When I circled back to the issue later that night, watching her brush her hair before bed, Granny seemed to have forgotten the conversation entirely. “That is a nice friend you have,” was all she said, looking at me in the mirror. “But she talks too much. She is not a hunter.”
I never made any further progress in finding Granny’s roots. No matter how many different maps and atlases I snuck into the attic under my cardigan, all she and I ever managed to determine was that North Africa was, on the whole, an entirely underrated place.
I WAS PULLED OUT of my snooze by a pat on the arm, and found Ahmed’s cellphone hovering in the air before me. “For you. James Moselane.”
Tingling with nerves, I pressed the phone to my ear. “I’m so sorry to be a nuisance—”
“Morg!” It sounded as if James was outside, walking through a rainstorm. “Am I to understand you actually went to Amsterdam?”
The direct question made me cringe. I wanted to say “No,” but knew it would result in a follow-up question I wasn’t allowed to answer. Instead, I said, “Would you mind terribly if I asked you another favor?”
There was a brief shuffle, a metal door slamming, and then the unmistakable swooshing and clanking of exercise machines. “Your wish is my command, madam,” said James, in a tone that told me I was overplaying my hand, but that he was being a gentleman about it.
“There is an aquarium in my apartment,” I began. “I forgot to mention it in my message. It takes care of itself, more or less—”
“Go on.”
I cleared my throat, aware I was pushing it. “There’s a thing of fish food in the fridge.” I quickly explained my routine of feeding Professor Larkin’s guppies, hoping my jolly tone would take the edge off the request.
When James finally spoke, I was relieved to hear a smile in his voice. “I must say, I was hoping for a more Arthurian task. Why not ask your students to take care of the fish? That should keep them busy until you’re back.”
Our conversation ended on a humorous note, but it left me feeling rotten nonetheless. There was something about James, a sort of old-world integrity that always compelled me to be absolutely honest with him. And yet here I was, lying to him and taking advantage of his kindness.
I had even told him about Granny’s illness once, over coffee, although I knew it might make him think—as I occasionally did myself—that my genes were tainted with insanity. With Federico’s betrayal still following me around like a distorted shadow, I had taken cover in a state of reckless defiance and didn’t much care to keep up appearances, even with James. “On a scale from one to ten,” I had said, positioning the cream and sugar at either end of our small café table, “with ten being complete straitjacket ax-murderer insanity and one being you and me, I would say my grandmother was a four.” I placed my coffee cup accordingly. “I mean, in the big scheme of things, her only problem was this absurd conviction that she was an Amazon warrior named Kara. It wasn’t as if she was plotting to blow up Buckingham Palace—”
“Well, first of all—” James stretched to move away the creamer even further, emanating a very pleasing whiff of sandalwood. “I object to being a one. Do I have your permission to be a zero?”
Our eyes met, and somewhere in his smile, underneath the platonic veneer, I could see that he bloody well knew he was anything but a zero to me. “Secondly,” he went on, pushing his own coffee cup forward, “I’m afraid Granny will have to be downgraded to a three, in order to accommodate my uncle Teddy, who was so stark raving bonkers he wanted to marry his horse and penned twenty-nine letters to the bishop arguing for the logic of the union.” James’s coffee cup snuggled up to mine. “Now that, Morg, is a four.” He sat back on the chair, legs crossed at the ankle. “Why not a five? Well, you see, Uncle Teddy was originally married to a girl named Charlotte …”
By the time James finally stopped talking, the Moselane family had annexed every piece of china available, and Granny had been relegated to the ashtray on the neighboring table.
It was that afternoon, as I bicycled back to college in a rare burst of sunshine, that I first admitted to myself I really was hopelessly in love with James, and that there could never be any other man for me, were I to live a hundred years without as much as a good-night kiss from him.
WE REACHED THE ALGERIAN border at noon. Judging by the virgin drifts of sand gracing the road, no one had come this way for hours, if not days, and I began to understand why Ahmed needed more than just four-wheel drive.
