Twilight in Babylon (17 page)

“Where are your relatives? You don’t live alone, do you?”

He shrugged. “My wife is visiting her family; she took the children and my second wife with her. To Eridu.”

“Nice breezes in the springtime.”

“You’ve been?”

Ulu snickered. “No, but I’ve been with a lot of husbands while their wives have been.”

He laughed, then explained the party, how it was going to be served.

Each plate was painted, Ulu saw. The cups were glass—she’d congressed with a glassblower once who said anytime she wanted some glass to come see him. The linens were woven and so soft. His table was wood—very expensive. The chairs were carved, not just pieces of wood nailed together.

Pots of flowers, bowls of incense, and little bowls of water.

“Finger bowls,” he said. “It makes touching much more pleasant, without the meal’s grease.”

She’d never thought of that.

He led her upstairs, where each of the rooms had been swept. Each had rugs on the floors, cloth on the windows, with more flowers, more perfumes. Clothes were stored in trunks. Lamps were used, instead of torches. “My wife hates to clean oil-lamp smudges off the paint,” he said.

“From our dalliances at the tavern, I had no idea you had such expensive taste,” Ulu said.

“It’s why I like you,” he said, then kissed her. “You’re so delightfully lowlife and seedy.”

Ulu looked around the comfortable, elegant home, then looked down at her feet on the even, swept, mudbrick floor. Dirty, scabbed, bare. The edge of her dress was stained with weeks of wearing, and the smell of her body was discernible despite the perfume of flowers and oils. Her nails were black, her wig cheap, and her breath smelled of onions.

For the first time, Ulu saw herself as others did, especially Ezzi. And she knew shame.

*      *     *

Cheftu had survived one day; one day in a new place, new language, new customs, and new… well, his body definitely wasn’t his own. The urges he felt for any female, the fear he felt regarding his position, the fury he felt when thwarted in any little way, were so unlike Cheftu as he knew himself. They were Kidu.

The body Cheftu now inhabited was an unoccupied body, for which Cheftu couldn’t find any reason. There were residual feelings and inclinations. Cheftu was going to have to fight against them. The most recurrent was a desire to slide into every woman he saw.

What manner of man was this high priest? In the course of the day, Cheftu had concluded that was his newest career: apprentice high priest to the Moon god Sin. This meant the
ensi,
a woman named Puabi, was his overseer. And already Cheftu was in trouble—he’d left her on her own this morning. Not a diplomatic way to handle anything, he had to admit. A less than auspicious beginning. Especially since Kidu felt so strongly about her.

He had to believe Chloe was here, that his being brought here was because this was where she had gone. In the mass of dark-haired, dark-eyed people, her green eyes and red hair should announce themselves in short order.

Though why should she have the same body? She never had before.

Her eyes, though, always were green. That had never been different.

Why she had come here, he didn’t know. His prayers had been for her to find a necessary task, safety, security, and love. Those things must be here for her.

He toyed with the cylinders that hung from his waist. They were an inch to two inches tall, and carved so that when they were rolled across clay they left an imprint. He knew cylinder seals had been popular in most ancient countries. They were a good alternative to a signature. The intriguing and frankly disheartening thing about these cylinders was—he couldn’t read them. The writing was familiar, but he didn’t know it.

The same with the architecture—familiar, but only vaguely. Of course, the baked-brick mountains proclaimed he must be in the lands between the two rivers. Where in those lands, and when, he had no idea.

It made no difference. Chloe was here, so it was where he wanted to be.

He couldn’t explain how either of them had gotten there. After he’d noticed Chloe had traveled on the eve of a lunar eclipse in Jerusalem, Cheftu had considered whether or not the moon and its phases was a factor in their travel. Every day he’d sneak out of the caverns and listen to the seers’ predictions before bartering for some food and returning to the dark. When the city had anticipated a blood moon he’d prayed that he would be drawn to Chloe’s side.

It worked. He believed.

Thus, as much as Cheftu could tell, short of the hand of God Almighty plucking him up from that time and place, there was no escape.

No escape from apologizing to the jilted priestess, either. Smooth over that relationship so he could begin his search for Chloe. A randy young priest should be able to find a green-eyed girl in a predominantly dark-eyed city within days. Perhaps hours.

