The Lost Sisterhood (11 page)

Myrina could feel the resentful glares stinging her from all sides. She wanted desperately to speak up and somehow soften the censure, but she dared not risk it. Lilli was still outside, and the sooner things were brought to a conclusion, the better.

“Now let us all thank the Goddess—” continued the High Priestess,
holding out her arms so that the flared sleeves of her garment spread like the wings of a phoenix. “Thank you, kind Mistress, for sending this young woman to train us. Please help her strip away our folly and weakness that we may once again stand guard around your radiant majesty with our bows strung.”

There was once, in the western parts of Libya, on the bounds of the inhabited world, a race which was ruled by women and followed a manner of life unlike that which prevails among us.

—D
IODORUS SICULUS,
Bibliotheca Historica

ALGERIA

M
Y FIRST NIGHT AT THE TRITONIS DRILL SITE WAS ONE OF DISAP
pointment. It didn’t take me long to realize that no welcome committee was waiting with bubbly and roses; Nick, it seemed, was the only Skolsky representative on location.

After a lukewarm meal in the empty cantina Craig the foreman took me to the tiny trailer compartment that would be my home for the week. It was a relief to finally be alone, and the door had barely closed behind him before I broke out Granny’s notebook. Despite my exhaustion I was determined to continue my work on it and knew the next step should be to organize the foreign symbols in some sort of alphabetical order. But the bluish light of the buzzing ceiling lamp did nothing to help my efforts. It was set on a timer that made it necessary to get up and pull a plastic string of pearls every two minutes or so, and after having done this at least fifty times without making much progress with the notebook, I finally gave up and went to bed.

Next morning, right after breakfast, I stepped out of the cantina to find Craig and Nick waiting for me with three camels. The sky was still dark, but bursts of purple and orange on the eastern horizon suggested
the sun was on its way. The morning air had a pleasant chill to it; I suspected things would heat up soon enough. “I hope you brought your riding crop,” said Craig, breaking the silence. “We have closed off the site to motorized vehicles.”

I glanced up at the camels, who looked regally bored. “I suspect a riding crop is not the way to endear oneself to these individuals?”

Craig grinned at Nick. “See? She’s not as clueless as you think.”

Moments later we were off, and I was happy to discover that the proud quadrupeds walked at a steady, phlegmatic pace that allowed me to look up and admire the landscape. Around us, the desert was slowly changing colors. As the sun rose in the sky, the sand came alive as if it were a vast tray of embers, flaring up at the first touch of dawn. Sitting there on the camel, rocking gently back and forth, I felt I had a balcony seat to a gigantic shadow play in the dunes; for each mountainous sweep of brightness there was a distorted black reflection on the other side, but with every passing minute those inky pools shrank into rivers, then lines, then nothing, as the sun took full possession of the world.

The spectacle of our Sahara sunrise, however, was soon marred by the debris of human activity. As we crested a dune and looked down into a deep sand basin, we were met by the unseemly sight of scattered drilling equipment and a prostrate metal tower. In the middle of it all sat a brown Bedouin tent with two horses tied outside.

“We discovered the building when we were trying to determine the best location for the tower,” explained Craig as we rode down toward the lonely tent. “It’s right beneath us, just a few meters down, but for some reason our imaging never picked up on it … just took it for sediment along the old lake.”

“There was a lake here?” I looked around, trying to imagine a body of water in this parched landscape.

“Oh, yes,” nodded Craig. “Probably an inland sea that covered parts of Algeria and Tunisia and was connected to the Mediterranean by some sort of channel. You can see the shape of it on a paleohydrology map. But that’s thousands of years ago. Over time, the sea became a lake, the lake became a swamp, and the swamp became desert.” He smiled wryly. “Climates change; that’s the way it has always been, and
there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s the big guy up there”—he pointed a thumb at the sun—”who calls the shots.”

As we approached the tent, two men emerged to greet us. They were dressed in paramilitary clothing, and their sizable sidearms did not escape me. Although they both greeted Nick and Craig with smiles and bent their heads politely in my direction, I could not help feeling these were men who, if they thought it necessary, would not think twice about using deadly force—in fact, they might relish the prospect.

