Authors: Elizabeth Hand
“They don’t sleep
…”
This one hadn’t been sleeping when they killed him. Or perhaps he had been. Perhaps among the shattered remains of pottery and ornament she would find a ritual cup, a cauldron with pollen still adhering to its rim, chemical traces of psylocibin spores or
papaver rhoeas,
corn poppy. She extended one hand, her fingers trembling as they brushed the fragile-looking arch of ribs. She half expected the bones to crumble into ash at her touch, but they did not. They felt cool and solid as polished wood, their slightly rough pitted surface giving them a softer edge than she would have expected, like the velvet covering a yearling stag’s antlers. If she struck one, she was certain it would ring sweetly, like a bell.
It was bright enough now that she switched off her flashlight and stuck it into a soft mound of earth. She turned and lovingly ran both hands across the long femur, her fingertips catching on the raised lip of a scar, the rounded knob of its pelvis gleaming softly in the silvery dawn. Not just a burial, but a sacrificial burial: a ritual murder dating back some three thousand years. A major,
major
find.
June Harrington would be vindicated. Michael Haring would recoup his small investment. And Magda Kurtz’s reputation would be made.
Somewhere far above a warbler let loose a thin ribbon of song. She should go and wake the others, get cameras and notebooks and plaster of Paris down here, some kind of sandbags to keep the shaft from eroding further. Automatically she noted all the things she would write up later. Width of pelvis indicated a male. The clean edges along the damaged vertebrae suggested that a very sharp blade had been used for the sacrifice. A broken rib had healed unevenly; perhaps he had been a warrior. Teeth in surprisingly good condition, which meant a good diet. Probably quite young by modern standards, maybe eighteen years old. Most striking of all the positioning of the skull: carefully placed within the hands so that it faced outward, its empty eyes watching, waiting …
Nowhere had she ever read of a ritual slaying even remotely similar to this. She thought of George’s linguistic research, of how it pointed to heretofore unproven links with the Aegean. Together with the skeleton, this find would give weight to his work, and to all the hours of research that Magda herself had put into proving her mentor right. The welter of objects buried with the victim might at last provide conclusive evidence for June’s theories of a matrilineal culture in central Europe, undeniable proof of human sacrifice to a lunar goddess.
Magda took a deep breath. She pressed her clenched fists to her breast to keep them from shaking. This wasn’t just another find to be written up in
Archaeology
or
Science.
Not with women burning their bras and someone like Valerie Solanas shooting Andy Warhol. This would mean coverage in the
Times
and a mention on national news, early tenure, maybe even her own film crew …
She let her breath out in a long gasp and reluctantly forced herself back to the task at hand. There was still a considerable danger that the entire shaft might collapse. She should set as many details to memory as she could, and get the hell out. She thought of removing some of the jewelry for Michael Haring. This, after all, was what she had been hoping to find; this was why Haring had underwritten the spiraling costs of the entire odyssey.
But for once Magda Kurtz the scientist won out over raw ambition. If the site’s integrity was destroyed, any future speculation regarding the nature of Çaril Kytur would be compromised. There would be plenty of time to pocket some precious toy for her patron; this afternoon, perhaps, while the others were shoring up the excavation, or even sooner. She smiled and started to turn back to the skeleton.
Before she could, her gaze fell upon a small mound. Dun-colored and coarse with dirt, the mound had been easy for her to overlook. But now Magda whistled softly. The pile held tiny figurines, dozens of them, carved of bone and ivory and stone and clay. No bigger than a knuckle or forefinger, although Magda glimpsed one cylinder of dark green stone the length of her arm. Most of the figurines were simple, pendant-shaped, with tiny protrusions representing arms, legs, breasts; others were more elaborate and showed the figure of a woman extravagantly garbed with swirling drapery and ornate headgear.
“No,” breathed Magda.
Goddess figurines. There might be a hundred of them, spanning thousands of years of worship: Lascaux to the Parthenon, the Venus of Willendorf to Persephone. Magda’s hand hovered above them, and almost she could feel heat rising, the dust and earth turned to ashes as flames licked at sculpted azurite and carven bone.
Oh, June, if only you could see this!
