“Angelica!” the voice commanded. Angelica froze. “Listen to me: You will not slay him!”
It was Oliver’s voice. I whirled, trying to find him in the darkness, but there was only a woman there, tall and raven-haired. She wore a loose purple robe and her feet were bare. About her butterflies flew lazily, lighting upon her shoulders as though to feed.
“Go from here!” Angelica hissed.
The other woman shook her head. “Not yet. You have something of mine, Angelica.” She stepped from the shadows and stretched out her hand.
For an instant I thought she was going to tear the lunula from Angelica. Instead she gestured at the bull. It snorted and gave a weird high-pitched wail; then it was as though it melted into the broken lattice of flowers upon the floor. I shouted in dismay and wonder.
Where the bull had been, Dylan sprawled on his back, naked, his arms flung protectively in front of him. From a gash on his collarbone blood welled and spilled down his chest. His hands clenched as his head moved blindly back and forth. There were streaks of black and red along his flanks and chest, and his hair fell in thick oiled curls about his shoulders.
“Dylan!”
He shook his head numbly.
“Dylan!” I shouted, and ran toward him. “Dylan—”
“Get back.”
I screamed: it was as though I had been set aflame. My face and limbs burned, my bones blazed with the most acute pain I have ever felt. I stumbled to my knees and looked up helplessly.
“He is my son!” Angelica shrieked. She looked like a madwoman—her hair flung across her bloodstained face, bodice torn and skirts tangled behind her. “Mine!”
As though her voice were a match set to paper, rage leapt from Angelica to the Titan’s head above us. The huge eyes narrowed, the mouth gaped open. Upon Othiym’s brow the moon began to burn with a fierce black flame.
“And mine,” the dark-haired woman said evenly. As though she were skirting a muddy curb she stepped across the mounded fruit and flowers, to where Dylan lay. “Mine,” she repeated.
It was Oliver—the same lustrous hair, the same fine cheekbones and strong chin, the same strong long-fingered hands. But it—she, he—was a woman, too, with rounded flesh and mouth, breasts and skin smooth and white as an eggshell.
A woman. My head roared. I could hear Baby Joe’s voice, very faint as though recorded on faulty equipment, saying Your goddess-worshipers… the priests would go into some kind of ecstatic frenzy and castrate themselves, then live like women, like priestesses…
“Oliver?” I whispered.
But Oliver did not hear me. Oliver wasn’t there. The dark woman was, and she was gazing upon her son for the first time, with the most intense yearning I had ever seen; with such raw love and pride and sorrow as to make my eyes grow hot with tears.
“Dylan,” the woman said. She stooped and touched the place where the lunula had cut him. “Dylan, son of the wave. Here, get up.”
My heart burst inside me. Because the gesture she made was Oliver’s, pushing the long black hair from her face and smiling that crooked canine grin as Dylan stumbled to his feet. They stood and stared at each other, the dark woman with a sort of greed, Dylan with stoned incomprehension.
“What’s—what’s going on?” he asked, slurring his words. He looked around at the heaps of dead flowers and fruit with their heavy smells, the rows of silent icons. He held his hands out imploringly. “Where am I?”
“Dylan!” I lunged for him; but before I could grab his hand Angelica was there.
“No! He is mine—you are nothing to him, nothing!” Her voice rose to a shriek. “I will destroy you all—”
She raised the lunula above her. Her eyes closed as she let her head fall back, her mouth contorted as she opened herself to the waiting goddess and cried,
Strabloe hathaneatidas druei tanaous kolabreusomena
Kirkotokous athroize te mani Grogopa Gnathoi ruseis itoa!
From the emptiness above us came a roar, the sound of the last wave as it overtakes the shore. The sound grew louder and louder still, until I was deafened; until all about us I could hear the great stone idols shattering, an avalanche of ivory and granite and marble and bronze; and the sound of their destruction was that of a thousand prisons exploding into dust. Overhead the face of Othiym burgeoned until there was nothing in all the world but Her. She was the world, She was the Moon, Her eyes huge, no longer green but iridescent, all the colors of the spectrum streaming from them, lips curved into a vast and secret smile, Her hair a river of light coursing across the sky, the stars like silver dust upon Her cheeks. Her arms were upraised, only they were no longer arms but immense columns holding back the night. Her legs reared to either side of us, vaster than anything imaginable. When She moved the ground shook. On Her brow was a silver crescent, the hungry curve of the new moon like a mouth opening to feed. Beneath Her all the Earth was in shadow. But it was a moving darkness, a darkness that thrashed and flailed, a shadow that threw up first one leg like a continent and then another.
