Our Lady of Babylon

  All those nights away, Jason had been at Creon’s Court, preparing for his own ambitions.

  And he had offered me to him!

  “I shall see that the children of Jason will be brought forth by the best — and most loyal — midwife.” His look grew even more brutal. “We have arranged it, Jason and I. As soon as you give birth, your children will be taken immediately from you and delivered to Creusa, who shall from then on be the mother of Jason’s children. News of her ‘pregnancy’ has already been spread about the City. She has gone into a period of necessary seclusion.” He stood only inches from me so that I felt the impact of his words. “Find pleasure in this, Medea. I shall be generous to the children of Jason . . . and his wife, Creusa.” He waited, allowing his words to stir more pain as I grasped their full meaning.

  Creusa was barren, my children would be given to her — sold! “Creusa? Jason’s wife . . .” I tasted the vile words, masticated them.

  “Yes, his wife. They’ve been married, quietly, of course, while matters proceed. Oh, he’s told me about your own fraudulent ‘marriage’ under the gaze of Hecate, not under the laws of civilized Gods.”

  How quickly I accepted cruelty! I had learned it from masters. Love and hatred — easily now — wrestled in me and formed a new emotion greater than both, one without name, one that would rule my life from this moment forward.

  He extended his curses: “If anything happens to me or to my daughter, or to Jason, before all this is effected, Medea, instructions have been left to destroy your children.”

  I opened my arms, presenting myself to this King. “Even a barbarian knows when to surrender.”

  “I accept your surrender, and I shall retain the memory of this brief encounter between us to augment desire with anticipation of our next times. Now I shall return to celebrate with my daughter the approaching birth of her children.”

  He reached for his cape, preparing to leave.

  “Wait!”

  He turned.

  “Let me join in your celebration with your daughter, Creon. Allow me to be a part of the toast you and she shall drink to the extension of your dynasty, and Jason’s.” How quickly I had abandoned hope, how quickly I had to substitute justice. I located the wine I had brought from my country.

  “Oh?” He smiled. “You drink from it, Medea,” he tested.

  “Oh, but I shall!” I tilted the decanter, filled a goblet. And I drank all that I had poured, silently toasting my country with its wine that must be sipped, only sipped at first, preparing the body gradually for more of its enticing powers, power so vast that, without gradual initiation, it would scorch like fire, and —

  Assured, Creon took the bottle from me, sniffed with curious delicacy at it. “Yes, it is sweet indeed . . . I accept this gift to, finally, a dynasty of Creon — and silently I shall also toast you, my willing slave, Medea.” His lips twisted. “My . . . whore —”

  My essence —

  “Which is all you have been to Jason, a whore,” he extended his judgment.

  My essence stirred — “Yes, toast that, too, Creon. I shall be there with you in spirit.”

  Covered again with his cape, Creon left, a shadow as he had entered.

  I stood at the window facing the palace. I waited. I waited long, longer, waited for what I knew I would soon hear.

  It came!

  A howl of pain rushed to me across the streets of Corinth from Creon’s palace as my barbarian wine raged like melted fire through every vein of his body.

  “I told you I would scorch you, Creon!” said my new voice.

  I waited. There would be more! Another scream, this one Creusa’s. Yes! It came ripping through her father’s wail as the wine with which she had toasted my children wound its fierce way into her heart and burned and killed.

  I hurried to blend special herbs and roots I had gathered during my excursions into the desert at night. I mixed the chosen ingredients with water in a goblet. I placed the goblet in the center of the room. Then I decorated my naked body only with the new golden bracelets and anklets that Jason had ordered made for me for my appearance at the palace. I rubbed a light sweet unguent on my body, so that it glowed golden, too. I stood in the last shaft of sunlight slashing the room.

  And I waited for Jason.

  “They’re dead! Scorched with your wine!” he gasped.

  “Our wine, Jason, the wine I taught you to drink like a barbarian. Our wine killed them. They didn’t know they were toasting your betrayal of me and my children!”

