The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  From then on Jipfur always wore the neck piece, though ignorant of its meaning. It was comical to see him try to restrain his immense pride. He was so sure this signified a growing bond of love between him and his yellow-haired slave girl that Betty suffered weeks of bitter regret for her overflow of good will.

  Rumors began to fly. It was quite possible, by Babylonian law, for a girl to be lifted out of slavery if any free man cared, to marry her. Perhaps Jipfur had postponed his assignment of the yellow-haired foreign girl last fall for a very special reason!

  The more I heard of this talk the more anxious I was to see the red flash of time-hoops.

  There was just enough winter in this semitropical valley for the more savage side of civilization to hibernate. But the warm winds of planting time soon unleashed the furies of Babylon’s pent-up frictions.

  A storm of distressing news swept into our palace. There was talk that Jipfur’s Borbel estate was slipping out of his control, that many of Slaf-Carch’s old slaves were getting out of hand.

  And there was stronger talk—whispering that Jipfur had never washed the bloodstains from his hands, and the gods were growing angry.

  Even his staunchest friends who had shouted his innocence from the housetops admitted that he had been criminally negligent about the matter. He should have at least forced a conviction and execution upon some promising suspect.

  These gruesome suggestions, I am sure, took root in Jipfur’s imagination. The evidence cropped up unexpectedly one morning.

  It was one of those dismal mornings with slow rain dripping rhythmically along the arcade of the inner garden. Betty and Kish and I had agreed at breakfast that nothing ever happened on a day like this.

  What might have happened, an hour later, if I hadn’t chanced to walk past the library, will never be known. Crossing through this secluded corner of the palace I heard a clatter of clay tablets. I rushed in. Strangely there were no candles burning—the only light filtered through the closely packed shelves of Babylonian literature along the narrow windows.

  Jipfur stood squarely before the shelves with a sturdy shepherd’s crook in his hands. He was using the crook-end on the stacks of clay tablets, jerking them down. A heap of them were broken on the floor, and out of that heap came a painful groan.

  “Kish!” I cried.

  Jipfur whirled on me, swung the shepherd’s crook at my head. I ducked. The thing struck the wall and more plates of clay clattered to the floor.

  Before I could catch any meaning out of this mad turmoil, Jipfur was bouncing tablets off my head and I was rushing him with fists. A missile cut me across the forehead and for an instant I thought I would join Kish and the rubbish heap on the floor. I sank for a count of three—my hand closed over a four pound slab of dried clay—my fingertips caught it Up by its fancy cuneiform indentations—my arm let it fly.

  That tablet may have been the Code of Hammurabi, for all I know. If it was, I broke the law. I broke it over the bull moose’s brawny elbow. He yowled with pain.

  “Guards! Guards!” he shrieked, and he waved his hands so defenselessly that I stopped my attack. “Guards! Guards!”

  Kish stopped groaning, shook off a quarter-ton of debris and raised his head. One eye was swollen shut, the other was wide open.

  “Yes! Call the guards!” Kish’s choked voice was bitter, mocking. “Call the guards. Tell them what happened.”

  Jipfur’s face was strange to see. It was a study in terror. Jipfur, the mighty patesi, the man of wealth, the patriot with the big voice, the leader of parades! He clutched the shelf with quivering hands, his white lips trembled.

  “I’m sick!” he hissed.

  Heavy footsteps were pounding toward us. The guards were coming on a run. On the instant Jipfur sprang toward a certain object near the door—a fresh, soft clay tablet still gleaming with moisture. He hurled it to the floor, stamped on it with his sandals to obliterate the writing.

  In came a squad of guards, puffing and snarling, ready with battle axes. What was the matter? Had there been a fight?

  “Did someone attack you, your honor?”

  Jipfur’s eyes turned to Kish, slowly, calculating the delicate balance of advantages.

  “There has been a trifling accident, men,” he said in an unruffled voice. “Help that poor fellow up.”