The Bedouin tent, it turned out, was not a shelter for the guards as much as a barrier put up to cover our entrance into the underground. At first glance, it looked as if a large steel barrel sat right in the middle of the tent floor; only when I leaned over to look inside did I realize it had no bottom. It was a perfectly circular two-foot-wide hole in the ground, and it took me a moment to grasp that this was where we were going next: down an improvised chute in the middle of an ocean of sand.

I looked up, ready to voice my concern at having been brought this far without being warned about the potential danger of the final stage. But Nick was already handing me a harness and a headlamp, and even Craig looked as if popping in and out of the underworld through a giant straw was a perfectly normal thing to do. “Don’t worry,” he said to me, fastening my harness with confident fingers. “I’ll go first and receive you. Here”—he snapped a rubber band around my head and placed a dust mask over my mouth and nose—”just remember to breathe slowly. You’ll adjust in no time.”

“Adjust to what?” I wanted to say, but Craig was already astride the rim of the steel pipe, and without another word he whizzed away into the darkness.

Feeling oddly disembodied, as if I were a mere gaping bystander to my own circus act, I let Nick and the guards help me into the tube and plop a safety helmet on my head, as if that would really make a difference. The next thing I knew they lowered me into the hole, and for a few long moments I could hear nothing but the unsettling creaking of the rope attached to my harness and my own panicky breathing amplified by the dust mask and the metal surrounding me.

Then, suddenly, I was through the pipe, and all familiar sounds dissipated into a vast cold void. I dangled, like a grasshopper on a hook, wondering what manner of monsters lurked below in this dark, forgotten world.

O
NCE, DURING A SUNDAY
dinner, Granny had fallen into a trance over the chicken potpie. Only when my mother had asked her three times to pass the salt did she stir from her reverie and peer at me across the table. “It is all down there,” she had said, as if responding to a question of mine, “underneath the surface. You just have to find it.”

“There are three pieces of chicken per person,” my mother cut in, taking the saltshaker with a huff, “distributed evenly throughout the dish.”

“They think it’s gone,” Granny continued, her gray-blue eyes still locked in mine, “but it is not. They think they can destroy it, and we will forget, but we won’t. That is their big mistake.”

Only then did it occur to me that she must be referring to the newspaper clippings my father had recently removed from the walls of her attic apartment. To me, child that I was, Granny’s growing archive of articles had been too gradual to be truly shocking; every time I brought her one of my parents’ discarded newspapers, one or two scraps were added to her collection and ended up hanging from the sloping walls by tiny drops of school glue. “What are they about?” I had asked her once or twice. “All those articles?”

In response, Granny had pointed at a recent clipping that was still lying on the table. The headline read
FEMALE WRITER ESCAPES FROM HOUSE ARREST
. I read it through twice, carefully, but did not see any connection with my grandmother or anyone else I knew.

Seeing my bewilderment, Granny smiled in that childish way of hers, and whispered, “Amazons!” Whereupon she began walking around the room, pointing up at the clippings dangling from the walls, one after the other. “Amazons,” she said, her voice getting more confident. “All Amazons.”

I stopped at an article that hung a little lower than the others. The
headline read
KHANABAD: STONING ENDS IN CHAOS
, and there was a black-and-white photo of men and veiled women huddling behind some kind of barricade, clutching their heads. “Those women are Amazons?” I asked, wanting desperately to understand.

Granny came to my side, but only to snort with disgust. “No! Those women are just as bad as those men! But they got what they deserved. Look at them!”

“But—” I barely knew what to think. “What does ‘stoning’ mean?”

Just then, a sudden draft swept through the room, and the newspaper clippings fluttered like dry leaves.

Spinning around, I saw my mother standing in the door, a hand pressed to her mouth in silent horror. Ten minutes later my father appeared with a bucket and peeled off all the paper scraps without a word, leaving behind nothing but a star map of dried glue spots. As he did so, he didn’t look at us once; never before had I seen him so pale, so upset.

Granny merely watched as her carefully assembled archive of imagined Amazon activity was dismantled and taken away, her face hardening a little more for every news story that disappeared.

Although several days had passed since the incident, Granny’s eyes were still full of resentment, and she had only grudgingly agreed to come downstairs to join in our Sunday dinner—likely because she knew she wouldn’t be fed if she didn’t.

