Making History

by Rick Wilber

  Hecklers - Jew, Roman, Samaritan - she disarmed with sage and gentle words. Homilies and epigrams she dispensed with the skill of a venerable apothecary. Demons she cast out with the ferocity of a God-fueled warrior. Healings she administered freely to almost anyone. The arrogant, avaricious, and cruel she rebuked with authority but also with tenderness. The pious, smug, and hypocritical she shoved to the walls of their self-delusions and held them there with questions that stripped them naked of the virtues they thought their dress by birthright or seizure. And so of course they accused her of slander, blasphemy, and unnatural acts with her bemused disciples.

  I am Daughter of Wisdom, she said, Queen of Nations, Mother of Faith, Sister of Spirit and Peace. Whosoever would know the Most High’s heart need only wrap herself in a robe of my weaving and live within it as if within her own skin. We are fearfully and intricately shaped in Sophia’s womb and issue from it primed to glorify both Her and Her all-embracing Partner, El Shaddai.

  These sayings and others like them enraged Pharisees, Levites, and instructors of the Law. Meanwhile, talk of herself as Israel’s Consolation, and of an enigmatic coming kingdom, unsettled the Roman colonizers; and an advisor to the Emperor himself warned the procurator of Judea to help the Jews suppress this untoward female abomination and threat. Then Dorcas betrayed her, and Miriam was arrested, tried, convicted, scourged, and harried along the Via Dolorosa to a fate that flickered in her awareness like that of a Son she had never fully known.

  ***

  Dorcas fled with her silver, but the Jewish and Roman leaders agreed that this heretical Miriamist movement demanded a vivid joint response. During its namesake’s trial, they arrested and sentenced to death a host of her disciples, even picking out eleven women to die with Miriam on Golgotha, the Mount of Skulls. This seemed just, given the women’s defiance of traditional proprieties and religious strictures and their unswerving loyalty to Miriam. No mild insurrection, it wanted a strong rebuttal, and neither the procurator nor the high priest had any qualms about crucifying eleven women with her. After all, the Romans made few gender distinctions when punishing slaves or foreigners, and once at Ashkelon a ruler named Simeon ben Shetah had ordered over seventy sorceresses nailed up for their presumption and apostasy.

  And so Miriam staggered out of the city behind the black Cyrenian carrying her cross. Much of her hair had been snatched away, and blood had dried on her innumerable stripes like holly-berry husks.

  She looked up.

  On the small dome of Golgotha, a forest of crosses thrust up in two tight rings about its apex. From each cross hung a woman who had accompanied Miriam during the nearly three years of her God-sparked evangelical campaign, but she could not easily identify them because the soldiers, at the behest of the Hebrew priests, had affixed them to their crosses face-first, out of some warped notion of executionary decency.

  Still, Miriam knew their names: Abigail, Bilhah, Chloe, the twins Dinah and Rachel, Esther the Matriarch, Merab, Naomi, Shunnamite, Zilpah, and Esther the Maid - all dying, all dying for her, all dying for the Sisterhood of Heaven.

  The soldiers nailed Miriam to her cross facing front and naked but for a blood-streaked loincloth. They erected her stake at the top of Skull Mount, the highest tree in a glade of such impalings; and they diced not for her garments, a woman’s contemptible things, but for the right to break her legs when the time came and to expose her totally once she had died. Meanwhile, a society of Jewish women - none of them Miriam’s followers - prowled the uneven slopes offering drugged wine to the sufferers, but Miriam refused this kindness and her crucified disciples were not physically positioned to receive it, so at length, alternately laughing and cursing, the soldiers chased these sad do-gooders down the hill and back into the city.

  Father - Mother, rasped Miriam lowly, why have You forsaken us?

  ***

  But One was resurrected; and Dorcas, in lifelong atonement for her betrayal, traveled and preached and healed and wrote, so that, several generations on, Miriamism overcame the entire world, and much in the world that was stupid, arbitrary, and cruel inevitably, albeit gradually, lost its foothold.

