Waking the Moon

by Elizabeth Hand

  “Waldo.”

  “Whatever. He was nuts, fucking nuts, di ba? Tried to poison some teacher that failed him. With rat poison. Once he shot at my brother with a bow and arrow.”

  “He’s a Buddhist monk now.”

  “Figures. These guys—” He gestured disdainfully at the well-dressed crowd surrounding us. “—these guys tapped my brother years ago, di ba? When we were in Manila my mother was a bruja, you know, a—a midwife and—well, some other shit—but then she had a run-in with President Marcos’s chauffeur and they made things tough for us. My father died of bangungot—you know what that is? Bad juju, Schoolgirl, very bad stuff—and we had to leave Manila, leave the whole fucking country. My uncle lives in D.C. so we came here, but then he’s got like some weird connection with this place and my mom gets plugged into all that shit. And my brother Nestor, they think he’s brujo like my mother, they give him some tests and finally he gets a scholarship.”

  He shook his head and giggled softly. ‘“Religious Studies.’ But, like, this is the only way we get to go to college, di ba, so who’s going to say no?”

  I nodded as though this was all perfectly normal. “What’s your brother doing now?”

  “He’s got this band, Euthanasia. They play at the Atlantis sometimes.” He sighed. “Me, I’m only here ’cause they gave me a full scholarship. Nobody gives scholarships to poets.”

  He raised his eyes thoughtfully. “But what are you doing here, hija? How’d you hook up with those two?”

  I shrugged, stabbed at the floor with the metal toe of one boot. “I don’t know. They just started talking to me in Warnick’s class.”

  “Huh. Talking.”

  Baby Joe looked disgusted, as though this was an obvious setup. But he said nothing more, only gazed through hooded eyes at the room in front of us.

  I fell silent. I stared at my feet and wondered if I should cut my losses and just sneak out now. It seemed clear to everyone I met that I didn’t belong at this reception; didn’t belong with Angelica, and probably didn’t belong at the Divine. The three vodka tonics made me feel weepy and hopeless. I thought of my parents and how much it was costing them to send me here, how much they’d save if I returned home and commuted to SUNY Purchase. I thought of the classes I’d skipped, and the copy of The Golden Ass I wasn’t reading.

  “Shit,” I said under my breath. I glanced up, hoping I might see Angelica, or maybe even Oliver. But there was only Baby Joe, smoking and brooding like an extra in a bad French movie. Angelica seemed to have disappeared, and Oliver, I was starting to suspect, wasn’t going to show at all.

  So I turned back to the party going on without me; and who I saw was Professor Warnick. Amidst all that extravagant finery he looked absurdly small and demure in a pearl grey morning suit and striped ascot, his dark hair swept back from his face. He was watching the crowd with a bland expression, his blue eyes guarded but calm.

  It was the figure standing behind him that made my neck prickle: the same extraordinarily tall figure I’d glimpsed outside of Reardon Hall that morning. Only now, instead of a simple cape, he wore robes that evoked some bizarre liturgy. Cloth of a purple so deep and rich it was almost black, but with a sheen that picked up the light and shot forth a phosphorescent glow. They swept about his emaciated form, cuffs and hem trimmed with golden ropes and cords and tassels. The effect should have been ludicrous, Duchess of Malfi meets Star Trek; but it wasn’t. It was terrifying.

  “Hey, Baby Joe,” I said hoarsely.

  My voice died in my throat as the figure turned. Its hooded face bobbed, like a blind hound trying to pick up a scent, and I shrank against the wall. I was ridiculously certain that he was looking for me. I recalled the figures in my room last night. This could have been one of them, only even more frightening, because no one else took any notice of him at all. He towered a good three heads above Professor Warnick—cadaverously thin, head weaving from side to side, the robes looped about his frame like winding sheets.

  “Baby Joe,” I hissed, but still Baby Joe didn’t hear. He was staring absently into space, nodding in time to some private music. Between his fingers the cigarette had burned out. I started to reach for him, then stopped.

  This was crazy. Whether it was the vodka or nerves or just bad vibes, I was acting like I’d lost my mind, or at least the part of it that should tell me how to behave at a party I’d crashed. I took a deep breath and forced myself to look up.

