She’d seen the endless green of orchards and fields. Sure, there was lots of sun, but mostly floods and water and rivers and growth. When did the climate change? Or was it altered by man?
A small sob.
Was that sound from Puabi’s pit? One of the women against the wall? Or opposite, one of the bodies Cheftu had so graciously turned away from her? Maybe it wasn’t a woman, but one of the soldiers or grooms? Chloe could probably get away with adding a woman to the escape, but a soldier or a groom—that made her uneasy.
The dirt was a quarter ways up the shaft.
The cramps started; Ningal had warned her it would be uncomfortable, and worse, because she couldn’t move. Sweat beaded her forehead, and she was glad for the last little bit of drug that helped her resist jerking.
This must be like childbirth, she reasoned. Phases of pain interspersed with moments of rest. She felt a trickle of sweat roll across her forehead and drop onto her gold beech-nut leaf earring. The ping was deafening, and Chloe waited for a response from the darkness.
I left a headdress on the floor. I forgot to pick it up.
But Cheftu and the priest hadn’t said anything, so it must be okay.
The cramps fixed on her back, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from reacting audibly. After a while, the pain passed. She opened her eyes and thanked God—the shaft was almost two-thirds filled.
The next and final phase of coming out of the drug was the itching. Ningal had said it was the worst part—a punishment for abusing the drug, according to the asipu. A warning from the gods against it. Once you experienced the itching, no part of taking it was appealing, regardless of the high involved.
What high? I guess I was too terrified to experience the high, Chloe thought.
The itching would start on her extremities and work its way in toward her heart, Ningal had explained. She’d feel like the thing was beneath her skin, consuming her. At the end she would vomit, then be fine. They scheduled her vomiting right about when the shaft would be full, the priests deaf to the sound, and she would have the leisure to hide all marks of her presence.
Absence, by that time.
Shit! she thought, That isn’t itching, that’s fire inside! Jellyfish had stung her toes, the soles of her feet, her ankles—that’s what it felt like.
I can’t handle this, Chloe thought. If I don’t scratch, I’m going to die.
Don’t scratch, Ningal had told her. It spread the poison and infected the skin.
Her fingers were on fire; minute legs crawled underneath her fingernails and through the skin of her palms. Tears flowed down Chloe’s face, and her forehead ached from the fierceness of her grimace.
If it would just work faster, she thought. Just get it over with. But the itching took its sweet time. Her scalp was ablaze; she could almost feel blisters rising up.
A noise—she’d been too engrossed in her agony to notice what, or from where. The darkness was almost complete, just a fraction left before it reached the roof.
When the drug seized her gut, Chloe buried her cry against the woven matting.
“Death is preferable to surviving,” Ningal had said, tears in his eyes at the thought of her pain. Then he had given her a wry smile, “Except for the side effect of death’s permanence.”
How would she have the strength to move? Chloe curled more tightly around her stomach as the poison raced into her throat and chest. She dug her nails into her arms to resist clawing away at her breasts.
The vomiting was explosive and spontaneous.
When she opened her eyes, the chamber was completely dark.
And she felt fine.
Fear, which had been upstaged by agony, came back with long, fanged teeth.
No sound from above, no sound from within. Had she been wrong about the breathing? The other survivor?
Surreptitiously, she slipped out her dagger and carved out her mess from the matting on the floor, then turned it over and plastered it to the ground. She moved her fingers around the edge to make sure it matched.
The place stank; she might get sick again.
No, she told herself. Get up and get the hell out of here.
She slipped the knife back into her beaded belt and slowly sat up. Carnelian and lapis and gold beads clanged together. The bangles she shoved up her arm slid down and clattered. Chloe froze and listened.
“Sss—” she hissed softly. Her whole body trembled; if someone else were alive there, then she wasn’t alone. If no one else breathed, she was in a room with seventy-three corpses.
