Authors: Elizabeth Hand
“I guess. But—”
“The reception’s at seven,” said Oliver. He ducked his head, making agreeable noises as three white-clad friars rushed past us. “If we get separated, we’ll all meet there.”
Angelica laughed—a surprisingly loud and heartfelt laugh, not at all what you expected from such a carefully assembled beauty. She shook her finger at me and said, “Well, Sweeney, let’s you and me
not
get separated. I’ll wait for you outside the dining hall—”
She turned and hurried off, head bowed so that all I could see was her flag of shining curls.
“Come on,” Oliver said. He was staring after Angelica with a hungry expression, but he sounded relieved. “The coffee’s pretty good at the Shrine cafeteria. Then we can hit Dumbarton Oaks.”
“Let me make sure I got my wallet—”
Oliver drew a wad of bills from his shirt pocket. “Don’t worry about it.”
He spun around, like Puck in a play, and added, “Don’t sweat this Molyneux thing. Nothing but legacies. Alumni stuff, old school tie,
you
know. Another Old Boy Network—they’re just
Very
Old Boys, that’s all. Come tonight and you can see for yourself, okay?”
His blue eyes were intensely earnest, almost pleading. I smiled gratefully and nodded.
“Sure,” I said, and flapped the front of my shirt to cool myself. “Whatever you say, boss.”
Oliver grinned, walking backward and gesturing wildly as he began once more to lecture me on the plight of the city’s Dutch elms. I was so busy watching him that I almost didn’t notice the two figures that stood watching us from the curb. A diminutive man in black and, behind him, an almost grotesquely tall figure in an ankle-length black monsignor’s cape, the hood pulled so close around its face that its features were lost to sight, except for the malevolent glitter of a pair of huge and watchful eyes.
M
AGDA FOUND THE LUNULA
on her first dig—not her first archaeological foray, but the first one she supervised. Not coincidentally, it was the first excavation she had carried out without any direct regulation by the
Benandanti.
She was twenty-six years old at the time, in the postgrad program at UC Berkeley, heavily involved with her doctorate and the work that a few years later would become
Daughters of the Setting Sun.
She had gotten some funding through UC Berkeley, but most of it was to come from a wealthy patron named Michael Haring.
He was the CEO of an American automobile corporation: forty-two years old, Harvard-educated, never married. Magda met him at the Divine, at a reception in his honor. Michael Haring was one of the
Benandanti,
though his provenance was industry rather than the more rarefied realms of the university. Still, he had donated funds for several expeditions and financed the renovation of the reading room at Colum Library. He collected Neolithic art, concentrating on those tiny bronze figures of animals that were often found in Celtic graves and burial pits. He also collected young women, and was especially partial to the dark-haired Ivy League types who reminded him of his own youthful dreams of a career in classics.
“That’s him?” Magda was still young enough to be impressed by someone whose picture had appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine. “Michael Haring?”
The man next to her nodded. “Sure is. They put a little plaque in the reading room with his name on it. But hell, he could have rebuilt the whole building.”
“No kidding.” Magda moved away, thoughtfully sipping her Tanqueray and tonic.
For almost two years now she had been seeking financial support for an excavation in northern Estavia. She had received the promise of small grants from the Divine and UCLA, and even a tiny stipend from the National Science Foundation. But both her supporters at the Divine and those at UCLA’s Department of European Archaeology felt that her proposed work was not important enough, dealing as it did with a site associated with a minor European goddess cult.
“Why don’t you go with Harold Mosreich to Yaxchilán?” That had been Balthazar Warnick’s suggestion. “He thinks that one of the stelæ there has a connection with the main pyramid at Chichén Itzá. Plus he has that National Geographic film crew—you know, ‘Mayan Adventure!’ or something like that.”
Magda shook her head. “The Mayans are overdone. This is something
new,
Balthazar,” she said fervently. “We both know that. Why won’t you back me?”
Balthazar had been her advisor since her freshman year. Even then she’d wondered what someone like Balthazar Warnick—a world-renowned antiquities scholar, the man responsible for cataloging the Metropolitan Museum’s Widdecombe Collection of Cycladic Art—was doing teaching an introductory anthropology course, even at a place like the Divine.
