Free Secret Magdalene by Ki Longfellow Page B

as pitch. I poke Salome, but Salome is glaring at Tata, offended that Tata betrays us by keeping a secret. But what is the secret?
    The woman as black as the night guides us to a door. Behind it there are only steps hewn into solid rock. The steps lead down into rooms below, storage rooms lined with bins full of foodstuffs, things that are better preserved by the chill and the dark. By the flickering light of one small lamp, no one of us speaks, no one moves. Are we hiding? Salome and I glance at each other; she makes one of our signs:
if so, from whom?
    The woman of the south walks forward, toward long-necked jars of oil and baskets of last summer’s grain. She and Seth together move a certain heavy pot and then the larger one behind it. Behind this is a wall of stone, rougher and older than all other walls. Seth moves this stone and she that stone, and then, to my utter amazement, a door opens through which he and Tata and the woman I hear them call Helena promptly disappear.
    “Go,” we hear Addai say. “It will take you where only the Few may go.”
    I duck my head and wriggle through the hole in the wall, Salome right behind me, to find that we go not to another room, but into a tunnel, a bore going down through the stone in which there are very narrow and very steep steps. I keep hold of Salome until we reach a bottom, far underground. It is cool down here and sounds echo. Addai shoos us along another tunnel after Seth and Tata and Helena whose light is far ahead.
    We follow them, passing other chambers to our left and to our right, until we come on one that is perfectly round. Instantly my heart races with joy. I care nothing that there are stone benches here, or that lamps are placed high in the round walls, or that there is a round bath in the middle of the round room. What matters are the books halfway from floor to ceiling. Books! Here is where Seth finds books! And here I notice the ceiling. A vaulted dome, round as the heavens and full of painted stars. There is the moon and there is the sun, both shining in the sign of Pisces, the Fish. And in the middle, a sign. It seems also a fish, but a fish made of two circles. What does it mean?
    In this vaulted chamber wait two others. One has the face of an actor—there is certainly an actor’s conceit written on it. But the other stands as tall as a ladder and as thin as a rung and I know him immediately. He was the ancient who pushed himself forward in the house of Heli of the Way when the Loud Voice spoke. Salome kicks my ankle. By this, I know she knows him too. We both think, Surely this cannot be the great teacher?
    The old man folds himself onto one of two stone benches at the edge of the pool; the others sit here or there. There seems no ordering of class or worthiness. There is only the feeling that since the old man has seated himself, so too shall the others.
    But not us.
    Addai signals that Salome is to remain on her feet, that she is to continue silent. This too I must do. Then he himself takes a seat near to Tata so that my friend and I now stand alone. I am jumping with nerves. Where is the great teacher, the sage, the
tzadik
? Will he appear from one of the tunnels? In my mind’s eye, I conjure up someone greater than the magician Hanina ben Dosa or the sorceress Megas. Will he strike us dumb? Or will he answer our questions? Will he tell us whose books these are? Beside me, I feel Salome tremble.
    Seth now does something very surprising. He stands, he places himself before the ancient and then he bows with his palms pressed together like an Arab. “Things have not gone well, John,” he says. “Our children have made themselves known.”
    The old man’s mouth is as small as a pebble. “Nothing goes well. Though it goes as it must.” He lifts a bony hand to point at himself, but he speaks to me and to Salome. “I am John of Kefar Imi. Few and Many and many more call me John the Baptizer.”
    By the moon, Addai has brought us to the madman of