Veil of the Goddess

by Rob Preece

  Ivy closed her eyes. “You're wearing a sort of poncho with an eight-sided cross pattern and sitting in the middle of the floor. It looks like you've got some sort of pentagram going with a little mount of sea-salt at each corner. I can't see your eyes and your hair is covered by a handkerchief."

  Hope sprang up in her heart—the eight-sided pattern reminded her of the stars on Mary's veil.

  "Yes, you see something. Give me your hand."

  Ivy stepped toward the pentagram, then reached across the faint lines that ascended from the floor into infinity.

  Her skin tingled where it crossed the line, but it wasn't painful.

  The Queen snatched her hand and studied it carefully.

  Only then did Ivy realize that the Queen's eyes had been sewn shut. She was blind. Blind, at least, to the wavelengths which normal humans could detect. Blind or not, though, clearly the Queen could see plenty.

  "My granddaughter thinks you are a vampire."

  Ivy hadn't thought about it before, but the original Dracula hadn't lived too far from where they were now. It shouldn't be a big surprise that the legends of the undead would be strong in his neighborhood.

  "Your granddaughter sees part of the truth and fills in the rest from her imagination."

  "That truth being that you are not a vampire but a saint?"

  Ivy wished people would stop calling her that. She was a woman trying to stay alive.

  "I just got lucky when someone tried to kill me."

  The blind woman stared at her. “Show me what you're carrying."

  For an instant, Ivy thought she meant the Cross. But the Cross was still outside, in the car. So, she must mean the Veil.

  "It's very old."

  The Queen gave a choking laugh. “I can be careful."

  The Veil's power shined so brightly Ivy had to blink the tears out of her eyes. With her eyes sewn shut, the Queen couldn't do that. She reared back at first, then reached out her hand to stroke the precious material.

  "Beautiful."

  Ivy nodded, wondering if the Queen could see her gesture.

  "Do you know what it is?"

  "The Patriarch of Constantinople says that it is the veil of the Virgin Mary."

  "Is it?” The Queen snorted.

  "So he says. It was hidden for many hundreds of years."

  "Hidden, yes. For more years than you can imagine. Mary may have worn it, but it was not Mary's alone, not hers first. This Veil was a secret for centuries before Mary was born. If this was indeed hers, Mary is more than your Christian faith allows you to believe."

  She pushed her own poncho forward so Ivy could make out the design. She'd been right—the designs were almost identical to those on the veil. “What do you see?"

  "Sorry, Queen. I don't believe that Mary was a gypsy.” Since she'd found the Cross, Ivy had been forced to believe plenty of things she had never even suspected, but there were lines she wasn't about to cross. It was a lot more likely that the gypsies had adopted Mary's design than that Mary had chosen theirs.

  The Queen snorted. “Of course not. But if she wore that veil, she was more than just a mother."

  Mother of God, Queen of Heaven. Yeah, Ivy had been raised Catholic long enough to think of Mary as a lot more than just a mother.

  "We need help.” Ivy figured it was time to change the subject. “We're trying to get to Greece but we don't have passports and I wouldn't be surprised if the Turkish army wasn't looking for us. As is the CIA."

  "I see."

  "Will you help us?"

  The old woman moved her cheeks in and out. It wasn't an attractive gesture and Ivy made a mental note not to do anything like that, ever—especially if she one day lost all of her teeth.

  "The Veil you carry was hidden well. Our people have walked the streets of old Constantinople searching for power for hundreds of years. How did you find it when we could not?"

  Ivy suspected the Queen wasn't changing the subject. This question had something to do with whether the gypsies would help them. “It was not just hidden, it was locked and protected. I had the key."

  "Ah, a key."

  The Queen brushed away the ward lines and grasped Ivy's arm, her thin fingers cold and rough against Ivy's skin. “A bargain, then. We too have a lost object of power. If your key can recover it for us, we will help you get across the border."

  A quick mental flash on the carnivorous sheep made Ivy cut off her automatic agreement. “What sort of object?"

  "Does it matter?"

