The Galileans: A Novel of Mary Magdalene Read online

  The song ended and the musicians lifted their instruments. Then on a crashing chord from the leader’s cithara they began a wild barbaric dance of the mountains and deserts beyond the Jordan and the Dead Sea. The flute wailed in the strange melody of the desert people, while the strings and the cymbalist took up the rhythm, set to the throbbing beat of the scabella. Stamped by the cymbal player against the stones of the pavement, the resonant boards produced a booming sound like the beat of drums heard afar off. Above this heady rhythm came the clear, commanding call of the long trumpet.

  Mary of Magdala put down her lyre and stood erect upon her toes, poised with her arms uplifted, as if in adoration of something unseen. The music seemed to caress her body, creating in its lithe beauty a fluid rhythm in cadence with the clash of the cymbals, the throbbing beat of the scabella and the strings, and the wail of flute and trumpet. Slowly at first, then faster as the rhythm quickened, she began to move in a dance that, while not consciously provocative, set the onlookers to breathing hard with the grip of its allure. Like a musical instrument in itself, her body, slender and girlish yet already seductive, seemed to vibrate in a wild melody all its own.

  As she danced, the shawl about the girl’s head came loose and was tossed aside, letting the glorious mass of her hair stream about her shoulders, enveloping them in a cascade of coppery gold. She was like a spinning torch, a veritable pillar of flame, and a roar of approval came from the audience. With an effort of will Joseph tore his eyes from the girl and studied Gaius Flaccus. Naked lust and a calculating light were in the Roman’s eyes, and Joseph wondered if the girl had any conception of what her dancing could do to the souls of men, or of the dangers that might come to her because of it.

  Mary of Magdala laughed exultantly in the midst of her dancing and, deliberately provocative now, whirled before the tall tribune, her eyes mocking him. Faster the rhythm went as she moved about the open circle in the crowd, skillfully eluding those who tried to touch her. Coins began to fall in a shower upon the stones as the music rose to its climax, then ceased upon a crash of the cymbals. Standing on her toes, her lovely young breast rising and falling rapidly with the excitement of her triumph and the effort of her dancing, Mary of Magdala poised like a statue of Aphrodite herself, eyes shining, cheeks bright with color, while the crowd deepened the spontaneous thunder of its applause.

  Joseph was the first to see the rich color drain suddenly from her cheeks, leaving them marble pale. For an instant she was rigid, as if truly transformed into a statue of the goddess of love, then she wavered and took a quick step as if to regain her balance. Sensing what was happening, he started toward her, darting between several men who stood between him and the open space where she stood. But he was too far away, and it was the tribune, Gaius Flaccus, who caught the slender body of the dancer in his arms as she toppled over in a dead faint.

  II

  For a moment, as the Roman officer lowered the unconscious girl to the ground, the crowd stood paralyzed. Then someone shouted, “Away! She is possessed by a demon!” Those in front began at once to push back, for everyone knew that demons sometimes left those who were possessed, particularly during a period of unconsciousness, and entered the body of a well person. Only Joseph moved toward the girl and the kneeling tribune.

  Gaius Flaccus recognized him, for Joseph had often attended his uncle, Pontius Pilate. “You there, leech!” he barked. “Help me with this girl.”

  Joseph knelt beside the unconscious dancer. As he felt for the pulse at her wrist, her body began to jerk convulsively, and he reached at once for the pouch at his belt, thinking to force one of the coins it contained between her teeth through the leather. Alexander Lysimachus had taught him early that the only thing to be done for an epileptic convulsion was to place something between the victim’s teeth to protect the tongue from being bitten. But the girl’s jaws were not tense; instead, a torrent of words poured from her throat. They seemed to be a confused jumble of childhood phrases and songs, then cries of protest, as if someone were punishing her, and finally screams of agony and a writhing of her body as if under the lash. The whole episode lasted only a moment, then as if the torrent of words had released some of the energy inside the slender body, she was quiet.

