Waking the Moon (16 page)

But always she was aware of how the other, older members of the
Benandanti
regarded her. Not quite, not
necessarily,
as a traitor. Certainly there had been others before Magda Kurtz who left the Divine, to carry on the
Benandanti’s
work in the government and the arts and even at other places of learning. But Magda’s work had reawakened an old, old feud, perhaps the very oldest one of all.

So this summer she had kept to her students, and to her tower room. Her little romances and necromancies helped pass the time, and the Divine’s extraordinary library, and of course all the other pleasures of the City on the Hill. She avoided the other faculty members as much as she could, especially Balthazar Warnick; but it had been difficult. As always she found herself falling under the diminutive Balthazar’s spell, his peculiar blend of wistfulness and melancholy and biting wit.

I might have fallen in love with him,
she thought, slightly wistful herself now as she sipped her champagne and gazed absently across the crowded reception room of Garvey Hall.
It might have all been different then, it might have
—

But really it could never have been anything but the way it was.

“We serve at different temples now. Different temples, different gods,” Balthazar had said a few weeks earlier, over lunch in one of the sunlit upper rooms of the Old Ebbitt Grill. It had always been one of Magda’s favorite places in the city. Balthazar had taken her there when they first met, awkward student and ageless mentor, and ordered her a Clyde’s omelet—bacon and spinach and sour cream—and
kir
in a round goblet. It was the most sophisticated meal she had ever eaten, and the first time she’d drunk wine from a wineglass.

“Different gods,” he repeated, and his voice sounded sad.

Outside the afternoon traffic strained past, inching toward the Old Executive Office Building and the White House. Magda sipped her
kir.
Balthazar continued to stare at her with those piercing electric blue eyes.

“Perhaps we always have,” he added.

Magda answered smoothly, pretending to misunderstand.

“Oh, but it’s always the same old ivory tower, Balthazar, you know that! And you’ll see, I’ve been right all along. Soon every student at the Divine will have read
Tristes Tropiques
and
Of Grammatology
—”

Balthazar made a face, and Magda laughed. “Well, I’m still very grateful
you
let me teach here this summer, Balthazar.”

He smiled. “But who could turn away the lovely and brilliant Magda Kurtz?”

“You refused Paul de Man.”

“You’re much better looking.”

Magda stared at him, amused, but then she saw how Balthazar’s eyes had clouded, blue shivering to grey.

“It’s nothing but
theory,
Balthazar. Just another way of looking at the world.”

“Theories can be dangerous things,” said Balthazar. His tone was light, but she saw how his eyes were cold and parlous as fast-moving water. “Remember Rousseau and romanticism.”

“I can’t sleep for thinking about them,” Magda said, laughing; but that gaze had stayed with her for a long time, like a bad chill.

She shivered at the memory, quickly composing herself as a passing couple greeted her. It was exhausting, keeping up the pretense of being just another Molyneux scholar made good in the ivory tower. She knew there’d been talk. Within the legions of
Benandanti
there was always talk. Conspirators wormed through its long history, brazen or retiring or deadly, but always
there.
In this the
Benandanti
were like the Vatican, only far more ancient. Like the Inquisitors of old they had their little ways, their probings and inquests, scrutators and catechists, their spies and delators and indagations. Cabals of old men—the
oldest
of old men—and they gabbled and gossiped like crones. Women had gotten a bad rap for being gossips, Magda thought bitterly. She had never known a group more eager to snipe and speculate than old Catholic priests and the
Benandanti.
No better place than the Divine (or the Vatican) for that.

Though, unlike the Vatican, the
Benandanti
left no histories for the world to read. Most of their cadastrals and cartularies had perished with the libraries of Alexandria, after which time the
Benandanti
became a nomadic sect. They maintained their eternal vigilance from behind the marble clerestories of the Eternal City, and the Kaaba in Mecca; from the Maharajah’s pavilion at Varanasi, and Italy’s octagonal Castel del Monte and even, very briefly, the Old Map and Print Room on the fourth floor of Harrods. It was not until the colonization of the Americas that the
Benandanti
found at last a permanent home, a place where all the old wise men of the Indo-European steppes could settle to grow even older and wiser, and from the dusty classrooms of the Divine watch their protégés make their way into this brave new world.