  "If it's evil, I won't do it."

  "There is already plenty of evil in the visible world. A little more would not add much to the equation."

  The Queen was right, of course. The world was already filled with evil. Getting to Venice was important, was worth making sacrifices for. She should agree. She opened her mouth to agree.

  Instead, “No."

  Well, that surprised her.

  The Queen's grip tightened on her arm. “If you won't help us, why should we help you?"

  Chapter 18

  Ivy stared into the Queen's eyes. Darkness was becoming less and less of a problem. Would she, like the Queen, someday have to sew her eyes shut against the glare of light?

  "We're trying to stop a war,” she explained. “We've got to get to Venice soon."

  The Queen shook her head slowly. “There will always be wars. I must look after my own people. Why should I care when Americans kill Arabs or Turks?"

  Ivy's blood froze “How did you know that was what I was talking about?"

  The old woman cackled. “I am not so blind that I cannot see something of the future. And a dark future indeed is what I see. Your own Bible tells the story, does it not? Gog-Magog is upon us."

  Ivy wasn't sure exactly what Gog-Magog was, but she did recognize the words. Partly from a horrible church retreat she'd been on when a truly weird priest had insisted on keeping the group of teenaged girls up all night long with horror stories from the Bible and partly because she'd seen those words in the papers she'd swiped from Smith—papers that had been destroyed in the predator missile strike.

  "What is Gog-Magog?"

  The woman shrugged. “A war. Nothing to do with gypsies."

  But it was in the Bible. A few more pieces of the puzzle fell together. The Patriarch had said that the Foundation was a group of extremist Christians. And Ivy's own experience said that the extremist Christians tended to love the most horrible of the prophesies.

  If they could combine their dreams of Crusade with Biblical prophesies of a great war, presumably a war they would win, that would seem like a double-win to the Foundation.

  As a soldier, it didn't sound so great to Ivy.

  "Everyone gets hurt in a war. Even if you aren't directly involved."

  "Gypsies are not locked to the land the way you gajikané are. When war strikes, we move away."

  Ivy didn't think so, and she didn't think the Queen did, either. Zack could tell her for sure, but she seemed to remember that the Gypsies had been hurt badly by Hitler's genocide during World War II.

  "Tell me about the object you want me to unlock."

  "You said you would not find it if it were evil."

  Ivy studied the Queen. “That was a test, wasn't it? You wanted to know if I had sold out. But I don't believe you would intentionally bring something evil into the world. You'd want it to remain locked where it could do no harm."

  "You think you know a lot about me, don't you?"

  "Not a lot, but I can read your aura just as you can see mine."

  "Ah. And what does my aura tell you?"

  "It's lavender, like much of the camp. I don't know what gods you worship, but you aren't a Christian. Nor are you a Moslem. Both Christians and Moslems glow red for me. Except for when they're blue for Mary. But you're not blue, so that can't be it.” Although, come to think of it, there was a similarity between Mary's blue glow and the lavender of the gypsy camp. And what logic was there for Mary to be a different color than Jesus?


  The Queen gave her a toothless grin. “We do not discuss our faith with outsiders."

  "But you want me to find your holy thing."

  "If you have the key, we have little choice. The Gypsies need it."

  "And I need to know more."

  "Very well, I will be frank. Everyone knows the Nazi slaughtered many Jews. But Jews were not their only targets. Hitler had a list of inferior people, people who needed to be exterminated as part of his final solution. Gays, pagans, anyone handicapped. The Nazi killed the Romany as well. Thousands of us: as many as they could catch. What treasures we carried, they stole from us, tried to use in their clumsy attempts to gain power over the other planes. My grandmother was Queen then, and she hid our chalice from them. She used the magic of her own death to wall it away completely. As she was dying, she told my mother that only a dead person could reach in and return it. My mother passed the words on to me, as if it mattered."

  The Queen gave a hacking laugh. “When my mother told me that, I thought she meant that no one could ever reach it again. Dead people do not walk, do not grab chalices from where they are hidden, do not return them to the living. Or so I believed. I was wrong, though, wasn't I? Because, behold, a dead person has come to us now."

