The Granite Key (Arkana Mysteries) (17 page)

“Don’t tell me that
Egypt
got invaded too. Was it the Hellenes again?”

Faye laughed. “I’m afraid I may have overemphasized the barbaric nature of the early Hellenes during our last conversation. There were many other overlord tribes actively engaged in conquest at the same time as the Hellenes. In fact, earlier. The evidence is that an invasion of
Egypt
occurred sometime shortly before 3000 BCE. Soon after that, kingship was instituted. Upper and lower
Egypt
were merged into one kingdom ruled by a single pharoah. The principal deity of the northern kingdom before this time was Ua Zit, the cobra goddess. Her southern counterpart was Nekhbet, the vulture goddess. Both were dethroned by male gods but the image of the cobra and the vulture continued to adorn the double crown of the pharaoh.”

“So who were the invaders if they weren’t Hellene?”

“We know from the dental remains of the ruling class that they were Caucasian. Based on artifacts that began to crop up in dynastic
Egypt
, the most likely invaders would have come from Mesopotamia or
Syria
. It would have taken a very small number of warriors to subdue a larger indigenous population. Aside from a superior knowledge of military tactics, the invaders had the advantage of more advanced weaponry and greater mobility due to the horse. All of these things made them highly efficient killers. As a consequence, a small band of elites could easily set themselves up as overlords of the less aggressive masses. They would have legitimized their right to rule, of course, by marrying the local priestess or princess. Such a maneuver would also explain why it became common practice for pharaohs to marry their sisters. The royal bloodline was traditionally transmitted through the female, not the male. After that, they revised the regional mythology to reflect the notion that nothing existed before their arrival. In the beginning— Well, you know the rest of that tale...” Faye trailed off.

Cassie shook her head. “Unbelievable that nobody knows this.” She laughed ruefully. “I’ve been saying that a lot lately. Thirteen years of education down the drain.”

Faye poured them both another cup of tea. “Don’t feel too badly. The average person is completely unaware of any of this. We’ve preserved the record for the time when people want to know what really happened.”

“What if they never do?” Cassie asked bleakly.

Faye’s eyes twinkled. “I have great faith in human curiosity. Eventually it gets the better of us all. It certainly got the better of you.”

Cassie laughed in spite of herself. “Busted.”

“Shall we move on to the next artifact?” the old woman suggested. She settled back into her armchair and placidly sipped her tea.

Cassie scrutinized the second object. It was a stone cat. A very fat stone cat. So fat that it was as round as it was tall. It looked like a small bowling ball with whiskers. “This should be interesting,” she murmured to herself as she picked it up. She could feel the weight of the object and tried to guess what kind of stone it might be. Nothing happened. She was still seated in Faye’s living room holding a fat stone cat.

“Is something wrong, dear?” Faye asked mildly, lifting her cup to her lips.

Cassie scowled in concentration. “I don’t know. I’m not getting anything. Wait a minute…”

She felt the scene shift. She was standing in a factory. Hundreds of people on an assembly line. They were oriental. It was over in a flash.

She was back again, still puzzled until she caught a glimpse of Faye’s broad smile. “Hey, wait a minute.” She shook the cat. “This isn’t an artifact. This came from a factory.” The truth hit her. “It was made in
China
!”

The old woman chuckled. “And it usually sits under a plum tree in my back yard. Charming bit of garden art, don’t you think?”

“I think you tricked me,” Cassie retorted, annoyed.

“Forgive me, my dear. I wanted to see how perceptive you would be if faced with a forgery.”

“Did I pass?” the girl asked archly.

“With flying colors.” Faye’s face took on a serious expression as her smile faded. “I assure you the third item is not a fake.”

Chapter 27
– Touchy Feelings

Cassie looked down at the third object sitting on the coffee table. It was about three inches high. A carving made from a polished piece of dark stone. It was a small figure with arms outstretched at right angles to the body. The figure wore a skirt with slanted lines incised across it. There were no feet so that the lower half of the body had a tubular appearance. The outstretched arms were squared off at the ends
—
handless but there were small holes bored into the ends. The rounded breasts indicated that the figurine was female but the face was not human. It was the head of a bird, or rather the head of a woman wearing a bird mask. The beak jutted out prominently from the place where a nose should be. The eyes were enormous and shaped like horizontal teardrops. It was odd and off-putting. The strangest looking relic Cassie had seen yet. She picked it up hesitantly. “OK, here we go,” she said.

