Babylon (16 page)

‘Did you?’

‘Did I what?’

‘Did you—’ I steeled myself. ‘Did you enjoy
osculation
?’

‘Enjoy what?’

‘Did you enjoy—’ I took a deep breath. Sometimes Cliticia could be very annoying indeed. ‘Did you enjoy
intimacy
?’

‘Wot?’

‘With Mr Malachi!’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see.’ She giggled, and then became quite serious, wrinkling her nose, not so much in shame, I think, as bewilderment. ‘Naw, ’e never touched me. Not once.’ Frowning, she leant forward, studied her reflection in the window, and rearranged an errant lock of hair. The night land flickered past like scenes in a diorama. But Cliticia had time only for herself. A consummate little actress, she behaved as if she were on her way to her first ball and cared for nothing apart from repairing the effects of the unfortunate incident that had occurred along the way.

‘Naw, ’e never touched me,’ Cliticia repeated. ‘Not sure I’d let ’im, either,’ she added, somewhat primly. Again, she leant forward and re-focused on her reflection. ‘Reckon there’s enough ruins around these parts,’ she continued, her gaze fixed upon the window. ‘No man wants second ’and goods. Keep your ’and on your ’apenny, that’s what my Mum always says. Or at least, until you can turn it to your advantage.’

‘I wasn’t suggesting that you were
ruined,’
I said.

‘There’s kissing,’ said Cliticia, ‘and then there’s kissing.’

‘I know,’ I said, flushing deeply. ‘And I wasn’t suggesting
that
either.’

In ancient times, Ishtar’s sacred prostitutes were virgin-whores. And so they were today. If we lay with the Illuminati, we ensured that we kept our honour. For we were not merely Daughters of Ishtar, but Daughters of Lilith, too: those succubi whom Thomas Aquinas said vampirized sleeping men so that they might consecrate their essence to the Goddess.

‘Whatever you were suggesting,’ said Cliticia, ‘the fact is ’e
never touched me.
Now move aside, I want to take a dekko at me poor ol’ face.’ I fanned my red-hot cheeks with my hand. Cliticia was again prettifying herself. ‘D’you think we’re nearly there?’ she continued. ‘My backside is giving me gyp.
And
me bleedin’ ’ead.’

‘It can’t be long now,’ I said, turning my attention to the sights outside. Hazy, and situated along a plane of indeterminable distance, buildings rose like banks of fog, and, Oh God, farther off, there were those great strangenesses of line and dimension that I had seen for the past hour but could not quite decide were real or existed purely within my own mind; but they grew, I knew that much—they grew in size and in strangeness the nearer we approached.

‘I’m sure my sister’ll ’elp us settle in,’ said Cliticia, turning away from the window and simultaneously giving up on her efforts to redress the cosmetic injuries we had perpetrated upon ourselves.

‘I certainly hope she has a good supply of soap and water,’ I said.

The Duenna stood at the end of the carriage. She adjusted the strap of her rifle—it seemed to have been chafing her shoulder— then took up her commentary from where she had left off.

‘According to Herodotus,’ she said, obviously a little more loudly than she had intended. She continued, more quietly, in an apparent effort not to further aggravate her audience’s nerves. ‘The city is divided into two portions by the Euphrates. The city wall comes down on both sides to the water’s edge. Thence, from the corners of the wall. . .’

I heard the low drone of a snore, and turned to see that my woefully hung-over friend had fallen asleep.

One of the girls seated in front of us lifted her hand.

‘Yes, Semiramis?’ said the Duenna, tiredly.

‘Please, Madam,’ she said, her voice betraying more than a hint of Russo-Polack. ‘I know men aren’t allowed here, but would it really hurt anyone if they let through, say, just a
handful
of soldiers? I mean, they could go back on the same train after they’d brought us to the temple. It wouldn’t exactly be
blasphemy,
would it?’