  Kish was nearer dead than alive as two of the guards led him away. But he distinctly echoed the word, “Accident!” under his breath—and it was not a kindly echo.

  As for the bull moose, he now lapsed into the luxury of raving and ranting like a mad man.

  “I’m sick! I’m sick! Take me to my bed and let the gods have mercy on me. These crashing walls have struck a dreadful malady through my bones.”

  They led him away, and the whole palace spent the rest of the week praying for him—at his command.

  Personally, I had no fear about his pulling through. His injuries amounted to no more than a cracked elbow and some bruises. There would have been a cracked skull if I had had more time. But he had taken such a quick escape to mock-illness that my good work had been cut short.

  Babylon gossip took his story at face value, namely that the rain had loosened the library walls and caused his stores of tablets to fall on himself and his attendant.

  But Kish had another story for Betty and me, as he lay bandaged, fighting death.

  The rain, he said, had played its part, but in a different way. A high pile of clay tablets might have killed him instantly. But the dampness stuck some of them and bungled the patesi’s neat plan.

  “I caught a glimpse of that freshly written document,” said Kish, referring to the wet tablet that the bull moose had so hastily stamped out. “It bore my seal—Jipfur had faked it—and it confessed that I had murdered Slaf-Carch to give my dear master more wealth. Now the painful memory of the deed drove me to take my own life.”

  “Your dear master!” Betty said with a saccharine whine. “He’d better not know that you know.”

  “He knows,” said Kish weakly. “He has warned me that if I breathe a word to anyone, he’ll cut my heart out.”

  CHAPTER VII

  “Get me a new doctor!”

  That, as the newscasts of Babylon went, was the quotation of the week. Friends would meet on the streets of Babylon and inquire about each other’s health, and their wives’ health, and the king’s health. When they got around to a certain wealthy young patesi’s health the conversation picked up interest.

  “I hear he called in three new physicians.”

  “Three! He had all of twelve. He’s calling doctors from all corners of the land. I think he’s crazy.”

  “I think he’s guilty.”

  And then the conversation would hush down, for it didn’t become common people to make charges that they didn’t have the money to prove.

  Kish absorbed all the antiseptic that Betty and I could concoct, and finally got back on his feet.

  Jipfur, meanwhile, grew steadily worse.

  On the day that I led Kish in for a visit, the bull moose was carrying on like a maniac. His attendants couldn’t quiet him.

  “If you came in to accuse me, get out!” he would roar.

  “We didn’t,” said Kish mildly. “We came to see how you were.”

  “You can’t tell me I was in the garden that night,” the bull moose went on. “There was no one in that garden. Old Slaf-Carch stoned himself to death, that’s what happened.”

  The doctor tried to soothe him. “No one’s accusing you. Stop making worries for yourself. Take some of these herbs—”

  “Marduk strike fire through your herbs!” Jipfur would shout. “I don’t want medicine. I want the hot flames removed from my head.”

  The doctors couldn’t work with him.

  That day Jipfur took a strange notion that men of magic might help. He ordered me to ride forth and find the Serpents. Not the last three, for they knew no magic; they were nothing but artists at badgering and threatening.

  �
��Find my first two Serpents. Yes, and that hunch-backed Third. We’ll see whether their magic is good. Bring each of them here—by force if necessary.”

  Outside the palace I was at the mercy of the motley street crowds. The hard feelings toward Jipfur would surely be hurled at me. I expected to be mobbed and lynched.

  But my reputation ran ahead of me—I was the pale-faced young foreigner that Slaf-Carch had befriended. I must be left unharmed.

  I spent three days chariot-cruising through farms on the Borbel side of Babylonia. I picked up the trail of the First Serpent several times, but failed to find him.

  The Second Serpent walked into my path and I carted him back to the palace. In all his rags and filth he pranced into Jipfur’s presence with an outlandish air of showmanship. He got out a bagful of magic boxes and colored feathers, and uncorked a rigmarole of incantations to unheard of gods, changing his facial mask with every change of gods.

  The more the Serpent prayed and pranced, the worse Jipfur felt.

