The Furies

by Mark Alpert

  The first order of business was deciding what to do with Comandante Reyes. Mariela and a few of the other women argued in favor of executing him, but Ariel overruled them. Reyes was still in shock, traumatized by the slaughter in the lagoon, and Ariel realized he could do a useful service for the Furies. Before she released him she described the horrible way he would die if he ever returned to the Yarí River. When Reyes rejoined his comrades in the FARC insurgency, he told stories of a family of brujas in the jungle who could summon caimans and anacondas to attack their enemies. As a result, the guerillas kept their distance from the Furies’ refuge, and the Yarí became the most peaceful river in Colombia.

  The second task was extending an olive branch to the remaining Riflemen. Ariel opened negotiations with the men in western Minnesota who were holding Grace, Claudia, and Gower as hostages. She told them what had happened to Sullivan. She gave them the details about the Fountain protein, explaining how it would addict and poison them. And she promised full amnesty to all who laid down their arms. The Riflemen didn’t respond to the offer right away. There was a fair amount of hemming and hawing. But in the end they accepted her terms. The men were leaderless, penniless, and on the run from the law. Although the FBI had suspended Agent Larson, the bureau was still investigating the strange incidents in northern Michigan and still on the lookout for the Riflemen. They had no choice but to return to their mothers and sisters.

  Then Ariel organized the gradual migration of eighteen hundred Furies from Canada to Colombia. Over the next six months they came in groups of ten to twenty, flying on commercial jets from Toronto to Bogotá. Pretending to be tourists visiting southern Colombia, they traveled by chartered bus to San Vincente del Caguán, where they boarded the skiffs that carried them downriver. And they brought supplies with them: food, medicine, laptops, and a whole lot of money. Once they arrived at the bend in the Yarí, Ariel put them to work. They made the cavern inhabitable and built water wheels for generating electricity. They constructed new laboratories underground, and a new library as well, and began the process of transferring their Treasures to it. In the deepest chamber of the cavern they built a crypt for Elizabeth and all the other Furies who’d died. Ariel made special arrangements to exhume Cordelia’s body from her hastily dug grave in Wisconsin and bring it to South America.

  Outside the entrance to the cavern the Furies cleared the trees and brush that had filled the huge bowl at the summit of Monte Mariposa. Then they divided the fertile land into sloping fields and planted corn, beans, manioc, and yucca. They also built a compound of huts aboveground, at the very center of the bowl, enough to house a few dozen people. To the outside world, they would pose as a New Age commune, a bunch of hippies from the United States and Canada who’d decided to establish their own utopia in the Colombian rain forest. Ariel liked this disguise much better than the Amish one. She enjoyed wearing the peasant blouses and tie-dyed skirts that were part of the subterfuge.

  Although the Chief Elder was now Grace Fury, who’d automatically ascended to the position after Elizabeth’s death, many of the Furies started to believe that their true leader was Ariel. She was involved in every aspect of the relocation, and she was more likable than either Grace or Claudia, the other council member. After a few months Grace felt compelled to recognize Ariel’s contributions by offering her the third seat on the Council of Elders. Ariel accepted the offer but insisted on two conditions. First, she convinced Grace to make the council an elected body within five years. Second, she received permission to marry John Rogers.

  John did all kinds of work during the construction of the refuge—carpentry, welding, stonecutting, cooking—but the job he loved the most, strangely enough, was farming. He got a big kick out of planting the seeds and watching the crops grow. And his favorite partner to work with was Gower, who’d had enough of being a guardsman and wanted to give agriculture a try. In the evenings the two of them would work side by side, weeding the rows of bean plants and chatting about baseball. John was trying to get Gower interested in the sport. Sometimes Ariel would join them and talk about watching Lou Gehrig and Bob Meusel play, and Gower would become thoroughly confused about which players were alive and which weren’t.

  On the last evening of April, though, John was working alone in the bean field when Ariel stepped out of the cavern to join him. She walked slowly along the edge of the field, then turned and made her way down the aisle of dirt between two bean rows. She wore a skirt tie-dyed with gorgeous starbursts, explosions of yellow and orange and red, and a loose peasant blouse that stretched expansively over her swollen belly and enlarged breasts. She was seven months’ pregnant and still getting used to walking with the extra weight. When she reached John she took his hand and they walked together across the field, heading up the slope that led to the rim of the bowl. They liked to sit on a stone ledge at the rim and watch the sun set over the rain forest below.

  As they walked, Ariel placed John’s hand on her belly. “Jaunui’s been kicking a lot today. And stepping on my bladder too. I’ve been running to the bathroom every five minutes.”