The darkness was a bull. It was the Bull, the great and eternal sacrifice, as she was the Woman, staggering to its feet and shaking its great black head, its horns the shadow of that blazing lunar crescent. The Woman in the Moon stared down at it, her mouth breaking into a smile.
And I knew Her. Her mouth the freezing maw of the abyss, her teeth like clashing knives, her tongue the flame that burned in the night country. Othiym the Devourer, Othiym the Mouth of the World—
Othiym Lunarsa! a million voices shouted. There was a smell of burning, of hyacinth and anemone and roses, of sandalwood and oranges. There was a smell of the sea. The chanting voices grew to a shout. The crescent in Othiym’s hands burned brighter still, when with a sudden choking roar the bull staggered backward, tossing its head so that its horns were silhouetted against the blazing light—
And suddenly the vision of goddess and bull was gone. Suddenly all I saw was Dylan, and before him his mother, her eyes like scorched holes, her face a ravaged mask, and the lunula gripped in her hands like a scythe. On the floor behind her the dark woman lay, stirring weakly. Beside her Annie crouched,
“Oliver! Are you hurt—oh!”
“Now!” cried Angelica.
Before I knew it I was upon her. A searing pain as I wrenched the lunula from her raised hands; then a scream, whether my own or Angelica’s I never knew. Then there was only light, light and sound, a vast echoing tumult. In my hands I clutched a flaming crescent.
“No, Sweeney!—please, you don’t understand, you can’t possibly—”
For one last instant I heard Angelica’s voice, faint as the sound of rain dying into the wind. With both hands I raised the lunula before me. I had a flickering vision of eyes and mouths, of white throats raised in supplication and weeping women. With all my strength I broke the lunula upon my knee.
High above me Othiym threw Her head back and howled; then with a groan She stooped. Her monstrous hand closed around something on the ground—Angelica’s doll-like figure. Othiym bore her upward. Her mouth opened, a yawning entrance to the abyss, and the moon upon Her brow glimmered fitfully as the tiny struggling figure was swallowed by that engulfing darkness. With a last howl of rage and hunger She was gone—and with Her, Angelica.
Every sense was riven from me. From very far away I heard a faint high ping!, a sound like the tiny crack that foretells the destruction of a prized vase. One moment I was numb; the next I was blinking as I looked around.
“Sweeney? Sweeney, it’s me—”
I moaned. A few feet away Annie was still crouched over the dark woman. Beside me knelt Dylan. He was covered with blood, but the blood was cracked and drying, the slash along his collarbone already scabbing over.
“Dylan?” I grabbed him and began to sob. “Oh, Dylan—”
“It’s okay, Sweeney,” he murmured. “It’s okay, it’s okay…” He helped me to my feet.
“Is it—what happened?”
“Hush. Not
now, Sweeney.” He put his arm around me and we started toward the back of the Shrine. “Maybe not ever…”
The endless lines of goddesses were gone. Instead the same wooden pews stood there, rank upon rank, the same holy water fonts and Sunday Missalettes. There were dead leaves everywhere too, and mud—
Mud!
“Is it raining?” I asked thickly.
Dylan nodded, unexpectedly grinned. “Wait’ll you see—”
We walked slowly till we came onto the Shrine’s broad steps. Rain sluiced from the sky, rain so cold that within a minute I was shivering.
“It’s broken!” somebody yelled. I turned, and saw Annie stomping in a puddle. “The heat wave’s broken—”
A thunderclap boomed and I jumped, then laughed.
Across the campus of the Divine, lights were flickering on, one by one. Lights in turrets and paneled studies, streetlights and crimelights and lights in cars—
In one car, at least: Yellow Cab Number 393, idling at the base of the Shrine.
“Is that for us?” I croaked.
“Not this time.” A diminutive figure slipped from behind Dylan, holding out some wadded clothing. “Here—put these on for now.” He drew Dylan away from me.
“Professor Warnick.” I raised my hand to my brow. “Angelica—where is she? What happened?”
“Hush,” he said, and he sounded exactly like Dylan. “Later. Sweeney, I want you and the others to come with Robert and me.”