‘But my dear,’ replied the Duenna with a great sigh. ‘We maintain our hold on power through
nympholepsy.
And our ability to inflict nympholepsy—the divine madness of lust—is intimately bound up with our
mystique.’
If she were too tired to pretend we were not in danger, she was not so tired as to be able to resist getting on her hobbyhorse. ‘You are hierodules,’ she continued, her voice rising.
‘Virgin-
whores. And Babylon is virgin soil.’ I had always been a little uncomfortable with the term ‘hierodule’. Duennas and High Priestesses used it, I think, not so much out of prudery, but in desperation at not having a more fitting word, or phrase, to adequately describe the full extent of a temple-maiden’s duties. ‘Prostitute’, like ‘whore’, might be applied as freely to a Whitechapel streetwalker as to a servant of Ishtar. ‘Harlot’ echoed biblical disapproval. And ‘courtesan’ had a certain aristocratic ring about it. (Whomever we might be destined to meet in the future, ‘courtesan’ would surely always sound inappropriate when applied to working-class girls such as Cliticia and myself.) To prefix any of these words with ‘sacred’ did little to overcome contemporary English’s essential limitations. The old, Akkadian expressions for ‘whore’, such as
kezertu, harimtu,
and
shamatu,
were obscure and about as useful as the words for temple employees,
naditu, kulmashitu,
and
qadistu.
‘Hierodule’ had therefore become the synonym of choice whenever the British establishment found the euphemistic ‘temple-maiden’ too anodyne to describe those who embodied the passionate exigencies of the Goddess.

‘Ishtar will not be mocked,’ the Duenna continued. ‘Neither she nor the holy ground that you travel over may be violated with impunity.’ If it was the usual justification, I am not sure it was one that I could any longer accept uncritically. These days Babylon was populated almost exclusively by girls from the lower orders: the descendants of maidservants who had accompanied their aristocratic mistresses off-world in centuries past. If it had been otherwise I am certain a garrison would have been established long ago. The Illuminati would not have put so many of their own daughters in peril. But what the Duenna would, I knew, never acknowledge, was that the argument for keeping Babylon sacrosanct—and denying men rightful access to the interdimensional Gates—was a matter of political expediency. We latter-day hierodules were cannon fodder, just as Dad had said: a necessary sacrifice for the maintenance of the
nympholepsy
and
mystique
that kept the Illuminati in power. ‘In the end, she will punish blasphemy—the kind of masculine presence, here, that has
always
been blasphemous, and will remain so, till the end of time. I tell you, girls: we must preserve our traditions. They are all that we have, all that guarantees our privileges. Without them, Babylon will fall!’

And that was the truth of it, I suppose. However much I might think I was working out my own destiny, I too was a pawn in a game of international politics, a dupe to the New World Order. The subtle magic that the Illuminati used to trick a captive world into a uniform state of obedience, was sometimes called Democracy, sometimes Christianity, and sometimes, more cunningly, Communism or Nihilism. And sometimes—as I had come to know too well—it was called Romantic Love, or more properly speaking, Obsession. Ensnared, mankind believed itself master of its own fate, unaware that it danced to the tune of the Illuminati puppet-masters. For it was necessary, of course, only to convince people that their opinions had nothing to do with the constant diet of fear and lies that they were fed, but that they were free, and their opinions were their own, to effectively enslave them.

The Minotaurs knew the truth. The Minotaurs saw through the lies and cant and offered purification by fire. What illusions I still laboured under, what obsessions I had not, and perhaps could never, put to rest, I would turn against the ones who had bewitched me: the Illuminati. I would serve the Goddess, but in serving her, dedicate myself to her shadow...

‘But why do we have to go to Ereshkigal?’ said a girl with a distinct north-country accent. ‘It’s dangerous, isn’t it? Why can’t we go to one of those new temples they’re supposed to be building outside the city walls ?’

‘Yeh,’ said a girl who, like us, was from the East End. ‘There’s St Vivyan’s, in Sumer, at the mouth of the Euphrates. And then there’s—’

‘The temples along the east coast of the Anatolian Peninsula,’ piped in another girl.

‘Or the temples in Edom,’ said yet another.

‘Quiet!’ said the Duenna, reminding me, for a moment, of my teacher, Miss Nelson. ‘Those temples are proving to be very difficult to complete. You must remember that engineering projects like these are dangerous in themselves. Sumer, in the south, is a jungle, and it is overrun with worms, serpents, and giant spiders. The Great Peninsula is simply too far away. And as for Edom and the west... ’

‘It’s a desert,’ said a girl. ‘Everyone knows that. But there are
oases.'