He touched the elaborately braided and coifed hair on his head, straightened the fall of his skirt, and left for Puabi’s quarters.

The path he’d taken earlier had been quite different, but he had a sense of the temple grounds now. It was a sprawling complex that employed almost ten thousand people.

Two acolytes played a dice game before Puabi’s door. Cheftu tapped, heard nothing, knocked again, and the door opened.

All he saw were a pair of luxuriantly lashed green eyes.
Chloe
!

He kissed her.

So this is how it is!” Puabi shouted.

The woman Cheftu kissed, kissed him back, then pushed him away. She glared at him and ran to the priestess’s side. “Your lover has lost his reason,” she said to Puabi. Then to Cheftu: “What was that for?”

Cheftu was dazzled, confused, but unable to look away from the woman’s green eyes. “Chloe,” he said.
“Ma chérie,
Chloe.”

The redheaded, green-eyed girl glared at him. “I don’t know your ruse today, Kidu, but do not put me in peril.”

“You’re already in peril,” Puabi said. “I cannot believe this betrayal!”

“Chloe,
ma chérie
?”

“Stop calling that name,” Puabi said to him. “What is wrong with you?”

“I told you opium was too strong, it would smoke his brains,” Rudi said.

“He doesn’t have brains to smoke,” Puabi said. “He’s the high priest of fertility, not a justice. His task is what he does with his hips, not his head.”

Cheftu’s euphoria was fading, and he felt shame and anger at her words—emotions from Kidu. Chloe, if it was Chloe, stared at him with righteous indignation, not recognition. Was she pretending? Puabi, his lover/employer, glared at him with disgust, and Shama, the chamber keeper, peered at him with confusion.

“Who are you?” he asked the redhead directly.

“I’ve been back for two months, Kidu,” she said. “You can’t have forgotten I’m Puabi’s sister.”

Cheftu looked from face to face. Had his error been to wind up in the bed of the wrong sister? Did God make mistakes? “A priestess also?”

Rudi stepped closer and looked up into his face. “Are you lost in drugs? I’m a stargazer. Do you remember nothing?”

“Are you ill?” Puabi asked him. “Your eyes look pale.”

Cheftu was beginning to feel ill, for certain. “Pale?” he said.

“Fetch a mirror, Shama.”

Cheftu plunked down on a carved, gold-plated armchair, and Rudi slipped a footstool beneath his feet. Puabi handed him a copper mirror, and he looked into it.

By all the gods, he was a blonde.

His eyes were his—Cheftu’s—bronze and brown. But his eyelashes were tawny, tipped with gold. And his beard was the color of late honey and elaborately curled. He wore more gold beads than a dancing girl. Chloe would never recognize him; he wouldn’t recognize himself. “Do you have tweezers?” he asked the woman. Cheftu’s honey-colored brows merged above his nose and crept down it. Hair was everywhere.

“What are tweezers?”

Cheftu glanced at them. They, obviously, did not.

Cheftu looked at himself. His chest was hairy, as were his arms and his shoulders. If he didn’t get a good Egyptian waxing soon, he would be crawling with lice and fleas. “I want a barber,” he said.

Puabi snatched back the mirror. “Why tell me? I am not your slave, you have plenty of those. Most of them young and flexible, if I recall.”

Cheftu looked at his hands; they looked like his if his were encased in large, furry gloves. He laced his fingers together.

“Why are you here, anyway? Did I send for you?” Puabi asked.

He kept his gaze on his fingers. “I came to apologize for… this, uh, dawn.”

Puabi stilled. “Rudi, I will speak with you later. Shama, see her out.”

When the two had left, Puabi sat down across from him. “It’s three days until your first official act. Perhaps you should spend some time in prayer and fasting. Away from opium and women.”

Cheftu’s ears burned; he was horrified to be in the body of a man who had to be reprimanded for his behavior. Ignoble behavior at that. “I bow to your wisdom,” he said.

“The chamber is already prepared, if you want to stay there. I can send Shama to bring you food.”

Which chamber? Prepared for what?

It would buy him two days at least. Two days until… Cheftu didn’t know. He was weary, he was aroused—a state he’d been in all day—and he was ravenous. Appetites Cheftu had always controlled seemed to be controlling him now. “Bring a lot,” he said. “I hunger.”

