“What if it’s a tainted artifact?” Erik challenged. “This could be bad news for Cassie.”
“I cannot assure you that it is not,” Stefan admitted. “Such a thing is used for killing, no? Knives do not generally have pleasant stories to tell.”
Cassie sighed. “Look guys. Whatever it is, I think I can handle it. It’s not like my head is going to explode and spatter my brains all over the carpet.” She scowled and turned to Griffin for confirmation. “That isn’t a possibility, is it? I mean you haven’t heard of that happening to a Pythia, have you?”
“Good grief! Of course not!” Griffin protested. “Just try to stay grounded as best you can. We’ll all be standing by to assist you.”
The girl laughed nervously. “After that Vinca artifact nearly decapitated me, what have I got to be worried about?”
Her companions looked grim. No one spoke.
“Cassie, you don’t have to do this,” Fred reminded her.
She gave him a brave smile. “I sort of do. It’s in the job description.” She took a deep breath. Sitting forward in her chair, she reached around her neck for the pendant Faye had given her and grasped it tightly in her left hand. Then she stretched out her right. “OK, I’m ready.” Stefan slid the obsidian dagger across the table toward her. She shut her eyes and placed her hand on top of the knife. “Gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts.”
She went into free fall. She was nowhere and everywhere at once. This was unlike any trance she’d experienced before. Images strobed through her consciousness. The dagger was passing from hand to hand in fast rewind mode as one person after another grasped its antler handle. She didn’t become any of them. The weapon was moving too fast though its impulse was always the same—to appease its rage with blood. She could feel flesh tearing, screams of pain, bodies falling to earth. Too many to count. Backward in time the dagger traveled, for thousands of years, leaving a mountain of corpses in its wake. Finally the blade stopped moving and settled in the hands of a burly young man. Cassie touched down in his consciousness. She had scarcely caught her bearings before he leaned over a kneeling woman and, with one deft stroke, cut her throat. The woman collapsed on the ground choking. Blood streamed out and covered the snow around her body. The burly man snatched an amulet from her forehead. Fury churned inside of him like molten lava.
The blood in Cassie’s veins felt polluted. Offal from a slaughterhouse. She tried to disassociate herself from the dagger. Pushing her awareness upward through a sea of gore. she gasped for breath, fighting a wave of nausea at the same time. Someone was calling her.
“Cass!” the voice reverberated inside her head. “That’s enough. Come on, snap out of it!”
She blinked several times. Erik was kneeling next to her, shaking her by the shoulders. “Cass! Come back!” he urged.
“I…uh…I’m.”
“Are you all right?” Griffin was beside her too.
She stood up dizzily, leaning on the table for support. “N…n…no,” she finally stuttered. “No, I’m not.” She ran to the bathroom and managed to reach the toilet just as another wave of nausea hit her. She vomited so violently that her head throbbed and her rib cage felt as if it were broken. She nearly blacked out while one spasm after another shook her body. When she finally caught her breath, she could feel someone placing a warm washcloth on the back of her neck.
“You’re going to be OK,” another voice said soothingly. She thought it might have been Fred.
She became aware that a cold slick of perspiration covered her skin, causing her to shiver. Somebody had placed an arm around her shoulder and was guiding her back into Stefan’s sitting room. It was Erik. In an uncharacteristically gentle voice, he said, “Just sit down here for a while and rest. I’ll get you a glass of water.”
She collapsed in a heap on the couch and concentrated on breathing in and out. Even her lungs hurt. When she finally blinked her eyes open, she could see four solemn faces peering down at her. The effect was almost comical. She chuckled weakly. “Guys, don’t worry. Really. I survived.”
Erik sat down beside her and handed her a glass of water. “Here, drink this.”
The water helped wash the awful taste of blood and bile out of her mouth. The blood of all those people the knife butchered had oozed into her own veins. She’d been psychically poisoned, if there was such a thing, and her physical reaction was just the same as if she’d swallowed something toxic. Her body acted decisively to purge away all that foulness. She wished her mind could purge the memories away that easily.
