Twilight in Babylon

by Frank, Suzanne

  “What about slaves? Most seem to be, well, the same race as the Black-Haired Ones.”

  “Slavery.” Ningal chuckled. “Slavery comes in several ways. Debt is the most common path. Anyone in debt can sell himself or a family member into slavery. Or any family member can be substituted for the debtor. And a slave can own slaves and property, have a business, a family, he just happens to be owned by someone else.

  “Then there are the temple slaves, who aren’t actually slaves at all. They were conceived by the high priest of fertility, the en, and when the women of the populace give birth, those children are dedicated to a life at the temple.”

  “They’re bred for slavery?”

  “Don’t be so alarmed. Within the temple come employment opportunities, same as in the commonwealth. Those humans aren’t raised by their parents, that’s the only difference. Oh, and of course, if they are not perfect, they are adopted by someone in the commonwealth. Only the most beautiful men may serve the goddess.”

  “What about the most beautiful women?”

  Ningal cocked his head, then spoke after a moment. “Inana is a jealous goddess, so she protects her position by stocking the temple with… less than appealing females. Nevertheless, they are flawless. No scars, no disfiguring or debilitating marks, perfect senses. They just… aren’t the loveliest to gaze upon.”

  Chloe flexed her fingers as she prepared to write. “So then, the council, composed of clients and gentlemen, meets and votes in the lugal and ensi?”

  “True, and then the ensi appoints the en.”

  “The freedmen and slaves are just stuck with the decisions.”

  “True.”

  “The women, too.”

  His expression was wry. “Are you trying to win permission to join the council, in addition to being allowed in the Tablet House?”

  “Females are in business all over town. What status are they?”

  “In Ur, they are freedmen.”

  “What if they own land, pay taxes, house slaves?”

  “Still, they’re freedmen.”

  “That’s unjust.”

  “In truth, they influence the men who vote, so they get their words in, just not formally.”

  “She who rocks the cradle rocks the vote?”

  Ningal frowned. “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing. Go to your meeting. If I go, it will just upset everyone. Especially my Tablet Father, who expects me to be able to read and write the forty humans on my list by dawn tomorrow.”

  She watched him leave, and had a sudden, almost-hysterical- desire to go too. Her legs wanted to get up by themselves. Will I stop at nothing to avoid this homework, she thought, and crossed her legs firmly. Then she pounded her clay flat, eased her fingers around the stylus and began her list. Determined. “Human. Male. Human. Female.”

  * * *

  Ulu rinsed her mouth, spat on the matting, weighed the stone against her carved-duck mina-weights, sighed, then stretched.

  “Stretch like that again, Ulu, and I’ll have to pay you even more,” her customer said, undoing the sash he’d just tied. “I’ll just be late for council.”

  Youth had its accommodations, but she’d made enough currency for the day and looked forward to sleeping in her own apartments, her own bed, and completely through the night. Still, this customer paid well. Deliberately she rubbed her mouth. “Tomorrow, my dear. You’ve exhausted me.”

  He laughed—he understood and acknowledged the graceful way she’d gotten out of it. Of course, grace and elegance was his way of life—except for needing her in the darkest of rooms in the daringest of ways. “I’ll plan on tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be waiting, with your beer.”

  “The courts are open late tomorrow,” he said. “I won’t be back before the double hour at midnight.”

  Ulu’s fingers drifted over her breast as she pinned her dress. “As you know, it’s a business of supply and demand.”

  He set another agate on the table. She moved it to the scale, weighed it against the carved duck, and smiled up at him. “A generous down payment. Your beer will be cool.”

  “As long as you are hot.”

  She blew a kiss at him as he walked out, then lay back on the bed after the door fell shut. Another knock almost immediately. “Not tonight,” she shouted.

  Disappointed noises.

  “Go away!”

  Footsteps retreated down the corridor.

  She knocked a roach off the scale—he weighed almost a half mina—and sat up. Another knock. “I’m finished for tonight!”

  Guli poked his head in.

