The Lost Sisterhood (33 page)

After weeks of clandestine practice, she finally summoned everyone to the horse enclosures. Since only Lilli had been privy to her plans, no one else knew what to expect, not even Myrina’s closest friends. All they saw was one of the straw stags set up for javelin practice in front of a vacant paddock. And then, to their bafflement, they saw Myrina mounted on her horse, without a javelin in sight.

“What is that deformed little thing?” asked Penthesilea, nodding at the curiosity Myrina was holding in one hand. It was a bow about half the length of a regular longbow, its tips forced over backward by the aid of horn and sinew; to the eye it did not seem like much, and Myrina could hardly blame the others for laughing and shaking their heads.

“I call it a recurve bow,” she told them, with patient defiance, “and
I say it is superior to the javelin as a rider’s weapon. Care to put it to the test?”

Scoffing at the challenge, Penthesilea mounted her snorting horse and rode toward the target, javelin pulled back for a mighty throw. With a cry of delight she launched her weapon from a distance, and the spearhead struck the straw stag with such force that it toppled over and fell down with a thud.

“There!” she exclaimed, circling back to Myrina in a triumphant canter. “Now what are
you
going to kill?”

Myrina nodded at the empty horse enclosure. “Those.”

Everyone turned to stare, and it took a moment before Hippolyta grasped what she meant and yelled, “Look! On the fence posts!”

Indeed, every third post had a straw ball balancing on top; the paddock was ringed with no fewer than ten targets.

Without another word, Myrina spurred on her horse, gathering as much speed as she could without sacrificing her aim. Then she pulled the first arrow from her quiver and laid it on the bow … but her desire to put Penthesilea in her place made her release it too soon, and the arrow flew right by the target without touching it.

Furious with herself for letting petty concerns interfere with her concentration, Myrina rode on and shot the next arrow with great care … and the third and fourth one, too. All were perfectly on target, and the straw balls fell into the field one by one, pierced through by her arrows. Encouraged by her success, Myrina rode faster, and her aim remained true despite her speed. By the time she came back around the enclosure on the other side, after shooting down every single target on the way, her speed was so furious the women scattered before her like poultry. Only Lady Otrera did not move; the distinguished woman stood perfectly still while the horse came to a skidding halt before her.

“I missed one,” said Myrina, glaring at the straw ball on the first post.

Lady Otrera turned slowly toward the post, then looked at the others, her face inscrutable. “What do you say, Penthesilea? Myrina missed one. Should I pronounce you the victor?”

Penthesilea did not need to reply with words; the red blotches on
her cheeks said it all. And although everyone around her was silent, too, Myrina heard their roaring cheers in her heart.

I
T FINALLY HAPPENED ON
a bright summer morning. Alone in the hay barn, Myrina was chasing a runaway chicken when a long shadow fell across the floor. Looking up, pushing away her tousled hair, she did not recognize him right away, for the sunlight coming through the door behind him was so blinding she had to shield her eyes.

“Still a hunter, I see,” said a voice she knew well—a voice she had longed to hear for months and months. “Are you ready for your lesson?”

There has always been affection in my heart unfading, for these Phrygians and for their city; which smolders now, fallen before the Argive spears, ruined, sacked, gutted.

—E
URIPIDES,
The Trojan Women

THE AEGEAN SEA
PRESENT TIME

W
HEN WE REACHED THE ISLAND OF
D
ELOS THE NEXT DAY,
M
R
. Telemakhos took one look at the water thermometer, threw the anchor overboard with a grunt, and announced that it was bath time. “Nineteen degrees!” he assured us, waving the thermometer before tossing it back in the water. “Better than a shower.”

In the sunshine of midday the water was a mellow transparent blue, and above were the sandy semicircles of the coastline. I wanted to point out that this was no pleasure cruise as far as I was concerned, but even my fastidiousness had met its match in the allure of this sunny cove. The only thing stopping me from tearing off my clothes and jumping in was pride; I didn’t want Mr. Telemakhos to think I had surrendered so wholeheartedly to his abduction scheme.