‘But no train lines,’ said the Duenna. ‘Making construction difficult and very, very
slow.’
The carriage buzzed with whispered conversation. The Duenna clapped her hands. ‘Girls, girls, that really is enough. Listen to me: Ereshkigal is perfectly safe. You will see for yourselves when we arrive.’

The girl sitting in the seat across the aisle turned to look at me.

‘Don’t see why they can’t use the Gates to transport stuff out into the desert, the jungle, or wherever they bleedin’ want. We came over by St Pancras. It was amazing. The train pulls out of the station. Then there’s this incredible noise and a big flash of light. And Bob’s your uncle, there we are, travelling through Babylon. Now why can’t they do that when they’re building a temple?’

I ignored her. I knew that few people understood the Gates. The one at St Pancras had been there for hundreds of years. Indeed, St Pancras station had been built around it. And without a greater understanding of the principles by which they had been constructed, new Gates would defy the efforts of the age’s best minds. The Black Order did not seem to be at such a disadvantage. Whatever the truth of the Order’s Hyperborean origins, their science was, in some respects at least, superior to that of the Illuminati. It gave them their one tactical advantage.

The Duenna resumed her monologue: ‘The outer wall is the city’s main defence. There is, however, a second inner wall, of less thickness than the first, but very little inferior to it in strength. The centre of each division of the town is occupied by a fortress ... ’ She prated on, and I too closed my eyes and joined Cliticia in a world of troubled dreams.

There was a great outrush of steam; the wheels squealed, the train slowed, juddered; and then, with a long blast of the whistle, we came to a complete halt.

We had drawn up alongside the Temple of Ereshkigal. Ereshkigal was Ishtar’s sister, the Lady of the Great Place, or Underworld. In ancient times, her cult had spread from Mesopotamia to Asia Minor, southern Arabia, and Egypt.

Outside her sacred house, jags of a blue-green, and seemingly artificial, form of lightning, snaked through the air, so that the temple was shrouded in a thin, diaphanous membrane that resembled the sloughed-off, jewel-encrusted skin of a snake. Later, I would be told that if the sisterhood did not possess
vril,
then it had long had recourse to a source of power that was at least its equal. Those electromagnetic kinks in space were the outward signs of an invisible ‘force-field’ that surrounded the temple grounds. The possibility of force- fields—such as surrounded all Goddess temples these days—had first been bruited by Galvani and Volta around 1800 in an attempt to preempt the comparatively new, but growing, threat presented by the Black Order. In the following decades, Faraday, Helmholtz, Maxwell, and Hertz had developed prototype fields, some of which were deployed off-world—with various degrees of success. Then, in the mid 1870s, the youthful genius of Nikolas Tesla had brought the science to a state of perfection. Babylon’s temples had become completely impenetrable. Or so everyone averred.

The jags of lightning ceased; the membrane dissolved. The locomotive made steam, the blast pipe disgorging big, hot puffballs that covered the sky in a pall of low-lying, ectoplasmic cloud. The chug-chug-chug of the engine was statelier now, as if it had put its former, somewhat more agitated rhythm, behind it, and was keen to prove to us that we were the rightful mistresses of this world and had nothing to fear. Slowly, the train crossed into the temple’s courtyard, until, with a final judder that sent a dark, anticipatory thrill through my bosom, its buffers gently impacted against the corresponding set that signalled the end of the line.

Ereshkigal was only one of many Goddess temples in the sacred precinct, or
temenos,
that covered the surrounding one hundred square miles. But it was the oldest and most important. As such— and despite the fact that upper-crust Shulamites usually remained on Earth Prime—its administration was in the hands of a wellborn High Priestess, or ‘Serpentessa’, rather than an ‘Amanuensis’, or proxy.

‘Your sister has done herself proud, coming to a place like this,’ I said.

‘Yeh,’ said Cliticia. ‘Not like St Lucy’s, or St Agatha’s.’

The temples Cliticia had mentioned lay within a ten-mile radius. They had been built during the Middle Ages and named after Shulamites who had been martyred during the early centuries of the first millennium: St Lucy, who carries a dish containing her eyes, and whose temple-maidens dress in white robes and wear crowns of evergreen; and St Agatha, who suffered so many barbarities, and is depicted in art holding her severed breasts. Other temples, such as those named after St Ursula, St Cecilia, St Margaret of Antioch, and St Agnes—all missionaries killed for their intrigues, treachery, and deceit, as they set about subverting Earth Prime—were also nearby.

