Pandemonium broke loose then. In the midst of it, without pausing even for a prayer of thanksgiving that Gaius Flaccus was still alive and Mary was not yet, at least, a murderess, Joseph vaulted over the seats just below him and into the open passageway by which the actors reached the dressing rooms under the stage. He knew vaguely that the dressing rooms were somewhere below him, and as he raced through the corridors, a deep roar from the crowd told him the people had at last realized how near they had come to witnessing a real murder.
Actors, actresses, dancers, musicians, and stage hands were milling about in the corridors beneath the great stadium. Most of them, not having been on stage, did not yet realize what had happened.
As Joseph hesitated for a moment, one familiar face appeared among the crowd. It was Albina, and when he called to her she came over at once, her face grave. “Mary ran through to her dressing room just now, Joseph,” she said hurriedly. “There was blood on her robe.”
“She tried to kill Gaius Flaccus,” he gasped. “Where is her dressing room?”
Albina wasted no time with questions but led him immediately to a door above which the torch symbol of Flamen had been painted. “I will wait outside!” she suggested. “If they come after her, perhaps I can send them in another direction.”
He nodded gratefully; there was no time for thanks. Hadja stood guard outside Mary’s door. “Praise be to Ahura-Mazda that you have come, Joseph,” he said fervently. “Did she kill him?”
“No.” Joseph swept the corridor with a quick surveying glance. There was a large window at the end, large enough for them to escape through if they had time. “Open the window there,” he directed. “I will get Mary and we will try to escape toward the lake.”
As Joseph pushed open the door to Mary’s dressing room, Hadja started toward the window. If they could get free of the stadium and reach the lake, it might be possible to hail one of the boats that plied for hire along the shore and make their escape before the audience in the great stadium had recovered from its momentary paralysis at the unexpected drama they had witnessed as a climax to the festival of Dionysos.
Mary stood beside her dressing table, her face devoid of color. Blood stained her fingers, her white gown, and the blade of the dagger still gripped in her right hand. Her eyes were dilated until they seemed to have no color, the wide pupils mirroring only a stark despair. By no act of recognition did she even so much as show that she knew Joseph was in the room.
When she did move, it was so rapidly that Joseph almost failed to seize her wrist as the dagger plunged downward toward her own breast. He was not quick enough to save her a wound, but did manage to deflect the sharp point of the dagger so that it failed to find the target for which she had intended it, her own heart. Ripping through the white fabric of her gown, the dagger made a shallow wound in her breast before it dropped from nerveless fingers as she swayed and collapsed in Joseph’s arms.
“I—I couldn’t do it, Joseph,” she sobbed in a sudden rush of words and tears, clinging to him like a terrified child. “Something held my arm back.”
“The Most High would not let you commit murder,” he told her. “We must go quickly. He will surely help us escape.”
The voice of the crowd was a deep-throated roaring now, like a great pack of snarling animals. They were enraged at the affront to the god in whose honor the festival was being held, and the first target of their anger would naturally be the woman who had tried to kill the impersonated god.
“Hadja is waiting outside,” Joseph told Mary urgently. “If we can reach the lake in the darkness, we will be safe.”
But she only shook her head. “I have caused enough trouble already,” she said almost in a whisper. “Leave me before it is too late.”
“I will never leave you, Mary,” he said simply. “If the crowd comes we will die together.”
Bana Jivaka burst into the room then. “Hurry!” he gasped. “The crowd was almost at my heels.”
“You must go, Mary,” Joseph pleaded. “All of us will die if you stay here.”
She moved suddenly and seized the dagger once more, but Joseph gripped her hand, keeping her from plunging the blade into her breast. “Please let me die, Joseph,” she begged. “It’s the only way to save you now.”
“Let me die! It’s the only way!” The words exploded in Joseph’s mind with a burst of inspiration. Death—or the appearance of death—might indeed be the best way now, perhaps the only way, as Mary had said, of escaping the fury of the crowd. Quickly he turned to Bana Jivaka. “You told me once you could induce a trance so deep that it cannot be told from death. Could you do it now and make it seem that she is dead?”
