The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  “I’ll pardon you for your appearance this time,” said Jipfur. “You’ve spent too many days in field work. After you get used to indoor work and learn a few manners you’ll be worth all of six shekels.”

  Jipfur laughed at his joke, but Betty didn’t see anything funny, and neither did I. I was right at the edge of the rail, feeling like a bomb about to drop. But I hadn’t realized, until Kish whispered, “Better put that away,” that I had drawn my iron knife from my pocket.

  Now our lord and master was urging Betty to come closer. She quietly refused, and a flame of ill-temper reddened Jipfur’s face. He rose to his feet, began to pace before her.

  Again Kish placed a restraining hand on my arm.

  “I’d better take that knife,” he whispered.

  I shook my head. The scared look in Kish’s face didn’t deter me. I was too intent upon Jipfur, whose every word and action was shooting my eyes through with red. The damned bull moose was flaunting his authority in the manner that was nothing short of bestial. I intended to do something.

  Betty kept eluding him with cunning evasions. But Jipfur was the master. The weight of all Babylonian law was back of him. He drove his advantage with the finesse of a skilled executioner.

  I crouched, trembling. No matter that this would be the end of me. The thing was to make my leap true, and make an end of Jipfur. Betty would be certain to fall into safer hands.

  I glanced back of me. Kish was gone. That was just as well. No need for him to be dragged into this crime as an accomplice.

  Now I was barely clinging to the balcony edge, gauging the twenty-foot drop. Jipfur had caught Betty’s hands, was trying to draw her into an embrace. The terror in her eyes was awful to see—worse because it was touched with a hint of resignation to her inevitable fate.

  Then she caught sight of me, knew that I was about to jump. Instantly she cried out—in English! “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”

  Jipfur let go one of her hands, whirling to see whether there was an intruder. Momentarily I jumped back out of sight. Then a booming voice sounded from out of nowhere—the rich baritone of Slaf-Carch.

  “Jipfur . . . Jipfur . . . I am speaking to you.”

  The power of that voice was no less than it had been at the Cave of Tombs. I sank to my knees, still clutching the iron knife, and bent to the rail’s edge to see—

  Jipfur stood in his tracks, open-mouthed. Beads of perspiration showed at the edges of his black wavy hair. The voice came again.

  “Jipfur, have you everything you want now? Have you?”

  Jipfur, turning dizzily, stammered an answer. He didn’t want anything. He hadn’t asked for this new inheritance.

  “Have you everything you want, Jipfur?” The voice repeated.

  Jipfur snarled. “Why all these questions? Are you accusing me—”

  “Careful, Jipfur. People may be listening. Unless you mean to confess—”

  “I’ve nothing to confess. Get away. Quit hounding me. I don’t believe in you.”

  “Do you believe in yourself, Jipfur? Who was it that shouted to the parade, ‘Slaf-Carch is a man of great honor’ ? Have you forgotten your eloquence so soon?”

  “Go away! Leave me alone!”

  “Very well. I will leave you—for a price.”

  “Price?”

  “Give Betty another year of freedom.”

  “Another year!” Jipfur roared. “That’s ridiculous. This is the fall—”

  “There will be another fall, Jipfur.”

  Out of anguished eyes, Jipfur stared at Betty, as if trying to convince himself she hadn’t heard. But she nodded to him, and a faint smile of victory touched her lips. Slowly she backed away from him and fled from the court . . .

  Kish and I threaded our way, that midnight, by the light of the stars to the Cave of Tombs.

  Kish had heard the conversation between Slaf-Carch’s voice and Jipfur, and somehow it got him worse than before. The first time he had excused as a sort of mass delusion. But now he was convinced that Slaf-Carch couldn’t be dead. Nothing would do but we have a look in the cave of the dead to prove it.

  My own nerves, I must admit, were considerably joggled. This midnight jaunt to the Cave of Tombs wasn’t what my twentieth-century physician would have prescribed for one in my chaotic state of mind. Kish, however, expressed wonder that I could be so calm and collected, and demanded to know whether I had some insight. I evaded his question.