‘St Agatha’s,’ said Cliticia, ‘is supposed to be a
dump
.’

We loitered before the temple gates. Constructed of bronze and thick cedarwood, and studded with huge, iron bosses, they rose to a height of something like eighty feet. On either side were towers surmounted by crenellated turrets. Their glazed bricks shimmered with moonlight.

‘How many temple-maidens are there in Ereshkigal?’ I said

‘About a thousand,’ said Cliticia.

‘And there’re about
half a million
girls resident in the
temenos.
So wouldn’t you say we needed all those other temples, even if they don’t quite meet Madam’s requirements?’

Cliticia poked out her tongue and giggled.

Here in the south the moonlight was harsh. The shadows we cast were crisp, like paper silhouettes. I tugged at my stiff collar. Dirty, bedraggled, I was beginning to feel hot.

‘They’ll give us summer dresses, I hope,’ I said.

‘Course,’ said Cliticia. ‘And traditional robes, too.’ I bit my lip. I’d forgotten that I would, at certain times, have to don Shulamite robes such as were worn in ancient times. ‘You won’t get ’ot in
those,’
added Cliticia, with a philosophical nod of her head.

‘It doesn’t really matter. We’ll only be in Ereshkigal for a short time anyway,’ I mused.

‘Suppose so,’ said Cliticia, becoming serious and looking a little abashed.

On one of the gate turrets I caught a glimpse of a girl. She wore a black, spangly domino. Behind her came another. She held a leash that was attached to the bejewelled collar of a big, fangtoothed cat that followed her like a tutelary spirit. The moonlight began to make my head ache and I lowered my gaze. The temple walls stretched out to either side. Like the walls of all sacred buildings they were decorated with the sacred colours of hell and heaven.

‘Red and blue, red and blue, red and blue,’ said Cliticia. ‘Couldn’t they use any other colours?’

‘The red is sesquioxide of iron and the blue is made from pulverized lapis-lazuli,’ I said, helpfully.

‘Gawd,’ said Cliticia. ‘There ain’t ’alf been some clever bastards, ain’t there?’

A breeze stirred the leaves of the cypresses and sycamores that decorated the big lunette of sandy ground that contained the railway siding.

The other girls kept a distinct, if not pronounced, distance from us. Perhaps we inspired in them some kind of instinctive dread. We had, after all, claimed to have come not merely into close proximity with men who were their sworn, implacable enemies, but to death itself. Perhaps it was wrong to have told such lies. Perhaps it was wrong to have raised my hand and volunteered when I still had had the chance of being a normal girl and of living a normal life.

‘Do you think about Mr Malachi?’ I said, determined to drown my sense of guilt in a new tide of conversation.

She smiled. "E ’as a name for me.’

‘A nice name I hope,’ I said, feeling a little irritated.

‘A pet name,’ she said.

‘And what might that be?’

‘Poison.’

‘Poison?’

‘Yeh. ’E calls me ’is little drop of poison.’ I raised my eyes to heaven. ‘No need to be like that, Madeleine Fell,’ she said.

‘You think of him a lot, don’t you?’

She avoided my eyes and stared straight ahead, studying the temple’s big gates.

‘Did I ever tell you about
my
Lord Barbarossa?’ she said. Piqued, I said nothing, doing my best to feign disinterest; but it was hard. Very hard. ‘After they killed the Tsar, the anti-Shulamite riots broke out. They were particularly bad in Krivoi Rog, in the Ukraine, where I used to live. The bloke who killed the Tsar was a Minotaur, of course. But rumours went around, put about by the Black Order, that it was us Shulamites who were responsible. Put the killer up to it, they reckoned. Drove ’im mad with the ol’ nympholepsy. And that’s when the pogrom started. I don’t remember much about it, to tell the truth. I don’t remember much about life back East at all. But there is one fing I can never put out of my mind.’ She stood, mouth open, staring into vacancy, as if at pains to summon up the quintessence of the past. ‘When the mob came and burnt our ’ome,’ she continued, ‘there was this man on a black ’orse riding in front of everyone, like ’e was the big cheese. ’E wore a cloak, and an ’ood, and he carried a sabre, and he rounded up all the girls and young women. And when he threw his ’ood back and exposed his face, I knew I’d never forget ’im, not to the day I died.’ Her brow creased. And then she turned to face me. °E was beautiful, Maddy. So beautiful and so... cruel.’ Again, she looked away, but not to gaze into the depths of the empty air, but rather, to study the ground. ‘ ’E looked just like Malachi, Maddy. Just like Malachi. And that’s why this poor girl is smitten.’

