“You know it is.”
“Then how can they also live here, in these figures?”
“The Gods are everywhere, child. Now, come, we must attend them.”
Nidaba sighed, but obeyed. The two walked forward, side by side, their feet whispering through the dried rushes that lined the floor and filled the cella with their green fragrance. They passed by all the smaller stone figures, which represented worshippers, for the Ancient Ones must never be left unattended. At the front of the room were statues created to house the essence of several deities. Enlil Lord of Air, Enki Lord of the Fresh Waters and the Abzu, Nidaba, Goddess of the Sacred Script, for whom the little girl had been named. And standing in the center, larger and more beautiful than any, was the Queen of Heaven, Inanna.
Bowing deeply, the priestess Lia held her bowl of fruit before the Great Goddess, and chanted, “Inanna me en, Inanna me en. Inanna duna agruna ka me en.” She placed the bowl of fruit at the feet of the statue.
“She won’t eat it, you know,” Nidaba said, eyeing the statue. “She never eats it.”
“The offering is only symbolic,” Lia said, obviously struggling now to keep the impatience from her tone. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
Nidaba sniffed. “The High Priest will eat what he wants of it, and we will get his scraps.”
“That’s enough, child. Now, go. Place your offering.”
With a sigh, Nidaba walked to the statue depicting her namesake, held up her bowl of sweet-smelling fruits, and heard her stomach growl as she chanted the sacred words. Then she set the bowl at the feet of the Goddess, licked her lips, and snatched a plum, taking a big, juicy bite before Lia could stop her.
“Nidaba, you mustn’t–” Lia pressed her hands to her mouth as Nidaba chewed and swallowed, smiling all the while. The priestess’s wide-eyed gaze darted into every corner of the room around them, as if fearing witnesses to such blasphemy.
Nidaba only shrugged and took another bite, then wiped the luscious juice from her chin with one hand. “Why mustn’t I? There is more of the Goddess in me than in this statue. And I am named for her, am I not? I will learn the sacred script one day soon. And then I will fill a thousand tablets with the reasons why it is wasteful and silly to feed delicious fruit to stone statues.” Crossing her arms over her chest, she nodded once for emphasis. Her long, dark hair fell into her eyes, undermining her powerful declaration, she thought, but she simply stuck out her lower lip and blew the hair aside.
The priestess Lia seemed to stifle a smile, but it was a sad one. Kneeling, she gripped the little girl’s shoulders. “You know that only boys are allowed to attend the edubba school and learn the sacred script.”
“It’s not fair, and you know it,” Nidaba said, her chin coming up higher. “The Goddess never made that rule! I’ll bet some...some boy did!”
Lia lowered her head a bit, conceding the point, but not aloud. Never aloud. “It is the way of things,” she said. “It was not always so... but... well, it is today, and there is nothing to be done. I’m sorry, Nidaba.”
“It was the Goddess Nidaba who gave us the script,”the girl said slowly. “And she is not a boy.”
“No, she is not.”
“And it was Nidaba who gave me to you, as well, and gave me her name,” the child went on.
The priestess nodded. “That is what some believe. You were found in a basket on the doorstep of the temple, with only your pendant, and the Goddess’s name was etched in its face.”
Remembering the tale she loved best, Nidaba softened her stance and her tone. “And you were the one who found me there,” she said.
“Yes. There was a terrible storm that night. I found you howling with rage, your little face just red with fury. I brought you inside, and all the priestesses gathered round to see you. We wrapped you in dry clothes, fed you warm goat’s milk sweetened with honey, sang to you until your wrath seemed to ease. And as it did, so did the storm. With your first smile, the clouds skittered away and the full moon beamed down on the city of Lagash. And that is why some believe you to be the daughter of the Goddess Herself.”
Nodding slowly, Nidaba smiled. But then she recalled the beginning of the conversation, and her smile became a frown. “Then...who would dare forbid me from attending the edubba school?” she asked.
Lia sighed. “It is as it is, Nidaba. We can only accept and be content.”