  We began jabbing at the sealed door with our heavy metal tools—about three jabs apiece. What stopped us was Slaf-Carch’s voice.

  “Why dig for me? You saw my crushed body laid away.”

  Kish gulped hard. “I—I can’t understand. That foolish legend—”

  “Believe it,” said the voice. “That will be simplest. And now—a word to both of you—about Jipfur. Watch him, but serve him, with vision. Now go.” If I had had a flashlight I would have combed those jagged rocks and put my curiosity at rest then and there. But Kish had already bounded off at the word go.

  It was good to be out in the fresh night air again, and we moved along at a good pace. It was what our pent-up nerves needed.

  I suggested that we take advantage of the moonless night to swing around by way of Borbel. Kish was willing. He was an understanding cuss, no less so for his cynicism, and he hit the nail on the head when he said, “Anything to postpone crawling back under Jipfur’s thumb.”

  I pondered his remark as we hiked along through the blackness. Unquestionably there would be an electric tension in the air every time I entered Jipfur’s presence from now on, for I was potentially his murderer. Except for Betty’s outcry, and the diverting intrusion of Slaf-Qarch’s mystic voice, I would have earned a one-way ticket into a fiery furnace.

  Now there was a shadowy form ahead of us, moving along the crest of the hillside. We overtook it, or rather, her, for there was just enough starlight to reveal—Betty!

  “I thought so,” I said accusingly. “Something told me you were out here in this midnight wilderness.”

  “I was sent back to Borbel,” said Betty, “but there was no use trying to sleep after that horrifying fracas with Jipfur.”

  “We’ve been at Slaf-Carchs’ grave,” said Kish. “He spoke to us again.”

  “Oh?” Betty seemed curious to hear all about it. When Kish finished, she commented, “Now, at least, you will believe the legend.”

  “Personally, I’m not so dense,” I said skeptically. “But sooner or later, Betty, you’ll need a new electric battery.”

  I borrowed some words from English to finish my sentence.

  She turned her starlit face toward me blankly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Hal.”

  “You’re very clever,” I said.

  “Indeed you are,” Kish added, missing my point completely, “The way you defended yourself against Jipfur—”

  “Kish,” said Betty in a low earnest voice, “you heard Slaf-Carch’s voice, the same as I did? And you, Hal? . . . Did you catch the implication? Jipfur murdered Slaf-Carch. There was no other possible interpretation—”

  “Not so fast, Betty,” I warned. “Maybe that voice doesn’t know. Maybe it was just guessing.”

  “But that voice is Slaf-Carch—his spiritual self, still alive—”

  I sputtered and gasped for air. Was she pulling the wool over my eyes? This was exasperating.

  “We’ve got to keep this confidential—the three of us,” she went on. “The danger is far greater than you think. The rumor is already rampant among the slaves that Jipfur is guilty.”

  “What?” said Kish. “So soon? It was only this evening that—”

  “I didn’t start the rumor,” said Betty. “But that’s exactly what Jipfur will think if he learns that the slaves held a mass meeting—”

  “Meeting? When? Where?”

  The three of us stopped and Betty pointed back to the hillside trail over which we had come. “That’s where I’ve been she said. “There were hu
ndreds of slaves gathered in the darkness. I didn’t get close enough to make myself known, and I left early. A group like that is sure to be full of spies.”

  “The Serpents were there, no doubt,” said Kish. “They’re Jipfur’s information agents and high-pressure men.”

  Betty said that the meeting didn’t promise any action, but everyone agreed that Jipfur was the only man who stood to gain by Slaf-Carch’s murder. Everyone aired his grievances against Jipfur but no one could see any chance for a rebellion.

  “The peasants were there, too,” she said, “and they complained of oppressive taxes that they were frightened into paying—”

  “By the Serpents,” said Kish. “Those peasants are so superstitious that any fake magician can intimidate them.”

  “All in all,” said Betty, “the people are in a fighting mood. It spells trouble ahead for a certain headstrong young patesi named Jipfur.”