There was no warning. She was running. Or rather, he was running, and his lungs were burning from the effort to pull in enough air. Something was bumping against his collarbone as he ran. Cassie knew it was the bird woman figurine hanging from a rawhide string around his neck. There were tall pine trees surrounding a village and it was on fire. He wasn’t merely choking from the effort to breathe fast enough. He was choking from the smoke boiling out of the doors of houses. People were running in every direction, trying to escape the blaze. The scene was chaos. He kept running forward toward a little girl. A toddler. She was standing some distance away from him, crying. He scooped her up in his arms, barely breaking stride. Then Cassie heard the sounds coming from behind them. First the screams and then thunder that seemed to surge up from the ground. The man briefly stole a glance over his shoulder. There was a beast bearing down on him. Half human. He didn’t know what it was. He’d never seen such a creature before. He didn’t know but Cassie recognized it. A horse running at a gallop and closing the gap between them. Its rider bent low over the animal’s neck urging it forward. The man couldn’t run as fast with the child in his arms. She was screaming now, her small voice merging with the shrieks echoing from every direction. The rider swung his arm downward. His long knife slashed into the side of the man’s neck. The runner crumpled over and Cassie was choking, clawing at her own throat before everything went black.

***

She didn’t know how long she had been gone. Faye was shaking her gently by the shoulder.

“Cassie, Cassie, wake up! You’re here with me. You’re all right.”

The girl tried to speak but no sound came out. For some reason she was lying on her back on what she assumed was Faye’s couch. Her eyelids fluttered open. Faye’s face was bent over hers. The old woman’s features came into focus.

Instinctively, Cassie’s hand flew to her neck. There was no blood there. She tried to speak again. “Wha… what…” She swallowed hard. Her mouth felt dry. The girl sat up, propping herself on her arms until the room stopped spinning around her.

Faye sat beside her, rubbing her shoulder. “Just sit still until you feel stronger.” The old woman sighed heavily. “My dear, I am so sorry. There was no good way to prepare you for this. You’ve had your first experience with a tainted relic.”

“A…a…a what?” Cassie finally managed to form words again.

“Some of our finds have unfortunate past associations. I’m guessing that you experienced something…unpleasant?”

“Unpleasant?” Cassie croaked out the word. “Try murder!” She was feeling stronger and also angrier. The anger fueled her energy and steadied her. She glared at Faye. “Some guy got his throat cut, or maybe it was mine. I felt like I was being killed! You never told me something like that could happen.”

Faye looked contrite but determined. “I’m sorry to put you through this but I had to know how you would react to a contaminated artifact. If you were to encounter an object like this on a field expedition and you weren’t prepared…” She trailed off. “Well, it would be too late, wouldn’t it? This bird goddess figurine was the last recovery Sybil brought to us before she died. It came from a Vinca settlement that had been destroyed sometime around 4200 BCE.”

The old woman handed her a glass of water. “Here, drink this.”

Cassie reached eagerly for the glass. Her mouth felt as if she had swallowed gravel. She gulped down the contents without pausing for breath. When she finished, she exhaled deeply and sat up straighter. “That’s a little better,” she tried to reassure her hostess.

Faye returned to her chair and regarded Cassie with a troubled expression. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“I’m fine, really.” Cassie rubbed her temples. “Guess this is the nature of the job, right?”

The old woman tilted her head and studied Cassie’s face intently. “It isn’t the nature of the job so much as the nature of the individual Pythia.”

“Huh?”

“I believe you’re acutely sensitive, even for someone with psychic abilities. You’re a natural-born empath, whether you know it or not.”

“An empath?” Cassie echoed, uncomprehending.

“Yes, that’s someone who has the ability to sense what other people are feeling. In fact, you are able to feel what the people around you feel as if it were happening to you.”

Cassie shrugged offhandedly. “Sort of. I thought everybody did that.”

Faye gave a humorless laugh. “I assure you, they do not. Maybe if they did, the world would be a better place. The principle of ‘Do Unto Others’ would be implicitly understood. If an empath were to hurt someone deliberately, she would be able to feel the pain she was causing. Empathy can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s a tremendous gift. On the other, a tremendous burden to be saddled with so much of other people’s emotional baggage. I suspect that you absorb it like a sponge.”

“I don’t know how to turn it off,” Cassie admitted. “Maybe that’s why being alone can be a relief sometimes. Not so much noise in my head when I’m by myself.”

“Perhaps I can help you with that. Wait here.” Faye rose and heaved herself up the staircase to the second floor. Cassie could hear the floorboards creaking above. She could hear drawers being opened and shut as Faye searched for some unknown object.

When the old woman descended again, she was smiling. “I found it at last.” She held a necklace out toward Cassie. A black stone disc suspended from a silver chain.

After her most recent episode, the girl was shy of touching any strange object.

