simon's house, Hephzibah told me days ago, when we saw her in the market. That fool? That fool of a woman! How I hate the way she looks! Simon was better off as a leper! But she gives us an excuse. Listen, this is what I shall do!" And she began to tell me her plan as if it was already made in her head, and only needed to be told aloud
So that two days later we set off for Bethany, to see him, and see him face to face, at close quarters, in Simon's house, where he was staying. It was only three miles from the City, and one could walk it comfortably, or uncomfortably given the hot weather of the day time, in not much more than an hour if one went quite slowly. But we travelled in style, with a hired litter and litter bearers, and Philip the Steward walking beside my mistress who lay inside the litter, hidden by the ivory satin curtains, and myself on a donkey behind them, riding on one of those wooden seats with a kind of basket work shelter round and over me, with faded blue cotton curtains to draw across the opening if I wanted to draw them, which I didn't.
It was like an embassy, and in a fashion it was one. To sound out the enemy, and make peace or war as things should happen. We were prepared for either, with gifts and weapons. Our kind of gifts and our kind of weapons. To leave him in peace to heal his sick and raise his dead, far away in Galilee, and leave us untroubled in the South. Or to loose the full power of the Cult against him, and the God, and destroy him, before he tried to destroy us. Because that was that inner feeling that my mistress had. That he meant to destroy us, that he and the Cult could not exist side by side. Even I could feel it. Even as an initiate and not a Celebrant. A heaviness about the Ceremonies, an atmosphere of - of things coming to an end. Of sadness, and worse than sadness. I cannot explain how it was, only that we both knew we must go to Bethany, and see him face to face.
We travelled through the heat of the morning, the dust rising up as the litter bearers carried my mistress along with their queer, flat footed run, heels kicking up and back and feet scuffling and shuffling forward in the dust. I kept leaning out to watch the litter, and the road ahead, and I could see the back of the rear litter bearer, with a big grey sweat stain in the middle of his white tunic, between his shoulders. I can still see the way his shoulders and head strained back, carrying the weight of the litter, because of course he at the back had the greatest weight to bear, and they used to set the litter down every half mile or so, and change ends. He wore a white sweat band roun
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