City of the Plague God

by Sarwat Chadda

  “Are you sure he’s got the right Mohammed? It is the most common boy’s name in the world. There has to be a mistake. Mo would never steal.”

  “Perhaps he sent something home to you or your parents? To Daoud?”

  “The only things he ever sent were seeds and plant cuttings for me to grow. I tried, but…” I blushed, thinking of all the pots that had remained barren and the fruitless work I’d done at the community garden. “Gardening’s not exactly easy.”

  Belet scoffed. “You put seeds in soil and water them. Sounds exceedingly easy.”

  Ishtar patted my hand. “Not everything survives transplanting. What prospers in one place may wither in another.”

  That was pretty much the best description of my gardening efforts ever. “But Nergal thinks Mo sent me…what? The Holy Grail?”

  “I can assure you the Holy Grail is quite safe in London,” said Ishtar. “Now, I know you loved your brother, and we don’t want to think ill of anyone we love, but this is important. Mohammed must have taken something precious from Iraq. I’m not saying he looted a museum, but he must have found something to drag Nergal out of Kurnugi.”

  “You’re wrong! My brother never stole anything. Ever.”

  Ishtar sighed. “I know how love can make you blind. Your brother must have taken—”

  “He did not!” I cried.

  Ishtar stood up and the light seemed to warp around her. I could feel a tremor in my bones, and the mugs rattled on the table. “Sikander, do not—”

  “Mother,” snapped Belet. “Stop it. Right now.”

  She did. The mugs settled, and my pulse rate stopped heading toward a heart attack. I couldn’t believe how quickly things had just flipped. I had to keep reminding myself of what Ishtar really was: a goddess of violence.

  “If Sik says his brother never stole anything, then that’s it,” said Belet. “You need to have more faith in people.”

  That sounded funny coming from Belet.

  But Ishtar didn’t laugh. She poured her untouched hot chocolate down the sink and said, “Gods do not need to have faith in people. People need to have faith in their gods.”

  “This is ridiculous,” I said, clutching one end of my mattress. “I do not need a babysitter.”

  “It was Mother’s idea, not mine.” Belet held the other end as we maneuvered it down the hall. “And she’s sorry about losing her temper and nearly annihilating you.”

  “What? Did you say ‘annihilating’?”

  “She apologized, and that’s what’s important,” Belet said hurriedly. “Look, I can’t protect you if you’re on the opposite side of the house.”

  I frowned. “And you’re ready to fight dressed like that?”

  Belet stopped. “Dressed like what?”

  “You’re wearing unicorn footie pajamas, Belet.”

  “So?”

  “You have a tail and a horn. They’re pink.” I tried to be diplomatic about this. “It’s just not a look I associate with you. I was expecting something more Xena, Warrior Princess than…Disney princess.”

  She flicked the horn on her hood. “But unicorns are the deadliest, fiercest, and most bloodthirsty of all creatures, both mundane and supernatural. Their kill ratio is six times higher than a dragon’s.”

  “Really?” Wow, she really did have a different view of the world.

  “One stab with a unicorn horn and it’s over. Doesn’t matter how big and scaly you are. Mother had one when she lived in Camelot.” She reached for the knob of her bedroom door. “In here.”

  The two of us struggled to drag in the queen mattress and dropped it in the middle of the floor.

  “My room’s bigger,” I said, looking around. “And has actual furniture.”

  All Belet had was a small table, a single twin bed, and a Louis Vuitton steamer trunk. Oh, and Kasusu on its sword stand. It was worrying how inseparable they were.

  “What’s the point?” said Belet. “We’ll be gone from here soon enough. I think we’re headed to Beijing after all this is over.”

  “Oh.” I’d just started getting, I dunno, used to her being around. Then I reminded myself we weren’t friends. Not real ones. Why should I be bothered if she left? “That must be cool, a new city every couple months. Your life’s one big adventure. I wish I could go away, even for just a little while.”

  Belet handed me a pillow. “You don’t take holidays?”

