Free Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand Page A

everywhere, some arranged against the wall, others floating like huge crystal pendants amidst the expanse of black leather furniture and white shag carpeting. The cabinets were filled with figures very like the one that rested on his table, and with silver torques, beaked masks, bronze armor in the shape of wings, plaques inlaid with bone and silver and crudely polished stones. He surveyed them all, not with pride but with a certain wistfulness that gave his dark eyes a mournful cast. An Iron Age prince’s ransom in artifacts and metalwork: nearly all of it obtained on the black market, spirited from original holdings in Britain and Czechoslovakia and Turkey and Greece. He was tied up in litigation right now with the embassy of a small country in Eastern Europe, fighting over the disposition of his most-prized treasure: the mummified head of a Bronze Age man found in a peat bog, and now displayed within a tall glass case like a casket stood upon its end.
    “I think,” he said carefully, staring at the tea-colored head in its crystal chamber. “I think that this could be a very important adventure you’re planning, Miss Magda. For both of us.” And turning, he let his hand rest upon her thigh.
    Six months later Magda and her crew were in Çaril Kytur. The site was in a desolate corner of northern Estavia, deep within the Psalgÿuk Mountains—tall, needle-thin spars of quartz and flint that shot up against leaden skies that rarely showed the sun. Like something out of a Dürer etching of Hell, Magda thought, or Murnau’s Nosferatu. Even the trees were stunted, crippled pines and alders whose roots poked through the thin acid soil where they sought footing.
    It was late July. In the three days it took Magda and her companions to drive from the Estavian capital to Çaril Kytur, they passed only two other vehicles: an empty Intourist bus with Moscow plates, and an ancient grey jitney piled high with wooden cartons, live chickens and ducks tied to its extremities with red twine. The bone-jarring trip was enough to make Magda wish that she’d left Janine, at least, back in Washington.
    “This is not, like, what my faculty advisor told me to expect,” Janine announced after their second night in the Jeep. “I thought I was going to get to practice my Russian, but there’s nobody here.”
    “Well, we’re stuck with each other now,” Magda said grimly. “So if you want to bail out, start walking.”
    No one did. A few hours later they’d reached their destination.
    “Oh man,” breathed Nicky D’Amato, another of the triumvirate who’d signed on from the Divine. “Are you sure you read that map right?”
    Magda sighed. “I’m sure.”
    They stumbled from the Jeep and looked down into the valley of Çaril Kytur, a long narrow spit of land crosshatched with streams that fed into a huge marshy area to the south. It was a dispiriting landscape. The stones dun-colored, pleached with lichen and moss; the few trees hunched against the wind that whistled down through a gap in the mountains to the north. Lowell Ackroyd’s theory had been that a band of Paleolithic hunters was stranded here during one of the minor ice ages, surviving to found the ancient encampment known as Çaril Kytur, Belly of the Moon. Certainly it was hard to imagine why anyone would choose to live here. The surrounding mountains were sparsely populated, mostly by shepherds who eked out a living from the barren hillsides and more temperate valleys. Magda had thought the natives would be eager to supplement their meager incomes with what they could earn from assisting on the dig, but that wasn’t the case at all.
    “He says they’re not interested.”
    George Wayford, the last of the three grad students who had accompanied Magda from D.C., shook his head. They were sitting in front of Magda’s tent—Magda, George, Nicky, Janine—the entire Çaril Kytur crew. Overhead the sky was grey and skinned-looking. A cold wind blew down from the mountain