  “Get out! I’ve had enough. Go back and hound the people. That’s all you fakirs are good for.”

  I stalled the fellow at the door to ask him a question. His magic boxes had reminded me of the vocoder and my foolishness in trading it off to a Babylonian junk man. I described the thing from all angles. But the Second Serpent had never seen it.

  I ran across Serpent Number Three in a busy market place. I recognized him by his enormous hunch-back; coming closer, I saw the grotesque mask of black-and-white circled eyes that I had remembered from my first glimpse of the trio in the marshes. Those ring-eyes had since become a familiar face to me from public meetings and parades that brought rich and riff-raff together.

  Serpent Number Three was engrossed in a cracker-barrel discussion of Babylonia’s economic system when I interrupted him. He turned his frozen ring-eyes on me. I wondered whether he was grinning or scowling inside the mask.

  He came.

  “Very fancy,” he commented, as we drove up to the front entrance of the palace. “You know we Serpents always enter through the tunnels under the inner court.”

  “You’re more than a Serpent today,” I said. “If you can tell Jipfur what’s wrong with him you’re more than a doctor.”

  As he hobbled out of my chariot I was amused at myself for having been so chatty with such a ragged creature—but after all, he was reasonably clean, and that set him apart from the other Serpents.

  I watched him ascend the steps past the scowling guards. For a man handicapped not only with a huge misproportioned back but also a peg leg, he carried himself with a remarkable bearing.

  Again I mused upon my vagaries of sympathy for a Serpent—indeed, it was admiration. However illogical, I began to wonder whether he might have a brand of magic up his sleeve that would shake Jipfur out of his nervous breakdown.

  But by the time I had turned my chariot over to the stable slaves and entered the palace, it was all over for the Third Serpent. He had shot his wad, point-blank, and blasted Jipfur into an unholy rage.

  Six guards with gleaming battle axes marched him down to a dungeon and locked him up.

  I turned to Kish. “How in the name of Marduk did he earn a jail term?”

  “He said that Jipfur’s trouble came from trying to carry too big a weight,” said Kish. “He said the weight was black guilt.”

  “That Serpent is nobody’s fool,” I said. “I wonder what he’s up to.”

  “He’s done,” said Kish. “The big boss booked him for an early execution—on religious grounds.”

  I gave up expecting any help from doctors and men of magic, though I went on searching fruitlessly for Serpent Number One. For more reasons than one Jipfur was anxious to see him.

  One day I returned to the palace to discover that a famous Egyptian wise man, sojourning with the Babylonian king, had paid a call to Jipfur, made the perfect diagnosis, prescribed the perfect cure.

  A fanfare of trumpets called all the officials of the palace into assembly, and Jipfur himself marched before us to announce the great news. The room grew tense with silence. Obviously the Egyptian wise man had struck upon something vital, for Jipfur was almost his old self again—straight, brittle, arrogant.

  “The flames that have tortured me are subsiding,” he said. “The gods be praised, I have been visited by one who saw through my troubles. I must break down a barrier which Slaf-Carch built before me.”

  Kish, sitting beside me at the rear of the room, whispered, “Here it comes!”

  “That barrier has been a trap for me. Some men can live in traps, but not Jipfur.”

  He filled his chest, tossed his head insolently.

  “All my life I have won everything I sought, I have wanted for nothing. In order to be myself I must never want for anything. To live, I must remove the barrier. That is what the wise man from Egypt told me. I shall obey him.”

  Jipfur paused for a brief breathless moment. Then—

  “No matter what the voice of Slaf-Carch has said—no matter what his voice may say—tomorrow I shall marry the yellow-haired foreigner girl named Betty.”

  A loud and boisterous cheer thundered through the room, and dignitaries leaped to their feet to call for drinks and feasts.

  I moved involuntarily toward the nearest exit, but Kish caught my arm and whispered, “Wait. Don’t hurry away. You’ll be seen. Besides, I’ve already taken care of everything.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  “You’re no chariot driver,” Jipfur snarled at me. “It’s no wonder you never found the First Serpent.”

