Waking the Moon

by Elizabeth Hand

  Because in the end the Çaril Kytur expedition hadn’t been a disaster for Magda Kurtz. George’s death had been a tragedy, of course, but a minor one. There had been an inquiry, and a grief-stricken family mad for justice, but in the end it had been like that I Ching hexagram Magda had always favored: K’uei, Opposition but also No Blame. Michael Haring had been disappointed that she had not returned with illicit artifacts, but he soon found solace in another archaeologist.

  In the wake of the Çaril Kytur investigation, with its threats of lawsuits and damaged reputations, Balthazar Warnick had not refrained from saying I told you so. Yet Magda herself had, been surprisingly cool about the whole thing. Her colleagues chalked it up to the general unpleasantness of the experience, another good reason to avoid the Soviet-controlled Balkan states like the plague.

  And eventually the whole thing blew over. George Wayford’s family settled for a scholarship endowed in his name. And Magda wrote the landmark paper that was published in Antiquities, the monograph that became the framework for Daughters of the Setting Sun. From what should have been a career disaster, Magda Kurtz emerged not only unscathed, but triumphant.

  Some of her colleagues remarked how obviously nobody knew the whole story; and of course they were right. Because Magda told no one about the lunula. Not Haring, not Balthazar Warnick, not even June Harrington.

  You are the secret mouth of the world

  You are the word not uttered

  Othiym Lunarsa, haïyo.

  In the wake of the failed expedition came long months when she researched her secret treasure. She traded her dimly lit carrel in the Colum Library stacks for a battered wooden desk in the upper reaches of the Museum of Natural History, then went to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Finally she made her way to London, for two weeks’ study in the dusty cool recesses of the British Museum. This was followed by a week of visiting private collections in the Scottish countryside, including a sojourn at Dalkeith Palace outside of Edinburgh, where she viewed the legendary skulls owned by the Dukes of Buccleuchs.

  What she learned there sent her to Athens. In a cafe shadowed by the Acropolis she met with Christos Eugenides, an eminent archaeologist friend of Michael Haring’s whose involvement in the thriving black market trade between the Aegean countries and the rest of the world had long been supported by the Benandanti.

  “These are very good, you should try them.” Christos speared a prickly star the size and color of a tarnished nickle. “Baby octopus. Quite wonderful. Or the bekri meze—you might like that.”

  Magda’s smile was more of a grimace. The sun and heat and effort of translation and travel had given her a permanent headache. She felt feverish and disoriented. The scent of olive oil and fried fish was nauseating. As a panacea, she sipped grimly and steadily at a glass of fiery tsipoura.

  “No thank you. Michael said you might tell me more about an object I found—”

  She could feel it nestled at her throat, cool as a blade for all the numbing heat. She parted her collar and let her fingers rest upon the crescent’s smooth edge. Christos Eugenides leaned forward.

  “Ah—ah.” His voice rose sharply, as though he had been kicked.

  “You know it, then.”

  Christos Eugenides had already drawn back into his plastic chair. “This is not within my provenance,” he said curtly. “I’m quite sorry. Michael must have misunderstood—”

  “He said you knew about Cycladic figurines—”

  “This is not remotely Cycladic.”

  “—and other things.”

  He removed a bill and several coins from his pocket and set them on the marble surface. “I have an acquisitions meeting at the university at six o’clock. I’m quite sorry not to have been more helpful.” He rose.

  “Then can you recommend someone else?” The lunula slid back into the folds of her blouse. “I’ve come all this way…”

  “Surely the Museum Library is quite—”

  “I’ve read enough. I need to talk to someone who’s seen one of these—”

  “There is no one.”

  She waited for him to go on but he said nothing more, only stared fixedly at her throat. Yet despite his tone and words, he seemed reluctant to leave. After a moment he turned to face the endless parade of automobiles, the sand-colored shadow of the mountain looming above them. Exhaust fumes mingled with the stench of fried fish, and Magda raised her glass to her face, breathing in the harsh smell of tsipoura. For a long moment they stood there, silent. Finally Christos sighed.

