“Say, lady,” a voice called through the rain. “Hey, pretty lady. Hey, there.”
Annja paused. She was walking home from the little Puerto Rican bodega around the corner from her loft with a small bag of groceries. She wore a light jacket, a calf-length skirt in dark maroon and soft fawn-colored boots that came up almost to meet it, leaving just two fingers of skin bare. A long baguette of French bread stuck up from the brown paper sack, shielded from the patchy downpour by a black umbrella. She liked to get small amounts of groceries during the brief intervals she spent at home, to force herself to get out at least once a day. Otherwise she’d spend all her time cooped up with her artifacts and monographs, turning into a mushroom. Or so she feared.
She looked into the doorway framed by grimy gray stones from which the words had issued. The speaker looked anything but threatening.
Don’t make too many assumptions, she warned herself.
A small man lay sprawled in the arched doorway with his legs before him like a rag doll’s. He looked emaciated within a shabby overcoat, knit cap and a pair of ragged pants, smeared with patches of grime, that came up well above grubby, sockless ankles and well-holed deck shoes. All might have possessed color at one point. Now all, including his grime-coated skin and stubble beard, had gone to shades of gray
The closest thing to color he displayed was the yellowish brown of his teeth and the slightly lighter but similar shade of the whites of his mouse-colored eyes.
In a quick assessment, she reckoned she could take him. It was part of the calculus of life as a New Yorker. And even more of the life she had taken on.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
“Need some change,” the man muttered in a voice as colorless as his skin. “Got some change for me?”
“You’re right,” she said. “You do need change. But I can’t give it to you.”
The man cawed bitter laughter. “Shit, lady. I need a drink not a sermon.” Spittle sprayed from his gray lips, fortunately falling well short of her.
“At least you’re honest,” she said. “I do want to help you.”
The impatient traffic hissed through the rain behind her. “But if I give you money, am I helping to keep you here? Is that really kindness or compassion?”
He had cocked his head and was staring at her fixedly. She realized he was contemplating trying to threaten her or outright rush her: a nice middle-class twentysomething white girl with more education than sense.
I’ve got victim written all over me, she realized.
She had already stopped talking. Instead she turned and lowered her head to bear squarely on his face and hardened her eyes. She would not summon the sword unless he displayed a weapon. And maybe not then; even before her transformation she had known how to take care of herself and been surprisingly good at it.
But if he actually tried to coerce her she would react with force as ungentle as it was unarmed. She had always hated victimizers. Now as her life’s destiny had begun to unfold she found herself growing almost pathological in her hatred for them.
Something in her manner melted his resolve, which had never so much as gelled. The readying tension flowed out of him. His head dropped and he muttered into a filthy scrap of muffler wrapped around his neck.
Annja realized he wasn’t a victimizer, not really. Just another opportunist who had realized on the teetering brink of too late that the opportunity he thought he saw was the eager smile of the abyss. He was weak rather than committed to anything. Even evil.
In a way she found that sadder.
She struggled with her groceries, her hand fumbling in her pocket, then handed him the first bill she found. “In the end, I find myself fresh out of answers,” she said. “So I guess I’ll take the easiest course.” And wonder who’s really the weak opportunist, she thought.
He snatched it away with crack-nailed fingers swathed in what might have been the shredded gray remnants of woolen gloves, or bandages. The movement sent a wave of his smell rushing over her like a blast of tear gas. Eyes watering, trying not to choke audibly, she turned and walked away.
“Hey, what’s this?” he screamed after her. “A lousy buck? Tight-ass bitch! Don’t care about anybody except yourself.”
HER LOFT HAD a window seat. She liked to half recline on it as she studied or read her e-mails. It gave her a cozy feeling, surrounded by her shelves of books and the artifacts, the potsherds, bone fragments and chipped flint blades, that seemed to accrue on every horizontal surface. Today the clouds masked the time of day and veils of rain periodically hid and revealed the distant harbor. Rain ran long quavering fingers down the sooted, fly-spotted glass.
She sipped coffee well dosed with cream and sugar. The way she’d loved it as a child at the Café du Monde. Which, of course, wasn’t there anymore.
As active as she had always been, she had never had much need to watch her diet. And now that her activity levels had increased, her main problem was keeping up weight.
She frowned slightly as she finished downloading headers from her favorite newsgroups, alt. archaeology and its companion, alt.archaeology.esoterica. There enthusiasts, nuts, grad students and professional archaeologists, mostly anonymous, would splash happily together in the marshy outskirts of her chosen discipline.
She quickly surveyed the headers in alt.archaeology. To her annoyance a number were obvious spam. While she was in South America she hadn’t been able to keep the filters up to date. She resented having to spend the time and effort to do so, but it was like weeding a garden: either you did it regularly or gave in altogether to the forces of entropy.
