Authors: Elizabeth Hand
“Yes,” she murmured. She turned away, coughing delicately, and blew out me candle. The Hand of Glory burned with a steady, poisonous gleam, flames licking at its fingertips. Where the smoke touched the rug it left a heavy dark smear, like rancid fat.
She turned to the silver dish, where the single strand of hair floated, and spoke beneath her breath. The hair started to move. Magda Kurtz continued to murmur in the same quick, almost thoughtless manner; but her eyes were slitted with concentration.
Upon the surface of the water, patterns began to appear. Faint lines, dull red and black against the silvery surface. After a minute or so an image emerged. Blots of light and shadow that soon took on the contours of a face: a young man’s face. Magda fell silent. For a long time she stared at the image, her mouth tight. Then she breathed upon the water. The face disappeared into cloudy ripples. From the Hand of Glory came a spattering sound as a drop congealed upon the tip of one finger and burned in a small greasy cloud. Magda glanced aside, finally began speaking again.
Her words sounded no different this time, but the hair moved more slowly in response to her voice. It grew thicker, until it might have been a nematode squirming there, or some bloated larva. The water roiled and churned, and suddenly was still.
Within seconds the second image appeared: the face of a young woman with huge slanted eyes, their color unguessable, but an unmistakably beautiful girl. Magda gazed at the image thoughtfully. Finally she nodded and whispered.
“I thought as much.”
She held her hand above the bowl, touched the water with a finger. The hair writhed like a worm upon a hook, with a soft hiss disappeared into a thread of white smoke.
“So,” said Magda.
So this was what the Sign portended. She almost laughed, thinking of her old friend and mentor Balthazar Warnick. “All for naught …”
For millennia the
Benandanti
had watched and waited for the awakening of their ancient enemy. For a resurgence of old ways, old deities; half-hoping that when their Sign finally came it might presage not Her return, but the arrival of a Champion, a Hero, a Second Coming of a Great Good Man.
Omnia Bona Bonis.
But was this what the loathsome Francis X. Connelly had glimpsed in the Tahor Chapel?
Magda laughed aloud. She had seen for herself who was to come. Not one person, but two. Not a hero of the
Benandanti
—politician or diplomat, or even a sturdy tenured classics professor—but a couple of
kids.
A young man and a woman—boy and girl, really—the oldest story in the book, and not at all what the
Benandanti
had been expecting.
Not quite what Magda herself had been expecting, either.
She frowned. The boy had taken her by surprise. And yet the Sign had been unmistakable. She had scried his face in the basin, as clearly as she had seen that of the girl. Now it only remained for her to learn who they were.
Magda glanced at her watch. Past midnight already. She stretched, then crouched before the Hand of Glory. The flames had burned to the first knuckle of each finger. Melting fat coursed in dark runnels to form a small pool in its withered palm. Magda grimaced. She began to speak in a loud, impatient voice, as though calling an animal to her.
“Eisheth. Eisheth. Eisheth.”
As she spoke she very slowly began to stand, straightening until at last she stood with arms outstretched. Pronouncing the name one final time she took a step backward.
“Eisheth.”
Directly in front of her, a shape like her own shadow rose in the darkness, arms outstretched, its back to her. Only this was a shadow filled with light. As Magda watched it slowly grew brighter, the lineaments and contours of its body so radiant that she had to shade her eyes. Her arms prickled with heat. Just when it seemed its intensity was such that she must burst into flame, the light dimmed. A figure stood there, taller by a foot than Magda. She gasped, as she always did. Its long black hair like marble coils upon its shoulders, the wings like sheaves of knives enfolded upon its back.
“Eisheth,” Magda whispered hoarsely. “Eisheth, look at me.”
The figure turned.
“Ah!—”
Her stomach knotted with rage and frustration at her weakness, but still she could not keep from crying out. The figure nodded. In spite of herself Magda started forward, her hands raised halfway between supplication and an embrace. But then she forced herself to stop. The figure continued to stare at her, its yellow eyes cold and unblinking as a tiger’s. Magda took a few deep breaths.