  John pressed his hand flat against her blouse and waited for a kick. Jaunui—which was the word for water in the language of the local tribes—wasn’t really the baby’s name. It was just a nickname they were using until the child was born. They didn’t know yet if the baby was a boy or a girl.

  Ariel frowned. “Wouldn’t you know it, now it stopped. Every time I get up, Jaunui takes a break. But as soon as I sit down and try to work, it starts up again.”

  “Well, that makes sense. When you’re walking, you’re rocking the baby to sleep.”

  “I’m telling you, I don’t remember so much kicking the last time I was pregnant.”

  John chuckled. “That was three hundred and forty years ago. How can you remember anything from back then?”

  “Oh, hush. I wish you could get pregnant. Then you’d know what I’m going through.”

  They walked on in silence. John sensed that something was bothering Ariel, something besides the baby’s kicks. Now that the relocation was mostly complete, she’d started looking for other challenges to take on, and one of them was inheriting her aunt Cordelia’s role as the family’s prophetess. She’d already set up a satellite dish so she and her cousins could access the Internet, and now she spent a few hours each day scanning the world’s news so she could see where things were headed. Unfortunately, the news was bad more often than it was good.

  “Okay, what happened?” John asked. “Another nuclear test in North Korea?”

  She shook her head. “No, not yet. It’s just a million other things. In Africa, in China, in the Middle East. And nothing’s going right. There’s so much work to do, I don’t even know where to start.”

  He draped his arm around her shoulders and squeezed. “Don’t worry. You’ll figure it out.”

  “The situation is getting worse, not better. It’s going to take hundreds of years to turn things around.”

  “But that’s okay. You got all the time in the world, right?”

  She stopped walking and looked at him. It was true, she had more than enough time ahead of her, a long golden trail stretching to the horizon. But he didn’t. That’s what was bothering her. “I’m sorry, John,” she whispered. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  He smiled. They were very near the stone ledge at the rim, but instead of heading for it he turned Ariel around and pointed at the fields they’d planted inside the bowl. “Look what we’ve done,” he said. “We’ve made our own garden. It’s not Paradise, but it’s enough for me.” Then he pointed in the other direction, at the vast carpet of rain forest surrounding Monte Mariposa. “And this is for you. You’re going to turn the whole world into a garden. And maybe Jaunui will help you.”

  Ariel started crying. John touched her cheek and wiped away a tear with his thumb. Then he led her to the stone ledge and they sat down to watch the sun set. The fiery circle was just about to touch the green carpet.
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  “There’s only one thing I feel bad about,” John observed. “I’d like to see God being born. You know, with the manger and the farm animals and the three wise men and all.”

  Ariel laughed through her tears. “It may not happen exactly that way, you know.”

  “Do me a favor. When you see Him, give Him my regards, will you?”

  “Of course. I think She’ll enjoy hearing about you.”

  Then John kissed her, and the sun sank below the horizon.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I got the idea for The Furies from one of my son’s term papers for middle school. He was reading about the Salem witch trials, and during the course of his research he came across a fact that startled me: the witch hunt in the Massachusetts Bay colony was just one episode in a long, terrible series of massacres. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, witch-hunters in Germany, France, Switzerland, and Great Britain killed thousands of people. In the late 1500s, for example, 368 accused witches were burned to death in a campaign begun by the Archbishop of Trier in Germany. The great majority of the victims were women. Two villages in the area were left with only one woman each.

  Historians have struggled to explain the causes of the mass hysteria and slaughter. Some have noted that the period of the witch hunts roughly coincided with destabilizing events such as the Protestant Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the rise of nation-states. In the midst of chaos, local authorities may have sought to bolster their control by encouraging the persecution of the least powerful members of society. But this argument isn’t entirely convincing. It doesn’t explain why the churchmen and secular leaders focused the public’s hostility on witchcraft in particular, or why the persecution was so brutal.

  I decided to invent another explanation. I imagined the Furies, a large, secretive family living in Western Europe at the time of the witch hunts. Although they dwelled side by side with other villagers, the Furies had their own history and customs. The family was led by its women, who shared an idealistic, pre-Christian philosophy. The Furies also shared a genetic distinction, a hereditary trait that made them the target of their neighbors’ fear and hatred. The markers of this trait were red hair and green eyes, which were considered the signs of a witch in premodern times.

  As in my previous novels, I’ve tried to incorporate real-world scientific ideas and technologies into the book. The descriptions of gene expression, evolutionary biology, and therapeutic proteins are based on the latest research in those fields. I’m grateful for the encouragement and support from my colleagues at Scientific American. I’d also like to thank my agent, Dan Lazar of Writers House, and my editor, Peter Joseph of Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press. And thank you, Lisa, for giving me the love story that I’ve retold here.