  “Our children, whom I sought to protect by making them —”

  “Hers?”

  “It was necessary!” His proud face broken, he stumbled toward me.

  “Stand there!” I commanded. He froze.

  Now, responding to Creon’s prepared instructions, his guards would be advancing. If my children were to die, they would die with love, not hatred.

  I held the goblet filled with the fresh mixture. I swallowed. The liquid coursed down my throat, past my heart, down, into my womb. For moments it soothed my children with its warmth — and then it mixed with their blood and flowed out.

  Before Jason, I stood on a flowering pool of darkening blood, mine, our unborn children.

  “Medea!” But he could not move.

  I felt unendurable pain. I had to dredge more strength to remain standing before him.

  “Medea —” This time he staggered.

  Did I hear regret in his utterance of my name? Darkness coiled about me. “The Black Sea heard you make me promise to remain a barbarian, for you, that’s how you loved me, you said.”

  I thrust away the darkness that narrowed in a circle about me. My bare feet felt the fading warmth of the spilled blood of my children as it turned cold, dark. I held my braceleted arms out to Jason.

  “Love me now, Jason, keep your promise, love the barbarian now.”

  He staggered toward me, fell at my feet, on the blackened blood. Before darkness and pain smothered me, I laughed, but all I could hear was an endless wail of despair, mine and Jason’s conjoined.

  XXVIII

  “LADY, LADY! I didn’t know. Who could have guessed the truth? Only you, who experienced it. And you were blamed!”

  “And I was blamed.”

  “I understand why your essence persevered, even against me, to redeem her. And we shall redeem her. I understand so much. Please, Lady, stop pounding on your stomach. Please stop! It can’t hurt anymore! It’s over. Take your tea, please, Lady.”

  Madame’s words brought me back to her garden, away from the blood in Corinth, away from the blood in —

  I heard the forlorn screaming of a woman!

  Echoes from the past?

  No. The scream was piercing through the quiet of Madame’s garden. From one of the destitute wanderers? No, the scream was much too close. But why was Madame not reacting? Oh, she was — by simply lowering her head sadly. I had been wrong, the scream was not close — it came from afar, yes, from one of the derelicts wandering the countryside displaced. No, it came — I shouted, to drown the scream, which had become a wail that swept the garden: “I feel the mounting horror of it all!”

  “Of course, Lady, oh, of course. The death of children always arouses despair —”

  “That, yes, that! — and more — horror, terror, unending sorrow — and, oh, Madame, the unceasing cruelty of every moment of existence!”

  “Lady!” Madame placed a firm arm about my shoulders. “You must remember that we’re about to shed the burden of unjust blame. Feel triumph in that.”

  I sipped the tea she was holding to my lips. Ermenegildo rested his head on my lap, to add his reassurance to Madame’s. That, and Madame’s words of confidence, assuaged the pain — some of the pain — that had ambushed my body.

  And the forlorn wail I had heard died.

  To show that I was in control, I took the cup of tea Madame was holding toward me. I touched Ermenegildo’s head in acknowledgment of his concern. My eyes swept over
Madame’s beautiful garden, inviting the spectacle of it to bring further surcease, and it did, lulling me. Warmth returned to my body — only now that I had stopped did I realize I had been shivering. I closed my eyes.

  When I opened them again, the slant of the sun was lower, shadows had lengthened, and the afternoon was fading.

  “Oh, Lady, where did you get —?”

  When Madame spoke in surprise, I discovered that, during the extended interlude when I had closed my eyes, I had released, onto the table, Ermenegildo’s unique feather left last night as a vague but terrifying warning on my gate.

  “A further message left last night,” I whispered my answer to her.

  But Ermenegildo must have heard me; his head shot up. Gliding my hand over it, I attempted to conceal the feather — I wasn’t entirely sure Ermenegildo wanted to see it again.

