Prayers to Broken Stone
Chapter 2 - The Violet HourThe sun sinks toward the sea by the time the dig starts to shut down, and long violet shadows slink across the ground. Cate props the shaker screen on her hip and wipes sweat off her face, smearing dust in its wake. A warm afternoon, even with the northern ocean breeze, and sweat slicks her scalp beneath her scarf-wrapped braids, plasters her undershirt to her back.
Students and professors bustle around her, stowing equipment and covering pits, chatting in Greek and English. This site has been excavated before, nothing left to find now but a few stray shards of pottery, but it's a good training seminar.
Or in Cate's case, a good distraction. Distractions have been rare the past couple months, the usual stress of finals compounded by her father's funeral, grading papers on her way to the service and dealing with lawyers and her mother when she should have been planning exams. She isn't finished with wills and estates and her mothers demands, but at least for six weeks she can try to forget, and let the brilliant Aegean sun beat salt and moisture out of her, all the tears she hasn't shed for her father.
She's about to set the screen down when her partner returns with another bucket of earth. "One more load, Dr. Scavella?" Petra asks. Sweaty and filthy, her olive cheeks flushed with sunburn, and she still looks enthusiastic. Cate can't remember the last time she felt that young.
"Sure."
"Cate, what are you doing with that thing?" Cate looks up to see Rebecca Herrell approaching, her face shadowed by the wide brim of her hat. "Don't you know what undergrads are for?"
"You heard the professor," Cate says, winking at Petra. "Switch with me." She stretches as she steps away, wincing at the ache in her arms and back. Too long out of the field.
"Are you two almost done?" Rebecca asks.
"This is the last load." Cate hefts the bucket and pours it over the screen. A cloud of khaki-colored dust drifts away as dirt and rocks rasp and rattle across the wire. "Has anyone else found anything today?"
"Potsherds," Petra says, wrinkling her nose. More dust billows as she shakes the screen, and sandy soil hisses down.
"Ninety-nine percent of all excavations is potsherds," Rebecca says, tilting her hat back. Her quarter-Cherokee nose casts a sundial shadow across her sun-darkened cheek.
"What's the rest?" Cate asks obligingly.
"Charcoal and bone splinters."
Cate runs her hands through the dry rocky dirt, searching for anything that doesn't feel like a pebble. The touch of warm earth is always comforting. "And people think archaeology is interesting."
"Hush. I won't have you poisoning impressionable young minds with your silly dead animals."
"My bones are much more interesting than your potsherds." A fingertip grazes a different texture and she pauses, lifting the flat object carefully out of the dust. Petra's eyes widen as she pulls up a coin; Rebecca leans closer.
Cate dusts it off gently and laughs. "Sorry, but I think this is too new-fangled even for you." She flips the two-Drachma piece at Rebecca, who catches it with a snort and tosses it to Petra in turn.
"Here. Never say you can't make money as an archaeologist."
The last of the dirt sifts through the mesh, leaving nothing but pebbles. Cate wipes her hands on the thighs of her cargo pants. With a sigh, Petra sets down the screen.
"Come on." Rebecca pats the screen's rough wooden frame. "Let's get this delicate university equipment back where it belongs."
The sun deepens from gold to peach as they stow tools. When they're done, Rebecca takes Cate's elbow and steers her toward the edge of the site. "Walk with me. I want to see the sun set from the temple."
"You could just buy a postcard." But Cate follows her, stepping over the low ropes that border the dig.
The site lies beside the pebbly Grotta beach, below the slope of Naxos Chora. Tourists stopped to watch when they first set up, but quickly realized how boring an excavation is and wandered off. The last sunbathers are packing up now, as the waves churn grey and orange against the shore.
Across the water lies the tiny islet that holds the Portara. A door against the sky, a door that might lead anywhere if you have the right key. Her father would have loved it; Cate's tried to ignore it since she first glimpsed it from the ferry. She glances away, toward the Chora, where the setting sun paints the sugar cube buildings carnelian and gold.
"How are you holding up?" Rebecca asks. Sand and pebbles crunch under their boots.
"I'm all right." She's been expecting this talk. "It's nice to be busy."
Her friend makes a non-committal sound. "Just don't get too busy. Burning yourself out won't make it any better. What you should do is have a nice relaxing affair."
Cate snorts, squinting against the slanting light. She should have brought sunglasses. "Didn't I try that a few months ago? Affairs are so rarely relaxing."
"So have a rebound fling."
Cate laughs. "Does Jack know you're so fond of flings?"