  Kish and I escorted Betty to Borbel and hied ourselves on to Babylon before daybreak. We entered the palace separately, hoping to escape notice.

  I had just closed the heavy wooden door of my room when a knock sounded. A guard escorted me to Jipfur’s council room.

  Jipfur sat at the head of the ebony table between yellow candles, looking sleepless and worried. Three or four of his advisers were talking with him as I entered. He scowled from under his towsled black hair and barked at me.

  “Hal, your position as patesi’s attendant has ended. The troubles are cropping up too fast in the complaint department, and so—”

  He paused for a draft of air through his thick lips. I stared at him, thinking how his thick, handsome face would have looked if I had plunged that knife in his back.

  “Since you were a protégé of Slaf-Carch,” he said, “I hereby promote you to the rank of Minister. You begin work tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER VI

  Rumors swept through Babylon like a devastating sandstorm: Slaves and peasants who had been loyal workers for Slaf-Carch were harboring angry suspicions. They were holding secret meetings.

  This news sifted through the glazed hallways of Jipfur’s palace with the chill of an oncoming blizzard.

  Jipfur called the Serpents in for a session behind closed doors. The business end of the palace became a chaos of conferences—some with bankers and merchants—some with military guards—some with alley rats. The magnificent Jipfur was in a jam, and he reached out for moral support in all directions. He doubled his military guard. He increased his Serpent gang from three to six.

  Meanwhile I took over the duties of Minister of Complaints, a job that was ninety-nine percent hot water. My appointment was a clever maneuver on Jipfurs’ part, aimed to quiet the complaints of Slaf-Carch’s old followers. For it was well known that “Hal, the young foreigner” had stood in good stead with Slaf-Carch.

  But I had no panacea for the growing unrest. I could feel trouble coming on. It came—a year of it—in a series of roaring avalanches.

  Jipfur spent six violent weeks reorganizing, and among other changes he was forced to appoint two additional clean-up men to take care of his own offices. They were needed to scoop up the thousands of clay tablets that he smashed all over the floors. Tablets were pulverized by the ton in his constant shifting of business deals and countermanding of orders.

  Jipfur, I soon realized, was on the ragged edge of cracking up.

  My new office, located in the business end of the palace, gave me an inside track on his affairs. He was at once the most interesting and the most perturbing case of human explosion I ever witnessed.

  Back of it all was Slaf-Carch’s mysterious voice. Whether it spoke to him daily or only at rare intervals no one knew. But all the wealth and power in Babylon can’t soothe a man If he thinks that the uncle he murdered is watching over his shoulder, waiting for a chance to vociferously bawl him out in public.

  Besides the hot coals of guilt that scorched the bull moose’s backbone, there was the stab of defeat through his heart—assuming he had a heart. Temporarily he had lost Betty. And I’ll never forget the volcano of rage that roared out of his office that morning when his aristocratic sister dropped in to ask him why he had postponed assigning the yellow-haired slave wench, and then tried to kid him about it.

  “There will be another fall, Jipfur,” the voice of Slaf-Carch had said.

  Those words were the torch that lighted Jipfur’s mind—the blowtorch that ignited his actions during the year’s seasons that followed.

  Across a ten-foot patch of palace wall a clay calendar was built. This was Jipfur’s crafty device for impressing Betty with his lustful will. He transferred her from Borbel to this palace, presented her with a dainty brass hatchet, and commanded that she chop out a number from the clay calendar for every day that passed.

  The ring of the little brass hatchet would frequently bring Jipfur striding out to the calendar, smiling arrogantly at her, gloating that time was marching on. Another fall would come.

  This daily exercise became the bane of Betty’s existence.

  “I could sink that hatchet in his dizzy skull,” she confided to Kish and me.

  Kish and I breakfasted with Betty these days. Our threesome, wedged into the morning’s schedule before the big shots were up, was the bright spot of the day. Betty said it was all that kept her courage up.

  Nominally, her job was to manage the table service for Jipfur, his sister, and their clique of dignitaries—and to take care of the calendar.

  But her knowledge of diet and her skill at preparing unheard-of dishes soon won for her the enviable position of Supervisor of Culinary Arts.

