The Woman who Loved an Octopus and other Saint's Tales

by Imogen Rhia Herrad

  Well – in Rome, they have different ideas about women. Very strange ideas. Like, they have an emperor and an empress, but it’s only the emperor who has the power.

  I don’t know. She just sits there and looks pretty. I think empresses do a lot of secret scheming though, you know? I heard some stories about an empress who had her husband poisoned and then had her little son crowned emperor. And then while the son is small, she is the real ruler; only officially it’s him, even if he’s only a baby.

  No, I’m not making this up! They were so rude to Mother! Even after they’d set us free, they only ever addressed Father as Ruler, never Mother! She was so cross. She nearly beheaded a couple of guards from the imperial palace. Do you know, they found us peculiar, because we always paid homage to the emperor and the empress.

  But now, most of my friends there are Marians, and they’re different. We’re all different. Junia, and Nesmut and me. And Tryphaena and Tryphosa – they’re missioners. They go about and preach the gospel to people who don’t know about it yet. In between their trips, we all meet up. There aren’t any Marian temples in Rome or anywhere else; nothing like that. We meet in people’s houses. Junia has a flat in a tenement, so we often met there.

  Oh, Arddun, I miss those evenings. We’d be all sitting there in the big room, with the shutters open and the noise and the food smells from the street coming in. Junia can read, so she would be reading out letters from other sisters in the church; or people would come with questions and then we’d have a discussion.

  Oh, you know – about the sayings of Mary and Jesus and what they meant. For example, Jesus said that the best thing you can do is to give away all your things and money to the poor and be free to travel about the country like he did. And Mary says that having a free spirit and striving for wisdom is the best thing. So we’d discuss that – can you own things and be free in spirit? Can you give away everything but still have a spirit that’s not free? And what do you do if you have to look after children or your old parents and can’t just give it all up and go away? Or when you’re a slave?

  Stuff like that. Philosophical questions. Junia said that talking like that was a way of achieving wisdom. Other times people would come and tell us about their problems, like when someone was ill or they were worried about something, and then we’d all talk about that and try to help. Or sometimes sisters would come from other parts of the empire and tell us what it was like there...

  Do you know what I’d really like to do, more than anything else in the world? Be a missioner with Nesmut, like Tryphaena and Tryphosa are. I’d love us to travel all through the empire together, see all the different countries and people and learn their languages and tell them about the message of Mary and Jesus. I want to tell people who own slaves why I don’t think it’s the right thing to do. And I want to tell the slaves that they have a spirit like everybody else. That we should all be free, but that at least in spirit, they can be as free as anybody.

  I think that’s what life is about. Being as free as you can, and striving for wisdom and justice. For everybody, everywhere.

  Indeg

  Ninth century

  Indeg was the daughter of a Viking chieftain of the Isle of Man. Like her mother before her, she became a Christian in secret. When her father found out, he had his wife killed and made their daughter choose between God and death. Indeg, a martyr to her faith, declared that she would never abjure.

  She was put in a boat and set adrift on the sea. The waves carried her miraculously to a spot near Abersoch on the Llyn Peninsula, where she lived as a hermit in a hut on the cliffs. On old maps, the place is still called Llanindeg.

  The Christians had come to my mother when she was young. They were wandering monks, two of them, over from Ireland in a tiny boat. They didn’t know anything about sailing.

  ‘The Lord guided us to you,’ they told her as they landed on the shore at her feet. She was sixteen and impressionable, but it is true that their coracle was washed up on the only bit of sandy beach on miles and miles of rocky coastline.

  ‘The Lord guided us to you.’ It would make you feel special, wouldn’t it? It did her. She converted on the spot and was baptised in salt water. She would dedicate herself to the new Lord the two strangers had brought. She was already married and pregnant, too late now to give her life to religion in the way they told her was best: pure and virgin. So she decided to do the next best thing and bring up her children in the faith.

