Strabloe hathaneatidas druei tanaous kolabreusomena
Kirkotokous athroize te mani Grogopa Gnathoi ruseis itoa
As though she were reading them in the air in front of her, the meaning of the words became clear. She had always known them, had heard them before a hundred times, a thousand.
Gather your immortal sons, ready them for your wild embrace
Ravage Circe’s children beneath the binding Moon
Bare to them your dreadful face, inviolable Goddess, your clashing teeth
The voices died into the rush of wind and the sea. Magda shook her head, trying to recall just where she was, why her knees seemed to be digging into rough dirt instead of cloth. She could smell the musty thick odors of Peter’s room, incense and semen and unwashed clothes, and see a small blue flame beneath its spiral of grey smoke. But the outlines of walls and floor and ceiling had grown blurred, lost in a growing haze. Then the sun was gone, and the candle flame. Everywhere about her was night save for a fine thread of silver drawn across the sky and the pale form of the kouros in front of her. In her hands she felt the lunula’s weight, no longer warm but icy cold. As she drew it over her head she felt the bite of metal, a tugging pain as it raked her temple.
Then it was free. Between her fingers she held the shining reflection of the new moon that burned high overhead. The face of Cybele, Brimo Hagne, Terrible Pure One. The sleeping moon, the fasting goddess: Othiym. She could feel eyes upon her, could see them now in the dark. But not Peter’s eyes.
No: Her eyes, cold and bright and full of yearning. She was there, standing before Magda on the mountaintop, the moon upon Her brow like an arc of flame, Her mouth curved into a smile. Magda could see Her white teeth and Her hands outstretched as though to gather Magda to Her breast; but Her breasts were withered and shrunken as an ape’s, Her hands knotted into clumps of bone. From Her mouth flowed a blackness so immense that Magda swooned; but before she could lose consciousness something grabbed her, she felt stony fingers pulling at her arms and that cold foul breath filling her nostrils like fetid water. Magda opened her eyes and She was still there, more immense and terrifying than anything Magda had ever seen.
“No!” Magda cried; but as she sought to wrench away she could feel herself bowing, even as her mind cried Worship! Worship!
And then She was gone. Magda gasped, blinked and raised her hands protectively, expecting to see that monstrous face. Instead she saw the boy, one arm flung across his face so that his eyes were hidden. His throat was pale, smooth, showing only the smallest bulge of Adam’s apple beneath his childish face. His breathing was soft. Across his mouth spilled a slender bow of moonlight. He stirred, murmuring, then lay still again. Without a word she raised the lunula, grasping its spurs so that the curved glittering blade faced outward, and fell upon him.
Long after she woke. She lay upon the pallet, the lunula still in her hand. The room was dark. From the sliver of bluish light that crept from beneath the door she guessed that it was morning. A foul smell hung in the air, excrement and bile and blood. There was blood on the sharpened edge of the lunula, still damp, and blood on the first three fingers of her right hand. On her knees was the crumpled mass of the shirt he’d given her. When she bunched the cloth between her fingers it crinkled, as though it had been starched. A tangle of something soft tugged at her fingers and she looked down to see a long matted plait of blond hair, at one end stuck with a felted blackish mass. Flies lifted from it in a lazy droning spiral, like the lingering ghost of the boy’s stoned chatter, and disappeared.
She drew her head up slowly. A few inches from where she sat, Peter’s corpse sprawled on the mattress. His head sagged backward; it had been nearly severed from his neck. He was so white he looked as though he had been frozen. She had never seen a body so purely albescent, like a figure carved of quartz or crystal. His hands were curled into rigid talons. His hair had fallen across his face, so that all she could really see was his mouth; his lips had drawn back in a snarl. One of his front teeth was missing.
“Aaahhhhh…”
With a moan she backed away from the corpse. When she bumped into the door she shrieked softly, covered her mouth with her hand. She stood there for a long time, staring. Finally she gazed down at the lunula dangling from her fingers.
