Aurya
It was morning. The baker’s brick fires filled the courtyard with smoke, which made Aurya’s eyes smart.
‘And go where?’ Abil shouted, throwing his hands in the air. ‘Our lives are here. The library is here. And you want to leave it just for a dream you had!’
‘It’s not just the dream,’ Aurya said. ‘It’s everything. It’s like a stone in my shoe, like a piece of food in my teeth. Abil, let’s get on the next boat and head downriver. Let’s go to Babylon or Egypt – or to the Westlands.’
‘You think they don’t have slaves in Egypt?’ he said. ‘You think there aren’t wars in the Westlands?’
‘I don’t know, Abil. I just can’t shake this feeling.’
‘What’s changed with you? You used to love the city. You always used to talk about it. Ever since that day on the riverbank when you told me you’d always wanted to come here.’
What had changed? Aurya let her hand rest on her stomach.
‘Abil …’ She nearly told him.
‘I don’t want to hear any more about this. Nothing is going wrong in the city. It’s been a bad war, but I’ve lived here all my life. I know how it works. The empire will crush these enemies as it always has. The refugees will go back to their homes. Then things will go on as usual. And Aurya, our lives are here. You get to work in the library. You love the library, don’t you?’
He took her by both hands and looked her in the eyes.
‘Yes.’
‘And I’m doing translations for the King. This text I’m translating was baked before the flood. We’re touching great things every day we live here. The world is cruel, but we have to find the parts of it that aren’t. The parts that make the rest of it worth it.’
‘I know, but Abil …’
He sighed and turned away, grabbed his work things and left the house on his own. Aurya was alone at the top of the steps, breathing in the smell of charcoal and aniseed from two houses down. She stood there for a few moments, feeling the blood pound in her head. Then she ran down the stairs, into the courtyard and threw up in the drain. A woman, airing her clothes on the ledge of a high window, looked down at her and nodded knowingly.
‘Don’t tell anyone!’ Aurya called up to her, but the woman just kept nodding and went back indoors. Aurya washed her mouth out and went to work in the library, chewing some fennel seeds on the walk. She tried not to think about the argument with Abil. She felt the usual feeling of peace descend over her the moment she stepped into the shaded halls: a place of quiet, a place separate from the bloody business of the city outside.
She spent most of the day ordering and tidying tablets, fetching texts for the soothsayers and medicine men. It seemed a group of doctors were competing to cure the King’s nosebleeds: they were always coming in and asking for the same medical texts on bloodletting and poultices. Every time Aurya picked up a tablet, she thought about Abil, and her face flushed with anger and helplessness. But he was right: there would be slaves in Egypt too. There would be wars, too. And in the library, at least she could escape all of that. At least here she was at peace.
Later, more tablets arrived in a cart, swelling the library’s collection by several hundred.
‘Where did the King find all these?’ she asked the carter Sin-Zababa, but he only shrugged. He had lost what weight he had, and looked tired.
‘Out west. That’s what the tablet says.’
It took all day to go through them, placing the King’s official tag on each new book. It was mindless work, and while Aurya did it, she ran through her conversation with Abil again and again. She raised the tablets to her face, breathed in the air of the far-off lands. When she did, she thought she smelt a hint of smoke on these new tablets. But her sense of smell had changed recently as much as her taste. She put a hand on her stomach and prayed:
May Nabu enlighten me like a mask of gold,
May the dream I dream be good; may the dream I dream come true.
Towards evening, when most of the other workers had gone home and she thought she was alone in the library, she went quietly to the medical room, and searched through the shelves until she found what she was looking for. She took the tablet out and brushed away the dust.
‘“If a woman is pregnant and the top of her forehead is yellow, the child is a boy,”’ she muttered to herself, following the lines of text with her finger. ‘“If the top of her forehead is white and shines, the child is a girl.”’
