Saviors 101

Chapter 43

Chapter 43

Dana checked the clock over the library information desk. Class. It must be between classes. That would explain all the students. No. Sunday afternoon, that would mean all the students were scrambling to labs and libraries to make up for goofing off since last class on Friday. It was Sunday, wasn’t it?

Screw it. She didn’t know and didn’t care. Astronomy, Physics, Calculus, none of them were exciting enough to drag her back into the cold at this moment. Especially not with the future that awaited out there.

Cowardly. She could feel it in a cringe that bent her shoulders and made her shuffle.

Fine. Cowardly worked just fine today. Every now and then a girl needed to indulge in a cringing dose of cowardly.

Turning toward the depths of the library, she climbed the wide, stone stairway to the Suzzallo reading room. Massive stone banisters carved into sweeping waves led her inexorably forward to heavy doors of dark wood beneath a triple stone arch easily three times her height. Every time she came here, she felt like a child entering the magic kingdom.

The doors swung aside like portals back in time. From one moment to the next, she moved from the modern world back into Gothic times.

Great columns soared five stories upward to an arched ceiling. A dozen chandeliers, that might have been Gothic designs for the most ornate flying saucers ever conceived, hung high in the space. Leaded windows transformed the outside light into a thousand magical little twists and turns. Whether the outside sky was sun- or rain-laden, the light in the reading room was filled with a gentle buoyancy as if it had come here to play. It was like Joshua and Anne’s deli gone mad. The light loved coming here.

She tip-toed down to the far north alcove, this room always made her tiptoe. Half a hundred students huddled over thick tomes at the various desks. The only sounds were the rustling of printed pages and the quick patter on a keyboard as someone found a relevant note to put in their laptop or a good passage to plagiarize.

Dana pulled a book at random from the heavy oaken shelves and curled up in a reading chair beneath the great globe of the Earth hanging a story or two above.

Opening the book, Dana sought the solace of the printed page, but she couldn’t make her eyes focus. She’d pulled all-nighters before and hadn’t had this problem. Closing her eyes didn’t help the headache that was threatening from very close at hand. Okay, she’d lost Thursday night to an overly chatty angel instead of Sam. And now she’d lost Saturday night to an overly daunting Devil instead of Sam.

Too tired to breathe, she’d gone home last night after the pizza and madness and not slept at all.

This pattern didn’t bode well for the future.

Opening her eyes again didn’t help the text resolve.

“I find Aramaic a bit difficult myself.”

“Uh-huh,” Dana automatically acknowledged the speaker, then she located the source of the voice.

A rounded woman sat nearby, wearing, Dana wanted to close her eyes again, a flowing robe that looked nothing like a modern caftan. Loose folds of blue and yellow-dyed cotton were gathered around her waist and then released again into a flowing skirt that reached to the floor. Her shoulders were bare beneath the straight fall of thick, dark hair. Her face was plump and ageless. But her eyes. Her eyes were old, the color of thousand-year-old whiskey. Of a woman who’d seen too much and wasn’t too happy having to live to tell about it. A Kurt Vonnegut novel with a bright red cover rested in her lap.

“Aramaic. Your book. Tricky.”

Dana followed the pointing finger again.

“Uh-huh.” No wonder it was a meaningless blur.

“Reading it upside down is even trickier.”

“Uh-huh.” Dana flipped it over to check the spine of the book, then turned it right side up. The title of the heavy black volume was filigreed in a delicate tracery of gold lettering. True Words of the Time, Volume 43.

“I have a weak spot for classical history.”

Dana would rather be shot than have to read a bunch of history. Even a psychology class would be better than history.

“Modern history is too frenetic,” the woman continued amiably, paying no attention to Dana’s thoughts. “Too often rewritten by some male with an agenda. In ancient times, it was simply written by the erudite and the victors. Much easier to unravel what happened. Now we get eighteen biographies of the next American President, and that’s just between election day and the Inauguration. It’s good librarianship to go back to the source text.”

The woman’s voice was worn smooth around the edges. Any trace of an accent had so thoroughly been lost that it was in itself an accent.

The book in her lap still held no meaning, though her eyes could focus on the page numbers at least. Roman numbers. CDXXIX. Four-hundred and twenty-nine, part of her translated.

The writing was still unreadable.

Or was it.

If she closed off the part of her mind that wished to dissect and analyze, that part of her that loved science and the everlasting puzzle of the cosmos, and just let the feeling of the words come through, they were no longer obscured by the mere fact that they were written in an alphabet she didn’t know.

She simply did, sort of.

The strokes were Hebraic she supposed, but not wholly. Aramaic, the language of the ancient Middle East. The language of Jesus.

Even the mightiest of Roman legions would not stand before the wrath of Artemis, the Great Mother Goddess, Huntress, and Progenitor. Neither tribune nor legionary would face her justifiable wrath at the destruction of her tribes and the fornication with her female subjects and their livestock.

At dire straits in seeking to overcome the mighty Artemis, did the Emperor Tarquins have built the Temple of the Vestal Virgins. The first act of the celibate cult was the dethroning of Artemis and the raising of Diana the Huntress in her place.

Fair to behold, strong, yet timid of spirit, thus did the new Romans conquer the ancient terror of Artemis. Not by feat of arms, but rather by holy fiat. This eternal maiden—

Dana snapped the book shut. She wrapped her arms across her chest and glanced around to see if any noticed her nakedness, for surely she and the emperor were similarly clothed.

No one was paying her the slightest notice.

Patting herself in a causal motion, her fingers told her she was still clothed. But her life was laid out in an ancient book resting on her lap. Or what would be her life if she really was Diana the Huntress. Which she wasn’t. Was she?

“I am always so amused by just how alive history can be.” The woman was smiling at her. “Most think it all set in stone. Scribed into ‘truth’ once it is inked upon the parchment. But it is a dynamic companion with ideas of its own on how and when it should be remembered.”

“Who are you?” Dana’s voice trembled as she rubbed at the goosebumps on her arms that had nothing to do with her race across Red Square to escape the Devil.

“Guess.”

“The Devil’s sister.”

The woman rocked back in her chair and laughed. It was a bright musical sound that bounced up to the ceiling and came back with more cheer laced within. None of the students studying in the hall reacted. Dana rubbed her eyes, but the woman was definitely still there. Perhaps, like Henrietta, only for her to see and hear.

“No, she is in a class by herself. The most solitary being on the planet no matter which dimension you believe in.”

“She always has that angel with her.” It wasn’t until she said it that she realized quite how bizarre this conversation was becoming. The book weighed heavy in her lap. Perhaps she could just slip it back on the shelf and tiptoe out of here. Better to face the Devil she knew, rather than whoever this was.

“Henrietta is better company than you might think, but you know how deep she isn’t. One of the prices of being Michelle is being ‘other.’ There are none like her. There just aren’t that many monotheistic Gods to begin with. And with Yahweh being dead, she has become more isolated.”

“Yahweh?”

“God. He’s dead, my child. There had been odd rumors off and on for the last millennia or so. Some even said he’d simply dropped out and retired. But just a few days ago, someone cornered Michelle. She confirmed that God was no longer the power of the universe. The only way that could happen was if he was dead.”

“A few days ago.”

“You’re repeating things.”

“I’m repeating things?”

“And now the universe is collapsing. This hasn’t been a good week for Michelle so far.”

Dana could empathize with that.