  “You’re both coming up in the Babylonian world,” Kish remarked.

  “And why not?” I commented. “We may be foreigners, but Betty’s heart and soul are right here in Babylon—”

  “No!” Betty exclaimed. “I want to go back home!”

  “Home?” I said, in blank surprise at her outburst. “Do you mean Borbel?”

  “I mean home,” she said. “My own land—my own times!”

  I stared at her in amazement. She suddenly gave way to tears.

  I couldn’t have been any more surprised if Slaf-Carch had whispered in my ears. There she sat sobbing, like a child. At this moment she was a child.

  Neither Kish nor I knew how to handle an emergency of this kind, but Kish quickly excused himself, and I sort of brushed her eyes with my handkerchief. Then my arms were around her and I was kissing her.

  That moment would have cost me a visit to the lions’ dens if Jipfur had burst in on us. But he didn’t, thank Marduk and all the little gods! And so, out of that unfinished breakfast, came a new understanding—and for a short moment a new plan of action.

  “Betty, if I just had a timetable of the return trips, we’d get aboard the first train.”

  I shouldn’t have said it, for I only brought back the hopelessness of our situation more cruelly. But then and there Betty told me something that offered a tiny clue—not what you’d call a floodlight of hope, but a spark.

  The time device had appeared before her eyes once—possibly twice—since she had been stranded here. It had happened two years ago—she had seen the hoops of light flash down on a hilltop. And again, not so many months in the past, she had seen a midnight flash descend to the top of the Tower-of-Babel ziggurat that might have been—“The rule, you know,” she said, “was that the time device would seek out the highest points of a landscape.”

  “I’ve no doubt the thing has hopped all over the Fertile Crescent. But how we’re going to know when and where—”

  “It’s really quite impossible,” she said. “I needn’t have mentioned it.” And with that our spark of hope burnt out. We scarcely mentioned the matter again, though Betty once alluded to her momentary weakness as a silly fear that she might get appendicitis or have to have a tooth pulled—and she hated Babylonian doctors. But concerning her real fear—the growing j terror of Jipfur—she said not a word.

  There was one thing t
hat I knew ta, do, and I did it.

  My new position ranked me high above the common slave I had once been, and invested me with the authority to employ personal servants. I handpicked a dozen men, gave them a clear description of the luminous time hoops that might come out of the sky—much to their bewilderment—and stationed them on hilltops and ziggurrats to keep watch, maintaining day and night shifts.

  From month to month I checked up on them, rewarding the alert ones, discharging the indolent. At last I had a faithful staff who understood what was wanted. Years might pass, but if ever the time hoops began to strike in this vicinity, these men would break their necks to get word to me.

  Betty had a case of homesickness that was pitiful to see. Perhaps it all stemmed from her fear of Jipfur. Every new square she chopped off the calendar sharpened her dread of Babylon, quickened her hopes of going back “home.”

  On the day we secretly designated as Christmas she was deep in the blues. For three years she’d passed Christmas without giving it a thought—a natural thing, considering that the first Christmas was still five and a half centuries in the future.

  But this time nostalgia had her in its morbid grip, and she couldn’t free herself until she resolved to do something about it—something to express good will—even to her worst enemies—in the old familiar Christmas spirit.

  I had a bright idea that we give gifts, and I went to no end of trouble to fix up something very special. Out of the best metals and chemicals I could bring together I constructed a small but powerful dry cell battery—one that would fit the vocoder. (I thought it was high time for the ghost of Slaf-Carch to break his long silence!) Imagine my consternation, a week after “Christmas,” to discover that Betty had emptied half of the battery’s contents and was trying to grow a hothouse flower in it.

  She gave Kish and me each an ivory comb—really fine gifts for these times. She bestowed trinkets on several of her palace friends. But most oddly, she took great pains in carving a small neck ornament for Jipfur. From a thin sheet of brass she made a chain of letters that spelled “Bull Moose.” Of course only she and I knew the meaning of the ornament, though we tried to share the joke with Kish.