Erik scowled at Stefan in reproach. “That artifact wasn’t just tainted. It was the grand daddy of all contaminated artifacts.”
Stefan looked sheepish. “I am so sorry, Miss Cassie. I did not know.”
She waved her hand weakly to reassure him. “Don’t worry about it. Comes with the territory. What doesn’t kill you makes you strong, right?” She gave a wan smile.
Griffin was standing over her looking skeptical. “A cold comfort that,” he observed dryly. “You appear far from well.”
She drank the rest of the water. Her head began to clear and she sat upright.
“You’re still cold.” Erik had noticed her trembling hands. He hastened to the closet to retrieve an extra blanket. “Here, put this around your shoulders.”
Cassie accepted the wrap and bundled herself into it like a cocoon before speaking again. “There’s a lot to cover.” She rubbed her temples.
“You can’t possibly want to go over all of that now,” Griffin objected.
“Oh, yes I do. I can’t carry this stuff around in my head. Better to get it out tonight so I can leave it behind.”
The Scrivener didn’t argue the point. He settled himself on the arm of the couch while Erik seated himself on her other side. Fred and Stefan drew up two chairs. They waited in silence for her to choose her time to begin.
Cassie leaned her head back against the couch cushions. “This wasn’t like any trance I’ve ever been in before. Blips and flashes of events, of people. Most of them dying on the sharp end of that thing.” Her gaze traveled toward the table where the obsidian dagger rested so quietly. “I was being dragged backwards through its history so I had to piece together a sense of what it all meant. It was like the knife itself had an emotion associated with it. Mainly anger and the only thing that quieted the anger was spilling somebody’s blood. And then the emotion in the dagger got transferred to everybody who possessed it. It was used for rituals by this Kurgan tribe. Whoever wanted to be the leader of the tribe had to use that dagger to kill the competition.”
“Although it’s an appalling practice, such trial by combat is not uncommon in patriarchal cultures,” Griffin commented. “Remember the Ottoman sultans who killed their own brothers to claim the throne?”
“Yeah but it wasn’t only men,” Cassie replied. “I don’t think they were all that patriarchal at the time when this dagger was in play. Not all the leaders of this particular Kurgan tribe were males. Everybody had an equal chance to be vicious.” She laughed bitterly. “So anyway, like I was saying, once a leader died, the next one to be in charge would be the one who was handiest with the dagger. The tribe passed it on from one generation to the next like some kind of unholy grail. It was a symbol to them. I guess you would call it a talisman. They believed that as long as they had that knife, it made them invincible.”
“Excuse me, please,” Stefan interrupted. “But this knife was found in a grave. It would not have been passed forward to anybody.”
“Yeah, that’s because the last guy who had it ended up getting stabbed with it himself. Then all of a sudden, it was bad juju.”
“Bad juju?” the trove-keeper repeated doubtfully. “I do not understand this expression.”
“Allow me to interpret,” Griffin said. “I think I’m becoming proficient in Cassie-speak.”
The girl rolled her eyes.
“I believe she means it came to be regarded as unlucky. Its magic was broken. Better
to bury it with its last owner than to pass it on.”
“You know that female body you found in the grave with the chieftain and the dagger?” Cassie looked inquiringly at Stefan.
“Yes,” he replied uncertainly. “She was most probably his wife.”
“She was more than that,” the girl said. “She was also his killer.”
The men all looked startled.
“I only got flashes of what happened but it seems that he had already been wounded in some big battle and was recuperating. She’d been captured during a raid and didn’t like being treated like prize livestock. So she decided while he was sleeping one night, she would let him and his whole tribe know what she thought about the situation. She understood what a big deal the dagger was to them, so using it as the murder weapon was a way of giving them all a collective black eye. After she stabbed the chieftain, she ran off. Too bad she couldn’t outrun a horse. They caught up with her and dragged her back. Broke her legs so she couldn’t run away again. Then when they had the big funeral ceremony, they cut her throat and put her in the grave. I guess the tribe figured their chief would get a chance to punish her in the afterlife for what she’d done.”