“Eisheth—thank you—”
The figure inclined its head to her and smiled. It might have been a man, except for some feminine roundness to its mouth, the arch of its cheekbones and the sly way its eyes took her in, appraising her as another woman might. Its skin was golden, not tanned or ruddy but a pure pale gold, the color of fine marble rather than metal. It was naked, and you could see its muscles as clearly as though they had been sketched upon its skin. From its chest two breasts swelled, a young girl’s breasts, tipped with pale roseate nipples. Its groin was hairless, its member engorged and erect; she had never seen it otherwise.
Magda forced a smile and stared boldly back into his eyes. She always thought of Eisheth as
him,
despite his breasts and coquettish smile, even as some of the other naphaïm she perceived as female despite their obviously masculine attributes, or the absence of genitals altogether.
“Yes?” The naphaïm never addressed her by name. “I have come.”
His voice made her quiver, trapped between stark terror and the most abject desire. It was the voice of a young boy before the change, sweet yet resonant with a man’s power. Magda clasped her hands tightly and indicated the silver basin on the floor.
“A few minutes ago I scried there in the water two faces. A young man and woman. I wish to know their names.”
As she spoke she grew more confident. She glanced down at the Hand of Glory. The smallest digit, a shriveled grey knot, was already burned away, and the flesh of the palm itself had begun to char. She went on quickly, “I—I could not see them clearly. And I do not know their names. I need you to tell me who they are.”
The naphaïm stared at her and smiled. At its back its wings rustled. “Last year, and the year before, and years before that: you who watch are always looking for a Sign, but one never comes.”
A flicker of desperation licked at the woman’s spine. She shook her head. “I am no longer among those who watch, Eisheth. I serve another now. And a Sign
has
come. I wish to know the names of those whose faces I scried in the water.”
Eisheth’s smile broke into a grin. He had very large, white teeth, and his tongue as it flicked between them was pointed, like an asp’s. “And does not your mistress know their names?”
“My Mistress—my Mistress is—She is not mindful as you are, Eisheth.” Magda’s desperation fanned into panic even as her tone grew more wheedling. “She sleeps, but perhaps this girl is the one who will help me wake Her, if—”
If I can find this girl before the
Benandanti
do.
Eisheth laughed. At the sound the walls trembled, the candle flames leapt until they formed a fiery ring about the two figures. He stretched out his great hand until it enveloped hers, and took a step forward. Magda shuddered. Willing herself to stare up into his eyes, she choked, “Their names, Eisheth! Or I’ll dismiss you and summon another—”
“Ahhh. A pity,” he murmured, mockingly. Slowly he withdrew his hand. “As you will.”
He stared down at the silver bowl, as though seeing something there beside the rippling reflections of candlelight and shadow. After a moment he spoke a name, and then a second name. He glanced at Magda and tilted his head.
“You will ask more of me?” His boy’s voice sounded innocent, almost tearful. “Or will you dismiss me so soon?”
Magda’s breath caught in her throat. “No more.
Go
—”
Quickly she repeated the rest of the incantation. Eisheth bowed his head, ebony locks spilling across his shoulders. From his wings smoke purled. Then, in a soundless conflagration, his entire body burst into flame. Magda stumbled backward, shielding her face. When she lowered her hand the naphaïm was gone. She drew a shuddering breath, looked down to see that the fingers of the Hand of Glory had burned away. A single ragged flame, brownish red like dried blood, scored the air above its clenched palm.
One last time she knelt before the copper dish. Almost frantically she began to whisper strings of words—Greek, Latin, Old Norse, and English, too, just to be sure. A simple cantrip, something to disrupt the meeting between those she had glimpsed.
Because almost certainly the girl could be turned to serve Her whom Magda served. But the boy was another matter. And the two of them were linked, Magda had seen that.
So now let them be torn apart.
And so Magda pronounced her cantrip. It was an ancient spell—Magda found such old folkways charming, and useful, too—and one that seldom failed to work. At the appropriate moment she whispered the boy’s name. Let
him
bear the brunt of whatever danger might come from Magda’s interference in the work of the
Benandanti.
She would trust her Mistress to see that the rest followed as it should.
“…
uia Othiym psinother theropsin nopsither nephthomaoth
…”
When she finished Magda sighed and stood. She crossed to where a white ceramic pitcher waited upon a windowsill. She took the pitcher, returned to the Hand of Glory and poured a thin stream of milk onto it. The Hand of Glory, sizzled, sending up a sour, clotted smell, then gave a shrill whistle as steam escaped from its pores.
