Waking the Moon

Elizabeth Hand WAKING THE MOON

For Oscar John Long,

friend and voyager

with all my love

Anyway those things would not have lasted long. The experience
of the years shows it to me.
But Destiny arrived
in some haste and stopped them.
The beautiful life was brief.
But how potent were the perfumes,
on how splendid a bed we lay,
to what sensual delight we gave our bodies.
An echo of the days of pleasure,
an echo of the days drew near me,
a little of the fire of the youth of both of us;
again I took in my hands a letter,
and I read and reread till the light was gone.
And melancholy, I came out on the balcony—
came out to change my thoughts at least by looking at
a little of the city that I loved,
a little movement on the street, and in the shops.

CR Cavafy, “In the Evening,” translated by Rae Dalven

If all those young men were like hares on the mountain
Then all those pretty maidens would get guns, go a-hunting.
If all those young men were like fish in the water
Then all those pretty maidens would soon follow after.
If all those young men were like rushes a-growing
Then all those pretty maidens would get scythes, go a-mowing.

—Maying Song

Contents

Prologue

PART ONE: DEPARTURE

1. The Sign

2. Raising the Naphaim

3. Oliver and Angelica

4. The Lunula

5. The Sound of Bones and Flutes

6. The Reception

7. Night of the Electric Insects

8. Twilight at the Orphic Lodge

9. The Harrowing

PART TWO: ABSENCE

i. Pavana Lachrym?

ii. Threnody: Storm King

iii. Lost Bells

iv. Saranbanda de la Muerta Oscura

PART THREE: RETURN

10. Ignoreland

11. Ancient Voices

12. The Priestess at Huitica

13. Other Echoes

14. Devil-Music

15. Ancient Voices (Echo)

16. Black Angels

17. Falling

18. A Meeting

19. Fire from the Middle Kingdom

20. Threnody and Breakdown

21. Waking the Moon

Coda

Author’s Notes

A Biography of Elizabeth Hand

Prologue

THEY NEVER FOUND HER. Nothing at all: no clothes, no jewelry, no bones or teeth or locks of auburn hair. No lunula. Maybe that’s why I never truly mourned Angelica. Oh, I grieved, of course, with that hopeless misery one reserves for lost youth or broken chances or a phantom limb. That was how I wept for Angelica; not the way I’d raged when I lost Oliver. Not even the muted anguish I’d felt during all those lost years in Dr. Dvorkin’s carriage house.

This was a small grief, really: because how can I believe that Angelica is really gone, any more than a storm or hurricane is gone? The clouds pass over, the skies clear; but there are still the shattered homes and decapitated trees, the dunes given to the sea. And always there will be that clutch in the chest when you see a darkness on the horizon, a greening in the evening sky.