“But Oliver!” I cried. “Where’s Oliver?”
That was when I saw someone standing by the cab. A tall black man with barrel chest, an umbrella in his hand. He was holding the door open for a woman in a purple robe, a woman with long black hair that fell, wet and glistening, to her shoulders.
“Oliver!” I shouted. “Oliver—”
Handsome Brown raised the umbrella so the woman could step into the back of the cab.
“Oliver!”
The dark woman stopped, shaded her eyes, and looked up the steps to the Shrine.
“Sweeney,” she said; although how could I hear her from that distance? She smiled, that beautiful crooked smile, and her voice rang out across the distance, across years and decades and maybe even centuries—
“I told you I’d be back.”
Then there was the muted thump of a car door slamming shut. With a low rumble the cab pulled out of the parking circle and onto North Capitol Street. In a moment it was gone.
“Here, Professor Warnick. I can take over now.”
Balthazar Warnick smiled slightly as Dylan pushed him aside. “You okay, Sweeney?” Dylan asked tenderly, drawing me close to him. “You okay?”
I stared at him openmouthed. He was wearing a clean, though damp, white oxford cloth shirt and chinos, and a pair of black leather wing tip shoes with no socks. One shirt cuff still bore the faded image, in blurred ballpoint ink, of a clock’s face, the hands set to four. Always time for tea.
“Where—where did you get those clothes?” I stammered.
“From Professor Warnick.” Dylan gestured to where the cab had been parked. “He said that woman told him to give them to me.”
“That—that woman.” I wiped my eyes and nodded. My throat was tight as I whispered, “They—they fit pretty good.”
Dylan gave me a sad smile. “I know. It’s weird, isn’t it? Warnick said she was an old friend of—of my mother’s.” He plucked at his shirt. “He said she’d been holding on to these for a while, to give them to me. And she said to give you something, too—”
Behind him, Balthazar Warnick and Robert Dvorkin and Annie Harmon stood watching us.
“What’s that?” I whispered.
“This,” Dylan said. He bent to kiss my cheek, his warm breath smelling of honey and coriander. “And this—”
He handed me a flower: a small flower with violet-blue petals and brilliant yellow stamen, its scent faint as the fragrance of rain and sweeter than anything I had ever know.
Huakinthos. The flower of Adonis. A wood hyacinth.
There were lights burning in the carriage house when we returned. Balthazar and Robert Dvorkin stood on the sidewalk, waiting for us to go inside.
“I won’t expect to see you in the office for several days,” Robert said.
Annie rolled her eyes. “Gee, what a prince.”
“Good-bye, Sweeney,” said Balthazar. Again he had the barest hint of a smile. Unexpectedly he raised his hand and waggled his finger at me, just as he had that first night at Garvey House. “We’ll be in touch.”
Annie stared as the two Benandanti walked back to the main house. “Goody. Next time, why don’t you just send a neutron bomb?” she muttered. Then we went inside.
Annie spent the night, and Dylan of course—I held him so tightly that more than once he woke, and I bit my lip to keep from crying out as he clutched me to his chest. When I finally slept I dreamed of the sun on blue waves, the warm fresh wind rushing down from a stony mountaintop and the smell of hyacinths perfuming the air.
Annie left the next morning, after having a very protracted telephone conversation with her lover. “Sorry, Sweeney. Helen is frantic and just about ready to come after me with a flaming sword, so I better go. But I’ll be in touch,” she added, grinning. “Just like everybody else. Now that I know how to find you.”
She looked at me soberly for a minute, then said, “I have an idea, something I want to talk to you about after—after all this dies down. I’m thinking of taking some of the money I’ve made off that stupid song and endowing a scholarship at the Divine. In Baby Joe’s and Hasel’s names. Something for normal people, you know? For ordinary losers like you and me—”
I laughed and hugged her, trying my best to keep from crying. “I think that’s a great idea, Annie. Call me—”
“Oh, I will.” She hesitated at the door, shifted her knapsack from shoulder to shoulder. Finally she said, “Well. Bye, Dylan.”
Dylan smiled. “Bye, Annie.”
“Ciao, Sweeney.” And she was gone.
That left only Dylan and me.
“Will—will you be going back to school?” I asked softly, late that night. Dylan lay beside me in the heated darkness, his breathing so slow and measured I thought he had fallen asleep.
