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.
“Maaaa…”
His voice was a child’s, soft, whimpering, the sound fading into a hiss as air leaked from his throat. He staggered and fell at her feet, and she stared down to see where the blood ran in a bright shining stream from the dark cleft left by the lunula. Her hand remained upraised, the silver crescent an eye peering into the shaft. Along its curved edge blood gathered in small black beads. Like water on an iron grill the beads danced and ran one into another, until they vanished and only fine white wisps of smoke remained. A metallic smell filled the air. Magda’s tongue grew swollen, dry and with the taste of something ferrous, flaking rust or dried blood clinging to the back of her throat until she retched and pitched forward onto the ground.
When she came to she was lying with her face pressed into the soft earth. Bits of dirt and gravel stuck to her lips. Her hair was matted with soil. She pushed herself onto her elbows, coughing. Her right hand still clutched the lunula, a leaden curl of metal now, all its glory gone; but her hands bore a fine red cross-hatching of fresh scars and she could feel a dull ache opposite her heart, as though she had been punched.
She got to her feet, brushed the dirt from her clothes and turned to look for her flashlight. That was when she saw George Wayford. He was lying
on his side, his body twisted into a grotesquely fetal position: arms curled inward, legs bunched up against his solar plexus.
“George?”
She bent over his corpse, her fingers stretching until they stroked the curve of his jaw. Gingerly she cupped her hand beneath his chin, tilting it until his head moved and she could see the wound beneath, as clean and smooth as though it had been executed with a razor. The blood made a stiff crimson sheet of his T-shirt, crumpled into hard folds like lava or ice; but the flesh of his throat was smooth and white, almost translucent. She marveled at the concentric rings inside, flesh and cartilage and sinew. She reached to touch it, then recoiled. From the corner of her eyes she had glimpsed his, dull and speckled with dirt. He had fallen so that his glasses were mashed into his face, and she could see the fine network of broken capillaries radiating from the shattered glass like twin spider’s webs.
“Oh, god.”
She stumbled to her feet, frantically wiping her hands on her legs. She turned and ran the few steps to the ladder, stopped and tried to calm herself, tried to keep the nausea from overwhelming her. She mounted the ladder, then looked back.
In the dimness the two bodies lay just a few feet apart, their posture nearly identical. It was like two stages in a time-lapsed sequence showing decay: before and much, much after. There would be feasting and song, exultant wailing from sisters and wives and mothers; but then the scarab beetles would come, and the elegantly segmented worms and ivory-billed vultures, and smooth-skinned boys with their arms full of asphodel and handfuls of red dust to be rubbed into the bones…
No.
She whimpered. This was crazy; she’d gone insane; it was the hash or something worse, some hallucinogenic poison percolating in her brain all these years. Acid is Groovy, Kill the Pigs! But even as she clutched at the worn ladder she heard something, a low moaning that rapidly grew louder and louder, filling the chamber like a torrent of black water pouring down. It wasn’t until something struck her cheek that she looked up and saw that the circle of light at the mouth of the shaft had been eclipsed, tongues of shadow licking fiercely at its sides as gravel and rusted tools began falling everywhere. Eleven-A was collapsing.
“No!”
Her voice was swallowed as she scrambled upward, the ladder bouncing against the earthen wall as huge chunks of compacted soil slid and fell away to either side. All she could see was the shaft above her and far away its opening, a small dead moon. She screamed, choking on dirt and debris; but still she went on, forcing her way out, until finally she could feel the top of the ladder; there were no more rungs, no more darkness, only grass-strewn earth and light and air. She scrambled from the pit and rolled away, heedless of her torn clothes, a place on her right arm that ached as though it had been caught between hammer and anvil. Behind her the rumbling grew to a thunderous roar, so loud her entire body shook. Then, abruptly, silence.
She lay on the ground, weeping softly. The echo of that final explosive surge died away. She could hear other sounds—Nicky’s shouts, Janine yelling her name in a shrill, panicked tone. When she tried to wipe the crust of dirt and leaf mold from her face, her hand grew sticky with blood.
“Magda! Oh my god, Magda, what’s happening, where’s George, where’s George?”
Nicky helped her to her feet. “Magda? Can you hear me? Magda?”
She pushed him away and barreled past the hysterical Janine, looking wildly for the excavation site.
It was gone. Anything that had ever been recognizable as the result of human engineering had vanished. There was only a great concave declivity like a sinkhole, fresh earth and stones strewn across its surface. From the soft dirt protruded two small nubbins of wood like fingers or horns: the top of Chasar’s ladder. Magda stared at them in stunned disbelief. They were all that remained of Eleven-A.
“…you were down there? Goddammit, Magda, I can’t believe you were down there!” Now Nicky was hysterical, his voice rising shrilly as he ran around the perimeter of the site, searching futilely for some way down, a passage, an air chimney, anything. “George! Can you hear me? George—”
“Of course he can’t hear you,” Magda said dully. She turned to where the sun hung above the horizon, the violet edges of the mountains in bold relief against the thin gold light.