  What were the odds?

  Ivy had thought she was in control, making decisions. Obviously there were stronger powers in the universe that were directing her path, or perhaps had directed the paths of the gypsies to meet her.

  "And the chalice, it is a force for good?"

  The Queen shrugged. “So it was said. It was hidden before I was born."

  An uneasy feeling swept over Ivy. She'd found the Cross and the Veil of Mary already. Of the holiest relics of the Christian faith, the only one missing was the Holy Grail. Which was supposed to be a chalice, right? And if she just happened to stumble over the Holy Grail, she'd have to wonder whether there was any such thing as free will at all. It went way beyond coincidence.

  "What sort of chalice is it, anyway?"

  The Queen gazed at her with her sewn-shut eyes, then cackled. “Just a cup. It came with my people out of India a long time ago. It isn't what you are thinking. Not that cup."

  Ivy exhaled a breath she hadn't known she was holding. “All right, I'll get it. Where is it hidden?"

  Although, if the Queen announced they'd hidden it back somewhere in Constantinople or Kurdistan, Ivy thought she would have a cow.

  "It is not far. I will show you. After sunset. But first, we must disguise you and you must eat."

  The Queen rapped on her floor and the gypsy with the shotgun opened the door and peered in.

  "Is she safe?"

  "She will help us find it."

  "Ah."

  "But first, more gajikané approach, quickly. Give the man and woman clothing, let them blend in."

  He nodded, then gestured for Ivy to follow him to another of the dilapidated trailers.

  "In. My wife will help you."

  Whether the woman's costume choice helped, Ivy wouldn't guess. Zack seemed appreciative, though, when she emerged twenty minutes later in a swishy skirt that seemed to be made up of men's neckties sewed together at the top but that hung loose after the first few inches around her waist, so her legs were exposed every time she made a step. The off-the-shoulders top left her breasts halfway naked and tied well above her navel. They'd also decorated her with a necklace of fingernail-sized gold coins of every vintage from the Roman Empire to modern South Africa. A greasy kerchief covered her short blond hair.

  "A gypsy carries her treasure, her dowry, with her,” the shotgun-man's wife insisted. “You have no money, you no gypsy. Need to have sex with lot of men to make this sum of money."

  Well that certainly made Ivy feel special.

  The makeup had taken even more time than getting dressed, but by the time they let her out of the trailer Ivy was fully vamped.

  "Wow."

  With his dark skin and hair, Zack didn't have to do much to look gypsy. Black pants, a multicolored striped shirt, and a Greek sailor hat seemed his whole disguise. Until he turned his head and she saw the gold earring.

  "Pierced?"

  He fingered the large gold ring. “They insisted. I guess it'll heal eventually."

  "Leave it. I think it's cute."

  He stared at her long enough to make her listen to the words she'd just said. Cute? She'd sounded like a high school girl with a crush.

  "You will be quiet,” the gypsy with the shotgun said. Although, by now that shotgun was hidden. Ivy wondered what the local police would do if they spotted it.

  She suspected that it could reemerge again quite quickly and that, if it did, she and Zack would be in trouble.

  * * * *

  No matter how they twisted, they seemed unable to escape the Foundation search.

  Zack wondered how many Foundation Agents there could be.

  Although the gypsy camp was hidden from the road, the Turkish Army patrol headed directly toward them, under the direction of one of the ubiquitous black-suited Agents.

  The Agent waved his Cross like a weapon while the Turks pointed real weapons at the gypsies, kicked over their cooking pots, frightened the draft animals, and pinched the women.

  "There's something weird here,” the Agent announced. “Keep looking."

  The Turk shouted out orders to the soldiers, but the only result seemed to be more destruction, more shoving, and a pathetic offer by one of the soldiers to buy Ivy's virtue for a few thousand Turkish Lira. Given the value of the Lira, Zack figured no one was surprised when she shook her head vehemently and spit on the ground.