"Hah. He's too busy fending off the doe-eyed goth girls who want to hear him talk about saponification." She rubs her wedding ring absently and smiles.
They cross the narrow causeway toward the islet, paving stones slick with salt. The wind tugs at Cate's scarf, threatens to steal Rebecca's hat. Cate falls back to let the older woman walk ahead of her.
She pauses at the end of the path. The pulse of the ocean surrounds her, enfolding her like a giant heart. For an instant she's tiny and fragile beneath the amethyst vault of sky. The feeling leaves her weightless.
A group of laughing college kids crowds past her on their way off the island, and the moment crumbles. Cate lengthens her stride up the hill, catching up with Rebecca. On the hilltop a man watches the sunset and a German-speaking family circles the gate with cameras, trying to capture the perfect postcard picture. The red-swollen sun leaks into the sea, silhouetting the gate against the incarnadine sky.
Cate stops as she nears the arch, dust puffing under her boots. Sunset paints the worn white stone bloody, casts shadows long and hard. An eerie alien landscape in this light. Yes, her father would have loved it.
She approaches the narrow eyelet between the pillars and lays a hand on sun-warmed stone, her skin dark against the pale marble. Nearly twenty-five hundred years old, and that's nothing compared to most rocks she handles, nothing compared to the granites and migmatites she's seen on the island, but still a weight--a presence--above her.
It should comfort her, this familiar gravitas, but it doesn't.
Just stone, she tells herself, stepping under the lintel. A temple of Apollo once, and the place where Ariadne met Dionysus--or the place where Ariadne threw herself into the sea, depending on the story--but still just stone, carved and raised by men. Gravel scrapes under her feet as she walks through.
Into another world.
Red rock drops away in front of her, sloping into an inky sea. Clouds the color of scabs seethe overhead, dark rain hissing into bruise-black waves. The ocean churns, something vast and sinuous moving beneath the surface. The wind washes over her, hot and rank, iron and brine filling her nose, coating her tongue. She raises a hand, catches a raindrop on her palm. Not water at all, thick and warm and dark against her skin.
Something moves in the corner of her eye, a dark animal skitter. She turns, sucking in a fetid breath, but the sea and sky tilt vertiginously. Her knees buckle and she falls, stone spinning above her, ground rushing up--
But an arm gets there first, catches her shoulders and cradles her against a man's chest.
"What--" She chokes off the rest of the question.
"You're safe," a deep voice murmurs in accented English. He eases her down, rocks biting her legs as she sits.
"The door--"
"It's closed now." Her vision blurs, but she catches a glimpse of his hook-nosed profile as he turns back toward the gate. Nothing but slate and orange sunset now, and the grey-ruffled water of the Aegean.
He saw it too.
Then Rebecca's there, crouching in front of her, and the man lets Cate go.
"Cate! Are you all right?" Strong callused hands brush her brow, tilt her chin so Rebecca can meet her eyes.
"I'm fine." She tries a smile. "Just a little dizzy."
"What did I tell you about working too hard?" She pulls out a bottle of water out of her bag and presses it into Cate's hand. "Even you melanistic types can't run around in the sun all day. Not too fast," she cautions as Cate tilts the bottle. The water is lukewarm, but a welcome sweetness after the taste of dust and brine. Plastic dents under her fingers as she drains half the bottle.
"I'm all right, really."
"You're sunburned." Rebecca touches the exposed skin of her arm and Cate winces. "See? Let's get you back to the hotel."
Cate lets Rebecca pull her up; the breeze chills her sweaty-damp skin as she stands. The German family hovers nearby--gawking, or making sure she doesn't need more help. The man is gone.
She wipes her palm on her pants before anyone sees the blood.
Cate can't sleep that night, even after she draws the curtains in her hotel room, blocking the sight of the mirror-black sea. She lies in the warm darkness, hugging a pillow against her chest and trying to explain away what she saw.
As long as she can remember, her father was looking for something. She never knew exactly what, but he was always searching. He collected books she couldn't read, brought back curios from his frequent travels--much more frequent than her mother liked--and filled journal after journal with his narrow slanting handwriting. Descriptions, questions, ideas and frustrations.
He told her stories of other worlds, places you might stumble into through closets or alleys. Wonderful stories and terrifying ones. Her mother told him to stop, but he never did. Cate never wanted him to.