  “Spyridon Marinatos.”

  “Who?”

  “Spyridon Marinatos. In Akrotiri on Thera—that is, Santorini. He is excavating a city on the south shore of the island, beneath the village of Akrotiri. It is a Bronze Age city…”

  His voice drifted off into the drone of traffic and the carnival sound of a radio blaring bouzouki music.

  “Marinatos?” Furiously Magda scribbled the name into her battered notebook. “Spiro Marinatos?”

  Christos shook his head very slightly, as though hearing some more distant music. “Spyridon. Nea Kameni,” he said softly.

  “Nea—what?”

  “Nea Kameni. ‘The New Burnt Land.’ It is a fabulous city, buried like Pompeii or Herculaneum beneath the volcanic ash from the great cataclysm of 1450 B.C. He believes it was the capital of the great lost Minoan culture.”

  For an instant the roar and rush of traffic, of blazing wind, died away. His next words sounded unnaturally loud in the abrupt silence. “He believes he has found Atlantis.”

  Magda put her pen down and rubbed her throbbing temples. “Oh, please—”

  Christos Eugenides shot her an angry glance. “This is all quite true, Miss Kurtz. The site is thousands of years old and I assure you more spectacular than anything you have ever seen. It is a more important archaeological find than Pompeii or Tutankhamen’s grave.”

  He paused, his gaze lingering upon her neck, then added in a very low voice, “You are aware, I am quite certain, that the Minoan culture is at the very heart of worship of the great goddess. Perhaps the most ancient culture of the Mediterranean. And we know next to nothing about it at all.”

  At the word goddess Magda’s mouth grew dry. “Of—of course,” she said, and gulped the rest of her tsipoura. The raw liquor scorched the back of her throat. “Yes, of course—and this Marinatos will see me? I can catch a plane to Santorini?”

  Christos Eugenides shook his head. “I do not know if he will see you or not. You will have to find someone with a boat. It may be difficult; Spyridon is not a popular man right now. His political views are considered reactionary and dangerous.”

  “Can you give me the name of someone with a boat?”

  He turned and walked to the edge of the patio. “I can give you nothing, Miss Kurtz. I am quite sorry.” But as he stepped down onto the sidewalk he hesitated, then said, “Santorini—that is not the correct name. In Greek it is called Thera.”

  He walked quickly toward the corner, his last words hanging in the sullen air before the wind and dust swallowed them.

  Thera: Fear.

  She had not gone to the island. Instead she returned to her room in the cheap pensione she’d found in Monastiraki, the old Turkish quarter near the site of the ancient Agora. There she finished another bottle of tsipoura and tried vainly to find some English-language news on the ancient radio. She knew she shouldn’t be drinking. She felt sick and frightened and exhausted, ready to give up this entire crazy quest to learn something about her stolen artifact. She wished she could leave tonight, but she’d booked a return flight for two days hence and couldn’t afford to change it.

  “Ahhh, hell.”

  With a groan she collapsed onto the mattress, flattening a pile of books and papers. The sheets were damp and reeked of bug spray. Her notes looked as disheveled and forlorn as Magda herself. She reached for the tsipoura.

  “Hair of the dogma,” she said, frowning. The bottle was empty. She co
uldn’t remember finishing it. “Well, enough already.”

  She dropped the bottle onto the cracked cement floor. With a satisfying crash it shattered. “Goddamn waste of time,” Magda swore.

  From the room next door came the endless percussive thud of music. The same song, the same tape played over and over until she could feel it in her spine as she writhed on her foul-smelling bed, trying vainly to sleep. Her neighbor wailed along with it, his voice hoarse and giddy.

  She lives, no fear, doubtless in everything

  She knows

  Through time, unchecked, the sureness of

  Her grows

  She leaves Herself inside you when

  She goes.

  She lives in a time of her own.

  “Goddammit!” she yelled, but the noise drowned her words. “Turn it DOWN!”

  Drumbeats and a fadeout; then the song began again. Magda rubbed her temples and moaned.

  “Oh, Peter, please.”

