Magdalen Rising Read Online Free

protection of Bride, also called Brigid, mother and/or daughter of the Dagda, goddess of smithcraft, poetry, and healing, who survived the coming of Christianity by turning into a saint—(I told you, they just won’t quit, those old girls) – and not just any saint. According to lore, Bride was the foster mother of Christ, which makes him—don’t you see?—my foster brother.
    In my lifetimes, I have been called by many names. Or, you might say, certain names have called me. More than one of those names begins
with the letter you know as M, a compelling shape in Latin script, echoing the shape of breasts, mountain peaks, sea swells, the wings of birds spread in flight. And if you take the Latin letter B and tip it on its side, you see that shape repeated. But it was many years before I learned any form of writing or inscription. Raised in the oral tradition as I was, I’m still not convinced that the written word is any improvement over the spoken. After all, talk never killed a tree.
    Meanwhile, despite Fand’s authoritative naming of me, my womb mother called me Little Bright One, and the others soon fell into the habit. And that is how I knew myself in my earliest years.

CHAPTER TWO
    WIST YE NOT?
    W HAT AMAZES ME ABOUT the time my foster brother stayed behind in Jerusalem playing child prodigy at the Temple is not his nerve or precocious wit, but the fact that nobody missed him till they’d gone a day’s journey. Cosmic twins separated before birth, we grew up so differently. Compared to me, he lived among throngs. Also the child-parent ratio was different. Her perpetual virginity notwithstanding, Mary did have more than one child. I had more than one mother. He had a whole country to lose himself in. I had one small island. So my determination to give my mothers the slip and be about my own business required more ingenuity. Oh, I know, I know. He wasn’t just being a bratty, worrisome kid. He was about his father’s business—and he didn’t mean Joseph’s. “Wist ye not,”—I love that word wist; that’s why I’m using the King James version—“Wist ye not,” he said to his dazed, uncomprehending parents, “that I must be about my Father’s business?”
    It wouldn’t have occurred to me to go about my father’s business. He seemed to have matters well in hand. The tides went in and out on schedule, and he often left gifts of whelks among the rocks. Though I had never seen him in the way you understand seeing, he was not invisible in that annoying, omniscient way of some gods I could mention. We were surrounded by his kingdom, Tír fo Thuinn, Land under the Wave. He was no less than Manannan Mac Lir, god of the sea.
    On this point, at least, my mothers were agreed. They loved, of an evening before the peat fire, to narrate my conception. The details varied considerably, depending on whose turn it was to tell the tale. There were always some interruptions and corrections, but, in general, poetic license was granted. A tale was “true” if it was well told.
    Manannán Mac Lir was a god who lent himself to invention. He was a night prowler, visiting women in the dark “as the dew visits the earth, making it moist and fertile,” so Fand liked to express it. And he was a shape-shifter. Yahweh with his angel messengers and Zeus with his swan feathers had nothing on my father. See the bone-white gleam of that twelve-point rack of antlers? That’s him. Feel a sudden gust of
wind from a rush of wings? There he is again. And that huge white seal slipping from the rock into the sea? Now you see him. Now he’s gone.
    In some stories he came to Grainne—whom the others described with utter lack of envy as the loveliest of all—on the shore, taking shape from sea foam. Sometimes he appeared in the oak grove. In yet another story he entered our round hut, his greatness expanding the walls to