In the dim light it looked almost black. The spots where the blood had dried were like jagged bites in the soft metal. As she stared, the blood staining the silver began to glow. The metal grew hot, so hot she cried aloud, but just as she moved to fling it away, the crescent cooled, as rapidly as a hot poker stuck in the snow. She saw where lines began to stand out on the smooth silver, the full curves and swells of its moons so brilliant they looked molten. Magda thought it would begin to drip, spattering liquescent metal upon the floor.
But then the lines faded, red to black to grey. The lunula’s surface gleamed as before, pure and smooth as though it had been cast anew.
She waited more than an hour before leaving his room. When she did, she saw no one. Not then; not when she bolted into the filthy bathroom at the end of the hall to wash. Not when she left the next day, her duffel bag stuffed with books and clothes, a small newspaper-wrapped bundle beneath her arm. She had paid for her room in advance; there was no one who cared when she departed, as long as it was before Friday. She had spent the intervening hours curled in a ball on her mattress, feverish, nearly delirious, waiting for the sound of footsteps that never came. When she finally left the pensione she walked quickly. She crossed several streets until she came to an empty alley. Without stopping, without even hesitating, she dropped the bundle containing Peter’s bloodstained shirt into the gutter.
Her flight left Athens as scheduled. While the customs officials spent twenty minutes going through her bag, and confiscated a model of a water clock that she had purchased in a shop near the old Agora, they took no notice of the crescent moon that hung pale and lucent as a tear against her throat.
“Excuse me—oh!”
Someone bumped into her and Magda winced. She ducked her head and let the lunula slip behind the silken folds of her dress.
“Well, well! Professor Kurtz! We’re sorry to be losing you again, Magda.”
It was Harold Mosreich, he who had attained such success with his work in the Yucatán and was now a fully tenured professor of Central American Archaeology at the Divine. He smiled at her, genuinely forlorn: whether because he had bumped her or because she was leaving, she had no idea. Magda smiled and leaned over to kiss his cheek, catching a whiff of talc and Lilac Vegetal.
“Oh, Harold. You’re the only one.”
He shook his head. “Not at all. Only yesterday I heard Balthazar Warnick say how sorry he was you were leaving us so soon.”
“So soon?”
At mention of Balthazar’s name she grew cold. She thought of the naphaïm in her room; of the faces she had glimpsed in the silver basin, the boy and girl she had come in search of tonight. She stammered, “I was actually supposed to leave earlier, but I stayed on a few extra days. Bind up a couple of loose ends. You know…”
Her voice trailed off. She wished she’d gotten another drink, or a canapé, something to use as a prop and distract Harold, keep him from looking at her face. She felt the lunula like a brand burning at her throat. How could she have been so stupid as to wear it here?
“Oh. Well, maybe he was sorry you hadn’t left sooner, then.”
She glanced at him sharply, but Harold’s expression was without irony. He was gazing across the room at a drift of white-clad nuns blocking one of the service doors.
“You don’t suppose they’re all going to the bathroom together, do you?” he asked. When Magda raised her eyebrows he went on, “It’s just that Balthazar particularly asked that we don’t have a lot of traffic upstairs tonight—they were supposed to cordon off that end, but then the loo by the kitchen backed up, and—well, you don’t want to hear all this, do you?”
He took her hand and shook it affectionately. “
Good luck, Magda. Have a safe flight back.”
“Thank you, Harold.”
She smiled as she watched him make his way through the crowd, his bald head gleaming beneath the gently swaying chandeliers. Before Harold reached the doors leading upstairs, she turned to snare more champagne from a passing waiter.
And so she didn’t see Balthazar Warnick step from behind the cluster of nuns to greet Harold Mosreich, with Francis Xavier Connelly looming behind him. By then Magda Kurtz was much too far away to hear Harold’s words to her former mentor, or to see how the tenured professor of Central American Archaeology sketched a half circle in the air, his melancholy eyes even sadder than they had been a few minutes earlier. She did not see how Balthazar Warnick nodded as she took her champagne flute, or how he marked the tenebrous halo about her like a cloud’s passing, the glint of silver at her breast.