“We have to get help—the Jeep, drive into town, someone to dig him out—”
She nodded mutely as Janine screamed on and on and Nicky shouted at her: as though his rage might somehow make things different. But after a few more minutes she let the two of them hurry her to the Jeep and help her into the back, where she lay on a heap of burlap. She tried not to cry out as the vehicle leapt forward, jouncing over rocks and gulleys as Janine’s voice rang desperately through the chilly morning air.
“We’ll find Chasar, right, he’s always there this time of day, why the hell don’t we have a goddamn shortwave—”
Magda bit her lip, wincing from pain and the effort of keeping silent. She knew they’d never find George. Chasar wouldn’t take on the job, and neither would anyone else. There was no way she and Nicky and Janine could get down there alone. The Çaril Kytur dig was finished. A thousand years from now someone else would discover George lying beside that other skeleton and marvel at the eerie symmetry, two victims in identical posture buried millennia apart in this desolate European wasteland.
At the thought Magda began to weep again. The ache in her breast grew stronger with each shuddering breath she took. She turned onto her side, still crying, and drew her hands upward. She grabbed at the damp weight of her sweater, kneading the wool as she tried to find some way to make the pain stop.
And then she felt it, cold and sharp as glass. The twin spurs of the crescent had been jammed into her, with enough force that they sliced through the heavy wool of her sweater and T-shirt before piercing her right breast. Magda closed her eyes. Her fingers ticked along its edge, feeling the cool bite of silver against her skin and the curve of her breast rising beside it, a solid aching mass. She expected the metal to cut her fingers but it did not; it lay there like something that had been planted in her, watered with her blood and waiting to bear fruit.
For a long moment she lay with eyes closed. The Jeep coughed and rattled, mercifully drowning out Janine’s voice. Magda wondered vaguely if she would lose consciousness, but it seemed that she hurt too much for that. Her entire body shimmered with pain.
Finally she couldn’t stand it anymore. She pulled herself up slightly, bracing herself with her feet against the floor and trying not to go flying as the Jeep made another precarious turn. With both hands she grabbed the edge of the lunula and, with a choking gasp, pulled it free. Agony exploded within her and she shouted, but neither Janine nor Nicky could hear her over the engine. With a grinding roar the Jeep lurched forward and began its treacherous ascent of the valley’s mouth. Magda pressed her hand to her breast, trying to staunch the wound. There was an incredible amount of blood—her T-shirt was soaked, her sweater bright crimson from collar to cuff—but she knew she’d be all right. She withdrew her hand, her fingers gloved with blood and dirt, and turned to look down into Çaril Kytur.
A shimmer of mist lay across the valley, softening the harsh edges of rocks and crippled trees. For an instant she had a glimpse of the ancient riverbed, the shadowy outlines of bawns and temples rising from its banks. Then it was gone, burned to nothing by the sun. She turned away, squinting in the painful light, and looked at what she held.
It was still there; it was real. She had been wrong—something besides Chasar’s ladder had survived the devastation of Eleven-A. As she raised her hand the Jeep’s groaning roar faded, and with it the dull buzzing of the others’ voices. A thin shaft of sunlight pierced the back of the vehicle. There was a smell of rain. Very faintly, as from some immense distance, she could hear the high plaintive cry of a bulbul seeking shelter from the day. Magda tilted her head and slowly drew her hand to her face.
Against her ruddy palm the lunula gleamed, t
he sun igniting its etched surface so that she could see all the moons there at once, new moon, full moon, dark, and within its curving bands of light the contours of a face, shuttered eyes and mouth half-open to the dawn, a sheen of blood staining her cheeks and lip and chin: Artemis, Durga, Cybele, Hecate, Inachus, Kali, Hel…
The Great Mother, lover and slayer of Her faithful son.
Othiym Lunarsa. The Woman in the Moon.
CHAPTER 5
The Sound of Bones and Flutes
WE NEVER MADE IT to Dumbarton Oaks. “Actually,” Oliver said, steam from his coffee clouding his glasses, “I think they’re closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.”
I tilted my cup until I could see my face reflected in it. “That’s okay. I don’t know where I would’ve gotten a bike.”
Medieval History had come and gone, then Introduction to Archaeology, followed by Oliver’s Early Greek Drama and my Philosophy 101. We hadn’t moved from our booth in the Shrine cafeteria, except to help ourselves to unlimited refills from a pair of battered plastic thermoses on a side table along the wall. Oliver took great interest in the endless stream of tour groups that filed through.
“Now watch them,” Oliver announced, tilting his nose toward a claque of grey-haired women. “Fill their plates because it’s an all-you-can-eat thing, but they won’t eat any of it, except the salad. Just watch.”
Ten minutes later, the women left. Oliver leapt from his seat and sidled up to their empty booth. He returned a moment later with two laden plates.
“See?” he said triumphantly, setting one of them before me. “You like shrimp creole? She didn’t even touch it.”
I stared at my plate. The shrimp creole did indeed look untouched. Only a fastidious bite taken from a biscuit, and a smear of lipstick on the water glass showed that he hadn’t just filled the plate himself. Looking at it made me feel ill.
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