  “Running a restaurant is hard. Spend a week at Disney World, and when you come back all your customers have gone elsewhere. Mo was the one who traveled. I stayed to, y’know, help out.”

  “You never wanted to go with your brother?”

  “I thought I would. Inshallah.”

  “But he never invited you along?”

  “I think he was waiting for when I was a little older.” Whenever Mo had started planning a summer trip, I’d think, Maybe this is the one. This time we’ll go together and have our one big adventure. “Flights are expensive, and we couldn’t both be away from the deli.” I shrugged. “You know how it is.”

  “At least you have a home, Sik.” When Belet saw my expression, she added, “You will again, when it gets cleaned up.” She tapped her massive trunk. “You’ll have a permanent place to put out all your things and enjoy them. That’s more than many people have.”

  “All you need are a few pictures.” It didn’t take much to make a home. Just memories.

  “I have one. Right by the bed.” Belet pointed to a small photo in a frame on the nightstand. The photo had creases in it from being folded.

  It looked much loved.

  Belet picked it up and held it out to me. “The best picture in the world.”

  A man stood with his arm draped over his wife’s shoulder, smiling easily. She was in the midst of laughing, her head thrown back and one hand catching a lock of hair that had slipped from her hijab. Behind them was a wall of emerald-green leaves sprinkled with white orchids.

  “They look happy.” I handed the precious photo back.

  Belet brushed her finger lightly over the glass, as if she could still feel them. “My father was Dr. Faisal Amari. He worked at a children’s hospital in Baghdad. My mother was Nadia, a civil engineer. Everyone told them to leave the city before it was too late, but they didn’t. There were people who needed them.” She paused as she gazed at the wrinkled picture. “They loved each other very much.”

  “Did you ever try and find any relatives? They must have had some brothers or sisters?”

  She shook her head. “I never found any. They’d only been married a year and had a small apartment in the Mansour district.”

  “Mansour?” I laughed. “That’s where my grandpa lived. How about that? In another life, we might have been neighbors. Hey, maybe they even knew him? He was pretty famous around there. Captain Heropants.”

  “Heropants? What are you talking about?”

  “This was right in the middle of the war. The US army had taken Baghdad, but things were really dangerous.” I pulled the tale from the memory bank, but it wasn’t hard. Every refugee had a war story; this was the one my parents must have told me a thousand times over. “Our neighborhood had no water or power, but plenty of soldiers. It was all very tense, but we needed water and the Americans were controlling the supply. Grandpa decided to go speak to the soldiers, but they didn’t trust locals to get too close. There’d been a suicide bombing a few days earlier. You can hide a lot under a kaftan.”

  “So what did he do?”

  “Baba told me that Grandpa was a scrawny, short guy, just a lot of wrinkles and bone, and a mean temper. He wasn’t scared of anyone or anything. So he went out to see the soldiers, dressed only in his underwear.”

  Belet laughed. “You’re making this up.”

  “Bright red ones,” I added. “Just like Superman. Grandma was scandalized and demanded a divorce there and then. He got the water running, though.”

  Belet gazed at her photograph. “Mother gave me this. She pulled it from the
ruins of our home, along with me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Still, it must be cool having a goddess for a foster mom.”

  “Is that what you think? Half the time she can’t even remember my name.”

  “But she loves you, I can tell.”

  Belet scoffed. “She’s the goddess of love. She loves everyone and everything. You should see how excited she gets over a new pair of Jimmy Choos.”

  I was starting to understand why Belet did everything so hard. She was always trying to be noticed by a distracted goddess, and to be worthy of her love.

  Belet’s demeanor changed. “I should be more grateful for her rescuing me. You have no idea what some girls have to do to survive war. I owe her my life. But how can I repay a goddess who already has everything?”

  “It’s not like that between parents and their kids.”

  “Could the both of you please shut up?” said Kasusu.

  Belet stared at her sword. “You shouldn’t be listening.”

