Twilight in Babylon

by Frank, Suzanne

  “If we could remove salt from the water, we would control our destinies,” the stargazer said.

  “Does anyone know that secret?” Asshur asked.

  “No, if they did they would need only to sell it to every commonwealth,” another merchantman said. “They would be established for generations with the profit.”

  Asshur picked the seeds of the fruit. “Perhaps that is a solution the Tablet Houses could pursue?”

  “My liege—”

  “Don’t call me that. I hate it when you say that,” Asshur said to Nia—his former wife. They shared a daughter.

  She dropped her almond-eyed gaze, the same one his little girl had. “Very well. We’re seeing problems in the Tablet Houses.”

  Asshur looked up, then glanced at the other representatives of Tablet Houses. They all nodded. “The students aren’t interested in education much past the age of twenty-five,” Nia said.

  “I had a student the other day who was wedded at thirty,” someone offered.

  “What of her poor husband?” one of the farmers asked.

  “He was twenty-five.”

  “Already she’d received her cycle?” another questioned.

  “As the Fathers said, our days will soon be only 120 years,” the vintner reminded them.

  The whole group, every one of whom was over that age, sat silent.

  “They are grown too soon. From twenty to eighty, to have children? Eighty is barely old enough to birth two children. Their life spans are going to be a ninth of what our fathers knew.”

  “We are doomed,” someone else contributed.

  “It was foretold,” Lud said.

  Asshur picked at the flesh of his fruit and concentrated on calming himself. “The Tablet Houses are not a possibility, then?”

  “I fear not, lugal,” one of the priests said.

  Any hope of calm fled. They had to find the water, they had to stop the raging growth of the people, their speedy reproduction, their waste.

  Every day the problems of Uruk, the most ancient city of the Shemti, just grew.

  And more were conceived.

  * * *

  “Uruk,” Cheftu said, staring out the window at the city. “Something pricks my memory, but I can’t get to it.”

  Chloe slipped beside him, draped his arm over her shoulder. Uruk was about a hundred miles outside of Ur—they were sister cities. Gilgamesh had been lugal there before being recalled to replace his father as lugal in Ur. Consequently, Nimrod and his coterie were being treated like royalty. Chloe and Cheftu were staying in the palace, a more colorful and dazzling building Chloe hadn’t seen in ancient Iraq.

  “Uruk,” she said. “I don’t know, it doesn’t sound familiar to me. Do you know when we are, what year it is now?”

  He shook his head and sighed. “No, I don’t. Before these Black-Haired Ones had interaction with Egypt—if Egypt exists yet. Someday, this will be Babylonia, but how many millennia until then, I don’t know.”

  “Everyone talks about the Deluge—are they talking about Noah?”

  “No, a man named Ziusudra, and his story has multiple gods and immortality in it. Noah, he just gets drunk and is humiliated by his sons,” Cheftu said. “Not the same story. The names aren’t even close.”

  He continued to speak. “So many things Kidu knows, that I don’t. It’s as though there wasn’t enough space in my mind for all the knowledge, so I lost a lot of it to make room for his.”

  “You don’t remember the Bible?”

  “Not details. The capacity I had for remembering anything I ever saw in writing is gone.”

  “Changing bodies made you lose your photographic memory,” she said. “That’s… odd, I guess.”

  He hugged her to his side. The staged temple of Uruk was directly opposite them. Thus far they hadn’t seen a taxman. “Dinner is purported to be an occasion tonight,” he said. “Do you want to bathe?”

  She slipped an arm around his waist. “Alone? Or will I have company?”

  “Chérie, when you touch me, I am a madman,” he growled. “We need to discuss something, however.”

  She knew what was coming. She nodded, and they walked to two chairs, then sat down, facing each other. Cheftu leaned forward and took her hand in both of his. “It’s late summer, early autumn.”

  “Yes.”

  “December, 23 December approaches.”

  “It happens every year.”

  He gave her a look for her levity. Chloe forced her face into mock-seriousness. “What are you trying to say?”