“What? Oh,” she said. “Of course, you eat like most humans’ livestock. Which is why you are the priest of fertility.”

The pieces began to fall into place. “How are the, uh, crops doing?” Cheftu asked, daring to look at her.

“The final irrigation is in two days. Have you not been listening?”

“Uh,” he said.

“I forget your beauty comes at the price of witlessness,” she said as she caressed his arm. “I am the
ensi,
remember? I am responsible for the fertility of the crops.”

He nodded. “I am the
en
?”

“You will be appointed by me, to be responsible for the fertility of the population.”

Women had been lined up outside his office; the women lined up outside his chambers. Fertility priest. “I… I have—”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “You are to congress with my handmaidens and selected matrons from town. They are selected by their generosity to the temple and the gods,” she said in the tone of one speaking to an idiot.

Mon Dieu,
I am in trouble,
Cheftu thought.

“For the next two weeks, you are to save yourself for me. The ritual.”

“Of course,” he said. Ritual what? Perhaps he didn’t want to know. Irrigating the crops, impregnating the population, and officiating at a ceremony in a select chamber sounded very much like the
hieros gamos
—Sacred Marriage—practice. Usually the male was killed after the consummation with the high priestess, to promote a good yield. Two weeks to save his carcass and find Chloe? Then what?

Puabi moved behind him, and her strong fingers kneaded the muscles of his neck and shoulders. “Are you ill? Last night… I thought you had died. You seem so different today, I could believe you did, and a demon lives in your body now, brought by the dark of the moon.”

Cheftu didn’t react. So that’s how he had ended up in this body; the real Kidu’s spirit had flown, and it had coincided with a lunar eclipse here. “I haven’t felt my best,” Cheftu said.

Puabi tapped his shoulders. “I’ll send an exorcist and diviner to your rooms. Maybe the stargazer, too, though not the same one who decried me, and certainly not Rudi, but one of them. The commonwealth depends on your strength.”

Was this the end of the season, or the beginning? “It seems uncommonly hot,” he said. “For it to be the end of year.”

She sighed deeply. “Kidu, my brainless beauty, the year is only a quarter gone. These are the winter crops we’re bringing in. The summer crops are in the fields, beneath the earth.” Her voice grew harder. “Go to your chambers now,
en
Kidu. Shama will take you. No more opium, truth?”

He looked at her. Puabi was worried, this dark-haired beauty. He didn’t have to feign confusion and stupidity, he certainly felt it. She seemed to be waiting for a response. “Truth,” he said, and left.

Cheftu followed the old man through hallways and corridors, until he entered some large, lofty quarters. Food steamed on a table, and the linens of his bed were already laid and drawn back.

“Leave me,” Cheftu said, and they did.

Cheftu sank onto a chair and laid his head on his knees. When was he? Where was Chloe?

What had he done to them?

*      *     *

Guli looked up as Ulu entered. She looked worn, and the roots of her red hair were long and brown. He winked at her as he finished curling his customer’s hair. The customer had paid in steamed fish for today and smoked fish he could sell on the morrow. The aroma had been teasing Guli’s nose for the past half double hour, but the customer had exceptionally fine hair that required a great amount of patience to get every curl to make and to stay.

The customer’s hands were held palm upward—a Harrapan girl on the wharf had painted them, and the dye was drying.

“There—” he said, laying the last curl. “You are beautiful.”

He’d already painted her face, elongating her eyes with kohl and attempting to slim down her wide face with a little oil and ash shading. “Have a wonderful time tonight at the feast.” The customer’s aged sister was finally marrying, which meant it was finally possible that she herself could marry. What better time did the gods provide for her to meet her intended, than at the feast?

“If good fortune strikes me, I’ll bring you barley cakes tomorrow,” she said, rising up on her toes to kiss his cheek.

“If
really
good fortune strikes you,” Guli said, “you won’t rise from your bed!”

The customer blushed, Ulu hooted with laughter, and Guli kissed the girl’s cheek. “Stay away from the hanging lamps. Stand only by those which are low.”

“Low lamps,” the customer repeated. “I’m so nervous. Family is coming from everywhere. As far as Nippur.”

Guli listened as he nudged her toward the door. She kissed him again, then set off down the street, wobbling in her festival shoes. He closed the door and turned to Ulu.