Waking the Moon

“No—” She shrugged into his shirt, then laughed. “Oh, what the hell. Sure, why not.”

The shirt hung almost to her knees. It had a strong powdery smell of jasmine incense. “Looks nice,” said Peter. He settled cross-legged on the mattress, reached beneath a lumpy pillow, and pulled out a small agate pipe. “Here—”

They smoked in silence. Peter’s head bobbed in time to the soft music, the small blue candle flame shivered with each pass of the ancient fan. After a few minutes Peter set aside the pipe.

“Is that the only song on this tape?” Her voice was hoarse, her tongue felt thick and sweet, as though she’s been eating jam.

He nodded, eyes slitted. “Yeah. Isn’t it great?”

“For the first million or so times.”

He only smiled and tapped out a rhythm on his thighs. Magda sat across from him, her headache still throbbing gently somewhere far beneath the soft buzz of hashish. She was so tired, she should get up and leave, thank him for the hash. She thought about moving, might even have stretched one leg toward the edge of the mattress; but when she looked up she saw that Peter was staring at her, his eyes gilded to gold coins by the candlelight.

“That’s really beautiful.” He moved until he sat on his knees facing her. He put one hand on her shoulder and gently touched her throat. She felt the weight of the lunula there, rising and falling with the pulse of her blood. “You’re really beautiful.”

She laughed again, softly. “Yeah, sure,” she murmured, but she didn’t draw away.

“No, really, I mean it.” One of his hands moved to stroke her breastbone beneath the crescent; the other brushed the hair from her face. “You really are. You look like a—” He shook his head, smiling, and made an extravagant gesture.

She could feel herself blushing: she’d been called beautiful about three times in her life. As he gazed at her Peter’s brown eyes were luminous, but also a little surprised, as though his own words confused him. He rested his palm against her cheek, staring at her with his lips parted, his eyes narrowed as though he was trying to remember something, like where or who he was, how she’d gotten into his room. Magda stared back at him. Her own breath was coming faster now and her heart was pounding. There was something about the flickering light, the way the shadows coursed across the boy kneeling in front of her—as though she was watching him from some impossible height, with webs of cloud and mist between them and blue waves smashing against cliffs far far below. She shut her eyes and the vision became even clearer, a barren mountaintop where small purplish flowers clung to the stones, their star-shaped petals hanging from a lax head nodding in the wind. Their scent was overpoweringly sweet, the smell of hyacinths. At cliff’s edge flames scored the rim of a blackened brazier. The air was full of sound, keening wind and gulls, the wail of an ibis. She heard voices, faint music and the sound of drums. Her bare skin burned from sun and salt water and she could smell something burning, a pungent leafy scent. Not wax or hashish but something else: yarrow sticks, dittany of-Crete, crushed bay leaves; and this mingled with the musky odor of Peter’s sweat, the faint scent of jasmine that clung to his hair, and the wind-borne sweetness of hyacinths. He was so near to her that his breath was warm against her skin, her throat. Nearly as warm as the metal crescent upon her breast, as the flames leaping behind them. She opened her eyes. A few inches from hers, Peter’s face was flushed, his eyes half-closed as though he was dreaming it all: the music, Greece, Magda herself.

She lives…

Magda shook her head, tried to blink away the flares of grey and gold and blue that streamed at the edges of her vision. What the hell is this? But she could see nothing clearly save the boy in front of her. He was impossibly beautiful, his hair unbound and his throat and face and eyes all turned to gold, his robe fallen open so that she could see his skin, smooth, the color of expensive oil. Like a bronze kouros, one of those sacred images dredged from the Aegean, his blank eyes fixed on some point in the unfathomable distance. He was unbuttoning her shirt, his fingers cupping her breast, his weight pressing the lunula into her flesh as he kissed her.

She…

She pushed him back against the mattress, pulling off his robe until he lay there, naked. For a long moment she looked at him, stroking the tops of his thighs, tracing the long curve of his waist and then cupping his ass in her hands as she lowered her head and took his engorged cock into her mouth. His flesh tasted salty, bitter; she could smell the sea and feel the wind cold upon her back, his hands hot as metal as they crushed her breasts and he groaned. A few bitter drops burned against her tongue. She drew back quickly before he could come. He groaned louder; she straddled his legs, took his cock in her hands.

“Oh—hey, don’t stop—”

His voice cracked as he stared up at her, his eyes no longer soft but imploring, almost desperate. She smiled, a thin smile, and mounted him.

It was too fast for him, she could hear him begging her to slow down but she didn’t care. Her fingers raked his chest, her nails left red streaks as she pulled him harder into her. Blood welled from beneath his bottom rib; she brought her finger to her mouth and sucked it, then lowered her face and kissed him. He moaned and tried to grab her, but she pulled back again, still holding him inside her.

When she came she gasped and let her breath out explosively. She could hear him crying out, a high thin sound carried away by the wind, felt the faint pulse and throb of him beneath her as she drew away. Her head pounded so that it drowned out everything else.

“God—ah, god—” Peter murmured where he lay beside her. “That was amazing…”

There was a sound. A lingering echo as of the voices she had heard earlier, far-off and indistinct. She sat with her knees sinking into the mattress, naked except for the silver crescent upon her breast. From its twin spars candlelight glinted, gold and red. The voices grew louder.

Strabloe hathaneatidas druei tanaous kolabreusomena
Kirkotokous athroize te mani Grogopa Gnathoi ruseis itoa

As though she were reading them in the air in front of her, the meaning of the words became clear. She had always known them, had heard them before a hundred times, a thousand.

Gather your immortal sons, ready them for your wild embrace
Ravage Circe’s children beneath the binding Moon
Bare to them your dreadful face, inviolable Goddess, your clashing teeth

The voices died into the rush of wind and the sea. Magda shook her head, trying to recall just where she was, why her knees seemed to be digging into rough dirt instead of cloth. She could smell the musty thick odors of Peter’s room, incense and semen and unwashed clothes, and see a small blue flame beneath its spiral of grey smoke. But the outlines of walls and floor and ceiling had grown blurred, lost in a growing haze. Then the sun was gone, and the candle flame. Everywhere about her was night save for a fine thread of silver drawn across the sky and the pale form of the kouros in front of her. In her hands she felt the lunula’s weight,