As we approached the small border station, I dug into my handbag to find my passport. While I was leaning down over my knees, riffling through my things, the car suddenly swung left, then right, banging my head against the glove compartment. “Ow!” I said, sitting up. “What—?”
The border station was now behind us.
“Are you okay?” asked Ahmed, without sounding too concerned.
“No!” I twisted around in my seat. “You just drove around that toll bar!”
He shrugged. “There is no one there. It’s closed.”
“But we can’t just—” I hardly knew how to express my outrage. Visions of border guards with machine guns flashed through my mind.
“What?” He didn’t even look at me. “Do you really want to drive back, find another border post, apply for a visa, wait for two days?” He nodded at my passport. “Trust me, you don’t want that kind of stamp in there.”
“I also don’t want to spend twenty years in an Algerian prison.”
Ahmed shot me a broad smile, revealing an impressive set of clickers. “At least we’d be there together.”
I had no idea how to reply; the whole situation was absurd, and his sarcasm was perhaps understandable. Behind us was an abandoned building the size of my father’s toolshed. The only thing marking the border was a five-foot toll bar that no one cared enough about to be around to operate. There was no wall, no fence, no barbed wire….
Within the blink of an eye I saw myself at seven years old, walking home from school all by myself for the first time. Inevitably, I was cornered by a pair of freckled schoolyard bullies who had recently been chastised by my father. They came right up to me, grinning and pulling at my hair, and one of them used a stick to draw a circle around me in the mud. “Stay here, Gorgon!” he commanded me. “Until we say you can go.”
Even after the boys disappeared, laughing and fighting over the stick, I had been afraid to move. After a while it started raining, and the line was washed away, but I had not been sure whether that meant I was free to go.
That was when I had first made friends with Rebecca, who was in the grade above me. She had come skipping down the lane, singing loudly to herself, and nearly bumped right into me as I stood there in the puddle, clutching my schoolbag. “My dear Miss Morgan!” she exclaimed, in the merry, high-pitched voice her mother always used with the vicar’s elderly parishioners. “Whatever are you doing out in this dreadful weather? Come.” She took me by the hand and pulled me out of the—by now invisible—circle. “Look at you—you’re a disaster!”
The memory made me wince. Apparently, even at twenty-eight I still needed others to pull me across lines drawn in the sand by faraway bullies.
Ahmed glanced at me, perhaps wondering whether it was his improper remark that had disgusted me so. “In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re trying to cover your tracks.”
“I have become aware of that,” I said, regretting my outburst. “I just don’t understand why. Perhaps you would be so kind as to enlighten me? … May I call you Ahmed?”
He shifted abruptly in his seat, as if the subject was fraught with discomfort. “Do you have any idea how big the black market in antiques is? Do you know how many people are involved with illegal excavations, tomb raiding, looting?” He pulled out his phone and let it fall into my lap. “Why don’t you call your boyfriend back? He can tell you a thing or two about coming to the rescue of other people’s history.”
I was so baffled I thought I might have mishear
d him. “You know James?”
“I know the family. Who doesn’t? And by the way, my name is not Ahmed. I’m Nick Barrán. You can call me Nick.”
I stared at him, still at a loss for words. “As in Nicholas?”
“They didn’t make you a doctor for nothing.”
This little knee-slapper set the tone for the remainder of our drive. Over the next many hours I sneaked up on the subject of the Skolsky Foundation from every conceivable angle, but to no avail; when it came to evasive tactics and wisecracks, Nick made even Mr. Ludwig look like a dilettante.
In the end I decided it didn’t matter. After all, before the day was over, this irritating man’s task of transporting me would be complete, and I would finally meet the people who had singled me out and invited me to come.
WE REACHED OUR DESTINATION about an hour past nightfall. I had long since dozed off in the passenger seat, using my handbag as a pillow, and woke to snippets of conversation and the sound of a metal gate opening. The desert night was as black as a broom closet, and it took me a moment to make sense of the gruff voices and sharp white lights flickering across my face.
