Waking the Moon

nearly silent avalanche, Magda knew its posture was not accidental. It was the same carefully arranged stance that she had seen in photographs of coundess burials, from the famous Neanderthal remains of Shanidar to dozens of Celtic graves throughout Britain and western Europe. The exact same pose: body carefully set upon its side, legs drawn up, arms tightly folded as though they held something.

And in this case, the arms did hold something: a skull. The long curving spine ended above the shoulders in a twist of vertebrae like heavy ivory beads. The skull was gone. Decapitated—the edge of the first vertebra sliced cleanly away. She shone her flashlight back upon the rib cage and there it was, a pale globe clutched within a cage of fingerbones and slender femurs. Its eye sockets gave back a hollow glow where the beam touched them.

“Sweet Jesus,” Magda breathed, and tears sprang to her eyes. “June was right. She was right.”

She half walked, half swam through earth and stone, heedless now of further danger. Enough light leaked from where the sun was starting to rise overhead that she could see it all clearly. Notched and shattered vertebrae like bits of broken chalk. Around one slender wrist a bronze cuff, chased in a pattern of curves and dots. A dusting of rust-colored powder—red ocher—on several ribs, staining the soil beneath like blood. Something glittered from the skull, and she caught glints of gold and silver where bits of metal had fallen into the rib cage as the corpse decayed. Peering into the hole left by the collapsed wall, she glimpsed another array of bones and a very faint glimmering.

More artifacts. When she withdrew, her heart was pounding so hard she thought she might faint. She gazed back at the skeleton. Nothing, no ancient hoard of gold or bronze, could be as precious to her as that human form. She wept openly to look upon it.

“Jesus God. June, June, June.”

Somehow it had not been crushed by the weight of millennia. Perhaps the slow withdrawal of the River Othiym from the valley had eased its passage, providing a protective boggy medium until the harsher weather of modern times overtook Caril Kytur. Or maybe it was as June Harrington had told her once—

“They look after their own, you know. It doesn’t matter how long— they don’t sleep, and they don forget.”

June had been speaking of the Benandanti, but Magda had used the anecdote with her own students, referring to the remarkable preservation of the Shanidar site.

“They don’t sleep…”

This one hadn’t been sleeping when they killed him. Or perhaps he had been. Perhaps among the shattered remains of pottery and ornament she would find a ritual cup, a cauldron with pollen still adhering to its rim, chemical traces of psylocibin spores or papaver rhoeas, corn poppy. She extended one hand, her fingers trembling as they brushed the fragile-looking arch of ribs. She half expected the bones to crumble into ash at her touch, but they did not. They felt cool and solid as polished wood, their slightly rough pitted surface giving them a softer edge than she would have expected, like the velvet covering a yearling stag’s antlers. If she struck one, she was certain it would ring sweetly, like a bell.

It was bright enough now that she switched off her flashlight and stuck it into a soft mound of earth. She turned and lovingly ran both hands across the long femur, her fingertips catching on the raised lip of a scar, the rounded knob of its pelvis gleaming softly in the silvery dawn. Not just a burial, but a sacrificial burial: a ritual murder dating back some three thousand years. A major, major find.

June Harrington would be vindicated. Michael Haring would recoup his small investment. And Magda Kurtz’s reputation would be made.

Somewhere far above a warbler let loose a thin ribbon of song. She should go and wake the others, get cameras and notebooks and plaster of Paris down here, some kind of sandbags to keep the shaft from eroding further. Automatically she noted all the things she would write up later. Width of pelvis indicated a male. The clean edges along the damaged vertebrae suggested that a very sharp blade had been used for the sacrifice. A broken rib had healed unevenly; perhaps he had been a warrior. Teeth in surprisingly good condition, which meant a good diet. Probably quite young by modern standards, maybe eighteen years old. Most striking of all the positioning of the skull: carefully placed within the hands so that it faced outward, its empty eyes watching, waiting…

Nowhere had she ever read of a ritual slaying even remotely similar to this. She thought of George’s linguistic research, of how it pointed to heretofore unproven links with the Aegean. Together with the skeleton, this find would give weight to his work, and to all the hours of research that Magda herself had put into proving her mentor right. The welter of objects buried with the victim might at last provide conclusive evidence for June’s theories of a matrilineal culture in central Europe, undeniable proof of human sacrifice to a lunar goddess.

