Waking the Moon

east. To the rising sun, as in the Shanidar burials.

Or the rising moon.

“The moon.” She said the words aloud and bit her lip.

Othiym, a minor lunar goddess with possible links to the great female deities of Knossos and Boeotia and Nippur in Sumeria…

The moon. As she raised her hand to brush the hair from her eyes, her nostrils filled with the sweet incense of hashish that still stained her fingers. With sudden clarity she recalled her walk, the eerie flood of moonlight and swarming insects. It was as though it had all been meant to lead her here, to this. For a moment she felt again the icy breath coming from the opening behind her, a chill that seemed to freeze her thoughts as well; but she quickly shook it off. She turned a last thorough gaze upon the burial victim, its arms clenched to its barren chest, its skull cupped within clawlike hands like a scryer’s globe.

And then, for the first time she saw something glittering upon the skull’s smooth surface. She had missed it in the darkness, but now dawn touched it with a rosy glow. It hung from the skull’s jutting brow in a gleaming curve, like a scythe or grinning mouth made of silver. She leaned forward until she could touch it, her fingertips grazing its edge so lightly they might have caressed nothing at all.

But it was there. It was real. Beneath her hands she felt metal, so cold it was as though she had plunged her hands into icy water, as though she had received an electrical shock. A jolt of pure energy bombarded her, shoving her back onto her heels. With a cry Magda reached forward again, though gingerly this time: because all she could think of was touching it, holding it. All she could think of was possessing it.

Upon the skull’s brow gleamed a crescent of pure light, so brilliant she had to shade her eyes. When she lowered her hand she could see it clearly: a span of smooth silver, like a little moon. At its widest point it was engraved with a triskelion that formed three moons, their intersecting crescents making a pattern as breathtakingly lovely as it was simple. Where the moons overlapped, there was a small crescent-shaped perforation, a grinning aperture. Very faint lines showed where once it had been touched with gold.

A sacrificial amulet, buried as an offering to the moon goddess. A talisman meant to guide the victim to his waiting and eternal mistress.

A lunula.

Magda hardly dared to breathe. Over the centuries only a handful of them had been recovered. Two from Artemis’s temple in Boeotia, where the Arktoi danced, bear-virgins sacred to the huntress. One from an Etruscan tomb, where no doubt it had been preserved as a curious relic of an even more ancient day. One or two others had been scattered across the Roman Empire, and now were locked within the holdings of the Vatican.

And then, of course, there was the fragment that June herself had found and given to the National Museum. With trembling fingers Magda touched the crescent-shaped hole in the pendant. This had to be it: the original of June’s lunula, the necklace from which the missing piece had been lost or stolen millennia before. Her breath caught in her throat. Michael Haring would give a fortune for it; any number of museums or collectors would give a fortune for it…

Magda pushed these thoughts aside, focused on the lunula itself. As she drew it from the skull, the hasp caught on a rounded plate of bone. Gently she tugged it free, and turned it slowly to catch the sunlight. The incised lines of its interlocking figures flickered from black to silver as it moved. The crescents seemed to burgeon from shining spindles to swollen orbs as she watched, new moon, half-moon, full, the missing crescent a bitter black mouth that twisted into darkness.

“Magda!” She jumped, the lunula swinging so that it struck her wrist. When she looked at her hand she saw a red blister there, faint as an old scar. “Magda! My lighter’s dead, I need some matches—”

In the glowing gap of the shaft’s entrance she saw George’s silhouette, his long hair a frizzy aureole.

“Hey! Thought you might be down here. You got matches?”

Magda stared up at him in panic. Her hand tightened around the lunula and she took a step backward, her feet sinking into the soft new fallen earth. “George,” she whispered.

“Couldn’t wait, huh?” he called cheerfully. He swung his legs over the edge of the shaft, one foot nudging at the air until it found the top of the ladder. “Last day’s a thirty-six-hour day, huh?”

She watched him slowly descend. Pebbles and clods of dirt fell in a dark rain as he came down. “Hey, you should be careful, you know? I mean, coming down alone like this in the middle of the night. This whole thing could collapse.”

She stood with her back pressed against the shaft’s wall. Panic boiled inside her. She was going to show it to him, to all of them; but so soon, so soon? A few feet away from her the skeleton lay streaked with light. In her hand the lunula was a burning arc, a star, a scythe. She clutched it against her breast and raised her face to where George stood midway down the ladder. His head turned this way and that as he squinted, trying to find her in the near-darkness. When he called out again his voice sounded muffled, confused.

“Magda?”

He shouldn’t be here.

The thought was another flaming arc. He shouldn’t be here. It was wrong, it was profane, stantikic’t. Not just tainted but forbidden. Against her back the earthen wall pressed, a moist enveloping weight. She could feel the lunula burning through her sweater, through her T-shirt, the smell of scorching metal and a raw red pain as the crescent bit into her hands, her fingers seared until nothing but blackened bone gripped the moon’s two horns and pressed them to her breast. Smoke filled the bottom of the shaft, smoke and the sound of her own anguished voice as she shrieked. Pain worse than any she could have imagined as the lunula branded her, its grinning livid mouth burning against her breast to leave its imprint, a pucker of moon-shaped scar tissue and just a trace of blood.

“Magda?”

She opened her eyes and he was there. His frizzy hair was pulled back sloppily with a leather thong and he wore a stained red T-shirt and jeans. He was staring at her, concern clouding his eyes as he stepped from the ladder and tried to find firm footing on the soft uprooted soil. He blinked in the dimness and pushed his steel- rimmed glasses firmly into place. He brought with him the scent of the open air, new morning and cold ashes and a faint smell of rain.

“Magda? You okay? You look a little—”

She tried to back away from him but she could go no farther, there was nothing but darkness now surrounding her, and earth. But George didn’t notice. He no longer seemed to see her at all. There was a quick sharp sound as he sucked in his breath. Behind their steel frames his eyes widened. Very slowly he raised one hand, pointing to the pale mound of bones glistening in the darkness. Before she could say or do anything, he lunged forward, shouting in amazement.

“What the hell? Magda, what did you find, that’s a, there’s a—”

Othiym.

She didn’t know if she said the name aloud or merely thought it. But she must have said something, done something. Because George froze, one hand reaching for the skeleton, his head turned to stare at her.

“Magda?”

It was a moon, a star, a scythe. Glittering in the darkness of the shaft as she swung it, a band of quicksilver slicing through the fetid air. She could feel its weight in her hand, a solid comforting thing like a smooth round stone, and feel how easily it sliced through his throat. Like a river swollen by the spring rain, erupting from its frozen prison to pierce and gouge its way through rocky soil; it was so easy, she brought her hand back and struck at him again, this time hearing a small pop as the lunula severed his windpipe.

“Maaaa…”

His voice was a child’s, soft, whimpering, the sound fading into a hiss as air leaked from his throat. He staggered and fell at her feet, and she stared down to see where the blood ran in a bright shining stream from the dark cleft left by the lunula. Her hand remained upraised, the silver crescent an eye peering into the shaft. Along its curved edge blood gathered in small black beads. Like water on an iron grill the beads danced and ran one into another, until they vanished and only fine white wisps of smoke remained. A metallic smell filled the air. Magda’s tongue grew swollen, dry and with the taste of something ferrous, flaking rust or dried blood clinging to the back