Black Light (35 page)

“And so always I was sustained by the thought that she c
ould
be there, somewhere. Even if I never saw her, even if I was never able to find her again—it was enough. I could serve out my duty to my masters, knowing that she might be alive but with no memory, no knowledge of what she had been, nor of what she might be. And the cycle would have gone on, endlessly—if not for Ralph Casson.”

“Ralph Casson!” I tried to pull from him. “Ralph fucking Casson didn’t create me! I wasn’t waiting for him to make me come to life—”

“I did not say he created you,” said Balthazar. “I said he made you
aware.
Do you know why Giulietta was executed, Lit?”

His fierce gaze made me look away. “Because she slept with you,” I muttered. “And they thought she was a witch…”

“She
was
a witch. By their terms—she had the sight, she knew I was a Benandante the first time she laid eyes on me, covered with dust and carrying my scrolls in a rotting leather sack. She did not know precisely what a Benandante was, but she knew me for something more than what I seemed to be. She was sixteen when we met, she had been her own cousin’s lover for two years already—she was no child, any more than you are. And she did not know what she was, any more than you do.

“I was the one who told her of our work; of our fight against the Malandanti. Because I loved her; because I wanted her to join me. I—I thought that if she knew, it might be possible—that my superiors might have permitted us to marry—that she might then have helped us, helped me to fulfill my part in all of it…”

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.

TERRORS UNSEEN

THE ERINYES

AND

THE ORIGIN OF THE MYSTERY CULT OF DIONYSOS

By June Harrington

“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.

“A greeting comes from one you think is dead.

She is not dead

But alive. You are looking at her now, for I am she—

But come and save me from a life

As priestess in a loathsome ritual—

Save me from dying in this lonely land

Lest memory of me shall always haunt you.”

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.”

“Ah! You think he was wicked—but the truth is, it was Artemis who demanded the sacrifice of Iphigenia. With the possible exception of Aphrodite, who was a bit of a latecomer to Olympus, none of the ancient goddesses were particularly nice people.” I glanced at Balthazar curiously: he was talking about these characters the same way my mother might discuss a neighbor who drank too much before Garden Club meetings. “They could be helpful, but there was nearly always a price, and usually it was blood. Nowadays we think of Artemis as the Huntress, and picture her like
that
—”

Balthazar waved a hand dismissively at an Edwardian illustration in the book, a demure young woman in long skirts carrying a bow, rather as though it was a tennis racket. “In fact, Artemis was a dreadful goddess, who didn’t hesitate to slaughter anyone who crossed her. Look at this—”

He turned the page. A gray-tinted photographic plate showed an alabaster statue of a woman, her face cast in bronze—but really, the statue scarcely looked like a woman at all. It was more like a thick column, topped by an androgynous face that wore a cylindrical crown; an austere, even cruel face. Beneath it the column was ornamented with animals with staring eyes and bared teeth, and by vaguely obscene shapes, swollen orbs that hung in distended rows from the goddess’s breast almost to her feet.

“The Artemis of Ephesus,” said Balthazar. He tapped the page officiously. “Sometimes called Cybele. This is a representation of the very goddess who so enraged Saint Paul when he visited the city. He referred to her as Diana, of course, in the Roman fashion—‘Diana whom all Asia and the world worshippeth.’ Not that one can blame him for being so disturbed by her rites. To this day, most people associate the Ephesian Artemis with fertility cults. They think
these
”— He indicated a bulbous ornament on the goddess’s dress. —“are breasts.”

“Well,” I said, squinting at the picture. “Aren’t they?”

“June Harrington thought they were the offerings of the
galli
—the men who castrated themselves to Artemis, and not always willingly.”

I grimaced, but Balthazar only turned the page and continued in the same solemn voice. “She was quite a remarkable woman, June Harrington. We disagreed on the most basic issue of—well, call it belief—but she was a tireless researcher, and fearless. She was obsessed with the ancient mystery cults, with how all of them so obviously had the same origin. She believed that the Erinyes were manifestations of the beings that were the companions of Dionysos. Have you read
The Bacchae
?”

“I have it.”

“Ah, yes,” murmured Balthazar. “The classic answer from first-year students from New York, no matter how obscure the text: ‘I have it.’ Well,
bacchante
is one of the terms for the women who followed Dionysos. There are many others. Bassarid, Maenad, Thyiad, Phoibad, Lyssad.
Maenad
means simply ‘mad woman’;
lyssad
means ‘the raging one.’ And we also have
Potniades,
which is particularly interesting because of its possible derivation from the far more archaic Minoan and Mycenaen
Potnia,
or—”

I exhaled impatiently. Balthazar looked surprised, even disappointed, but with a sigh he flipped through the volume in front of us. “Dionysos. The god of revelry, the god of ecstasy; the god of illusions. His rituals involve madness induced by wine or hallucinogenic plants; the apotheosis of the god was achieved in a state of intoxication, and often involved
omophagia
—the eating of raw flesh, of animals certainly but at some earlier point of humans as well. Most likely he is an Asian import, by way of Phrygia—Anatolia, that is, Turkey, and there are indisputable links with Shiva—and so from the same land that gave birth to the ancient matristic cults. They may literally have given birth to him—his mother is supposed to have been Semele, a mortal, but Semele is also a name for the goddess of the earth, the field that is wounded when it is tilled; and Semele is also linked with Cybele—who,
as you will recall
,” he added, gazing at me sternly, “is yet another manifestation of the goddess in her maiden form.”

I blinked, trying my best to look interested, and Balthazar’s expression softened. “Forgive me, Lit. You must be hungry. Here…”

He stood and walked to the far wall, where a small round device like a doorbell was set within the wainscoting. He pressed it. I heard nothing, but within a minute the hallway echoed with the sound of brisk footsteps.

“My housekeeper,” Balthazar explained. Seconds later there was an equally brisk knock upon the sturdy oak door.

“Yes, Kirsten. Come in please—”

The door creaked open. A dour woman in a dark blue paisley dress entered. “Professor?”

“Would you be so kind as to prepare some sort of tray for us?”

“Tray?” The woman gave me a reproving glance. She was tall, head and shoulders above Balthazar Warnick, thin-lipped and black-haired, with eyebrows so dark and straight they looked to have been drawn in black greasepaint. “I brought up your lunch only an—”

“My guest is hungry,” Balthazar said. “Is there any of that salmon left?”

“Inkokt lax,”
the housekeeper corrected him with a frown.

Balthazar ignored her. “Do you like salmon?” he asked, turning to me.