  “Did someone try to harm you when you recovered the missing sheet?” Madame Bernice asked him; she could not keep apprehension out of her voice.

  Ermenegildo nodded.

  “Who!”

  Ermenegildo pointed with his beak toward —

  The château down the road!

  Madame Bernice stroked and soothed him — unnecessarily, since he seemed in total control. “Tell me exactly how!”

  He scurried along, his feet racing —

  “Someone chased you —?”

  Yes.

  He tossed about — being attentive to position himself even then to good advantage.

  “— and tried to capture you?”

  Yes.

  “— but you escaped?”

  Of course!

  “How?”

  He pecked and pecked and pecked.

  “You defended yourself with your beak!”

  He held his head back proudly. Yes!

  “Why didn’t you let me know, last night?”

  He nestled his body against hers.

  Madame explained to me: “He didn’t want to worry me.” She touched his comb. “But your twisted feather —”

  He bristled.

  “I mean,” Madame adjusted quickly, “your singularly beautiful feather — it was plucked out?”

  What?

  I raised my hand on the table, revealing the feather to him.

  Ermenegildo looked at it in surprise: How did you get it?

  “It was left on my gate, last night,” I told him.

  “Was it a man who tried to capture you?” Madame continued questioning him.

  Yes and no.

  “A man and a woman?” She understood.

  Yes.

  Madame crumbled the largest pastry on the plate — and then added another — and served them both to Ermenegildo. He raised his head even higher.

  “They’ll go to all lengths to try to frighten us into canceling interviews,” Madame evaluated like a seasoned general. “This rash act is evidence. Since we won’t be scared away and they’ll know it soon enough, we must assume they’ll release every tactic now to ambush interviews. I may not have time enough to prepare a formal presentation — amenities may have to be relinquished. So we must be ready to reveal your truths at any moment! We have little time to idle.” She adjusted a blossom within the vase on the table; today she had chosen to grace it with upright lilies of the valley. “We must go immediately to Calvary.”

  The sorrow of the procession we must soon take through my memories saturated Madame’s garden. Mist had crept in. The sun paled into a blur of gray clouds like smeared tears.

  I took Madame back to the crucial encounter when Judas demanded that Mary tell Jesus the truth of his birth. Mary — coldly, Judas claimed later, but I said it was with quiet dignity — upheld that she had done so, that her son, like her, had been “purely conceived.”

  “The Angel Gabriel announced that to me.” Mary had spoken the words as if they were not remarkable.

  Jesus’ attacks on the corrupt priests and aristocrats of the land grew as fierce as we had long ago planned, but he denounced the commanding sects as “sinners,” not exploiters, and he did so “in the name of God,” not of justice. To the destitute, he extended the promise of an eternal reward, in Heaven.

  “Look at them, Magdalene. They used to chant defiance, now they bow and pray — and accept. Justice should be demanded here, now. Just as he used to demand it — as we used to demand it,” Judas remembered quietly.

  That night, when we had pitched a tent in the desert, as we often did, for a night, two, Judas challenged Jesus: “The people suffer enough! It’s here, now, that their lives need relief.”

  “What price should be put on attaining Paradise?”

  “More of your riddles, just riddles,” Judas said.

  It was true. Increasingly, Jesus spoke in riddles — and seemed, only seemed, to answer whenever he was questioned. Was it possible that he himself was not yet entirely certain of the reason for his journey?

  Madame Bernice startled me by tinkling, although softly, on the side of her tea cup for attention, apparently having tried otherwise to summon it unsuccessfully, so immersed had I become in my life as Magdalene. “Let’s pause a moment, Lady. The possibility that Jesus himself, at least at this point, was not entirely sure of his true purpose may prove vastly important in our deductions.”

  “I had the feeling, Madame, that for all the firmness of his declarations, his mission was evolving —”

  “Hmmm. We have to consider that.” Madame’s jeweled hands remained on her forehead, storing significant evidence.