  “Yes, your honor,” I said.

  “At the rate you’re going, you’ll never overtake her. She could outrun us on foot.”

  “Yes, your honor.”

  “Give me those reins. I’ll show you how to drive. I’ll wager in your foreign land the people travel no faster than the turtle crawls.”

  “Very true, your honor,” I said. Jipfur whipped up the horses, our chariot hummed along at a merry gait. He grumbled because Kish wasn’t able to attend him on this job. Only a cursed weakling, he growled, would let a few sore spots keep him off duty so long.

  For my part, I was quite content to make this wild-goose chase, as long as Kish would keep Betty hidden. That was his clever scheme—and he’d planted the trail so skillfully that the bull moose was sure he would overtake her somewhere beyond Borbel.

  “We’ve got to find her today,” Jipfur said for the twentieth time. “The people mustn’t know that she’s run away. She’d never live it down!”

  Actually, Betty hadn’t run away. At this moment she was hiding in the tunnels below the palace.

  But that hiding place couldn’t last long. Slaves were continually at work through these tunnels, carrying water for the fountain reservoirs. There were Serpents Four, Five, and Six—Jipfur’s confidential men—who entered at irregular intervals by these subterranean passages. And there was Serpent Number Three, of the hunch-back and wooden leg, a prisoner in an underground dungeon. He occupied a dangerous vantage point. How much he had seen of our clandestine maneuvers, how much he would tell to the guards was another mountain of worry.

  “Take these reins,” Jipfur snapped. “I’ve got things to think about. How can I think when I’m driving?”

  I took the reins and Jipfur ordered me to drive straight into Borbel.

  “We’ll pick up the First Serpent while we’re at it,” he said. “He’ll help us catch that runaway girl.”

  “Where will we find him?”

  “Right in the center of town. I can spot him in a street crowd as far as I can see.”

  As it happened, Jipfur made his boast good.

  We slowed up approaching a large crowd at the foot of the Borbel ziggurat. The center of attraction was the First Serpent.

  He stood on the first level of the ziggurat making a speech. The crowd was so engrossed that no one noticed our approach.

  “I’ve told you I want to confess!” he yelled. “By the gods, I’m going to con
fess! No matter what happens to me—or to someone else—I’ll be glad I’ve confessed!”

  A hard gasp escaped Jipfur’s lips. “The night it happened,” the First Serpent continued, as his spellbound audience leaned forward eagerly, “everything was pitch-dark. We approached the garden on foot—two of us—my master and I—”

  “Quick!” Jipfur whispered to me. “Swing the chariot around . . . Careful! . . . Now—drive back to Babylon as fast as you can go!”

  We slipped out of Borbel without creaking a wheel. Then we flew—and I mean flew. And Jipfur never said a word about the people in my foreign country being slow.

  All he said was, “Help me into the palace, Hal. I’m sick!”

  That night it was all over Babylon—the biggest news story of, the year: A Serpent had confessed before all Borbel. He had described precisely how he and his master—no other than the celebrated young patesi, Jipfur—had murdered Slaf-Carch! And the minute he had finished his speech the civil authorities had seized him, and burned him in a public bonfire!

  Now the throngs were gathering outside the palace of Jipfur, clamoring for him to appear and make his confession.

  Torchlight parades circled round and round. Shouting and rhythmic catcalls rang through the streets.

  Every life inside the palace was in danger. If this savage multitude turned to mob violence, Jipfur’s friends and foes alike would be trampled under foot or caught in racing flames.

  Jipfur’s order to his guards to “Disperse those howling idiots!” was no more effective than the barking of a dog. The guards shrugged in dismay. Their huge battle axes turned awkwardly in their hands. Though they had served Jipfur and his aristocratic sister all their lives, this ordeal shook their loyalties to the roots.

  Jipfur’s sister said she would walk out on the steps and cry her brother’s innocence. Never had her queenly dignity failed to impress the masses of common people.