Nervously, I looked at the novices out of the corner of my eye, wondering if they might have overheard. But they seemed consumed with their own thoughts and concerns. I tried to forget about them, diverting my gaze so as to study the sleek lines of the silver locomotive, its bogie, its blast pipe, and the name
The Empress Faustina
that ran along its boiler in gleaming copperplate.

Beyond the courtyard and train siding lay the familiar expanse of ruins—not blackened, here, by recent, or even more ancient, fires, but standing relatively intact, with only broken windows, missing roof tiles, and a few tumbledown chimneys to betray the fact that they were uninhabited. The architecture was chiefly early eighteenth century and had originally served to house the overspill from Ereshkigal, which, a century and a half ago, would have boasted twice its present complement of temple-maidens. The streets of ivy-festooned, still elegant Georgian houses, radiated out like spokes of a wheel, with me, Cliticia, and the other novices at the hushed, still centre of a ghost town.

The Duenna, and the two old women who had driven the train—Shulamites long retired who had doubtless taken this dangerous duty upon themselves to relive their youthful past, when life had been so much more exciting and meaningful— walked up to the great, bronze gates, and conducted a brief conversation with someone on the other side through a small, eye-level grille. Behind us, there was a crackle. I turned, and saw that the force-field had been switched back on. The crackle resolved into a hum. I was within the embrace of an electric-blue curtain of interdiction, a tiny figure trapped within a gigantic bell jar, shielded from harm, but unable to escape.

With a deep moan, the gates opened. We stepped forward, passing between the two big, marble gynosphinxes that guarded the way. They were symbolic, of course, of human women who had melded with animality—the feline animality of Ishtar’s sacred beast, the lion. Those gynosphinxes: how beautiful and yet how menacing they looked! Their deadly, cruelly-tipped mamma were like provocative shields bossed with pink points.

I was a sphinx, I decided. A woman’s head with wings and the body of a carnivorous beast.
Female sphinxes for complicated perversities, female sphinxes for the jaded and bored..
. They celebrated passage from childhood to womanhood—a womanhood that was close to something feral. They presaged the state of delirium that, with every passing hour, I felt myself surrendering to, like one so earnestly wooed by a beloved sickness, that she yearns for her long engagement to end.

The gates closed and we walked across the inner courtyard. As big as a football pitch, but with turf replaced by red breccia flag stones, it was enclosed on either side by high, sandstone walls. At its farther end was a peristyle, above which rose a ziggurat: a huge, crumbling structure half-obscured by monstrous effusions of convolvulus and ivy.

No one spoke. The courtyard echoed to the sound of our heels upon the flagstones. To my left was a well, to my right, a series of storerooms and stables. And riddling the ancient walls were rows of multitudinous windows behind which I sometimes spied a curious onlooker, or simply a girl before a pier glass staring irresolutely at her own reflection. I felt incredibly tired. The air was thick with the aroma of citron and jacaranda, almond and myrtle, and my eyelids became gummy, as much, I think, from the surfeit of exotic scents as from loss of sleep.

The Duenna raised a hand and we came to a halt before the elegant, marble steps that led up to the peristyle’s ambulatory. At the bottom of the steps stood a stele of black diorite inscribed in indecipherable cuneiform, and at the top, a tripod and brazier filled with burning spices that sent up a green, aromatic cloud. The
celia,
or
naos,
of the temple, was directly above us, its enamelled doors closed to all but those initiated into the mysteries.

The doors opened. Two temple-maidens of senior rank—they were far older than us; in their early twenties, perhaps—walked out of the temple and through the billowing clouds of perfume until they stood between the two columns that framed the
celia.
They were dressed in white
Style
Directoire
frocks, the Récamier- line cinched with blue silk ribbons that formed extravagant knots beneath the
décolletage.