My first impression was that we had pulled into a shipyard, for we were surrounded by containers and cranes, and men with hard hats and boilersuits were running everywhere, their efforts aided by blinding floodlights on metal poles. But before I could ask Nick where we were, a man with bushy sideburns and a headlamp on his helmet came over to greet us.
“Just in time for dinner!” he barked. “I told Eddie to hold some meatballs.” Then he turned to me and went on, more politely, “Dr. Mayo? I’m Craig, the foreman.” He shook my hand carefully, as if afraid of crushing it in his massive Scottish fist. “Welcome to the Tritonis drill site.”
“Actually,” I said, croaky from sleep, “my name is Diana Morgan.” Craig glanced at Nick, a little perplexed.
“Don’t worry.” I smiled at them both, hugging the handbag that held Granny’s notebook. “I am the person you need.”
CHAPTER TEN
TEMPLE OF THE MOON GODDESS
WHEN MYRINA CAME TO, HER FIRST THOUGHT WAS: LILLI.
But Lilli was not there. Instead, in the darkness, there was something else. She instinctively knew she was in danger. She heard rustling … slithering … hissing. Something cold glided over her ankle. She guessed it was a tiny viper, most likely venomous. And then came another, not quite so small, and slid right by her ear. Biting down on her lip, Myrina forced herself not to stir, not to breathe. She was lying on something mushy. A pile of twigs and rotten leaves? Whatever it was, the putrid smell of it made her gag. And then the memory finally struck her; the temple guards had thrown her in a pit.
Ever so slowly, ever so silently, Myrina began liberating her arms from the ropes. Luckily, the men had been in too much of a hurry to tie proper knots. They had probably expected her to die in the fall, and she might well have broken every bone in her body, for judging by the faint pattern of light coming through the metal grate above, the pit was as deep as a well—in fact, it probably was an old well, now dried up.
Myrina fought back a shiver of fury and pain. Fury at the men who had treated her like an animal, and pain at the thought of Lilli, waiting for her, huddled in the scorching sun. Even the throbbing ache in her back from the brutal fall dwindled by comparison.
Just then, the hissing stopped, and for a few breathless moments all was silent. The small vipers had fled. Myrina’s throat tightened with dread. Something else was coming.
Listening intently, she finally heard it: a heavy body sliding over stone.
Pulling the knife from her belt, she braced herself. If she guessed correctly, the beast currently circling the outer wall of the pit, looking for a way in, was a large snake of the kind that coiled around its victims, squeezing the life from their bodies before swallowing them whole. Every two years or so, back home, someone had been killed this grisly way. Myrina still remembered the horror of a neighbor’s son who went missing—then, days later, seeing a giant serpent cut open to reveal the pallid corpse of the boy.
Mud demons, the villagers called them. Each spring, the elders had walked out to the watering hole in a long procession, with drums and songs and branches from flowering trees, to beg peace from this ancient evil.
From the earliest age, Myrina had suspected the ceremony was in vain. Not because the snakes did not listen, but because it was not in their nature to care. Her father had told her so, the way he had told her many things when they were out in the wilderness together. Snakes did not have the hunter’s respect for their prey, he had explained, when Myrina had once cried over a dead fawn; reptiles were not capable of mercy. They felt neither love nor hatred; they were without emotion.
And to fight them, one had to be entirely without emotion, too.
Standing up, Myrina held her arms above her head, waiting for the serpent to find her. Had there been more light in the pit, she might have positioned herself more wisely. As it was, her eyes were useless to her; she had only her ears and the knife in her hand.
But for all her courage, Myrina nearly fainted with terror when the snake finally made its way into the enclosed space. She had braced for the feeling of its cold, smooth scales against her skin, but was unprepared for its formidable size. As the serpent coiled up around her legs and thighs, its sheer weight brought her to her knees with a groan.
