Elizabeth Hand: Waking the Moon

Omnia Bona Bonis. The Benandanti’s motto.

All things are Good with Good Men.

Balthazar rested his palm upon the wood. For a moment he glanced over his shoulder, gazing longingly at the door leading into the hall. His car was still parked out front. It would take nearly four hours to drive back to Washington, by which time Francis would long since have lost all patience and stormed back to his room.

Or—what was far more likely-—Francis would come bursting through this little ashwood door, and forcibly drag Balthazar back with him. At the thought Balthazar sighed. With one quick motion he slid the key into the keyhole and turned it. The door shuddered, then flew open.

There was nothing there. Not the dim interior of a closet; not the cool watery sky, greenish-cast and storming. Nothing but a formless emptiness, neither dark nor light but somehow other, cold and rent by a high keening wail.

A Sign.

Without looking up, Balthazar took a step into the void. His foot fell through empty air and his chest tightened as he felt himself start to tumble forward. The last thing he heard was, very faintly, the sound of the wind slamming shut the door behind him.

At the top of the main steps of the Shrine Francis Xavier Connelly waited, just as impatiently as Balthazar had imagined, for his mentor to arrive. Below, the daily flood of tourists poured from a seemingly endless stream of buses, the women fanning themselves with folded maps and brochures, the men loosening ties and cuffs and gazing back yearningly at the air-conditioned vehicles. People still got all dressed up to visit the Shrine, although some of them would get no farther than the gift shop.

Watching them Francis snorted in annoyance and glanced at his watch. Nearly two o’clock. Someone bumped his elbow, apologizing in a shrill voice. Francis looked down to see a group of tourists armed with fearsome-looking cameras, trying vainly to encompass the vast expanse of domes and minarets and bell towers that made up the Shrine.

They don’t know the half of it, he thought. No one would ever know a fraction of what went on around and beneath—and above and below—the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine, and the Shrine that stood at its heart.

“Come on, Balthazar,” he said beneath his breath.

He turned and looked out to the long white driveway that led from North Capitol Street into the Shrine parking lot. A tiny utility building stood near the entrance, plywood and molded blue plastic. A Gray Line Tours bus pulled in from North Capitol and careened past the shed, trailing exhaust. When the smoke cleared a slender dark-haired man stood on the curb in front of the shed, coughing and flapping his hands.

“About time,” muttered Francis to himself. He leaned back on his heels and dug in his pockets for a cigarette. “About goddamn time.”

In the parking lot, Balthazar Warnick tried to catch his breath. He groaned and smoothed the front of his shirt, already damp and heavy with sweat, then crossed the parking lot and headed for the steps.

“Balthazar! Kirsten gave you my message, then.” Francis’s Harvard-Yard voice rang out stridently as Balthazar staggered the last few feet toward him. “I was starting to worry…”

“Ye-es!” gasped Balthazar. He stopped and dabbed at his face with his handkerchief, then, catching his breath, added, “Sorry to take so long. So damn hot —”

Francis nodded and peered irritably into the hazy air, as though waiting for someone more interesting to arrive, perhaps by helicopter. Looking up at him, Balthazar smiled wryly. His protégé was exceptionally, almost grotesquely, tall, big-boned, and stooped, with an air of supercilious hauteur that Balthazar associated with certain breeds of camel. Like Balthazar, he was terribly nearsighted, but too vain to wear glasses. So Francis was always peering impatiently into thin air and complaining about inattentive companions. His cigarette twitched between nervous fingers with nails bitten to the quick. He was one of the youngest of the Benandanti, and Balthazar’s most promising protégé—except for the archaeologist Magda Kurtz, who had first arrived at the Divine nearly a decade earlier and had long since left to pursue her career elsewhere. Though now Magda was back at the Divine for the summer, as a visiting scholar, and Francis had never left.

“It’s always hot,” Francis muttered, as though it were Balthazar’s fault. “Diplomats used to get paid hardship wages for being posted here.”

Balthazar smiled. As an undergraduate Francis had been Balthazar’s golden boy and, like Magda, an archaeology student, though Francis had never strayed from his original love of classical Greece and Mycenae into the muddier territory of Old Europe.

“Anyway, it’s not the heat that gets you,” Francis added. “It’s the humidity.”

Balthazar nodded, sighing. In addition to being head of the Divine’s renowned Department of Anthropology, his formal titles included that of Provost of Thaddeus College, as well as 144th Recipient of the Cape of the Living Flame of the Gjnarra of Transbaikalia in the Gobi Desert, a title that was less honorary than some of his colleagues in the Explorers’ Club might think.

And, of course, he was the chief of the Benandanti at the Divine. Here his duties consisted of a certain type of surveillance, an eternity of watching and waiting for an enemy who never seemed to arrive. An enemy who might no longer exist at all. Balthazar did not in fact like everything about his job, but the Benandanti were in some ways like the military. You were often born to the job, and once indoctrinated you were indentured for life, and presumably beyond. For the last six years, Francis had been as close to family as Balthazar had here: a melancholy thought.

Francis took another quick drag on his cigarette. “Thank you for coming, Balthazar,” he said. For the first time he grinned. “But wait till you see!” Turning, he gazed up at the bulk of the Shrine, his face shining. “It’s incredible, Balthazar, incredible—”

Balthazar shook his head and followed Francis’s gaze. “Well, perhaps you’d better show me,” he said mildly.

Above them reared the heart of the University—the Shrine of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine. A fabulously immense Byzantine folly, completed early in the twentieth century after nearly two hundred years of construction. Minarets and mosaics and Gothic sandstone buttresses, crenellated parapets and winding stairways that led to no visible doors: all of it surmounted by a dome of gold and lapis lazuli that threw back to the sky its own gilded map of the heavens. Seven different architects had designed and built disparate aspects of the Shrine. Inside, no less than fifty-seven chapels, some no larger than a closet, others the size of bowling alleys, had been consecrated to saints of varying rank and degree of holiness. The upper level alone was so crowded with ghosts that in the predawn hours the nave was filled with their hollow whispers. In the crypt chapel near the catacombs, icons routinely wept blood, and in dim corners lustful teenagers lagging behind on class trips often glimpsed Victor Capobianco, known as Damnatus, the Doomed Bishop, kneeling on the granite floor and weeping as he recited the Stations of the Cross. Francis’s Sign would have to be quite original to merit even this minor investigation.

For a moment Balthazar let his gaze rest upon the stone triad above the entry-way. Callow undergraduates had christened the trio The Supremes. They actually represented Michael and Gabriel and Raphael, the Archangels who guarded the Divine. Balthazar waited, just in case they had a message for him, but there was nothing.