  “Is it the Sacred Disease?” Gaius Flaccus asked. Epilepsy, variously thought to result from possession by demons or divine visitation, was often called the “Sacred Disease” even now, although Hippocrates had argued nearly five hundred years before that it was no different from other diseases, having a natural cause in the diminution or loss of humors from the brain and nerves, leaving them in an uncommonly dry state. Watching the girl, Joseph thought there seemed to be much reason in the Greek view, for she was perspiring, and as she had begun to fall, her face had become suddenly very pale, showing that the body humors had indeed left the head where the brain was located. On the other hand, however, she had not bitten her tongue, there was no froth at her mouth, and no jerking movements, such as Hippocrates had described in what he had preferred to call the “Great Disease.”

  “Answer me, leech!” Gaius Flaccus barked irritably. “It must be the Sacred Disease.”

  Joseph hesitated to disagree with the Roman, for his violent temper was well known. But on the other hand, he was not at all sure of the diagnosis. Just then, however, the girl sneezed violently.

  “Hayim tobim umarphei,” Joseph repeated automatically, for some said sneezing was connected with death, which might be averted by thus wishing the person who sneezed a “good and healthful life.” Others felt, however, that ittush, the act of sneezing, presaged good fortune. In any event, it helped him to make the diagnosis, for he had never seen an epileptic attack end by sneezing. “I do not believe it is the Sacred Disease,” he told the Roman confidently.

  “What then?” They did not realize that the girl had opened her eyes and was listening to them.

  “A faint perhaps,” Joseph admitted, “from the dancing. Or she might be possessed,” he added in deference to conventional Jewish belief.

  Mary of Magdala sat up quickly, her cheeks burning with indignation. “Am I cheresh [deaf],” she demanded angrily, “that you speak ill of me to my face?”

  Gaius Flaccus smiled. “No one speaks ill of you. The physician and I—”

  “Physician! Zut! Joseph of Galilee is but a leech.”

  Joseph found himself squirming like one of his own leeches under the intensity of her indignation at being labeled possessed by demons. “I did not claim to be a physician,” he protested. “You were dancing and fainted. The noble tribune caught you and I offered to help.”

  The girl’s anger seemed to depart as suddenly as it had come, like the quick play of emotions in a child. She smiled, but upon the handsome Roman, not the Jew in the dingy robe. “I regret if I have troubled you, noble sir,” she said graciously in flawless Greek, and again Joseph marveled at her self-possession and her manners. Most girls of her age would have been dumb before the magnificence of the procurator’s nephew.

  Gaius Flaccus bowed with equal grace. “If you still feel faint, my uncle’s villa is only a short distance away.”

  But something else had claimed the girl’s thoughts. “Hadja!” she called to the leader of the musicians, who waited nearby. “What of the coins? There should be many.”

  The Nabatean smiled and held out his cupped hands. They were almost filled with gold and silver. “We picked them up, O Living Flame, while you lay in the fit.”

  Mary stamped her foot. “How many times must I tell you I do not have fits?” she cried angrily.

  “Then you have had them before?” Joseph asked.

  “Sometimes when I dance, I grow faint. It is nothing.” She stood up but swayed, and Joseph caught her or she would have fallen. Her body was soft under his fingers about her waist, and he could not deny the stirring of his pulses at the contact.

  “Let me ca
rry you to my uncle’s villa to recover,” Gaius Flaccus suggested eagerly.

  “I am all right now.” The girl pushed away Joseph’s supporting hand. “Thank you for your kindness, sir,” she said graciously to Gaius Flaccus. “I must return to Magdala with my musicians.”

  “You can ride my mule,” Joseph suggested. “I am going directly there.” He did not stop to think that his patients in Magdala would be angry because he was late. Right now being with Mary of Magdala was more important.

  III

  The road climbed sharply up the black basalt cliffs of the mountain above Tiberias, and Joseph had to lead the mule carefully because of the girl’s weight upon its back. When they came to a level spot on the mountainside he stopped for the animal to rest, but the Nabateans went on ahead, since their long strides covered ground more rapidly than the plodding mule. Mary sat on a rock at the edge of the lake with the white marble buildings of Tiberias below them. “How cool it is up here!” she exclaimed, pushing her hair back from her face. “Tiberias is much too hot.”

