Waking the Moon

the Benandanti had yet determined who they were, those two innocents doomed to be pawns in this latest skirmish between ancient enemies. She couldn’t imagine Balthazar not knowing, if only because she couldn’t imagine Balthazar not knowing anything.

She finished her champagne and handed the empty glass to a passing busboy. Over the years she had attended dozens of receptions like this, and some far more strange. Benandanti in full evening dress gathered in a derelict warehouse beside the Potomac; a seventeen-course dinner at the Gaslight Club served by naked young women; Benandanti mingling with career diplomats and Balinesian hierodules at Dumbarton Oaks. She had seen Michael Haring’s disconcertment turn to awe when he first viewed the collection of Iron Age cauldrons in the library of Saint Vespuccia’s College at the Divine. She had seen Balthazar Warnick walk through the door of a custodial closet in the Shrine, thence to disappear among the flower-strewn monuments on the island necropolis of San Michele in Venice. Compared to some of those other gatherings, the annual reception for new Molyneux scholars was nothing but a glorified frat party.

But tonight Magda felt uneasy. Perhaps it was her knowledge that the two innocents she had glimpsed last night were here, somewhere, ready to meet and ignite. Or perhaps Magda felt a small share of guilt over having doomed some poor fool to walk into the resulting conflagration. She took a deep breath and once more fingered the pendant around her neck.

Othiym, haiyo.

This, too, was a risk. But she always felt stronger when she wore it, and she often did so despite the danger. A number of the guests here might recognize it for what it was: a real, a true lunula, sacred to the ancient European Goddess, she who in the northern lands was called Kalma, “corpse-eater,” and in Greece the White Goddess; in Sumeria Lamasthu, “daughter of heaven,” and in certain remote valleys of the Balkans Othiym Lunarsa, Teeth of the Moon. She who is both Mother and Devourer, whose breath is plague, who suckles serpents and devours children. She who had made Magda’s reputation.

Because in the end the Caril Kytur expedition hadn’t been a disaster for Magda Kurtz. George’s death had been a tragedy, of course, but a minor one. There had been an inquiry, and a grief-stricken family mad for justice, but in the end it had been like that I Ching hexagram Magda had always favored: K’uei, Opposition but also No Blame. Michael Haring had been disappointed that she had not returned with illicit artifacts, but he soon found solace in another archaeologist.

In the wake of the Caril Kytur investigation, with its threats of lawsuits and damaged reputations, Balthazar Warnick had not refrained from saying I told you so. Yet Magda herself had, been surprisingly cool about the whole thing. Her colleagues chalked it up to the general unpleasantness of the experience, another good reason to avoid the Soviet-controlled Balkan states like the plague.

And eventually the whole thing blew over. George Wayford’s family settled for a scholarship endowed in his name. And Magda wrote the landmark paper that was published in Antiquities, the monograph that became the framework for Daughters of the Setting Sun. From what should have been a career disaster, Magda Kurtz emerged not only unscathed, but triumphant.

Some of her colleagues remarked how obviously nobody knew the whole story; and of course they were right. Because Magda told no one about the lunula. Not Haring, not Balthazar Warnick, not even June Harrington.

You are the secret mouth of the world
You are the word not uttered
Othiym Lunarsa, haiyo.

In the wake of the failed expedition came long months when she researched her secret treasure. She traded her dimly lit carrel in the Colum Library stacks for a battered wooden desk in the upper reaches of the Museum of Natural History, then went to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Finally she made her way to London, for two weeks’ study in the dusty cool recesses of the British Museum. This was followed by a week of visiting private collections in the Scottish countryside, including a sojourn at Dalkeith Palace outside of Edinburgh, where she viewed the legendary skulls owned by the Dukes of Buccleuchs.

What she learned there sent her to Athens. In a cafe shadowed by the Acropolis she met with Christos Eugenides, an eminent archaeologist friend of Michael Haring’s whose involvement in the thriving black market trade between the Aegean countries and the rest of the world had long been supported by the Benandanti.

“These are very good, you should try them.” Christos speared a prickly star the size and color of a tarnished nickle. “Baby octopus. Quite wonderful. Or the bekri meze—you might like that.”

Magda’s smile was more of a grimace. The sun and heat and effort of translation and travel had given her a permanent headache. She felt feverish and disoriented. The scent of olive oil and fried fish was nauseating. As a panacea, she sipped grimly and steadily at a glass of fiery tsipoura.

“No thank you. Michael said you might tell me more about an object I found—”

She could feel it nestled at her throat, cool as a blade for all the numbing heat. She parted her collar and let her fingers rest upon the crescent’s smooth edge. Christos Eugenides leaned forward.

“Ah—ah.” His voice rose sharply, as though he had been kicked.

“You know it, then.”

Christos Eugenides had already drawn back into his plastic chair. “This is not within my provenance,” he said curtly. “I’m quite sorry. Michael must have misunderstood—”

“He said you knew about Cycladic figurines—”

“This is not remotely Cycladic.”

“—and other things.”

He removed a bill and several coins from his pocket and set them on the marble surface. “I have an acquisitions meeting at the university at six o’clock. I’m quite sorry not to have been more helpful.” He rose.

“Then can you recommend someone else?” The lunula slid back into the folds of her blouse. “I’ve come all this way…”

“Surely the Museum Library is quite—”

“I’ve read enough. I need to talk to someone who’s seen one of these—”

“There is no one.”

She waited for him to go on but he said nothing more, only stared fixedly at her throat. Yet despite his tone and words, he seemed reluctant to leave. After a moment he turned to face the endless parade of automobiles, the sand-colored shadow of the mountain looming above them. Exhaust fumes mingled with the stench of fried fish, and Magda raised her glass to her face, breathing in the harsh smell of tsipoura. For a long moment they stood there, silent. Finally Christos sighed.

“Spyridon Marinatos.”

“Who?”

“Spyridon Marinatos. In Akrotiri on Thera—that is, Santorini. He is excavating a city on the south shore of the island, beneath the village of Akrotiri. It is a Bronze Age city…”

His voice drifted off into the drone of traffic and the carnival sound of a radio blaring bouzouki music.

“Marinatos?” Furiously Magda scribbled the name into her battered notebook. “Spiro Marinatos?”

Christos shook his head very slightly, as though hearing some more distant music. “Spyridon. Nea Kameni,” he said softly.

“Nea—what?”

“Nea Kameni. ‘The New Burnt Land.’ It is a fabulous city, buried like Pompeii or Herculaneum beneath the volcanic ash from the great cataclysm of 1450 B.C. He believes it was the capital of the great lost Minoan culture.”

For an instant the roar and rush of traffic, of blazing wind, died away. His next words sounded unnaturally