Especially
at a place like the Divine.
She’d found out, of course, when he’d tapped her for the
Benandanti.
Since then she and Balthazar had butted heads more than once, most recently over her decision to leave the Divine for UC.
“Not
the place for a scholar of your rank.” Balthazar never raised his voice, but his mouth had been tight as he rifled through a stack of photographs, the most recent mailing from the Chichén Itzá site. “California! Jesus, Magda, you tilt this country on its side and everything loose rolls into California! There’s nothing out there but hopheads and surfers and rioting students. How are you going to get any work done?”
She’d gone anyway. She never told Balthazar that part of Berkeley’s appeal—part of the appeal of the entire West Coast—was precisely that open-mindedness that Balthazar and many of the
Benandanti
dismissed as quackery or, at its worst, a threat to their ancient ways. But she remained on good terms with her old mentor. Remained an active member of the
Benandanti,
even when her own work began to diverge from what they felt was important.
What they did
not
feel was important was the small but growing body of evidence that Magda, and June Harrington before her, had uncovered: all of it pointing to the existence of a matrilineal culture in ancient Europe. Balthazar at least had been courteous, reading preliminary drafts of her articles for
Antiquities,
but he did not feel that Magda’s theories were worth pursuing into the field.
“It’s small potatoes, Magda.” He turned and stared out the window of his office, to where the Shrine’s blue dome glistened in the sun. “Sure, you’ll find something there, but it’s not going to ever
amount
to anything. I mean, look at Catal Huyuk: there’s one of your goddess sites, a big one, too, but it doesn’t really add up to much, does it?”
Magda had listened, her foot tracing Xs on the expensive kilim that covered Balthazar’s floor.
Doesn’t add up to what
you’re
looking for,
she thought furiously. But she said nothing. She hadn’t expected him to agree with her. Balthazar was after much bigger fish than her modest research had discovered. The
Benandanti
had financed digs in Jerusalem, Sardinia, Luxor; at Karbala’ in Iraq, and Katta-Kurgan near Samarkand; in Niger and Jamshedpur and the Hentiyn Mountains in Mongolia. Anyplace where the
Benandanti
had ever built a temple or cathedral of clay or gold or marble was suitable for resurrection. As was anyplace where their ancient enemy had once been worshiped: Athens, Knossos, Ur.
But a minor Balkan river goddess in a Soviet backwater was not exactly the powerful and vengeful deity they had been set to guard against. And so there was no funding for Magda’s project.
Fortunately, there was at least one other person willing to entertain her ideas.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” She smiled brightly at her host. It was a few days after the Divine’s reception for Michael Haring, a few days after Magda had finagled the invitation to visit Haring at his Georgetown town house. “It’s a helmet crest, first century
B.C.
”
Michael Haring turned the figure over in his hand. A little bronze boar, no longer than his middle finger, its raised dorsal spine worked with an intricate pattern of whorls that ended in the tiny beaked heads of cranes. He whistled softly. “It’s absolutely stunning. Where’d you find it, Magda?”
“It was June Harrington’s. She gave it to me a few years ago, for a birthday present.”
“And it came from your proposed site?”
She nodded. “The American Museum mounted an expedition there in 1923, with June and her first husband, Lowell Ackroyd. She’s given me her field notes, and some of the pictures he took. They’re not very good—the photos, I mean, her notebooks are superb—but I can tell, Michael, I can just tell! June says they found three burial pits with evidence of ritual animal sacrifices, and that—”
She gestured at the bronze figurine. “—
that
came from the last one they uncovered, Eleven-A. The neighboring valleys show signs of having very advanced Bronze Age settlements—we’re talking collective burials, hypogea with detailed wall paintings, and heating from thermal springs, maybe even some kind of linear script on some of the pottery fragments. The whole valley’s a potential gold mine. The surrounding heath is pretty marshy, which means there’s a good chance that whatever we come up with could be well preserved.”
Michael nodded, turning the bronze boar between his fingers. “Why did they stop the dig?”
“Winter. The valley becomes completely impassable in winter. The first storm came in early October; June and Lowell and the crew barely got out before the snows blocked off the pass.”
