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.
Craig sensed my discomfort. “God knows how big this building complex is. We tried to map the basement”—he paused to show me a hole in the floor, with narrow stone steps going down into the underground—”but the boys couldn’t do it. There is a whole world of caves down there, and we all got a little freaked out by the … animal population.”
When we finally caught up with Nick, he was standing in a doorway at the end of the main temple, pointing a flashlight into the dark corners of another, smaller room, checking—I guessed—for unwelcome critters.
“Here we are!” Craig paused on the threshold and held up his lantern. “The inner sanctum. What do you say, Doc, have you ever seen anything like it?”
I had been too preoccupied with Nick’s search to look up and realize that I was now, finally, face-to-face with the inscription in Mr. Ludwig’s photo—the mysterious symbols that had lured me all the way from Oxford. There they were: three walls covered in writing, occasionally making space for paintings in red, black, and yellow. And in the middle of the floor sat a large, rectangular stone that might have served as an altar.
“It looks as if the paintings were there first,” I said, stepping into the room, all thoughts of creeping shadows forgotten. “And the writing came later. See?” I took the lantern from Craig and held it up to demonstrate my point. “Notice how the writing comes right up to the figures?”
Leaving both men gaping at the wall, I took a quick turn about the room with the lantern raised. At this proximity, the inscription loomed over me in an abundance of colors, and I was happy to conclude that Mr. Ludwig’s photograph had not done it justice at all. There were interesting variations in the density of the paint and the size of the writing itself, as if the writer had been scribbling the entire thing in great haste, using whatever tints happened to be available and stretching them by adding more and more binder—probably egg or oil—to the point where the symbols became nearly invisible.
Furthermore, my close inspection revealed that there were, indeed, word dividers in the text. The reason why the photograph had not picked them up was that they were very faint in color. They appeared in the form of small yellow asterisks wedged in between individual symbols; most often there was just a single one, and I took that to signal a word break, whereas the presence of two probably meant a sentence break.
I was so excited I couldn’t help myself. Reaching out, I touched my hand to the smooth, cold plaster wall and felt a tingle in my fingertips at the prospect of returning with Granny’s notebook.
Pulling out my camera I began taking close-ups of the word dividers, but was interrupted by Nick snapping his fingers. “Come on, time to work.”
I watched as he and Craig walked up to the stone altar in the middle of the room and started pushing. Only on the third attempt did the top part finally give way, as if it were a giant lid, and together they rotated it ninety degrees, revealing that the large stone block underneath was, in fact, hollow. “Come and say hello,” urged Craig, waving me closer.
I stretched to see. “Is that a sarcophagus? I don’t usually … do sarcophagi.”
Nick straightened and brushed off his hands. “I didn’t drive you halfway across the Sahara for you to stand there and do nothing. So will you please come over here and tell us what needs to happen next.”
I adjusted my dust mask and walked up to the stone coffin, bracing myself for a mummy wrapped in bandages. But there was nothing terribly dramatic inside, merely the outline of a desiccated skeleton at the bottom, resting on a bed of dust. “Oh dear,” I said, sorry to be unable to come up with a more respectful remark. “Not much there. No personal treasures, no gifts to the gods of the underworld—”
“Actually—” began Craig, but a look from Nick shut him up.
“Perhaps,” I said, “ancient tomb raiders beat us to it?”
“Don’t think so.” Craig pointed into the sarcophagus. “See the bracelet? They wouldn’t have left that behind. But what’s more … don’t you see something unusual about this poor bastard?” When I didn’t reply, he pointed again. “Look. No head.”
“I don’t believe this,” I muttered, but my shock had less to do with the missing head than with the bracelet the person had been wearing on his or her right arm, just above the wrist, and which was still there, half covered by dust. The shape was unmistakable, but it almost seemed impossible….
“So,” said Nick, taking off his headlamp. “What do you need?”
“Need?” I stood back from the sarcophagus. “Nothing, really. Just time.” I nodded at the walls around us. “These things can take a while to decipher.”
“Never mind the walls,” said Nick. “This coffin was opened last week. We need to preserve the body.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you with that,” I said, aware that Craig was following our exchange with growing confusion, “I’m not an archaeologist.”
“What?” Nick glared at me. “I told John to get an archaeologist—”
“Excuse me,” I said, determined to maintain my grace, “but Mr. Ludwig specifically said you needed a philologist … someone who could make sense of this inscription.” I made a sweeping gesture at the text crying out at us from every wall. “I don’t mean to appear immodest, believe me, but if you want to know what is written here—”
Nick held up a hand, squinting as if I suddenly emanated a bright, piercing light. “All right. You’re not an archaeologist. You’re here for the inscription. Great. How long will it take to decipher it?”
