Twilight in Babylon (50 page)

“From your mind?”

She nodded.

“That’s impossible.”

“What?”

“It is impossible for a language to be stolen from a mind, or even a mouth. It takes years to learn, to—” He crossed his arms and closed his eyes. “I’m going back to sleep now.”

Chloe glared at his closed eyes, then got up and paced the eight-by-eleven room.

“We time-traveled. That’s impossible,” she said.

“We saw water turn to blood. We saw firstborn-only die. We’ve seen a sea part. We’ve met immortals. We’ve watched a civilization vanish in a day and a night. We’ve seen lightning harnessed. We’ve watched people we’ve known from history live and breathe.

“Cheftu, for God’s sake! We live in other peoples’ bodies! Our lives are built around impossibilities.”

He didn’t move.

She was pretty sure he was playing possum.

“Try this on for size, Mr. Impossible. The Tower of Babel is a co-op, and baby, you’re living in it.”

*      *     *

When she went up to the top at sunrise, Chloe saw that a third of the tents were gone. A third of the people had left. Some of them so recently, she could see them still walking north or south, east or west, or any of the eight compass points in between. They’d stopped felling the trees. They’d stopped draining the river. They’d stopped building. Mostly, they argued. Their voices floated up to her, and she wished she had a list of the languages Cheftu spoke so she could know which ones were out there.

But she knew one thing: which way was up.

“Latin,” he said in her ear, then slipped his arms around her waist.

“Do you remember it?”

She felt him shake his head. “No, I just know enough to identify it. That voice is speaking another Chinese.” He rested his forehead against her neck. “Forgive—”

“No,” she said and turned to him. “Nothing is wrong. No forgiveness required. That,” she said, as they listened to the rising racket, “do you remember that?”

“Aztlantu. A precursor to Greek.” His arms tightened around her. “I thought I’d lost my mind. I would have these flights of fancy in which I would conduct conversations in these languages. I knew it must be impossible. I must be going crazy.”

“What’s that?” she asked, inclining her ear.

“Sanskrit. One of the firstborn from the original Indo-European tongue. English is related to the Teutonic languages, German, Dutch, Scandinavian tongues. Latin, you know—”

“Yes. Yields French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese.”

“Also Greek, Russian, and Baltic-states tongues.”

Above them, thunder rumbled.

“Arabic and Hebrew are related.”

“As are Chinese, Burmese, the Asian languages.”

“The season of rains begins,” Cheftu said.

“There were only three in the beginning. The roots,” Chloe said. “And they become, grow into, three hundred languages.”

Thunder drew closer; they saw a flash of lightning.

“God gave us minds like his.” Cheftu smiled in wonder. It started to rain. “Endless possibilities.”

“Since one of those possibilities is being struck by lightning, I suggest we go downstairs,” Chloe said. “But one more question—was there any specific person around, in those conversations?”

“No, no.” He shook his head.

Chloe started down the stairs.
There was for me,
she thought.
Who was Ela, really? Or should I be asking
what
was Ela?

*      *     *

It rained for two days. Cold, winter rain that soaked through wool and made the entire camp smell like a sheep farm. The sick had been left, so Chloe worked at Cheftu’s side as they watched the patients grow more and more ill.

They hadn’t gone back to the tower; there had been too much to do. Wind followed the rain, and Chloe spent half her time tying down skins and rushes, trying to keep the patients dry. Finally, both wind and rain abated, and Chloe and Cheftu slept.

Chloe was pouring the remnants of milk into the copper pot before the children awoke, when Cheftu attacked her. “No! Put it down!” he shouted.

She dropped the pot and pulled away from him, the corroded copper spoon still in her hand. “You really have lost it! You made me spill the milk!”

“It’s poison, Chloe.”

His eyes were bright, his shoulders back, he looked like a different person. “The copper, it’s what’s killing them.”

Chloe looked around at the few awake patients who all stared at her with the same copper-tinted gaze. Sunflower eyes, copper plates on top of brown irises, extra copper in the body. Copper—she looked at the ladle, at the pot. The milk had pooled on the ground, and tiny fibers of copper stood up from it.