  “Honeysweet!” she shrieked, sitting up, and crawling across the bed to him. “What happened to you?”

  He stepped inside. “Let’s just say, I don’t believe in the gods.”

  Ulu looked up at the mud-daubed palm fronds of the roof. “How can you doubt them?”

  “I don’t think they care for us, then,” he said.

  His face was wrecked. Split lip, one eye swollen shut, the other the color of raw meat in the marketplace. A gap in the front of his smile. His big hands were bruised, the skin split at the knuckles.

  “No one said they cared for us,” she said. “But they’re our masters.” Guli sat down on the bed with a wince and buried his head in her bosom. “Is this the work of Viza?” she asked as she rubbed his head.

  “Oh yes, Viza indeed.”

  “The shop?”

  “Ruined.” He sighed, and his hot breath burned her skin through the wool of her dress. “All the things I bought, to replace the ones they broke before. I can’t pay you back—”

  “Hush,” she said, rocking him back and forth. “Do you have a place to stay?”

  His arms went around her back and he hugged her. “I don’t need one.”

  “What do you mean? Guli, what are you thinking?” He didn’t answer, so she moved his hair, to be able to see his face. “Don’t do something stupid.”

  “I’ll have a home soon,” he said.

  “No! I thought you said it would do you no good to sell yourself.”

  “What do I have left?”

  “Be a gardener,” she said.

  He pulled away. “I hate gardening.”

  “You have such a gift for it.”

  “I want to be a hairdresser!”

  “Apparently it is not what the gods want.”

  He sat up, his back to her. “Anyway, I was just telling you, in case you went by. Viza has taken the house.”

  “Guli, wait. There must be something—”

  “I could kill him,” he said.

  “Then you would be back in the courts.”

  “Ningal would love to see me hanged,” he said.

  Ulu froze. She didn’t know the details about Guli’s life before she met him, but she knew he’d had a severe warning from a justice after serving two sentences for violent crimes. One more mistake, and Guli would be executed. “Justice Ningal?” He lived on her street.

  “Yes.” He stood there, shaking his head like an ox, side to side. “I can’t prove anything against Viza; they destroyed the documents.”

  “What about the public records?”

  “I signed copies for them, but now that I know Viza’s business practices, I doubt they were ever filed in the Office of Records.”

  “Do you want to stay with me tonight?” she asked.

  He looked around the rented room, and she knew he saw the bugs, the stains of spit, and other splotches on the matting. She hadn’t even rinsed. Guli was fastidious, not with Ezzi’s superior manner, but in relation to beauty. Guli needed loveliness, craved order. He was repulsed by grime and stench and coarseness. Even though he’d lived in it for a very long time.

  His nature was a gentleman’s, who was cursed with the temper of a scorpion.

  Doubly awful for him to be sold into slavery and live in the marshes, drinking the same water the buffaloes did.

  He pressed his lips to her hand. “Thank you, sweet, but no.” />
  She squeezed his hand; he held it for a moment, then let himself out quietly.

  Ulu sagged onto the bed and watched the roach crawl across the scale. She didn’t even know what god to bribe on Guli’s behalf.

  Chapter Four

  Cheftu left, following the aide back to his rooms. He’d been ratified; now he wanted sleep. He opened the door and moved through his dark apartments, into the bedroom. He shed his clothes, picked up a flagon of wine and his glass, then got into his bed. The small window let in the scents of the city and garden. It was over. He took a sip of wine and leaned back.

  Against a naked torso.

  The sensation was so warming, so confusing, that it took Cheftu a second before he leaped away—surrounded by women’s giggles. He lit a lamp and beheld them—three women, all undressed, all in his bed. Two he recognized.

  “Chloe?” he asked the one he’d never seen, an older, rounded woman, and held the lamp higher.

  She smiled, revealing blackened teeth.

  “Ma chérie?”

  Her eyes were green, but like the color of the darkest firs, not like emeralds.

  “We brought you your green-eyed girl. This is Jesi.” The sneaky-looking blonde kissed Jesi and turned to him. “Are you ready, Kidu?”