She gazed down, filing it all away in her head, and prayed that nothing would happen before she could get George and Nicky down here with shovels and sandbags.
Slowly she turned from the figurines, and back to the human skeleton. She stooped to examine the bones more closely. The corpse had been painted with red ocher, same as at Shanidar. Or perhaps it was left to decompose and be picked clean by vultures—there were ancient paintings of such a ritual in Anatolia—and then the bones were colored in another ceremony. Gently Magda ran a finger along a blunt curve of vertebra rusted with the powdered mineral. Clay and hydrated ferric oxide, dark red, almost brown. They’d have to run an analysis on the pigment, see if it was local or not. She could smell the pigment, a faint tang like scorched metal. She drew a little X on her wrist and watched as the ocher seeped into her skin, a stain like old blood. Amazing. To think of such a ritual surviving for tens of thousands of years, from Neanderthals to proto-Celts! The thought made her feel exhilarated and a little nauseated. It was like doing really good acid, this whole night had been like some horrible and wonderful drug—
But then from somewhere overhead she heard a dull clinking sound. She looked up. Someone was awake in the camp. George, probably. He liked to drink his ersatz coffee while going over the previous day’s field notes, and he didn’t trust anyone else to fire up the recalcitrant little oil-burning stove. Her mouth opened and she almost called up to him, but thought better of it. Instead she bent over the skeleton once more.
How had it been aligned? The bodies found in Celtic burials at Lindow and Gournay had pointed east. She looked up at the small rosy mouth of the shaft. After making adjustments for the burial site shifting over time, and for the sudden collapse of the wall, she decided that the corpse had originally been aligned with its head facing east. To the rising sun, as in the Shanidar burials.
Or the rising moon.
“The moon.” She said the words aloud and bit her lip.
Othiym, a minor lunar goddess with possible links to the great female deities of Knossos and Boeotia and Nippur in Sumeria …
The moon. As she raised her hand to brush the hair from her eyes, her nostrils filled with the sweet incense of hashish that still stained her fingers. With sudden clarity she recalled her walk, the eerie flood of moonlight and swarming insects. It was as though it had all been meant to lead her here, to this. For a moment she felt again the icy breath coming from the opening behind her, a chill that seemed to freeze her thoughts as well; but she quickly shook it off. She turned a last thorough gaze upon the burial victim, its arms clenched to its barren chest, its skull cupped within clawlike hands like a scryer’s globe.
And then, for the first time she saw something glittering upon the skull’s smooth surface. She had missed it in the darkness, but now dawn touched it with a rosy glow. It hung from the skull’s jutting brow in a gleaming curve, like a scythe or grinning mouth made of silver. She leaned forward until she could touch it, her fingertips grazing its edge so lightly they might have caressed nothing at all.
But it was there. It was real. Beneath her hands she felt metal, so cold it was as though she had plunged her hands into icy water, as though she had received an electrical shock. A jolt of pure energy bombarded her, shoving her back onto her heels. With a cry Magda reached forward again, though gingerly this time: because all she could think of was touching it, holding it. All she could think of was possessing it.
Upon the skull’s brow gleamed a crescent of pure light, so brilliant she had to shade her eyes. When she lowered her hand she could see it clearly: a span of smooth silver, like a little moon. At its widest point it was engraved with a triskelion that formed three moons, their intersecting crescents making a pattern as breathtakingly lovely as it was simple. Where the moons overlapped, there was a small crescent-shaped perforation, a grinning aperture. Very faint lines showed where once it had been touched with gold.
A sacrificial amulet, buried as an offering to the moon goddess. A talisman meant to guide the victim to his waiting and eternal mistress.
A lunula.
Magda hardly dared to breathe. Over the centuries only a handful of them had been recovered. Two from Artemis’s temple in Boeotia, where the
Arktoi
danced, bear-virgins sacred to the huntress. One from an Etruscan tomb, where no doubt it had been preserved as a curious relic of an even more ancient day. One or two others had been scattered across the Roman Empire, and now were locked within the holdings of the Vatican.