  Sheila Finch is an award-winning science-fiction and fantasy writer and longtime teacher at El Camino College in Torrance, California. A winner of the Nebula Award and Compton Crook Award, Finch was born and raised in England before moving to the West Coast of the United States in adulthood. She often includes English history in her stories, though not necessarily the history we are familiar with. In this story, she wonders what if the European colonization of California had happened quite differently?

  “Consider what a great voyage we are like to make, the like was never made out of England, for by the same the worst in this fleet shall become a gentleman.”

  - Sir Francis Drake, 1578, The Inland Sea, 1776

  Little Gull saw the men before I did.

  A fine, early summer day, I remember, two days after we returned from the shores of Great Sea. We had just celebrated the coming of First Captain in the Big Canoes, swooping out of the setting sun.

  I was gathering duck eggs when my brother came running to me, panting hard with excitement, abalone beads bouncing around his neck, berry basket bouncing on his back, spilling its purple fruit along the path. Five summers is not so many that a boy should remember berries and forget exciting news.

  My pulse raced and I was filled with sudden hope. In spring I had met a young man here, not Miwok but yet one of The People. His name was White Cloud. We walked together beside the irrigation ditch, and he was full of questions. Why did our canoes have sails? Why did we bother to plant crops? Why were our fields so square and neat, each with its own hedge separating it from its neighbor? How did the windmills fill the ditch with water? I laughed at his childlike ignorance. The tribes farther south on the shores of Great Sea were not as rich and wise as we, but he did not even know a well when he saw one! Yet I thought him the most beautiful man I had ever seen. My heart shivered when he touched my hand. Someday, he promised, he would come back to claim me. I believed him utterly, as only those who love believe. In that blustery spring weather, I knew White Cloud was my destiny.

  “Red Deer! Red Deer!” Little Gull called out breathlessly as he ran headlong into my arms. “There’re men coming! Lots of men. Strange-looking men! Wearing very odd clothes!”

  Hope that a moment before had made me light as thistledown vanished.

  “Don’t you want to see them, Red Deer? Come with me! Please? You can see them from the top of the hill.”

  I held Little Gull firmly by the arms. He had the light skin that often runs in our family, speckled all over with dark patches like the wings of a pheasant, and eyes the color of misty sky. But his hair was brown, the color of pine bark. My own hair had red light in it, as if a field of poppies grew there.

  “Don’t talk nonsense, Little Gull!” I said.

  “A lot of hunters coming up the long valley,” he insisted. “Some of them were - riding, it looked like. I couldn’t tell what the beast was. And there were women with them. And children!”

  I still did not want to give up my fantasy of White Cloud’s return. “What kind of hunting party travels with its children?”

  “I did see them. Red Deer,” he said stubbornly. “I did!”

  “Then we’d better tell Bear-With-One-Ear,” I said.

  My heart was heavy. White Cloud had vowed he would return, but the weeks went by, and my loneliness grew.

  Holding hands, we ran down the hillside to the town, then up a street of very fine houses until we came to my uncle’s house.

  John Bear-With-One-Ear was sitting outside, where the overhanging thatch roof offered a shady spot to sit and enjoy the flower gardens. A sweet sound of music drifted on the fragrant air. My uncle’s house was the largest and finest in the town, just as Nova Albion was the largest and most powerful of all the towns around the Inland Sea, which the old people called the Lesser Sea. He was sharing a cane pipe of tobacco with
his three brothers. Little Gull and I and our older brother, Francis Hawk Wing, were raised in his house, for our uncle had no children of his own.

  (I tell you this at such length so that you should understand all things at last.)

  We stood in front of the men, waiting for them to speak first, and I gripped Little Gull’s arm to remind him to be polite, for he was shaking with excitement and would have blurted everything out before they asked him.

  At last Bear-With-One-Ear laid down his pipe. He was an old man by then, but still handsome. The bright hair was only now fading to gray, but the locks that curled over the gray lace collar were just as thick as ever.

  “Well, Little Gull,” he said, “have you brought berries for our supper?”

  Little Gull looked down at the basket and was much surprised to find it empty.

  “My brother brings something better, Uncle,” I said hastily, before Little Gull could cry. “He brings news. A large group of men approaching from the south.”