I shrugged and looked around. “Hard to say. It could take a few days … or a few weeks. Or it could take years. It all depends—” I stopped. I couldn’t very well tell him it all depended on the accuracy of Granny’s notebook.
“Years?” Nick stared at me, the strangest expression in his eyes.
I smiled reassuringly. “Well, in an ideal world—”
“No.” He spoke calmly, as if to himself. “This is not going to work. I knew it. Let’s get you back to the drill station. Right now.”
Realizing with horror I was being expelled fro
m my adventure, I grabbed him by the sleeve. “But you need me! I’m an expert on the Amazons—”
Nick glared at my hand. “The what?”
“The Amazons,” I stammered. “From Greek mythology. I thought—”
There was a brief but unpleasant silence. Then he simply shook his head, turned, and walked away.
CHAPTER TWELVE
TEMPLE OF THE MOON GODDESS
MYRINA SMILED, BUT NO ONE SMILED BACK.
Already seated at long tables in the dining hall, huddled over their food in intimate clusters, the three dozen white-clad priestesses greeted their two new sisters with silence.
Myrina was not surprised. She saw in their eyes they still thought of her as the violent trespasser who had survived the snake pit just a few hours earlier, and of Lilli as some lesser being whose blindness had made her deaf and dumb as well. It did not help that the High Priestess had shamed them all so thoroughly; had she deliberately sought to stir up resentment against the newcomers, she could have chosen no better way.
Biting back her frustration, Myrina reminded herself that this temple, this sisterhood, was Lilli’s best chance of survival in a dying world, and that only the Moon Goddess had the power to restore her eyesight. “This is what Mother would want me to do,” she had told herself while the eunuchs put aside her hunting weapons and escorted her and Lilli to a large, subterranean bathhouse. There they were placed in the hands of an unsmiling hag who shaved off their matted hair, threw their clothes on the fire, and scrubbed them both all over with soap and oil until their skin was stinging with cleanliness. To Myrina, the ordeal was particularly painful; the woman had pushed and pulled at her bruised limbs without any sign of compassion. In fact, she almost seemed to enjoy Myrina’s wincing and moaning as she cleaned her large bite wound thoroughly with soap and bandaged it as tightly as possible. “Lilli’s safety matters more than my freedom,” Myrina reminded herself over and over. “For her sake I will endure this, too.”
Naked and shivering, Lilli had tried to hide behind Myrina, but there was no escaping the prickly hemp dresses and little pointy caps that marked them as servants of the Goddess. “How fine you look!” Myrina had said, drawing her sister into an embrace. “I am sure I have never seen you so clean before.”
“I should much rather be caked with dung,” Lilli muttered, rubbing her eyes with angry fists. “And roam about in the wilderness with you.”
But they both knew the wilderness was no place for Lilli. Even before the fever, when she still had the use of her eyes, the girl had preferred the comfort of the village to the lonely trail. Myrina had taught her to hunt, yes, but Lilli’s joy lay in the tasks of farming, which to Myrina had always seemed tedious: sowing seeds, tending sprouts, and feeding the chickens. Endless routine, requiring precisely the sort of patience Myrina did not possess.
Their mother always used to say her three daughters had inherited the hands of each of their very different fathers. “Those there,” she had once observed, nodding at their older sister, Lana, as they all sat around the fire, shelling beans, “are hands that tell big stories. Hands that can make a naïve girl do anything—break any rule.” She grimaced at the memory of her first love, whom she had always refused to name, but who had apparently lived in the big city by the sea. “And those there—” She turned to Myrina, next in line. “They take delight in danger, and mark my words, they will follow it to the end of the world.”
The girls all sat around, sharing in their mother’s wistful silence, until Lilli held out her own hands, smudged with dirt. “What about me, Mother?”
“Your hands,” their mother said, kissing the little fingers one by one, “tell wonderful tales of a sweet man.” She paused to overcome an onrush of sadness. “They are hands made for nurture and preservation. But they are no match for the wild animals preying on the herd. So you, my love”—she reached out to draw her youngest daughter closer—”had better stay near the fire, where the lions are afraid to come.”
A PATH OF LUMINOUS flower petals had taken Myrina and Lilli directly from the humiliation in the washroom to their initiation in the inner sanctum. The sight of the stone floor specked with merry colors was surely meant to cheer them, but to Myrina it resembled a trail of grains leading into the loop of a snare.
Throughout the ceremony she was in a state of dazed denial; even after their oath, when the High Priestess took the terrible sacrificial knife from the altar and cut a gash across her and Lilli’s left breasts, to let out blood for the gilded offering bowl, Myrina barely felt the pain. Or maybe she was too preoccupied with Lilli’s reaction to notice her own. The girl was brave, though, and as they stood there together, holding hands, Myrina felt a surge of admiration for her sister.