“Come on, North Sea woman!” he taunted me, clearly interpreting my hesitancy as a form of squeamishness. “Your namesake was born on this island! Not Lady Diana,” he went on to clarify to Nick, “but the
Greek goddess of the hunt, Artemis, or, as the Romans knew her, Diana.”

“Yes.” I gave them both a sideways look. “But as you know, it is not wise for mortal men to behold Diana while she bathes. One tends to end up dead.”

I was sure I heard Nick mutter, under his breath, “The name’s spot-on, then.” We had avoided each other all morning, and whenever our eyes met, he looked at me with a sort of ironic forbearance, which did not exactly encourage conversation. Nor did I particularly look forward to our next exchange; I had spent most of the night cringing at some of the things I had said to him, and yet, upon reflection, would wish none of them unsaid.

Before jumping into the water, Nick handed me his phone and said, “I’m sure you have someone back at Oxford waiting for a report.”

As he stood there in front of me in all his tawny glory, it was impossible not to admire his physique, which was as chiseled and polished as a Roman statue and equally inviting to the touch. I told myself that for all his present physicality Nick was so removed from me in everything but time and space that indeed, he might as well have been made of marble. But it was no use; he still made my boreal blood run wild.

“Thank you,” I said, looking away. “Should I pass on a message?”

“Tell them you were worth every cent. Here—” He pushed a bankroll into my hand. “Half and half euro and dollars.”

I weighed the roll in my hand. “Is it all here?”

“No tip yet. So better be nice to me.”

A splash later, I was left with the money and his phone, and a lingering sense of regret. Earlier in the day, when Rebecca and I had made up the bed in our small cabin, she had demanded to know what was wrong with me. Clearly, my anger with Mr. Telemakhos was only the tip of it. Too tired to fabricate anything more flattering than the truth, I had given her a quick summary of Nick’s confession from the night before. “So, obviously,” I had concluded, boxing my pillow into shape, “he’s a lying, thieving charlatan. Unfortunately, in her fathomless nonsense, your pathetic old friend has managed to become ever so slightly—”

“I knew it!” Rebecca stood up straight, morning hair abristle. “He’s the fourth horseman. I knew it the moment I saw him. There he is, I said to myself, there is the man who is going to finally outdo the fencing shyster in the art of breaking Diana’s heart.”

“Oh, please!” I protested, already regretting having confided in her.

Rebecca nearly jerked the bedspread out of my grip. “Weren’t you the one who told me he was disgusting? That he smelled?”

I grimaced at her, fearing Nick might hear us through the wall. “Yes, but the problem is that I
like
the way he smells. Even when he’s disgusting, which he isn’t.” I shook my head, trying to get rid of the blur. “It’s as if I’m trapped in some sort of balloon where the laws of physics don’t apply—”

“Then allow me to puncture your balloon.” Rebecca came around the bed to slap me on the bottom with her hairbrush. “There! Feel better?”

“Ow,” I said. “That hurt.”

“Good! Now get a grip. This is what happens with people on boats: They forget who they are and what really matters.”

A
FTER OUR SWIM
I called my parents, who, fortunately, were not at home. “Sorry about that,” I said to their answering machine, “but my phone just suddenly stopped working.” Then I sent a quick text to James, stating simply, “Amazon hunt continues. Next stop Troy. Aiming to be home by Monday.”

“So,” said Nick, laying out his towel next to mine. “I can’t wait to pick up where we left off.”

“And where was that exactly?” I glanced at Rebecca and saw her rolling her eyes before disappearing belowdecks to change.

Nick sat back on his elbows, squinting against the afternoon sun. “How about your grandmother’s notebook?”

“Oh.” Because of the playful overture, I had half-expected him to take me back to the shared sleeping bag by the Nahanni River and was mildly upset to have strayed down that path all by myself.

