Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

“Because she kicked a priest?”

“No. Because her fury is what gave her power. It’s what fueled her sight, it gave her the dreams she had, where she could see things she was not meant to see. Her anger is what drove her to learn about the plants that kept her sterile. It made her lash out at the other women, who refused to listen when she tried to help them—”

He stood and crossed to one of the massive book cabinets, shelves bowed beneath volumes bound in leather, untanned hide, rainbow silks, parchment. A library ladder leaned against the wall, and Balthazar nimbly climbed it, looking like an earnest schoolboy in the shadow of all those somber tomes. Dust puffed out around him as he withdrew a volume and blew on its spine.

“Kirsten better see to those,” he said as a pair of moths flew past his head. “Here, take this please—”

I hesitated, then walked over. I was half-expecting something exotic, or at least undeniably ancient—crumbling vellum, cracked leather and Latin—but the book he gave me was merely old and musty-smelling, its cloth binding frayed, its spine cracked as from much use. Disappointed, I turned it to read the cover.

“Do you know it?” asked Balthazar as he clambered back down the ladder.

“Oh, sure. Are you kidding?”

He walked over to a narrow table set along one wall. Papers covered it, and an old Royal upright typewriter. I followed him, opening the book to read its title page.

An inquiry into the Vegetation Gods of Old Europe, and their connection with the Ancient Women’s Cults of the Mediterranean and surrounding regions. Cambridge University Press, 1904.

“Well,” I said as Balthazar took the book from my hand. “It’s not exactly The Catcher in the Rye .”

He smiled and with a flourish pointed to a velvet-padded chair, its arms carved with whorls and griffin’s-heads. “Sit.”

I sat. He pulled a matching chair alongside me and settled himself into it, smoothing the book’s cover. “It’s a very important work, that’s all. In my day students younger than you are could recite long passages by heart.”

In your day guys were reciting Beowulf in mud huts, I thought darkly, but said nothing. Balthazar opened to the table of contents, an impenetrable listing of bizarre names and Greek characters, with a few bits of Latin thrown in for leavening.

“Do you know who the Erinyes are?” he asked.

“No.”

“Really? Well, the name means ‘the angry ones.’ They were commonly known as the Furies, but also they were called the Eumenides, ‘the kindly ones.’ They are three women—usually old women, but not always. I have found depictions of them on black-figure vases where they are beautiful, and young, although they do have eagle’s talons and wings. They were associated with terrible, terrible things. Even their names are bloodthirsty: Megaera, the Jealous One; Electo, the Relentess; Tisiphone the Avenger. They are the Punishers—June called them the death-Sirens, who would drive guilty people to frenzy. In ancient Greece, the very word used to describe ‘rage’ was almost indistinguishable from their name. They are far older than any of the Olympic deities; they may be among the oldest supernatural creatures of which we have any written record.”

“What did they do?”

“They restored order. Not necessarily human order, and not divine order—certainly not divine order as we think of it now. Whatever their code of ethics was, it was far more ancient than anything we can even begin to imagine, and more horrible. June Harrington speculated that it was the order of the Mothers—of an unimaginably ancient form of worship. It is an extremely interesting thing, really.”

I looked up, surprised at how his tone had changed. It was softer, more thoughtful, and his expression as he gazed at a page of June Harrington’s book was almost dreamy. “So many of the images of women that we have from ancient Greece are terrible ones. Medea slaughtering her children, Medusa turning people to stone, wicked Clytemnestra plotting against her husband—

“But she wasn’t really plotting ,” I broke in. “He murdered their daughter—he sacrificed Iphigenia, and Clytemnestra was just—”

“Ah.” Balthazar raised an eyebrow, his sea-blue gaze mocking. “And how came you by that bit of arcane knowledge?”

“We had to read it at school,” I said defensively. “At least we were supposed to read it, for one of my drama classes. We did all that stuff. Ali played Iphigenia in a scene for our acting class.”

“Did she?” Balthazar smiled. Suddenly he no longer seemed so old. The burnished light touched his cheeks and graying hair with gold, so that his face looked smooth and timeless. He tilted his back back, and in a soft voice began to recite.

I frowned. “I don’t remember that part.”

“It’s a different play,” confessed Balthazar. “Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris. There’s a happier ending than in the Oresteia, at least for Iphigenia—her father sacrifices a deer instead of his daughter.”

“That was big of him.”

“Ah! You think he was wicked—but the truth is, it was Artemis who demanded the sacrifice of Iphigenia. With the possible exception of Aphrodite, who was a bit of a latecomer to Olympus, none of the ancient goddesses were particularly nice people.” I glanced at Balthazar curiously: he was talking about these characters the same way my mother might discuss a neighbor who drank too much before Garden Club meetings. “They could be helpful, but there was nearly always a price, and usually it was blood. Nowadays we think of Artemis as the Huntress, and picture her like that —”

Balthazar waved a hand dismissively at an Edwardian illustration in the book, a demure young woman in long skirts carrying a bow, rather as though it was a tennis racket. “In fact, Artemis was a dreadful goddess, who didn’t hesitate to slaughter anyone who crossed her. Look at this—”

He turned the page. A gray-tinted photographic plate showed an alabaster statue of a woman, her face cast in bronze—but really, the statue scarcely looked like a woman at all. It was more like a thick column, topped by an androgynous face that wore a cylindrical crown; an austere, even cruel face. Beneath it the column was ornamented with animals with staring eyes and bared teeth, and by vaguely obscene shapes, swollen orbs that hung in distended rows from the goddess’s breast almost to her feet.

“The Artemis of Ephesus,” said Balthazar. He tapped the page officiously. “Sometimes called Cybele. This is a representation of the very goddess who so enraged Saint Paul when he visited the city. He referred to her as Diana, of course, in the Roman fashion—‘Diana whom all Asia and the world worshippeth.’ Not that one can blame him for being so disturbed by her rites. To this day, most people associate the Ephesian Artemis with fertility cults. They think these ”— He indicated a bulbous ornament on the goddess’s dress. —“are breasts.”

“Well,” I said, squinting at the picture. “Aren’t they?”

“June Harrington thought they were the offerings of the galli —the men who castrated themselves to Artemis, and not always willingly.”