  Cheftu set the oil lamp down and stared back at the three women. They were certainly staring at him. “No.”

  “No? We had an agreement!”

  “I’m sorry, but the situation has changed.”

  “How is that? This is an infringement on an agreement between two—”

  He held up his hand to ward off her words. “There are grave omens,” he said. “I am the priest of fertility, and the barley ripens in the field. I can’t allow you lovely women,” he said, making eye contact with them all, “to deplete my strength. It would be unfair to the people of Ur.”

  The blonde cursed. The three of them stayed in his bed, and Cheftu crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “It would be dishonorable not to be concerned for the fields,” the blonde said. She spat the words. “Come along,” she said to the women. “We can’t stay here.”

  Cheftu ushered them out the door, dodging their questing hands and greedy mouths.

  “Our agreement is still in effect,” the blonde said before they left. “You are obligated to meet your side. Maybe not now, but as soon as the fields are in.”

  “Bring me a different green-eyed woman,” he said. Then he endured her kiss and shoved her out the door.

  His bed was ripe with the smell of the three women. He picked a spare blanket out of the trunk and threw it on the floor. If this was how Casanova lived, he had been beyond insane.

  * * *

  “Samana! Samana!”

  The cry began at the city gates, and Cheftu’s eyes popped open. Rust.

  In seconds, there was a pounding at his door. He was up and wrapped in his cloak by the time the acolyte opened his bedroom door. “En Kidu! There is rust!”

  “Send runners to the lugal.”

  “He is being informed as we speak.”

  “Run tell the ensi.”

  The boy hesitated, then bowed and ran out the door. Cheftu shut his gathering attendants in the outer chamber and took a moment to dig in his borrowed brain for details on rust.

  Barley mold, set on the ripening ears. It could ruin the whole crop, if it spread from field to field. Barley was the staple of the people in the plain. If the barley crop failed, or was even reduced by half, it could spell hard times for the plains dwellers.

  If it was reduced further, it could mean famine.

  Either way, Samana just confirmed that the ensi—whose responsibilities were crops and weather—was in disfavor with the gods.

  He threw open his door. “Call me a sledge,” Cheftu ordered. “We’re going to the fields.”

  * * *

  School was canceled.

  Some places had snow days; in Ur, they had rust days. The population spilled from the gates and into the fields. Though the people were shipwrights and merchants, craftsmen and scribes, no one was so far removed from farming that he couldn’t spot rust.

  Ningal was no exception, and he and Chloe joined the masses of quickly dressed residents picking their way carefully down the narrow ditches between the barley rows. Every ear had to be examined, every field scrutinized. The lugal rode the land on a donkey, moving slowly, scribes in his wake to make notes as the clients ran up to tell him which fields were clean and which weren’t.

  Any sign of rust on a stalk meant the stalk had to be cut down and burned, so not to infect the others. There was no singing, no joy as the people—mothers with children in slings, great-great-grandfathers with canes, boys and girls whose eyes were wide with fear, and young farmers who had used credit to plant their fields—threaded through the thousands of acres outside Ur.

  Gossip was that the great en and ensi had been to the fields at dawn, seen the damage, and were even now interceding with the gods.

  “Samana!” they would hear the call from one side, then “Samana!” from another.

  “It’s this,” Ningal said, pointing to the ear. Chloe crouched down and saw the reddish stripe on the leaf of the plant. He knelt and drew on the ground the sign for “poison.” “Go tell the lugal there is samana in this row.”

  Chloe noted the location, then inched down the narrow path beside the irrigation channel. It was hard to believe on such a beautiful, cloudless day, destruction was sighted. She reached the main path and saw the people standing five deep around the lugal’s donkey. Scribes took notes and sent priests to mark the rows. A cart from the far end was making its way down, to take away the poisoned stalks.

  “Cut it,” the scribes told people. “There’s too much. Cut it before it passes on.” She listened to them tell this several times, then ran back to her row and picked her way down it.

  “Ningal,” she called softly. He had knelt again, marked the spot. “Ningal!”