  Professor Warnick and his companion were gone. In their place stood a group of boisterous undergraduates who seemed to have all just come from the same boozy pregame show. I glanced around, certain that I’d be able to find that towering emaciated figure; but it was gone. It might never have been there at all.

  My fear faded into drunken ennui. I watched the laughing students and tried not to feel envious and stupid and headachy. Finally I turned to Baby Joe and asked, “So. You live in D.C?”

  “Huh?” Baby Joe started, gazing in surprise at his dead cigarette and then looking suspiciously at the crowd. “Hey, hija—isn’t that Barbie Doll? Over there with that famous lady professor—?”

  I turned. For a moment I glimpsed Angelica between waves of black tie and silk, her auburn hair shimmering. She was talking excitedly to a woman who kept glancing over her shoulder and motioning Angelica closer to her.

  “Her?”

  Baby Joe nodded. “Yeah—you know, that archaeologist. I forget her name.”

  I tried to get a better look at the famous lady professor archaeologist. She was maybe in her forties, brown-haired and sexy in a scholarly kind of way. Not exactly pretty but interesting-looking, with intense dark eyes and a Mary Quant haircut and probably the same frosted lipstick she’d been wearing since grad school. The same minidress too: a sleeveless black-and-white sheath with big eyes on it. A little weird, but the sort of thing I could imagine an archaeologist might think was appropriate formal wear. Whoever she was, Angelica looked more excited than I’d seen her all day I thought of joining them, but another wave of partiers swept through and I lost sight of them.

  “You want a drink, hija?” Baby Joe pulled at his shirt collar to expose where it had been repaired with black thread. “Sweeney? You look like you need one.”

  “Yeah, I guess I do. Thanks.”

  He started for the bar, pausing to stare at my T-shirt and boots. “Blue Cheer. Well, fuck me. Di ba, okay, maybe you’ll be okay…”

  I walked with him, this time accepting the Pall Mall he offered me, and for good measure ordered two vodka tonics.

  Magda Kurtz, the famous lady professor of European Archaeology, had come tonight against her better judgment. It meant canceling her flight back to the West Coast, which was an expensive indulgence, and now she wouldn’t get enough sleep, which was always annoying.

  But mostly, it was dangerous. All summer she’d been playing fox and hounds with the Benandanti, tiptoeing around the Divine like the renegade student she still felt like. While her own students here treated her like the prophet of a new age, the other teachers were more circumspect. Distant, at best, like Balthazar Warnick—and why were so many of them at the Divine still men! You’d think they’d at least make some recruitment effort!—at worst, cavalier or disdainful or even suspicious of her work. So different from Berkeley, where her theories were already part of the core curriculum.

  But then the Divine had always been like that—so far ahead of its time in many ways, positively medieval in others. The Anthropology Department especially seemed hardly to have changed at all since she’d left. Sometimes, she thought wryly, it seemed like it hadn’t changed since Malinowski’s day.

  A lot of that was Balthazar’s doing, of course. He’d been the one to approve her summer term here—it had been his suggestion, in fact, and Magda still wasn’t sure why the invitation had come. But once offered the chance to return, she’d been surprised at how strong her feelings were for the place, how very much she wanted to be here again, even in the middle of the summer.

/>   So Magda had come. She hadn’t been back since the disastrous Çaril Kytur expedition. That was how they all still referred to it, even Magda herself. As in the words of the Washington Post article that had heralded her return this summer—

  “…that disastrous Çaril Kytur expedition from which, like a phoenix from the ashes, Magda Kurtz arose with her landmark theories of the matristic cultures of ancient Europe.”

  Here at the Divine the students loved her. Professor Kurtz, with her wry, rather droll teaching style. And, of course, her theories, and her books—the trade paperback edition of Daughters of the Setting Sun had recently become a campus best-seller. And the legendary parties she held in her tower room on campus, where a few of the chosen would pass around Magda’s ancient ivory opium pipe with its embellishment of tiny grinning evil-eyed lions, and smoke opium—Real opium! from Nepal! She was Too Much!—and where, as the night burned to dawn, one (and sometimes two) of the more comely undergraduate boys might be discreetly steered toward the little back room, while the rest of her admirers were directed to the door. Oh yes: Professor Kurtz was famous.

