Twilight in Babylon

by Frank, Suzanne

  “Tablet Father.”

  Human male determinative, with the symbol of the Tablet House. Whew. Two out of three.

  “Administrator,” he said.

  I didn’t learn this one, Chloe thought. It wasn’t on my list.

  “Accountant.”

  Damn. I can’t believe I studied the wrong thing. She scrawled the determinative… what was the symbol for numbers?

  “En.”

  “Merchant.”

  “Sailor.”

  Chloe sat through the rest of the test, all male humans, all words she didn’t know. The Elder Brother smiled at them, “Any questions?”

  Chloe raised her hand. “How come there were no females on this list?”

  * * *

  Shama felt sorry for Puabi—not because she hadn’t enjoyed herself thoroughly, but because afterward when she realized Kidu hadn’t returned, she had been lonely.

  He knew what it was like to be lonely. She suffered a different kind of loneliness than he did, but in truth it felt the same. He was particularly gentle with her hair, massaged oil into her skin, and fed her the choicest figs.

  “I cannot believe he just walked out,” she finally said. “Is it another woman?”

  Shama shook his head; the en had been stringently observing the rules Puabi had laid out for him: only one visit at a time for a woman. If she didn’t get pregnant then, she wasn’t going to. Puabi seemed to care very little about the consequences. And soon the season would change, and there would be no congressing with the en, except with Puabi.

  Babies were to be born in the season of cold and rest, not in the heat of harvesttime.

  “Watch him for me, Shama,” she said. “Last night, I think he got very sick. In fact, I think he almost died. His breath left, and it didn’t come back for a long time. I fell asleep waiting. Apparently it did return.”

  He hung golden hoops through her ears.

  “Even if he is en, he can’t leave me… in the middle!” Her breath, blown in Shama’s face from frustration, was acidic. Onions and opium had fermented into a bitter brew. He would stir cinnamon into her breakfast mint drink and add a dollop of crushed dates to sweeten her tongue. “Although… as long as I’ve known of Kidu, I can’t imagine him walking away from any willing woman. Even were he sick.” She shook her head, and Shama had to reset her diadem so it would sit evenly on her braided and coiled wig.

  A knock. She grabbed his hand. “If it’s him, I’m not available. But he better give you an excuse, a good one for this morning. But why should I care,” she asked, sitting back. “I’m the ensi, anyone I want is mine.”

  The knock was firmer. “It’s Rudi,” the person called.

  Puabi sagged in her chair. “Oh. Her.”

  The sisters greeted each other, and Shama was astonished, as ever, at the variety of physical forms that humans, even sisters, came in. Where Puabi was dark, Rudi was light. Where Rudi was stocky, Puabi was lithe. Though they had the same features, the same day of birth, they were opposites.

  Until one learned Puabi’s father was green-eyed and her mother was black-eyed; which made sense of the sisters.

  “Go check on him,” Puabi said to Shama. “Send in some wine.”

  He bid an acolyte fetch the ensi wine, and her sister beer. Rudi liked a beer for breakfast, she’d told him so. Puabi paid no attention to other humans’ likes or dislikes; as the ensi her thoughts were on greater things.

  Shama walked slowly; his hip had been stiff since he’d fallen at Kidu’s hand. Or it could have been New Year’s, going up and down all the stairs. The lower vaults where the statues’ clothes were kept were farther than he walked in a week, and he’d walked it five times in one day. Oh, for the days of his great-grandfather, when men didn’t ache so early and had congress with women until the day they died.

  Alas, the water of vitality was gone; the Deluge had accomplished that.

  Shama went to Kidu’s quarters. His female slaves were in various stages of undress as they cleaned his linens and crushed the herbs for his incense. He wasn’t in his audience chamber, and the line of women outside was long and growing irritable. The sun was well into the sky; the en should be there to fulfill his duties. Where was he?

  Shama wandered the offices of the temple complex. The pace of summer was beginning, so people moved more slowly, angered more quickly. And the grass beneath the palms was flattened by the commonwealth’s citizens’ rear ends since they rested more frequently.

