Waking the Moon

by Elizabeth Hand

  “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—”

  “What? Haunted?” Janine interrupted derisively.

  George squatted in front of the hissing campfire and lit a cigarette. “No,” he said, and tossed his match into the flames. George had majored in Slavic languages at Georgetown, and was hoping to find linguistic links between the Estavians of the Psalgÿuk range and the neighboring Cuclterinyi culture in the Transylvanian Alps, and even modern Crete. “Isch’raval, that would be haunted. This is more like tainted.”

  “But they’re not coming. That’s what you’re telling us, right? That we are it as far as personnel goes—” Nicky looked balefully at his three companions, then picked up a stone and shied it at the Jeep. “Fuckin’ A, I knew we should have called first.”

  “Called?” Magda laughed in spite of herself. “Christ, Nicky, there’s not a phone for seventy miles!” She got to her feet, rubbing her hands and doing a mental inventory. “Look, we don’t need anyone else, not really. We’ll start right in with the shaft at Eleven-A. That’s the one June said they’d just opened when they had to leave. It’s where they found that boar helmet crest—”

  (now part of Michael Haring’s collection)

  “—and it won’t be as much work as digging out a totally new site. We should be able to handle it on our own.”

  Janine and Nicky shot her dark looks, but George was already heading for the makeshift lean-to where their tools were stored. “All right then,” Magda said, and started after him.

  It took them four days just to dig through the accumulated debris and soil that had silted over the old site. But once they’d cleared away the dirt and rotting shrubs, the excavation that June Harrington had named Eleven-A proved to be remarkably well preserved. Nearly fifty years had passed since the original team from the American Museum had set up scaffolding around the burial shaft. But when they reached the first level, Magda and her students found that the timbers placed by Lowell Ackroyd were still holding back the chamber’s earthen walls.

  “I’d feel better if we had some new beams there,” George announced, staring dubiously at the sagging timbers.

  “I’m not climbing down otherwise,” Janine said flatly, peering into the dim reaches of the pit.

  Magda nodded and took the shovel from Janine’s hands. “Well, then, I guess you and Nicky can start cutting down trees.”

  By the end of the first week they had erected a second scaffold around the first, the whole shaky edifice sunk twenty feet into the earth. Curiosity and greed had gotten the better of the natives in the nearest village. Now Magda had a half dozen laborers helping to pull up buckets of soil and gravel. Janine carried these to a system of seines and screens set up nearby, and sifted through the debris for anything that might hold a clue to the nature of the shaft. So far they’d found potsherds, and a few bones that were probably a dog’s, but nothing more dramatic—no figurines, no human remains, nothing to make this site worth much more time and effort.

  “I know it’s a burial pit,” Magda said stubbornly. She was balanced precariously atop a ladder sunk into the soft marshy ground at the bottom of the site, sipping her morning brew from a battered tin mug. She grimaced and stared at the cup’s murky contents, a concoction made from powdered beetroot that was the locals’ answer to coffee. “God, this is awful—no wonder they’re all so surly.”

  “You’re gonna need something besides dog bones and a little bronze boar to determine that,” George replied mildly from a few steps below her on the ladder. “Chasar—” Chasar was the spokesman for the locals. “—Chasar says this hole is fancr’ted—unholy, you know, profane. Not a sacred site—”

  “Or it could mean it was a pre-Christian site, which obviously it is,” Magda retorted. “And if the locals have some vague memory of that, they’d think it was profane, meaning pagan, meaning bad juju. Unholy,” she added, frowning for emphasis.

  “Nah. This could’ve been a midden, someone might have pitched that ol’ boar in here—” George flicked at the wall and sent a miniature avalanche of pebbles and dirt flying to the bottom of the shaft. “Or it could have fallen out of somebody’s Neolithic pocket—”

  “Do you mind?”

  From the belly of the pit Nicky shouted amidst the hail of stones, brandishing a shovel. He wore waders and a totally useless plastic Soviet-made hard hat, and was covered with mud from head to toe. “Dammit, George!”

  “Sorry, man.” George waved apologetically, shifting his weight on the ladder. Magda realigned herself to keep from falling. “But it’s been over a week, Magda—I really, really think we should abandon this site and check out that mound by the marsh. There could be human remains there, and the chances of preservation are so much better—”

  “One more day,” said Magda. She and George had been having this argument for almost a week now. “June said she thought it was a burial site, and she wouldn’t—”

  “June is senile, Magda! That was fifty years ago; they still believed in Piltdown Man—”

  “One more day,” Magda said stubbornly. Without looking, she turned her mug upside down and dumped its contents. “Okay? Just—”

  “Goddammit, Magda!” Nicky shrieked from below.

  George and Magda burst out laughing. Magda shook the hair from her eyes and smiled. “Let that be a warning, Wayford.”

  “Okay, okay,” George said, and grinned. The ladder shimmied as he climbed back to the top. “One more day.”

