Waking the Moon

entire West Coast—was precisely that open-mindedness that Balthazar and many of the Benandanti dismissed as quackery or, at its worst, a threat to their ancient ways. But she remained on good terms with her old mentor. Remained an active member of the Benandanti, even when her own work began to diverge from what they felt was important.

What they did not feel was important was the small but growing body of evidence that Magda, and June Harrington before her, had uncovered: all of it pointing to the existence of a matrilineal culture in ancient Europe. Balthazar at least had been courteous, reading preliminary drafts of her articles for Antiquities, but he did not feel that Magda’s theories were worth pursuing into the field.

“It’s small potatoes, Magda.” He turned and stared out the window of his office, to where the Shrine’s blue dome glistened in the sun. “Sure, you’ll find something there, but it’s not going to ever amount to anything. I mean, look at Catal Huyuk: there’s one of your goddess sites, a big one, too, but it doesn’t really add up to much, does it?”

Magda had listened, her foot tracing Xs on the expensive kilim that covered Balthazar’s floor.

Doesn’t add up to what you’re looking for, she thought furiously. But she said nothing. She hadn’t expected him to agree with her. Balthazar was after much bigger fish than her modest research had discovered. The Benandanti had financed digs in Jerusalem, Sardinia, Luxor; at Karbala’ in Iraq, and Katta-Kurgan near Samarkand; in Niger and Jamshedpur and the Hentiyn Mountains in Mongolia. Anyplace where the Benandanti had ever built a temple or cathedral of clay or gold or marble was suitable for resurrection. As was anyplace where their ancient enemy had once been worshiped: Athens, Knossos, Ur.

But a minor Balkan river goddess in a Soviet backwater was not exactly the powerful and vengeful deity they had been set to guard against. And so there was no funding for Magda’s project.

Fortunately, there was at least one other person willing to entertain her ideas.

“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” She smiled brightly at her host. It was a few days after the Divine’s reception for Michael Haring, a few days after Magda had finagled the invitation to visit Haring at his Georgetown town house. “It’s a helmet crest, first century B.C.”

Michael Haring turned the figure over in his hand. A little bronze boar, no longer than his middle finger, its raised dorsal spine worked with an intricate pattern of whorls that ended in the tiny beaked heads of cranes. He whistled softly. “It’s absolutely stunning. Where’d you find it, Magda?”

“It was June Harrington’s. She gave it to me a few years ago, for a birthday present.”

“And it came from your proposed site?”

She nodded. “The American Museum mounted an expedition there in 1923, with June and her first husband, Lowell Ackroyd. She’s given me her field notes, and some of the pictures he took. They’re not very good—the photos, I mean, her notebooks are superb—but I can tell, Michael, I can just tell! June says they found three burial pits with evidence of ritual animal sacrifices, and that—”

She gestured at the bronze figurine. “—that came from the last one they uncovered, Eleven-A. The neighboring valleys show signs of having very advanced Bronze Age settlements—we’re talking collective burials, hypogea with detailed wall paintings, and heating from thermal springs, maybe even some kind of linear script on some of the pottery fragments. The whole valley’s a potential gold mine. The surrounding heath is pretty marshy, which means there’s a good chance that whatever we come up with could be well preserved.”

Michael nodded, turning the bronze boar between his fingers. “Why did they stop the dig?”

“Winter. The valley becomes completely impassable in winter. The first storm came in early October; June and Lowell and the crew barely got out before the snows blocked off the pass.”

“I see.” Carefully Michael set the boar back into its nest of yellowed newsprint. He reached for the bottle of claret beside it and raised an eyebrow. “More?”

“Please. It’s wonderful.” Magda held out her glass, smiling brilliantly and hoping he wouldn’t notice how nervous she was. “So!” She toasted him and let the first rich mouthful of wine slide down her throat. “What do you think?”

Michael Haring looked around his living room. There were glass cabinets everywhere, some arranged against the wall, others floating like huge crystal pendants amidst the expanse of black leather furniture and white shag carpeting. The cabinets were filled with figures very like the one that rested on his table, and with silver torques, beaked masks, bronze armor in the shape of wings, plaques inlaid with bone and silver and crudely polished stones. He surveyed them all, not with pride but with a certain wistfulness that gave his dark eyes a mournful cast. An Iron Age prince’s ransom in artifacts and metalwork: nearly all of it obtained on the black market, spirited from original holdings in Britain and Czechoslovakia and Turkey and Greece. He was tied up in litigation right now with the embassy of a small country in Eastern Europe, fighting over the disposition of his most-prized treasure: the mummified head of a Bronze Age man found in a peat bog, and now displayed within a tall glass case like a casket stood upon its end.

“I think,” he said carefully, staring at the tea-colored head in its crystal chamber. “I think that this could be a very important adventure you’re planning, Miss Magda. For both of us.” And turning, he let his hand rest upon her thigh.

Six months later Magda and her crew were in Caril Kytur. The site was in a desolate corner of northern Estavia, deep within the Psalgyuk Mountains—tall, needle-thin spars of quartz and flint that shot up against leaden skies that rarely showed the sun. Like something out of a Durer etching of Hell, Magda thought, or Murnau’s Nosferatu. Even the trees were stunted, crippled pines and alders whose roots poked through the thin acid soil where they sought footing.

It was late July. In the three days it took Magda and her companions to drive from the Estavian capital to Caril Kytur, they passed only two other vehicles: an empty Intourist bus with Moscow plates, and an ancient grey jitney piled high with wooden cartons, live chickens and ducks tied to its extremities with red twine. The bone- jarring trip was enough to make Magda wish that she’d left Janine, at least, back in Washington.

“This is not, like, what my faculty advisor told me to expect,” Janine announced after their second night in the Jeep. “I thought I was going to get to practice my Russian, but there’s nobody here.”

“Well, we’re stuck with each other now,” Magda said grimly. “So if you want to bail out, start walking.”

No one did. A few hours later they’d reached their destination.

“Oh man,” breathed Nicky D’Amato, another of the triumvirate who’d signed on from the Divine. “Are you sure you read that map right?”

Magda sighed. “I’m sure.”

They stumbled from the Jeep and looked down into the valley of Caril Kytur, a long narrow spit of land crosshatched with streams that fed into a huge marshy area to the south. It was a dispiriting landscape. The stones dun-colored, pleached with lichen and moss; the few trees hunched against the wind that whistled down through a gap in the mountains to the north. Lowell Ackroyd’s theory had been that a band of Paleolithic hunters was stranded here during one of the minor ice ages, surviving to found the ancient encampment known as Caril Kytur, Belly of the Moon. Certainly it was hard to imagine why anyone would choose to live here. The surrounding mountains were sparsely populated, mostly by shepherds who eked out a living from the barren hillsides and more temperate valleys. Magda had thought the natives would be eager to supplement their meager incomes with what they could earn from assisting on the dig, but that wasn’t the case at all.

“He says they’re not interested.”

George Wayford, the last of the three grad students who had accompanied Magda from D.C., shook his head. They were sitting in front of Magda’s tent—Magda, George, Nicky, Janine—the entire Caril Kytur crew. Overhead the sky was grey and skinned-looking. A cold wind blew down from the mountain pass to the north, sending skeins of mist racing across the encampment. Magda shivered in her heavy Icelandic wool sweater and wondered why she’d thought this was a better idea than the Yucatan. “He says the whole valley is stantikic’t—”

“What? Haunted?” Janine interrupted derisively.

George squatted in front of the hissing campfire and lit a cigarette. “No,” he said, and tossed his match into