  “I… my,” Cheftu stopped, and shook his head. “I do not think this is because of the creature whose body I have, but it is undeniable.” He looked at her. “All I want to do is make love with you. I want to take you in every way, to bend you to my desires—”

  Chloe could barely think, she was so aroused by his words.

  “—make you swell with my child. Our child,” he amended.

  Silence. Not awkward, but steaming.

  “Such a thing, I know we both realize, was not possible before. You, me, the combination, the time, it was not our destiny to be parents, yes?”

  “Truth,” she said. A word from Ur that was so useful. “That is true.”

  “We are now, both of us, in new husks, and before we—”

  She looked at him. Despite the movie matinee façade, he was still her careful, honorable, precise, emotional and God-fearing spouse. “If I get pregnant, then we’ll be stuck here, and you want to know if that is all right with me. If not… you’re going to get us bunk beds?” she said.

  “I understood most of that,” he answered in his heavily accented English. “But… what is bunk beds? You lose me in your native tongue.”

  And I always speak it when I’m nervous, she thought. Even after seven years of living anywhere but the U.S. “I want to tell you that it doesn’t matter—”

  “I don’t want you to feel trapped here. Do you remember Jerusalem?”

  Chloe felt a pang and remembered standing alone at the well, hearing whispers about how God hadn’t blessed her, but had made her barren. She recalled how friend after friend had become pregnant while her stomach had stayed flat. The restlessness Chloe had felt as she wandered the streets of the burgeoning city, alone. A woman’s life shouldn’t be judged by whether or not she’s a parent, she’d argued.

  But it didn’t stop the whispers… what has she done for God to curse her? Will good Cheftu take another wife? Let’s not invite her, she doesn’t understand what we’re talking about… God has rejected her.

  And month after month she would wait so hopefully, count off the days—and have her dreams dashed again. Family was denied her; her family in twentieth-century reality, and a new family with Cheftu.

  “What about Jerusalem?” she asked. Her memories were vivid, but it was like revisiting a movie. It seemed unreal and a step removed. “Why didn’t I like it? Why wasn’t I happy there?”

  Cheftu’s grip on her hands changed, he rubbed his big thumbs over her knuckles.

  “Every day, you saw women losing position. You saw violence growing. You told me that the people were turning more inward and less outward. We were watching the beginning of nationalism, chérie. There is no room for compassion toward others when a country is feeding itself the theory it is the best, the select, the only.”

  He didn’t realize the ache her heart had known; and there had been no substitute for having a family in that society. A woman was named after her children, “The mother of Rebecca, or the mother of Shaul.” There wasn’t room for a career woman. And as a visual artist in a city that prided itself on no images, there wasn’t much work. David had dismissed his female soldiers, for he needed more little Israelites.

  “How do we know it won’t happen here?” Chloe said, suddenly filled with fear. “That we won’t make the decision to stay, anchor ourselves so we can’t leave, then… the same thing? You’re supposed to get more conservative as you age. I think I’m getting more liberal
.”

  He lifted her hand to his lips. “Your heart is growing, my love. You see the world beyond yourself. Many people never do.” He kissed her fingers, and the heat of his mouth, the softness of his tongue, brought their initial topic to bear.

  I’m shaking I want him so bad, she thought. And I want him for him, not for any other reason, not for anything that might result from it other than being with him. “Now that we discussed this,” Chloe said in a rush, “the truth is, I don’t care. If it happens, it does, if it doesn’t—just get your clothes off and—”

  And he did.

  * * *

  Ima looked over at him, without actually moving her eyes. Asshur was never completely prepared to be in her presence. Since childhood, his beautiful cousin had unnerved him. That she had no need for men, or for children, confused him. Most of the women he’d known, cousins and sisters included, held their breath waiting for those things, once past their training. Ima, never.