  “Honestly. Do you think King Arthur sat at the Round Table whining like you two? No! He’d just pick up a shield, and we’d go out and kill a giant! That’s how you deal with a problem, girl! You hit it very hard! Repeatedly!”

  “Some problems can’t be solved with violence,” I said.

  “You know what I call those problems?” sneered the sword.

  “No. What?”

  “Not problems,” the sword declared.

  “Life is simple when you’re a weapon of mass destruction,” said Belet.

  Kasusu snorted. “Life’s simple. Period.”

  Belet snored softly, and I stared at the ceiling.

  I couldn’t sleep. Too many thoughts were galloping through my head. Why was Nergal so convinced Mo had found something in Iraq? Had I been wrong about my brother? Was there some magical treasure hidden away back at the deli?

  No, there wasn’t. I’d trust him over a god any day of the week.

  But I still couldn’t sleep. I sat up. I needed to do something.

  Kasusu glistened.

  “Let Belet sleep,” I whispered.

  “If you need help, just scream.”

  “Will do.”

  The cats prowled the moonlit corridors as I explored. One would pace beside me, as if keeping guard, then pass the duty on to the next. Everywhere I went, a cat’s glowing eyes followed.

  “Hello, Sikander.”

  I almost jumped out of my skin.

  Ishtar stood in the shadows, smiling. It didn’t look like she was still mad at me. “Can’t sleep? Me neither.” She was dressed for a party, in a bloodred jacket, sleek embroidered pants, and six-inch high heels. “Gods don’t.”

  “At all?”

  She shook her head. “I wish I could. What a delight it must be to dream away the hours and wake up to a new day full of fresh possibilities.”

  “Sleeping’s a waste of time,” I said.

  “I have time to waste. Endless amounts of it.” She knelt down and stroked Sargon. “I use the quiet moments to listen to prayers.”

  “People still pray to you?”

  She laughed. “What? Has love gone from the world? Are there no more heartthrobs left? No screen goddesses to adore or cheerleaders to pine for?”

  “But you’re the goddess of war, too.”

  “I no longer listen to those prayers.” She patted a chaise lounge, and I sat down beside her. “I wish I could pray sometimes.”

  “What would you pray for?”

  I could see words forming on her lips, but then she stopped herself. “What do you think of Belet?”

  Uh-oh. I’d have to choose my words carefully. “She’s…intense.”

  “I’ve tried to tell her to be a little more accommodating, but she’s built a protective wall around herself. If she’d had a few siblings, perhaps she would have learned to trust other people. She still views herself as a war orphan.”

  “Orphans are tough. Just ask Bruce Wayne.”

  “Be her friend, Sikander. She will need you.”

  It sounded like Ishtar needed a friend just as much as her daughter did. “Er…how’s Daoud?”

  “Asleep. Three parties and a gallery launch tonight. He’s attracting a lot of attention.”

  I scowled. Why wasn’t she looking for Nergal?

  She must have caught my expression. “Trust me, Sikander. I know what I’m doing. Well, except when it comes to Belet. You would have thought I’d have this down perfectly by now. It’s hard being a single mother, even when you’re a goddess. I cannot imagine how you mortals manage it.”

  I recalled the little girl I’d seen in Ishtar’s World War II memory. “How many children have you raised? Before Belet?”

  She stood up. “Let me show you.”

  WE WENT INTO A ROOM DOWN THE HALL WHERE PAINTINGS and photos covered the walls so completely, there was barely an inch of wallpaper exposed. Shelves overflowed with scrolls and books, and cabinets were stuffed with…toys?

  In the nearest cupboard, I found a threadbare teddy bear and a G.I. Joe clutching a carved wooden rifle.

  “Thought you might discover the corpses of my previous husbands?” She smirked. “Sorry, but I keep them in a warehouse in Queens.”

  I hoped she was kidding.

  Hundreds of eyes, maybe even thousands, stared back at me from the walls. There were crude charcoal sketches on pieces of whitewashed plaster, carefully transplanted into a frame. On a piece of warped wood, I saw a faded painting of an old man in a toga. I paused at a yellowed photograph of a pair of Native American kids, one sitting on Ishtar’s lap, staring blank-eyed at the camera.