Jivaka’s alert mind took in the situation at once. “With that wound on her breast . . . and the dagger . . . Yes, it might be the answer.”
Joseph took the dagger from Mary’s resistless fingers. “You must do exactly as Jivaka tells you, dear,” he said quickly. “He may be able to save us all from the crowd if you help.”
She swayed against him as if she were about to faint, and without waiting for an answer he lifted her in his arms and placed her on the floor before the dressing table. “Look at Jivaka,” he commanded. “And do exactly as he tells you.”
The Indian physician had already removed from his pocket the emerald he always carried. As he held it before Mary’s eyes, the gem began to glow from the light of twin tapers burning on her dressing table. “You must sleep, Mary of Magdala,” he started to chant in a deep monotone. “You must yield yourself to sleep . . . sleep . . . sleep.”
XIV
Albina had done her work well, diverting Plotinus on a futile errand when he came raging backstage seeking Mary. It was almost five minutes before the gymnasiarch, with Gaius Flaccus and a pair of brawny soldiers carrying drawn swords, burst open the door above which a torch was painted. The tribune was pale and his tunic was still bloody, but the shallow wound in his chest made by Mary’s dagger had been controlled easily with a bandage. Behind the Romans, the forefront of the crowd surged into the narrow corridor, shouting with bloodlust, but the soldiers held them at bay outside the door.
A dramatic scene greeted the eyes of the onlookers. Mary lay on the floor with the bloody dagger gripped in her right hand, the point touching the wound where the blade had penetrated skin and muscle. The red trickle of blood across her breast stood out sharply against the alabaster pallor of her skin, and closer observers than the angry and excited Romans would still have thought she had stabbed herself in the heart, pulling the dagger out again in the agony of death.
“By the gods!” Gaius Flaccus cried. “She has killed herself!” And the people behind him took up the cry, passing it back to the crowd outside. “Flamen is dead! Slain by her own hand!”
Plotinus seemed stunned for a moment, then he wheeled upon the two physicians. “Why are you here?” he demanded savagely, as if he blamed them for his not finding the woman called Flamen alive.
“I was her father’s physician,” Joseph said, “and her friend. I came after her immediately, afraid that she might do something like this. She tried to kill herself once before in Magdala.”
“Then she really is a Jewess as you claim,” the gymnasiarch said to Gaius Flaccus. “But why would she try to kill you?”
Before the tribune could answer, Joseph said quickly, “He betrayed Mary of Magdala long ago, when she was a girl. The life of the tribune Gaius Flaccus has been forfeit to her since that time, according to the ancient laws of the Jewish people.”
“And after five years she still wanted to kill me?” Gaius Flaccus swayed and held onto one of the soldiers for support. “Let us leave this place,” he gasped. “The smell of blood sickens me.”
“What drivel is this?” Plotinus snapped. “Romans are not governed by Jewish laws.”
“This woman’s father was a citizen of Rome,”
Joseph told him. “As such she is entitled to justice, even if she tried to kill the man who betrayed her.”
Plotinus shrugged. “I dispense justice in the name of Rome here,” he said coldly. “And I judge the woman called Flamen to be a murderess, even in death. Take her body away,” he ordered the soldiers. “Let her be buried this very night on the shore of the lake, in the common ground for criminals.”
Joseph paled. This was more than he had figured on, for he had planned that Mary’s body would be turned over to him for burial. Then he and Jivaka would be able to revive her and escape from the city by way of Lake Mareotis and the Nile. “She was a Jewess,” he said to the gymnasiarch. “Grant that I may take her away and lay her to rest after the manner of our people.”