  Always, she was in the scroll room. Reading tablets in the library. She had the blood, the disposition of their ancestors. Age hadn’t touched her, or infirmity. Her mind was wiser, sharper than it had been, and her body—

  Asshur could immerse himself in Harta’s athletic, energetic body, but Ima’s was the form in his dreams. She stood as tall as most men, without the curves of most women; nor did she shave her head for wigs. Instead, her black hair fell like water over her shoulders and down her back. The edges of her eyes were creased from squinting into the sun for so many decades, but her eyes themselves were dark and thickly lashed. Her mouth was wide, but thin-lipped, her face sharp at the chin and nose. Thin eyebrows, hopelessly out of fashion, rose in points so that she always looked surprised.

  “How are you, Asshur?” she asked. She was surrounded by tablets, the same way a wrecked sledge scattered its contents around the site of impact. Cross-legged in her chair, with a bronze drinking tube close enough to lean into, she reminded him of a feline. Creases between her brows—lines of determination, according to the seer who analyzed faces—had drawn themselves on her face since last Asshur had seen her. “Or is the fact that you are lugal indication enough?”

  He laughed and wondered if he should step inside her chamber as a cousin or request her to treat him like a ruler.

  “Are you too important to sit for some beer?” she asked, and he saw a glimmer of humor in her eyes.

  “Never,” he said as he walked in. Ima called for beer to her assistant and offered him another chair. “How is the research?”

  “You see Ukik. He tells you my results before I’m even certain of them,” she said. “What more do you want to know?”

  Asshur wove his fingers together in his lap. “Is there anything to lend hope?”

  The assistant brought a jar of beer and gave Asshur a drinking tube. The beverage was cool, refreshing, but Asshur remembered that he shouldn’t be consuming it. Any relaxation of his standards could lead to demise. He sat back and watched Ima drink down half the jar. The concentration on her face, the effort he saw, was discomfiting. Asshur shifted in his chair.

  Thankfully, Ima leaned back and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I had hoped Lud would bring the answer.”

  Asshur waited.

  “In my studies, I can’t find anything yet to produce the same effect. Combinations that make the water cloudy, as it is supposed to be, assure that it can still be drunk cold. What makes it agitate, again, as eyewitnesses claim, doesn’t make it milky. It is an association of several elements, and each one must be tried alone, then when we find that—”

  “You’ll add the other element, the other thing.”

  She nodded. “Regarding other things, have you pursued the legend?”

  Asshur sat back. “It’s an old mothers’ tale,” he said. “Just like the nonsense that the underworld can be reached from a cave in the center of town.”

  Ima’s eyes narrowed. “My grandmother was a wise woman, she wouldn’t have told untruths.”

  He shook his head. “I cannot believe, it doesn’t stand to reason, that the First Father knew that the world would be destroyed once by flood, once by fire. So he commanded the stories to be inscribed on two standards. One was brick, the other stone, so at least one would survive.”

  “Maybe he knew the water would change?”

  “So he wrote the location of the source? Or perhaps the formula for creating it?” Asshur reached forward as though to pat Ima’s arm, but didn’t. “You are a woman of science. The First Father lived in a cave, his son was a murderer, what could he know of writing, or mapmaking, or even the concept of time? He was an ignorant ancient.”

  “We are any better?” Ima asked. “Dust we began and to dust we return, the white dust for our bones and veins, the green for our pale skins, the black for our bowels and red, for the life of us, the blood.”

  Asshur could recite it with her, an oft-told saying, practiced in the Tablet House until one could write it like the Tablet Father. “We are made of the same thing as the First Father, but we have journeyed so far beyond him,” he reasoned.

  Ima turned away from him. “Perhaps the seers know something.”

  “They are too young, none of them born before the Deluge.”

  “Have you thought to seek out Ziusudra?”

  “He wouldn’t speak to his own sons about this, why should he converse with me? I’m just the son of a son.”

  She reached over and touched his arm. Even through his despair, Asshur felt his body leap. “You are elected to get us through this time, not to save us. To guide us, Asshur. You don’t have to know all of the answers. You’re merely a shepherd.”

  He wanted to touch her hand, but he mustn’t. Her choice had been to live apart from men, to live in the world of research and information and not dilute that with the responsibilities of a home or family. He had accepted Harta. “Do you ever regret it?” he asked.