“Last night,” he went on, his frown confirming we were thousands of miles apart, “when you told me about your grandmother, you said that she—most likely—had been trained as an archaeologist, and that the notebook must be the result of her efforts to decipher an ancient unknown language.”

“That,” I said, berating myself for admiring his recumbent body and, more important, for having told him so much, “seems the only logical—”

“Then how do you explain the modern words?” He turned abruptly toward me. “Tomato. Corn. Cocoa.” When I did not immediately react, he smiled. “Come on, Dr. Morgan, don’t disappoint me. Those plants all came from the Americas during the sixteenth century. So, explain to me why a Bronze Age civilization in North Africa needed words for them.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but the truth was, even if I knew the notebook fairly well by now, I had never paid much attention to these so-called modern words. My starting point had always been the foreign symbols, never the English glossary. In other words, the reason I had never stumbled over the word “tomato” before was that it had never appeared in the text I was actually translating. Nor, I was sure, had “corn” or “cocoa.”

“So, you looked through the notebook?” I eventually said.

Nick spun his phone absentmindedly on the varnished wood. “Of course.”

“Why? To find traces of present-day Amazons?”

He finally met my eyes, and beneath all the teasing I spied the profound darkness I remembered so well from Algeria. “There are also words for hotel, train, and envelope. I think that’s more than a trace, Diana.”

Shocked at the fact that he had discovered so much in Granny’s notebook, I lay down on my elbow, mirroring his posture. “What are you saying?”

“Do I really have to spell it out?”

I shook my head, refusing to take him seriously. Here I was, a lifelong Amazon believer with every reason in the world to embrace the
idea of modern-day Amazons … yet still frozen with indecision on the edge of that ultimate leap of faith. And here was Nick, coming out of nowhere and jumping right in. “Why do you even care?” I said. “Isn’t this all just a big illusion, staged to fool the enemy?”

Nick rolled away from me, an arm over his face. “What matters is that
they
believe. Your laptop, by the way, is in Geneva.”

“How on earth do you know that?”

“There’s a group in Switzerland that’s been on our radar for some time. They’re a slick network of smugglers and dealers headquartered in the Geneva Freeport. They have fingers in all the major international markets.” He moved his arm to cast me a knowing glance. “I’m pretty sure they’re in bed with your friends, the Moselanes.”

There was still some warmth in the sunshine, but I suddenly felt chilled. “Honestly, Nick—”

He folded his hands over his chest and continued, “Did you ever ask your boyfriend how his ancestor got the title in the first place? Well, I’ll tell you how. It was a reward from the king for bringing back such a huge haul of treasures from the ancient world. Lord Moselane has a proud family history to live up to, and the Geneva network is his faithful supplier. These people are experts at removing dirty fingerprints and creating fake provenances. My favorite one is ‘Gift from an anonymous Swiss collector.’ “

More than anything, it was Nick’s arrogant invective against James that caused a timely flare-up of my anger from the night before. Regardless of whether he was lying—which I highly suspected he was—I knew Nick’s jab at the Moselanes had no other purpose than to provoke me.

“How do you know my laptop is in Switzerland?” I asked, studying his face. “And what about my cellphone? Let me guess, you are tracking my personal belongings with some sort of device?” When he didn’t contradict me, I shook my head. “And you have the nerve to call other people crooked!”

Nick looked embarrassed, but not for long. “That’s the nature of the game,” he said, with a grim shrug. “I thought you’d been bought off by Grigor Reznik.” Glancing at my gobsmacked expression, he quickly
added, “Why else would you pretend to board a plane to the UK but go to Crete instead? I couldn’t figure it out. But I know Reznik is obsessed with those jackal bracelets.” He nodded at my wrist. “He’d pay good money for that one, trust me. It’s not surprising that he wants to see what’s on your laptop. Your phone, however”—he shrugged noncommittally—”seems to be on a tour of Spain. Don’t ask me why.”