  But always she was aware of how the other, older members of the Benandanti regarded her. Not quite, not necessarily, as a traitor. Certainly there had been others before Magda Kurtz who left the Divine, to carry on the Benandanti’s work in the government and the arts and even at other places of learning. But Magda’s work had reawakened an old, old feud, perhaps the very oldest one of all.

  So this summer she had kept to her students, and to her tower room. Her little romances and necromancies helped pass the time, and the Divine’s extraordinary library, and of course all the other pleasures of the City on the Hill. She avoided the other faculty members as much as she could, especially Balthazar Warnick; but it had been difficult. As always she found herself falling under the diminutive Balthazar’s spell, his peculiar blend of wistfulness and melancholy and biting wit.

  I might have fallen in love with him, she thought, slightly wistful herself now as she sipped her champagne and gazed absently across the crowded reception room of Garvey Hall. It might have all been different then, it might have—

  But really it could never have been anything but the way it was.

  “We serve at different temples now. Different temples, different gods,” Balthazar had said a few weeks earlier, over lunch in one of the sunlit upper rooms of the Old Ebbitt Grill. It had always been one of Magda’s favorite places in the city. Balthazar had taken her there when they first met, awkward student and ageless mentor, and ordered her a Clyde’s omelet—bacon and spinach and sour cream—and kir in a round goblet. It was the most sophisticated meal she had ever eaten, and the first time she’d drunk wine from a wineglass.

  “Different gods,” he repeated, and his voice sounded sad.

  Outside the afternoon traffic strained past, inching toward the Old Executive Office Building and the White House. Magda sipped her kir. Balthazar continued to stare at her with those piercing electric blue eyes.

  “Perhaps we always have,” he added.

  Magda answered smoothly, pretending to misunderstand.

  “Oh, but it’s always the same old ivory tower, Balthazar, you know that! And you’ll see, I’ve been right all along. Soon every student at the Divine will have read Tristes Tropiques and Of Grammatology—”

  Balthazar made a face, and Magda laughed. “Well, I’m still very grateful you let me teach here this summer, Balthazar.”

  He smiled. “But who could turn away the lovely and brilliant Magda Kurtz?”

  “You refused Paul de Man.”

  “You’re much better looking.”

  Magda stared at him, amused, but then she saw how Balthazar’s eyes had clouded, blue shivering to grey.

  “It’s nothing but theory, Balthazar. Just another way of looking at the world.”

  “Theories can be dangerous things,” said Balthazar. His tone was light, but she saw how his eyes were cold and parlous as fast-moving water. “Remember Rousseau and romanticism.”

  “I can’t sleep for thinking about them,” Magda said, laughing; but that gaze had stayed with her for a long time, like a bad chill.

  She shivered at the memory, quickly composing herself as a passing couple greeted her. It was exhausting, keeping up the pretense of being just another Molyneux scholar made good in the ivory tower. She knew there’d been talk. Within the legions of Benandanti there was always talk. Conspirators wormed through its long history, brazen or retiring or deadly, but always there. In this the Benandanti were like the Vatican, only far more ancient. Like the Inquisitors of old they had their little ways, their probings and inquests, scrutators and catechists, their spies and delators and indagations. Cabals of old men—the oldest of old men—and they gabbled and gossiped like crones. Women had gotten a bad rap for being gossips, Magda thought bitterly. She had never known a group more eager to snipe and speculate than old Catholic priests and the Benandanti. No better place than the Divine (or the Vatican) for that.

  Though, unlike the Vatican, the Benandanti left no histories for the world to read. Most of their cadastrals and cartularies had perished with the libraries of Alexandria, after which time the Benandanti became a nomadic sect. They maintained their eternal vigilance from behind the marble clerestories of the Eternal City, and the Kaaba in Mecca; from the Maharajah’s pavilion at Varanasi, and Italy’s octagonal Castel del Monte and even, very briefly, the Old Map and Print Room on the fourth floor of Harrods. It was not until the colonization of the Americas that the Benandanti found at last a permanent home, a place where all the old wise men of the Indo-European steppes could settle to grow even older and wiser, and from the dusty classrooms of the Divine watch their protégés make their way into this brave new world.