  “Hot air breeds fevers for physicians to treat,” Joseph told her. “I should like it, but I am always glad to leave Tiberias.” Herod had failed to take into consideration the nature of the prevailing winds when he built this new city. While the flow of air through the mountain defile in which the lake lay kept the center of the inland sea and the cities around its northern curve cool in summer, it failed to stir the hot sultry air close to the western shore, where Tiberias was located. So for all its beauty, the magnificent Roman palaces, and Herod’s own luxurious edifice on the higher ground of the acropolis, it was an unhealthy city.

  “Who were you treating today?” she asked.

  Joseph reached for the bottle containing his leeches and held it up to the light. Three of the sleek black squirming animals were fat and turgid. “My leeches are plump from the blood of Pontius Pilate,” he said proudly.

  She seemed entirely unafraid of the leeches, which was unusual for a young girl. “They say in Magdala that the blood of David flows in your veins, Joseph. Why do you work as a leech?”

  “My patients pay me well. Meanwhile I am learning all that Alexander Lysimachus can teach me.”

  She wrinkled her nose at him impudently. “And it does not hurt your work, I suppose, for people to know that the richest merchant in Jerusalem, Joseph of Arimathea, is your uncle and you are his namesake?”

  Joseph flushed at her raillery. Actually the recommendation of his uncle had secured him the procurator as a patient. “When I have saved enough money,” he told her, “I will go to Alexandria to study medicine.”

  “Why not Pergamos or Epidaurus?”

  Joseph looked at her in astonishment. “How do you know of those places?”

  “I know a lot,” she said loftily. “Probably more than you do, for you see nothing but your medicine. I have seen you several times in Magdala, but you were too busy to notice me.”

  “I must have been blind,” he said promptly.

  Mary smiled at the compliment. “Demetrius has taught me since I was twelve years old. He has been everywhere and, besides, I read everything I can find.”

  “Demetrius? Who is he?”

  “The maker of lyres. He lives on the Street of the Greeks, where the Via Maris passes. I live with him,” she added matter-of-factly.

  Joseph was shocked by her casual admission that she lived with a man. To cover his confusion, he changed the subject to Alexandria again, but to his surprise, she knew more about that city, too, than he did. When he told her of its university and medical school, acknowledged to be one of the best in the world and drawing students even from beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, she countered with a description of its magnificent theaters and arenas, the Serapeum devoted to the worship of the combined deity, Serapis, the ancient rites of Isis and Osiris, and the great lighthouse of the Pharos dominating the harbor, which was said to be all of four hundred ells, or five hundred and ninety feet, in height.

  “When were you in Alexandria?” Joseph asked.

  “I have never been there. But I shall go someday,” she added confidently.

  “Then how do you know these things? I have read much of the city, but you know more about it than I do.”

  “Demetrius lived there a long time,” she explained. “And he still loves Alexandria. It will mean much to you, Joseph, to say that you studied at the Museum. Few can make that claim, even in Jerusalem or Antioch.”

  What she said was true, Joseph knew. There were few really learned physicians either in Galilee or Judea. Those who went to Alexandria to study usually stayed there, for the Jewish community in that city was larger than the whole population of Jerusalem. But the hills and valleys of Judea and Galilee had been the home of Joseph’s people since the days of the kings from whom he was descended.

  He loved the beautiful region around the lake, and he knew it would always draw him back. For the most part, the healers of Galilee were either leeches like himself or mere Essenes, who relied upon prayer and a few dried herbs to treat the sick. Thirsty for knowledge, he had absorbed everything his preceptor could teach him, but a young physician could still learn much in Alexandria, where new medicines were constantly being used and some physicians even dared to cut into the body to cure disease.

  “I am going to Alexandria someday.” Mary’s voice brought Joseph back to the present. “I shall dance and sing in the theater and become very rich.” It was a calm statement of fact, not of hopes.

  “You are very sure of yourself.”