“I assume you’re enjoying the meal,” said my mother at length, never able to pass on an opportunity to point out her mother-in-law’s bad manners.

In an unusual fit of present-mindedness, Granny responded right away, in a voice so full of hate it sent a chill through the room, “Rule number three: Never assume.”

Understandably, my mother said nothing else on the matter, but the look she sent my father was enough to make the food clog in my throat. Later that night, I sat on the stairs as I always did, listening to my parents arguing in the living room. It was actually not much of an argument—it never was—since my father’s contribution came mostly in the form of deep sighs and a restless pacing up and down the floor. “This cannot go on!” my mother kept saying, with growing despair.
“We have to think of Diana. I can’t take any more of this obsessive behavior. God knows what she found in those newspapers. Will you please
say
something, Vincent!”

When they both finally fell silent, I heard the unmistakable creaking of the attic door and knew Granny had been listening, too. Cold and miserable, I wanted so much to go up and comfort her, but I was afraid it would only make my mother more upset if she discovered I was not in my bed.

That same night, while I was lying awake in the darkness, my mother came into my room. She probably thought I was asleep, for my eyes were closed, and she bent over to kiss me and whisper against my forehead, “I will never let anything bad happen to you.”

From that moment on, I had lived in constant fear of losing Granny. Maybe one day soon, I thought, I would come home from school to find her gone, and my parents would refuse to tell me where she was. They would assume that by removing her from my world, they could extinguish her influence on me. To them, silence had always been a cure-all, and they applied it generously where needed—usually on me.

That was their big mistake.

A
S
I
SWUNG FROM
a rope somewhere beneath the surface of the Algerian desert, I was so engrossed in my own primal fears that, when something grabbed hold of my legs, I yelled in surprise.

“It’s just me!” boomed Craig as he eased me to the ground and unhooked my harness. “The bogeyman called in sick this morning.”

While I was doing my best to breathe calmly in the cool, stagnant air, Craig lit a lantern and held it up between us, its ghostly light revealing that we were standing in a room so enormous I couldn’t see the walls. Here and there lay drifts of sand, which must have come in through cracks in the roof before the entire building, at some point, was swallowed up by the surrounding desert.

“How extraordinary,” I said. My voice sounded just as frightened as I felt, and it seemed to travel through the darkness for a long time. “I can’t believe the pressure of the sand never made it collapse.”

“It’s a bit of a wonder,” agreed Craig, “but our mineralogist can give you a good explanation. Something to do with the salt concentration in the sand. Depending on the weather conditions it forms a crust and, in this case, apparently, it became its own retaining wall. Careful!”

We both stepped aside as Nick joined us. He monkeyed down the rope as if he had never used a staircase in his life, treating us to a little display of coordination and agility that stood in odd contrast to the bedraggled clothes and scruffy beard. “Still okay?” he asked, blinding me with his headlamp.

When the men started walking, I was too overwhelmed by everything around me to keep up. Judging from the way in which the sound of our footsteps first disappeared, then came back as a faint, distant echo, the building was colossal, its tall ceiling held up by dozens of pillars.

“This is astonishing!” I said to Craig, my voice muffled by the dust mask. “It must have been some sort of royal palace.” I walked over to one of the pillars and examined it as best I could in the dim light. “If only I could see better. But I suppose I am too clueless to be entrusted with a headlamp.” I took a step back and pointed at the numerous little shelves and hooks fastened to the stone. “Look at that! Maybe it was some sort of covered marketplace.”

“We are fairly sure it was a temple,” said Craig, holding up his lantern. “And those shelves and hooks were probably for votive offerings. Some of them are still there. Little urns, possibly with human ashes in them. But”—he looked at me with a teasing smile—”that’s what we’re hoping
you
can tell us.”

As we continued down the central aisle, trying to catch up with Nick, my initial unease with the place grew into full-blown foreboding. If Craig really wanted to know more about these ancient artifacts, I thought, he would need a whole army of archaeologists, not just a single philologist.

The aisle was flanked by tall metal fire pans, some leaning dangerously, others toppled over completely. And at the end of the nave was a stepped podium with a large stone chair. The presence of this lonely piece of furniture—however stern and impersonal—could not help
but make me wonder about the people who had once lived here, and what had happened to them.