Bright Dark Madonna. Elizabeth Cunningham

turn, Dido and Berta, kneeling beside me ready to deliver the afterbirth, Judith who is hovering, waiting to wash and swaddle the baby, Ma who is silent for once, all here, as if no angel could ever distract her again.

      “Colomen Du,” I say again. “That is her name. It means Black Dove.”

      There is a brief silence, and then everyone tries, without much success, to pronounce the name.

      “Is that Celtic?” asks Reginus suspiciously.

      I nod and return my gaze to Colomen Du.

      “Don’t you think a nice Greek name would be a little easier for the kid? Everybody speaks Greek. How about Phoebe, or something, since she was born at sunrise.”

      “She is a little princess!” Ma pronounces, and she bends down and coos over the baby as if she were an ordinary grandmother. “We will call you Sarah.”

      “Her name is Colomen Du,” I protest. “She is my daughter.”

      You see? It is beginning already.

      “Of course,” says Miriam as if there is no contradiction. “Every divine child needs a name, secret like the name of the Most High, that no one can pronounce. We’ll call her Sarah.”

      “Sarah,” everyone murmured happily.

      “Sarah,” I sigh in surrender, too happy, too tired to fight.

      After a breakfast feast and hymns to Isis, I was ready to go inside to the inner temple to rest. I curled up with Sarah in the very same chamber where we had laid Jesus the night the Samaritan merchant brought him to us, half dead of exposure and wounds. I had held him in my arms all night long, the fire of the stars flowing through me, restoring him to life. Now as I fell asleep, I felt him with me, holding me, as I held our child. And if you never understood the trinity before, maybe now you do.

      When I woke—or perhaps I was dreaming—I saw Jesus, saw him with my eyes, for the first time since he walked through the Beautiful Gates. He was gazing at us and weeping silently. I wanted to go to him, but somehow I knew I could not.

      “I am sorry,” he spoke at last. “I didn’t know how hard it would be.”

      Maybe you are accustomed to picturing the ascended Jesus seated at the right hand of the father, all knowing and supreme, just biding his sweet time till he comes again in glory or whatever it is his followers still expect him to do. Maybe it is hard for you to imagine him grieving for the loss of his human life, the loss of a human love he would not have the chance to know, but I am here to tell that you he did grieve. He does.

      “I want to hold her.”

      “Can’t you?” I pleaded. “Can’t you, can’t you just come back and be with us, stay with us?”

      “No, I mean, yes, I mean, I’m here. But not…not the way I want to be. Oh, Maeve, please will you hold her so I can see her face.”

      I sat up and, resting Sarah in the crook of my arm, I turned her toward her father, and she opened her fathomless, golden eyes and looked straight into his. I don’t know how long I watched them take each other in, deep to deep, but I swear the close warm air filled with the scent of spice and dawn, and a few golden leaves fell from that other world into the cave.

      “Beloved.” It was hard to speak through whatever connected us, through whatever separated us, but I knew I had to. “The apostles asked me to consider what Jesus would want for his son.”

      He frowned for a moment, then he brightened.

      “But I don’t have a son.” It seemed to strike him very funny, and he laughed as if he still had a belly.

      “Which technically means you don’t have an heir. The levirate is so amusing.”

      “Oh.” He sobered up.

      “Well, I told them I would pray about the matter. So I am.”

      “What?”

      “Praying. Doesn’t talking to you count as prayer? You know, because of the god-making-death?”

      “I’m still getting used to that,” he sighed. “But all right. Go ahead.”

      “Dear Lord Jesus Christ. What is thy will concerning the raising of this child?”

      “Maeve, that is not an honest prayer,” he said. “You never lied to me in life; don’t start now.”

      “You’re right. How’s this then? Dear Jesus, there is no way in hell I am letting them take our daughter away from me.”

      “That’s much better,” he acknowledged.

      “Good, then I will tell Peter, James and the rest that you spake unto me and said to leave your wife and daughter the fuck alone! Or better yet why don’t you tell them to bugger off yourself?”

      “Beloved, are you going to make a habit of using foul language around our daughter?” he asked mildly enough, but I was getting worked up.

      “Probably. And I’m going to raise her in a pagan whorehouse, looks like. If you have a problem with that, you should have thought twice before you went and got yourself crucified. It’s bad enough I’ve got your mother on my hands for life—who has already renamed our baby. Did you know that? I am not about to take orders from—”

      My baby’s (dead) daddy, I choked back the words, and I burst into tears as weepy and unreasonable as any exhausted new mother plug full of postpartum hormones. Sarah soon joined in, her wails way more piercing than mine.

      “Cariad,” I thought I heard Jesus say over the din. I felt a hand caress my cheek.

      By the time I looked up, after guiding Sarah, flailing and squalling, to my breast, I was a single mother again.

      “Red,” It was Dido with a plate of food and a wineskin. “The others didn’t want me to tell you, but I thought you should know. They’re outside the gates. We haven’t told them anything, of course. But they are refusing to go away till they’ve spoken to you. ”

      A single mother with a custody battle on my hands.

      CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      SIEGE

      WHAT WE CAME TO CALL the Siege of Temple Magdalen began on a small scale: Just Peter, James, Andrew, John, and a few of the other disciples who came from the area standing, almost politely, outside our gates. They might even have been mistaken for suppliants seeking our usual services—(Oh the shame of it! That’s how determined they were)—except that they refused our invitation to come inside. To step foot in a pagan temple whorehouse would clearly render them instantly unclean. God only knows for how long and what they would have had to do to become clean again. Nor did they invite me to come out. According to the Law, a woman is unclean for forty days after the birth of a male child and for eighty days if the child is female. But clearly they wanted to know if I had given birth yet, and if so—to a son or a daughter? There was debate within the walls of Temple Magdalen as to what and how much to tell them.