  That night she couldn’t sleep. Part of it was anxiety over abandoning June Harrington’s site. George was right, of course. The shaft at Eleven-A had yielded little in the way of data, a few bits of bone and fired clay that might have been found anywhere—nothing remarkable at all. The mound near the swampy end of the valley might well hold more interesting material, and there was always the hope of finding human or animal remains preserved by the bog.

  “Damn,” Magda swore aloud. She lay inside her tent, arms folded behind her head, and stared at the canvas ceiling. Outside the moon must be nearly full. The tent’s worn green fabric glowed so that she felt as though she were floating in a phosphorescent sea, the cool breeze carrying the scent of the tiny night-blooming stonecrops that were the only flowers that grew in the valley.

  One more day.

  There must have been some reason why June Harrington had been convinced of the site’s importance, something besides a little bronze boar and a few canine tibiae
. It was the fragment of the lunula, of course: such a small thing to build a life’s work on, and lost now in the Museum. Magda wished she had questioned her mentor more carefully, but June had been so certain, her usually restrained site notes so exuberant—

  …Yesterday at Eleven-A I uncovered an artifact of hammered silver, a luniform pendant the size of my little finger. Of course it is only a fragment remaining of what must have been an extensive burial site; but judging by the workmanship the pendant came not from anywhere near here but from the Sea of Crete. There is a marked similarity between the devices inscribed upon it and the record of those figures engraved upon the so-called “Lost Ring of Minos”—this curvilinear charm might well prove the authenticity of the lost Ring, if only it could be found again! Quite beside myself with excitement and trying not to read too much into this single artifact but Lowell agrees, there is a good chance the entire valley was sacred to Inachus; that is, Leucothea, or the White Goddess, herself an avatar of the Great Goddess of the ancient Minoans. Which would, of course, prove my theory that trade routes existed between the Hittite and Minoan cultures. And Harold Sternham (bless him! he seemed a stick at first, but I am grateful now of his patronage!), dear Harold may be correct in his assertion that the minor nymph called by the natives Othiym, affiliated as she is with the river of that name which once ran through here, is related to that same river-goddess Ino or Inachus who was worshiped in Crete…

  There had been a curious addendum to this entry. Curious because June so seldom revised her first impressions—she was in the habit of being right. And so Magda had been surprised to see something scrawled in the margin, a quotation that had obviously been recorded decades after the original entry.

  I should never have taken the lunular fragment from the site. “The dark aspect of the antique mother-goddess has not yet reappeared in our civilization.”

  And after this, the words:

  No: She Lives.

  Magda started as a sudden gust sent the tent’s flaps and lines humming, and an eddy of dust flying up from the door panels.

  “The hell with it,” she said aloud, and scrambled from her sleeping bag.

  Outside the night air struck her like a clapper to a bell, making the blood sing inside her head and her ears throb painfully. She shivered in her heavy sweater and held the flashlight close to her chest, as though its pale beam might give some warmth. In front of George’s tent she hesitated. Even with the shrill wind she could hear his breathing, loud and measured as the pulse of a metronome. For a long moment she stood there, as though waiting for him to rise and come out to join her. But of course he didn’t wake, didn’t stir at all. She turned away.

  She walked carefully between the other tents, her work boots sending gravel flying as she tried to tiptoe through the loose scree of pebbles and sandy soil that covered the valley floor. She paused again after she passed Janine’s flimsy little Sears Roebuck shelter, with its absurd red-striped awning and Janine’s wool socks hung out to dry.

  “Janine?” Magda called softly, tilting her head. “Nicky?”

  She saw no one: only the shadows of tents and stones, unnaturally large and black in the brilliant moonlight. But she had heard something, a faint noise like the tiniest of footsteps, or pattering rain. She waited, holding her breath; but the sound died away into the breeze. Finally she took another step. And stopped.

  “Ohh!—get away, no—!”

  It was as though she had walked into a whirlwind. All around her were falling leaves, hundreds of them: livid grey-green in the cold light, rushing up from the ground in a whirring explosion of dirt and dusty foliage. Magda shrieked and struck at them as they whirled and fell, brushing against her cheeks as they fluttered everywhere, tangling in her hair and slithering between her fingers. A scent of damp earth came with them, a smell like bitter chocolate. When she struck one with her open palm it exploded in a damp burst, as though she had crushed a rotten fruit.

  “Jesus!—ugh, go away!”

  She stumbled forward, beating at the air and whimpering, as the leaves covered the ground in a rippling carpet. For a moment the air was still. Then to her horror they rose once more from the rocky earth, fluttering and rustling, their fragile stems and tattered fronds beating against her like tiny living things as they climbed the legs of her jeans and clung to her sweater.

  And suddenly Magda realized what they were—not leaves but insects, hundreds, thousands of them—wings crinkled and mottled in uncanny imitation of dying foliage, their legs and bodies elongated to resemble twigs. They filled the sky, blotting out the moon. She choked on the scent of bitter chocolate. Her legs felt bound as the insects clung to her jeans; she felt something brush against her throat, the soft impression of legs ticking slowly across her cheek.