“I will not be content. I want to go! I want to learn! I want to go to edubba!” Nidaba made fists of her hands, stomped her foot, and grated her teeth as a flood of rage washed through her. Her face heated and her heart pounded.
The floor beneath her bare feet began to tremble as she ranted and raged. The shaking intensified; the entire room, perched high atop the ziggurat tower quaked and shuddered violently. The stone images themselves rocked back and forth, some of the smaller ones tumbling onto their frozen faces.
Screaming in fear, Lia fell to her knees, prostrating herself before the image of the Goddess Nidaba, even as the tremors faded. “Forgive me!” she cried. “The child will learn the sacred script! I vow I will make it so!”
The rumbling stopped. There remained only silence as the little girl stared at the bowed form of her beloved priestess and felt sorry for her outburst. Quietly, Nidaba went to where Lia still knelt trembling, her face damp with tears. The child touched the priestess’s shoulder. “Don’t be afraid,” she said softly.
“I have angered the Goddess!”
“But... you didn’t,” Nidaba whispered. Moving in front of Lia, she cupped the priestess’s cheeks in her small palms and looked right into her dark eyes. “The Goddess didn’t make all that fuss, Lia. I did.”
Lia sat up slowly, looking at the child with eyes as wide as the sky over all of Sumer. “You... you did?”
Nidaba gnawed her lip. “Sometimes... when I get very angry, things... happen.” She sighed and bent her head. “I’ll try not to do it again.”
Chapter 1
OF ALL THE men he’d ever been, he thought he liked Nathan Ian King best.
He sat on the veranda, sipping strong Nepalese tea as the sun rose. Orange with a pink hue, its upper curve licked at the sky over the Atlantic. This veranda, on the back of his house, looked out over the sea from on high. It was the view that had made him choose this place... had made him want to stay. All that water...
It still seemed incomprehensible to him.
Nathan King was a collector and dealer in antiquities. He was an expert in his field, though few would venture to guess how he had come by his expertise. Even fewer would believe he had acquired most of the pieces in his personal collection long before they’d been considered old.
Nathan was at ease and content with his life. And why shouldn’t he be? He had established his gallery in a “historic”—the term made him smile—two-story brick building on the narrow, cobbled streets of old Boston. Then he had purchased this estate, an hour’s drive from the city. The house was a sprawling one, built of red brick in the Victorian style: flat roof, tall, narrow windows, endless rooms lining long hallways, all of it set on fifty acres of lush meadows and secluded woods against the backdrop of the mighty sea.
He had created Nathan King, and his kingdom, some ten years ago. He’d been tired, then, of caution, tired of living in anonymity, of keeping to himself, of moving around so frequently. Enter Nathan, who in a very short time had become known and loved by hundreds. Nathan, who contributed yearly to homeless shelters and scholarship funds. Nathan, who had even been known to speak to local students about various historical periods, at the requests of their teachers.
Nathan Ian King was a model citizen. He never so much as ran a red light. His life was so perfectly ordinary that it was almost boring.
Almost.
Too good to last, this persona. Already he knew his time as Nathan King would eventually come to an end. In ten years he hadn’t aged a day. In ten more people would begin to wonder about that. And while he had cut off all con
tact with others of his kind, they were bound to find him out as soon as tales of a man who did not age began to surface.
Then again, he thought, lifting the porcelain cup to his smiling lips, there was always makeup. A drastic measure, perhaps, but possible. He was really going to hate to give up his mundane life as Nathan King. It had been peaceful, tranquil... and not a single immortal Witch, Dark or Light, had tracked him down in all the time he’d been living it. The past decade had healed some of his oldest wounds, he thought. Like an overworked laborer after a long vacation, he felt renewed. Almost... reborn. Which was a miracle in itself.
“Got the mornin’ paper for you, Nathan.”
Nathan inclined his head without taking his eyes off the spectacular sunrise in progress over the ocean. So much water. The abundance of so precious an element still amazed him, even after so much time. You could take the man out of the desert, he mused...
“Come, George. Watch this with me. It’s incredible.”