  There were two sorts of tales my mother told me as I grew up: stories from the Holy Book; and the account of her conversion by the sea and the sayings of the holy Fathers. Of all the children she bore, I was the only one to survive; that made me all the more precious. Mine was the life she was going to give to the Lord; in secret if necessary. My father, who worshipped the old gods, wanted a good marriage for me. He had his eye on a chieftain in the Hebrides, an important man. Family ties with him would be desirable. So I was to make myself useful.

  But my mother had other plans. She knew that there was no arguing with my father. She schemed and planned, and finally bribed a fisherman to spirit me away at night to a convent in Ireland. She liked the thought of giving me to Ireland whence had come her own salvation. She never asked me, or herself, whether I would like it. There never was an alternative. I had known all my life that I was going to be given to the Lord. She was an obedient wife in everything but this. Perhaps the idea of martyrdom appealed to her, because of course, once it was done, there was no hiding the deed from my father.

  I didn’t learn about her fate until later. For the time being, there I was on the boat in the middle of the night, the sea calm, the moon making a bright path on the dark waters, guiding us to Ireland, to my future in the bosom of the Lord. I knew what awaited me: a clean, unsullied life in prayer, no distractions from the world. I was to be luckier than my mother, who had had to sacrifice her virginity to do her parents’ bidding. Unlike her, I would be able to keep my maidenhead intact. No husband for me but the Heavenly Bridegroom for whom my mother had yearned all those years, ever since that encounter with the holy Fathers on the beach.

  So I came to Ireland and the convent, my salvation. I was welcomed into the community of devout women, marvelled at as a prized gift of my mother’s giving. My mother had dedicated the most precious thing she had to the Lord: her only child.

  I learned to bend my head and move my lips as if in constant prayer to escape the stares and the whispers.

  I settled in. I’d always known that this would be my life. The world at bay, I safe in the faith; six prayers a day from midnight to midnight. Life rolled by. The seasons were the only thing that changed. Every day brought us closer to the death of the flesh, life eternal of the soul. Every time a sister died, we celebrated the beginning of her life in the Lord.

  It was a wandering preacher who brought me the news from home. He was one of the men who travelled spreading the faith, just like the ones who had met my mother on the bit of sandy beach.

  My mother was dead, had died with the name of the Lord on her lips. It was my father who had killed her when he’d heard that she had taken me away and would not tell him where I was.

  The sisters came fluttering all around me, eager and envious.

  ‘She is with the Lord!’

  ‘How proud you must be.’

  ‘She died a martyr for the faith.’

  I got away in the end and went to kneel in the chapel, my lips moving automatically. They would have liked to talk more, but they could not interrupt my prayers.

  What a waste, I thought. I wanted to cry but my eyes burned, dry as tinder. What a waste. Why should she die for believing in a different god? Why should she not tell my father where I was, and live? Buried in a convent or buried in a marriage, it was all the same to me. No one had asked me what I wanted.

  It was as if the heavy shutters on the chapel windows had banged open and let fresh air and sunlight into the dark.

  I had never known that I didn’t li
ke life in the convent. It would have been futile to think about what I did or did not want, because my thoughts counted for nothing.

  But already it was too late. I knew now that I did not want to be where I was. I did not want to be a nun. I did not want to be a wife. I did not want my father’s gods nor my mother’s Lord. I wanted the freedom of fishermen: to come and go and work with my hands and my body, proud of my knowledge of the weather and the currents. I wanted the freedom of the convent’s maids whom I’d seen at night, more than once, in the orchard; skirts hiked high and bodices undone, hands or mouths busy between each other’s thighs. They didn’t have to keep themselves pure for a husband or for the Lord. They weren’t required to pray all day. The holy sisters had long given up their souls as lost, and anyway, they were only servants.

  I tried to close the shutters in my mind that had so suddenly opened on thoughts I hadn’t known were mine. I fastened them and turned my back on them and I began to pray in earnest, begging the Lord for forgiveness, praying for my mother’s soul.

