The Lost Sisterhood Read Online Free Page A

fellowship awaiting me at the end of the year; I would be back in my basement on creepy Cowley Road, writing uninspired job applications and flicking mice off my crumpets.
    As I filled up the kettle for a cup of bedtime tea, my mind wandered through the events of the day and ended up—not surprisingly—at Mr. Ludwig. In a matter of minutes this strange man had presented me with a dazzling cornucopia of temptation: academic glory, adventure, and enough money to buy me half a year’s freedom, devoted to my own research. Maybe I could even squeeze in a trip to Istanbul, to look up Grigor Reznik in person and talk him into showing me the
Historia Amazonum
—the only original document on the Amazons I hadn’t read. My mind bubbled with possibilities.
    In return, however, Mr. Ludwig had asked for a week of my precious time, and even if I had been reckless enough to consider his proposition, there was no way I could justify that sort of absence hardly a month into my new lectureship. It would have been one thing if he had shown me some official document, stamped and signed, outlining precisely what his foundation was asking me to do and how marvelous it would look on my curriculum vitae … but as it was, the whole thing was just too vague, too risky. Indeed, as both Katherine Kent and James had made amply clear over dinner, one would have to be absolutely insane to fly off like that, into the unknown.
    If only Mr. Ludwig had not said the magic word.
    Amazons.
    He obviously knew of my scholarly obsession with the subject, or he wouldn’t have approached me in the first place. But what was I to make of his assumption that I was pining for proof the Amazons had really existed? Surely, there was no way he could know just how right he was.
    How could he possibly?
    According to most academics, the Amazons had never lived anywhere except in Greek mythology, and those who claimed otherwise were, at best, moonstruck romantics. Yes, indeed, it was entirely conceivable the prehistoric world had been populated in part by women warriors, but the myths about Amazons laying siege to Athens or taking part in the Trojan War were obviously the product of storytellers looking to mesmerize their listeners with ever more fantastic tales.
    The Amazons of classical literature, I would always explain to my students, should be seen as the predecessors of the vampires and zombies populating our bookshelves today; they were creatures of the imagination, terrible and unnatural with their habits of training their daughters in the arts of war and mating with random males once a year. Yet at the same time these wild women possessed—at least in the eyes of ancient vase painters and sculptors—enough appealing human characteristics to arouse our secret passions.
    I was always careful not to disclose my own feelings in the matter; to be interested in Amazon lore was bad enough, to come out of the closet as an “Amazon believer” would be nothing but an act of academic self-annihilation.
    As soon as my tea was ready, I sat down to study Mr. Ludwig’s photograph with the aid of a magnifying glass. I fully expected to be able to identify the script on the wall right away as one of the more common ancient alphabets; when that did not happen, I allowed myself to feel a tiny tickle of excitement. And after another few minutes of hunched scrutiny and increased confusion, the possibilities began scooting up and down my spine with the urgency of battlefield messengers.
    What intrigued me the most was the universal quality of the symbols,which made it almost impossible to link them to a particular place or time. They might have been drawn on the cracked plaster wall immediately before the picture was taken, as part of some elaborate swindle, or they might be several thousand years old. And yet … the more I looked at them, the more I became aware of an eerie sense of familiarity. It was as if somewhere, in a remote corner of my subconscious, a dormant beast was