Waking the Moon

by Elizabeth Hand

  Angelica shook her head. “I have a class at Reardon.”

  “We’ll walk you over.” Oliver waited for us to catch up with him. “Sweeney looks half-asleep, anyway.”

  “I can’t—I’ve got Medieval History—”

  Oliver gave me a smug grin. “Me too: kid stuff. Lecture. Origins of civilization, conversion of Constantine. Pseudo-Ambrose and the Avicennian heresy. Got the notes from a guy on my floor who took it last year. We can catch up on the reading tomorrow.”

  I laughed, then saw he was serious. “We-ell—”

  Behind us footsteps echoed. I caught a faint whiff of sweetly scented pipe tobacco. “So! You’re this year’s crop of scholars.”

  It was Professor Warnick. He walked beside us with small neat steps, his blue eyes glittering. “You, of course, Angelica.”

  Angelica gave me a queer, almost apologetic look, then nodded.

  Professor Warnick smiled. “And you?” He raised his eyebrows at Oliver, who clicked his heels and bowed. “What a silly question! Yet another scion of the Crawford clan. And you?” He looked up at me roguishly.

  “N—no—”

  “No?” There was a world of disappointment in the word. I flushed, started to stammer some excuse but stopped.

  Because from somewhere down the hall came that sound again, the droning noise that had seemed an echo of the sistrum’s graceless note. For a moment the hallway seemed to vibrate, as though we all stood inside some huge drum that had been struck. Then silence. I was staring into Professor Warnick’s bright feral eyes, and he was staring back at me with pity and what might have been relief.

  “I see,” he said softly. “Well, I think you will all enjoy The Golden Ass, and I will enjoy meeting with you again on Wednesday.” A mocking smile as he tilted his head in farewell. “And some of you I may see tonight at the reception.”

  We watched him march off, his silhouette growing smaller and more gnomelike as he approached the end of the hallway. Abruptly he disappeared, leaving us alone and at a loss for words.

  “Well,” Angelica said at last, “I don’t want to be late.”

  We clattered down the steps without talking. I felt overwhelmed and a little shaken. At first I was afraid to say anything, but then the heat began to work at me like a drug. Relief flooded me, and exhilaration, and fear: as though I had just escaped some terrible accident.

  “God,” I said as we finally burst out into daylight. “Is it just me, or was that, like, the weirdest class you’ve ever seen?”

  Angelica and Oliver looked at me curiously. “Guess not,” I said, and shut up.

  The campus had come alive since last night. There were students everywhere, and enough anachronistically dressed clerical types to cast The Greatest Story Ever Told. As we headed toward the Strand, Oliver pointed out things of interest—

  “Dutch elm trees, planted in 1689 by Goodman Prater and Arthur Simons. They’ve died of blight everywhere else in the United States, except on the seventh fairway of the back nine at Winged Foot.”

  Or, “That’s Brother Taylor Messingthwaite. He was ethical consultant on the Manhattan Project, teaches postgrad Confucian Ethics and Modern Christian Problems. Last year he got a Pemslip Grant for five hundred thousand dollars.”

  Or, “That’s the Ma es-Sáma mosque. This sheik donated a million dollars to build it, so Islamic students here would have a place to worship. No one else’s allowed inside. It’s got a sixty-foot lap pool underneath.”

  Or, “Wild Bill! He’s on my floor, grows psilocybin mushrooms in a terrarium, plus he has this hash oil factory with Martin Sedgewick—yo, Bill!”

  Angelica laughed at each pronouncement. I said nothing. The effort of trying to maintain my poise had given me a headache. And it seemed like a bad omen, to be skipping class on my first day at college. The heat blurred my vision. My velvet pants felt as though they’d been dipped in hot wax. In the nether distance, the soaring towers of the Shrine shone like glimpses of some watched-for shore. It all made me light-headed. Not giddy, but a cheerless dizziness, as though I had opened my front door at home and somehow found myself at the edge of some windswept chasm.

  “Reardon Hall. Designed by Emmet Thorson, the pedophile—he hanged himself in the foyer after it was completed,” Oliver announced as we approached a small Palladian-style building. “Same architect as designed Rossetti—”

  “What’s a Molyneux scholar?”

