Twilight in Babylon

by Frank, Suzanne

  The room wasn’t tall enough to stand up in, or long enough to take more than six steps. Memories of television she’d seen, photographs, flashed through her mind. POW camps, the cages captured soldiers were kept in. The stories of how the captives kept in shape, how they stayed sane, ran through her mind.

  Who helped that boy?

  Ningal had still been in bed when Chloe left. Kalam hadn’t arrived yet. The Tablet Father had sent her home—odd. But it could be he really was being considerate.

  Chloe lay down on the dirt packed floor and began to test the strength of the brick walls. She’d try each brick, then she would come up with a plan. Along the way she’d figure out who’d set her up.

  Chapter Three

  Cheftu was washing his face when the panel in his bedroom moved, then slid back. Shama stood there, coughing from the dust. Cheftu moved forward to help the man. Shama pushed a wheelbarrow, filled with even dustier tablets.

  He handed one to Cheftu, then took it back and rinsed its face off. He offered it back to Cheftu, who took it, mystified. Cheftu looked at the words, which made no sense. The tablet was obviously ancient, the signs even more complicated then than they were in the present.

  Shama touched him on the arm, then gestured from his throat.

  “Aloud?” Cheftu asked.

  The old man nodded enthusiastically.

  “My male human parent’s female human parent’s tame feline is a mighty catcher of four-legged field rodents.” Four lines of this same phrase. What meaning did this have? “My grandmother’s cat catches rats well?” Cheftu said, and looked up at Shama.

  He just smiled and nodded. Then he indicated Cheftu read it again.

  Cheftu frowned, and his hands grew slick with sweat as they gripped the edges of the clay. What was he supposed to understand? He read the sentence; then he read the paragraph that followed. “Again?” Cheftu asked the old man. What purpose did this serve?

  Shama nodded, and Cheftu read the first three words. Then Shama slipped his hand in front of Cheftu’s face, close to his eyes, just touching his nose. The man’s palms smelled of Puabi’s perfume and dust. He held his hand there and Cheftu waited. Slowly, he relaxed. His forehead smoothed out, his hands eased their hold, and he stared through the old man’s hand.

  Shama moved his palm away and Cheftu’s eyes didn’t react fast enough—he stared through the writing on the tablet. He saw the pattern. The hidden message that concentration could obscure, but relaxation and calm revealed. He blinked, and it vanished.

  He looked at the old man, who reached for the tablet, then laid it on the bed. He rinsed a second one for Cheftu. Now, Cheftu knew what to do. He focused his vision through the tablet and saw the pattern immediately: lines that intersected and paralleled each other.

  On a hunch, he laid the two tablets side by side. They connected in three places.

  He turned to the old man. “A map?”

  Shama shook his head. Cheftu took a few more tablets, rinsed them, and placed them next to the first two. “A plan?” he asked, when he had seven of them connected.

  The old man nodded.

  For the next two hours, Cheftu and Shama rinsed the tablets and built the image. When there were no more, Cheftu looked at the enormous architectural rendering in stone they’d created. “Where is this?”

  Shama pointed down.

  Then he crooked a finger, and Cheftu leaned over the tablets with him. Shama pointed to a drawing of a stick figure in a box. With his fingers Shama walked through the rooms, then out a narrow passageway. “Substitute.” His voice was as worn and dusty as the tablets.

  Cheftu looked at the tablets. A very crude crown was drawn on the head of the figure. “This has happened before,” Cheftu said.

  Shama nodded.

  “The substitute… escaped?”

  Shama nodded. Then he handed Cheftu a goblet, built of clay, with a wide base.

  * * *

  Ningal was frantic. Chloe had vanished like a dust storm. The Tablet Father said she hadn’t attended school. Kalam, who had informed him of her disappearance, had claimed she hadn’t come down to break her fast. “I assumed she was weary and stayed in bed.”

