“Or it could mean it was a pre-Christian site, which obviously it is,” Magda retorted. “And if the locals have some vague memory of that, they’d think it was profane, meaning pagan, meaning bad juju. Unholy,” she added, frowning for emphasis.
“Nah. This could’ve been a midden, someone might have pitched that ol’ boar in here—” George flicked at the wall and sent a miniature avalanche of pebbles and dirt flying to the bottom of the shaft. “Or it could have fallen out of somebody’s Neolithic pocket—”
“Do you mind?”
From the belly of the pit Nicky shouted amidst the hail of stones, brandishing a shovel. He wore waders and a totally useless plastic Soviet-made hard hat, and was covered with mud from head to toe. “Dammit, George!”
“Sorry, man.” George waved apologetically, shifting his weight on the ladder. Magda realigned herself to keep from falling. “But it’s been over a week, Magda—I really, really think we should abandon this site and check out that mound by the marsh. There could be human remains there, and the chances of preservation are so much better—”
“One more day,” said Magda. She and George had been having this argument for almost a week now. “June said she thought it was a burial site, and she wouldn’t—”
“June is senile, Magda! That was fifty years ago; they still believed in Piltdown Man—”
“One more day,” Magda said stubbornly. Without looking, she turned her mug upside down and dumped its contents. “Okay? Just—”
“Goddammit, Magda!” Nicky shrieked from below.
George and Magda burst out laughing. Magda shook the hair from her eyes and smiled. “Let that be a warning, Wayford.”
“Okay, okay,” George said, and grinned. The ladder shimmied as he climbed back to the top. “One more day.”
That night she couldn’t sleep. Part of it was anxiety over abandoning June Harrington’s site. George was right, of course. The shaft at Eleven-A had yielded little in the way of data, a few bits of bone and fired clay that might have been found anywhere—nothing remarkable at all. The mound near the swampy end of the valley might well hold more interesting material, and there was always the hope of finding human or animal remains preserved by the bog.
“Damn,” Magda swore aloud. She lay inside her tent, arms folded behind her head, and stared at the canvas ceiling. Outside the moon must be nearly full. The tent’s worn green fabric glowed so that she felt as though she were floating in a phosphorescent sea, the cool breeze carrying the scent of the tiny night-blooming stonecrops that were the only flowers that grew in the valley.
One more day.
There must have been some reason why June Harrington had been convinced of the site’s importance, something besides a little bronze boar and a few canine tibiae. It was the fragment of the lunula, of course: such a small thing to build a life’s work on, and lost now in the Museum. Magda wished she had questioned her mentor more carefully, but June had been so certain, her usually restrained site notes so exuberant—
…Yesterday at Eleven-A I uncovered an artifact of hammered silver, a luniform pendant the size of my little finger. Of course it is only a fragment remaining of what must have been an extensive burial site; but judging by the workmanship the pendant came not from anywhere near here but from the Sea of Crete. There is a marked similarity between the devices inscribed upon it and the record of those figures engraved upon the so-called “Lost Ring of Minos”—this curvilinear charm might well prove the authenticity of the lost Ring, if only it could be found again! Quite beside myself with excitement and trying not to read too much into this single artifact but Lowell agrees, there is a good chance the entire valley was sacred to Inachus; that is, Leucothea, or the White Goddess, herself an avatar of the Great Goddess of the ancient Minoans. Which would, of course, prove my theory that trade routes existed between the Hittite and Minoan cultures. And Harold Sternham (bless him! he seemed a stick at first, but I am grateful now of his patronage!), dear Harold may be correct in his assertion that the minor nymph called by the natives Othiym, affiliated as she is with the river of that name which once ran through here, is related to that same river-goddess Ino or Inachus who was worshiped in Crete…
There had been a curious addendum to this entry. Curious because June so seldom revised her first impressions—she was in the habit of being right. And so Magda had been surprised to see something scrawled in the margin, a quotation that had obviously been recorded decades after the original entry.
I should never have taken the lunular fragment from the site. “The dark aspect of the antique mother-goddess has not yet reappeared in our civilization.”
And after this, the words:
No: She Lives.
Magda started as a sudden gust sent the tent’s flaps and lines humming, and an eddy of dust flying up from the door panels.
“The hell with it,” she said aloud, and scrambled from her sleeping bag.
Outside the night air struck her like a clapper to a bell, making the blood sing inside her head and her ears throb painfully. She shivered in her heavy sweater and held the flashlight close to her chest, as though its pale beam might give some warmth. In front of George’s tent she hesitated. Even with the shrill wind she could hear his breathing, loud and measured as the pulse of a metronome. For a long moment she stood there, as though waiting for him to rise and come out to join her. But of course he didn’t wake, didn’t stir at all. She turned away.
She walked carefully between the other tents, her work boots sending gravel flying as she tried to tiptoe through the loose scree of pebbles and sandy soil that covered the valley floor. She paused again after she passed Janine’s flimsy little Sears Roebuck shelter, with its absurd red-striped awning and Janine’s wool socks hung out to dry.
“Janine?” Magda called softly, tilting her head. “Nicky?”
She saw no one: only the shadows of tents and stones, unnaturally large and black in the brilliant moonlight. But she had heard something, a faint noise like the tiniest of footsteps, or pattering rain. She waited, holding her breath; but the sound died away into the breeze. Finally she took another step. And stopped.
“Ohh!—get away, no—!”
It was as though she had walked into a whirlwind. All around her were falling leaves, hundreds of them: livid grey-green in the cold light, rushing up from the ground in a whirring explosion of dirt and dusty foliage. Magda shrieked and struck at them as they whirled and fell, brushing against her cheeks as they fluttered everywhere, tangling in her hair and slithering between her fingers. A scent of damp earth came with them, a smell like bitter chocolate. When she struck one with her open palm it exploded in a damp burst, as though she had crushed a rotten fruit.
“Jesus!—ugh, go away!”
She stumbled forward, beating at the air and whimpering, as the leaves covered the ground in a rippling carpet. For a moment the air was still. Then to her horror they rose once more from the rocky earth, fluttering and rustling, their fragile stems and tattered fronds beating against her like tiny living things as they climbed the legs of her jeans and clung to her sweater.