“Copper,” he said. “I’m such a fool! I’ve seen this before.”

She was confused, and looked it.

“As a boy, when I was in Egypt, as Jean-François, my brother and I… ah, the details don’t matter. We were walking with a French physician. A woman begged him to make her child well. He looked into the eyes of the child, and refused to help.”

“That bastard!”

“No, he was wise actually. He knew the child wouldn’t live, the copper was too much in its system. If he took the case on, and the child died, the Egyptians would just have an excuse to retaliate. We would be child murderers on top of tomb robbers. The child’s eyes, they were the same as these people’s.”

“So we don’t feed them any more copper-poisoned food, but, what do we do to make them well?”

Cheftu scratched his head, pushed hair out of his eyes. “Water, to flush it out. I don’t know what else. Something must bind with the copper to remove it from the body, but I don’t know what.”

*      *     *

Lightning struck the Esagila.

The unfinished top caught fire and fell to the ground, landing in one of the bonfires in the middle of the night.

Then and there, the remaining people scattered.

Chloe supposed there were a hundred or less who were hanging on, maybe who still understood each other. The patients, whose systems they were trying to wash out by feeding them copious amounts of water, were improving. Or dying.

Winter had arrived. Cold, wet. Frost on the ground.

I’m standing in the shadow of the Tower of Babel.

Cheftu, just rinsed, stepped out of the protection of the infirmary tent. “They’re all sleeping.” He’d buried a few more the previous night, but the sorrow of it wasn’t attached to him anymore. He whistled as he went about his rounds, he smiled and joked with the healing patients. Though he proclaimed he hated medicine, Chloe had to admit she hadn’t seen him as satisfied and eager to go about his day, in years. What he hated, she realized, was being inefficient and ineffective in medicine. He loved to make people well.

“You saved sixty people’s lives,” she said.

“You saved mine.”

They joined hands and walked to the edge of the Esagila, where bricks were left in the rain, wheelbarrows frozen in their tracks, garbage everywhere. The flies were fewer, the rats, too. Operating during mostly daylight hours prevented Chloe from seeing too many insects.

The top of Esagila had been burned black, and they didn’t know how much structural damage had been done. Neither had taken time away from the copper patients to climb up.

“It was all for this,” Chloe said. “Your knowledge of languages, my knowledge of languages. Everything. Circles and cycles. Wheels within wheels.”

Cheftu stared at the building. “Do you think we saw the fathers of the nations here?”

“Yes.” She chewed her lip. “We read it so wrong, in my time.”

“The Tower of Babel?”

She nodded. “We ridiculed the idea of God’s jealousy and fear that the people would actually make it to heaven. When you realize that heaven isn’t a location, that it’s nothing but space up there, that statement seems pretty silly. We need a cleanup crew around here.” She kicked dust at an emboldened rat. He ran away. “We started it here, the tradition of not learning. We never do.”

Cheftu looked at her. “I’m sure I agree, but to what are you referring?”

“Abusing the planet. Look at this. Piles of… yuck. Just left. Garbage. People on top of people.”

“God told the people, after Ziusudra, to spread out and multiply.”

“Instead they multiplied and clumped together. And worked on ruining the land.”

“Now, they will be divided but alive.”

“You were the tool,” she said.

Cheftu looked at her.

“All those languages, all that time, the memory, the experience, disseminated here.”

“Ah, circles you said.”

“Though, I’m a little confused how just speaking them made us forget them. How the words were stolen that way.”

“Egyptians thought words were items, tangible presences.”

“The Sumerians—us—words are power, here. Writing them is controlling them.”

“Speaking them releases their power to the air,” Cheftu said. “At least, that is my guess.”

“Somehow when we released those words, they were imprinted on the minds of other people? I’d say that’s impossible, but—”

Cheftu laughed, and said something in French. He looked at her, as though expecting agreement, then spoke in Sumerian. “You don’t remember French?”

She shook her head. “One of those dinners with Ela.”

“I must confess, I no longer know English.”

He raised his head, and Chloe heard a fight taking place in some other language. He looked at her. “Some of your work. Those are Frenchmen leaving now.”