  The girl had been on fire to get back to school. She’d mastered her words. Ningal had seen her clay—and when she wrote to herself, she wrote sideways. For her homework, she wrote properly. Nevertheless, she’d been fearful she would forget what she’d learned if any more time passed. From the moment she woke up, she’d be practicing her words, expanding her vocabulary past what they’d taught her. She was learning foods and furniture, actions and intentions. And carefully writing everything down.

  They had settled into a comfortable routine. She usually was gone before he woke, but in the evening he’d be waiting with cool beer when she returned from school. They’d share the events of their days, then dine. While Ningal worked with Kalam on the list of lists or the next day’s schedule, Chloe would do her homework.

  Consequently, it had been two days since anyone had seen her. Ningal had thought they were missing each other. The slaves thought she was eating out. No one had thought to ask anyone else about her.

  “She left, Justice,” Kalam said. “That is why her rooms are cleared out.”

  It had been the most damning evidence: an empty room.

  “What about her sheep?” The sheep Ningal had personally rounded up after she’d been hurt. They had been left in the care of the commonwealth’s head sheepherder with strict orders not to let them out of his sight. Ningal didn’t want Chloe to lose her wealth, her independence.

  Kalam shrugged. “I don’t know. He said a few must have run away.”

  Sheep didn’t flee; they were led. Ningal looked away. He’d tried to ignore the signs, but they were too clear. Please, he prayed, give me an omen if I’m being too suspicious. His chest ached with betrayal.

  “Maybe she hit her head again, you know, opened the wound that garden fork made.”

  Ningal didn’t flinch, but his heart broke. Kalam couldn’t have known Chloe’s head wound was made with a garden fork unless he’d had something to do with it. Ningal hadn’t shared that information with anyone. I didn’t want a sign that I was right, Ningal complained to the deity. I wanted to know that I was wrong.

  “I can’t believe she left so abruptly,” Kalam said. “After you labored to get her into school, it’s the height of bad manners to go. I thought she was really committed to her ‘franchise’ idea.” He shook his head. “We can only trust our own kind, in the end.”

  Kalam was behind this; he knew where Chloe was. How could the man Ningal had loved as a son betray him so? Ningal needed to be as slippery as the first snake and wheedle it from him. How was I so blind to the nature of this human? he wondered. How did the root get so rotten?

  Kalam finished his wine in one swig. “Shall we go to the council meeting?”

  “I will meet you.”

  “Don’t worry for her,” Kalam said, his voice thick as honey with sentiment. “She will be fine. Best to see if she took your gold, in addition to her own.”

  Ningal looked into the face of the man who’d been his family, his protégé. Kalam didn’t realize he’d betrayed himself; his pride blinded him there, too.

  “I will meet you,” Ningal said, staring at the table once more. “Go now.”

  Kalam closed the courtyard door. Ningal called for his slave. “The morning that Chloe went missing, did Kalam come to the house?”

  She nodded. “Same as usual. Maybe a bit later. He seemed to be in and out.”

  Ningal nodded and rose. “Bring me my finest cloak,” he said. “And the golden basket hat.” Ningal had a meeting to attend.

  * * *

  “Clients, freedmen, slaves, and gentlemen,” the lugal said to the gathered council members. “We are in a grave situation. As you know, the rust has depleted our food source. We have no surplus. Stars are falling from heaven, the moon turned to blood, the stargazers predict worse. The portents for the
future are grim.”

  His eyes shone with tears, and Nimrod watched the corresponding reactions as each man realized a dire judgment loomed.

  “We have displeased the gods. As a community or individuals, I do not know. This I do know, the personification of Inana is going to intercede for us with Sin and the court of the skies.”

  There was rustling, worry, but the men were silent.

  “In five days’ time, Puabi will go meet her lover Sin in an eternal marriage—”

  Cries. Shouts. Declamations.

  “—the sun and moon will debate over the issue, with Puabi as a bartering device—”

  More shouting. It was almost impossible to hear the lugal.

  “—and we shall see if Ur will survive.”

  He waited until the group quieted. Nimrod watched them, men of circumstance and power, stripped free of their control by one thought of heaven.

  “I need from you all the accoutrements a goddess requires for a journey to heaven. All that we can offer, to barter with the gods.”

