Twilight in Babylon

by Frank, Suzanne

  “The final irrigation is in two days. Have you not been listening?”

  “Uh,” he said.

  “I forget your beauty comes at the price of witlessness,” she said as she caressed his arm. “I am the ensi, remember? I am responsible for the fertility of the crops.”

  He nodded. “I am the en?”

  “You will be appointed by me, to be responsible for the fertility of the population.”

  Women had been lined up outside his office; the women lined up outside his chambers. Fertility priest. “I… I have—”

  She sighed and rolled her eyes. “You are to congress with my handmaidens and selected matrons from town. They are selected by their generosity to the temple and the gods,” she said in the tone of one speaking to an idiot.

  Mon Dieu, I am in trouble, Cheftu thought.

  “For the next two weeks, you are to save yourself for me. The ritual.”

  “Of course,” he said. Ritual what? Perhaps he didn’t want to know. Irrigating the crops, impregnating the population, and officiating at a ceremony in a select chamber sounded very much like the hieros gamos—Sacred Marriage—practice. Usually the male was killed after the consummation with the high priestess, to promote a good yield. Two weeks to save his carcass and find Chloe? Then what?

  Puabi moved behind him, and her strong fingers kneaded the muscles of his neck and shoulders. “Are you ill? Last night… I thought you had died. You seem so different today, I could believe you did, and a demon lives in your body now, brought by the dark of the moon.”

  Cheftu didn’t react. So that’s how he had ended up in this body; the real Kidu’s spirit had flown, and it had coincided with a lunar eclipse here. “I haven’t felt my best,” Cheftu said.

  Puabi tapped his shoulders. “I’ll send an exorcist and diviner to your rooms. Maybe the stargazer, too, though not the same one who decried me, and certainly not Rudi, but one of them. The commonwealth depends on your strength.”

  Was this the end of the season, or the beginning? “It seems uncommonly hot,” he said. “For it to be the end of year.”

  She sighed deeply. “Kidu, my brainless beauty, the year is only a quarter gone. These are the winter crops we’re bringing in. The summer crops are in the fields, beneath the earth.” Her voice grew harder. “Go to your chambers now, en Kidu. Shama will take you. No more opium, truth?”

  He looked at her. Puabi was worried, this dark-haired beauty. He didn’t have to feign confusion and stupidity, he certainly felt it. She seemed to be waiting for a response. “Truth,” he said, and left.

  Cheftu followed the old man through hallways and corridors, until he entered some large, lofty quarters. Food steamed on a table, and the linens of his bed were already laid and drawn back.

  “Leave me,” Cheftu said, and they did.

  Cheftu sank onto a chair and laid his head on his knees. When was he? Where was Chloe?

  What had he done to them?

  * * *

  Guli looked up as Ulu entered. She looked worn, and the roots of her red hair were long and brown. He winked at her as he finished curling his customer’s hair. The customer had paid in steamed fish for today and smoked fish he could sell on the morrow. The aroma had been teasing Guli’s nose for the past half double hour, but the customer had exceptionally fine hair that required a great amount of patience to get every curl to make and to stay.

  The customer’s hands were held palm upward—a Harrapan girl on the wharf had painted them, and the dye was drying.

  “There—” he said, laying the last curl. “You are beautiful.”

  He’d already painted her face, elongating her eyes with kohl and attempting to slim down her wide face with a little oil and ash shading. “Have a wonderful time tonight at the feast.” The customer’s aged sister was finally marrying, which meant it was finally possible that she herself could marry. What better time did the gods provide for her to meet her intended, than at the feast?

  “If good fortune strikes me, I’ll bring you barley cakes tomorrow,” she said, rising up on her toes to kiss his cheek.

  “If really good fortune strikes you,” Guli said, “you won’t rise from your bed!”

  The customer blushed, Ulu hooted with laughter, and Guli kissed the girl’s cheek. “Stay away from the hanging lamps. Stand only by those which are low.”

  “Low lamps,” the customer repeated. “I’m so nervous. Family is coming from everywhere. As far as Nippur.”