CHAPTER 7
Night of the Electric Insects
I ALWAYS WONDER WHAT would have happened if I hadn’t gone with Baby Joe for those two vodka tonics. If instead, I’d gone over there to stand with Angelica and Professor Kurtz. In my head that’s always been the moment when everything changed, the stone tossed into the stream that changes its course. If I’d been there talking to them, maybe the others would have left them alone. Maybe my entire life would have been different.
Probably I couldn’t have done anything at all. But I would have saved them if I could.
Her conversation with Harold Mosreich left Magda uneasy.
Only yesterday I heard Balthazar Warnick say how sorry he was you were leaving us so soon.
But she hadn’t told Balthazar, or anyone else, that she was going. He could have easily figured it out, of course: the summer session was over, the fall term had already started; but it was still unsettling. She had interfered with Benandanti matters; she had stolen knowledge of their Sign, cast a pebble into the clear water where they went to scry their secrets.
Time to go, she thought. But as she started for the door a voice cried out to her.
Wait!
The command was so loud and clear that she stopped, glancing around furtively. She saw only the same crowd of well-dressed men and women, nothing else. But when she took another step it came again—
Wait!
—a man’s voice, low and insistent. She smoothed her damp palms against the front of her dress, closed her eyes as she tried to summon whom or whatever had called to her.
Nothing. She heard scattered bits of conversation—classes, football, something about incunabula at the Library of Congress—the sweet sad notes of the string quartet. Tod und der Mädchen. She opened her eyes.
All was as it should be. There was Harold Mosreich, chatting with a blue-haired matron. There was one of her students, a boy who had been her partner in a brief and intense liaison over the Fourth of July weekend. Near Harold was another boy, stocky and dressed in an ill-fitting suit, who leaned over to light the cigarette of a pale, dark-haired girl, with a freckled, waifish face and nervous hands. Nothing more.
Magda let her breath out. Nerves and fatigue, that was all. She had forgotten how the effort of summoning the naphaïm exhausted her. By this time tomorrow she’d be back in her apartment at Berkeley, readying herself for her own fall term. She’d done what she could to intervene on behalf of her Mistress. Now it was out of her hands. She finished her glass of champagne and was turning to leave when the girl approached her.
“Professor Kurtz?”
Magda froze.
“I’m Angelica di Rienzi.”
It was the girl Magda had scried in her room. In sudden panic Magda took a step backward, then caught herself and tried to smile. The girl smiled back and went on breathlessly.
“I wish I’d been able to take one of your classes this summer—I wanted to audit one but they wouldn’t let me. I’m just starting here,” she added. “But I wanted you to know how much I loved Daughters of the Setting Sun—”
She was such a beautiful girl! Magda nodded, stunned. “Angelica, how—how nice of you—”
She winced as Angelica took her hand and shook it vigorously. The girl had incongruously large strong hands, a peasant’s hands despite their long polished nails, with broad, slightly callused fingers.
“Oh, I mean it, Professor Kurtz, it was wonderful—”
That smile! It was ravishing, and Angelica was probably not as unconscious of its effect as she tried to appear. When Magda wanly smiled back, she felt that her own mouth was too small and meager to project anything remotely worthy of this girl’s radiant good will.
“—I did a paper on it at school. It really, really changed my life.”
Magda arched an eyebrow. “Really really?”
“Oh, yes! I loved that story about the Greeks—the fight between the men and women, and how when the women lost, the men said their children would no longer be allowed to keep their mothers’ names. That was the first time I ever thought about the whole notion of a matriarchy. It was like a door opening, and you opened it for me.”
“Saint Augustine.”
“Excuse me?”
“The story’s from Saint Augustine. You know, the proto-feminist,” Magda said drily. “So I guess you should thank him for opening the door.”
“Oh. Well, anyway…”
When you took them apart Angelica’s features were almost too exotic, at least to someone accustomed to California, where girls were polled neatly and expensively as bonsai evergreens. And, of course, she was wearing green contacts. No one had eyes that color, Magda thought, like the virent flash of some Amazonian butterfly’s wing.
