Balthazar made a face, and Magda laughed. “Well, I’m still very grateful you let me teach here this summer, Balthazar.”
He smiled. “But who could turn away the lovely and brilliant Magda Kurtz?”
“You refused Paul de Man.”
“You’re much better looking.”
Magda stared at him, amused, but then she saw how Balthazar’s eyes had clouded, blue shivering to grey.
“It’s nothing but theory, Balthazar. Just another way of looking at the world.”
“Theories can be dangerous things,” said Balthazar. His tone was light, but she saw how his eyes were cold and parlous as fast-moving water. “Remember Rousseau and romanticism.”
“I can’t sleep for thinking about them,” Magda said, laughing; but that gaze had stayed with her for a long time, like a bad chill.
She shivered at the memory, quickly composing herself as a passing couple greeted her. It was exhausting, keeping up the pretense of being just another Molyneux scholar made good in the ivory tower. She knew there’d been talk. Within the legions of Benandanti there was always talk. Conspirators wormed through its long history, brazen or retiring or deadly, but always there. In this the Benandanti were like the Vatican, only far more ancient. Like the Inquisitors of old they had their little ways, their probings and inquests, scrutators and catechists, their spies and delators and indagations. Cabals of old men—the oldest of old men—and they gabbled and gossiped like crones. Women had gotten a bad rap for being gossips, Magda thought bitterly. She had never known a group more eager to snipe and speculate than old Catholic priests and the Benandanti. No better place than the Divine (or the Vatican) for that.
Though, unlike the Vatican, the Benandanti left no histories for the world to read. Most of their cadastrals and cartularies had perished with the libraries of Alexandria, after which time the Benandanti became a nomadic sect. They maintained their eternal vigilance from behind the marble clerestories of the Eternal City, and the Kaaba in Mecca; from the Maharajah’s pavilion at Varanasi, and Italy’s octagonal Castel del Monte and even, very briefly, the Old Map and Print Room on the fourth floor of Harrods. It was not until the colonization of the Americas that the Benandanti found at last a permanent home, a place where all the old wise men of the Indo-European steppes could settle to grow even older and wiser, and from the dusty classrooms of the Divine watch their protégés make their way into this brave new world.
And now that an unmistakable Sign had come, those at the Divine would be especially watchful against traitors. Without thinking, Magda touched the amulet at her throat.
In hoc signo vinces. Othiym Lunarsa, Othiym, Anat, Innana, Othiym evohe! Othiym haïyo.
The ancient tongues ran together but she knew them all. In this sign we shall conquer, Othiym. We exult! We praise you.
She’d been recklessly stupid the other evening, leaving her room with the spent Hand of Glory and the other remnants of her craft in it. That was what happened when you toyed with the naphaïm—they made you feel indestructible, made you forget that while they could soar above it, you were likely to plunge into the inferno and burn. Her fingers played along the smooth edge of the silver crescent, the half-conscious refrain still echoing in her head.
Othiym, Anat, Innana…
But she should watch her thoughts here—especially here—shroud them in nonsense or dull mental chatter. She closed her eyes and dredged up one of George’s dopey verses, composed on that endless flight to Estavia—
Someone touched her elbow and she started. One of her students, holding a bottle of Heineken and peering at her in concern.
“You okay, Professor Kurtz? You want a beer or something?”
She smiled and shook her head. “No thanks. Just tired. I have an early flight.”
He nodded sympathetically. “Oh, yeah, man, I can relate. Jet lag. Have a few drinks first, it really helps.”
She grimaced. “At 7:00 A.M.? Maybe not.”
He grinned and left her, weaving slightly.
Magda took another sip from her champagne. All these drunk kids, thrilled to be drinking Heineken when there was Veuve Clicquot and Tattinger Brut for the asking. She sighed.
Because of course it was the kids who had brought her here tonight. Knowing it was foolish, knowing it might mean dangerous questions from Balthazar or his toady Francis—still she hadn’t been able to resist the notion of seeing in the flesh one or both of the faces she’d scried in her room the night before. She wondered if 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 Michèle 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, haïyo.
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 Çaril 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.