Christ the Lord - Anne Rice [74]
She lay as one awakened from a dream, faintly stunned and musing, eyes passing over those who stood around her.
I sank down on my knees and I put out my arms, and she received me. I drew her up close to me. She made no sound, but clung to me as I kissed her forehead.
“Lord,” she said. “My Lord.”
Ravid's hoarse broken crying was the only thing in the stillness that surrounded us.
. . .
I DOZED.
I saw them, and felt their hands, but I didn't resist them.
The slaves washed me with great luscious streams of water. I felt the old robe taken away. I felt the water worked into my hair. I felt it run down my back and shoulders.
Now and then my eyes rolled up. I saw the golden linen of the tent snapping in the wind. On went the washing.
“Some soup, my lord,” said the woman beside me. “Only a little for you have been starving.”
I drank.
“No more. You sleep.”
And beneath the tent I did.
The desert cooled, but I never lacked for robes or blankets. Soup again, take this, and then sleep. Soup, just a taste. And then their voices far off collected in gentle agitation.
Morning came.
I watched it with one eye from this silken pillow. I saw it rise and push the darkness up and up until the darkness was gone and the whole world was light, and the shade of the tent was cool and sheltering.
Ravid stood before me.
“My lord, my sister has asked to come to you. We ask that you come home with us, that you allow us to care for you until you're well, that you stay with us under our roof in Magdala.”
I sat up. I was clothed in linen robes, robes trimmed in embroidered leaf and flower. I wore a soft bleached mantle with a thick border.
I smiled.
“My lord, what can we do for you? You have given back to us our beloved sister.”
I put out my arms to Ravid.
He knelt down and held me fast. “My lord,” he said. “She remembers now. She knows her sons are dead, that her husband is dead. She has wept for them and she'll weep again, but she's our sister.”
He renewed his invitation. Micha had come and he too pressed me.
“You're weak, my lord, you're weak though the demons obey you,” said the older brother. “You need meat and drink and rest. You've done this wondrous thing. Let us restore you.”
This one, Micha, got down on his knees. He held a pair of new sandals in his hands, sandals studded with brilliant buckles. And he did now what I'm sure he'd never done in all his life as a man. He buckled these sandals to my feet.
The women stood apart. In their midst stood Mary.
She came forward step by step, as if ready at any moment for me to forbid it. She stopped a few feet from me. The rising sun was behind her. She was clean and wrapped in fresh linen robes, her hair bound beneath her veil, her face still for all its scratches and fading bruises.
“And the Lord has blessed me, and forgiven me, and brought me back from the powers of darkness,” she said.
“Amen,” I said.
“What shall I do to repay you?”
“Go on to the Temple,” I said. “That was the direction of your journey. You'll see me again. You'll know when I need your assistance. But for now, I must be on my way. I must return to the river.”
She didn't know what this meant, but the two brothers did. They helped me to my feet.
“Mary,” I said to her again, and I reached for her hand. “Look. The world is new. You see?”
Faint smile.
“I see it, Rabbi,” she said.
“Embrace your brothers,” I said. “And when you see the beautiful gardens of Jericho, stand there and look at the gardens around you.”
“Amen, Rabbi,” she said.
The servants brought me the tightly wrapped bundle of my ruined clothes, my broken sandals. They broke me a walking stick.
“Where do you go?” asked Ravid.
“To see my kinsman John bar Zechariah at the river . . . northward. I have to find him.”
“Be quick and be careful, my lord,” said Ravid. “He's made the King very angry. They say his days won't be very many.”
I nodded. I embraced one after the other of those present, the brothers, the women, the slaves who'd bathed me. I raised my hand in farewell to the wary bearers who