She closed her eyes, tried to shut out the image of skin bubbling with larvae. Why do I recall how a body decays and I can’t remember the name of this ancient land? Because I never knew it.
“A fly buzzed as I died.”
Damn Emily Dickinson.
She got to her feet, dust and gold powder falling off her body, sprinkling the ground. Dizziness assailed her, but from fear, or from the remnants of the poison, she couldn’t guess. It didn’t matter. She had to get out of there. “Sss—” she hissed again, and waited.
They were all around her, dozens of bodies right here. She couldn’t see them, though. She couldn’t see anything. You need a tiny bit of light for any kind of glitter or glow. In this silent, sealed tomb, there was nothing.
It was going to take a very long time to get to the chest.
A line of corpses was opposite her, their faces turned away. She got down on her hands and knees and felt for the edges of cloaks. One body on the left, there, one on the right. Holding her hands in place, she put her foot in the blank space, then stood. Hesitantly, she reached for another step. Empty space. In another step she should be past their heads.
The floor of the pit was not even, the matting was slippery with… oh God, don’t think about what you might be stepping in, she told herself. Her toe nudged a lock of hair, and Chloe jumped forward, into empty space.
Past the line of dead women.
There had been no more sounds—and it was deafening, this silence. In two steps, she knew she was approaching the sledge, it was at the foot of the ramp. The smell of blood overrode the smell of refuse here. She couldn’t step in it, make any marks. Though how she was supposed to tell in the dark, she didn’t know. Chloe leaned forward with her hands extended, feeling for anything.
Another step.
Reaching forward again.
A leather sandal.
But was it the groom closest to the door, or the one closest to the sledge?
Chloe smelled her own sweat, and even stinking with fear it was more pleasant an odor than the ones around her. She bit back a squeal when she felt the hairy leg of a draft animal.
Wood, the sledge. The high edge with hammered lions’ heads, then the border inlaid with mother-of-pearl, she could feel the swoops and curves beneath her fingertips, the carnelian and lapis, with gold in between, not yet cold in this place.
Will it ever get cool? she wondered. Here, so far beneath the sun, in Iraq, could it get cool? Maybe the bodies wouldn’t rot so fast—
She squinted her eyes shut: The deceased, all around her, soon would be teeming with new life. Get me out of here, she thought, and stumbled around the edge of the wooden transport, then stubbed her toe on something clay.
Chloe bit back a swear word and thought a split-second curse on whatever idiot had set a jar in the walkway.
Of course, they hadn’t expected any of the corpses to get up and walk.
The chest should be just there. She’d gone over the placement again and again. She inched forward. Nothing. Slipped one toe along the mat. Nothing. A whimper escaped her and Chloe clapped her hand over her mouth.
She was going to die in here. Another body among the many, with no legacy, nothing to show she’d ever walked this earth. Tears streaked her cheeks. She was trapped in a tomb.
Chapter Six
He could just kill them all; there were only six. Six more deaths on a conscience that had lost track of the lives it had ended
. Snuff six humans, then drop down into the ditch, dig through the dirt in the shaft, then scramble over the sledges in the doorway and the corpses lined across the room and find Chloe.
Cheftu’s skin crawled when he remembered moving her body into position. Closing her staring eyes. How badly he’d wanted to check her pulse, look for any sign to prove she lived. Because she had looked dead, pale and tinted blue from the combination of drugs in her body. He had to believe the cup had worked—he’d wanted to check it, see if it felt heavy, but he hadn’t dared. Cheftu just had to believe. Faith is believing what you can’t see.
He wanted to spit.
What madness had they embarked upon?
“We’re ready for the floor, en,” a priest said.
Cheftu’s last chance to slaughter them and run. But if he did, there would be no time wasted in tracking him down. No ship could sail far enough, fast enough. No marsh was that impenetrable, no land that distant. Cheftu didn’t trust his voice, so he motioned for the bricklayers. It was quick work to dump the clay on the packed dirt, until it was even. The men slicked the clay flat, then climbed out. It would dry quickly in the heat of summer, even at night, but not fast enough for Cheftu.
