Waking the Moon

I ALWAYS WONDER WHAT would have happened if I hadn’t gone with Baby Joe for those two vodka tonics. If instead, I’d gone over there to stand with Angelica and Professor Kurtz. In my head that’s always been the moment when everything changed, the stone tossed into the stream that changes its course. If I’d been there talking to them, maybe the others would have left them alone. Maybe my entire life would have been different.

Probably I couldn’t have done anything at all. But I would have saved them if I could.

Her conversation with Harold Mosreich left Magda uneasy.

Only yesterday I heard Balthazar Warnick say how sorry he was you were leaving us so soon.

But she hadn’t told Balthazar, or anyone else, that she was going. He could have easily figured it out, of course: the summer session was over, the fall term had already started; but it was still unsettling. She had interfered with Benandanti matters; she had stolen knowledge of their Sign, cast a pebble into the clear water where they went to scry their secrets.

Time to go, she thought. But as she started for the door a voice cried out to her.

Wait!

The command was so loud and clear that she stopped, glancing around furtively. She saw only the same crowd of well-dressed men and women, nothing else. But when she took another step it came again—

Wait!

—a man’s voice, low and insistent. She smoothed her damp palms against the front of her dress, closed her eyes as she tried to summon whom or whatever had called to her.

Nothing. She heard scattered bits of conversation—classes, football, something about incunabula at the Library of Congress—the sweet sad notes of the string quartet. Tod und der Madchen. She opened her eyes.

All was as it should be. There was Harold Mosreich, chatting with a blue-haired matron. There was one of her students, a boy who had been her partner in a brief and intense liaison over the Fourth of July weekend. Near Harold was another boy, stocky and dressed in an ill-fitting suit, who leaned over to light the cigarette of a pale, dark-haired girl, with a freckled, waifish face and nervous hands. Nothing more.

Magda let her breath out. Nerves and fatigue, that was all. She had forgotten how the effort of summoning the naphaim exhausted her. By this time tomorrow she’d be back in her apartment at Berkeley, readying herself for her own fall term. She’d done what she could to intervene on behalf of her Mistress. Now it was out of her hands. She finished her glass of champagne and was turning to leave when the girl approached her.

“Professor Kurtz?”

Magda froze.

“I’m Angelica di Rienzi.”

It was the girl Magda had scried in her room. In sudden panic Magda took a step backward, then caught herself and tried to smile. The girl smiled back and went on breathlessly.

“I wish I’d been able to take one of your classes this summer—I wanted to audit one but they wouldn’t let me. I’m just starting here,” she added. “But I wanted you to know how much I loved Daughters of the Setting Sun—”

She was such a beautiful girl! Magda nodded, stunned. “Angelica, how—how nice of you—”

She winced as Angelica took her hand and shook it vigorously. The girl had incongruously large strong hands, a peasant’s hands despite their long polished nails, with broad, slightly callused fingers.

“Oh, I mean it, Professor Kurtz, it was wonderful—”

That smile! It was ravishing, and Angelica was probably not as unconscious of its effect as she tried to appear. When Magda wanly smiled back, she felt that her own mouth was too small and meager to project anything remotely worthy of this girl’s radiant good will.

“—I did a paper on it at school. It really, really changed my life.”

Magda arched an eyebrow. “Really really?”

“Oh, yes! I loved that story about the Greeks—the fight between the men and women, and how when the women lost, the men said their children would no longer be allowed to keep their mothers’ names. That was the first time I ever thought about the whole notion of a matriarchy. It was like a door opening, and you opened it for me.”

“Saint Augustine.”

“Excuse me?”

“The story’s from Saint Augustine. You know, the proto-feminist,” Magda said drily. “So I guess you should thank him for opening the door.”

“Oh. Well, anyway…”

When you took them apart Angelica’s features were almost too exotic, at least to someone accustomed to California, where girls were polled neatly and expensively as bonsai evergreens. And, of course, she was wearing green contacts. No one had eyes that color, Magda thought, like the virent flash of some Amazonian butterfly’s wing.

“…made me want to become an archaeologist. Before that I was planning to go into the theater—a friend of mine from Sarah Lawrence said she could set me up with an audition for ‘Dark Shadows’…”

Magda nodded. The girl definitely had something. The unusual features projected a striking, almost disturbing, beauty—Magda thought of the famous bust of Nefertiti, or the heavy-lipped face of the hermaphroditic Akhenaton. Exquisite, but in a way that wasn’t quite human. She wondered why the Benandanti had brought her here. Perhaps they had known, somehow, that she was to be chosen for some great work. But Magda was fairly certain that even the Benandanti had not known until a few days ago that a Sign was to appear.

No, something else would have driven them to Angelica; the world was full of beautiful girls who were not marked for the Benandanti. What Magda sensed in her was an overwhelming determination, a great and terrible will.

Will toward what, Magda had no idea. Probably the girl herself didn’t even know—not yet, at least. But when she found out, all hell would break loose. Magda stared at her thoughtfully as Angelica went on.

“…spent some time with my cousins in Florence and then…”

It wasn’t just her beauty: she projected such raw pure energy. Nearly everyone stared at her. A few, men and women both, quite literally stopped in their tracks to stare. As though some great icon—the Sphinx, Venus de Milo, Greta Garbo—had strolled into a cocktail party and mixed herself a drink.

And, while she seemed to pay no heed to this constantly changing backdrop of admirers, Angelica di Rienzi noted every single one of them. Magda was sure of it.

“And then one night I got a phone call from Balthazar…”

Balthazar? Since when did undergraduates call him Balthazar? Angelica reached out to stroke Magda’s bare arm, the girl’s touch like warm oil poured across her skin. Magda shivered.

“…and I love it, I just love it…”

Magda closed her eyes. The girl’s perfume enveloped her, a sweet warm fragrance like sandalwood and oranges. Like the sun burning down upon those tiny wild hyacinths that grow beneath endless blue Aegean skies —

Kirkotokous athroize te mani Grogopa Gnathoi ruseis itoa

—like the sweet smoke drifting up from the mountaintop, the kouroi gathered there and harrowed in the dusk like grain…

“So I like, really think that I’ll find myself here.” Angelica laughed and let go of Magda’s arm. “I’m sorry to go on like this! But your work really has meant so much to me.”

…Othiym haiyo…

Magda drew back as though she had been slapped.