“Aw, you say that every mornin’,” George said, obviously unimpressed but with a touch of humor in his childlike voice. He closed the French doors behind him and lumbered onto the veranda to take a seat at the round glass-topped table. He tossed the newspaper down in front of Nathan, but Nathan didn’t so much as glance at it. Not yet.
The sun rose still higher, its neon-orange glow spreading now over the face of the water, reflected in a million glowing ripples. And higher still, beaming warmth onto Nathan’s face, spilling light and heat over his body. “It’s glorious,” Nathan whispered.
A deep, booming laugh escaped George. “You say that every mornin’, too.”
“I do, don’t I?” Nathan finally dragged his gaze away to look at George. As always, his right-hand man was dressed... interestingly. Today he wore a stylish brown suit from the Big and Tall Shop over a pink tie-dyed T-shirt that he must have picked up at a garage sale. Glancing down, Nathan saw the ever-present Air Jordans on George’s size 12 feet. He managed not to smile. He wouldn’t hurt the big man’s feelings for the world.
“So tell me what’s on the schedule for you today, George,” Nathan began.
But before George could answer, there was a thump on the French doors. Nathan looked up to see Sheila, her pudgy arms weighed down by a cluttered tray, standing on the other side of them. Nathan jumped up and flung the doors open.
“About time, too!” Sheila huffed, handing him the tray. “A lady could die of old age by the time you two gentlemen got around to opening a door for her.”
Nathan smiled at her. He knew full well her name wasn’t Sheila. Not really. She used to wait tables at a diner where he liked the tea. Until they caught her stealing leftovers to feed the pigeons outside and fired her. Just an excuse, really. She was getting on in years, and maybe someone had learned, as well, that she hadn’t given them her real name and that her green card was a fake.
If you asked her who she was, where she was from, her reply was always the same. “Just a sheila from Down Under. Born in the bush and raised with the joeys.”
She sank into a chair at the table and fanned her face with one hand for dramatic effect. “I swear, you two will work me to death one of these days.”
She was kidding. It was a running joke how hard the two men of the house tried to keep her from overdoing. When Nathan thought about the way she had been living when he’d met her—the condition she had been in... but that was over now. She was part of his own, odd little family. She kept pigeons of her own up on the flat roof of Nathan’s house.
“Breakfast smells fantastic,” he told her, carrying the laden tray to the table and scrutinizing her weathered face, as he did every morning. She would never say a word if she was feeling poorly. She couldn’t know it, of course, but Nathan would pick up on it anyway. His gift was empathy. He tended to pick up on and oftentimes internalize the pain—physical or otherwise—of others. He’d had to learn to shield himself, block it out, for the most part, or live in misery. But he often lowered his guard to experience the feelings of those closest to him. It was probably why, when he loved at all, he loved so much.
Today Sheila was well. Her cheeks were pink and plump and freckled, eyes bright and blue. Her carrot hair, just starting to line itself with silver strands, was pulled into a 1950s-style ponytail high atop her head.
“My breakfasts always smell fantastic!” she declared with a wink. She reached for his newspaper, moving it out of the way as Nathan deposited the tray in the middle of the table. Then she said, “Oh, my, now, is this a sorry-looking beauty.” She turned the paper toward him, and Nathan glanced down with feigned interest as he took his own seat.
Then he went still, staring at the small photo in the sidebar on the front page. The caption read, “Do You Know This Woman? (Story on page 10)”
Nathan’s throat went dry. His eyes seemed to burn and his vision blurred. Even as he stared, trying to make sense of something he knew to be impossible, George and Sheila were taking their plates from the tray, removing the shiny stainless-steel lids, and digging in.
“Today we’ll get those new bulbs planted in the front garden, won’t we, Georgie?” Sheila was saying. “It’s gonna be turnin’ cold before we know it. We’ll soon be fresh out of time for fall gardening.”
“I like to plant things,” George said with a smile.
“Will you have time to pick us up some more mulch on your way home from the shop tonight, Nathan?” Sheila asked.
Nathan didn’t reply. He was lifting the newspaper now, staring down at the photo, unable to look away, even to read the story that went with the hauntingly familiar face in the photograph.