  Oliver halted, teetering on the curb with one grimy wing tip toeing into the grass. He stared at me nonplussed.

  “I mean, is it some secret thing?” I went on. “Like I’m not supposed to ask?”

  Oliver and Angelica exchanged a look. After a moment Angelica said, “Well, yes, it is. It’s a—it’s something they test you for, before admitting you here.”

  “But I never—I mean, they didn’t ask me. I don’t think. Is it like an advanced placement thing?”

  Oliver pursed his lips. “You sacrifice some accuracy in describing it that way.”

  I tried not to sound petulant. “So what’s the big deal? I mean, Warnick was talking about it in class. It can’t be that secret.”

  “It’s not that kind of thing,” Angelica said slowly. The warm wind stirred her tangle of curls. She brushed the hair from her face and turned, sighing, to stare at Reardon’s neoclassical facade. “Some of it’s hereditary, a legacy—I mean if your father went here or something. It’s more like—well, like Skull and Bones. Have you ever heard of that? At Yale?”

  “Sure. If you’re a member and somebody asks you about it, you have to leave the room.”

  “Right. It’s more that kind of secret—”

  “But what do they test you for?”

  Angelica smiled wryly and shrugged. A few yards away, students lolling on the steps of Reardon were starting to gather their books and knapsacks, extinguishing spent cigarettes or lighting new ones. “I have to go. You’re in Rossetti, aren’t you? I saw your name on a dorm list. I’m on the third floor. You want to meet for dinner?”

  “I guess. But—”

  “The reception’s at seven,” said Oliver. He ducked his head, making agreeable noises as three white-clad friars rushed past us. “If we get separated, we’ll all meet there.”

  Angelica laughed—a surprisingly loud and heartfelt laugh, not at all what you expected from such a carefully assembled beauty. She shook her finger at me and said, “Well, Sweeney, let’s you and me not get separated. I’ll wait for you outside the dining hall—”

  She turned and hurried off, head bowed so that all I could see was her flag of shining curls.

  “Come on,” Oliver said. He was staring after Angelica with a hungry expression, but he sounded relieved. “The coffee’s pretty good at the Shrine cafeteria. Then we can hit Dumbarton Oaks.”

  “Let me make sure I got my wallet—”

  Oliver drew a wad of bills from his shirt pocket. “Don’t worry about it.”

  He spun around, like Puck in a play, and added, “Don’t sweat this Molyneux thing. Nothing but legacies. Alumni stuff, old school tie, you know. Another Old Boy Network—they’re just Very Old Boys, that’s all. Come tonight and you can see for yourself, okay?”

  His blue eyes were intensely earnest, almost pleading. I smiled gratefully and nodded.

  “Sure,” I said, and flapped the front of my shirt to cool myself. “Whatever you say, boss.”

  Oliver grinned, walking backward and gesturing wildly as he began once more to lecture me on the plight of the city’s Dutch elms. I was so busy watching him that I almost didn’t notice the two figures that stood watching us from the curb. A diminutive man in black and, behind him, an almost grotesquely tall figure in an ankle-length black monsignor’s cape, the hood pulled so close around its face that its features were lost to sight, except for the malevolent glitter of a pair of huge and watchful eyes.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Lunula

  MAGDA FOUND THE LUNULA on her first dig—not her first archaeological
foray, but the first one she supervised. Not coincidentally, it was the first excavation she had carried out without any direct regulation by the Benandanti. She was twenty-six years old at the time, in the postgrad program at UC Berkeley, heavily involved with her doctorate and the work that a few years later would become Daughters of the Setting Sun. She had gotten some funding through UC Berkeley, but most of it was to come from a wealthy patron named Michael Haring.

  He was the CEO of an American automobile corporation: forty-two years old, Harvard-educated, never married. Magda met him at the Divine, at a reception in his honor. Michael Haring was one of the Benandanti, though his provenance was industry rather than the more rarefied realms of the university. Still, he had donated funds for several expeditions and financed the renovation of the reading room at Colum Library. He collected Neolithic art, concentrating on those tiny bronze figures of animals that were often found in Celtic graves and burial pits. He also collected young women, and was especially partial to the dark-haired Ivy League types who reminded him of his own youthful dreams of a career in classics.