  She withdrew her hand. “I must prepare for tomorrow’s classes. Because, while to you I am a thinker and a cousin, to twenty-five boys, I am Nergal come to winnow through them.”

  He laughed as he rose, eager to leave. “I remember that drawing you did of our Tablet Father, with the scythe of Nergal.”

  “I have been repaid that insult,” she said with a chuckle. “Time and over, I have been the object of that drawing.”

  “How nice to tell them they aren’t original,” he said, as they stood on the threshold. “Good lessons,” he wished her.

  “I’ll let you know when I have anything,” she said. “I’ll send Ukik.”

  “You don’t have to wake him,” Asshur said.

  Her gaze was cool. “He’s here now.”

  “Ukik?”

  She nodded. And said nothing else.

  Asshur mumbled something and fled. He needed to think about his guests, not about aged cousins who lived with their young aides.

  * * *

  They were seated in the temple, so that the patron goddess of the city, Inana, could participate in the feast. It was two temples, actually, placed at right angles. Between them was a courtyard with a wall of bright mosaic cones in black, white, and red zigzag. One side of the courtyard led to a terrace lined with massive columns adorned with shell and mother-of-pearl rosettes.

  Low tables, lush flowers, sheepskin-covered pillows and metal drinking tubes completed the feeling of complete luxury. Chloe and Cheftu reclined next to each other—another place where men and women ate together, Chloe thought. In the Middle East. When did this practice go out? It was way gone by the time David of Jerusalem had shown up. Who was responsible for that step backward?

  Lyras played softly in the background. Asshur was the new lugal here, the man responsible for the feast, Gilgamesh’s successor. Fish of every description were served, complete with eyes. The marsh girl’s knowledge told Chloe it was a sign of respect to show the eyes of the catch. Then the guest would know how fresh the fish was.

  Chloe’s fish’s eyes confirmed he’d been caught an
hour before he’d landed on her plate, no more. Now if I could just cover him up, she thought. Bread, stacked, formed a ziggurat in the center of the table. Vegetables stewed with spices, broiled with oil, and layered with cheese and baked were presented on colored plates. “Hard to believe that in Ur they’re hungry,” she whispered to Cheftu.

  “Not terribly hungry,” he said. “If the city’s population decreased enough, everyone would be fine. Maybe enough people fled.”

  “Okay, then hungry in Larsa.”

  “When you’ve left them the wonders of sausage balls?”

  “Don’t be sarcastic.”

  “Me, chérie?” he said, as he drew her hand up his thigh.

  “Cheftu!”

  “I’m a lunatic where you’re concerned. I warned you.”

  “Drink your beer.”

  “It’ll just make it worse, later,” he said.

  “Good,” she said, and gave him a wicked smile.

  He threw back his head and laughed.

  At the end of the meal, Nimrod’s responsibility was to bestow gifts on Asshur. Those from Ur had pooled their resources that afternoon. In the mix, Asshur was going to receive an expectant sheep and a goat. Dadi and Mimi were going to be parents. It was really rather twisted.

  But, finally, Chloe was ridding herself of the goat.

  Nirg was handing over an ivory comb, Nimrod was giving up a lion’s skin cloak, Cheftu donated three gold necklaces, and the various other women, guards, and children were casting something of value into the community pot.

  Asshur expressed delight at his gift and promised a percentage—once the taxmen had done the math—would go to Inana. “Though,” he said, “we could arrange a little… competition now. Wager with these gifts you’ve given me.”

  Nimrod didn’t look at Cheftu, but Chloe could sense he wanted Cheftu’s input. They communicated without speech, most of the time. How that happened, she didn’t know, but it seemed to go with the extra shot of testosterone Cheftu exhibited these days. And the long history the two men shared.

  Nimrod was still smiling. “What type of competition?”

  “A sacred wrestling match. A bowl.”

  Chloe paused, her cup halfway to her mouth. Surely not: Was this the first bowl? The Palm Bowl? The Mosaic Bowl? The Inana Bowl?