He fell silent. His grasp upon my shoulders loosened, and I drew back.
“I think you’re crazy,” I said. “But even if it were all true—and I know it’s not—why should I listen to you? You betrayed that girl—you let them burn her at the goddam stake—”
“There was no betrayal. I was going to help her, I had no idea that the Conclave had condemned her to death—”
“You were afraid. You were afraid of them, and you were afraid of—whoever she was.” I tilted my head back and regarded him coldly. “That was how the story went that Ali told us.”
Balthazar sighed. He ran a hand across his brow and sat back down on the window seat, shoving aside the model of the planets and watching me with bleak eyes. “They were all afraid of her.”
“Because she was so powerful?”
“No. Because she was so angry. Not bad-tempered—she was good-natured, too easily led into bed, too kind when it came to helping her father and her cousins. But she had a very great rage, sometimes it seemed that everything would make her angry—babies dying of the flux, her own mother dying as she struggled to give birth to her tenth child, her friends and cousins becoming pregnant before they were fourteen years old—all of it enraged her—”
“No shit.”
“—but there was nothing she could do about it. For herself, she took herbs, and was very careful in her lovemaking so as not to get with child. But she would shout at the others when they got pregnant, she would shout at the parents whose children died—she shouted at the village priest, and when he tried to force her confession during the sacrament of penance, she kicked him.”
I laughed. Balthazar smiled ruefully. “I was a bit afraid of her, as much as I was afraid for her. Not that she would hurt me—she loved me, and we argued very rarely—but because I knew her rage would draw attention to her.”
“Because she kicked a priest?”
“No. Because her fury is what gave her power. It’s what fueled her sight, it gave her the dreams she had, where she could see things she was not meant to see. Her anger is what drove her to learn about the plants that kept her sterile. It made her lash out at the other women, who refused to listen when she tried to help them—”
He stood and crossed to one of the massive book cabinets, shelves bowed beneath volumes bound in leather, untanned hide, rainbow silks, parchment. A library ladder leaned against the wall, and Balthazar nimbly climbed it, looking like an earnest schoolboy in the shadow of all those somber tomes. Dust puffed out around him as he withdrew a volume and blew on its spine.
“Kirsten better see to those,” he said as a pair of moths flew past his head. “Here, take this please—”
I hesitated, then walked over. I was half-expecting something exotic, or at least undeniably ancient—crumbling vellum, cracked leather and Latin—but the book he gave me was merely old and musty-smelling, its cloth binding frayed, its spine cracked as from much use. Disappointed, I turned it to read the cover.
“Do you know it?” asked Balthazar as he clambered back down the ladder.
“Oh, sure. Are you kidding?”
He walked over to a narrow table set along one wall. Papers covered it, and an old Royal upright typewriter. I followed him, opening the book to read its title page.
An inquiry into the Vegetation Gods of Old Europe, and their connection with the Ancient Women’s Cults of the Mediterranean and surrounding regions. Cambridge University Press, 1904.
“Well,” I said as Balthazar took the book from my hand. “It’s not exactly The Catcher in the Rye.”
He smiled and with a flourish pointed to a velvet-padded chair, its arms carved with whorls and griffin’s-heads. “Sit.”
I sat. He pulled a matching chair alongside me and settled himself into it, smoothing the book’s cover. “It’s a very important work, that’s all. In my day students younger than you are could recite long passages by heart.”
In your day guys were reciting Beowulf in mud huts, I thought darkly, but said nothing. Balthazar opened to the table of contents, an impenetrable listing of bizarre names and Greek characters, with a few bits of Latin thrown in for leavening.
“Do you know who the Erinyes are?” he asked.
“No.”
“Really? Well, the name means ‘the angry ones.’ They were commonly known as the Furies, but also they were called the Eumenides, ‘the kindly ones.’ They are three women—usually old women, but not always. I have found depictions of them on black-figure vases where they are beautiful, and young, although they do have eagle’s talons and wings. They were associated with terrible, terrible things. Even their names are bloodthirsty: Megaera, the Jealous One; Electo, the Relentess; Tisiphone the Avenger. They are the Punishers—June called them the death-Sirens, who would drive guilty people to frenzy. In ancient Greece, the very word used to describe ‘rage’ was almost indistinguishable from their name. They are far older than any of the Olympic deities; they may be among the oldest supernatural creatures of which we have any written record.”
“What did they do?”
“They restored order. Not necessarily human order, and not divine order—certainly not divine order as we think of it now. Whatever their code of ethics was, it was far more ancient than anything we can even begin to imagine, and more horrible. June Harrington speculated that it was the order of the Mothers—of an unimaginably ancient form of worship. It is an extremely interesting thing, really.”
I looked up, surprised at how his tone had changed. It was softer, more thoughtful, and his expression as he gazed at a page of June Harrington’s book was almost dreamy. “So many of the images of women that we have from ancient Greece are terrible ones. Medea slaughtering her children, Medusa turning people to stone, wicked Clytemnestra plotting against her husband—
“But she wasn’t really plotting,” I broke in. “He murdered their daughter—he sacrificed Iphigenia, and Clytemnestra was just—”
“Ah.” Balthazar raised an eyebrow, his sea-blue gaze mocking. “And how came you by that bit of arcane knowledge?”
“We had to read it at school,” I said defensively. “At least we were supposed to read it, for one of my drama classes. We did all that stuff. Ali played Iphigenia in a scene for our acting class.”
“Did she?” Balthazar smiled. Suddenly he no longer seemed so old. The burnished light touched his cheeks and graying hair with gold, so that his face looked smooth and timeless. He tilted his back back, and in a soft voice began to recite.
I frowned. “I don’t remember that part.”
“It’s a different play,” confessed Balthazar. “Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris. There’s a happier ending than in the Oresteia, at least for Iphigenia—her father sacrifices a deer instead of his daughter.”
“That was big of him.”