And now that an unmistakable Sign had come, those at the Divine would be especially watchful against traitors. Without thinking, Magda touched the amulet at her throat.

In hoc signo vinces. Othiym Lunarsa, Othiym, Anat, Innana, Othiym evohe! Othiym haïyo.

The ancient tongues ran together but she knew them all.
In this sign we shall conquer, Othiym. We exult! We praise you.

She’d been recklessly stupid the other evening, leaving her room with the spent Hand of Glory and the other remnants of her craft in it. That was what happened when you toyed with the naphaïm—they made you feel indestructible, made you forget that while they could soar above it, you were likely to plunge into the inferno and burn. Her fingers played along the smooth edge of the silver crescent, the half-conscious refrain still echoing in her head.

Othiym, Anat, Innana
…

But she should watch her thoughts here—
especially
here—shroud them in nonsense or dull mental chatter. She closed her eyes and dredged up one of George’s dopey verses, composed on that endless flight to Estavia—

Magda is so very mean

She’s a Ramapithecene

When she hangs around with us

She’s Australopithecus.

Someone touched her elbow and she started. One of her students, holding a bottle of Heineken and peering at her in concern.

“You okay, Professor Kurtz? You want a beer or something?”

She smiled and shook her head. “No thanks. Just tired. I have an early flight.”

He nodded sympathetically. “Oh, yeah, man, I can relate. Jet lag. Have a few drinks first, it really helps.”

She grimaced. “At 7:00
A.M.
? Maybe not.”

He grinned and left her, weaving slightly.

Magda took another sip from her champagne. All these drunk kids, thrilled to be drinking Heineken when there was Veuve Clicquot and Tattinger Brut for the asking. She sighed.

Because of course it was the kids who had brought her here tonight. Knowing it was foolish, knowing it might mean dangerous questions from Balthazar or his toady Francis—still she hadn’t been able to resist the notion of seeing in the flesh one or both of the faces she’d scried in her room the night before. She wondered if the
Benandanti
had yet determined who they were, those two innocents doomed to be pawns in this latest skirmish between ancient enemies. She couldn’t imagine Balthazar not knowing, if only because she couldn’t imagine Balthazar not knowing anything.

She finished her champagne and handed the empty glass to a passing busboy. Over the years she had attended dozens of receptions like this, and some far more strange.
Benandanti
in full evening dress gathered in a derelict warehouse beside the Potomac; a seventeen-course dinner at the Gaslight Club served by naked young women;
Benandanti
mingling with career diplomats and Balinesian hierodules at Dumbarton Oaks. She had seen Michael Haring’s disconcertment turn to awe when he first viewed the collection of Iron Age cauldrons in the library of Saint Vespuccia’s College at the Divine. She had seen Balthazar Warnick walk through the door of a custodial closet in the Shrine, thence to disappear among the flower-strewn monuments on the island necropolis of San Michèle in Venice. Compared to some of those other gatherings, the annual reception for new Molyneux scholars was nothing but a glorified frat party.

But tonight Magda felt uneasy. Perhaps it was her knowledge that the two innocents she had glimpsed last night were here, somewhere, ready to meet and ignite. Or perhaps Magda felt a small share of guilt over having doomed some poor fool to walk into the resulting conflagration. She took a deep breath and once more fingered the pendant around her neck.

Othiym, haïyo.

This, too, was a risk. But she always felt stronger when she wore it, and she often did so despite the danger. A number of the guests here might recognize it for what it was: a real, a true
lunula,
sacred to the ancient European Goddess, she who in the northern lands was called
Kalma,
“corpse-eater,” and in Greece the White Goddess; in Sumeria
Lamasthu,
“daughter of heaven,” and in certain remote valleys of the Balkans Othiym Lunarsa, Teeth of the Moon. She who is both Mother and Devourer, whose breath is plague, who suckles serpents and devours children. She who had made Magda’s reputation.