“No,” he said at last. He rolled over to look at me. “How can I go back there, after all this? I’m going to stay here. In D.C. And marry you, if it’s still okay.”
“Of course it’s okay,” I whispered, kissing him. “It’s the most okay thing in the world. But what will you do?”
“I have a trust fund that my father set up for me. If my—if Angelica ever shows up, well, I guess I’ll have to deal with her then.”
He was silent. Then he said, “I talked to Dr. Dvorkin this morning.”
“You did?” I was surprised and a little ashamed; I still hadn’t called or gone over to see him.
“He said that he could arrange for me to go to the Divine, if I wanted to. I could start in September, get my transcripts sent out from UCLA. He says I won’t have any trouble getting in—I’m a double legacy, whatever that is. I guess because of my mother and grandfather di Rienzi.”
I said nothing, thinking of Oliver and the hyacinth, now wilted upon the harvest table downstairs.
“So I thought, if it was all right with you, maybe I might do that. We’d still have a few weeks before the fall term starts.”
“And you won’t mind living with someone who’s older than most of your teachers?” I teased.
He shook his head. “No. Dr. Dvorkin said it’s nobody’s business, anyway—”
“Which it’s not.”
“—and he seems to think I’ll do really well there. He says I’m sort of the ideal student for them, whatever that is. He says they’ve waited a long time for someone like me to come along.”
“Oh, they have, Dylan,” I murmured, drawing him close to me. “And so have I.”
Coda
THERE IS A WOMAN in the moon. Dylan and I see he
r, night after night, her face growing closer to ours until it fills the window, huge and round and white, and we can hear her singing to us in Angelica’s voice. She has Angelica’s face as well, but bleached of all color. Angelica’s emerald eyes washed to grey, Angelica’s hair streaming from her face like clouds, Angelica’s hands the limbs of the willow tree tapping at the window. She is calling to us, she is waking us; she is willing us to follow her. Her hands reach through the window; the glass shatters as the moon engulfs our room and she is everywhere around us, the color of night, the color of milk, the color of bone.
We awaken in each other’s arms. We are in bed, Dylan and I, in the carriage house—the place that Robert Dvorkin, and the Benandanti, have given us. Outside the late-night traffic on Capitol Hill murmurs past. A lone taxi trawls for passengers, two college girls call drunkenly to each other on the distant avenue.
With a groan Dylan turns to look out the window. The moon is full. It no longer has his mother’s face, because he is awake now, and he remembers that his mother is gone. But something in the wind tapping at the glass reminds him of Angelica, I can tell, something in its low moaning makes him turn to hug me close to him, his arms tight around my stomach, his fingers moving restlessly, feeling what is there even though I have told him it is much too soon, it will be weeks, maybe months, before we will be able to feel the baby move.
But Dylan knows that she is there—his daughter, Oliver and Angelica’s child as much as his and mine—just as he knows that Othiym is there too, somewhere beyond the rim of the sky and the racing ledge of clouds, someplace where the sky runs black and stars stream down the bowl of heaven like blood in a cauldron.
She is there now. She will be there for the rest of our lives, and our daughter’s life, and perhaps beyond. That vast and dreaming form—sister, mother, daughter, wife—the eternal mystery, lover and destroyer. Othiym Lunarsa.
The woman in the moon.
Author’s Notes
IN THE COURSE OF writing this novel I referred often to the works of many people, chief among them Carlo Ginzburg (whose studies of the benign and very real benandanti inspired the fictional Benandanti), Paul Faure, Marija Gimbutas, Camille Paglia, Riane Eisler, Robert Graves, Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, Yves Bonnefoy, Rodney Castleden, Charles Pellegrino, Clifford Geertz, Patricia Monaghan, Carl Kerényi, Merlin Stone, Christos Doumas, Sir Arthur Evans, and Jane Harrison, as well as to numerous primary sources from the ancient world. Whenever possible, I have tried not to wander too far from what is currently known or speculated about the various goddess cults of Old Europe and the Mediterranean; an exception is in my use of the Linear A script from the Minoan/Mycenæan cultures, which, insofar as I am aware, continues to confound translators. However, this is a work of fiction, an entertainment and improvisation on some classical themes. As the classicist M. P. Nilsson wrote, “gods also have their history and are subject to change.” In no way should my pages be viewed as a critique, reflection, or interpretation of the works of those mentioned above. Any errors of fact contained herein are strictly my own.
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