  “These are all your children?” I asked.

  Ishtar picked a small rag doll from a shelf. “This was Fimi’s. She was the only thing left living in her village—the militia had even killed the livestock. She’d spent two days hiding under her mother’s body.” She kissed the doll and replaced it gently.

  I’d never heard her like this. Her voice sounded so fragile, nothing like the Ishtar I thought I knew.

  She caught my gaze. “Not what you expect of a goddess, is it? I sometimes wonder what I truly am, how I came to exist. It is so easy to be called a god, yet I have my limits. More than you can imagine, Sikander.”

  “But think about everything you can do. The fact you’re immortal. Who wouldn’t want what you have?”

  “Immortality is a sickness—a cancer. Your cells renewing and renewing endlessly.” She stood in front of a small photograph in an oval frame. I could make out a smiling young man in a sailor’s hat, posing in front of the USS Arizona. “Jacob always dreamed of being a sailor.”

  I heard a deep sadness in her tone. “No mother ever gets over the loss of her child.”

  “Why do you do it?” I asked. “Take them in, knowing you’ll outlive them?”

  “I am the goddess of love. How can I not?”

  And the goddess of war. Was this her way of making amends for that role? Every warrior who died for her on the battlefield had left a devastated family behind. And she’d been at it for thousands of years.

  “The stories about you tend to focus on…other aspects of love.”

  Her laugh brightened the somber mood instantly. “Ah. You have to remember, many of the archaeologists were lonely Victorian men working far, far away from home and their wives. They tended to get…overexcited in their translations.”

  I looked at row after row of faces in photos, portraits, and sketches that stretched back in time—way, way back. Some were laughing, others gazed coolly at the viewer, others seemed distracted by something off to the side, not realizing that the moment would last forever. They came from all parts of the world. Some of her children weren’t young. In one shot, Ishtar sat in the shade of a cypress tree, holding an old man’s dark, wrinkled hand, his head as bowed as the branches. Yet he looked at me from beneath his red-checkered keffiyeh with eyes burning fiercely, refusing to be humbled by his age. Beside it was a photo of the same spot, though the pape
r had turned ocher with age, with a boy hanging upside down from those same branches while Ishtar laughed at his antics. I realized the old man and the boy were the same person—it was all in the eyes, the vitality undiminished despite the many decades.

  Ishtar joined me in looking at it. “Ahmed at his family’s orchard in Jordan. The boy wouldn’t sit still. He’d had a good life, Sikander, but wanted me to be with him at the end of it.”

  “How can you bear the pain?” I asked.

  She turned. “You tell me.”

  Tell her? How? I didn’t know how to begin. Mo had been my world, and the day he’d died, all the memories, all the great moments, had turned into an ache that still lingered. “I don’t have a choice. There are times I wish I could forget him. Forget what he meant to me.”

  “Listen to me, Sikander. There are only two things that are truly infinite, that transcend time and space. Love is one of them.”

  “And the other?”

  “That is not for mortals to know.” She gestured at a small frame. “Here’s Belet.”

  She couldn’t have been more than four or five, and she was glaring at the camera, her mouth turned down in a dangerous grimace. While dressed in a sparkly pink tutu.

  “Oh, wow. She is never going to forgive you for showing me this.”

  “Isn’t she sweet?” cooed Ishtar.

  Sweet wasn’t the word that sprang to my mind, but like all moms throughout history, Ishtar had a starry-eyed view of her child. And that’s how it should be with parents, right?

  The ballet teacher reflected in the mirror clutched her throat as if Belet was about to launch herself at her. Which, knowing Belet, was quite likely. “She hasn’t changed much, has she?” I asked.

  “Would you want her any other way?”

  Belet’s fierceness burned. You knew she would fight, no matter the odds, no matter how hopeless it all got. You wanted a Belet in your corner. As long as her blaze didn’t get out of hand and destroy everyone and everything.