Now, of course, such appliances were commonplace, and it seemed that every time she came home, there was more technology to be learned. For someone who owned so little, who spent more time in the past than in the present, the accoutrements of modern life were mind-boggling.
Daria had no such problems with computers, however, and used them in almost every aspect of her work. Remembering that she needed to charge her battery, she went back to the front hall, took her laptop from her shoulder bag, and plugged it into an outlet. She wandered upstairs, going from room to room, wondering which of her relatives had spent a night in this bed or that. It gave her an odd feeling, knowing that three generations of her ancestors had slept under this roof.
At the front of the house she found the master bedroom, complete with four-poster bed, bath, sitting room, and a balcony that overlooked the back of the campus. She thought of poor Iliana, who had spent many a night here alone after Alistair died.
Then again, maybe not, Daria mused. No one seemed to know much about Iliana. Maybe through her diaries and her husband’s journals, Daria would get a glimpse of the woman who had been her great-grandmother.
Daria went back to the kitchen, opened the canvas bag and took out all the journals. She sat at the kitchen table in the corner of the room and leafed through them, hoping to put them in chronological order. When she felt she had it right, she took the top leather-bound book from the stack and began to read.
The year was 1864, and fourteen-year-old Alistair had just read the epic in which life in the city of Shandihar was described, written in the sixth century.
There were houses several floors high, wherein dwelled the merchants and their families. There were slaves from the four corners of the world, and comforts such as cannot be described. There were foods such as we had not tasted, from cities far beyond the mountains, beyond the desert. And in the temple of the goddess, treasures unknown to any man…
The journal told how Alistair had been drawn in by the tale of the city of riches in the desert of Asia Minor, how he memorized every word ever written on the subject, and how, by the time he was twenty, he was convinced that not only had the city been real, but that he knew where to find it.
It took years, but in Benjamin Howe, he had finally found someone who believed him.
Daria closed the journal and rubbed her eyes, then glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. It was almost seven-thirty. She’d been reading since one. In her eagerness to get to Alistair’s journals, she’d declined Louise’s offer to join her for lunch. Now she needed dinner, and couldn’t remember where the dining hall was. She locked up the house and drove directly to the diner in Howeville, where she read over the notes she’d taken from Alistair’s desk while she absently picked at crab cakes and a salad. On her way back through Howeville, she stopped at the renovated train station and picked up a cup of rum raisin ice cream-large, since she hadn’t had this favorite in longer than she could remember-and returned with it to McGowan House. She took the last of the journals into the library where she removed a dusty sheet from an overstuffed chair and sat, reading and eating ice cream, long into the night.
For what had seemed to be hours, I dug through the dirt, where once bricks made of baked mud had formed walls. Upon the stone floor, beneath the sand, the mosaic outline of a woman was clear. With my hands, I brushed away the debris until the whole of her form was clear. She stood upon a lion, eagle talons where her toes should be and wings upon her back. In each hand she held an arrow, and upon her head was a tall crown. Around her, a ring of lapis lazuli formed a circle, and I knew immediately who she was, and what I’d found.
The Queen of the Night. Ereshkigal, the goddess brought from Mesopotamia by the earliest settlers of the city. The Queen of the Underworld.
I felt the breath leave my lungs as I stared upon the face of the goddess, a face that had not been seen since the great earthquake buried Shandihar beneath the desert sands…
Daria blew out the breath she’d been holding. The goddess Ereshkigal was well known to her, indeed, to anyone who’d studied the early cultures of the Near East. In Mesopotamia, she’d been the sister of Inana, one of three great goddesses. Once transported to Shandihar, however, she had become supreme, the only deity, one who demanded total fealty and expected nothing less than total devotion. Her priestesses had ruled the city in her name, and for several centuries, all passing through Shandihar had been required to pay a toll. It was said that by the time the desert had reclaimed the city, its treasure had rivaled that of Solomon.
Daria closed the journal and took another long look at the work notes Alistair had left behind, but the ink was far too faded to make much sense of them in this light. She finished the ice cream and took the cup and the journals into the kitchen. She closed up the house and took her belongings along with the canvas sack to the second floor. On the landing, she debated which room to sleep in.
“Oh, why not?” she said aloud, then went into Iliana’s room and switched on the light.
She took a long hot bath in the claw-foot tub, every word she’d read that day and night etched in her brain. Her great-grandfather had found an uncommon treasure. Much like Heinrich Schliemann had done in Troy, Alistair McGowan had used the tale of an ancient storyteller to find an ancient city. That he’d never doubted himself was clear in his writings, from the time he’d made his first journal entry as a teenager, until he was a man in his forties standing at the brink of an immense treasure. He’d never stopped believing that the city existed, and that he would be the one to find it. It had taken him four expeditions, but he’d been proven correct. Finding Shandihar had been his destiny.
Was bringing it to the eyes of the modern world hers?
“You understand how very costly this is going to be, Louise? It’s something the trustees have to consider.” First thing in the morning, Daria went to Louise’s office, and over coffee laid out her plan.
“I do. I’d be relying on you to appraise the collection so that we’d have a number to take to the bank for the loan.”
“I’m going to need staff. At the very least, to start, I’m going to need an assistant, preferably a fellow archaeologist who specializes in the region.”
“We have Dr. Bokhari on staff,” Louise said thoughtfully. “She’s out of the country right now supervising a group of graduate students on a dig, but I expect her back well before the start of the fall term. I’m sure she’ll want to be involved.”
“Sabina Bokhari?” Daria asked.
“Yes. Do you know her?”
“I know of her. We have mutual friends. I think she worked on a dig in Afghanistan several years ago.”
“She was on sabbatical then.” Louise nodded.
“And she’s on staff here?”
“She’s head of the archaeology department.”
“You’re very lucky to have her,” Daria said. “She has a fine reputation.”
“And you’re wondering why she’s here.” It was a statement, not a question. “I’ve asked myself that. Every time she makes an appointment to come to see me, I hold my breath, hoping that she isn’t coming in to resign.”
“Why didn’t you ask her to work on this project?” Daria asked.
“It did cross my mind. She’s certainly qualified,” Louise told her, “but once the trustees decided to go ahead, they felt it necessary to start immediately. Sabina had already committed to being out of the country for part of the summer. They also felt-as I do-it was fitting that a descendant of the man who found the treasures be the one to supervise the exhibition. And frankly, they wanted a bigger ‘name’ in the field. Your name alone will make this of interest in the academic community.”