“When will it be ready for the next offering?” he asked one of them.
“Did you want to install drains, for the drink offerings?”
Cheftu didn’t want anything that would help sound travel. Nothing that would make it easier for the priests to go back down or would inhibit Chloe’s movements. “No. The dead can receive offerings poured directly into the ground. No drains are necessary.”
“Do you need aught else, en?”
I need to know she is breathing. “Nothing,” he said. “I will pray the night through.”
A new team would arrive at dawn.
Meanwhile, it was Cheftu alone with the open sky, and his wife entombed below with the dead.
* * *
If anyone had been alive, they would have already gotten up, Chloe reasoned. The chest had been made of heavy wood, with an inlaid front and filled with… grain? Clothes wouldn’t weigh that much. But she’d nudged it far enough. Now she touched the ground with relief, her fingers outlined the escape. The hole to freedom.
It was bricks, the roof to the pit underneath her. The original death pit, the one Cheftu had the map for.
The air from below was definitely cooler, and the smell was musty. Much better, though there wasn’t going to be much oxygen. I’ll be out of there in no time, she thought. Carefully, she felt the edges of the opening and blessed the tomb raiders who had gotten here first and done all the work. It was big enough for a person, but no one had told her how far the fall was.
Drop and roll, she thought, and eased her way through the space, hanging from her fingers, trying to sense the ground. She felt a piece of wood beneath her feet and set her weight on it. It held. She stood. The thieves had been extremely thoughtful.
Chloe grasped the edge of the trunk above her and pulled, feeling the effort all through her abdomen and back. The chest moved a few inches. It would cover enough.
“Another day, another tomb,” she said. “And I have a voice that sounds like a pack a day.” The noise was obscene in the silence. How many bodies were in here? All she had to do was cross to the king’s grave, and there was a passage in the wall.
The last sacrifice had walked away, too. If Cheftu hadn’t stepped into the body of Kidu and known how to read the sacred texts, if Shama hadn’t liked Cheftu and shown him the tablets and the goblet, this would all be turning out very differently.
Her toe touched something dry and… bony. Chloe recoiled. Skeletons. “At least there is nothing living,” she whispered. Don’t think about the bodies above. She couldn’t help it. Striking out from the furniture she’d landed on, she headed straight. Bones, beads, clay. Every time she touched something, she moved faster, until she tripped on the sunken edge of a depression and crashed into the wall.
“Way to go, graceful,” she said as she sat up. At least it was the right place; the passage was here somewhere. All she had to do was kill a little time, break through a fake wall, then crawl out to the well.
Do these people go to heaven or hell, or is there really a purgatory? Chloe wondered. Maybe we go to what we think there is. Any Sumerian is going to have a miserable time of it, if that’s the case. I wonder why these people believe in such a gloomy afterlife. Slaves to the gods now, in the heat and caprice of the elements, and then slaves to the gods below, in the dust and darkness.
She shivered.
Surely I know something that is light and cheerful. Chintzy. High tea with biscuits. Mom’s roses. Cammy’s laugh. Popsicles in the summertime on the porch in Reglim. The feel of Cheftu’s skin in the darkness, that moment when he kisses me—
The chamber reverberated with sound.
Someone was moving the chest away from the hole.
* * *
“More is required,” Asa said.
The lugal and Cheftu looked at each other. “What more is there?” the lugal asked. “We’ve given almost every mina of gold in the commonwealth, emptied the temple’s stores and almost depleted the granary. Countless clients weep tonight because the women they love are gone—we don’t have anything else!”
The stargazer lifted his hands. What could you do, if the gods weren’t satisfied, you had to give them more. His gaze shifted to Cheftu.
“The first floor is ready for the offerings,” Cheftu said. “This meeting delays me.”
“They require more offerings.”