  The Queen waited for about five minutes, then emerged from her trailer.

  Ivy had given him a vague idea about what the woman was like, but seeing her in person was positively frightening.

  She wore a shapeless black drape that reminded him uncomfortably of what the nuns had worn when he'd been in school. Thick black twine pierced through her eyelids, sewing her eyes shut.

  She ignored the Agent, but screamed at the soldiers in a language neither Zack nor the soldiers could understand. They understood enough to back away from her, though.

  She had been leaning heavily on a walking stick when she'd come down the steps to her trailer, but she straightened her back and threw the stick in front of the Agent.

  He dropped his crucifix and pulled back when the stick writhed and transformed itself into a snake.

  "Jesus."

  The Queen cackled. “Take your abomination away from here, English."

  The soldiers did finally leave.

  Which seemed way too easy.

  "Why do you think they couldn't find the Cross this time when Smith was able to track it down back in Mosul?” he asked.

  He had to watch himself to make sure he didn't just stare at Ivy like a lovestruck high school freshman. The skirt they'd put her in showed more leg than you'd see in a USO show and the top seemed connected by a single button at her breasts that threatened to pop every time she breathed. A rope of gold coins drew his eyes toward her cleavage. Looking at her tangled his tongue up in itself. Looking away from her was just plain impossible.

  Ivy leaned toward him, oblivious to the fact that this let him look further down her blouse. She spoke in a whisper, obviously not believing that the Queen's little magic trick had permanently gotten rid of the Foundation Agents.

  "There's a lot of magic around this camp, and their Queen seems able to generate some sort of confusion. She knew they were coming but she didn't come out of her trailer until they'd been here a while. In Mosul, Smith didn't have to confront active magic, just the holdover from hundreds of years of prayer and faith, and he started by bombing out the mosque which probably diluted its power. Of course, they may also be scraping the bottom of the agent barrel. Smith was top-notch. This guy looked like a desk-worker, not a field agent.” She giggled. “Did you see the way he squirmed when he saw that snake?"

  "Yeah, a good trick."
<
br />   "I thought only Moses could turn a staff into a snake."

  "Huh-uh. The Egyptian priests did too. Don't know if you noticed, but our friend the gypsy with the shotgun picked up the snake after he scared the agent. He's their pet."

  Zack fingered the heavy gold ring dangling from his ear. It felt strange and not particularly comfortable although, given Ivy's reaction when he'd said he would lose it, he figured maybe he'd better keep it in.

  There was no way he was going to be welcomed back into the Army after going AWOL for so long, so he didn't have to worry about the dress code.

  "I told them I'd help them find something they magically hid during World War II,” Ivy said. “They're waiting until dark."

  "Waiting for another visit from the Foundation is more like it,” he guessed.

  Sure enough, another group of soldiers, this one including three U.S. sailors and a pair of Agents, showed up just before dark.

  One of the Agents spent five minutes walking around the spot where Zack had parked their Opal. The car was gone now, probably vanished into a Turkish chop shop for parts, but it, or the Cross that had been in it, must have left some magical residue that Foundation sensors picked up.

  The Agents wanted to haul the whole group of gypsies in for questioning. But the Turks continued to demur, possibly, Zack guessed, because they were afraid of gypsy magic—he saw a number of the Turkish draftees fingering evil-eye pendants—and possibly because they just didn't know how to deal with all those gypsies.

  And there were a lot of them. From almost the minute Ivy had finished her appointment with the Queen, gypsies had been trickling into the camp until they now numbered better than a hundred.

  They milled around, confused the soldier's efforts to count and organize them, started small fires where they burned incense and herbs that Zack didn't recognize but that seemed to confuse the brains of anyone who inhaled too much.

  "Gypsies no have Turks with us,” the shotgun-wielding gypsy insisted to one of the Turkish officers in English. “None of kidnapping here. We good Gypsies."

  "We're not looking for Turks. We're looking for Americans. Deserters."

  "Yes, yes. Americans looking. Looking for stealing our women. We know this Americans. They want women but they think payment is of muchness."