The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [154]
“I’ll try,” she said. “I really will, Pouncy. But you don’t know what you’re asking.”
You’d never hear Pouncy cop to it, but Julia turned out to be right. When they narrowed their focus to the local mythology only, Project Ganymede began to get traction. Once they started looking at just one corner of the puzzle—and stuck all the rest of the pieces back in the box—everything started to fit together.
Poring through Gregory of Tours and other, nameless medieval chroniclers, Julia began to get a feel for the local magic. Like wine, Provençal magic had its own distinctive terroir. It was rich and chaotic and romantic. It was a night-magic, confabulated out of moons and silver, wine and blood, knights and fairies, wind and rivers and forests. It concerned itself with good and evil but also with the vast intermediate realm in between, the realm of mischief.
It was also mother-magic. Gradually Julia began to become aware of something, or someone, who was standing behind the old dead pages, just out of view. Julia couldn’t see her, or name her, or not yet, but she felt her. She must have been old, very old. She must have gotten here early, long before the Romans. Nothing Julia read spoke of her directly—you couldn’t look straight at her, but you knew she was there because of the small ways she perturbed the universe around her. Julia picked up on her only by triangulation, via tiny traces, little glimpses, like the curious Black Madonna figures you saw scattered around Europe, and especially around Provence. Black Madonnas were otherwise ordinary images of the Virgin Mary, but with an inexplicably dark complexion.
But she was older than the Virgin Mary, and wilder. Julia thought she must be some kind of local fertility goddess from out of the darkness of the region’s deep, preliterate past, before the cosmopolitan conquerors came in and scraped everything smooth and clean and paved it over with official homogenizing Christianity. A distant cousin of Diana or Cybele or Isis, ethnographically speaking. When the Christians arrived they would have lumped her in with Mary, but Julia thought she might still be out there on her own. She sensed the goddess looking out from behind the mask of Christian dogma, the way the second Julia had looked out from behind the mask of the first Julia.
The goddess called to Julia—Julia, who had turned her back on her own mother to save herself, and now heard about her only in oblique and infrequent e-mails from her sister, sent from the safe bosom of a small, top-flight liberal arts college in western Massachusetts. Julia remembered the grace and forgiveness with which she had been received back into her home, when she came crawling back from Chesterton. It was like nothing else she had ever experienced, before or since. It was the closest to the divine she’d ever been.
The more Julia read and cross-checked and deduced and collated, the more she was convinced her goddess was real. Nothing she longed for that ardently could fail to exist—it was like the goddess was just on the other side of all these useless words, trying to find Julia as Julia was searching for her. She wasn’t a great and grand world-ruling goddess, a Hera or a Frigga. She was more of a middleweight, a team player on a big pantheon. She wasn’t a grain-goddess like Ceres—Provence was rocky and Mediterranean, not wheat country at all. Julia’s goddess dealt in grapes and olives, the dark, intense fruit of hard, gnarled trees and vines. And she had daughters too: the dryads, ferocious defenders of the forests.
The goddess was warm, even humorous, and loving, but she had a second aspect, terrible in its bleakness: a mourning aspect that she assumed in winter, when she descended to the underworld, away from the light. There were different versions of the story. In some she grew angry at mankind and hid herself underground half the year out of rage. In some she lost one of her dryad-daughters and retired to Hades in grief. In others the goddess was fooled by some Loki-type trickster-god