The other part of the fighting group—a stout, black-bearded man, came barreling toward them. “Imbeciles!” he shouted. “No sense of how to structure a city!”

Sumerian, he spoke.

Chloe and Cheftu grinned at each other. God, however He was called, had made up the list of citizens for this place and designated them clearly.

“We need latrines so we aren’t defecating in the street like animals, we need some organization of children and someone to plant the fields. Those palms are going to rot, left in the rain. Waste, such waste.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Chloe said.

He beamed. “What a delight! Someone who doesn’t babble!”

Not anymore.

*      *     *

Nimrod arrived three months later. Enki, the black-bearded man, had organized the cleanup. Most of the copper patients were on their feet, doing small tasks. A garbage dump had been designated, and the Esagila had been partially dismantled for building materials.

It took less than a week for Nimrod to be elected
lugal.

By spring, the new Babylon’s numbers had swelled to almost three hundred. Houses, laid out on carefully straight streets and wide boulevards, were spacious and tiled in beautiful colors. Bricks were waterproofed through firing.

Wells had been dug in the center of the few squares. Nirg set up a window through which she sold Chloe’s sausage balls and other, easy-to-eat items. Chloe had fallen in love with palms and spent the winter transplanting those that had been half–dug up, to places within the city. Irrigation ditches were next.

Cheftu came for her one afternoon from his position at Nimrod’s side as a city planner and part-time justice, who mostly oversaw the writing of contracts.

“I’m busy,” she said, her hands covered in mud, after giving him a kiss.

“Come with me.”

She excused herself and followed him. They strolled through the palm groves south, hand in hand, to where they’d first seen the strange glow in the sky over Babylon.

“This is for you,” he said after they sat down.

Chloe looked at him, then unwrapped the small parcel. A cylinder of ivory fell out, intricately carved. She looked at the writing on the side, the drawing of a woman and a child writing.

“Nimrod wants you to open a school, a Tablet House.”

Yes!

It sang through her veins, a profound sense of
fit.
This, yes, what she was made for. This dream, this moment. Children, not born of her body, but of her heart. She examined the carving through a prism of unshed tears. The why of her future was answered. The why of here and now was answered. The why of everything, from her first step into ancient Egypt to her most recent step into this palm grove, was answered.

My whole life has led up to this moment. I’m home.

“He even turned the logograms ninety degrees,” Chloe said through a throat clogged with tears.

“He did. He said it was your school, you should hire teachers who instruct what you felt comfortable with. Teach to males, females. This cylinder seal, it’s for you.” Cheftu looked at her with golden eyes, the fringe of his blond hair framing them. “Women are going to be equals here, in politics, religion, socially. You’re a client, Chloe.”

She clutched the seal that would be her legacy in one hand, and, with the other, Chloe reached for Cheftu.

If it appears to any trained student of early Mesopotamian history that I took the elements of Sumerian culture, threw them in a blender, then spread them on these pages, he or she would be correct.

These people, even more than my beloved Egyptians, fascinate me. However, definitive answers about who and where and when and why are few and far between. So while I don’t know the answers per se, many things in this, Chloe and Cheftu’s final adventure, are based in fact.

The death pits; substitution theory; exorcism with a goat; all the artifacts mentioned, the clothing worn; the school, even the translation of alumni to “Old Boys”; Ur was the first place to have a restaurant; Enkidu and Gilgamesh are characters in one of the most well-known myths from ancient times; there is record of one female Tablet Father, and an ancient school for girls in Ur; mourning the loss of extreme old age and appreciating the concept of “humanity” are common threads in both Sumerian mythology and Genesis; Shem, Kham (Ham) and Japheth (Jepheti) were the three sons of Noah (Ziusudra); Roo (Reu) is Abram’s (Abraham’s) great-great-grandfather; Lud is another Biblical relative; Nimrod is credited with founding Babylon; Asshur with Ninevah and Calneh; the cycle of eclipses was certainly not known or predictable to these people; the standards, mostly famously the Code of Hammurabi, are now thought by scholars to be examples of judgments that had been meted out rather than absolute laws; writing, in about this time period, did change direction and angle; a dictionary, or as Ningal puts it: “list of lists.”