  Bear-With-One-Ear gazed at me. “And how is this unusual?”

  “They’re not Pomo or Miyakma or Yokuts. And they travel with their women and children!”

  Bear-With-One-Ear frowned, and Edward Gray Seal, the youngest uncle, who had been playing the lute, said, “Not much to fear in that, I think.”

  “Still,” one of the other uncles said (Walter Black Otter, I think it was, but my memory is not so clear now), “it is unusual.”

  Bear-With-One-Ear looked troubled. He was a strong leader, a peacemaker. Yet it was said of him that he was sometimes slower to anger than was good.

  “We’ve heard of a gathering of strangers,” he said. “Lookouts to the south sent word by the smoke towers. They seek land to grow food and raise children. The land is big enough to share a little with those who need it.”

  Black Otter set down his cup of fermented juice from apples I had helped harvest last autumn. “Where’s my nephew, Hawk Wing?”

  My brother’s hunting,” Little Gull said proudly. “He’s going to bring me an eagle feather for my cap!”

  Bear-With-One-Ear smiled. “Your brother’s skilled with a crossbow. But I doubt he hunts eagles with it!”

  Little Gull pouted. “Someday I’m going to be Big Gull! And I’m going to kill enemies too.”

  Bear-With-One-Ear stopped smiling. “We have no enemies.”

  “Don’t delude yourself, Brother,” Black Otter said. “These strangers may be the very wolves of whom First Captain warned.”

  There was one uncle who had said nothing. I knew he was a shaman, although among the men it is done differently, and they did not seem to have the sight. I remember that his name was Henry Fog-On-Water.

  Now Fog-On-Water said, “First Captain warned us of evil men who come from a land of abomination. They seek treasure and they kill all who oppose them.”

  “Then we must do something!” I said.

  Black Otter smiled at me. “First Captain also gave us a strategy. Let the enemy advance into a fortified place until you have them surrounded!”

  “These aren’t matters a girl just turned woman should hear!” Fog-On-Water said sharply.

  I started to protest, but Bear-With-One-Ear held up his hand.

  “We won’t begin by fighting in the family. Red Deer, take Little Gull to your grandmother. Little Gull, stay with your sister until I send for you. We’ll need Lark Singing’s wise counsel in this matter.”

  “There is now a very great gap opened very little to the liking of the King of Spain. God work it all to his glory.”

  “First Captain warned us to beware the coming of men who worshiped images, for they are wolves who would devour us,” Elizabeth Lark Singing said. “He told us the leader of the wolf pack is called the papa. We must be vigilant against this man.”

  My grandmother had a fine house in town, next to the one of my uncle, Bear-With-One-Ear. But in spring she had built a hut of willow branches at the top of a little hill; it had three sides, the fourth open, facing away from the town to Lesser Sea. She said young men and girls might face the storms of Great Sea even as First Captain had, but Lesser Sea was kinder to the old. She liked to watch the fog creep in along the water, then slide up the hills till its cold fingers reached into her hut. She said she would not die inside four walls, or her spirit would not find its way out. Fog-On-Water scoffed at that, but Lark Singing quelled him with a glance, a hard look from eyes so blue I thought as a child a piece of the sky had fallen into them. My grandmother was a powerful medicine woman, and none of her sons could ever withstand that flinty look.

  “Tell me what we must do,” I asked her. But in my heart I did not want to do anything. I wanted White Cloud to come back. I wanted my life to go on as I had dreamed it would.

  “Something is changing. My time is over. Yours is coming.”

  Little Gull played with a family of ducklings that had wandered into the hut while the mother bird watched from the open side. “How will we know if these are First Captain’s enemies, Grandmother?” he asked.

  Before she could answer, a shout rose outside, and I went quickly to look out, shielding my eyes against the sunset.

  A small tribe of strangers was coming up the road along the stream toward Nova Albion. They were led by men in metal clothes that flashed in the sun, like the metal mirror in my uncle’s house that had come from First Captain’s canoe. Some of them rode on the backs of strange animals. They were warriors, for I saw their weapons - long knives that hung from their belts to their knees, and something else, like a metal pipe, that they handled lovingly as one touches a baby. They were followed by others on foot, some carrying banners, some dragging burdens on carts and sleds. Yet I saw also that Little Gull had spoken truly, for there were women and children and even tiny infants in their band.