Because in the end the Çaril Kytur expedition hadn’t been a disaster for Magda Kurtz. George’s death had been a tragedy, of course, but a minor one. There had been an inquiry, and a grief-stricken family mad for justice, but in the end it had been like that
I Ching
hexagram Magda had always favored: K’uei,
Opposition
but also
No Blame.
Michael Haring had been disappointed that she had not returned with illicit artifacts, but he soon found solace in another archaeologist.

In the wake of the Çaril Kytur investigation, with its threats of lawsuits and damaged reputations, Balthazar Warnick had not refrained from saying
I told you so.
Yet Magda herself had, been surprisingly cool about the whole thing. Her colleagues chalked it up to the general unpleasantness of the experience, another good reason to avoid the Soviet-controlled Balkan states like the plague.

And eventually the whole thing blew over. George Wayford’s family settled for a scholarship endowed in his name. And Magda wrote the landmark paper that was published in
Antiquities,
the monograph that became the framework for
Daughters of the Setting Sun.
From what should have been a career disaster, Magda Kurtz emerged not only unscathed, but triumphant.

Some of her colleagues remarked how obviously nobody knew the whole story; and of course they were right. Because Magda told no one about the lunula. Not Haring, not Balthazar Warnick, not even June Harrington.

You are the secret mouth of the world

You are the word not uttered

Othiym Lunarsa, haïyo.

In the wake of the failed expedition came long months when she researched her secret treasure. She traded her dimly lit carrel in the Colum Library stacks for a battered wooden desk in the upper reaches of the Museum of Natural History, then went to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Finally she made her way to London, for two weeks’ study in the dusty cool recesses of the British Museum. This was followed by a week of visiting private collections in the Scottish countryside, including a sojourn at Dalkeith Palace outside of Edinburgh, where she viewed the legendary skulls owned by the Dukes of Buccleuchs.

What she learned there sent her to Athens. In a cafe shadowed by the Acropolis she met with Christos Eugenides, an eminent archaeologist friend of Michael Haring’s whose involvement in the thriving black market trade between the Aegean countries and the rest of the world had long been supported by the
Benandanti.

“These are very good, you should try them.” Christos speared a prickly star the size and color of a tarnished nickle. “Baby octopus. Quite wonderful. Or the
bekri meze
—you might like that.”

Magda’s smile was more of a grimace. The sun and heat and effort of translation and travel had given her a permanent headache. She felt feverish and disoriented. The scent of olive oil and fried fish was nauseating. As a panacea, she sipped grimly and steadily at a glass of fiery
tsipoura.

“No thank you. Michael said you might tell me more about an object I found—”

She could feel it nestled at her throat, cool as a blade for all the numbing heat. She parted her collar and let her fingers rest upon the crescent’s smooth edge. Christos Eugenides leaned forward.

“Ah—
ah.”
His voice rose sharply, as though he had been kicked.

“You know it, then.”

Christos Eugenides had already drawn back into his plastic chair. “This is not within my provenance,” he said curtly. “I’m quite sorry. Michael must have misunderstood—”

“He said you knew about Cycladic figurines—”

“This is not remotely Cycladic.”

“—and other things.”

He removed a bill and several coins from his pocket and set them on the marble surface. “I have an acquisitions meeting at the university at six o’clock. I’m quite sorry not to have been more helpful.” He rose.

“Then can you recommend someone else?” The lunula slid back into the folds of her blouse. “I’ve come all this way …”

“Surely the Museum Library is quite—”

“I’ve
read
enough. I need to talk to someone who’s
seen
one of these—”

“There is no one.”

She waited for him to go on but he said nothing more, only stared fixedly at her throat. Yet despite his tone and words, he seemed reluctant to leave. After a moment he turned to face the endless parade of automobiles, the sand-colored shadow of the mountain looming above them. Exhaust fumes mingled with the stench of fried fish, and Magda raised her glass to her face, breathing in the harsh smell of
tsipoura.
For a long moment they stood there, silent. Finally Christos sighed.

“Spyridon Marinatos.”

“Who?”