Twilight in Babylon (16 page)

To get away from that woman.

The old man handed him a kilt—that itself was recognizable, though the pattern, cloth, and design were not. Cheftu felt heat in his cheeks as he fought to make it lie flat, especially under the old man’s amused, questioning gaze. When Cheftu’s fair skin was covered completely, he hurried to the door.

The next room smelled like smoke, and he saw the implements of opium; then he recognized that his head ached, and why his mouth was bitter with bile. Cheftu closed the door behind him, shut away her loud cries, and opened the door to questions.

Three men, in similar kilts, also with beards, scrambled to stand upright and formal in the passageway. They were obviously confused by his presence, considering the woman’s cries, but they bowed to him and mumbled greetings. He nodded acknowledgement and walked down the hall. It was dark, with oil torches affixed to the walls. He had no idea where he was going, or where he’d been. He was astounded at how much effort it took to move his body away—he literally pulled with every step.

“
En
Kidu,
en
Kidu,” a man called. Cheftu halted and turned on his heel. The man smiled and pulled out a slab of clay. “Good day, sir. Would you like to go over the day’s activities?”

The faces of the other men were turned in his direction. Curious.

“Of course,” Cheftu said. “Walk with me.”
I
must be Enkidu.
En
Kidu?

“Certainly, sir,” the man said. “Where are you going?”

“I need some fresh air.”

“Then perhaps… outside?”

“Excellent choice,” Cheftu said. “Lead on.”

The scribe, if that’s what he was, turned around and walked down the hall, then turned again. Cheftu’s first sight of his new world was blue sky and palm trees. And a breeze that hinted at a scorching afternoon.

They walked in silence to the threshold, and Cheftu took in the view.

Sunlight poured on the city, and Cheftu was blinded by ribbons of reflection. Water. Rivers? No, they were irrigation channels. Two-story buildings cast shadows across straight, gridlike streets lined with green palms. An impressive wall enclosed the structure where he was, and directly below him were gardens with flowers, trees, and fountains, just touched by the sunrise. It was a sophisticated town.

He saw no people.

He looked to the south and saw a bay, shimmering silver, in dawn’s light. More irrigation channels branched off a broader river that ran through the western part of the city. The smell of garbage, ash, and incense burned his nostrils as he stood. This place was completely foreign.

Steps led down from this platform, and steps led up. Cheftu turned to look behind him, and gaped at the building he’d just left; colorful stages with ramps, steps, and archways, leading from one color and level to another. A man-made mountain. From this perspective, he couldn’t see the top. He knew, somehow, that it was a blue temple dedicated to a sky deity.

A sky deity in an unknown land with a language he had never heard. He’d never even heard its like—it bore no similarity to the Semitic tongues of Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Persian. Nor was this India, for he knew Prakrit and its written derivative, Sanskrit. To his left, the bay stretched away to become a sea. The organization of this city looked almost Greek. But they spoke nothing like Greek or Latin, or any of its offspring tongues: French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, or the other Indo-European- languages he knew, like German or English.

The people were not Chinese, nor was their language—at least none of the six dialects of Chinese that Cheftu knew. The land was flat, the people unfamiliar, the place unrecognizable. He felt a ball of fear and fury rise up in his chest;
why have you brought me here.
The rage was incoherent and apart from him. Fierce, nevertheless.

It was Kidu’s emotion, but Cheftu shared it.

This world was not one he knew or had known.

“So tell me,” he said to the scribe in this language that was borrowed from the other part of his mind, formed by the strange combination of gluing syllables together. “What does my day hold?”

*      *     *

Chloe yawned through the first few hours of class. This was only her second day, and she was exhausted!
We’d get so much further with coffee.
She wondered if there were any coffee beans around.
Or leaves—wasn’t that how the first Arabs discovered coffee? Their sheep ate the leaves?
It didn’t matter, her sheep weren’t that useful.

The heat, the droning, the smoky air, the flies—her head felt as though it were on a string not a neck. It took massive effort to face forward with open eyes.

None of the nine–to nineteen-year-olds seemed to have this problem.