Plotinus did not even answer. “See that her grave is guarded,” he told the soldiers and, turning on his heel, left the room, followed by his retinue. Two soldiers remained behind as guards until slaves could be sent with a litter to carry Mary’s body to the burying ground of the criminals, but they would not let either Joseph or Bana Jivaka approach the body.
Led by two slaves bearing torches, a macabre procession filed from the stadium a short time later. Mary’s body lay upon a litter borne by four slaves. So deep was the trance into which Jivaka had managed to place her that even Joseph, stealing a glance at her as often as he could and occasionally managing to come close enough to touch her skin, could still not tell that she was alive. Joseph and Bana Jivaka walked with Hadja at the rear of the procession, each cudgeling his brains for some stratagem by which to get Mary’s body away where Jivaka could release her from the stupor. But none of them thought of a way, and as each step brought them closer and closer to the grave where the Romans would bury her alive, their hopes for Mary’s life grew fainter and fainter.
Through the turbulent streets of the city the little procession marched toward the dark, ghostly monuments of the Necropolis, across the Agathadaemon Canal. And still Joseph was able to see no way in which they could hope to save Mary from being buried alive. Then near the Necropolis Gate, he spied a building before which a number of elongated boxes stood upended against the walls. It was the shop of a coffin maker, logically placed here at the entrance to the City of the Dead.
“How long could she live in the trance if she were buried in a coffin?” he asked Jivaka in a whisper, seizing his arm and drawing him back out of earshot of the others.
The Indian’s quick mind grasped his meaning. “I once saw a magician in India removed from a coffin alive after six hours,” he whispered. “But the box was very large.”
“Hold!” Joseph called to the slaves carrying the litter. “We must stop for the coffin.”
“Plotinus said nothing about this,” the soldier in charge of the guard objected as the procession halted.
“Would you rob the dead of a decent resting place?” Joseph demanded sternly. “Be sure her soul will torment yours throughout eternity if you do.”
The soldier shivered. “It is true that the gymnasiarch did not forbid that she be buried in a coffin,” he admitted.
“Then there is no reason why she should not.” Before the soldier could object any more Joseph hammered on the door of the coffin maker’s shop. “Wake up!” he shouted. “We have need of your wares.”
The slaves had put down the litter, grateful for a chance to rest. In a few minutes the proprietor emerged from the building, rubbing his eyes, his sleeping cap still on his head. Joseph had already canvassed the row of coffins leaning against a building and selected the largest one he could find. “I will take this one,” he said. “What is the price?”
“Why do you need such a large one?” the soldier grumbled. “It will only mean more weight to carry.”
“This one has the best wood,” Joseph explained. “It will last longer.” He paid the coffin maker and called Hadja to help carry the rough wooden box.
Once again the little procession got under way. Now they were inside the City of the Dead itself, and as they moved through it toward the burial place reserved for paupers and criminals near the shore of Lake Mareotis, the shouts and sounds of revelry from the city across the canal grew fainter and fainter. Finally, almost at the water’s edge, they came upon an empty space, and the soldier at the head of the party ordered a halt.
One could not dig very deeply here close to the water without having the grave turn into a well, so the pits were very shallow, with the sand piled up to cover the coffin if the dead were lucky enough to rest so luxuriously. Rotted fragments of wood sticking out of the ground all around them showed where others had lain, and sometimes bones projected from the soil, bleached white by the salt air from the sea that blew across the narrow tongue of land upon which the Necropolis stood.
A shallow grave was quickly dug by the slaves, barely deep enough to cover the coffin. Joseph did not insist upon its being deeper, for if his plan were to be carried out—and a desperate one it was indeed—every minute lost in uncovering Mary’s body might mean the difference between life and death for her. He did not let himself think that his desperate plan might fail; the thought of his beloved smothering there in the darkness beneath the earth was more than he could bear. And yet he could see no other, no better way; the three of them, unarmed, would have no chance of overpowering the soldiers and the slaves. And if they were killed in a fruitless fight, all chance of saving Mary would be gone.