Magda took a deep breath. She pressed her clenched fists to her breast to keep them from shaking. This wasn’t just another find to be written up in Archaeology or Science. Not with women burning their bras and someone like Valerie Solanas shooting Andy Warhol. This would mean coverage in the Times and a mention on national news, early tenure, maybe even her own film crew…

She let her breath out in a long gasp and reluctantly forced herself back to the task at hand. There was still a considerable danger that the entire shaft might collapse. She should set as many details to memory as she could, and get the hell out. She thought of removing some of the jewelry for Michael Haring. This, after all, was what she had been hoping to find; this was why Haring had underwritten the spiraling costs of the entire odyssey.

But for once Magda Kurtz the scientist won out over raw ambition. If the site’s integrity was destroyed, any future speculation regarding the nature of Caril Kytur would be compromised. There would be plenty of time to pocket some precious toy for her patron; this afternoon, perhaps, while the others were shoring up the excavation, or even sooner. She smiled and started to turn back to the skeleton.

Before she could, her gaze fell upon a small mound. Dun-colored and coarse with dirt, the mound had been easy for her to overlook. But now Magda whistled softly. The pile held tiny figurines, dozens of them, carved of bone and ivory and stone and clay. No bigger than a knuckle or forefinger, although Magda glimpsed one cylinder of dark green stone the length of her arm. Most of the figurines were simple, pendant-shaped, with tiny protrusions representing arms, legs, breasts; others were more elaborate and showed the figure of a woman extravagantly garbed with swirling drapery and ornate headgear.

“No,” breathed Magda.

Goddess figurines. There might be a hundred of them, spanning thousands of years of worship: Lascaux to the Parthenon, the Venus of Willendorf to Persephone. Magda’s hand hovered above them, and almost she could feel heat rising, the dust and earth turned to ashes as flames licked at sculpted azurite and carven bone.

Oh, June, if only you could see this! She gazed down, filing it all away in her head, and prayed that nothing would happen before she could get George and Nicky down here with shovels and sandbags.

Slowly she turned from the figurines, and back to the human skeleton. She stooped to examine the bones more closely. The corpse had been painted with red ocher, same as at Shanidar. Or perhaps it was left to decompose and be picked clean by vultures—there were ancient paintings of such a ritual in Anatolia—and then the bones were colored in another ceremony. Gently Magda ran a finger along a blunt curve of vertebra rusted with the powdered mineral. Clay and hydrated ferric oxide, dark red, almost brown. They’d have to run an analysis on the pigment, see if it was local or not. She could smell the pigment, a faint tang like scorched metal. She drew a little X on her wrist and watched as the ocher seeped into her skin, a stain like old blood. Amazing. To think of such a ritual surviving for tens of thousands of years, from Neanderthals to proto-Celts! The thought made her feel exhilarated and a little nauseated. It was like doing really good acid, this whole night had been like some horrible and wonderful drug—

But then from somewhere overhead she heard a dull clinking sound. She looked up. Someone was awake in the camp. George, probably. He liked to drink his ersatz coffee while going over the previous day’s field notes, and he didn’t trust anyone else to fire up the recalcitrant little oil-burning stove. Her mouth opened and she almost called up to him, but thought better of it. Instead she bent over the skeleton once more.

How had it been aligned? The bodies found in Celtic burials at Lindow and Gournay had pointed east. She looked up at the small rosy mouth of the shaft. After making adjustments for the burial site shifting over time, and for the sudden collapse of the wall, she decided that the corpse had originally been aligned with its head facing