“Or what?” the lugal asked. “We’ve had floods, barley rust, crops fail, starfall, and an eclipse. What more can they send?”
“You mock the gods?” Asa questioned. “We haven’t sacrificed enough, that is all I can read in the stars.”
“More lives?” the lugal asked.
“Clients,” Asa said. “Representatives of the First Families.”
The lugal sank into a chair.
“Another pit?” Cheftu asked. He must keep them from digging close to Chloe’s escape route. Another pit could ruin everything.
“It needs to be carried out immediately,” Asa said. “Stars continue to fall from the heavens. A new star burns in the house of the moon of the barley stalk. It burns red.”
The lugal looked at Cheftu. “Is there any alternative?”
“To the choice of humans, or where they’ll… go?”
“Ask stargazer Rudi if my word is in doubt,” Asa said. “It was she who brought this to my attention.”
“I’ll go convene the council,” the lugal said, standing up. “Prepare a chamber.”
Cheftu nodded, his mind racing.
Asa spoke softly. “It is a harsh thing the gods ask, but we are here at their pleasure.”
“We are their slaves,” the lugal said.
Cheftu muttered something, but he made sure they didn’t hear it. Cloak flapping, he raced back to the pit. His stomach growled with hunger, and his head felt light, but there was no time to eat, regardless of what his contentious body wanted. His scribe scurried to catch up with him. “Wake the diggers,” Cheftu said. “Bring me a team of bricklayers, pull brick stock from the storehouses, get the remaining vessels from the treasury and send a phalanx of priests to meet the lugal at the city gate. Go!”
Acolytes with incense and food came stumbling out of the barracks, with eyes still glued shut from sleep. One let a ladder down into the shaft and Cheftu clambered down it. While he sang, they poured drink offerings, placed the incense, and made a primeval feast for the dead.
Cups and baked bread, and chunks of meat, stewed with onions. He was ravenous. They inverted a clay bowl over the offering, then climbed out. “Fill it some more,” he said to them and walked through the dawn to the council meeting.
* * *
Guli paced his cell. Eight steps left, eight right. The smell of dung wafted through the window, but at least it was cool now, at dawn. Whoever thought to cut holes in perfect
ly good walls? he wondered. Did they not realize how miserable it made the room? Footsteps had pounded the streets, men and women moving back and forth in the night. Apparently the gods had accepted the gifts—they were no better than Viza—for the earth still stood.
He looked out at the gray. The afterlife was like this. Gray and dusty, with nothing but the smell of shit. He sat down on the floor with his legs bent and arms akimbo.
“Guli, is that you?” a voice said from the window.
“Justice?”
“Listen to me. Have you accepted your sentence?”
Guli looked at his hands.
“Was it worth it, to lose your freedom and life for the joy of killing Viza?”
“The scorpion deserved to die.”
“It was not your decision to make.”
Guli didn’t say anything. Whether or not the justice was correct, the system had condemned him. “Did you disturb your rest to prod my conscience?” he said.
“No. I have an offer to make you. I’m coming in.”
Guli heard the wooden gate open, then the clay seal on his door crack. Ningal must have caught the pieces because they didn’t fall. The bar lifted, and Ningal stepped inside. Guli looked up at him.
“Your clothes are stained yet,” Ningal said.
“They didn’t give me a change of clothes before locking me away,” Guli said. “I am meditating on my future of being dead. What do you want? What is your offer?”
“Die a hero.”
“I’m no fool like Ulu.” He wanted to weep at the thought of her quenched of life to cold, uncaring gods. Yet he was blessed for having touched her that last time. For a moment, he had been her gentleman husband, and she had been his honored wife. It was enough to die with.
“You’ll perish anyway,” Ningal said.
“What’s the benefit to me?”
Ningal looked away. “Tonight, in fact most of tomorrow, you can have any woman you want, feast to your contentment, and go to death with a smile.”
Twilight in Babylon Page 26