  Guli listened as he nudged her toward the door. She kissed him again, then set off down the street, wobbling in her festival shoes. He closed the door and turned to Ulu.

  “It’s been forever! How are you?” he asked, as they kissed. “What happened to your hair?”

  “So much,” she said, unpacking her basket. “I brought you dates—”

  “I love dates.”

  “I know this about you,” she said with a sly smile. “Also three days’ worth of peas, lentils, and an onion tart.”

  “Three days for an ordinary man is not three days for me,” he said.

  Ulu leaned back, squeezing her breasts together by crossing her arms at the waist. “I know well you are a man of extraordinary appetites. You’ll find the rations are substantial.”

  “Business is going well?”

  She sighed. “I couldn’t be doing better.”

  “Well sit here and tell me all about it,” he said, then tore a piece of bread. “What do you want me to do to you, in exchange for this bounty?”

  “Two things.”

  He finished the piece of bread and mopped mashed lentils up with another piece. “The first?”

  “Get rid of these roots. I’m embarrassed to be seen with myself.”

  He looked at her hair. “Are you red yet?”

  “I was considering brown.”

  “Ah, you want to be a Shemti?”

  She chuckled. “Truth be told, I am Shemti.”

  “Are we matching, below?” he asked, winking at her.

  “The gods have seen fit to do that work for you. Like I said, I truly am Shemti.”

  “I’ll need to go to the market, get some palm trunk to make the dye. What is the other thing you wanted?”

  “This other thing I’m doing, I want you to come with me.”

  “I’ve come with you many times, dear Ulu.”

  “Don’t be a rascal. I’ve been changing some things.”

  Guli’s eyebrows rose, and he tore off another piece of bread. “Go on.”

  “A whole new look, a whole new Ulu.” She swallowed. “You recognize fine things, I… I don’t.”

  Guli looked at the food—estimated its resale value. “Ulu, you know I would love to help you, but I can’t afford it.”

  “Viza again?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll pay you.”

  “Ulu—”

  “A few days of shopping. Some clothes, some furnishings. Please?”

  “I would love to go spend your money with you, but I can’t afford it.”

  “Are you going to have to sell the food I brought you?”

  “It’s this location,” he said. “It’s dreadful. I have those few who know where I am, but almost no foot traffic. Crocodiles surround me, I can’t find a way out.”

  “You could move in with me,” she said. “Your own rooms and everything.”

  Guli chewed the last piece of bread. If he were going to trade this food, he should stop eating it. “I can’t imagine the clients of Crooked Way would tolerate that,” he said. “Besides, I still have the agreement. It doesn’t matter what I do. I owe.”

  “Viza is a criminal,” she snapped. “You’re a good man!”

  “I did what I couldn’t afford,” he said, wrapping the rest of the food. “I just thought if I could get started—but, no matter.”

  “How far in debt are you?”

  “With that interest rate? I couldn’t sell myself into slavery and make it back.”

  She looked around the hous
e. “Not to slight your surroundings, Guli, but this space is hardly worth half of what you spend.”

  “Taxes,” he said. “They kill you with leasing. Then compounded interest. When I showed the scribe what I had done, he refused to look any further. He claimed he could do nothing.”

  “You want to stay out of the courts, I imagine.”

  Guli chuckled without mirth. “Far away. At least here I’m not stamping clay or digging ditches. I work inside now.” He touched his seal. “I’m a client of the commonwealth.”

  Ulu looked down.

  “At least for the next few days,” he said. “Come back tomorrow, and I’ll have your dye.”

  Ulu stood up. “I will. Guli, don’t sell the food. Eat it. You are too thin already.”

  He nodded, and she left. He closed the door behind her and turned back to the room. If he ate today, then when the other customer brought barley cakes he could take those to the dyer before breakfast and make the trade, be back here in time to open, with the brown dye.

  Maybe his destiny would change in the next two days. Maybe he could escape Viza.