  “God damn it!” she yelled, and fled.

  She ran for a few yards, wielding her flashlight like a bat. Then she had to stop, panting as she tried to catch her breath, hands raised protectively to her face. Her cheek felt wet. When she lowered her hands she gasped.

  “What the hell?”

  The insects were gone. Magda was so startled she shrieked again and jumped backward, caught herself and turned slowly, holding her flashlight at arm’s length as she swept its beam up and down her body.

  Nothing. On her sweater, her jeans, her face: nothing at all. When she looked back she saw only the empty gravel in front of Janine’s tent. A single leaf twirled beneath the canvas awning and disappeared. She heard no sound except for the wind rattling distant branches. Her own tent stood off by itself. From a makeshift tripod her mud-stained rugby shirts and jeans hung drying, and moved like her own shadow in the breeze.

  Magda let her breath out with a shudder. She might have dreamed it all. Only, as she brushed furtively at her sweater, her hand scraped against a tiny leg caught like a splinter in the coarse wool. As she walked away from the camp, she smelled the rich odor of bitter chocolate.

  After a few minutes she quit trembling. Her heart slowed, she relaxed her grip on the flashlight and even grinned a little, imagining what June Harrington would have had to say about that.

  Tonight at the moon’s full we were set upon by a swarm of leaf insects, Phasmida luridium. Harold has noted that at Mount Ida these are sacred to the Bee-goddess Melissa, and representations have been found on kraters from the so-called Dark Age…

  She kept walking, not paying attention to where she was going, intent only on calming herself and trying to remember enough details of the swarm to relate convincingly to George in the morning. So it was that when she stumbled on the sharp edge of a boulder she looked up in surprise, and saw that she was heading for Eleven-A.

  “Huh,” she murmured, and laughed.

  Overhead the sky was clear, the color of a mussel shell and nearly starless. The moon had risen above the eastern edge of the valley. Where its light fell upon Çaril Kytur, it was as though someone had streaked the valley with chalk. Magda switched off her flashlight and tilted her head back until all she saw was the swollen moon. When she looked away pearly swabs of light still clung to her vision. The wind whistled down the channels it had found in the ragged bluffs. A fresh icy scent filled Magda’s nostrils, like rain on clean stone, and washed away the bitter odor of the swarm. She slid her hands inside the sleeves of her sweater and shivered.

  It must be long after midnight; that cold thin hour when the dreaded keres of ancient Greece moved freely between their own dark world and this one. Magda smiled again, thinking of June Harrington and her endless ranking of specters and demons and harpies, all the nightmare eidolons that haunted the past. She would love hearing about the leaf insects. Magda shook her head ruefully. A hundred yards or so from where she stood, the rickety scaffolding of Eleven-A rose from the barren landscape.

  “All right.” Her voice sounded shaky, so she repeated the words, louder this time. “Let’s have a smoke.”

  She felt in the pocket of her jeans until she found the cello-wrapped packet of cigarettes she h
ad gotten from Chasar a few days earlier. She’d traded him a half dozen of her Old Golds for three times as many of the local smoke—stubby hand-rolled cigarillos heavily laced with soft amber chunks of Turkish hashish. She lit one and smoked slowly, standing with one hand resting against the trunk of a wizened tree as she stared at the shadows in the lunar valley before her.

  It was weird, how different the place looked by moonlight. Not just the normal difference you would expect between day and night, or between the night of a full moon and any other. It was much stranger than that, stranger and more unsettling. And, of course, the hash made it all even more intense, and the memory of the swarm.

  Magda shuddered and took another long drag on her cigarette. As the moon rose higher, the chalky outlines of things grew burnished, until stones and withered trees and rocky outcroppings all took on an October glow. In the hollows, the tiny stonecrops covered the thin soil in a pale yellow carpet. Above Eleven-A hung the moon, placid, ripe as a pear about to fall. From an unseen roost a bulbul sang, its bubbling voice as improbably lovely as the night-blooming flowers.

  “Wow,” Magda breathed. Smoke hung in a pall about her face as her eyes widened. “Too fucking much.”

  The bulbul’s impassioned song rose and fell and rose again. A sweet smoky scent hung over everything, and Magda had one of those mind-jarring stoned moments when she wondered if she had somehow wandered far from the camp, far from Çaril Kytur itself, and come somehow to another country, the landscape in a dream.

  But that was stupid; that was just the hash. She took a final drag from her cigarette and tossed it into the shadows. Then she headed for Eleven-A.

  Even through the heavy soles of her work boots she could feel the bite of stones and thorns. She had no idea what time it was. Probably no more than an hour or two until dawn, judging from the moon. She thought of returning to bed, but in spite of the hashish she wasn’t tired—fear and adrenaline and wonder had purged all the sleep from her body. She stared balefully at the scrim of canvas and two-by-fours that hid the excavation.