She looked at her attempted homework.

“Prepare your tablets. We’re going to have an examination,” the Elder Brother, said. The Tablet Father was away on business, so the rumor went. His superior skills were being used to figure the new, postflood, taxes.

The boys got in line, dunked their damp clay, and mashed it smooth. Chloe dodged the splash fights. Five of the boys were disciplined, and the rest of them tittered as the clay dried on the miscreants’ faces.

“We begin,” the Elder Brother said. “Example one: human, male parent of male parent.”

The translation was fairly easy for grandparents, for it was a prefix in English, too. Take a parent, removed once from your immediate family, and they became grand. In… whatever these sideways pricking marks were, the answer was the sign for human, a determinative, then male parent twice. Easy enough. Thank God she’d slaved over her homework.

“Slave.”

Chloe drew the determinative, then bit her lip. Slave, what was the sign? A human owned by another human? No. A human in debt? A human from someplace else? She skipped to the next question.

“Tablet Father.”

Human male determinative, with the symbol of the Tablet House. Whew. Two out of three.

“Administrator,” he said.

I didn’t learn this one,
Chloe thought.
It wasn’t on my list.

“Accountant.”

Damn. I can’t believe I studied the wrong thing.
She scrawled the determinative… what was the symbol for numbers?

“En.”

“Merchant.”

“Sailor.”

Chloe sat through the rest of the test, all male humans, all words she didn’t know. The Elder Brother smiled at them, “Any questions?”

Chloe raised her hand. “How come there were no females on this list?”

*      *     *

Shama felt sorry for Puabi—not because she hadn’t enjoyed herself thoroughly, but because afterward when she realized Kidu hadn’t returned, she had been lonely.

He knew what it was like to be lonely. She suffered a different kind of loneliness than he did, but in truth it felt the same. He was particularly gentle with her hair, massaged oil into her skin, and fed her the choicest figs.

“I cannot believe he just walked out,” she finally said. “Is it another woman?”

Shama shook his head; the
en
had been stringently observing the rules Puabi had laid out for him: only one visit at a time for a woman. If she didn’t get pregnant then, she wasn’t going to. Puabi seemed to care very little about the consequences. And soon the season would change, and there would be no congressing with the
en,
except with Puabi.

Babies were to be born in the season of cold and rest, not in the heat of harvesttime.

“Watch him for me, Shama,” she said. “Last night, I think he got very sick. In fact, I think he almost died. His breath left, and it didn’t come back for a long time. I fell asleep waiting. Apparently it did return.”

He hung golden hoops through her ears.

“Even if he is
en,
he can’t leave me… in the middle!” Her breath, blown in Shama’s face from frustration, was acidic. Onions and opium had fermented into a bitter brew. He would stir cinnamon into her breakfast mint drink and add a dollop of crushed dates to sweeten her tongue. “Although… as long as I’ve known of Kidu, I can’t imagine him walking away from any willing woman. Even were he sick.” She shook her head, and Shama had to reset her diadem so it would sit evenly on her braided and coiled wig.

A knock. She grabbed his hand. “If it’s him, I’m not available. But he better give you an excuse, a good one for this morning. But why should I care,” she asked, sitting back. “I’m the
ensi,
anyone I want is mine.”

The knock was firmer. “It’s Rudi,” the person called.

Puabi sagged in her chair. “Oh. Her.”

The sisters greeted each other, and Shama was astonished, as ever, at the variety of physical forms that humans, even sisters, came in. Where Puabi was dark, Rudi was light. Where Rudi was stocky, Puabi was lithe. Though they had the same features, the same day of birth, they were opposites.

Until one learned Puabi’s father was green-eyed and her mother was black-eyed; which made sense of the sisters.

“Go check on him,” Puabi said to Shama. “Send in some wine.”

He bid an acolyte fetch the
ensi
wine, and her sister beer. Rudi liked a beer for breakfast, she’d told him so. Puabi paid no attention to other humans’ likes or dislikes; as the
ensi
her thoughts were on greater things.