  Guli opened the lentil paste and scooped up some. It had been made with fresh goat’s cheese and spices. Today he would eat; tomorrow. He glanced at the small altar in the back of his house. The crude figures had been payment in exchange for waxing a potter’s back and trimming his wife’s toenails. Guli supposed they were his personal god—gods? Doubtful, but desperate, he cracked a jar of beer and walked over to the altar.

  Sitting down heavily on his haunches, he poured a little beer before the male and female lumps of clay. “Please bring me currency,” he said. “Make Viza forget about me. Let me keep my business.”

  Their faces were gashes that approximated eyes and nose and mouth. They had no hands and stood stiffly. Guli had the sinking feeling he had just wasted two sips of beer.

  * * *

  “When you don’t know what to do, keep doing what you’re doing. You can make a U-turn if you have momentum, but if you stop, you’re doomed.” Chloe smiled. “I can’t believe I’m giving a pep talk to sheep.”

  It was early, or late, depending on one’s perspective of day and night. “Early, I guess,” she said to Kami, who was gnawing on some grass in her sleep. After finishing her homework—listing hundreds of male human occupations—Chloe had had both a headache and a hand cramp. But attending school was good, it kept her from pining away for Cheftu too much.

  “Who knows, if I was yanked out of my bed and dumped here, maybe he was, too.” Though no one seemed to recognize any nationalities other than Harrapan and the Black-Haired Ones themselves. “Maybe he’s in Egypt, and is on his way here.” It had happened before. “Of course, we chose to travel before. This was completely spontaneous.”

  If sheep could snore, hers were.

  Chloe stretched back on the grass, her arms above her head. “They have big sky in Texas, but nothing like this,” she said. In a pancake-flat land, the heavens looked like a -diamond-studded dome. Domes, she thought. These people have them already. In one of her design classes at university she’d been taught that domes were the invention of the Greeks.

  She heard some rustling on the other side of the skin-fence. In a practice that her body knew, but her mind didn’t, she tensed, her fingers gripping a clump of turf, preparing to throw. A clod of dirt would be confusing to a wild animal, disintegrating as it came toward him. Enough of it would stay solid, so he would also receive a wallop for his efforts. He’d reason it would be easier to eat someone else’s sheep.

  She listened intently, but didn’t hear anything else. After a moment, Chloe relaxed, her hand around the dirt. There was no moon now, and the night before had been a partial lunar eclipse. The students at school were buzzing before the Tablet Father arrived, wondering what that meant. The last sign from the moon had been the night of the flood.

  The night I arrived, Chloe thought. Apparently, I traveled on March 23. Now it is, as close as I can guess, May 25. Two months I’ve been gone. Does Cheftu wonder where I am? Does he miss me?

  “Shut up,” she said, sitting up. “Just don’t go there.” Hope for the best, she thought. He’ll be here. Just keep an eye open for a tawny-eyed, dark-haired, dark-skinned, intelligent man. Egyptian.

  And keep going to school and learning until then.

  “Someday my prince will come,” she told the sheep. They didn’t appreciate the sarcasm in her voice. She left for the city gate.

  * * *

  It was an innocent start. A knock at the door. Cheftu opened it. A woman threw herself at him, kissing his face, grabbing at his body. Someone else sucked on his fingers, and more hands than he could count caressed him.

  Kidu had no physical self-control.

  Cheftu extricated himself and got the door almost shut. Gilded-nail hands flapped in the narrow opening.

  “No,” he said to the pleading brown eyes attached to the hands. “You must go.”

  “I told you,” another one said, squeezing into view. “He wants me.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Me then.”

  “No, it’s me!”

  The mass of them pushed open the door, and he stepped back and raised his hand. They halted.

  “Not you either,” he said to the last woman.

  “Me?”

  “Me?”

  Cheftu looked around in exasperation. Women crowded the hallway and the outer room of his bedchamber. “No one,” he announced. “I want no one tonight.” Puabi had declared it. However—”Unless you happen to know a lost, green-eyed girl.”

  They looked at each other. “Does he mean Jesi?”

  “Durat?”

  “These are green-eyed women?” His pulse raced; could it be? “They are here?”

