A.K.A. Goddess (15 page)

No lights went off because they hadn’t been on; it wasn’t even seven p.m. Evening light still filtered through the church’s ancient windows, sliding down the long length of its pilasters and across the increasingly shadowed bestiary of its friezes.

So here I sat. Me and Melusine.

It felt somehow right that Rhys wasn’t along. It felt right that it was just me and the goddess. In fact, the longer I looked at the intricately carved vesica piscis in front of me, fading with the light, the more clearly I could picture goddess worshippers making nighttime visits to this building.

For how many centuries?

Only once the shadows became so thick that I could barely see did I risk standing. No alarms went off—not that I knew of.

The pilaster was one, two, three steps away from me. I took those steps with careful balance. My logical side wanted to hesitate, maybe even give up before I left fingerprints or disturbed anything. This was crazy. I was no professional. Even if I found the secret entrance, based only on nursery rhymes, what chance was there that any locking mechanism still worked after all these centuries?

But this wasn’t about logic. Logic would let whoever cut down the most sacred oaks win. Logic would give up.

This was about faith.

I reached out my hand, not thinking, just acting. It fit against the lozenge where the two circles of the vesica piscis design overlapped, and my fingers slipped into nearly hidden holes. Until this moment they’d looked like intricately carved decorations. They were that—and more.

They’d been made for a woman’s slim fingers.

I curled my fingers into a solid hold—and pushed.

Absolutely nothing happened.

I pulled—and the chunk of stone in my hand pulled, as well, with an audible click. I heard a surprising, grating noise.

Then the two front flutes of the pilaster beside me lurched. I caught my breath.

A stone door had unlatched, just far enough for me to grasp it and swing it the rest of the way open. Goddess cultures had built aqueducts even before the Romans, so maybe they could manage some sort of weights-and-pulleys mechanism that would work even today. How sweet was that?

I stepped forward blindly, not wanting to risk the light in case this wall was visible to the security cameras. In three steps, my searching foot met only air. I put out one hand, touching the ancient stone wall for balance as I felt for more floor, and found a step downward.

Got it.

With one last glance toward the Plantagenet effigies, I grabbed the stone handle and pulled the door shut behind me.

It latched with a single, heavy grunt.

Now I turned on my light—and quickly shone it on the door. There was a latch to get back out, wasn’t there?

Yep. Right there, beside the door.

I turned back to the dusty stairway, raising my halogen light—and slowly inhaled.

Oh…my…goddess.

This wasn’t just a spiral stairway, hidden between a pilaster and buttress, curling down into the earth. It was a work of art. I’d thought the carvings in the church were fine? The ones that curled above the stairway were no less amazing. People with curving Celtic bodies and blank eyes. Knotted dragons. Cats with tails entwined. And Melusine, complete with wings and a double tail, flew over them as if leading the way.

I arched my light along the wall, then went to the steps, about to start down—

And hesitated. What if this was like an Indiana Jones or Alan Quartermain story with booby traps, anthrax, poison darts, or walls that would push in to crush the uninvited trespasser?

“No,” I whispered, again meeting the gaze of the stone snake-woman carved above me. “You were a mother. I don’t think the women who followed you would consider even something as sacred as your chalice more important than a human life.”

The stairs had a faint dip worn into them, from centuries of use. I took a step, then a second, curling downward along the tight staircase. Nothing bad happened.

Instead of blades or arrows, I faced a tapestry.

Then, seven steps down, another. Then another.

They lined the outside curve of the stairwell, easily as large and fine as the famous unicorn panels at the Cluny and the Cloisters museums. But unlike those tapestries, these told the story of Melusine.

Here, she stood naked in a fountain with her two sisters, her hair wild and untamed. At the edge of the panel, half behind a tree, a knight stared with wonder.

Here, she sat wearing a crown and twelfth-century clothing, a child to her breast. More children sat at her feet, her knight beside them. Everyone wore the blue and silver of Lusignan.

Here she bathed in her tower, bat-winged and snake-tailed. She had a potted tree beside her tub. On the edge of the panel—the opposite edge than in the first—her knight looked on, this time wide-eyed in horror.