  “I am beautiful, I have a fine voice, and I dance well. Why should I not become a great actress? And I can also declaim the lines of most of the Greek comedies from memory.”

  “But you are a Jew,” Joseph protested. “A Jewish woman should not show herself in the theater.”

  “Part of me is Greek,” Mary said spiritedly. “And I was never happy until Demetrius took me into his home, where we live as the Greeks do.”

  “It is your affair.” Then he smiled. “Is it not written of a woman, ‘She opens her mouth with wisdom’?”

  Mary tossed her head at the irony in his tone and the clever way he had turned her words upon her. She stood up. “Let’s be on our way. You must have work to do, and I must buy supper for Demetrius in the market.”

  “And I must visit Eleazar, the seller of cloth,” Joseph agreed, helping her up on the mule. “He is bedded with a painful swelling of the knee.” Privately Joseph suspected the swelling to be of a character that would not be relieved by leeching, but he knew of nothing else to offer save the voracious appetites of his leeches. And at least the animals gave visible evidence that something was actually removed from the swelling when they sucked greedily and grew fat before the startled eyes of the patient.

  With Mary riding the mule once more they began to climb the path leading to the heights upon which stood the city of Magdala. As he walked along beside the animal, past the aqueduct bringing water from the fountain higher up along the steep black cliffs that formed the mountainside here, Joseph was counting in his mind the number of coins he had saved in the earthenware jar at home. The contents of the purse hanging from his belt today would make a fine clinking as they dropped into the jar. And with a few more patients as liberal in their gratitude as Pontius Pilate had been, he might get to Alexandria sooner than he expected.

  Mary of Magdala seemed lost in the beauty of the lake, which looked like a clear green jewel in its cup surrounded by mountains, with the snowy white peak of Mount Hermon gleaming like marble in the distance.

  Against the steeply rising sides of the mountains at the end of the lake, beyond the Cities of the Plain and the beautiful Plain of Gennesaret itself, lay a ribbon of rock-paved road that ran between Egypt to the south and Damascus and Babylonia to the north and east. Joseph had once ridden as far as the ford, called the Bridge of Ja
cob’s Daughters, crossing the swift waters of the Jordan where it plunged downward to the lake far below. Occasionally he had been called to treat the sick in the cities of Bethsaida and Capernaum along the northern shore of the lake, but in general he shunned them, as did many devout Jews, for they were turbulent places where many had turned away from the ancient customs to the newer and looser habits favored by the Greeks and Romans. It was a common saying in Jerusalem that “no good ever came out of Nazareth,” which lay southward and westward toward the seacoast, but there was equal reason to say the same of Capernaum.

  Mary’s voice broke into his thoughts. “Who was the Roman that caught me when I fell, Joseph?”

  “I thought you knew. It was Gaius Flaccus, nephew of Pontius Pilate.”

  “He is very handsome.”

  “And very evil,” Joseph said sharply. “I hear bad things about him.”

  “How do you know they are true?”

  “I have been in the palace of Pontius Pilate many times,” Joseph boasted.

  “Is it true that the procurator has slave girls from the East who dance naked before him?” she asked breathlessly.

  Joseph blushed. “A young girl should not say or even think such things,” he scolded, shocked at her boldness. “Is it not written, ‘Let her works praise her in the gates’?”

  “I am eighteen,” Mary said spiritedly. “I do as I please.”

  “You will get into trouble. Remember the law of Moses, ‘Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the LORD your God gives you.’”

  A strange look came into the girl’s face, and her lips tightened until the lovely softness of her mouth was a grim line. “Do not speak to me of fathers and mothers, Joseph,” she said sharply, “if you would be my friend.” Then her entire manner changed in one of those mercurial transformations which he had first witnessed back there in the street in Tiberias. “And don’t be so self-righteous, either. You can’t be much over twenty-one or twenty-two years old yourself. If you don’t watch you will be old without ever knowing what it is to be young.” And she drew her mouth down in such a typical imitation of a disapproving old man that Joseph could not help but laugh. It was in such a mood that they entered Magdala.