  “Well, Jesi is. She’s one of Tubal-Cain’s daughters, but comely anyway.”

  “Where is she?”

  “We could get her to come here,” one of the women, sneaky-looking and fair-haired, said.

  “The other one you mentioned, Dura?” Cheftu asked.

  “Durat. Well, she does have green eyes. Last I heard her travails were upon her.”

  “Delivered a boy-child,” another one said. “His left foot is curved.”

  “Poor Durat, the gods are envious of beauty.”

  Could Chloe be hiding in the body of a recently delivered woman? She could be anywhere. “I want to meet them both,” he said.

  “And what will you do for us?” the sneaky blonde said. “It is against our advantage to bring you someone else.”

  By the gods—“I have a preference for green-eyed women,” he said. “It cannot be helped.”

  “Since when?”

  “I’ve never heard that?”

  “No others allure you?” a brunette who did “allure” Kidu’s sensibilities said, slipping her hand over his bared arm. Damn Kidu’s responsive body. “When did that change?”

  “Are your abilities so great, you can please several women at once?” someone else asked.

  An image flashed through Cheftu’s mind: intertwined bodies, legs and arms moving in tandem; heat and fierce power filling his body. “Ah yes,” he said. “Kidu can do that.” It was truth; though it was certainly not Cheftu’s memory.

  “If we bring you a green-eyed woman, will you please us all?” the blonde said.

  “At the same time?”

  There would ten women, plus Chloe. Ha! She would kill him first; it wouldn’t matter.

  If he found Chloe, she could stake her claim and deal with these others. He grinned. She wouldn’t be pleased with him, but the means, in this case, justified the end. “Certainly. The more, the merrier.” He’d heard that somewhere.

  Probably from her.

  The flock of them left, and Cheftu closed the door, then dropped the bolt so he was locked safely in. And they were out.

  He picked up a goblet of finely carved obsidian, so delicate he could see the shadow of his finger through it. Would she know him, in this o
dd configuration of flesh and bone?

  He had to believe. Believe in the seven years they’d shared together. Believe in the fact they’d found each other through time and history twice before. Believe that they were here for a reason, and that they couldn’t accomplish it unless they were together.

  Believe.

  * * *

  The copper vase bounced off the wall, and the stargazers ducked its ricochet. The ensi’s attitude toward the heavenly signs hadn’t improved. Ezzi felt a tug on his cloak and stood up again.

  Puabi wasn’t painted gold today, so she looked pretty much like most black-haired women, he thought. She glared so fiercely at Asa, Ezzi couldn’t tell the color of her eyes.

  “You have no proof!” she said.

  “The time is approaching, ensi,” Asa said. “The stars are shifting in unknown patterns.”

  “Why would we presume that to be bad?”

  “The dikes are clogged, the river is silting up.”

  “That is because the slaves and overseers aren’t doing their jobs. I’m responsible for the weather and the crops. The lugal’s responsibility is for the economics and actual workmen. Go depose him.”

  There was a disturbance at the door. Puabi sat up straighter and looked at the men. “En Kidu joins us. As the high priest of fertility, he should be here.”

  They bowed as the en and his retinue of priests, scribes, and acolytes entered. Ezzi was struck by the difference in the man. They stood again, and Ezzi looked at the en. He was tall and broad like a hillside tree and golden, without paint. His eyes, which before had been half-closed in a slumbering face, were bright and sharp.

  They almost looked a different color.

  The ensi motioned for him to approach her, then made him sit in her chair and sat on his lap. The en’s expression was neutral, but he didn’t embrace her. His hands rested on the arms of the chair.

  Today, he was awake.

  “Continue,” she said to the stargazers.

  “I just came to warn you the time was approaching,” Asa said. “I do not threaten you, ensi. I am but a gentleman, fulfilling my responsibility to the commonwealth.”

  “What has the ensi done, that the gods require her dismissal?” the en asked. His words were precise, his inflection and tone like an Old Boy’s. Ezzi marveled at the change in the man. Was this the difference opium made?