Secret Magdalene Read Online Free PDF Page A

are a Samaritan. You cannot believe in prophets?”
    “What has been,” says he, “can be again.” And here he smiles a smile as wide as his wide face, and I cannot help it, I smile back. There is no maintaining fear and foreboding before him. I redeem myself by saying, “Prophets are as common as rocks. Why wish to be another rock?”
    The people laugh. In the midst of this laughter, Heli of the Way calls forth a servant, a woman he names Rhoda, and in her hands she bears a tray. My laughter dries in my throat.
    There are stones on the tray. There is a pendulum. Heli signals the woman to place the tray on a small stone table, saying, “Ananias has described these things to us. As humbly made as they are, I hope they will serve you as your own.”
    Tata has come forward, but Salome stays her, “You expect us to perform
kishuf
?” Her color and her voice are high. Not to mention her eyebrows.
    “I had hoped,” replies Heli, “you would favor us with your gifts.”
    “Hope is a flown bird.”
    But I find I trust Addai, stone carver and Samaritan. And if there is yet danger here, I have thought of something that will release us from it.
    “I will,” I say, and enjoy the surprise followed by the disapproval that clamps down on Salome’s face, the shock on Tata’s. I pick up the pebbles, arrange them any which way. I take the pendulum, nothing like ours in balance and weight. Everyone has gone quiet. The men lean forward. The wife Dinah leans back. With this, my Salome is returned. I can see it in the curve of her lip as she struggles to keep a straight face; adults have only three reactions to things they do not understand: they fear it or they worship it or they deny it.
    Perhaps the first two are the same reaction. The third as well.
    The pendulum does not move. I throw it down as if I am exasperated. I slip the silver chain from my neck with its small vial of spikenard. With a flourish, I use this for a pendulum. But this too hangs like a dead thing.
    What comes is exactly nothing. Just as I meant to do. Nothing.
    I swear I will not be stoned for a witch.
    Ananias is ashamed that he has praised us so, and I am pleased to see it. So too am I pleased to see the disappointment of Heli bar Nehushtan and of Dinah, his wife. Though it does not please me that Addai might be cast down. But if not to stone us as witches, what then did they all expect? That Isaiah or Ezekial or Elijah had come among them as a female child? As two female children?
    But Salome cannot stand it, she simply cannot. She snatches the alabastron from my hand, rearranges the pebbles in their proper order. What can I do? Salome is Salome. Right away the alabastron steadies under her hand, then begins to slowly swing, picking out one letter at a time. All lean forward in earnest, even the servant Rhoda. I wonder they do not bump heads. If they mean us ill, we are sunk.
    The first thing the alabastron spells is the word
silence.
Then in a rush, “Lo, comes the Angel of Silence. Hear ye, children, hearken to the unheard.” Salome reads it aloud so that they do not miss a word. I have not heard this before. I catch Salome’s eye. Rather than pretend to fail, does Salome pretend to succeed too well, so that she makes no sense at all, thereby confusing and confounding? Ananias is repeating the words under his breath, “The Angel of Silence. Hear ye, children. Hearken to the unheard.” Meaning what? he thinks. Is this great profundity? Or great foolishness?
    But Addai of Shechem has been staring at Salome; instead of puzzling out the words, he has taken up the mirror from the tray. He has been turning it this way and that, and now he turns to me. The shape is in the mirror again. Something that seems a coiled snake moves like smoke across its surface. I gasp. Salome’s eyes dart from the stones to the mirror. As do the eyes of Ananias. “See! Did I not say my little fish were full of wonders?”
    “Salome,” I gush, “where is the new spell?”