  She’d run into him when she had arrived two days earlier, a young hippie taking a year off from Swarthmore. A sweet kid, actually, stoned every time she saw him, his head bobbing to music real or imagined, it didn’t seem to matter. But she just couldn’t stand it anymore.

  You have always heard Her speaking

  She’s been always in your ear

  Her voice sounds a tone within you

  Listen to the words you hear

  Her time has no past or future

  She lives everything She sees

  Her time doesn’t stand outside Her

  It’s in every breath She breathes.

  Magda stumbled into the hallway, its stained white walls pocked with dead silverfish and faded blue handprints, talismans against ker, the spirits of the dead. From a small recessed window came the muted noise of traffic. When Magda pounded her neighbor’s door, the cheap wood paneling felt frail enough to break.

  “Peter!”

  Abruptly the door swung inward. Music and smoke poured into the hallway, the smells of sweat and burning wax. And there was her neighbor, blinking sleepily and holding a cotton kimono closed at his chest.

  “Peter,” she repeated, striving to be heard above the din. “Look, could you turn it down a little? I—I’m not feeling well.”

  He stared at her curiously, then backed into the room. She could glimpse a small tape player atop a heap of dashiki shirts and frayed jeans. In one corner a tiny old-fashioned oscillating fan turned listlessly back and forth, back and forth. He’d dragged his mattress onto the floor and covered it with an Indian print batiked in lurid shades of purple and orange. When he reached the mattress he stopped, kicking it idly with a dirty bare foot. He made no move to turn down the music.

  “Peter?”

  He was young, nineteen or twenty. Young enough that even after days, maybe weeks, without shaving he had only the faintest gold stubble on his chin. Thin but broad-shouldered, with long unwashed blond hair spilling down the back of his kimono. Where his robe hung open she could see his chest, hairless and tanned, and the smooth slope to the top of his narrow hips, the jutting edge of his hipbone and a flash of white where the sun hadn’t touched him. He nodded and cocked his head.

  “Hey, Magda,” he said in a thick honeyed drawl. “How you doing?” His brow furrowed. “Um, maybe you better come in.”

  She took a step after him, stopped as the warm wind from the fan tickled her legs.

  No wonder he was staring: she’d stormed out barely dressed. Her jeans were still on the floor where she’d flung them after she’d returned from her unhappy meeting with Eugenides. She was wearing nothing but her blouse and white cotton underwear.

  “Oh, shit.” She clutched foolishly at her collar and started to leave, but Peter was already at the door, peering outside before closing it with exaggerated courtliness.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” he said, then, miracle of miracles, crossed to the tape player and turned it down. Without looking back he tossed her a dashiki shirt. “You want to get high?”

  High? With no way to get to Thera, no hope of learning more about the lunula, only fìfty-three dollars (American) in her pocket and no credit left on her American Express card?

  “No—” She shrugged into his shirt, then laughed. “Oh, what the hell. Sure, why not.”

  The shirt hung almost to her knees. It had a strong powdery smell of jasmine incense. “Looks nice,” said Peter. He settled cross-legged on the mattress, reached beneath a lumpy pillow, and pulled out a small agate pipe. “Here—”

  They smoked in silence. Peter’s head bobbed in time to the soft music, the small blue candle flame shivered with each pass of the ancient fan. After a few minutes Peter set aside the pipe.

  “Is that the only song on this tape?” Her voice was hoarse, her tongue felt thick and sweet, as though she’s been eating jam.

  He nodded, eyes slitted. “Yeah. Isn’t it great?”

  “For the first million or so times.”

  He only smiled and tapped out a rhythm on his thighs. Magda sat across from him, her headache still throbbing gently somewhere far beneath the soft buzz of hashish. She was so tired, she should get up and leave, thank him for the hash. She thought about moving, might even have stretched one leg toward the edge of the mattress; but when she looked up she saw that Peter was staring at her, his eyes gilded to gold coins by the candlelight.

  “That’s really beautiful.” He moved until he sat on his knees facing her. He put one hand on her shoulder and gently touched her throat. She felt the weight of the lunula there, rising and falling with the pulse of her blood. “You’re really beautiful.”

