The Birth of a new moon

She was given the inevitable wide-brimmed hat and a short-handled garden fork, and as she took the tool, she realized wryly that her faraway dream of spending her free hours turning soil was about to be fulfilled. She dug until blisters opened along both palms, when she was sent to tote instead: hay to the horses, firewood to the house, and finally stones in a wheelbarrow to a wall being restored.

After four hours of hard labor, she felt as if she had been beaten about the shoulders and back. Her legs trembled, her hand and knee throbbed, her palms were aflame; every muscle in her body protested. Worst of all, she had not given a thought to her coming interview with Jonas. Whoever said that mindless labor gave one a chance to think had never hauled rock in a barrow with a crooked wheel. But the haunting memories had drawn back momentarily into their pit; for that she was willing to suffer greater discomfort than this.

At four-thirty Ana laid down her load and went in to grab a mug of tea and another bath. There was no getting the soil from under her nails, but at least she didn't stink when she presented herself at Jonas's study.

The Change leader's room was at the bottom of a dim, dank set of stairs under the kitchen, in a part of the house that the Victorian family upstairs had probably never set foot in. She stood on the uneven stones that formed the floor and looked longingly at the three firmly closed doors in front of her. All three had new, sturdy-looking locks. Although she would have given much to see behind them, she had no choice but to turn and walk beneath the stairway to the open door of Jonas's study.

'Lair' might have been a more accurate description. It was a big room, twenty-five feet across and nearly twenty high, and from the looks of it had been the original kitchen, back when servants were expected to run upstairs with heavy platters of hot food rather than taint the upper air with the sounds and smells of cooking. The high windows, excavated below ground level, may once have lit the space adequately: now they were so covered with uneven bead curtains as to be indistinguishable from the walls, aside from a certain glow behind the beads.

Or not beads—objects, thousands of objects hung up against the light on strings and ribbons and fishing line. With themes—one window held nothing but drinking vessels, from commemorative teacups to the small mended pottery anaphoras of an archaeological dig, while the next one had figurines from all over the world, all less than two inches in height. The third one seemed to be sticks and rocks until Ana looked more closely and saw that they were bones: chicken bones, bird skulls, the articulated foot of some small mammal, and near the bottom an object that looked disconcertingly like the skull of an infant human being. She hoped it was a monkey.

Jonas was reading a newspaper, apparently a current one, which seemed to her somehow extraordinary, particularly as he wore steel-framed half-glasses to do so. He looked up as she came in, and his eyebrows raised as if he had no idea who she was or what she wanted. She tore her gaze from the strange window coverings and offered him a tentative smile.

'Ana Wakefield. You told me to come at five?'

His face did not change as he said, 'I hope you are wearing more adequate footwear than you did this morning.'

She nodded, and he pulled off his glasses and tossed them and the paper on top of the huge wooden desk that was piled high with papers, journals, used coffee cups, and more books than Ana could have gotten through in a month.

'Wait here,' he told her. 'I need to urinate.'

It was indeed a lair, or a den, or one of the illustrations of medieval alchemical laboratories come to life, lacking only the actual tools of the trade. She would not have been surprised to see Rackham's awe-struck alchemical gnome lurking in one corner. Tables were heaped high with books and papers, plates of half-eaten food and cups bristling with pens and pencils. The ballpoint pens seemed anachronistic, to say nothing of the elaborate computer array with scanner, phone line, and an industrial-strength-sized external hard drive: quills and an abacus would have been more appropriate. High, dark bookshelves held literally thousands of books, many several inches thick and hand-bound in ancient leather, but others considerably more recent, and she had a true shock when she saw a familiar spine tucked between two books from the end of the nineteenth century: Jonas had a copy of Anne Waverly's Cults Among Us on his shelf, and she was very glad that she had refused to have an author photo placed on the inner flap. It was disconcerting, as if she had caught sight of Glen peeping through the windows: comforting, but she could only hope no one else noticed.

Jonas came back and found her standing in the same spot as when he had left. He ran his gaze over the room as if to make sure he had not forgotten anything, then grunted, and walked out. She took the grunt as an invitation, or a command, but as she turned to follow, she glanced over at the headlines of the paper he had been reading, and caught the words AMERICAN CULT. She swore under her breath; all she needed was for another notch of pressure on Change. If the media climbed onto the current load of problems, it would not make her time there any easier.

'Why do they so love the word 'cult'?' Jonas was saying irritably. 'They use it as a term of opprobrium, certainly of derision. Did you know that 'cult' is from the Latin cultus, from the verb colere, meaning to inhabit or care for a place? And that it is related to the Greek kyklos, wheel, which in turn is linked to the Sanskrit chakra? You do know what a chakra is?' he demanded, stopping on the stairs to peer down at her.

This time he seemed to want his question answered, so she obediently said, 'It means wheel, too, doesn't it? Or the energy centers of the body that are depicted as wheels.'

He grunted and continued. 'Cultivate, culture, they're all the same, though I would say in this country we're more a cultigen than a cultivar. You don't have the faintest idea what I'm taking about, do you?'

'Cults,' she said promptly.

'I suppose,' he said, and led her out of doors.

They walked again, out into the jungle that had once been the formal gardens of an estate. Twice they went through green walls that she would have considered impenetrable, but Jonas knew just where to push his way, and they continued.

And he talked. She was well on her way to establishing herself as his soror mystica, she thought, but she had begun to feel a deep sympathy for Sami Dooley. When she got caught on a branch as he was telling her about the life of Arnold of Villanova, he merely reached back and hauled her bodily through the gouging, scraping branches. She tried to raise her spirits by the thought of what a fascinating study she would someday write of this whole episode, but the humor was halfhearted and the pain too sharp, and more immediate was the knowledge that she was being led off into the lonely woods by a man who made her feel as if she were carrying a rattlesnake in her coat pocket.

Focus! she ordered fiercely. Think, you stupid woman. Listen to what he's saying, this modern alchemist who believes, with all the power of his stunted emotions and considerable intellect, that the very nature of matter can be transformed by the application of a precise set of changes, forces, circumstances. Listen to his words, pick out his key images and the central ideas that drive him; use them to nudge him toward where you want him to be. Yes, he's a goddamn genius, but even the brightest minds have their blind spots, and you are about to become his. You can do this. You have to.

The path had cleared somewhat, and Ana walked just behind Jonas, her hands clasped behind her back, her head bent to catch his words, the perfect disciple. He was talking again about the stages of transformation that the prima materia goes through on its path to perfection into gold. She waited until he came to a resting point, and then she asked him a question.

'I do see that is like the rising of the Kundalini through the chakras. Don't the Chinese call them chis?'

That set him off on the topic of nerve centers and the rising of energies, sexual and otherwise, and the Indian/Chinese ties throughout history. Ana walked quietly, listening to his remarkably explicit descriptions of the frankly erotic discipline of Tantra and then asked him, struggling to keep the question matter-of-fact, 'To what extent do you think the alchemists saw the Kundalini as a metaphorical idea rather than actual, physical Tantra yoga?'

She might have been asking about rocks for all the overtones his answer held. 'The alchemist always speaks on several levels at once: literal, then metaphorical, and then on the plane where the literal and the metaphorical are one. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.' He then went on to speak about the role of the soror mystica, the mystical sister, during the course of which he left Ana in no doubt about the distinctly