“What lovely people,” Griffin remarked caustically.
“After that, the tribe thought the dagger was defiled. It had been used against them by someone they conquered—one of the so-called inferior tribes—so that’s why it got buried.” Cassie yawned wearily. “And that’s where its story ends.”
Fred handed her a fresh glass of water. ”Which brings us back to Stefan’s original question. How did that tribe get the dagger in the first place?”
Cassie took several sips before replying. “I think the guy who had it first was the founder of that tribe though he would have lived a couple of thousand years before its last owner. He was bad news, that one. Somebody should have forced him to take an anger management class. Except maybe ‘angry’ isn’t the right word. It felt more like rage. The same kind of rage I could feel in the dagger itself.”
“What was he enraged about?” Griffin asked.
The girl paused to consider. “Everything. Everybody. It was almost as if he had a grudge against life itself for being the way it was. He didn’t like being told no.” She stopped speaking, trying to reach out into the atmosphere and pluck out the right phrase to describe what was wrong with him. “It’s almost as if he thought he was God and every time reality smacked him down to prove he wasn’t, he got even madder.” She paused again and closed her eyes, trying to recall the details. “He was traveling with a bunch of people who were all running away from a giant flood.”
Griffin laid a hand on her arm to interrupt her. “Cassie, where were they? Could you see the surroundings?”
She nodded. “Yeah, they were in some mountains. There was snow on the trail.”
“Good heavens, do you know what you may be describing?” Griffin asked in wonderment.
Cassie stared at him. “No, what?”
“This young man and the people who were with him may have all been fleeing from the Black Sea deluge.”
“But that would mean this knife goes back about seven thousand years,” Erik speculated.
“Precisely,” Griffin concurred. “Stefan, is there any way you could get this carbon-dated?”
The trove-keeper nodded. “Yes, I think that is possible.”
“Amazing,” Griffin exclaimed. “This artifact may provide a direct link between refugees of the flood and the origins of Kurgan culture.
“How do you figure?” Fred asked.
“If these people were climbing into the mountains to escape a great flood, there’s a very good chance they were fleeing directly into the Russian steppes. This may help broaden our understanding of the Kurgan tribes. Their warlike tendencies may have predated the dessication of the grasslands by thousands of years. Those refugees would have already been hungry and desperate when they arrived in their new homeland. Quite possibly they might have started preying on the indigenous peoples in the area. Remember what happened to the area around Catal Huyuk after the flood? Cities with fortifications. It stands to reason that these starving, predatory newcomers to the steppes might have entirely changed the cultural balance in that part of the world. This aggressive young man that Cassie has described would have been proto-Kurgan.”
“He sure was brutal enough to be a Kurgan,” Cassie observed. “He cut her throat like it was nothing.”
“Who?” Erik asked.
“Oh yeah, I forgot. I’m getting ahead of myself. In my vision, this guy was ornery at the best of times but he’d linked up with this tribe that was trying to get away from the flood. He was mad at the direction they were going. I think that was what set him off. He wanted to be in charge. But there was this woman, I guess she was some kind of priestess and she kept insisting that they go in a different direction. So he took out his knife and cut her throat. That was the beginning for him. He saw that catastrophe with the flood as…” She paused to summon the right word. “As an opportunity. That’s it. An opportunity for him to take over. He was a different kind of human from the rest. Maybe he was born different. The tribe he was traveling with—their leaders acted for the good of everybody. They all felt bound to each other. But this guy, he was disconnected. He really didn’t care about the rest of the people or what was good for them. Only what was good for him. He wanted to be giving the orders. Wanted to be worshipped and obeyed. Some of the tribe followed him because they didn’t know what to do and he acted like he knew where he was going. So they went off with him and left the others behind.” She shook her head ruefully. “Jeez, what a psycho.”
