because of a fall suffered in a renowned suicidal charge.
And how did you survive that charge?
Two are the reasons. With God's blessings and also because my father said I had other things to do in the future. Do you see these medals and especially this cross? They indicate I'm an established hero from the middle of the nineteenth century, when I foolishly aided the cause of the British Empire in a substantial and dangerous manner.
Maud held the cross and laughed.
How old does that make you now?
Twenty, just. Although sometimes I feel older, even as aged as my father. He was a fisherman and a poor man like myself.
And all those things you told me the other day were true?
Jaysus and yes they were true, each and every one of them more than the last and as much as the next.
True to the end as only the end can be. I know. My father had the gift.
What gift?
Seeing the future as the past, seeing it as it is. The seventh son of a seventh son he was and in my land that means you have the gift.
Maud laughed again.
And what did your father see about your future that allowed you to survive the suicidal charge?
Fighting for Ireland he saw, not rowing over to Florida as good St Brendan had the sense to do some thirteen hundred years ago. That's one of my names too you see. I come from an island of saints and I would have been glad to row to Florida for the sake of the Church from all I hear of the climate there but that wasn't for me, fighting in the mountains of Cork was for me lugging around a monstrous old weapon, a modified musketoon it was, U.S. cavalry issue 1851 and sixty-nine caliber, me firing it like a howitzer to keep my distance, but after a while they caught onto my faraway game and I had to escape so God allowed me to join an order of nuns known as the Poor Clares, temporarily of course, because some of these Poor Clares were going on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land that had been requested at the end of the eighteenth century, God waiting to grant permission until the moment was opportune, and that's how I happened to come to Jerusalem as a nun but now I'm not a nun anymore, now I'm a retired veteran living in the Home for Crimean War Heroes because the baking priest decided to award me this Victoria Cross for general valor because the bread was getting to his brains, only natural after sixty years at the oven baking the same four loaves of bread, and if I seem to be rambling and this is confusing its just because I've been keeping company with a peculiar Arab, a quite elderly sorcerer, an unusual old man who is so unusually old he has that effect on you. Sorry, we'll start again. Ask me something.
Maud took his hand and smiled.
What would your father see if he were here now?
Surely the desert. We must be away from this babble of Jerusalem with its roving fanatics of every kind.
Did you see that item pacing the top of the stairs to the crypt?
Yes.
Well he's been doing that for two thousand years, just pacing and muttering and never stopping. How could we even begin to think clearly in a place where such things go on?
Who told you that?
About the man on the top of the stairs? My sorcerer friend. And he knows because he's been watching him all that time. Around the beginning of every century he drops in to compare notes and see if there's been any change in the general situation but there never is. But what do you think, will we be going to the desert then? I've never been but the old Arab says it's a wonderful place for filling your soul. He's been making a haj for the last ten hundred years or so and he says nothing compares to it in the springtime, wild flowers and all that. Shouldn't we be going?
Yes my love, it must be a wonderful place and I think we should be going.
From Aqaba they rode south along the shore of the Sinai until they found a small oasis where they camped. Through the foothills in the moonlight they circled the colors of the desert, swam at noon in the brilliant gulf and lay on the hot sand of the beach, asleep in each other's arms in early evening and awake again at dawn to slip down to the shore and embrace in the shallows, laughing over their figs and pomegranates and toasting the new sun with arak, whispering
On their last evening they sat on a rock by the water watching the sunset gather silently, passing the arak back and forth as the Sinai burst into flames behind them and the last of the light settled on the barren hills where darkness was coming to Arabia. The rustle of the waves and the fingertips of the wind, the desert cast to fire and the rush of arak in their blood, the air lapsing into blackness and inevitably on the far side of the gulf another and distant world.
He stood then and threw the empty bottle far across the water.
They held their breath and waited and a minute seemed to pass before they heard a tiny splash somewhere out there in the night, perhaps only imagining it.
-13-
Jericho
Joe was overjoyed when he found out they were going to have a child. He sang and danced all his father's songs and dances and insisted they get married that afternoon, as he had been insisting since before they went to Aqaba.
It's too hot today, September is soon enough. This heat is frightful.
Frightful it is and atrocious and terrible and just plain bad. Now just don't move, you shouldn't be moving, just sit quiet there and fan yourself while I make a cup of tea. Frightful, yes.
You know Joe, I'm really beginning to love Jerusalem.
It's a madhouse isn't it, nothing like it, just what the baking priest said. When he gave me his veteran's papers I looked at him and said, you're eighty-five and I'm twenty and how about apparent age?
Laughed, he did. No problems like that in such a place, he said. Apparent anything doesn't mean much in our Holy City, everybody's Holy City, that's what he said. Just a minute now.
I remember once I saw a man in Piraeus who looked a lot like you except he was older.
A sailor?
Yes.
How much older?
Fifteen or twenty years.
Seventeen to be exact. That was brother Eamon jumping ship on his way to join the Rumanian army. He got himself killed fighting for the bloody Rumanians, can you imagine. The father told me all about it before it happened. You saw him in 1915. April.
I'm not sure.
That's when it was. None of my brothers ever wrote home after they left but the father knew what they were up to anyway. You can't fool a prophet can you. Here's a good cup now. Rest quiet and we'll be home from the sea free as birds.
Maud laughed, the summer passed in their small apartment in Jerusalem. September came and again she made some excuse for delaying their marriage. Joe continued to make trips to Constantinople and now each time he returned he noticed changes in her mood. She was withdrawn and irritable. But that's just her state, he thought, surely such things happen, only natural that they would.
With winter coming he decided their rooms were too drafty and cold for her to be comfortable. The warm sun of the Jordan valley would be better. He found a little house on the outskirts of Jericho and rented it, a lovely house on a small plot of land, surrounded by flowers and arbors and lemon trees.
Proudly he took her down there and was astonished when she first saw it. She didn't even smile.
But don't you like it, Maudie?
No.