“There,” Magda pronounced. She smiled with relief. So very simple, and also a little chastening, when one thought how it was that tiny acts such as these had kept their great and ancient feud alive for so many thousands of years. She moved cheerfully about the room, blowing out one candle after another, humming. She had been a promising student at the Divine herself once, before she joined the
Benandanti
and then betrayed them. It gave her a poignant thrill of nostalgia to think of those two attractive young people with all the world before them. With a final
pouff
like a kiss she blew out the last candle. Then, gathering her papers, she left the room, to spend the night at a friend’s apartment.
As for the candles and bowls, and the smirched remains of the Hand of Glory—well, custodians at the Divine were accustomed to disposing of such things.
I
DON’T KNOW WHAT I
was thinking when I dressed for my first day of class. Recalling September in New York, I guess, where the air would have the ringing chill of true autumn. Or else maybe it was some kind of magical thinking already at work inside my head, stirred by that terrible dream of angels in my room, the bizarre and inexplicable reality of the long crimson feather I had carefully wrapped and hidden in the bottom of my knapsack. For whatever reasons, I left my room poorly armed against the numbing heat outside. I wore black velvet trousers tucked into knee-high black leather boots and a white cotton poet’s shirt, and a man’s black satin vest, very old and with tarnished silver buttons. By the time I was halfway across the Mall the shirt clung damply to my back. A blister throbbed insistently on the side of my left ankle. The sun beat against my cheeks like hot fists, and for a few minutes I considered returning to my room to change, or just going back to bed.
But then I saw the boy who’d waved at me the day before, strolling across the parking lot with his Frisbee sticking out of a knapsack. When he saw me he smiled and waved.
A Sign,
I thought. I was always looking for Signs. And so I went on.
The Department of Anthropology was at the far end of campus. Today all that part of the Divine has been built up, given over to the Bramwell Center for Dysfunctional Study and Thought. But then it was mostly trees, scraggly kudzu-hung locust trees and sumac bushes, with that nasty footing of broken bottles and tattered newsprint that you find in city woodlots.
I followed a narrow meandering path. All the tropic glamour that had clung to the city last night was gone, burned away by the remorseless sun. The air smelled faintly of garbage. I wiped my face, panting with relief when finally I saw my destination, rising from steaming sumac mounds like Atlantis from the sea.
I approached it slowly: an ancient building formed of blocks of granite so colossal they might have been stolen from some neglected menhir. Several students lolled on the steps. They had that ruddy heartiness I would soon associate with archaeology majors—sunburned and freckled, hair bleached by the sun, sturdy work boots and fatigues stained red with mud. They smiled but said nothing when I passed, feeling dandyish and stupid in my velvet pants and harlot’s boots. At the door I paused to catch my breath. They didn’t even glance at me as I went inside.
Edgar Hall was like all the buildings at the Divine. Cool and old and silent, even the loudest of voices hushed by the long high corridors with their aqueous light. I found my class on the second floor, the door propped open with a torn textbook. Like my room at Rossetti, the classroom had high arched windows, though these were of stained glass that formed uninspiring geometric patterns, blue, yellow, red, blue, yellow, red. After the soft green light of the corridor, the riotous colors were painful to look upon. For a moment I stood there, shy, embarrassed by my clothes. I nudged the textbook that held the door open. The spine crackled softly, and a signature of pages slipped to the floor.
Child Sacrifice in Edessa, A Study in Ritual Infanticide.
I kicked the pages aside. When I entered the room, four faces in the front swiveled to look at me, then returned to staring at the runic words on a blackboard.
MAGIC, WITCHCRAFT & RELIGION
PROF. BALTHAZAR WARNICK
An unusually small wooden podium had been set beside the chalkboard, and in front of this a slight man stood sorting papers. Except for him and those four students, the place seemed empty. Some thirty-odd seats staggered toward the back of the room. In one of them someone slouched, head flung forward above the desk so that all I saw was a mass of long straight black hair, an arch of neck with a white crescent bitten out of sunburned skin. I had never sat in the front of a classroom in my life, but I didn’t want to be alone amidst all those empty chairs. So I settled on an empty seat near the black-haired apparition, who didn’t look up. I dug into my knapsack, grubbing among wadded tissue, leaky pens, three new notebooks already soiled with ink. For an instant I grazed something sharp: like running my fingers longways across a razor.