I was so disoriented I could barely remember what we had touched on when we discussed the nefarious Istanbul art collector and his deceased son in the car from Algeria. “I never knew the bracelets were part of Reznik’s Amazon fixation,” I said. “And how do you know that
he
has been after my laptop? I thought we agreed that he was
not
behind the explosions in the temple—that someone else had tried to implicate him—”

Nick looked surprised. “I guess I forgot the most important part: Reznik is the gray eminence behind the Geneva network I just told you about. Whether or not they actually blew up the temple, his people
have
been following us, right from the beginning. I’ll bet my life on it.”

“But why?” I was reluctant to espouse his slapdash theory without a few pros and cons. “Does Reznik really believe in the Amazon Hoard? If that’s the case, it would seem his treasure hunt began long before
we
joined in.”

“He obviously knows something we don’t,” agreed Nick. “But what? Maybe the answer is in your
Historia Amazonum
… which would explain why he’s so interested in you. You wrote to him, didn’t you, asking to see it?”

“But he never replied.”

“Oh, he did.” Nick nodded at my bruised temple. “I bet you’ve been in his crosshairs ever since. He’s probably been tapping your cellphone. That’s how he knew you went to Crete.”

“But then why would he have his people steal it?” I countered. “It doesn’t make sense. Now he can’t listen in on my conversations anymore.”

Nick was quiet for a while. Then he said, squinting at the hazy horizon, “It seems we have two options. Either we split up, go home, and do everything we can to convince Reznik we’ve given up. Or”—he
shot me a daring smile—”we continue together and find the treasure before
he
does.”

W
E REACHED THE DARDANELLES
on Friday afternoon. The Dardanelles—or the Hellespont, as it was known by the Greeks—is the extremely narrow passage going from the Aegean into the Sea of Marmara. It is rivaled only by the narrowness of the Bosphorus Strait a couple hundred kilometers further east, where the Marmara Sea connects with the Black Sea, and is, naturally, a windy and potentially dangerous place to sail.

After the freedom of the open sea, it was daunting to head into the perilous strait, which soon closed in on us from both sides, until the waterway was hardly wider than a large river. For the last hour or so, Mr. Telemakhos had peppered our progress along the coast with comments such as, “Tenedos! This is where the Greeks supposedly hid the fleet, while they waited for the Trojans to take the bait,” and “See the coastline over there? That used to be an open bay, just like Homer described it.”

By the time we finally moored in busy Çanakkale—the city closest to the ancient ruins of Troy—Rebecca was fast asleep on a mattress on the deck, oblivious to the portside pandemonium. During our time at sea, she had begun napping at the oddest hours, and I suspected that despite her seemingly high spirits she found the whole situation depressing. Here she was, expelled from her beloved Crete, traveling with a friend whose normally sympathetic ear was clogged with competing concerns; even Mr. Telemakhos was too busy savoring his unexpected windfall of young people to spend much time on Rebecca’s predicament.

As for Nick, he had so far been rudely unmoved by her efforts to enlighten our cruise with insightful lectures, and the hoped-for job offer from the Aqrab Foundation remained conspicuously absent. His only proposal had been for me: Treasure or no, Nick was prepared to pay me another ten thousand dollars to continue on the Amazon trail with him.

I had told him I would think about it. It wasn’t that I meant to punish him for the uncertainty he had so readily inflicted on me, but rather that I myself was unsure what my next step should be. Despite the frustrations of our detention on the
Penelope,
and despite Nick’s deceitful behavior, it was hard to imagine parting from him; he had come to represent everything Granny had divined my life would hold—adventure, danger, and discovery.

In contrast, the reality awaiting me at home had all but lost its luster. After almost two weeks away, I struggled to remember what was so attractive about an Oxford career—why it was so imperative that I hurry back. The more familiar I became with the foreign world around me, the more old Avalon, with its cracked, mossy walls and Gothic rigor, receded into the mists….