She looked for his other worlds till she was seventeen, searched for forests in the backs of wardrobes, looked for something besides her reflection in mirrors and still puddles. But she never found anything, and high school ended, and that last fleeting summer at home. College may have been magic, but it was a real sort of magic, nothing otherworldly about it at all.
She stopped listening to her father's stories after that, stopped asking for them when she came home for holidays. He promised her magic and never delivered and she never really forgave him for that, no matter how foolish she knew it was.
Science was balm enough. Geology, anthropology, paleontology. The bones of the earth, of this world, its history buried in strata. Deep time. She told herself it was all the wonder she ever needed.
Most days she still believes that.
Whatever Anthony Scavella was looking for, he never found it, not by the time his heart gave out a month and a half ago, left him sprawled on the floor of his study, cold and grey when the maid found him. Her mother had long since left. Nothing as distasteful as divorce--she simply packed quietly and moved back to Massachusetts when she couldn't deal with her husband's growing absences and moods any longer.
Cate flips the pillow to the cool side, wincing as fabric scrapes her tender cheek, and breathes in the scent of detergent and musty stuffing. Her father's notebooks are locked away in her house in Texas now. Before Rebecca invited her on the Naxos trip, she pondered following his notes, his glimpses of mermaids and ghosts, demon-haunted crossroads and cemeteries. One last chance to let go of any lingering doubt, to lay old memories to rest.
Rest is a long time coming.
Outside a taverna by the sea, Adrian sips his wine and watches the rich indigo twilight slip into black. Just a sky now, stars catching fire over the water. City lights glow along the curve of the shore, casting long reflections across the harbor. No bloody sky. No other world.
"What did you see?" Sybella asks, her voice soft under the din of laughter and music and conversation, the whisper of the tide.
"A storm." He tilts his glass, oak and herbs and tannin washing warm over his tongue. "Moving this way. The woman saw it too, walked into the penumbra like it was nothing."
"That was only luck, I think. A trick of the hour and the door."
"Bad luck. If mortals can wander through, so can other things. It's getting worse."
"It is. Much worse." The breeze gusts off the ocean, ruffling her hair and shaking the lights in the trees. The candle between them gutters in its glass bowl and Sybella pulls her shawl tighter. "It could rip the skin of the world if it goes on. I heard stories on the mainland of creatures slipping through the cracks."
He frowns, rolling the glass between his hands. "I thought I saw something else, too. Something lurking on the other side of the door. The woman distracted me before I could get a better look. What can we do?"
Sybella arches a black brow. "I thought this wasn't your concern anymore."
"It isn't." He glances away from her skeptical gaze, refills his glass. "But I'll help you. My dreams have been uneasy lately."
Such a mild word for the nightmares, the monsters and the howling storms, waking drenched in sweat with the stink of fear still in his nostrils. He's seen no sign of the trouble in the living world before today, though he's caught restless whispers in the cemeteries and among the dead that roam the streets of Naxos Chora. He came to Naxos because it's quiet, warded by Sybella and her witchy kin. He doesn't know what secrets they guard in the great house on Mount Zas, but nothing from the mainland ever seems to challenge them. Only his friendship with Sybella, and his discretion, let him stay here undisturbed.
But the dreams and what he saw today are nearly enough to threaten his resolve not to involve himself in the trouble in the betweens. It isn't his concern anymore. Whether that's bitterness or cowardice or sense, he still isn't sure.
"I'll see what I can find out," Sybella says. She stretches a hand across the table, taps a finger against the back of his. "Shall I tell your fortune while I'm at it?"
He snorts, squeezes her hand softly before pulling away. "No doubt it's much the same as my past. Dust and bones and dark places."
"You never know. Maybe I'll see fortune and glory, beautiful women."
His smile is bitter, even as he remembers the woman from the Portara, her weight in his arms. "I doubt you'll see many of those these days. Except you, of course."
She chuckles at the awkward save. "Well, I'm going home, so you'll have to find your own tonight." Under the table, she nudges an insulated bag toward him. Nylon rasps over the sand; inside, he hears the slosh and rattle of melting ice. "This should keep you for a while. Good night, Adrian. We'll talk again soon."
Her skirts and shawl flutter in the breeze as she crosses the beach. She turns heads, as she always does.
Adrian finishes the bottle of wine and watches the waves roll into shore. A dull edge of hunger tightens his stomach, but he ignores it. He can't ignore the storm, though, not if it spills into the living world. Peace and quiet are one thing, freedom from the council's machinations, but he can't stand by and dust his shop while the walls of the world crumble.
But if he's going to involve himself again, it will damn well be on his own terms.