  “That’s him?” Magda was still young enough to be impressed by someone whose picture had appeared on the cover of Time magazine. “Michael Haring?”

  The man next to her nodded. “Sure is. They put a little plaque in the reading room with his name on it. But hell, he could have rebuilt the whole building.”

  “No kidding.” Magda moved away, thoughtfully sipping her Tanqueray and tonic.

  For almost two years now she had been seeking financial support for an excavation in northern Estavia. She had received the promise of small grants from the Divine and UCLA, and even a tiny stipend from the National Science Foundation. But both her supporters at the Divine and those at UCLA’s Department of European Archaeology felt that her proposed work was not important enough, dealing as it did with a site associated with a minor European goddess cult.

  “Why don’t you go with Harold Mosreich to Yaxchilán?” That had been Balthazar Warnick’s suggestion. “He thinks that one of the stelæ there has a connection with the main pyramid at Chichén Itzá. Plus he has that National Geographic film crew—you know, ‘Mayan Adventure!’ or something like that.”

  Magda shook her head. “The Mayans are overdone. This is something new, Balthazar,” she said fervently. “We both know that. Why won’t you back me?”

  Balthazar had been her advisor since her freshman year. Even then she’d wondered what someone like Balthazar Warnick—a world-renowned antiquities scholar, the man responsible for cataloging the Metropolitan Museum’s Widdecombe Collection of Cycladic Art—was doing teaching an introductory anthropology course, even at a place like the Divine. Especially at a place like the Divine.

  She’d found out, of course, when he’d tapped her for the Benandanti. Since then she and Balthazar had butted heads more than once, most recently over her decision to leave the Divine for UC.

  “Not the place for a scholar of your rank.” Balthazar never raised his voice, but his mouth had been tight as he rifled through a stack of photographs, the most recent mailing from the Chichén Itzá site. “California! Jesus, Magda, you tilt this country on its side and everything loose rolls into California! There’s nothing out there but hopheads and surfers and rioting students. How are you going to get any work done?”

  She’d gone anyway. She never told Balthazar that part of Berkeley’s appeal—part of the appeal of the entire West Coast—was precisely that open-mindedness that Balthazar and many of the Benandanti dismissed as quackery or, at its worst, a threat to their ancient ways. But she remained on good terms with her old mentor. Remained an active member of the Benandanti, even when her own work began to diverge from what they felt was important.

  What they did not feel was important was the small but growing body of evidence that Magda, and June Harrington before her, had uncovered: all of it pointing to the existence of a matrilineal culture in ancient Europe. Balthazar at least had been courteous, reading preliminary drafts of her articles for Antiquities, but he did not feel that Magda’s theories were worth pursuing into the field.

  “It’s small potatoes, Magda.” He turned and stared out the window of his office, to where the Shrine’s blue dome glistened in the sun. “Sure, you’ll find something there, but it’s not going to ever amount to anything. I mean, look at Catal Huyuk: there’s one of your goddess sites, a big one, too, but it doesn’t really add up to much, does it?”

  Magda had listened, her foot tracing Xs on the expensive kilim that covered Balthazar’s floor.

  Doesn’t add up to what you’re looking for, she thought furiously. But she said nothing. She hadn’t expected him to agree with her. Balthazar was after much bigger fish than her modest research had discovered. The Benandanti had financed digs in Jerusalem, Sardinia, Luxor; at Karbala’ in Iraq, and Katta-Kurgan near Samarkand; in Niger and Jamshedpur and the Hentiyn Mountains in Mongolia. Anyplace where the Benandanti had ever built a temple or cathedral of clay or gold or marble was suitable for resurrection. As was anyplace where their ancient enemy had once been worshiped: Athens, Knossos, Ur.

  But a minor Balkan river goddess in a Soviet backwater was not exactly the powerful and vengeful deity they had been set to guard against. And so there was no funding for Magda’s project.

  Fortunately, there was at least one other person willing to entertain her ideas.