  “Do they threaten another Deluge?” someone asked.

  “The rainbow is their seal!” someone else protested. “They can’t break their contract!”

  The lugal held up his hand. “I do not know their threats. I do know they are displeased, and the skies reveal that displeasure. Go to your homes and businesses, and think of extreme forfeiture. If we don’t, there will be nothing to build on in the future. There will be no future.”

  As the men dispersed, the lugal mingled with them, asking this one to donate a sledge and that one to give his finest furniture. Puabi wasn’t being buried; she was being outfitted for a journey to an unknown world where the commonwealth hoped the trading system was the same. Nimrod looked up at the sky. It seemed benign, but the lugal said five days would bring disaster.

  Kalam bumped into Nimrod, his eyes wide with fear. “The ensi is going to die?” he asked.

  “Puabi is going to intercede for us. It is her duty to the commonwealth.” Nimrod repeated what his father had said in all twelve rehearsals he’d made Nimrod endure.

  “The gods would listen to a woman?”

  Nimrod stepped away. The Old Boy was so ignorant, so vain. “Before your parents’ parents walked, women were justices. They were the first. Inana is the queen of heaven because she is an honorable and even-handed ruler.”

  “What about the Deluge?”

  Nimrod sighed. Even Nirg, for all of being a mountain woman, knew these tales. “Some young god, whose bouts of drinking hurt his head, got violent at the noise the humans were making. He appealed to the god of gods, who looked down and saw how far humanity had fallen, how lost it had become. The god of gods decreed the world must be washed clean and begun again. Inana bartered so each man could live at least 120 years.” Ningal shrugged. “As her eloquence won him over, and his reasoning occurred to her, it was concluded the earth should be wiped clean, and when begun again, humans would have 120 years.”

  “What about Ziusudra?”

  “His family was the means to sustain life, so the gods didn’t have to make humans again.”

  “A female did this?”

  “Which is why a female journeys to heaven to argue for us again.”

  “If that’s the truth, why are there no women justices?” Kalam was trying to play a game with Nimrod; Nimrod was above games.

  “Perhaps because male humans’ blood runs too hot to listen to the reason of a female. We would rather solve a problem with fists instead of conversation. A spear is the choice, more often than a conciliatory drink. It’s easier to fight than to compromise.” Nirg had told him this often enough.

  But he wondered, what was the cause for the change, for females not to have an equal share in ruling, for men to promote bloodletting? What effect did those differences have on their cumulative humanity.

  We need to start again, he thought. Without 120 years as a guarantee; then maybe we would use our time and energies better.

  * * *

  Rudi heard footsteps outside her door before she heard the soft tap. She drew a cloak over her shoulders and opened the door. Immediately, she bowed. “Asa, stargazer,” she muttered, her voice still groggy with sleep.

  “Don your robes,” he said. “I have a task for you.”

  “Of course, sir, but… I am on suspension, if you don’t recall.”

  “No longer,” he said. “Be quick.”

  Rudi ran back to her room and threw on her stargazer’s robe, a cloak that fell from her neck to the floor, dyed dark with stars emblazoned on it. She’d been forbidden to wear it since the day after the blood moon.

  “What has happened?” she asked, as they walked down the torchlit corridor.

  “I need you to bring the en,” he said.

  “Bring him where?”

  Asa handed her a small tablet. “The location is written here. Bring him at dawn, if you will.”

  She bowed her head. Even now he didn’t trust her with actual information. She heard his footsteps fade on the stairs, then lifted the tablet to the light and read its directions. Why was she to bring the en to the marshes?

  Somewhere in the temple, the singers practiced. Soon, it would be dawn. Rudi recalled the location of the en’s rooms and set off for them. What was she going to say to persuade him?

  * * *

  Guli rose to his feet as the door opened. Two guards stood there. “You’re the hairdresser Guli?” a young stargazer asked.

  He nodded.

  “Come with us.”

  He followed them, and climbed up into the sledge. Rather than riding toward the gallows beside the southwestern gate, they drove through the gate in the tenemos walls of the temple grounds and into the back courtyard complex.