  As growing numbers responded to Jesus’ messianic presence, Judas and I began to locate among the crowds quiet, attentive presences. Spies? That meant that Jesus was arousing serious suspicions among the rulers — what was this once-radical really plotting?

  “He’s in danger,” Judas announced.

  We would approach Mary again, Judas and I, with that blunt assertion of danger. We went to her home, where Jesus still dwelled when he was not with us or preaching outside the City. In the courtyard, we encountered Joseph. He was just standing there, looking forlorn.

  “He fades more every day,” I whispered to Judas.

  Judas agreed sadly, “One day he’ll be gone and no one will notice.”

  Near Mary, who was weaving, Jesus sat on the floor carving out a rose from a piece of wood left there by Joseph. He smiled a warm greeting at us.

  Judas was bold: “If you continue to allow the rumors that you’re the Messiah, you’ll give the rulers reason to arrest you for blasphemy. They’re already watching you,” he told Jesus in a voice intended to extend his warning to Mary. “Your promises of Heaven are making your followers meek, they won’t have the spirit to rebel if you’re arrested now . . . Years ago, we planned —”

  I knew he had been about not only to remind him of our fervid plots, but to evoke the intimacy among us when we had planned them, the long conversations we had had — so long ago, it seemed — about justice, revolution. In my memories, growing distant, those interludes had occurred always on warm nights while palm trees held benign witness under bright stars.

  Jesus held out to Mary the carving in his hands. She took it. “Lovely.” She sniffed it, as if its form itself would scent it with perfume.

  Judas’s hand rose over Jesus’ head, yearning, I knew, to stroke it, as he had done before in the many moments of controlled intimacy, those moments that attempted to calm desire. He withdrew his hand when Jesus did not look at him. Judas turned to Mary, and blurted desperately: “Blasphemy is punished with —”

  Would he speak the words that he had not been able to speak during our rehearsal of this encounter earlier?

  “— blasphemy is punished with death by crucifixion.”

  My mind rejected the sudden image —

  Mary said, “Dear Judas, you still don’t understand. Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.” Her lips hardly moved; those words now formed themselves.

  She smiled, the beautiful enigmatic smile that would haunt me at Calvary. Is she saying he can’t
be harmed? I wondered, with fear. “Please, help us, Mary,” I added to Judas’s plea. “You’re the only one who can convince him he’s in danger” — I couldn’t keep out of my voice a note of lament at our own inability to be able to persuade him — “and you love him —”

  “— with all my heart,” Mary asserted . . . “I’ve heard rumors about danger. So has he. So of course I shall exhort my son to shift his holy journey.”

  Her casual words startled us. I looked for doubt on Judas’s face, but he was eager to believe.

  Mary addressed her son: “They’re beseeching me to tell you to shift your mission,” she told him. “Do it, my beloved son.”

  “Please listen!” Judas demanded.

  “My mother is she who shall do the will of God,” Jesus seemed — only seemed — to chastise Mary. He had smiled at her, and his words had been so soft they evaporated in the blue light that bathed her from the window.

  Mary faced us triumphantly. She had staged a charade for us, to dramatize Jesus’ unswerving mission, his — and hers. “You see?” she said. “No one can stop what God has appointed.”

  At the door, I turned back to face Mary. “What guarantee do you have that Jesus will be saved from the rulers’ anger?”

  “God has given His word, through his messenger, the Angel Gabriel. Jesus will not be harmed. God has promised.”

  “She said those exact words, Lady?” Madame Bernice asked me. “‘God has promised.’”

  “Those exact words, yes, Madame.”

  Across the land, we followed Jesus like shadows as he continued his sermons. At times, over Jesus’ words, Judas would utter his confused love and pain: “He’s a kind man, a caring man, a man committed to justice — and he does love us. But he’s a man nonetheless.” As Judas grew more despondent, he became more stunning in his appearance as if, now that his desire — and Jesus’ — threatened to remain unfulfilled, it must find another manifestation, and found it in sensual, angered beauty.