And finally, toward the bottom of the stairwell, hung a tapestry depicting a dragon-like Melusine flying outside her tower, her mouth wide in what I assumed was her infamous scream, exiled by her husband’s betrayal.

I hardly noticed the tapestries’ worth, I was so intrigued by the familiarity of Melusine’s poses. I took the camera from my cargo pocket, climbed the stairs again, and snapped pictures. It was through the lens that I placed the familiarity.

Melusine in the fountain was like Boticelli’s Venus rising—aka love goddess. Melusine with her children suggested countless pieta and Madonna poses, and statues of Isis and Horus from even further back—aka Mother Goddess.

Was Melusine in her bath a Water Goddess or a Snake Goddess? The fruit on her tree looked suspiciously like apples.

And her flying? I just wasn’t sure. In the meantime, the double doors at the foot of the stairway beckoned. Their only lock seemed to be a simple stone bolt. Goddess worshippers were either naive or remarkably secure in their faith. Or both.

Over the doors read: Soeurs Pour Toujours.

Sisters forever. From centuries ago.

I lifted the bolt, pushed open the doors and walked in.

T he first thing I noticed, in that three-hundred-year-old hush, was the splatter of water.

I turned in a slow circle, shining my light across the Romanesque arches and pillars, the inverted, vaulted peaks of the low ceiling, the marble floor. In the middle of the round room stood a high altar table of white Fontevrault limestone. And beyond it, at the far end of the temple…

My light found a human-size statue of Melusine, tall and empty-eyed against the wall. Her bat wings looked somehow angel-like. Her full breasts were proud and bare, her tummy rounded out. She had wide hips, and she looked glorious. Both of her serpentine tails curved out in opposite directions, then back, to encircle the slightly raised edge of a floor-level well.

The splashing of water came from the large, thick bowl in her sculpted hands, pouring water into the pool. My light briefly reflected on the surface in bright flashes.

Had I sensed power in old churches? Even in shadows, this place sparkled with it…Real power.

Personal power.

I crossed the room to the statue, focused on the bowl. Sadly, the erosion of water pouring from it across the years, the centuries, had worn a scoop out of it. We might never know what had once been carved there. But still—it was the chalice!

I cleared my throat. “May I?”

Only my own voice responded—May…I may…I may…

Well, I was a Grail Keeper, wasn’t I? Putting down my light, I stepped to the side of the floor-level well, reached across and took the cool rock of the bowl into my hands. I lifted—

And couldn’t move it. Or pull it. Or twist it. Or push it.

It was part of the statue. It wasn’t the chalice.

When I looked up at Melusine’s face, extrashadowy without direct light, I imagined a glint of humor in her hollow eyes.

Fine. “Cup, cup, cup,” I murmured. “Who’s got the cup?”

Then my gaze fixed on the altar, the hub of the round room. Retrieving my light, I went there. The round top displayed a carving of the vesica piscis. And its sides—yes. I found a place where my fingers slid easily in. Click.

The top of the altar was hinged. Swinging it outward revealed an inset box lined in worn, deep-blue brocade; I feared a sneeze would disintegrate it. A silver necklace, with a sapphire, lay in a loving circlet. And within the circle—

The most beautiful chalice I’d ever seen.

Dismissing the idea of traps one last time, I lifted the treasure. And for the first time in over two hundred years, a Grail Keeper held the Melusine Chalice in her hands.

No. The Melusine Grail.

It had barely three inches of height, but far more width in its bowl and flared base. It seemed to be made of alabaster, and every inch of it had been beautifully etched. Medallions had been designed onto its bowl, engraved with the same images as on the four tapestries—beauty, motherhood, watery secrets and exile. An oddly textured Celtic knotwork swooped and curled across the rest of it. Melusine’s tails, I realized. They twined around the base, low stem and rim of the chalice.

I closed the top of the altar, set the grail lovingly on it—then dug out my disposable camera.

“Help me understand,” I whispered, and set about taking pictures. They had to be good enough to convince a French archeologist—preferably someone trustworthy and female—to retrieve this treasure so secretly that the Comitatus wouldn’t find out until everyone did. Whoever she was would be putting her neck on the line, arranging something so covert. She would need damned good proof.