“…made me want to become an archaeologist. Before that I was planning to go into the theater—a friend of mine from Sarah Lawrence said she could set me up with an audition for ‘Dark Shadows’…”
Magda nodded. The girl definitely had something. The unusual features projected a striking, almost disturbing, beauty—Magda thought of the famous bust of Nefertiti, or the heavy-lipped face of the hermaphroditic Akhenaton. Exquisite, but in a way that wasn’t quite human. She wondered why the Benandanti had brought her here. Perhaps they had known, somehow, that she was to be chosen for some great work. But Magda was fairly certain that even the Benandanti had not known until a few days ago that a Sign was to appear.
No, something else would have driven them to Angelica; the world was full of beautiful girls who were not marked for the Benandanti. What Magda sensed in her was an overwhelming determination, a great and terrible will.
Will toward what, Magda had no idea. Probably the girl herself didn’t even know—not yet, at least. But when she found out, all hell would break loose. Magda stared at her thoughtfully as Angelica went on.
“…spent some time with my cousins in Florence and then…”
It wasn’t just her beauty: she projected such raw pure energy. Nearly everyone stared at her. A few, men and women both, quite literally stopped in their tracks to stare. As though some great icon—the Sphinx, Venus de Milo, Greta Garbo—had strolled into a cocktail party and mixed herself a drink.
And, while she seemed to pay no heed to this constantly changing backdrop of admirers, Angelica di Rienzi noted every single one of them. Magda was sure of it.
“And then one night I got a phone call from Balthazar…”
Balthazar? Since when did undergraduates call him Balthazar? Angelica reached out to stroke Magda’s bare arm, the girl’s touch like warm oil poured across her skin. Magda shivered.
“…and I love it, I just love it…”
Magda closed her eyes. The girl’s perfume enveloped her, a sweet warm fragrance like sandalwood and oranges. Like the sun burning down upon those tiny wild hyacinths that grow beneath endless blue Aegean skies—
Kirkotokous athroize te mani Grogopa Gnathoi ruseis itoa
—like the sweet smoke drifting up from the mountaintop, the kouroi gathered there and harrowed in the dusk like grain…
“So I like, really think that I’ll find myself here
.” Angelica laughed and let go of Magda’s arm. “I’m sorry to go on like this! But your work really has meant so much to me.”
…Othiym haïyo…
Magda drew back as though she had been slapped.
What the hell is going on?
But Angelica had noticed nothing. Her huge emerald eyes were fixed on Magda. She opened her hands and held them palms upward as she recited in a low voice, “‘I have made you a lioness among women, and given you leave to kill any at your pleasure.’”
“What?” demanded Magda. “What did you say?”
Angelica dropped her hands. “From your book.” She looked confused. “I mean, I think that’s where it’s from. I’m sorry—was it, was I—did I remember it wrong?”
Magda drew her clenched fists to her breast.
“No,” she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking. Who is this girl? “It’s—it’s not from my book. It’s from the Mysteries of Eleusis—I mentioned them in there, but I never quoted that verse. I never quoted it anywhere.”
“Oh. Eleusis. The corn thing.” Angelica gave a self-deprecating laugh. “I must have read it somewhere else, then.”
Her voice trailed off and Angelica suddenly looked away. Magda followed her gaze.
On the other side of the reception room there was a stir, as people turned and craned their necks, to watch someone arguing with a gentleman by the front door. Magda heard tittering, a single raucous shout. Several students cheered drunkenly. Magda stood on tiptoe, trying to see over the crowd.
In the smoke-filled entrance to Garvey Hall stood a tall unsteady figure, wearing what appeared to be white robes—no, a sheet—no, two sheets, and one of them patterned with lurid purple daisies—draped around his torso and across his head like a hood. As she stared the figure straightened and pulled a small white rectangle from somewhere within his makeshift toga. Magda recognized the same heavy embossed card that had been issued as invitation to every Molyneux reception she had ever attended. With a flourish the sheet-clad figure presented it to the man at the door. The guard peered at it suspiciously, then waved the newcomer through. The boy walked into the main room with his head bowed, face still hidden by white and purple folds. Whistles and catcalls filled the air.
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