  Priests, acolytes, guards, stargazers, clients, gentlemen… they were all scurrying around in the early dawn, all glancing fearfully at the sky. Guli had been in the total darkness of the cell—but he found himself looking up also. The day seemed as any other—a prophecy of scorching heat. The stargazer said nothing, but his very attitude indicated that merely standing beside Guli was an insult.

  Weary of him, of them, of the system that condemned, Guli said nothing. What did it matter what they did, where? He was a dead man.

  He just couldn’t reason out why the sentence hadn’t been carried out, when it happened. Justice had never been slow before.

  The sledge halted, and the stargazer dismounted. “These are your things, I am told?” he asked as he pointed to Guli’s belongings—the remnants of his little shop, with additions Guli could never afford: a packet of gold dust, a blade with a metal edge, vials and pots he didn’t recognize.

  “Enter that room and prepare the lady for a great journey,” the stargazer said. “She is to be the goddess Inana.”

  Guli stepped toward the man, and the guards, spears pointed, stepped toward him. The stargazer’s expression was hard to read, but he seemed almost frightened. Guli bent slowly and picked up the bags with dyes and blade and curling tongs and backed to the door.

  “Open it,” the stargazer said.

  Guli lifted the bolt and stepped inside. “Hello?” he called. The smell of roasted meat and damp fleece greeted him. He blinked in the contrasting darkness. “Greetings?”

  A creature sitting against the wall raised its head. “Guli?”

  “Ulu?”

  The door slammed shut.

  * * *

  En Kidu opened the door before Rudi knocked. He was awake, clear-eyed, and dressed formally. To her surprise, he didn’t question her insistence and request. Instead, he sent the acolytes to retrieve a cart and onagers for travel.

  As the sky turned dark before the light of day, they were on their way out of the gates. Kidu was at the reins, and Rudi hung on to the sides of the vehicle as they bounced along the road at breakneck speed. Sledges were so much steadier, but slower.

  “It’s here,” she said a while later.

  In the middle of a palm grove, a foreigner
had built a palace.

  Asa himself opened the door. “I have our substitute,” he said to the en. “She awaits you.”

  Kidu looked puzzled. “A second substitute?” he asked, as they all walked to a shed in the back.

  Asa looked a little uncomfortable. “She is truly the one the gods require.”

  “Is she willing?”

  Asa turned to Rudi. “The night you missed the blood moon and were thus suspended, what night was it?”

  “The night the flood struck.”

  “And the skies warned of evil coming from the north, truth?”

  Rudi nodded. Kidu watched them both, inscrutable.

  “This female came into Ur and demanded things no one ever has before, then samana struck. Her requests upset the—”

  “Open the door,” Kidu said.

  “She is the reason for it, the famine and the flooding,” Asa explained. “She is the one who deserves to die!”

  “Open the door!”

  Asa opened it, and Rudi peered into the dark depths of the mud shack. A woman had curled into a fetal position on the ground. Flies clustered around her face and hands. Kidu said nothing, but Rudi felt his fury as though it was the rays of Shamash. Two slaves doused her with water. They dragged her into the dawn.

  “She’s the reason,” Asa said. “The female Chloe.”

  Kidu inhaled so sharply that he hissed like a snake. “Lift her head,” he said.

  “Why?” Asa asked.

  “Lift her head,” Kidu commanded through clenched teeth.

  Asa grabbed the girl’s head by her hair and turned her face to them. Rudi had never seen her before. Khamite, and beaten. One green eye, glazed from pain, stared at them.

  Kidu was entranced. He crouched at her side, and spoke softly. “Who… who did this to you?”

  “The Old Boys who collected her had a little fun,” Asa said.

  Kidu moved like lightning, standing toe to toe with the older man, glaring down into his face. “Did they—”

  “They took some petty revenge, but they didn’t violate her,” Asa said. “She’s the one who should die, en Kidu. She brought this on us.”

  “Die?” the girl said through her scabbed mouth. “I’m supposed to die?”