“Not psycho,” Griffin corrected. “The personality you’re describing sounds very much like a sociopath to me.”
“It all fits,” Erik added. “That kind of leader usually manages to show up whenever there’s a culture in crisis. People get scared stupid and they listen to anybody who sounds like he has a plan to get them out of the jam they’re in. Overlord history books are full of his kind.”
Cassie wasn’t paying attention to their conversation. “There should be something else here.” She was puzzled.
“Pardon?” Griffin stared at her.
She transferred her attention to the trove-keeper. “Stefan, didn’t you find something else with this knife? Something shiny buried right next to it?”
The trove-keeper looked perplexed. “There was the sheath which you have already seen.”
“No, not that. Can somebody get me something to write with?”
Fred walked over to the desk to retrieve some hotel stationary and a pen. He handed them wordlessly to Cassie.
She traced an outline on the paper. A five-sided geometric shape. Inscribed inside it was a five-pointed star. She held the picture out for Stefan to see. “It would have looked like this. Some kind of amulet made of metal, copper maybe. It had a star carved into the middle of it. The dead priestess wore it across her forehead. I got the impression it was the symbol for the goddess those people worshipped. Anyway, when the psycho cut her throat, he took it with him and it was handed down with the knife from one chieftain to the next.”
“I have no knowledge of this.” Stefan seemed bemused. “I am sorry to be saying I am sorry yet again.”
“Oh well, it must have been lost somewhere along the way. But I think it was important to them. A trophy. The sort of thing you’d want to display in your den if you were a big game hunter. Like a moose’s head.”
“That’s a pretty bizarre analogy,” Fred commented.
Cassie made a wry face. “Give me a break. My head hurts and all my bones feel like I’ve just been crunched by a boa constrictor. My communication skills are still a little off.”
“On the contrary,” Griffin broke in. He seemed oddly animated. “My dear girl, your communication skills are spot on.”
“Huh?”
“The star amulet. A goddess symbol. It’s given me an idea. A fantastic idea!”
By no
w they were all staring at him dubiously.
He jumped up and began pacing the room. “I’ll have to get in touch with a few people back at the vault to run the calculations but I believe we’ll still be in time.” He stopped muttering long enough to notice the reaction of his colleagues and hastened to explain. “Cassie’s words jogged my memory about something. My theory may be far-fetched but if I’m right…” He was beaming now. “By tomorrow, I’ll be able to tell you precisely when and where the soul of the lady will rise!”
Chapter 25 – On Purpose
“Thanks, Gamma. I don’t think I ate anything since lunch.” Zachary wiped his mouth with a napkin and proceeded to lick up every last bread crumb on his plate.
The lemon squares had vanished into the boy’s stomach an hour earlier to be followed by two sandwiches, several dill pickles and a bag of potato chips.
“I can make you another sandwich, dear,” Faye offered. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like some chicken salad instead of another mushroom burger?”
“Sorry, Gamma. You know I’m a vegan. Give me enough time and I’ll convince you to be one too. You wouldn’t believe the way animals are treated in the meat and dairy industry. I could show you pictures that would turn your stomach. Worse than Auschwitz.”
Faye regarded him dispassionately. “I take it you won’t be wanting the chicken salad, then?”
Apparently deciding to proselytize another time, the boy replied, “Those portabellos were pretty good. I think I could manage just one more.” Then he changed the subject entirely. “Sorry if I chased off your friend.” He was alluding to Maddie’s hasty departure. “Who is she, anyway?”
“Oh, just a neighbor.” Faye remained intent on slicing two more pieces of bread. “She came over to borrow a cup of sugar.”
“She didn’t leave with any.”
The old woman shrugged innocently. “She must have forgotten in all the excitement of your arrival.” She placed another grilled portabello sandwich in front of Zachary.
The Mountain Mother Cipher (The Arkana Archaeology Mystery Series Book 2) Page 15