  Then I saw one man in a long gray robe, the top of whose head was hairless and shiny with sweat. He was holding a long stick in front of him, to which a shorter stick had been joined as a crosspiece. First Captain taught us also to hold that symbol sacred in our ceremonies, but there was something different here, something wrong.

  “Grandmother,” I began. “I must go back at once-”

  But she cut my words off. “Tonight I will teach you many things, Red Deer. I will teach you to see, and to hear the truth.”

  Raising herself on one elbow, she told Little Gull to throw wood on the fire, and when the flames leaped up, she instructed me to take powder from her medicine pouch and pour it in a cup of water and give it to him. Then I wrapped him in a blanket and laid him on the sleeping mat at the back of the hut, and soon I could tell from his breathing he was asleep.

  The valley outside filled with flooding dark, and a crescent moon rose, drawing stars with it like salmon on a fisherman’s line. Somewhere in the distance I heard shouts, then laughter that suddenly ceased. Unease crawled over my skin as if I had sat by an anthill, and I wanted only to run to my uncle. But I, too, could not stand against my grandmother’s fierce eyes.

  She took out a small pipe, daubed with yellow and black paint on the bowl. She filled it with dried leaves of a plant I did not recognize and lit it from the embers. The smoke filled the hut with fragrance. I watched her face; it seemed small and gray, sharp as a bird’s face.

  After a while she opened her eyes and held the pipe out to me. I took it with both hands. She nodded at me, encouraging me to draw in a breath of smoke.

  I think I must have known all my life that this moment would come, that I would someday learn the secrets of women’s medicine. Only the women of our family had the sight. Now that the moment was here, I was afraid. It was a terrifying gift she would give me. Once I received it, there would be no turning back. There might not even be room for my own life.

  “You don’t have a choice, Red Deer,” she said to me. “The power chose you a long time ago, as it chooses us all.”

  But why must she choose now, I thought, when so much was happening!

  I lifted the pipe to my lips and inhal
ed the sweet, dark smoke. My nose stung and my throat tightened, but nothing else happened for a moment, and I thought perhaps she was wrong about my being chosen. Then the hut lurched, and outside an owl screeched, and my vision went black.

  My inner eyes opened, and I saw the gray-robed man with the cross, but above him I now saw four frightening figures swooping down on the backs of eagles. I knew their names: Famine, Pestilence, War, and the pale rider who was Death. A voice said to me, “There is no time to lose!”

  I felt someone touch my hand, and I turned to see Elizabeth Lark Singing in a white deerskin robe trimmed with beads in the fashion of young brides. Her hair was braided, full and red, and her face was as young as mine. Then it seemed as if she were smoke drifting away, dissolving the shape of the young woman she had been. But before she was gone, she gave me my ceremonial name: Mary.

  Mary Red Deer. The name echoed in my head.

  I must have fallen down then in a faint, for when I woke again, it was early morning, and I was lying on the floor of my grandmother’s hut. Little Gull was weeping.

  “Don’t cry, Little Gull, I’m alive,” I said.

  “I’m not crying for you, Red Deer!” my brother said indignantly. “I’m crying because Bear-With-One-Ear told me to stay here with you, so I can’t go outside to see the strangers!”

  The air was filled with the voices of men shouting in a language I had never heard before. I stood up and glanced at my grandmother to ask what to do, but Lark Singing slept soundly.

  “If you’re awake now, Red Deer,” my little brother said hopefully. “Perhaps we could go out together?”

  “Grandmother,” I said, half afraid to disturb her, for she had been so sick.

  “She’s been asleep a long time,” my brother said.

  I looked again at Lark Singing, so still on the sleeping mat, and I knew she was dead. Her spirit had flown away over the water just as she had wished. Then I felt very lonely, for who would give us good counsel now? She had made me medicine woman in her place, but I knew how much I still had to learn.