  And now that an unmistakable Sign had come, those at the Divine would be especially watchful against traitors. Without thinking, Magda touched the amulet at her throat.

  In hoc signo vinces. Othiym Lunarsa, Othiym, Anat, Innana, Othiym evohe! Othiym haïyo.

  The ancient tongues ran together but she knew them all. In this sign we shall conquer, Othiym. We exult! We praise you.

  She’d been recklessly stupid the other evening, leaving her room with the spent Hand of Glory and the other remnants of her craft in it. That was what happened when you toyed with the naphaïm—they made you feel indestructible, made you forget that while they could soar above it, you were likely to plunge into the inferno and burn. Her fingers played along the smooth edge of the silver crescent, the half-conscious refrain still echoing in her head.

  Othiym, Anat, Innana…

  But she should watch her thoughts here—especially here—shroud them in nonsense or dull mental chatter. She closed her eyes and dredged up one of George’s dopey verses, composed on that endless flight to Estavia—

  Magda is so very mean

  She’s a Ramapithecene

  When she hangs around with us

  She’s Australopithecus.

  Someone touched her elbow and she started. One of her students, holding a bottle of Heineken and peering at her in concern.

  “You okay, Professor Kurtz? You want a beer or something?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “No thanks. Just tired. I have an early flight.”

  He nodded sympathetically. “Oh, yeah, man, I can relate. Jet lag. Have a few drinks first, it really helps.”

  She grimaced. “At 7:00 A.M.? Maybe not.”

  He grinned and left her, weaving slightly.

  Magda took another sip from her champagne. All these drunk kids, thrilled to be drinking Heineken when there was Veuve Clicquot and Tattinger Brut for the asking. She sighed.

  Because of course it was the kids who had brought her here tonight. Knowing it was foolish, knowing it might mean dangerous questions from Balthazar or his toady Francis—still she hadn’t been able to resist the notion of seeing in the flesh one or both of the faces she’d scried in her room the night before. She wondered if the Benandanti
had yet determined who they were, those two innocents doomed to be pawns in this latest skirmish between ancient enemies. She couldn’t imagine Balthazar not knowing, if only because she couldn’t imagine Balthazar not knowing anything.

  She finished her champagne and handed the empty glass to a passing busboy. Over the years she had attended dozens of receptions like this, and some far more strange. Benandanti in full evening dress gathered in a derelict warehouse beside the Potomac; a seventeen-course dinner at the Gaslight Club served by naked young women; Benandanti mingling with career diplomats and Balinesian hierodules at Dumbarton Oaks. She had seen Michael Haring’s disconcertment turn to awe when he first viewed the collection of Iron Age cauldrons in the library of Saint Vespuccia’s College at the Divine. She had seen Balthazar Warnick walk through the door of a custodial closet in the Shrine, thence to disappear among the flower-strewn monuments on the island necropolis of San Michèle in Venice. Compared to some of those other gatherings, the annual reception for new Molyneux scholars was nothing but a glorified frat party.

  But tonight Magda felt uneasy. Perhaps it was her knowledge that the two innocents she had glimpsed last night were here, somewhere, ready to meet and ignite. Or perhaps Magda felt a small share of guilt over having doomed some poor fool to walk into the resulting conflagration. She took a deep breath and once more fingered the pendant around her neck.

  Othiym, haïyo.

  This, too, was a risk. But she always felt stronger when she wore it, and she often did so despite the danger. A number of the guests here might recognize it for what it was: a real, a true lunula, sacred to the ancient European Goddess, she who in the northern lands was called Kalma, “corpse-eater,” and in Greece the White Goddess; in Sumeria Lamasthu, “daughter of heaven,” and in certain remote valleys of the Balkans Othiym Lunarsa, Teeth of the Moon. She who is both Mother and Devourer, whose breath is plague, who suckles serpents and devours children. She who had made Magda’s reputation.