Joseph himself placed Mary’s body in the roomy box. When it was covered, he managed to push a hole down to the wooden cover under the guise of placing a marker of driftwood at the head. He had purposely left the cover itself unnailed, hoping that some air would filter down through the loose dirt, at least enough to preserve life until his plan could be carried out.
When the burial was finished, the slaves departed hurriedly, anxious to be away from this realm of the dead. Joseph’s heart lifted when he saw that only one soldier remained behind as a guard. It was like the Romans, he thought, to consider one armed soldier more than equal to three men, especially when one was a Jew. Actually, it was no part of his plan to attack the guard, for even if they managed to kill the soldier, another would come to relieve him in a few hours, soon enough to rouse the city and intercept them before they carried through their plan of escaping up the Nile. For all of them to be quite safe, it was important that Plotinus should think Mary was dead.
Joseph drew Bana Jivaka to one side, out of the guard’s range of hearing. “How long do we have?” he asked anxiously.
“The coffin is large, and in the trance she breathes very lightly,” Jivaka whispered. “She may have several hours. It is difficult to say.”
Hadja clenched and unclenched his great hands. “Engage the soldier in conversation, Joseph,” he begged. “And I will slip behind him and throttle him.”
Joseph shook his head. “It is best if they do not know we have stolen the body,” he explained. “We must wait a little while yet.”
“But we cannot let her lie there in the grave and die from lack of breath.”
“I am as worried as you are, Hadja,” he admitted. “Believe me, my way is best, but I will hurry it.”
The soldier paused in his steady pacing up and down beside the grave when Joseph approached. “What do you want, Jew?” he demanded, drawing his sword.
“This woman was my betrothed,” Joseph explained. “Have you never loved a woman yourself?”
The guard relaxed. “She was very beautiful,” he admitted. “I saw her dance once in the theater.”
Joseph nodded toward the Rhakotis, only a short distance away across the canal. The sounds of singing and drunken laughter floated to them across the tombs. “There will be many such in the drinking houses tonight,” he suggested. “Why should you not be with them?”
“I have been ordered to stay here until I am relieved.”
“And when will that be?”
“Four hours at least. By that time my relief will probably be drunk and stop for another flagon.”
“Surely no one will care if you quench your thirst in the Rhakotis for an hour while I watch beside the grave of my beloved.”
“It would go bad with me if I were found out,” the soldier said doubtfully, but Joseph realized with a rising sense of elation that he was wavering.
“Can the dead speak?” he asked. “I would pay well for an hour alone with her.” He lifted his purse and let the man see that it was well filled.
The sight of money settled the soldier’s doubts. He took the liberal handful of coins Joseph gave him and set off at a trot toward the gate leading into the city and the merriment of the Rhakotis. No sooner was he out of sight than Joseph whistled to Hadja and Bana Jivaka and, dropping to his knees, began to claw dirt from the shallow grave.
Quickly they uncovered the top of the coffin and removed it. Mary lay inside, just as Joseph had placed her, but the skin of her hands and feet were as cold as the marble they resembled, and there was no sign of life. “She is dead, Jivaka,” Joseph said brokenly as they carried her to one side and laid her body upon their cloaks. “I waited too long to bribe the guard.”
“Waste no time in self-censure,” Jivaka said. “Place your mouth over hers and breathe into her body while Hadja and I cover the grave again. It is a method I have often used to breathe life into babies at birth.”
Kneeling beside Mary and putting his mouth over hers, Joseph forced his breath between her lips. Steadily and slowly he breathed into her body, feeling her breast rise as the air distended her lungs. And when he drew away, a soft rushing sound could be heard as the air escaped from her nose and mouth. Over and over again he kept up the steady rhythm of inflating her lungs while Bana Jivaka and Hadja worked rapidly, covering the grave so the soldier would not suspect that it had been tampered with. When they finished, the Indian physician knelt beside Mary and felt for her pulse.
The Galileans: A Novel of Mary Magdalene Page 21