A poet had left a bronze lamp on the table, and she tried to look at the reflection of her forehead wrapped around the dull metal. The colour of the lamp made it impossible to tell, though. Aurya placed a hand on her stomach. It was frightening: the feeling that her body wasn’t her own, but something that happened to her, unstoppable as a flooding river. She went back to the tablet.
‘If she has an appetite for foods preserved in vinegar, her child will be a boy. If she has an appetite for sweets, a girl.’
Aurya tried to feel what her appetite was, but before she could decide, a voice behind her said her name, making her jump.
‘It’s Aurya, isn’t it?’
She nearly dropped the tablet on the floor. She swung around to see a familiar face. It was the King’s servant and soothsayer Bel-Ibni, dressed in a typically fine robe of blue and gold threads. He was running his fingers along the edges of the tablets lined on the shelves, rustling the paper wrappings.
‘Yes, that’s right.’ She put the tablet back in its place, making sure the servant couldn’t see what it was about. Aurya hadn’t spoken with this man since her time at the workshop. She often saw him moving about with the same officious air, conducting the King’s will here and there in the city, but it had been years since he’d last found reason to talk to her.
‘I heard you spoke with the King the other day,’ he said blankly. Aurya didn’t know if this was a question or not, and the smooth lines of the man’s forehead gave no clue. ‘What did you speak about?’
‘About …’ Aurya’s mind raced. ‘About his dreams. And my brother.’
The servant gave her a hard look. He smoothed his moustache with fingers that had grown new gold rings since she’d last seen them. He watched her as if trying to read her.
‘Well, the King would like to talk to you.’
‘Right now?’
‘Yes. He’s waiting in the palace.’ Aurya’s insides moved.
‘What does his majesty want?’
‘I believe it’s about your brother. The stone carver.’
‘I don’t speak to my brother any more. We haven’t spoken for five years.’
‘Even so. The King wants to speak to you. Please come with me.’
Aurya hesitated, but Bel-Ibni didn’t give her another chance to protest. He turned off down the corridor. She shook her head and gathered up her things, put on her cloak. She followed him through the library halls, out on to the path leading to the palace, feeling suddenly afraid. The night was cold. In the ziggurat’s high chamber, the priests were performing some great rite that had taken days, and smoke rose from its altar, lit from beneath by fires. Their chanting drifted down to her, and the night insects flitted and fluttered.
‘Does my forehead look a certain colour to you?’ she asked Bel-Ibni, as they passed the guardhouse, and he looked at her as if she were mad.
‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing.’
They passed through the palace gate. No servants rushed through its shaded halls now, no courtiers whispered in the cloisters. The painted carvings along each wall still clamoured in a riot of bright colour: the reds and greens and yellows of crushed seashells, and of rare kinds of trees and flowers and beetles. In the patches of occasional lamplight, she saw the garden scene Sharo had helped to carve in the workshop five years before, now finished and fixed in place along the walls: the King lounging and raising his cup, the servants standing in attendance, with the trees and vines all around. The head hanging in the tree nearby. With the colours added to
the carving, it looked magnificent. Aurya thought she recognised Sharo’s work here and there: that living quality in the curling vines and the courtiers’ soft faces. Near to the throne room, they passed a long corridor, and Bel-Ibni stepped inside it for a moment.
‘Look,’ he said, gesturing. Small oil lamps were burning at intervals on the floor. There were no carvings in there: all the walls here were blank, just cavities of baked brick. ‘Here’s where the King’s next series of carvings is going to be placed,’ Bel-Ibni told her. She looked around the room, at the long lines of waiting spaces.
‘What are the carvings of?’
‘They will show the King in his chariot, hunting lions the way he used to, when he was young.’
‘Oh.’
The servant led her on to a pair of doors. He put his hand on the brass fittings, then paused for a moment before opening.
‘You have probably already seen that these days the King … is not the way he used to be. It is best not to anger him.’