  Shama crossed over the Euphrates bridge to the temple factories and storerooms. Occasionally Kidu wandered through there, looking for new conquests, though usually they came to him.

  The en wasn’t with the tanners, or the storehouse that kept leather goods for the temple and its thousands of employees. Nor with the dyers, the weavers, or spinners. Not in their warehouse, now empty since everyone got new clothes at the New Year. The brickmakers hadn’t seen him; the coppersmiths and silver workers shook their heads. Shama’s hip ached.

  He sat down in the common courtyard where the emmer, barley, legumes, and seeds were kept in sealed jars, in the event the crops failed and needed reseeding. The fields were full of workers, as the summer barley was in its next irrigation. No Kidu, and no one to ask if they’d seen him.

  Sweat stuck the felt of his skirt to his waist. Shama spied a soft patch of green beneath a clump of palms. No one was about, so he tottered over and lay down. The grass was cool and the earth still soft. Shama fell asleep in minutes.

  His last thought was strange, for he couldn’t tell some colors apart. Yet it seemed Kidu’s eyes had been a different shade of amber this dawn.

  I’m an old man, he told himself. Everything is deteriorating, and now my vision is going, too.

  * * *

  “You want to know why there were no human females on the list?” The Elder Brother looked at his copy. “Can anyone illumine Brother Chloe’s mind on this matter?”

  There was some rustling as the students looked around at each other. Finally, one little boy raised his hand.

  “Brother Roo?”

  “Several of these occupations could be filled by women.”

  “You don’t even have mother on this list. Goddess?” Chloe looked at the boys, who were watching her. “Wife? Not to mention priestess, felter, seamstress, cook, ale—”

  “Accountant could be answered as female,” one boy said.

  “Can lugal, or sailor or Tablet Father?” she asked.

  “Of course not,” the Elder Brother said.

  Chloe set down her stylus. “Then I’m afraid I have to protest this exam.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “I wasn’t properly prepared because I wasn’t told the exam would be exclusively about males.”

  “This is what happens when you let a girl in school,” some boy said.

  Chloe turned and looked at him, a big, burly boy of almost sixteen. “Yes, what happens is you can’t forget half the population is female. That’s what happens.” She looked around the classroom. “I bet, if you all asked your parents who should be on the list of humans, the answers they’d give would be at least half-female.” She looked from one face to another. “I dare you to ask your mothers and fathers.”

  “You are heard!” the Elder Brother said. “Tomorrow, we’ll examine again.”

  Much loud protesting.

  “—and at least half the answers will be female occupations. Though,” he said, looking at Chloe, “this is not an excuse on your part. Half will be males.”

  “Just like the world, truth?”

  * * *

  Ulu stepped into the courtyard; this was a house very much like hers. The layout was the same. Nothing else, she had to admit, was similar. A slave appeared, smiled, and guided her to the back room where the banquet was laid out.

  None of the guests had yet arrived, and she felt a little uncomfortable kissing her customer in these surroundings. He, however, did not.

  When she met him in the tavern, he was
always well lubricated with beer, emptied of stories, and aroused from watching her with other men since twilight. Here, it was still light. Guli had done her makeup by daylight, a precaution she was suddenly appreciating.

  “Does it feel different, being in my home?” he asked.

  “Where are your relatives? You don’t live alone, do you?”

  He shrugged. “My wife is visiting her family; she took the children and my second wife with her. To Eridu.”

  “Nice breezes in the springtime.”

  “You’ve been?”

  Ulu snickered. “No, but I’ve been with a lot of husbands while their wives have been.”

  He laughed, then explained the party, how it was going to be served.

  Each plate was painted, Ulu saw. The cups were glass—she’d congressed with a glassblower once who said anytime she wanted some glass to come see him. The linens were woven and so soft. His table was wood—very expensive. The chairs were carved, not just pieces of wood nailed together.

  Pots of flowers, bowls of incense, and little bowls of water.

  “Finger bowls,” he said. “It makes touching much more pleasant, without the meal’s grease.”

  She’d never thought of that.