Myrina plunged her knife into the rigid body that now wound around her waist. At first, the blade did not even penetrate the tight, scaly skin, but her strength grew with her desperation, and soon she could feel the serpent responding. It paused, as if in confusion, and then, in the faint light from above, Myrina saw a flash of a ghastly, open mouth before it snapped shut around her left arm.
Screaming, she hacked at the snake’s head, aiming for its eyes. The pain in her arm was so overwhelming she barely knew whether she was doing the beast any harm at all. In the end, the serpent jerked violently, and Myrina lost her last bit of balance. Toppling over, entwined with the massive body, all air was squeezed from her chest, and she felt the knife slipping from her hand.
She was dying.
And yet, she kept breathing. For all its crushing weight, the giant serpent did not constrict around her any further.
Moving required tremendous effort, but the monster’s grisly jaws had become unhinged in death, and she was able to carefully free her arm from its barbed teeth. Then, inch by inch, she wriggled out of its coils, liberating her legs and feet.
She had been lucky, for though her arm was throbbing and slick with blood, there was no massive gushing, and the bone was not broken….
Myrina was too busy inspecting her wounds to notice anything above her, until she suddenly heard the metal grate sliding aside. Looking up, she saw a flickering torch and two faces contorted with disgust. Then came a shower of accusations in a language she did not understand and a glimpse of what looked like her traveling satchel, clenched in a meaty fist and shaken violently in the air. Fighting the urge to scream right back at her guards, Myrina stood up, arm bleeding, to place a foot on top of the mighty body she had just slain and raise her palms in friendship.
“Let me out of here,” she said in the Old Language, her voice trembling with the need to make her captors understand, “and I will tell you everything.”
For a brief, terrible moment the men disappeared from sight, and Myrina feared they were leaving again. Then something came whipping down from above, its knotted end snapping to a halt right in front of her.
A rope.
WHEN THE MEN PULLED the gritty sack from her head for the second time, Myrina was relieved to find herself in a large temple room under a high ceiling held aloft by massive pillars. There were no windows and no natural light anywhere; the place was lit by countless flickering fires burning atop tall three-legged fire pans, and it took Myrina a while to make sense of the people gathered around, staring at her through the dancing shadows.
Since they were all women and all w
ore the same white dresses and horrified expression, Myrina assumed they were priestesses serving the Moon Goddess and unaccustomed to the sight of blood and bruises. What confused her were the bows and quivers strapped to their backs, for none of them struck her as having the bearing of archers.
Her rambling thoughts were interrupted by a commanding voice from above, and after a moment’s disorientation and several impatient prods from the men standing right behind her, Myrina turned around and saw the fearsome form seated on an elaborate chair on top of a stone podium. Guessing she was looking at the High Priestess, Myrina bent her head in respect. She would have knelt down, too, but the men had bound her too tightly for that.
“You stand accused,” began the woman on the podium, perfectly fluent in the Old Language, “of being a trespasser. And possibly a murderer. Do you realize what the punishment is for those crimes?”
Myrina shook her head, too afraid to speak.
“If you do not answer me,” the woman went on, “I must assume you are guilty. And I must hand you over to the city officials … something I would rather avoid.” She held up a small object, and only when it twinkled in the light of the fire pans did Myrina recognize her mother’s bracelet. Then suddenly, it all began to make sense—the men furiously waving her traveling satchel above the pit, and then pulling her out for questioning.
Myrina was not the only one who recognized the bracelet; the mere sight of it drew a collective gasp from the priestesses.
“Tell me then,” continued the High Priestess, her voice deeper than before, “how did you come to possess this?”
Myrina straightened before the woman’s scrutiny. “It belonged to my mother. She wore it on her arm every day of her life.”
As soon as the words rang out in the hollow room, they were followed by a burst of mumbling confusion. Only then, when she saw the priestesses turning this way and that in search of an explanation did Myrina notice that they all wore similar bracelets around their wrists.