  I ought not to grieve for her. She was in heaven, she was a holy martyr whom the Lord prized above all, she would sit at His right hand. I bowed my head, prayed six times a day for the salvation of my soul. I believed in the Lord.

  Father Hugh had died. He had been old and frail, and for months had been unable to journey out to the far-away convent to take our confession and absolve us. We had been unshriven for a long time.

  Father Diarmuid came instead. He was young and strong, and his beauty blazed like a bonfire. He moved as gracefully as a cat. His habit flowed loosely around him, but when a gust of wind moulded it against his body, I could see him as clearly as though he was wearing nothing at all. I knew that I wanted to do with him what the maids did in the orchard with each other.

  I knew that it was wrong and impure. I would lose my maidenhead and my salvation. I was afraid of losing my eternal soul to damnation, but the wanting in my body was stronger. I was tired of being a virgin for the Lord.

  I went to confession twice in two days, and when he heard my voice the second time, he opened the grille to look at me. I lifted my head and looked back at him, and said, ‘Meet me in the orchard tonight’.

  He was there. His beauty shone in the moonlight, he drew me like a magnet. The long grasses caressed my thighs as I walked towards him. And when my hand touched his naked skin, the shutters in my mind flew wide open and a gust of wind blew through me, so strong that it lifted me up and spun me around and made me fly.

  Of course, they found us out in the end. We were caught one night in autumn when the cold rain had driven us indoors.

  They beat him with birch rods until he bled and begged forgiveness. They made me watch. After they had birched me too, they held a council and decided that as I had come from across the sea to them – a stranger; not one of them as had become abundantly clear – I was to be put in a rudderless boat and sent where it pleased the Lord to take me.

  When day broke, all I saw around me was water. Waves smacked against the sides of the boat. A wind rose and slapped me with raindrops, hard and cold.

  The boat drifted on and on. I was going to drown or starve, and I did not care which it was going to be. Clouds moved across the sky all grey day long, until night fell again.

  When the second day broke, I saw a dark line on the horizon. I was drifting towards it. Suddenly, I was certain that the land was my island, the place I came from, the place where my father lived and my mother had died. I was going to be washed up on the same piece of sandy beach where the Fathers had met my mother; I was being carried by the same current. I imagined my father’s face as I arrived, and I had to laugh and laugh and couldn’t stop.

  The land came nearer. I could see the outline of a rocky coast, steep cliffs. The laughing stopped, and instead I was afraid, terribly afraid. I was on my way back to my father’s lands. He was going to kill me as he had killed my mother. I was a disobedient daughter and not a virgin any more.

  I began to pray, gabbling with fear. I promised the Lord that I was going to be a faithful daughter; that I was going to keep myself chaste. I promised Him that I was going to beat the bad urges out of my body. The holy sisters had shown me how when they had beaten Father Diarmuid and me in the chapel after they caught us sinning. I suddenly understood that what we had done was a sin against the faith and the Lord, because it went against the laws that He had laid down. I understood that I was nothing and that the Lord was everything. I had been given to Him, I was His and no longer mine.

  The land came nearer. There were jagged mountains on the horizon, blue as clouds. I was washed ashore at the foot of a steep cliff. This was not my island.

  I was saved.

  I fell on my knees in prayer to thank the Lord. Then I set about doing His work. I had to subdue my will and my unruly body. So I carried large stones up the steep cliff path, one after the other. I would build a church. Soon my hands were rough and bleeding, my back bent and aching. Every time I slipped and the stone rolled back down to the bottom and I had to start again, I fasted for penance. The winter storms lashed me with rain and hail. Some days I was so weak, I could not even lift a stone, let alone carry it up the cliff.

  But every evening, no matter how tired and worn out I was, I used a birch rod to beat my body into submission. I had to keep my promise.

  Every night, my lover visited me in my dreams. His hands stroked my wounds and scars and caressed my body until I swam in pleasure.

