Days passed of this silent—sometimes angrily thrusting—agony. And weeks. The inner voice that cried forlornly in the empty nights grew louder as she knew with a prescient certainty that she was with child. She sensed the difference in her body. A thickening. A difference in appetites and tolerance. The heat made her grow nauseous on occasion. Once in the market she heard his voice from far away.
“Hail, Mary.”
But she ran and he did not pursue her.
Sometimes she dreamed of a small, perfect golden-skinned boychild, fingers small as bean seeds, eyes wide and innocent as pools of freshly rained water. But then her fear took over and that innocence dried to the hard kernels of the sand beneath it, leaving in its wake a flat malevolence. A boychild that glowed with the power and force and dangerously irresistable charm of its father.
After a time, Mary came to her mother following the morning meal and announced that she would take a trip. She needed to get away to shake this dreariness from her, and her cousin would be happy to receive her company. Mary’s mother nodded; her heart sang a song of relief. Perhaps a trip was indeed the thing to shake the darkness from her daughter’s soul. As luck would have it, the opportunity presented itself on the very next day, and Mary packed a few meager clothes and left home with a family friend whose caravan was to pass near the town of her cousin Elizabeth.
The heavy blood of sunset stained the doorway of her cousin’s house as Mary, trembling with fear and hope, knocked. The door opened, and a dark portly woman, in stained saffron robes received her.
“Mary!” she exclaimed, holding her arms out to embrace her cousin, at the same time pulling her inside. Elizabeth was just 10 years Mary’s senior, but already her face betrayed the wrinkles of age, her black coiled hair the thin twinings of grey. When she smiled, her cheeks filled with river valleys for tears.
“It is so good to see you,” the older woman said, holding Mary back at arm’s length to study her up and down.
“Something of you has changed,” she observed instantly.
Mary nodded, but said nothing.
“And I’m certain that this something is behind your visit to me tonight.”
She threw her hands up, stopping herself and Mary from answering.
“But there is time for such talk. First, come in, come in. Let me get you something to drink, you must be thirsty after a day in the sun with camels and cameldrivers. Did they treat you well?”
Mary grinned and nodded yes, and the two women retired to the kitchen.
There passed drinks and cakes and a dinner before Elizabeth held up a hand again and stared hard into Mary’s watery brown eyes.
“Enough pleasantries, cousin. I’ve known you since you were in swaddling clothes. This is no social visit. Tell me who, what and why.”
Slowly, haltingly, Mary began to describe the voices at the well. Her voice grew in strength as she told of his entrapping kiss and condensed the events of his subsequent nightime visit to her bedroom.
“You are with his child, then,” Elizabeth concluded, staring harder at Mary. “I thought as much when I opened the door to you.”
“I have heard that you have access to potions that might help me,” Mary replied, hanging her head and not daring to meet her cousin’s eyes. Elizabeth did not answer, but instead, rose from the table and walked from the room. Mary’ heart raced. Had she just insulted her cousin and made sure that she would never be welcomed under this roof again?
Presently, though, Elizabeth returned, and set a vial on the table.
“You must be sure,” was all her cousin said.
“I have thought about nothing else for weeks,” Mary said. “I am without a husband and pregnant with the issue of a demon. What good could come from this?”
“You will be sick for at least two days after this, perhaps more. We should begin tonight if you are able.”
Mary nodded.
“This is very powerful,” Elizabeth warned. “A drop or two will not kill you, but will smother the life of a child.”
Elizabeth’s face betrayed no emotion as she uncorked the vial, and allowed three ruby drops of liquid to fall from the vial into Mary’s tea.
“Drink and from this, at least, you will be safe.”
At that moment, a fierce wind screamed through the room, and the cup upended from Mary’s hand of its own volition.
A violent tornado streamed about the room, its sound shrieking louder and louder as it drained from the sides to the center of the room, shattering every loose bit of pottery in its path. A golden light grew bright from its center, and with a slurping snap, the wind imploded into the shape of a man. A golden, angry man with piercing eyes and a stormy smile.
He put both of his perfectly smooth, long hands down on the table and glowered at each woman in turn.
“You would kill my child?” he asked, incredulity drooling from his lips. He shook his head in amazement. Neither answered.
He looked at Mary. “You disappoint me, girl. I think it is time for you to sleep.”
Mary felt her eyes instantly growing heavy, though she struggled to stay awake. Her back relaxed and her body slipped down in the chair.
“No…” she heard her voice mumbling as if from a mile away, when the storm incarnate turned its attention to Elizabeth.
Her last vision was of her cousin’s eyes watching, frozen and wide, while her hand moved slowly, shaking—as if it were a great struggle—picked up the vial of poison and drained it into her own mouth, held open by the long golden hands of the demon.
“Drink deep of your own medicine,” he whispered, and then Mary’s world was gone.
So, shortly thereafter, was Elizabeth’s.
Her belly cringed at the greeting, daggers of ice spitting her with hatred and fear. He had taken to walking with her through the center of town since her disastrous return from Elizabeth’s. The two women had been found collapsed on the floor the day after her failed abortion; only one of them remained alive. Food poisoning, the wisemen had declared, and Mary didn’t dispute their divinations.
So she had returned home, and now the demon watched her closely, determined to make sure she made no other terminal attempts on their child’s life.
Within her, she had begun to feel his spawn kick.
He fell into step beside her. It seemed as if the ground around the two of them lit a degree or two brighter than the surrounding desert glare.
Didn’t people notice the gleam that came not from the sun, but from this man?
she wondered.
“How is the lord’s mother today?” he asked solicitously, touching a hand to her belly.