  He led her upstairs, where each of the rooms had been swept. Each had rugs on the floors, cloth on the windows, with more flowers, more perfumes. Clothes were stored in trunks. Lamps were used, instead of torches. “My wife hates to clean oil-lamp smudges off the paint,” he said.

  “From our dalliances at the tavern, I had no idea you had such expensive taste,” Ulu said.

  “It’s why I like you,” he said, then kissed her. “You’re so delightfully lowlife and seedy.”

  Ulu looked around the comfortable, elegant home, then looked down at her feet on the even, swept, mudbrick floor. Dirty, scabbed, bare. The edge of her dress was stained with weeks of wearing, and the smell of her body was discernible despite the perfume of flowers and oils. Her nails were black, her wig cheap, and her breath smelled of onions.

  For the first time, Ulu saw herself as others did, especially Ezzi. And she knew shame.

  * * *

  Cheftu had survived one day; one day in a new place, new language, new customs, and new… well, his body definitely wasn’t his own. The urges he felt for any female, the fear he felt regarding his position, the fury he felt when thwarted in any little way, were so unlike Cheftu as he knew himself. They were Kidu.

  The body Cheftu now inhabited was an unoccupied body, for which Cheftu couldn’t find any reason. There were residual feelings and inclinations. Cheftu was going to have to fight against them. The most recurrent was a desire to slide into every woman he saw.

  What manner of man was this high priest? In the course of the day, Cheftu had concluded that was his newest career: apprentice high priest to the Moon god Sin. This meant the ensi, a woman named Puabi, was his overseer. And already Cheftu was in trouble—he’d left her on her own this morning. Not a diplomatic way to handle anything, he had to admit. A less than auspicious beginning. Especially since Kidu felt so strongly about her.

  He had to believe Chloe was here, that his being brought here was because this was where she had gone. In the mass of dark-haired, dark-eyed people, her green eyes and red hair should announce themselves in short order.

  Though why should she have the same body? She never had before.

  Her eyes, though, always were green. That had never been different.

  Why she had come here, he didn’t know. His prayers had been for her to find a necessary task, safety, security, and love. Those things must be here for her.

  He toyed with the cylinders that hung from his waist. They were an inch to two inches tall, and carved so that when they were rolled across clay they left an imprint. He knew cylinder seals had been popular in most ancient countries. They were a good alternative to a signature. The intriguing and frankly disheartening thing about these cylinders was—he couldn’t read them. The writing was familiar, but he didn’t know it.

  The same with the architecture—familiar, but only vaguely. Of course, the baked-brick mountains proclaimed he must be in the lands between the two rivers. Where in those lands, and when, he had no idea.

  It made no difference. Chloe was here, so it was where he wanted to be.

  He couldn’t explain how either of them had gotten there. After he’d noticed Chloe had traveled on the eve of a lunar eclipse in Jerusalem, Cheftu had considered whether or not the moon and its phases was a factor in their travel. Every day he’d sneak out of the caverns and listen to the seers’ predictions before bartering for some food and returning to the dark. When the city had anticipated a blood moon he’d prayed that he would be drawn to Chloe’s side.

  It worked. He believed.

  Thus, as much as Cheftu could tell, short of the hand of God Almighty plucking him up from that time and place, there was no escape.

  No escape from apologizing to the jilted priestess, either. Smooth over that relationship so he could begin his search for Chloe. A randy young priest should be able to find a green-eyed girl in a predominantly dark-eyed city within days. Perhaps hours.

  He touched the elaborately braided and coifed hair on his head, straightened the fall of his skirt, and left for Puabi’s quarters.

  The path he’d taken earlier had been quite different, but he had a sense of the temple grounds now. It was a sprawling complex that employed almost ten thousand people.

  Two acolytes played a dice game before Puabi’s door. Cheftu tapped, heard nothing, knocked again, and the door opened.

  All he saw were a pair of luxuriantly lashed green eyes. Chloe!

  He kissed her.

  Chapter Two

  So this is how it is!” Puabi shouted.