And then, of course, there was the fragment that June herself had found and given to the National Museum. With trembling fingers Magda touched the crescent-shaped hole in the pendant. This had to be it: the original of June’s lunula, the necklace from which the missing piece had been lost or stolen millennia before. Her breath caught in her throat. Michael Haring would give a fortune for it; any number of museums or collectors would give a fortune for it …
Magda pushed these thoughts aside, focused on the lunula itself. As she drew it from the skull, the hasp caught on a rounded plate of bone. Gently she tugged it free, and turned it slowly to catch the sunlight. The incised lines of its interlocking figures flickered from black to silver as it moved. The crescents seemed to burgeon from shining spindles to swollen orbs as she watched, new moon, half-moon, full, the missing crescent a bitter black mouth that twisted into darkness.
“Magda!” She jumped, the lunula swinging so that it struck her wrist. When she looked at her hand she saw a red blister there, faint as an old scar. “Magda! My lighter’s dead, I need some matches—”
In the glowing gap of the shaft’s entrance she saw George’s silhouette, his long hair a frizzy aureole.
“Hey! Thought you might be down here. You got matches?”
Magda stared up at him in panic. Her hand tightened around the lunula and she took a step backward, her feet sinking into the soft new fallen earth. “George,” she whispered.
“Couldn’t wait, huh?” he called cheerfully. He swung his legs over the edge of the shaft, one foot nudging at the air until it found the top of the ladder. “Last day’s a thirty-six-hour day, huh?”
She watched him slowly descend. Pebbles and clods of dirt fell in a dark rain as he came down. “Hey, you should be careful, you know? I mean, coming down alone like this in the middle of the night. This whole thing could collapse.”
She stood with her back pressed against the shaft’s wall. Panic boiled inside her. She was going to show it to him, to all of them; but so soon, so soon? A few feet away from her the skeleton lay streaked with light. In her hand the lunula was a burning arc, a star, a scythe. She clutched it against her breast and raised her face to where George stood midway down the ladder. His head turned this way and that as he squinted, trying to find her in the near-darkness. When he called out again his voice sounded muffled, confused.
“Magda?”
He shouldn’t be here.
The thought was another flaming arc. He shouldn’t be here. It was wrong, it was profane,
stantikic’t.
Not just tainted but forbidden. Against her back the earthen wall pressed, a moist enveloping weight. She could feel the lunula burning through her sweater, through her T-shirt, the smell of scorching metal and a raw red pain as the crescent bit into her hands, her fingers seared until nothing but blackened bone gripped the moon’s two horns and pressed them to her breast. Smoke filled the bottom of the shaft, smoke and the sound of her own anguished voice as she shrieked. Pain worse than any she could have imagined as the lunula branded her, its grinning livid mouth burning against her breast to leave its imprint, a pucker of moon-shaped scar tissue and just a trace of blood.
“Magda?”
She opened her eyes and he was there. His frizzy hair was pulled back sloppily with a leather thong and he wore a stained red T-shirt and jeans. He was staring at her, concern clouding his eyes as he stepped from the ladder and tried to find firm footing on the soft uprooted soil. He blinked in the dimness and pushed his steel-rimmed glasses firmly into place. He brought with him the scent of the open air, new morning and cold ashes and a faint smell of rain.
“Magda? You okay? You look a little—”
She tried to back away from him but she could go no farther, there was nothing but darkness now surrounding her, and earth. But George didn’t notice. He no longer seemed to see her at all. There was a quick sharp sound as he sucked in his breath. Behind their steel frames his eyes widened. Very slowly he raised one hand, pointing to the pale mound of bones glistening in the darkness. Before she could say or do anything, he lunged forward, shouting in amazement.
“What the
hell?
Magda, what did
you find,
that’s a, there’s a—”
Othiym.
She didn’t know if she said the name aloud or merely thought it. But she must have said something, done something. Because George froze, one hand reaching for the skeleton, his head turned to stare at her.
“Magda?”
It
was
a moon, a star, a scythe. Glittering in the darkness of the shaft as she swung it, a band of quicksilver slicing through the fetid air. She could feel its weight in her hand, a solid comforting thing like a smooth round stone, and feel how easily it sliced through his throat. Like a river swollen by the spring rain, erupting from its frozen prison to pierce and gouge its way through rocky soil; it was so easy, she brought her hand back and struck at him again, this time hearing a small
pop
as the lunula severed his windpipe.