Part of living in the modern world, she told herself, as she added a few new exclusions. It helps to keep me appreciative of the Middle Ages. Not that she was naive or romantic enough to wish away little things such as air-conditioning and antibiotics, she thought with a laugh.
The spam du jour was real estate. Before that it had been small-cap stocks, and before that, the heyday of male enhancements. She had filtered all of them out. She manually deleted all the new spam she could identify as such, and also the vast majority of legitimate headers that failed to spark her interest.
The usual controversies were being trotted out, she saw: the coastal-migration theory of the human settlement of South America. The authenticity of the Vinland map. Nothing of terrific appeal to her. As usual the flames raged hot and furious.
She switched to alt.archaeology.esoterica. Though it dealt with the far fringes and beyond of archaeology—or what was accepted—the discourse was actually less vitriolic than the regular archaeology group. If only just.
There was the usual debate about pre-Columbian visits to the Americas from Europe and Asia, and a thread about the building of the Great Pyramid that people kept poking at sporadically like a hollow tooth. She opened a message at random:
I give you your Caral pyramids, built even before the Egyptian pyramids. But if there was contact between Peru and Egypt, why didn’t the Caral people learn about ceramics, as well as megalithic civil engineering?
The next header down was something new and different. It caught her eye. “Solomon’s Jar?”
She downloaded the thread and read.
I have come into possession of an antique brass jar, which I believe may be the jar in which King Solomon is said to have bound the demons after he used them to build his temple in Jerusalem. Can you tell me, please, how to authenticate? Also how much it might be worth?
The poster was shown as trees@schatwinkel.com.nl. Annja knew the suffix .nl meant the address was in the Netherlands.
The last question could have been asking what the worth of such a discovery would be to science. Somehow she doubted that was how it was meant. The responses—many—were the usual flames and derision such naive questions from obvious nonprofessionals engendered. About half of them were from the reflex skeptics who derided the idiocy of believing in demons, in a jar in which they were bound, and for that matter that any such person as King Solomon ever existed. The others were from believers of one degree or another abusing the debunkers.
“Hmm,” she said aloud. Annja closed the cover of her notebook computer.
THE SWORD IN HER HAND, she flowed through the ritual motions.
Though it was a gray day outside, she left the overhead light off. She enjoyed a companionable semidarkness; unless she was reading or examining an artifact, she didn’t care much for intense light.
Annja had changed into a gray sports bra and a matching pair of terry trunks that clung to her long, lithe form. Her feet were bare on the hardwood floor of her exercise space, which was separated from her living area by a fifteenth-century north German carved altar screen representing the Annunciation. Her steps echoed. Though it cost her dearly, she lived in that most enduring of Hollywood clichés, a New York loft apartment.
Still, it was worthwhile. She needed room both to keep her specimens and books, and to move. To work out.
It wasn’t as if she was dependent on grants anymore. She had some royalties from her book. Although it was temporarily in abeyance she also had money in the bank from her work on the cable-television series, Chasing History’s Monsters, from which she was taking an indefinite sabbatical as she sorted out the details of her new life. When she’d gotten back from South America she had found her answering machine jammed with pleas from the show’s boy-wonder producer, Doug Morrell, to come back immediately if not sooner….
The sword made soft swishing sounds in the air. She turned, holding it blade up in her right hand. She had the first two fingers of her left hand extended and pressed against the inside of her right forearm.
The ritual had nothing to do with the sword as such, nor her mission—so far as she understood either. So far as she knew. Which, she had to admit, wasn’t far.
SHE HAD MET Roux, the ageless man of mystery when the earth literally opened at her feet and swallowed her up.
It happened on a mountain in France, while hunting the legend of the Beast of Gévaudan for Chasing History’s Monsters. Shortly thereafter she had fallen into a sinkhole that opened beneath her feet during an earthquake. In the caves where she landed she had found the skeleton of the beast herself, as well as the man who killed it—and a medallion that proved to be the final, missing piece of the sword of Joan of Arc, which had been broken by the English when she was burned as a witch at Rouen in the fifteenth century.
Roux, it turned out, had been there. He had been Joan’s mentor.
The old man had stolen the medallion from Annja in a restaurant. She had tracked him down to his mansion near Paris with the help of billionaire industrialist Garin Braden, who claimed to have been Roux’s apprentice—half a millennium before. And there, by some means of which she still had not the slightest comprehension, she had healed the ancient blade—made it whole again out of fragments by no more than the touch of her hand.
It had caused Roux to proclaim her the spiritual descendant of the martyred Joan, and her fated successor as champion of the good. It had also inspired Garin to try to kill her. Or at least to break the sword, fearing that its restoration would break the spell—Roux named it a curse—that had kept both men alive and unaging for centuries.