  The woman Cheftu kissed, kissed him back, then pushed him away. She glared at him and ran to the priestess’s side. “Your lover has lost his reason,” she said to Puabi. Then to Cheftu: “What was that for?”

  Cheftu was dazzled, confused, but unable to look away from the woman’s green eyes. “Chloe,” he said. “Ma chérie, Chloe.”

  The redheaded, green-eyed girl glared at him. “I don’t know your ruse today, Kidu, but do not put me in peril.”

  “You’re already in peril,” Puabi said. “I cannot believe this betrayal!”

  “Chloe, ma chérie?”

  “Stop calling that name,” Puabi said to him. “What is wrong with you?”

  “I told you opium was too strong, it would smoke his brains,” Rudi said.

  “He doesn’t have brains to smoke,” Puabi said. “He’s the high priest of fertility, not a justice. His task is what he does with his hips, not his head.”

  Cheftu’s euphoria was fading, and he felt shame and anger at her words—emotions from Kidu. Chloe, if it was Chloe, stared at him with righteous indignation, not recognition. Was she pretending? Puabi, his lover/employer, glared at him with disgust, and Shama, the chamber keeper, peered at him with confusion.

  “Who are you?” he asked the redhead directly.

  “I’ve been back for two months, Kidu,” she said. “You can’t have forgotten I’m Puabi’s sister.”

  Cheftu looked from face to face. Had his error been to wind up in the bed of the wrong sister? Did God make mistakes? “A priestess also?”

  Rudi stepped closer and looked up into his face. “Are you lost in drugs? I’m a stargazer. Do you remember nothing?”

  “Are you ill?” Puabi asked him. “Your eyes look pale.”

  Cheftu was beginning to feel ill, for certain. “Pale?” he said.

  “Fetch a mirror, Shama.”

  Cheftu plunked down on a carved, gold-plated armchair, and Rudi slipped a footstool beneath his feet. Puabi handed him a copper mirror, and he looked into it.

  By all the gods, he was a blonde.

  His eyes were his—Cheftu’s—bronze and brown. But his eyelashes were tawny, tipped with gold. And his beard was the color of late honey and elaborately curled. He
wore more gold beads than a dancing girl. Chloe would never recognize him; he wouldn’t recognize himself. “Do you have tweezers?” he asked the woman. Cheftu’s honey-colored brows merged above his nose and crept down it. Hair was everywhere.

  “What are tweezers?”

  Cheftu glanced at them. They, obviously, did not.

  Cheftu looked at himself. His chest was hairy, as were his arms and his shoulders. If he didn’t get a good Egyptian waxing soon, he would be crawling with lice and fleas. “I want a barber,” he said.

  Puabi snatched back the mirror. “Why tell me? I am not your slave, you have plenty of those. Most of them young and flexible, if I recall.”

  Cheftu looked at his hands; they looked like his if his were encased in large, furry gloves. He laced his fingers together.

  “Why are you here, anyway? Did I send for you?” Puabi asked.

  He kept his gaze on his fingers. “I came to apologize for… this, uh, dawn.”

  Puabi stilled. “Rudi, I will speak with you later. Shama, see her out.”

  When the two had left, Puabi sat down across from him. “It’s three days until your first official act. Perhaps you should spend some time in prayer and fasting. Away from opium and women.”

  Cheftu’s ears burned; he was horrified to be in the body of a man who had to be reprimanded for his behavior. Ignoble behavior at that. “I bow to your wisdom,” he said.

  “The chamber is already prepared, if you want to stay there. I can send Shama to bring you food.”

  Which chamber? Prepared for what?

  It would buy him two days at least. Two days until… Cheftu didn’t know. He was weary, he was aroused—a state he’d been in all day—and he was ravenous. Appetites Cheftu had always controlled seemed to be controlling him now. “Bring a lot,” he said. “I hunger.”

  “What? Oh,” she said. “Of course, you eat like most humans’ livestock. Which is why you are the priest of fertility.”

  The pieces began to fall into place. “How are the, uh, crops doing?” Cheftu asked, daring to look at her.