  He turned, and she hurried to him, staggered at the number of stalks he’d marked. The rust had spread evenly down the row. “We cut them,” she said. “There’s too many, they said.”

  “Do you have a blade?”

  Chloe produced a delicate bone knife she had bought with the rest of her wardrobe.

  “Make certain to get the root,” he said. “Don’t let it fall into the water and thus spread the rust, or touch the other stalks. Work from here down, I’ll work the other way. We’ll meet in the middle.”

  She nodded and knelt at the first symbol of poison. Barley had shallow roots, and her knife wasn’t as useful as a pronged fork would be, yet it worked. She laid the stalks on the ground, stepped over them and worked at the roots of another one. The sun climbed in the sky. The calls of “samana” had become the chorus of a very sad song. To her right, Ningal sweated and chopped. Between the two of them the row was decimated.

  Chloe bundled a stack of poisoned stalks together and carried them to the end of the row. Someone had laid sheeting on the ground so the stalks wouldn’t touch any dirt. She walked back to bundle some more. No one had stopped moving. There were no breaks for lunch and only the muddy ditch water to splash on her face and arms and wet her tongue as the day got hotter.

  “En Kidu!” someone called later. “En Kidu appears!”

  Chloe looked down her row and saw a line of priests, identifiable by their bald heads and fringed skirts. They walked two abreast. The words en Kidu raced like mice through the fields.

  The oxen that pulled his sledge were white, with golden rings through their noses and traces of red-and-blue leather. Priests in white and gold flanked him. She stood on tiptoe to see the great en, the high priest of the staged temple. What would a high priest of fertility look like?

  Ohmigod. He’s gorgeous.

  He was tall, broad, his fair hair was fixed back, and he wore a golden fillet. His beard was full.

  People called to him, and women screamed, like groupies at a concert. They prostrated themselves as he
passed. Chloe watched as he shook hands with the people, waved at them, smiled and blessed them.

  In her ancient travels, most of the priests and aristocracy ignored the people, especially in a procession. Then again, this was a democracy, and though the en wasn’t elected by the people, he must be aware of their power. The entourage could barely move for all the congestion. Chloe meandered down her row, transfixed by the man.

  In the sun, he was slick with sweat, which just made him look like an overdressed athlete, emphasizing the muscle and sinew of his arms and shoulders. She dumped her stalks on the sheet at the end of her row, and he glanced her way. “Bless you, client. We will win against the samana.” His smile was white-teethed and his voice low.

  She didn’t see his eyes, but she felt his magnetism. As she turned, he spoke to another person on the edge of another row, but she had the sensation of his eyes on her body, as strong as touch. The thought made her even warmer than the day, and she knelt by the stream to pat water on her face. When she looked up, he had moved a little farther, but glanced back at her. Their gazes met, and Chloe felt electricity zoom through her.

  She turned back at the water, willed her body to stop trembling. You are married, she told herself. Though he may be a thousand miles and a thousand years away, you made promises. You’re scoping out the high priest of fertility—have you lost your mind? She heard the jangle of the oxen’s bells as the sledge moved away, and breathed a sigh of relief. Back to the barley.

  * * *

  Cheftu watched the girl splash her face again and marveled at the grace with which she moved. Her hips swung with the unhurried sway of those who are used to carrying enormous bundles on their heads. All the women moved similarly, but most didn’t have long, lithe legs and high breasts that even a clumsy felt dress couldn’t disguise. Her headdress shadowed her eyes so all he could distinguish were full lips, high cheekbones, and skin that glowed with hard work and an African heritage.

  A man worked in the row with her, handsome, with a white beard and camel-colored skin. Her father? Her husband? The lust Kidu felt for all females had become almost an accustomed thing. But never before had Cheftu been intrigued by the details. To Kidu’s undiscerning palate, being female and having breath seemed to be the requirements for a bedmate. The girl was returning to her row. Cheftu gestured to the driver, and he drove the oxen forward, hiding her from Cheftu’s view completely.