She was still sorting this all out in her mind, trying to integrate a lot of fundamentally dissonant facts.
Unexplained things happened. She knew that. That the parents she could not remember had died and left her in an orphanage in New Orleans had rubbed her nose in that truth at a very early age.
Earthquakes happened. The earth opened. But that didn’t stop it all from being a little too coincidental—providential, one might say.
The fact she just happened to be dropped more or less on top of the final piece needed to restore the sword was just too neat for rational explanation. Thinking about that—she did that a lot these days, trying to find her bearings—made her wonder about what she had been accustomed to thinking of as “rational.” Because in this case truth and rational explanation were divergent. They had wandered far down very different pathways indeed.
IN THE WEEKS since taking the sword as her own burden to bear, Annja had worked assiduously to learn to use the mystic weapon. Roux had her start conventional fencing, mostly for conditioning. Even with her impressive physical abilities, she needed training. And that training hurt, for she was using her muscles in unaccustomed ways and taxing them to their utmost.
But Roux expressed contempt for fighting with what he called “car aerials,” although he admitted the épée approximated a useful weapon in size and balance, and that the cut-and-thrust of the saber mimicked actual combat, however faintly. He spurned the modern mythology of point-fighting as the be-all and end-all of sword combat.
So she went beyond modern, conventional fencing. She studied sixteenth-and seventeenth-century sword manuals by masters such as Vadi and Meyer—even published a paper on them. She sought out live-steel masters of reconstructed sword techniques from the Middle Ages and Renaissance and learned from them.
What she was doing now, though, was a form meant to be performed with a two-edged sword. It was convenient to do, kept her body fluid and mobile and perfected her balance. It helped familiarize her with the sword—and it with her. The form also helped to soothe her mind and spirit. That was something she put a premium on these days, even as she found it increasingly difficult to do so.
She especially liked the symbolism of the left hand, the empty hand. It was traditionally held with first two fingers extended, the latter two folded into the palm with the thumb across them: what was called the spirit sword.
She found it appropriate, somehow. And the slow motions were easy on her nose. It was still tender from having been broken when she did the face-plant against the cliff in Peru.
AFTER SHE HAD GONE for a run in the rain, then come back and spent twenty minutes stretching, she showered and occupied herself fixing dinner. Then she watched part of the DVD set that had arrived in the mail while she was away, the first season of Ally McBeal. She didn’t really watch much television, and hated waiting from one episode to the next of a show. She much preferred being able to watch as many episodes as she cared to at a sitting. Besides, she’d always harbored a sneaking prejudice for artifacts of the past…even the very recent past.
Leaving the television turned on for a little bit of light and motion, but no sound, she settled herself back on the window seat to see what had developed in her newsgroups.
As the colored shadows played disregarded across her face, and outside the great light went down and the little lights came on in fairy profusion, she went back to alt.archaeology.esoterica. The post about Solomon’s Jar had elicited a new slew of comments. She scanned the headers.
The majority remained abusive. As usual, she found that once the comments nested more than a couple of removes from the main thread they had little or nothing to do with the ostensible topic. So she concentrated on comments on the original post, and immediate replies to them.
One username caught her eye: seeker23@demon.co.uk, a British domain. She had seen the name before. Often. He was a quixotic defender of the borderlands of respectability, of the realm of the possible—who nonetheless spoke knowingly in the jargon of archaeology. And never once in screaming caps. Seeker23 even knew that it’s isn’t a possessive, a rare attainment anywhere on the Net.
She downloaded the comments he—or she, but the tone caused her to sense the poster was masculine—had posted. Mostly they were calm pleas for open minds. But one uncharacteristic sally made her sit up and open her eyes.
There are even rumors that the crew of a Greek fishing trawler who found the supposed jar were mysteriously slaughtered on board afterward. Such a massacre did take place, in Corfu a couple of months ago. It’s possible, always, that was merely coincidence. But I hope Trees is exercising due caution.
That brought him a positive flame tsunami, of course. Annja paid no attention. She could have recited most of the contents of the negative responses aloud without ever reading them anyway.
She minimized her newsreader window and fired up Firefox. A Google search of news items brought a number of hits from the wire services. Six Slain In Fishing-Boat Massacre, she read. The crewmen had been found hacked to death as the boat lay tied at the dock in its home port on the island of Corfu.
Annja closed her computer and stared out the window. The rain had started up again. The hard little lights across the East River seemed somehow muted, as well as blurred by chill tentacles of rain that stretched across the windowpane, that ran down the glass like the fingertips of dying men….
Shuddering at the sound of unheard screams, the nape of her neck tingling, she opened the computer up again and went to a travel site to check flight times and prices to the Netherlands.