The Galileans: A Novel of Mary Magdalene by Frank G. Slaughter Page B

in the closet.” Suddenly she began to weep. Great tears spilled from her eyes and ran down over her cheeks, but her face remained a frozen mask of suffering and shame.
    Joseph looked away, for somehow it seemed indecent to watch while she wept for the girl who had disappeared last night, never to return. He sensed that nothing he could say would diminish her agony now. It would do no good to tell her that others had survived an equal desecration and had gone on living. He could not possibly know, as kind and understanding as he was, what the terrible experience had meant. Only a woman who had been through it all could know that. But he could see how, overnight, the gay and carefree girl who had danced and sung for the sheer joy of it had become a woman.
    The change was not only in the physical bruises upon her body and the lines of suffering in her face. It went deeper than mere flesh into her very soul, a wound that would never completely heal. There was the same pale beauty, the same rich sheen to her hair, the same lovely body outwardly unchanged by the desecration it had survived. And yet the girl weeping there was an entirely different person from the gay and joyful Mary of Magdala who had loved to visit Simon and his wife here by the lake, the “Living Flame,” as Hadja called her, who had danced on the streets of Magdala.
    Finally the tears ceased to flow. “No one knows what happened last night except us, Mary,” Joseph said, trying to comfort her. “I did not tell Hadja, or Simon and his wife. You must try to forget it; the memory can only bring you pain.”
    “Then let it,” she said with sudden anger. “Let the pain keep me from ever forgetting I must be revenged.”
    “‘Vengeance is mine, and recompense,’” he reminded her. “They are the words of the Most High.”
    “Where was He when I cried out to Him to save me?” she stormed. “Why did He not answer me then?”
    Joseph was silent. The wife of Eleazar and most of the devout Jews of Magdala would have said God had deserted her as a punishment for her sins. But what was sinful about high spirits and courage, the impatience of youth for the conservatism of age, or the desire to be happy and share one’s happiness with others? If this were sin, then God was indeed an unfair taskmaster.
    “You think I deserved it, too, because you told me not to go to Tiberias,” Mary accused, lashing out like a child in her pain and bewilderment, instinctively trying to allay the hurt and guilt she felt.
    “None of those who love you could ever think or say such a thing, Mary,” he told her gently. “It is written, ‘Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses.’”
    “Stop quoting proverbs to me!” she snapped angrily, turning her face away from him. “Why don’t you go away and leave me alone?”
    “I thought I would go to Magdala this morning . . .”
    “Well, go then. Stop bothering me.”
    “Do you want to tell Demetrius anything?”
    “Tell him I want to die.” Her voice broke then and the tears began to roll once more, but her face still did not alter in its fixed mask of suffering. “Tell him to forget he ever had a daughter,” she whispered and, turning over suddenly, buried her face in the pillow.
    Joseph found Simon’s wife and warned her to watch Mary closely, on the grounds that she might suffer another attack. Then, his heart heavy with concern for the girl he loved, he got on his mule and started up the hill to Magdala. There he learned that the soldiers had visited Demetrius during the night, seeking Mary, but had departed without troubling him when satisfied that she had not come there. The remainder of the musicians had drifted in during the early hours of the morning, but the pudgy lyre maker had been worried until Hadja arrived with the news that Mary was safe.
    “What really happened at Pilate’s villa, Joseph?” Demetrius asked soberly. “I am sure Hadja didn’t know the whole story.”
    Joseph had no