  Every morning when I woke up, the wounds of the day before had closed and healed. Weeks passed, but nothing changed. The Lord would be displeased with me.

  The birch was not enough.

  I walked inland until I found a thorny shrub and tore off several of its branches. They would take care of the dreams.

  But when the rods landed on my skin, their touch was as tender as a lover’s fingers. They had grown white flowers whose sweet scent rose into my nostrils and made my head swim. The thorns had disappeared as though they had never been there.

  I was going to burn in hell.

  I ran down the cliff path and threw myself into the sea. There were sharp rocks just under the surface, impossible to evade. I braced myself for the shock of the cold, but the water was warm. It held me as though in a huge hand, blue and sparkling in the sunlight that had broken through the clouds. The currents moved over my skin until my body uncurled all of its own accord.

  I spent the next day collecting tufts of wool from the grazing sheep. I felt as though all the nuns in the convent were watching me, as well as the Lord; and I had to do something.

  When I had enough, I twisted the wool into thread. I knotted stones and broken shells with sharp edges into them until I had a formidable lash. I tried it out on the back of my hand. The threads wound round my fingers, curled and moved and hissed at my other hand when I tried to prise them loose.

  The lash had turned into live snakes.

  ‘Saint Patrick cast all snakes out of Ireland,’ the voice of the Mother Superior said in my head. ‘Snakes are the Serpent’s foul brood. Saint Patrick was so pure that they could not abide him.’

  Warm, dry bodies moved slowly over my skin, coiling and uncoiling, entwining themselves with my fingers. Tongues flickered as heads moved here and there.

  They were beautiful.

  Their beauty was like that of Father Diarmuid’s body in the moonlight, like white blossoms against black wood, like air and sunshine through open windows.

  I sat and looked at them and stroked their lovely, scaly bodies until, one by one, they unwound themselves from my hand and slipped away.

  Then I got up and threw the birch rod off the cliff. It turned into a cormorant.

  Collen

  Sixth or seventh century

  collen [f] – (n) hazel

  Sometimes called Collen Filwr, Collen the Warrior. A champion for Christianity, he fought and killed a pagan warrior. Later on, Collen became a wandering preacher and missionary, settling down to live
in what is called today the valley of Llangollen. At this time – according to the legends – there was a cattle-stealing and man-eating giantess living in the area: Cawres y Bwlch, the Giantess of the Pass. Collen decided to go and see her. As he approached her cave and asked who she was and what she was doing, the giantess answered: Myfi fy hun, yn fy lladd fy hun. (It is I myself, killing myself.) He challenged her and they fought. He sliced off her arm. She picked up the bleeding limb and hit him with it. He cut off her other arm as well and eventually killed her.

  According to a local version of this legend, Collen was a woman.

  I was The Muscular Christian. My stage name, you see. Wrestling for GOD. For years and years of my life, I fought for God on a stage, not only for a living, but for a life.

  ‘You’ve heard of Jacob wrestling the Angel! Who wants to wrestle with this angel here?’ That always brought a roar of laughter from the crowds. I was fighting on the side of the angels, but I’m not exactly your fragile blonde. I’m six-foot-four in my socks and about three foot across and, as I say, I have a fair amount of muscle.

  Now my mother was one of those fragile blondes. Me, I’ve got thick black hair that doesn’t even curl. ‘God only knows how you gave birth to that,’ my stepfather used to say, and even when I was small I could tell that he didn’t think I was a gift from heaven.

  In the beginning she’d laugh and say, ‘Well, her father was quite tall, I expect that’s where she gets it from,’ but after a while we both learned that he didn’t like us mentioning my real Dad. He liked it even less when I said it that way. My real Dad.

  ‘You’re not my real Dad!’ I’d scream at him when I was older, and then I’d run away and stay at a friend’s for a night or two, until he’d simmered down. Two times out of three he’d have forgotten by the time I showed up again. Sometimes he didn’t, and I got it with his belt. So I started the weight training. I’d pay him back one day, when I was stronger.