  “It’s lovely, isn’t it?” She smiled brightly at her host. It was a few days after the Divine’s reception for Michael Haring, a few days after Magda had finagled the invitation to visit Haring at his Georgetown town house. “It’s a helmet crest, first century B.C.”

  Michael Haring turned the figure over in his hand. A little bronze boar, no longer than his middle finger, its raised dorsal spine worked with an intricate pattern of whorls that ended in the tiny beaked heads of cranes. He whistled softly. “It’s absolutely stunning. Where’d you find it, Magda?”

  “It was June Harrington’s. She gave it to me a few years ago, for a birthday present.”

  “And it came from your proposed site?”

  She nodded. “The American Museum mounted an expedition there in 1923, with June and her first husband, Lowell Ackroyd. She’s given me her field notes, and some of the pictures he took. They’re not very good—the photos, I mean, her notebooks are superb—but I can tell, Michael, I can just tell! June says they found three burial pits with evidence of ritual animal sacrifices, and that—”

  She gestured at the bronze figurine. “—that came from the last one they uncovered, Eleven-A. The neighboring valleys show signs of having very advanced Bronze Age settlements—we’re talking collective burials, hypogea with detailed wall paintings, and heating from thermal springs, maybe even some kind of linear script on some of the pottery fragments. The whole valley’s a potential gold mine. The surrounding heath is pretty marshy, which means there’s a good chance that whatever we come up with could be well preserved.”

  Michael nodded, turning the bronze boar between his fingers. “Why did they stop the dig?”

  “Winter. The valley becomes completely impassable in winter. The first storm came in early October; June and Lowell and the crew barely got out before the snows blocked off the pass.”

  “I see.” Carefully Michael set the boar back into its nest of yellowed newsprint. He reached for the bottle of claret beside it and raised an eyebrow. “More?”

  “Please. It’s wonderful.” Magda held out her glass, smiling brilliantly and hoping he wouldn’t notice how nervous she was. “So!” She toasted him and let the first rich mouthful of wine slide down her throat. “What do you think?”

  Michael Haring looked around his living room. There were glass cabinets everywhere, some arranged against the wall, others floating like huge crystal pendants amidst the expanse of black leather furniture and white shag carpeting. The cabinets were filled with figures very like the one that rested on his table, and with silver torques, beaked masks, bronze armor in the s
hape of wings, plaques inlaid with bone and silver and crudely polished stones. He surveyed them all, not with pride but with a certain wistfulness that gave his dark eyes a mournful cast. An Iron Age prince’s ransom in artifacts and metalwork: nearly all of it obtained on the black market, spirited from original holdings in Britain and Czechoslovakia and Turkey and Greece. He was tied up in litigation right now with the embassy of a small country in Eastern Europe, fighting over the disposition of his most-prized treasure: the mummified head of a Bronze Age man found in a peat bog, and now displayed within a tall glass case like a casket stood upon its end.

  “I think,” he said carefully, staring at the tea-colored head in its crystal chamber. “I think that this could be a very important adventure you’re planning, Miss Magda. For both of us.” And turning, he let his hand rest upon her thigh.

  Six months later Magda and her crew were in Çaril Kytur. The site was in a desolate corner of northern Estavia, deep within the Psalgÿuk Mountains—tall, needle-thin spars of quartz and flint that shot up against leaden skies that rarely showed the sun. Like something out of a Dürer etching of Hell, Magda thought, or Murnau’s Nosferatu. Even the trees were stunted, crippled pines and alders whose roots poked through the thin acid soil where they sought footing.

  It was late July. In the three days it took Magda and her companions to drive from the Estavian capital to Çaril Kytur, they passed only two other vehicles: an empty Intourist bus with Moscow plates, and an ancient grey jitney piled high with wooden cartons, live chickens and ducks tied to its extremities with red twine. The bone-jarring trip was enough to make Magda wish that she’d left Janine, at least, back in Washington.

  “This is not, like, what my faculty advisor told me to expect,” Janine announced after their second night in the Jeep. “I thought I was going to get to practice my Russian, but there’s nobody here.”

  “Well, we’re stuck with each other now,” Magda said grimly. “So if you want to bail out, start walking.”

  No one did. A few hours later they’d reached their destination.