“Benandanti.” The word slid off her tongue. “It means ‘The Good Walkers,’ or sometimes ‘Those Who Do Well.’ They started in the Middle Ages, in Italy—I mean their whole sort of organized way of doing things dates back that far, to the eighth century, I think. You can find accounts of them in records from the Inquisition. But really they’re much, much older. They go back thousands and thou-sands of years, my father told me once.”
She stopped and reached for the wine bottle, as though she was going to take a sip, but then thought better of it. I took another swig and asked, “But what do they do? I mean, is it like the Masons or something, that you can’t talk about?”
“No—well, yes, some of it is. Most of it, I suppose; at least there are things my father has never told me, and I guess he never will. Because I’m a woman, and women are—well, they’re not exactly forbidden, I mean there’ve always been a few women—Magda Kurtz was one—but as far as the Benandanti are concerned, women are just sort of beside the point.”
I frowned and let this sink in. “Is it part of the Church, then? I mean, there they all are at the Divine, all these priests and rabbis and ministers running around—”
Angelica shook her head emphatically. “No. It’s not a religious thing—at least, it’s not just a religious thing. It’s more like the Church is part of the Benandanti—like all these churches and religions and things are part of it. There are members everywhere, all over the world. The Masons, the Vatican, Bohemian Grove, Skull and Bones… It’s like the ultimate Old Boys’ Network.”
“But then why doesn’t anyone else know about them? I mean, even if it’s such a huge secret, wouldn’t this have popped up on ‘Sixty Minutes’ or something?”
“It’s not a secret.”
In the glow of the hurricane lamp Angelica’s face looked lovelier and more serene than ever, but also strangely remote: her voice detached, a little strained. As though she was reciting something she’d learned long before and was having difficulty remembering. ‘“Hide in plain sight,’ that’s one of their maxims. So, we all know about parts of the Benandanti—but nobody knows about all of it, unless you’re in the very center; and that’s where people like Balthazar Warnick are.”
“So what do they do?”
“Research, mostly. Very obscure, totally useless research.” She began to enumerate. “Sacrificial rituals of the ancient Scythians. The secret meaning of the Book of Genesis. Trying to find a pattern in NYSE figures between April and June of 1957.” She laughed. “I mean, can you imagine wasting your whole life on something like that?”
I thought of Balthazar Warnick running his fingers across a door, letting it fall open upon the landscape from a nightmare. “Yeah,” I said at last. “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I can see how it might come in pretty fucking useful.”
I moved closer to her.
“Angelica,” I said, my voice low but urgent, “if what you’re telling me is true—and, I mean, it is true, I saw what they did to Magda Kurtz!—if this is all true, it means the world is completely different from what we think it is. It means—it means there’s, like, magic, or something—
“It means that everything I know is wrong.”
“No.” Her eyes were huge and luminous. “It just means that you didn’t know everything. That’s all.”
“But what happens now? Are they going to kill me because I saw them? Because I found out about this big awful secret?”
She looked at me pensively. “I don’t think so. I think if they were going to kill you, they would have done it already. I mean, I found out about them when I was young, and nothing happened to me.”
“But you said your father is one of them.”
“He is. But my father always said that no one ever really learned about the Benandanti unless they were supposed to, unless there was some reason for it. No, I don’t think they’ll kill you, Sweeney.”
I leaned back and gazed at the ceiling. “Tell me this, then. What’s the point? Why are they doing all this research, if it’s so useless? I assume they get their weird books and monographs published, and they all get tenure, but why? What are they trying to find out?”
Angelica hugged her pillow to her. “It’s not so much that they’re trying to learn things. It’s more that they’re trying not to forget, trying to make sure they remember—
“Someone like Professor Warnick… he knows the words to all the Vedas, he knows a language they spoke in eastern Europe ten thousand years ago. Not the whole language, maybe, but words, phrases, stories: this whole incredibly ancient oral tradition that’s been carried on since the Ice Age. Maybe even before then; maybe so far back that the people who spoke it, we’d hardly even recognize as human at all. But the Benandanti remember. That’s their job.”
I felt chilled, by what lay behind her words: thousands of years unrolling in the darkness before me like a vast eternal plain, endless steppes where tiny figures could just barely be discerned, crouched around a single flame or dancing with arms outflung beneath the starless sky.
“So,” I said at last. “They go out and find these old primitive priests, these witch doctors, and take their pictures and film them and stuff. Like they’re an endangered species. They’re just into saving all these old shamans.”
“No, Sweeney,” Angelica said softly. “You don’t get it. The Benandanti aren’t into saving the shamans. They are the shamans.”
She walked over to the lantern on the floor, squatted before it, and held her hands out, so that black smoke licked at her fingers. “Thousands of years ago they came out of the northern steppes and boom! everything changed. The way people lived, the way they talked and dressed, how they divided property, how they determined parentage. There was this sort of cultural explosion, and we’re still feeling the aftershocks; we’ll go on feeling them forever. That’s what the Benandanti are for: to make sure we keep on hearing the echo of a bomb that went off seven thousand years ago.
“The men in my father’s family have been Benandanti since the fifteenth century, when the sultan Mehmed helped create the Laurenziana, the de’ Medicis’ library in Florence. So my ancestors were librarians. Balthazar Warnick goes back to the Dark Ages, to those monasteries in Ireland that were the only place in western Europe where they still could read and speak Greek, until the Renaissance. And Oliver’s family goes back even further than that, to the first wave of Milesians in Ireland.”
I stared at her for a long time, the lunula a faint gleam upon her breast. Finally I said, “This is crazy.”
Angelica looked up, her face composed. “No, it’s not,” she said calmly. “When it starts to get crazy is when you find out that underneath this whole Indo-European tradition is an even older tradition. One that goes back twenty, thirty thousand years; and that’s what the Benandanti are afraid of.
“Because the people who were there before the Benandanti knew things that make my father and Balthazar Warnick look like Boy Scouts putting on a magic show. The Benandanti did their best to stamp them out, but old things survive. Old religions survive. And the Benandanti are afraid that someday the old ways will truly return. If you know anything at all about history, you can see the signs: there’ll be these little isolated outbreaks, like the old religions that were persecuted as witchcraft during the Middle Ages, and again in Salem. The whole hippie movement in the 1960s, and some of this pagan revival stuff that’s going on now.