“I see.” Carefully Michael set the boar back into its nest of yellowed newsprint. He reached for the bottle of claret beside it and raised an eyebrow. “More?”
“Please. It’s wonderful.” Magda held out her glass, smiling brilliantly and hoping he wouldn’t notice how nervous she was. “So!” She toasted him and let the first rich mouthful of wine slide down her throat. “What do you think?”
Michael Haring looked around his living room. There were glass cabinets everywhere, some arranged against the wall, others floating like huge crystal pendants amidst the expanse of black leather furniture and white shag carpeting. The cabinets were filled with figures very like the one that rested on his table, and with silver torques, beaked masks, bronze armor in the shape of wings, plaques inlaid with bone and silver and crudely polished stones. He surveyed them all, not with pride but with a certain wistfulness that gave his dark eyes a mournful cast. An Iron Age prince’s ransom in artifacts and metalwork: nearly all of it obtained on the black market, spirited from original holdings in Britain and Czechoslovakia and Turkey and Greece. He was tied up in litigation right now with the embassy of a small country in Eastern Europe, fighting over the disposition of his most-prized treasure: the mummified head of a Bronze Age man found in a peat bog, and now displayed within a tall glass case like a casket stood upon its end.
“I think,” he said carefully, staring at the tea-colored head in its crystal chamber. “I
think
that this could be a very important adventure you’re planning, Miss Magda. For both of us.” And turning, he let his hand rest upon her thigh.
Six months later Magda and her crew were in Çaril Kytur. The site was in a desolate corner of northern Estavia, deep within the Psalgÿuk Mountains—tall, needle-thin spars of quartz and flint that shot up against leaden skies that rarely showed the sun. Like something out of a Dürer etching of Hell, Magda thought, or Murnau’s
Nosferatu.
Even the trees were stunted, crippled pines and alders whose roots poked through the thin acid soil where they sought footing.
It was late July. In the three days it took Magda and her companions to drive from the Estavian capital to Çaril Kytur, they passed only two other vehicles: an empty Intourist bus with Moscow plates, and an ancient grey jitney piled high with wooden cartons, live chickens and ducks tied to its extremities with red twine. The bone-jarring trip was enough to make Magda wish that she’d left Janine, at least, back in Washington.
“This is
not,
like, what my faculty advisor told me to expect,” Janine announced after their second night in the Jeep. “I thought I was going to get to practice my Russian, but there’s nobody
here.”
“Well, we’re stuck with each other now,” Magda said grimly. “So if you want to bail out, start walking.”
No one did. A few hours later they’d reached their destination.
“Oh man,” breathed Nicky D’Amato, another of the triumvirate who’d signed on from the Divine. “Are you sure you read that map right?”
Magda sighed. “I’m sure.”
They stumbled from the Jeep and looked down into the valley of Çaril Kytur, a long narrow spit of land crosshatched with streams that fed into a huge marshy area to the south. It was a dispiriting landscape. The stones dun-colored, pleached with lichen and moss; the few trees hunched against the wind that whistled down through a gap in the mountains to the north. Lowell Ackroyd’s theory had been that a band of Paleolithic hunters was stranded here during one of the minor ice ages, surviving to found the ancient encampment known as Çaril Kytur, Belly of the Moon. Certainly it was hard to imagine why anyone would
choose
to live here. The surrounding mountains were sparsely populated, mostly by shepherds who eked out a living from the barren hillsides and more temperate valleys. Magda had thought the natives would be eager to supplement their meager incomes with what they could earn from assisting on the dig, but that wasn’t the case at all.
“He says they’re not interested.”
George Wayford, the last of the three grad students who had accompanied Magda from D.C., shook his head. They were sitting in front of Magda’s tent—Magda, George, Nicky, Janine—the entire Çaril Kytur crew. Overhead the sky was grey and skinned-looking. A cold wind blew down from the mountain pass to the north, sending skeins of mist racing across the encampment. Magda shivered in her heavy Icelandic wool sweater and wondered why she’d thought this was a better idea than the Yucatan. “He says the whole valley is
stantikic’t
—”