With that warning, he pushed on the door; a waft of warm air, smelling of hay and wood smoke, breathed from inside. Aurya stepped into the room, and Bel-Ibni stayed outside, pulling the door closed behind her. She saw that it was a high vaulted space, full of statues. They were large and small, made of stones of all shades, some of metals that glinted in the dim light; some horned, some with the beaks of birds or the faces of monkeys; some with wide, frightened eyes of white ivory. The statues stood all around the room like a strange kind of audience. In front of them, the King sat in a long chair, with the greenish glow of burning sea wood lapping over him. His crumpled legs were covered, and he was reading from a tablet.
‘Come in, come in,’ the King croaked, and raised a hand to cover his scars. Aurya tried to remember the proper honorific.
‘My King, my lord, my sun. I am the dust upon which you step. Seven times and again seven times, I …’
‘It’s the river girl, isn’t it?’ the King murmured, cutting her off. Aurya coughed.
‘Yes. Bel-Ibni, your servant. He told me you wanted to speak to me.’ The King put down the tablet. Aurya’s gaze wandered around the wide eyes of the statues looming out of the dark, the frightful expressions on their faces. ‘My lord, what is this place?’
‘This? This is the house of broken idols. This is where we keep all the gods we take from our enemies. The gods we take from their shattered temples, their burnt-out palaces. We bring them back here to live out their lives, so they might serve us as they served their former masters. This one with the horns, we took from the people of the seacoast. This bird monster is from Egypt.’
‘They look sad.’
‘Perhaps they are. They’ve travelled a long way from the lands they used to rule.’ He coughed. ‘Just like you, little girl. You’ve come a long way, since that day on the riverbank.’
‘Yes, my lord. I have.’
‘Bel-Ibni tells me you’re indispensable in the library. One of our best workers. That you’ve been helping to order the new tablets as they come in. We should have a large load coming in soon. You’ll see.’
‘Yes, your majesty. Thank you. I’ve always loved those stories. It’s an honour to work with them.’
‘Yes, the stories,’ the King said. ‘I’ve always loved them too. This one especially. Have you read this one? The story of King Gilgamesh?’
‘No, my lord.’
‘But it’s the most famous story of all,’ the King said dreamily, his brow furrowing. ‘The first half I always love: the journey to defeat the demon Humbaba, the fight against the bull of heaven. And the second half, after the death of the wild man Enkidu … when the great king goes off in search of the secret to eternal life. How can you have missed it?’
‘My brother … he used to tell me the story. It was a way of calming him down. But he never got to finish it.’
‘Your brother …’ the King slurred.
‘Yes, my lord. I don’t think I want to know how the story ends.’
The King nodded.
‘I don’t want to think about my brother either. It’s why I haven’t set foot in Babylon, since we reclaimed it. Or my father’s palace, across the river, where the two of us grew up, running together through those halls. I always loved Babylon, you know. The glorious blue tiles of its gates, the shaded groves, the waterbirds. Of course now,’ he waved at his blanketed legs, ‘I can’t travel anywhere. I sit here and direct the happenings of the world, seeing only through the signs the gods choose to send me.’
He fluttered one hand at her, as if to say that she was one of these signs. Aurya shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
‘And while I sit here,’ he went on, ‘our empire flourishes. Our armies trample the lands of our enemies, scatter the bones of their ancestors, bring their gods back to Nineveh. And my artists – my artists are creating the finest works the world has ever seen.’
He coughed and cleared his throat.
‘And that’s why you want to speak to me,’ Aurya said, tingling with fear.
‘Your brother …’ The King’s eyes wandered off as if he could see through the walls, out into the city. ‘Your brother is refusing to perform his work. I have explained to him what I want him to carve, and he has refused.’
‘Can’t one of the other carvers do it for you?’ The King just laughed, cold and clear as a clapping hand. He spat some phlegm into the brazier with a hiss, and the light flickered across the faces of the surrounding statues.
‘There are no other carvers,’ he said. ‘What used to take a whole team of men now takes only one. All the others were reassigned, sent off to the far corners of the empire, to Dur-Sharrukin and Nimrud, to work on dull fortifications, to carve stone stelae on old hilltops. None of them can create work of the same beauty. The same detail.’
