Read Online Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand - Free Book Online Page B

in the postgrad program at UC Berkeley, heavily involved with her doctorate and the work that a few years later would become Daughters of the Setting Sun. She had gotten some funding through UC Berkeley, but most of it was to come from a wealthy patron named Michael Haring.
    He was the CEO of an American automobile corporation: forty-two years old, Harvard-educated, never married. Magda met him at the Divine, at a reception in his honor. Michael Haring was one of the Benandanti, though his provenance was industry rather than the more rarefied realms of the university. Still, he had donated funds for several expeditions and financed the renovation of the reading room at Colum Library. He collected Neolithic art, concentrating on those tiny bronze figures of animals that were often found in Celtic graves and burial pits. He also collected young women, and was especially partial to the dark-haired Ivy League types who reminded him of his own youthful dreams of a career in classics.
    “That’s him?” Magda was still young enough to be impressed by someone whose picture had appeared on the cover of Time magazine. “Michael Haring?”
    The man next to her nodded. “Sure is. They put a little plaque in the reading room with his name on it. But hell, he could have rebuilt the whole building.”
    “No kidding.” Magda moved away, thoughtfully sipping her Tanqueray and tonic.
    For almost two years now she had been seeking financial support for an excavation in northern Estavia. She had received the promise of small grants from the Divine and UCLA, and even a tiny stipend from the National Science Foundation. But both her supporters at the Divine and those at UCLA’s Department of European Archaeology felt that her proposed work was not important enough, dealing as it did with a site associated with a minor European goddess cult.
    “Why don’t you go with Harold Mosreich to Yaxchilán?” That had been Balthazar Warnick’s suggestion. “He thinks that one of the stelæ there has a connection with the main pyramid at Chichén Itzá. Plus he has that National Geographic film crew—you know, ‘Mayan Adventure!’ or something like that.”
    Magda shook her head. “The Mayans are overdone. This is something new, Balthazar,” she said fervently. “We both know that. Why won’t you back me?”
    Balthazar had been her advisor since her freshman year. Even then she’d wondered what someone like Balthazar Warnick—a world-renowned antiquities scholar, the man responsible for cataloging the Metropolitan Museum’s Widdecombe Collection of Cycladic Art—was doing teaching an introductory anthropology course, even at a place like the Divine. Especially at a place like the Divine.
    She’d found out, of course, when he’d tapped her for the Benandanti. Since then she and Balthazar had butted heads more than once, most recently over her decision to leave the Divine for UC.
    “Not the place for a scholar of your rank.” Balthazar never raised his voice, but his mouth had been tight as he rifled through a stack of photographs, the most recent mailing from the Chichén Itzá site. “California! Jesus, Magda, you tilt this country on its side and everything loose rolls into California! There’s nothing out there but hopheads and surfers and rioting students. How are you going to get any work done?”
    She’d gone anyway. She never told Balthazar that part of Berkeley’s appeal—part of the appeal of the entire West Coast—was precisely that open-mindedness that Balthazar and many of the Benandanti dismissed as quackery or, at its worst, a threat to their ancient ways. But she remained on good terms with her old mentor. Remained an active member of the Benandanti, even when her own work began to diverge from what they felt was important.
    What they did not feel was important was the small but growing body of evidence that Magda, and June Harrington before her, had uncovered: all of it pointing to the existence of a matrilineal