  She laughed again, softly. “Yeah, sure,” she murmured, but she didn’t draw away.

  “No, really, I mean it.” One of his hands moved to stroke her breastbone beneath the crescent; the other brushed the hair from her face. “You really are. You look like a—” He shook his head, smiling, and made an extravagant gesture.

  She could feel herself blushing: she’d been called beautiful about three times in her life. As he gazed at her Peter’s brown eyes were luminous, but also a little surprised, as though his own words confused him. He rested his palm against her cheek, staring at her with his lips parted, his eyes narrowed as though he was trying to remember something, like where or who he was, how she’d gotten into his room. Magda stared back at him. Her own breath was coming faster now and her heart was pounding. There was something about the flickering light, the way the shadows coursed across the boy kneeling in front of her—as though she was watching him from some impossible height, with webs of cloud and mist between them and blue waves smashing against cliffs far far below. She shut her eyes and the vision became even clearer, a barren mountaintop where small purplish flowers clung to the stones, their star-shaped petals hanging from a lax head nodding in the wind. Their scent was overpoweringly sweet, the smell of hyacinths. At cliff’s edge flames scored the rim of a blackened brazier. The air was full of sound, keening wind and gulls, the wail of an ibis. She heard voices, faint music and the sound of drums. Her bare skin burned from sun and salt water and she could smell something burning, a pungent leafy scent. Not wax or hashish but something else: yarrow sticks, dittany of-Crete, crushed bay leaves; and this mingled with the musky odor of Peter’s sweat, the faint scent of jasmine that clung to his hair, and the wind-borne sweetness of hyacinths. He was so near to her that his breath was warm against her skin, her throat. Nearly as warm as the metal crescent upon her breast, as the flames leaping behind them. She opened her eyes. A few inches from hers, Peter’s face was flushed, his eyes half-closed as though he was dreaming it all: the music, Greece, Magda herself.

  She lives…

  Magda shook her head, tried to blink away the flares of grey and gold and blue that streamed at the edges of her vision. What the hell is this? But she could see nothing clearly save the boy in front of her. He was impossibly beautiful, his hair unbound and his throat and face and eyes all turned to gold, his robe fallen open so that she cou
ld see his skin, smooth, the color of expensive oil. Like a bronze kouros, one of those sacred images dredged from the Aegean, his blank eyes fixed on some point in the unfathomable distance. He was unbuttoning her shirt, his fingers cupping her breast, his weight pressing the lunula into her flesh as he kissed her.

  She…

  She pushed him back against the mattress, pulling off his robe until he lay there, naked. For a long moment she looked at him, stroking the tops of his thighs, tracing the long curve of his waist and then cupping his ass in her hands as she lowered her head and took his engorged cock into her mouth. His flesh tasted salty, bitter; she could smell the sea and feel the wind cold upon her back, his hands hot as metal as they crushed her breasts and he groaned. A few bitter drops burned against her tongue. She drew back quickly before he could come. He groaned louder; she straddled his legs, took his cock in her hands.

  “Oh—hey, don’t stop—”

  His voice cracked as he stared up at her, his eyes no longer soft but imploring, almost desperate. She smiled, a thin smile, and mounted him.

  It was too fast for him, she could hear him begging her to slow down but she didn’t care. Her fingers raked his chest, her nails left red streaks as she pulled him harder into her. Blood welled from beneath his bottom rib; she brought her finger to her mouth and sucked it, then lowered her face and kissed him. He moaned and tried to grab her, but she pulled back again, still holding him inside her.

  When she came she gasped and let her breath out explosively. She could hear him crying out, a high thin sound carried away by the wind, felt the faint pulse and throb of him beneath her as she drew away. Her head pounded so that it drowned out everything else.

  “God—ah, god—” Peter murmured where he lay beside her. “That was amazing…”

  There was a sound. A lingering echo as of the voices she had heard earlier, far-off and indistinct. She sat with her knees sinking into the mattress, naked except for the silver crescent upon her breast. From its twin spars candlelight glinted, gold and red. The voices grew louder.