Faye laughed. “It’s all right. This isn’t an artifact. It’s an obsidian pendant. Very good for protection and blocking negative energy. Take it.”

“You think some New Age trinket is going to protect me from bad vibes?” she asked incredulously.

Faye returned to her chair. “Those people who believe in the vibrational properties of crystals would say that obsidian is a grounding stone. It will anchor the energy of the wearer. Keep your feet on the ground so to speak.”

Cassie raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I feel safer already,” she murmured sarcastically as she fastened the clasp of the necklace.

“On the other hand,” Faye continued, “from a purely practical standpoint, it also functions very well as a mnemonic device. If you focus a part of your mind on the pendant while reading an artifact, you should be able to keep your identity separate from the more unpleasant aspects of the telemetric experience.”

“So you’re saying if I pay attention to the black disk, I can avoid feeling like my throat is being cut?” she asked bluntly.

“Exactly,” the old woman confirmed. “In the beginning, it might even be helpful to keep one hand wrapped around the pendant while you perform a telemetric reading with the other hand. Over time, it should become second nature and you will only need to think of the pendant for it to split your focus.”

“I guess it’s worth a shot,” the girl concurred.

“Then shall we try it again?” Faye suggested calmly.

Cassie’s heart skipped several beats. “You don’t mean you want me to pick up that weird little bird woman again, do you?”

“If you fall off a horse
—
”

“I don’t care about falling off a horse. I care about the one in my vision who was going to trample me!” Cassie exclaimed.

“If you’d rather wait, we can do this another time.”

Cassie was still for a few moments, considering her options. She could feel Faye silently willing her to continue. Finally, with a deep sigh she said, “No, I guess I should get it over with now. It’ll be worse for me if I wait. I know I’ll have nightmares about it.”

The old woman nodded approvingly. “Very good. Close your eyes and grip the obsidian disc in your left hand for a few moments. Just concentrate all your attention on it. Tug lightly on the chain and feel its connection to your neck. Now, reach out your other hand and pick up the figurine of the bird goddess.”

***

It took six agonizing tries before Cassie finally got her balance. The first time, she lost herself immediately and began drowning in the scene of the massacre. When she was thrown clear, she refocused her attention more intensely on the black stone disc. A second, a third, a fourth time. With every new attempt, she held onto a shred of herself a little longer before the atrocity took over. By the sixth try, she was able to split her awareness and watch the terrible scene unfolding before her as if she were watching a horror movie from the safe vantage point of the audience.

“It still leaves me feeling awful,” she commented to Faye after her final successful try.

By this time Faye had brought in a fresh pot of tea and a plate of cucumber sandwiches. She served more refreshments for both of them. “That just means you have a conscience,” the old woman observed. “No feeling person could witness the murder of an innocent without some sympathy for the unfortunate victim.”

“What happened to those people?” the girl asked. “Why were they being killed?”

“You forget you haven’t told me the details of everything you observed.”

“Oh, that’s right!” Cassie exclaimed. She then proceeded to give Faye all the sickening particulars of the scene.

The old woman’s face drained of color. “Well, it’s done and now we know. You’ve had your trial by fire.”

Cassie took a bite of her sandwich. Unaccountably, she was feeling better. “I guess the upside is that it can’t get much worse, can it?”

“No, it certainly can’t and you’ve proven your ability to deal with difficult situations.” Faye studied the girl’s face for a few moments. “You really are an extraordinary young woman,” she finally said.

Cassie blushed. Nobody had ever called her extraordinary before. She had always been treated like somebody’s appendage, or maybe just their baggage. First she was toted around by her parents, and afterward by Sybil. She’d never been anything in her own right. “Extraordinary?” she repeated. “What makes you say that?”

Faye smiled. “Given the recent shocks you’ve experienced in your life, I can’t think of a single person of your age who would willingly relive a scene of such horror. Not once, but six times. It was quite brave of you.”

The girl shrugged offhandedly. “Maybe stubborn is a better word. I hate to quit. I guess it comes from all the moving around I did as a kid. I never got to finish anything.”

“In our line of work, tenacity is a virtue,” the old woman commented approvingly.

“Speaking of tenacity, a while ago I asked you why all those people were being killed. I still want to know.”

“Ah, yes.” Faye stirred sugar into her tea contemplatively. “You’ve just seen an overlord invasion in all its glory.”

“Glory is a strange word to use for it,” the girl observed grimly. “Gory might be better.”

“Yet how often history books like to use ‘glory’ to describe acts of viciousness.” Faye sighed expressively. “The Vinca were among the inhabitants of Old Europe before the
Kurgan
invasions.”