So I shot the grail from all sides. Camera in one hand and light in the other, I took pictures of the Melusine statue and her well, of the floor and the columns. Then, holding the grail again—I loved its heft in my hand—I snapped pictures of the altar’s contents.

Then I carried the grail to the fountain’s edge. I sank onto Melusine’s stone coils at the base of her statue, one of her breasts very near the top of my head, and laid my flashlight on the marble floor. The grail cupped between my hands, I gazed into the shadowed, seemingly depthless well.

I imagined the generations of nuns who had slipped into this sanctuary to celebrate Melusine. Surprisingly powerful women. I tried to imagine what kind of rituals they performed.

It was a good bet that they drank together. Just as I’d promised the old woman at the church.

I turned the grail in my hands. I’d be spending all night here, so I had time. But time wouldn’t change the fact that now, holding absolute proof of my lineage, I was scared.

Not about where the cup had been. Not about messing up an archeological investigation. I was afraid of losing myself.

I was scared to lose Dr. Magdalene Sanger and all her logical, academic distance to the mysticism that filled this room.

It didn’t matter. I’d already promised.

I knelt before the well, before the goddess. I held the grail under the trickle of water from the statue’s bowl, rinsed and poured it out a few times, then filled it with temple water.

Then, determined to meet my fate with honor—I drank.

The water tasted sweet and surprisingly fresh. Spring fed, yes. But something about its coolness in my mouth, then my throat, felt even more refreshing than that.

It felt like drinking history, drinking womankind, drinking faith. It felt…

It felt like…

The waters splashing in the well seemed to swirl, sapphire blue, from more than the fountain. I felt suddenly dizzy, suddenly lost, suddenly drowning—

Save yourself, screamed my academic side. And I knew that normalcy waited for me, one protest away. But that way lay cowardice, too. So I let myself drift deeper into the sensation, safe in Melusine’s coils, letting her take me to where…

Where…

Welcome, daughter.

I didn’t hear the words; I sensed them. They weren’t words at all, but feelings. How do you transcribe feelings?

Welcome. Belonging. Love. I felt the heat of tears on my cheeks, so overwhelming was Her soul-deep acceptance. I took another sip of Her water to keep the physical sensation from drawing me out of this….

I sensed delight and humor. The physical is also spiritual. We women know that.

That came in images of childbirth, a flash so real that I momentarily felt labor pains. I embraced them, as had so many women of old, not as their victim but a warrior who withstands agony for the worthiest of goals, no matter its form. Life!

Those were replaced with images of sex, me and Lex Stuart tangled in silky Egyptian cotton sheets and each other, surging and gasping together as we strained toward that last moment when yes, oh goddess, yes…

I cried out at a rush of pleasure, there on the stone floor of Melusine’s temple—and sensed Her approval. At moments like that She seemed to say, I was a goddess, like ancient priestesses who brought men closer to the gods by making sex a sacred act.

“I get it,” I whispered weakly, savoring my breath hot on my own lips. “The physical is spiritual….”

Listen, Melusine said—or something like it. Look, or Know.

Then, so clearly it did not need words: We Are One.

I nodded, but the rush of scenes and figures flooding through me seemed to insist I didn’t wholly get it. Not yet.

Women forced to resort to secrecy in order to protect their holiness amidst a patriarchal world. Women hiding their talents, downplaying their true selves.

One.

Women who fell so deeply in love that they sacrificed not only their names but their individuality, their autonomy, their own dreams to that love. Whole-heartedly. Gladly. An offering.

One.

Women who were betrayed by that love. By infidelity, or distance, or condescension. The pain of having one’s other half turn against them.

One.

Women who found the strength to continue loving friends, and family, and the world, through their pain. Who cherished their children despite treachery by those children’s father, despite hardships that nearly destroyed them…but not quite. Never quite destroyed. Women who could look past pain to see that not all men are alike, who dared to love again.

One. One. One.

Now I got it. Melusine’s legend of love and loss wasn’t a cautionary tale about unworthy lovers. She was more than Her relationship. Hers was a heroic tale of survival, a testimony of spirit. Her snake self wasn’t ugly any more than any woman’s strength is ugly. Her refusal to conform to expectations was what got Her demonized, like so many women before and since.