‘My lord, Sharo obeys strange gods. I haven’t spoken to him for years. What can I do to change his mind?’
She already knew what the answer would be.
‘Go and speak to him. Convince him to carve what I have ordered him to carve, and nothing else. Or I will lay down the sentence reserved for those who disobey their King. You know what that is, don’t you, girl?’
‘Yes,’ Aurya tried to say, but it came out as a hollow pipe. The King ran his fingers over the ancient marks in his tablet, and Aurya caught the glance of one statue with wide, frightened eyes.
‘And while you’re there, get him to tell you the rest of this story,’ the King said. ‘Maybe you can explain to me what it means in the end. We need the young … the young minds. For the future.’
The door creaked open and let in a bar of light from the hall. Around the room, the wide eyes of the captive gods lit up. Bel-Ibni beckoned.
‘I will take you to see your brother now,’ he said. Aurya’s stomach plunged.
‘Now?’
The servant nodded.
‘We should let his majesty get some rest.’
Aurya stepped out into the cool grey hall, with one last glance back at the idols imprisoned in the gloom of that room. Tiny bats were beginning to gather in the rafters. The servant closed the door on the King softly, careful not to make a sound.
‘It’s late,’ Aurya said. ‘Can’t we go in the morning?’
‘You know,’ the servant said, ‘It was only last month that our armies finally conquered Elam. His majesty told me for weeks how much he would like to be its king, how he wanted to wander its vineyards, to learn its language and read its books.’ He ran one of his ringed hands over his cheek. ‘Only days later, he gave the order to burn the whole land, to tear its cities down to stones, to scatter the bones of its kings and leave it to the gods of the ruins. Our men are still at work there as we speak.’
Aurya’s hand came up to her mouth.
‘What happened to the people there?’ Aurya whispered, but the servant ignored her.
‘I tell you this to show you how quickly the King’s moods change these days. That your brother is alive today shows how much respe
ct he commands in the palace. How much the King loves his work.’
‘But tomorrow …’
Bel-Ibni pursed his lips.
‘Tomorrow his majesty might feel less inclined to mercy.’
‘If that’s what you think, then let’s go. But my brother must be asleep by now.’
The servant shook his head slowly.
‘Your brother has changed a lot since you last saw him,’ he said, and ran a hand through his hair. ‘I’m told he hardly ever sleeps.’
They walked through the city with a band of soldiers, who shoved with their spear butts at the crowds that still gathered around the drinking places. People reeled in the lamplight of beer houses, rocked on wooden benches and sang, sobbed and snorted, fought in the mud, talked over each other, jabbing at the air with their fingers. They passed a band of refugees begging on the riverbank, desperate faces lit by torches. They soon reached the crown of the hill where the empty palace stood, the palace of the King’s father. A mass of memories passed over Aurya, after-images overlapping and erasing one another. She remembered the fearsome presence she’d once felt moving in the old halls. Already the dust was whipping up into the air in a great spiral, and she could hear a solitary chisel striking stone. Aurya prayed:
May Makhir, the god of dreams, settle upon my head,
Let me enter Beth-Saggil, the palace of the gods.
As they rounded the crest of the hill, the mason’s workshop came into view. Aurya saw drawings etched into the mud. They came one at a time at first: the scratched figure of a bird or a person, or a man with a donkey. As she got closer, the drawings sprawled everywhere in the clay earth, and where they reached the walls of nearby houses, they became charcoal etchings, climbing on every surface: drawings of a busy marketplace full of performing animals and bubbling crowds, the priests in the ziggurat performing their rituals, the herdsmen taking their animals through the water gate to drink – and lions, everywhere lions. Aurya’s skin tingled at the sight. As the mason’s workshop came into view, the chisel grew louder, and Aurya saw a solitary figure in a pool of torchlight at the centre of its courtyard, wrapped in a shawl and hunched over a huge piece of stone.
All Our Broken Idols Page 29