“Rejoice!” the High Priestess said, as she placed the sacred bracelets of the Moon Goddess on their wrists—bracelets identical to their mother’s. “Your blood has joined our blood, and you are now one with us. This armband is a token of our holy sisterhood, and of your promise never to let a man besmirch your purity. Should someone attack you, you will find this sharp bronze an excellent deterrent. But remember: If you betray the Goddess, or your sisters, this golden jackal will become your enemy, and you will feel its bite. For the hunting hounds of the Goddess are ever faithful; obey her divine commands and they will protect you with their lives; disobey her and they will hunt you down and tear you to bits.”
Such had been the speech that welcomed Myrina and Lilli to the temple. Yet as they stood on the threshold of the dining hall, wearing their bracelets for everyone to see, they were met by glares that were anything but sisterly.
At last, Myrina stepped forward. “Can anyone tell me,” she said, “who threw that stone at me when I stood on the garden wall?”
Utter silence.
“I am asking,” Myrina went on, standing straight before the horde of wary eyes, “because that was a fine throw. My compliments.”
A murmur went through the room. Then someone yelled, “Animone threw the stone!” and the murmur broke into full rumpus.
The dining hall would likely have erupted in a bluster of flying food had not Myrina let out a sharp whistle. “Then Animone,” she concluded, as soon as she had regained everyone’s attention, “is my first friend! And I want her to meet Lilli”—she lifted up the girl for everyone to view—”the sweetest sister you will ever have. There is nothing wrong with her except that she can’t see all your sour faces. And that, I think, is a happy loss.”
Myrina had the pleasure of seeing shock, even shame, in the eyes of the priestesses as her words traveled around the room in many different languages. A few women remained tight-lipped and hostile, deliberately avoiding her gaze, but they were soon drowned out by general excitement.
Three young priestesses—Animone, Pitana, and Klito—now seemed keen to make friends. “How did you survive the snake pit?” Animone wanted to know, her eyes drawn to the bandage on Myrina’s arm. “Tell us how you killed the monster.”
“Even better”—Myrina leaned forward conspiratorially—”I will show you.”
THE STEALTHY MIDNIGHT TRIP by Myrina and her three new friends into the temple basement more than confirmed that the daughters of the Moon Goddess were, indeed, in need of training. Even this trio, who had been willing to come with her, backed away in horror when Myrina threw a rope into the pit and bade them to follow. “But there are snakes down there!” exclaimed the excitable Animone, waving her hands in disgust.
“Why do you think I threw the torches down first?” Myrina nodded into the illuminated grotto where the giant constrictor snake lay coiled in death. “Serpents are afraid of fire. Come—”
“I am not sure I can climb down that rope,” said Pitana, a gawkish young woman who was almost as tall as Myrina, but had none of her muscles. “My arms are too long to be strong. I may be able to get down, but I would never have the strength to climb back up.”
“Klito?” Myrina turned to the last of the three: a beautiful, wholesome gir
l with eyes full of adventure.
But even Klito would not go. “I will watch you from up here,” she promised, nodding with enthusiasm, “and make encouraging comments.”
Myrina shook her head and started down the rope, her newly recovered hunting knife wedged between her teeth. The three women watched with fascination while she skinned the large snake and rolled up the speckled scales in a big bundle.
“That,” observed the adventurous Klito from above, “is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen. Please don’t bring it upstairs.”
“I am going to clean and dry it,” said Myrina, “and turn it into clothes. You will see. Now pull it up for me. I promise to give you all a piece to wear.”
“You know,” said Animone, shaking her head, “I am not even sure I want to be your friend.”
THAT WAS ONLY THE beginning.
Before a week had gone by, the High Priestess instructed everyone to commence weapon training in the courtyard. “Our exercises will be overseen by Myrina,” she told them in the Old Language, in a tone that tolerated no opposition, “and they will take place every day after breakfast. Animone will translate for those who do not understand Myrina. You will be sorted into groups of six, and there will be no exceptions!”
Naturally, the new arrangement was met with fierce resistance as soon as the High Priestess turned her back. Why this sudden nonsense of weapon practice? Why could things not continue the way they were? The older priestesses especially did not understand the reasoning behind the change and soon became masters at making excuses.
But Myrina’s greatest challenge turned out to be a handful of younger women accustomed to being in charge. Even though they had no official titles granting them more authority than the rest, these women had somehow managed to assume roles of superiority. For them to submit to the teachings of a newcomer was unthinkable. One of them, a doe-eyed troublemaker named Kara, made a point of missing every single training session—not by staying away from the courtyard, but by pretending to be dozing in a hammock, in plain view of the others.