Waking the Moon Read Online Free PDF

streaked with grey. She wore unfashionable clothes, baggy trousers of black linen and a Betsey Johnson blouse that had been le plus ultra when Magda herself was an undergraduate, but now was faded and somewhat shabby. More striking was Magda’s necklace: a crescent-shaped collar of beaten silver. At its widest point it was engraved with a triskele composed of three interlocking moons. The workmanship was exquisite, in the Celtic style favored by metalworkers in Bronze Age Europe. The lunar curves joined to form an abstract pattern of still more crescent moons, smaller or larger depending on how they caught the light. There was a gap in the collar, a hole where another, smaller, curve should fit. But ancient treasuries and burial sites are often raided or despoiled, by grave robbers and disinherited relatives and greedy priests.
    The necklace was a lunula, sacred to the lunar goddess Othiym. Magda knew of only a handful like it which had ever been found—one, a mere fragment, had been discovered by her mentor and was now among the holdings of the National Museum. It was an object of great power, especially in the hands of a Benandanti like herself. Had it been whole, and not missing that curved spar from its center, it would have been unimaginably so.
    Magda knew where that missing fragment was, but she had long ago decided not to retrieve it. Her West Coast mentor, the great June Harrington, had found a fragment of a lunula during one of her own early excavations, and (to her later regret) donated it to the National Museum of Natural History. She told Magda of glimpsing it there many years later in the museum archives, a sliver of light in a dusty glass case.
    “I often think of it,” June had sighed, her gnarled hands opening and closing in her lap. “I could have just taken it back, you know. I could have just taken it, they never would have known.
    “But I never did. And I never saw it again.”
    Magda did not show her lunula to June Harrington. She did not show it to Balthazar Warnick, who had sponsored her within the Benandanti, or indeed to anyone at all. Had the Benandanti known she possessed it, they would almost certainly have tried to wrest it from her. But until now it had remained safely in Magda’s possession. The lunula—and its Mistress—protected its own.
    “In hoc signo spes mea.”
    Magda recited the words softly, her fingers brushing the edge of the silver collar upon her breast.
    “Othiym, Anat, Innana, Kybele, Kali, Artemis, Athena, Hecate, Potnia, Othiym. In hoc signo vinces.” In this sign is my hope, in this sign thou shalt conquer. “In hoc signo spes mea: Othiym. Haïyo Othiym Lunarsa.”
    Some years ago, Magda had been one of the first female students admitted to the Divine. She was still one of the few female Benandanti. Her career since then had been quietly triumphant. Early tenure at UC Berkeley, several major archaeological discoveries, a few token appearances on morning talk shows. She had written a work now commonly regarded as a classic text, the two-volume Daughters of the Setting Sun: The Attic Mystery Tradition in Anatolia, which her mentor, the eminent classicist June Harrington, had called “absolutely indispensable.” This past summer, Professor Kurtz’s lectures at the Divine had been crowded with undergraduates and doctoral students alike, and she had briefly considered staying on a little longer, to see the fall term begin. To see for herself the new crop of students and decide if there were any worth claiming.
    But then she had learned of the Sign—learned just that morning, which left her precious little time for what she had to do. Because, while Magda had a long past history within the Benandanti and the Divine, her present loyalties lay elsewhere.
    She knelt on the rough wool of the Pasquar rug. A round copper dish stood in front of her, and a tiny cloisonné casket filled with gold-tipped matches. Next to the casket gleamed a small silver bowl filled with