Something within her leapt, and her groin and breasts threaded with heat from just the brush of his fingers.
“Praying for death,” she answered in a hiss.
“I’m not answering,” he said.
She scowled at him.
“What would make you happy, Mary?” he begged, a haze of sepia lazing from his eyes to her neck and chest.
“Not to be having a bastard child for a demon.”
“Mary, the child you carry is no demon, but the son of God,” he soothed.
She laughed in scorn.
“And, as for the bastard part, you’re correct, we should do something about that.”
“Who would have me now?” she said. “I’m obviously ruined. Only my parents are so blind that they do not see.”
“Mary, Mary,” he said, stroking the back of her head. Her brain seemed to take flight and hover above clouds of orgasmic peach at his attention. “Your body is a temple. We will find a man to worship it.”
They were passing a small tent filled with ornate carvings and claspings of wood when he pointed to a withered grey man sitting crosslegged on the ground in its midst.
“How about him?”
Mary laughed. The old man looked up at her, his one good eye widening in appreciation. “He’s ancient and crippled and disgusting,” she spat.
“Perfect. He will guard you like a precious jewel while you refuse his attempts to polish you. In this way, I can be sure you will always yearn in your heart for me.”
He led her to the man, who clung to a table to raise himself to his feet. His voice launched into a well-rehearsed, “Can I interest you in some…”
With a wave of his hand, the glowing man cut short the sales pitch.
“You are Joseph?”
The old man nodded, his bad eye seeming to bob like a yo-yo with a trick string.
“This is Mary.”
He propelled her forward into the body of the ailing carpenter. The man clutched at her to prevent himself from losing balance and toppling.
“Would you marry this girl and take her home as your own?”
Joseph looked confused a moment, and then nodded eagerly.
“You can’t make me do this,” Mary complained. “Such a marriage would not be holy in the eyes of God.”
He leaned into her and whispered so that only she could hear:
“It’s about time you got used to it, Mary. I AM God.”
Something within her broke then, as looking at him, she realized that his glow, his power, his jaunty ease, the purity of sensation that she had gleaned from his touches…could only belong to that of God. She recoiled in horror from the realization.
“And this,” he announced, “shall be your mortal husband, Joseph. I expect the ceremony soon. Don’t make me come back again, Mary.”
With that, he vanished.
Joseph fell to the ground.
And Mary began to cry in the full light of day.
On the following day, Mary rose from her bed, retrieved a cleaver from the kitchen, and brought its edge down across her wrist. The pain was excruciating and she cried out as a spray of blood warmed her face. She grinned as the weakness hit her, cold nausea rising from her stomach to choke her throat. Let this be her answer to the wedding. If the old man would have a bride, she would be a dead weight in his bed. If God would have a child, then let him get it on someone else.
Strong hands gripped her from behind, pulled her upright. It was God and he was angry, his eyes seething with fire. She could feel his rage like waves of heat from a brick oven. He slapped her hard across the face so that she lost her already shaky balance and fell to the floor. Her brain spun with stars and haze and she could feel a warm wetness spread from her arm to her belly where her wrist lay. She blacked out for the second time in his presence.
When she awoke, God was gone.
And so was the cut on her wrist. She was at the kitchen table, dressed in her best robes, and next to her was the old man, Joseph. Her parents were seated across from them, nodding at the older man’s words. He sounded cultured, learned in his dissembling, and Mary sought in vain for a resemblance to the decrepit merchant bum God had led her too before. This silver tongue could not belong to that man.
What had happened? Oh God, she cried inside, what have you done?
A voice whispered in her head in answer.
“What I told you to do, stupid girl. You will be married in a fortnight. And you will live to bear my son. What you do with your wrist and your kitchen utensils is up to you after.”
Some months later, on the eve of the census, Mary arrived in Bethlehem on the back of a wheezing, stolen donkey, ready to deliver the bastard child of God. Joseph hobbled along beside. The innkeepers laughed in secret at their sad plight, and in public shook heads and shrugged shoulders. Their fleas were not welcome in the crowded city’s hostelry. Some keepers with insight to the spiritual made warding signs at Mary’s face. As door after door closed to them, she shivered with cold but laughed inside. Perhaps she would get sick and die, taking the baby with her. Joseph reached out a hand to comfort her and she reeled with disgust. The old man was vile and smelled bad. She sensed that his mind was nearly gone. She had never again heard the silver tongue that won her father over once their troth was pledged, and wanted nothing to do with him.
At last, one innskeep took pity on the two and offered his stable for a resting place. As Mary slid from the back of the donkey, she felt a shooting pain, and a warm rush of water down her thighs. Tears streamed down her face, gleaming like falling stars in the night as she realized her plight. On this very eve, in a dirty stable in a town far from home, she was to deliver the spawn of Satan. Or God. She still found it hard to believe that the beautiful tempter could be the eternal. And yet, who else could be so desirable, and so cruel?
She lay down on a bed of straw and pushed, wishing with all her might that the child would leave her. Wishing that everyone would leave her.
Joseph brought water and rags from their saddles and before the dawn broke, the cries of a newborn babe echoed through the drafty boards of the stable. Joseph cradled the tiny babe, a boychild, in his arms when Mary refused to hold it. But eventually, she relented and he laid the babe at her breast. It attached itself to her immediately, and she stared at the child in fear, searching its eyes for some sense of its bloodline, its future. Try as she might, she couldn’t identify their color. They seemed to glow and yet at the same time were wetly black, fathomless. His head was a mass of deep charcoal hair too, and his face a fat pad of soft pink skin. He looked like any baby, she determined, and at length, let him feed.