Shama walked slowly; his hip had been stiff since he’d fallen at Kidu’s hand. Or it could have been New Year’s, going up and down all the stairs. The lower vaults where the statues’ clothes were kept were farther than he walked in a week, and he’d walked it five times in one day. Oh, for the days of his great-grandfather, when men didn’t ache so early and had congress with women until the day they died.

Alas, the water of vitality was gone; the Deluge had accomplished that.

Shama went to Kidu’s quarters. His female slaves were in various stages of undress as they cleaned his linens and crushed the herbs for his incense. He wasn’t in his audience chamber, and the line of women outside was long and growing irritable. The sun was well into the sky; the
en
should be there to fulfill his duties. Where was he?

Shama wandered the offices of the temple complex. The pace of summer was beginning, so people moved more slowly, angered more quickly. And the grass beneath the palms was flattened by the commonwealth’s citizens’ rear ends since they rested more frequently.

Shama crossed over the Euphrates bridge to the temple factories and storerooms. Occasionally Kidu wandered through there, looking for new conquests, though usually they came to him.

The
en
wasn’t with the tanners, or the storehouse that kept leather goods for the temple and its thousands of employees. Nor with the dyers, the weavers, or spinners. Not in their warehouse, now empty since everyone got new clothes at the New Year. The brickmakers hadn’t seen him; the coppersmiths and silver workers shook their heads. Shama’s hip ached.

He sat down in the common courtyard where the emmer, barley, legumes, and seeds were kept in sealed jars, in the event the crops failed and needed reseeding. The fields were full of workers, as the summer barley was in its next irrigation. No Kidu, and no one to ask if they’d seen him.

Sweat stuck the felt of his skirt to his waist. Shama spied a soft patch of green beneath a clump of palms. No one was about, so he tottered over and lay down. The grass was cool and the earth still soft. Shama fell asleep in minutes.

His last thought was strange, for he couldn’t tell some colors apart. Yet it seemed Kidu’s eyes had been a different shade of amber this dawn.

I’m an old man,
he told himself.
Everything is deteriorating, and now my vision is going, too.

*      *     *

“You want to know why there were no human females on the list?” The Elder Brother looked at his copy. “Can anyone illumine Brother Chloe’s mind on this matter?”

There was some rustling as the students looked around at each other. Finally, one little boy raised his hand.

“Brother Roo?”

“Several of these occupations could be filled by women.”

“You don’t even have mother on this list. Goddess?” Chloe looked at the boys, who were watching her. “Wife? Not to mention priestess, felter, seamstress, cook, ale—”

“Accountant could be answered as female,” one boy said.

“Can
lugal,
or sailor or Tablet Father?” she asked.

“Of course not,” the Elder Brother said.

Chloe set down her stylus. “Then I’m afraid I have to protest this exam.”

“On what grounds?”

“I wasn’t properly prepared because I wasn’t told the exam would be exclusively about males.”

“This is what happens when you let a girl in school,” some boy said.

Chloe turned and looked at him, a big, burly boy of almost sixteen. “Yes, what happens is you can’t forget half the population is female. That’s what happens.” She looked around the classroom. “I bet, if you all asked your parents who should be on the list of humans, the answers they’d give would be at least half-female.” She looked from one face to another. “I dare you to ask your mothers and fathers.”

“You are heard!” the Elder Brother said. “Tomorrow, we’ll examine again.”

Much loud protesting.

“—and at least half the answers will be female occupations. Though,” he said, looking at Chloe, “this is not an excuse on your part. Half will be males.”

“Just like the world, truth?”

*      *     *

Ulu stepped into the courtyard; this was a house very much like hers. The layout was the same. Nothing else, she had to admit, was similar. A slave appeared, smiled, and guided her to the back room where the banquet was laid out.

None of the guests had yet arrived, and she felt a little uncomfortable kissing her customer in these surroundings. He, however, did not.

When she met him in the tavern, he was always well lubricated with beer, emptied of stories, and aroused from watching her with other men since twilight. Here, it was still light. Guli had done her makeup by daylight, a precaution she was suddenly appreciating.

“Does it feel different, being in my home?” he asked.