“Nathan?” Sheila asked.
He finally tore his gaze away from the photo and turned to Sheila. “I... Sorry, I...”
“Say, now! Is it the unknown beauty who’s got you so dumbstruck?” She was using her motherly tone. From time to time she tended to do so. More often with George than with Nathan, however.
She leaned closer, looking over his shoulder, and Nathan smelled the ever-present scent of Ben-Gay on her shoulders. “She’s a looker, she is. All that long, dark hair. Do you know her, then?”
“I... No, I don’t believe so.”
“Couldn’t tell from the look on your face, love. You’ve gone chalk white.”
He shook his head in denial, because, of course, it was not possible. “She resembles someone I knew once.”
It was George’s turn to become curious. He got to his feet and limped around the table to lean over and stare as well. “I know who she is,” he announced, as if it should be obvious to them all.
His words made both Nathan and Sheila stare up at him.
George smiled. “She’s the lady in the picture,” he said, looking toward the French doors with a nod. “The one in the front parlor, over the fireplace.”
Nathan closed his eyes. Neither of them could know he’d painted the piece himself. Neither of them ever would, if he had his way. His secrets were his own. And knowing them... could be dangerous. Fatal.
“Well, now, you know, George, you’re right. She does look a good deal like the woman in that painting! Isn’t that curious?” Sheila asked, and her eyes narrowed on Nathan. “Turn the pages, Nathan, love. Don’t keep us in suspense.”
He pried his numb fingers loose and managed to turn the pages. He found the article beneath the headline
MIRACLE IN MANHATTAN.
Yanking her bifocals out of her apron pocket, Sheila perched them on her nose and read aloud in her Aussie accent. “ ‘An unidentified woman survived an apparent suicide attempt in Manhattan last week.’“ She clucked her tongue. “Oh my, such foolishness! ‘Witnesses claim the woman jumped from the rooftop gardens of the Hotel Tremayne on Wednesday night and fell four hundred feet to the street below. Paramedics at the scene were astounded. The woman, who they said appeared to have been near death, regained consciousness en route to the hospital. She became disoriented, and even violent, breaking the arm of one paramedic in her
panic.’”
Tilting her head, Sheila frowned. “My, now, but she don’t look strong enough to break a twig, does she?”
Nathan gently took the newspaper from Sheila’s hands, and she let him, looking at him with worry in her eyes.
Nathan read on, silently. The woman had been sedated and taken to a nearby hospital. Despite what should have been a lethal plunge, the article reported, she was unharmed but catatonic, and had been moved to a mental hospital in New Jersey.
“‘No identification was found among her personal effects,’”Sheila read, the sound of her voice startling Nathan by coming from so close. She had run out of patience and was now reading over his shoulder. “‘Police are asking for help in establishing her identity and locating her family. She is approximately five feet nine inches tall, of slender build, with black hair and eyes, and an olive complexion, perhaps indicative of Middle Eastern descent. The only other possible identifying features, police said, are a pierced left nostril, in which she was wearing a ruby stone—’”
“A ruby stone,” Nathan echoed.
“‘—and an unusual birthmark,’” Sheila read on. “Odd, they don’t say what the birthmark might be.”
Nathan swallowed the lump of sandstone that seemed to have lodged in his throat. “They’ll keep that quiet. A genuine relative would know. That way they can filter out crackpots.”
“Makes sense,” she said. “Lord knows, this sorry world has enough of those.”
Nathan stared at the story, willing it to tell him more, but the final line was nothing but the number to call should anyone have knowledge of the woman’s identity.
He folded the paper closed, staring again at the fuzzy black-and-white photo on the front page—the one that looked so much like a woman who had been dead for well over four thousand years.
She couldn’t possibly be the same person.
And he couldn’t possibly rest until he knew that for sure.
He gave his head a shake, closed his eyes. Gods, it had been so long. He told himself it was an illusion, a trick of a faulty memory. But he knew better. He could never forget her... could never forget the woman she had been, the woman he had loved.
Eternal Love: The Immortal Witch Series Page 68