“You don’t mind?”
“Heck no.”
“Thanks, Annie,” I said, relieved. “I feel bad, but we had this all planned and—”
“Like, no problemo, Sweeney.”
“Okay. We should be home by four-thirty or so. I’ll give you a key and you can just let yourself in, then maybe tomorrow we can—”
Annie cut me off. “Sweeney?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t you have work to do?”
“Right. Later, Annie.”
The problem was, I didn’t have work to do. Because of the terrible weather and air quality both inside and out, the museum had put its Liberal Leave policy into effect; the place was almost deserted. With the Aditi gone, I couldn’t even kill a few hours with some Pink Pelican, and I knew Dylan had been feeling guilty about not getting the Kroeber project wrapped up before now.
I really wished I could just go back home. But Annie was there, and Annie’s arrival had me on edge. Everything had me on edge. I felt the way I did when Oliver and I used to drop acid: the same queasy mixture of terror and exhilaration, compounded when the drug started to kick in and everything got a little blurry around the edges. Only now it was a combination of not enough sleep, too much alcohol, too much heat, and far too many ghosts popping up. Like the end of a Restoration comedy, when all at once everyone shows up onstage, fools and diviners and soldiers and lovers and cuckolds, until you wonder whether the whole rickety platform will just collapse beneath them.
I wandered out into the corridor. Laurie wasn’t at her desk, and I figured she’d probably just left early for Hatteras. I went by Robert Dvorkin’s office, thinking I might grill him about what I’d seen on the news last night, but of course he wasn’t in.
“Okay,” I said out loud. There wasn’t anyone around to hear me. “Time for Classics.”
Classics was an expanse of brightly lit offices on the side of the museum abutting the dome. Fritz Kincaid was the chief of Hellenic Stuthes, a rosy-cheeked red-haired man of fifty who played squash on his lunch hour and lived in a houseboat tethered on the Potomac. I knew he’d be in because Fritz was always in. He was the kind of museum curator beloved of old movies and local news stations: photogenic, partial to polka-dot bow ties and cheerfully eccentric headgear, and most of all a terrific source of Strange but True (and often disgusting) Facts regarding the Ancients.
“Katherine Cassidy! Queen of the Interactive Video Display!” he crowed when he saw me peeking through the door. “What brings you to visit this old fossil?”
“You’re the only old fossil here today,” I said. “Actually, I saw the news last night, about all those artifacts at the University of the Archangels, and I thought of you.”
Fritz rolled his eyes. “Oh, yes: Potnia. Just what we need in these troubled times, a revival of the ancient matristic societies of the Aegean.” He turned and gave me a quizzical look. “Oh, but I forgot—your young friend Tristan—”
“Dylan.”
“Yes, of course, I’m sorry—Dylan. His mother’s the writer, isn’t she? The one we have to thank for all this nice publicity.”
He grimaced, then added, “Please, Katherine—come in, have a seat. Would you like some coffee?”
“No thanks. But are you busy? I wanted to pick your brain for a few minutes.”
Fritz shook his head solemnly. “I am never too busy for lovely young ladies. Entrez—”
I walked around the perimeter of the long library table that took up most of his office. It held an exquisite scale model of the Acropolis and the Athenian Agora, constructed of paper and cardboard and balsa wood, with matchstick triremes in the distance that glowed against the painted sea. The model had been constructed for an exhibit dismantled years ago, but Fritz never had the heart to get rid of it. It made a nice backdrop when he was visited by local news crews, especially since he’d improved the Acropolis by adding several troll dolls and plastic velociraptors.
“So this group Potnia,” I said. “Is that the name of a goddess?”
“In a manner of speaking. To be more accurate: it’s a name of the goddess.” Fritz cocked his head and raised gingery eyebrows, so that he looked like an intelligent Airedale. “Have you—taken an interest in this sort of thing, Katherine?”
I shrugged and tried to look noncommittal, although in truth my heart was racing. “Not really. Well, maybe a little.”
He gave an understanding nod. “Probably young Dylan knows a great deal about it…”
I laughed. “Yeah—kids these days, with their wacky matristic cults! No, I was just kind of—intrigued. I saw that article in Archaeology, and I understand the museum might be hit with a lawsuit…”
Fritz shuddered. “God forbid—I’m sorry, Goddess forbid,” he said quickly, raising his eyes to heaven. He picked up a piece of paper from his desk, holding it between thumb and forefinger and making a face as though it smelled bad. “Did you see this? No? It’s Potnia’s press release—they’re timing all their little escapades by the old pagan calendar. Actually, this one is dated today, but they dropped it off yesterday.”
“Today? What’s today?”
Fritz made a great show of squinting as he held the release at arm’s length and read aloud, “ ‘August First is Lammas, one of the great harvest festivals sacred to the blah blah blah.’ ” He grimaced, crumpled the page, and tossed it into a wastebasket. “So much for Potnia.”
He turned to me and shook his head apologetically. “Oh! But I forgot, you asked about them—
“Well, Katherine, Potnia is a name found on various Linear A and Linear B tablets in Knossos and Mycenæ—you’re familiar with those?”
“A little.”
“Well, the tablets are some of the earliest records of our so-called Western Civilization, and Potnia is one of the oldest names found therein. It’s been translated as one of the titles of the Great Mediterranean Goddess. Atana Potnia, she was called—Atana like Athena, do you see? Most of the Greek gods actually started out as Cretan gods—by Cretan I mean what we call the Minoan culture, from our old friend King Minos.”
“The guy with the minotaur?”
“The guy with the minotaur. But these are very, very ancient gods, dating back millennia before the more well-known Greek gods. A lot of the place-names in that part of the Mediterranean are actually pre-Hellenic, completely different linguistically from Greek words. But the Greeks were so impressed by this culture that they ended up incorporating many of these names and words into their own language. So a lot of words we think of as being classically Greek, like theos or hieros or laburinthos, actually belong to this earlier society.”
I eased myself up onto the table beside the Agora. “Really? That’s fascinating.”
Fritz nodded, pleased. “It is fascinating. Because, you see, the Greeks did the same thing with their gods. They co-opted these more ancient deities for themselves—gods like Hyacinthus, who was sort of a proto-Apollo, although he was also associated with the death cults that the Greeks later attached to Adonis; and Posidas, who became Poseidon, and—”
He gave an effete wave. “—oh, you know a bunch of lesser deities. But—”
Fritz started pacing, carried away by his monologue. “Your feminist friends out there are onto something. Because in fact this entire Minoan/Mycenæan civilization probably grew up around the worship of goddesses. The gods were a much later addition, most of them we think brought in by Northern invaders. The goddess cults probably originated on the mainland—Turkey, Anatolia, that whole cauldron of Eastern European countries—and then were brought by colonists to Crete and its satellite islands. The Cyclades, Rhodes, Thera…