Twilight in Babylon

by Frank, Suzanne

  “What did you mean?” Chloe asked again.

  “You came in from the south?”

  They nodded.

  “Keep going, around the base of the Esagila. You’ll come to the other camps.”

  “There’s more?” Chloe asked.

  The man went back to his job. Chloe and Cheftu meandered away.

  “Don’t forget to tell them at the ovens!” the foreman shouted.

  They walked around the western side of the structure and found the brickmakers. A portion of the river had been hewn out, and a mud pit put in. What looked like miles of bricks were drying, laid out as far as the eye could see. Even in the dark, men and women trudged straw into the mud, and others slung the mud into forms, then hauled those forms out to dry.

  “The rains start soon,” Cheftu said. “They have to work while they can.”

  “I’ve never known a Middle Eastern culture that was nocturnal,” Chloe said. “The Bedouin travel at night, but only sometimes and… my God, there are a lot of people here.” They had to step carefully to avoid the rats, the sewage, the garbage, and a few dozing people. The reflection of the copper plates wasn’t as strong here, but still daylight-powered.

  They walked on.

  In one moment, they were in false twilight, the next was pure nightfall.

  The Esagila cast a shadow over the sleeping side, and except for the glow in the sky, you would never guess the hubbub on the other side. Tents, another sea. A few flickering fires, whinnies and snorts, but all in all, a sleeping town. They couldn’t see much, but they could smell it.

  “What are these people eating?” she asked. “There are so many of them.”

  “The eastern side must be fields,” Cheftu said. “Those ovens he mentioned, they must be to feed these people.” Here, they could tell morning, natural morning, was approaching.

  Chloe’s second—ninth?—wind had worn off. She was dead on her feet. “It stinks.”

  “Truth,” Cheftu said vehemently. “Shall we keep walking around and see if it smells better on the other side?”

  “They don’t have garbage pits? Latrines?” In the military, designation of those two locations was priority one in the job of setting up camp. “There’s no organization.”

  “Not in the community,” Cheftu said. Keeping close to the base, they walked on.

  By the time the sun had risen, they were on the eastern side. More tents. More of a brick factory. And the ovens—were not for food—but for bricks. They walked along a path, lined with baked bricks, painted and waiting to be set. “Facing bricks?” Chloe said, pointing to the colors that corresponded to all the stepped temples she’d seen. She couldn’t see the top, so she didn’t know how many levels the Esagila had, but she could see from the ground, they’d only made bricks for four levels, thus far.

  “What are these people eating?” Cheftu asked.

  By tacit agreement they walked through this side of the tent city until they were out of range of smell and sound. The Esagila was revealed by the dawn’s light, piercing the pastel dawn. “That’s just amazing,” Chloe said. “There’s some organizing going on, somewhere.”

  “They’re not dead,” a voice said, sotto voce. “They aren’t buggy.”

  “They aren’t working,” another voice said. “If you don’t work, you die.”

  Chloe opened her eyes, just a crack. Two children stood looking at her and Cheftu. One had a bucket, the other had a basket. They couldn’t be six years old.

  She moved.

  They screamed and ran off, dropping their bucket and basket in the process.

  “They’ll be back,” Cheftu said as he stretched and yawned.

  They came back, with adult reinforcements. The men’s questions weren’t rude, but they were brusque. Who were they? Why were they there? What skills could they lend? Cheftu was designated as a workman and Chloe got oven duty.

  “What about food, shelter?” Cheftu asked.

  “You use what you have,” the men said. “Glean from the palms, the fields, or someone will sell you food, I’m sure.”

  “We—” Chloe started, but Cheftu put a hand on her arm.

  “Does it matter where we pitch our tent?”

  “Wherever you can stand the smell of the shit,” one of them said. “Your shift starts in two double hours. You work for twelve, so get settled before then.”

  After they left, Chloe and Cheftu pondered what to do. The plan had been to meet Nimrod, and everyone else, here, at Bab-ili. Neither of them wanted to stay, but it didn’t look like they could stay and not work, and if they left, they would never find Nimrod. They could backtrack, and risk running into the lugal’s soldiers.

  “A few days of work won’t kill us,” Chloe said. “It can’t be that bad, or this many people wouldn’t be here.”

  Fourteen hours later, she wanted to rip her tongue out from those words. As she trudged through the tent camp to the perch they’d shared, she saw why people just slept out in the shadow of the Esagila and let life take place around them.

  She was exhausted. Every muscle, every joint, every tendon. The ovens handled thousands upon thousands of bricks a day. These were the facing bricks. In her dreams, Chloe worked up to being a painter and getting to sit most of the day. Otherwise, her job was kneeling to pick up as many bricks as she could carry—about eight, at five pounds apiece—then walking them to the painter, kneeling to unload them, stacking them for ease to the painter, then kneeling to pick up dry ones and carrying them to the wheelbarrow that would take them to the side where they needed to be. Then back to the ovens.

  Chloe had always been thin, fit, she’d kept up her regimen from the military in the years she’d lived in Jerusalem, but this was something new. And on a mostly empty stomach. A friendly coworker had told her about some date palms. Dates, Chloe thought. That’s why the camp smells so bad, everyone’s stomach is sick from green dates. And it was true… everywhere, piles. Flies, rats, bugs—she was glad her shift had been in daylight so she could at least pick her steps carefully. This was the most repulsive environment she’d ever lived in.

  On her stumbling path home she’d seen two or three fights break out over space, about water and fires. Spectators stood and cheered as the opponents’ words turned to violence. When both were unconscious, the fight was over.

  We’re living like rats, Chloe thought as she left the tent city and collapsed on the spot—she thought—where Cheftu had been. Cool fell a while later—nighttime. Cheftu showed up with some raw grain and… dates. Not green, but only slightly. “We’ve never had this conversation before, but I’m going to dig a hole and—” she started.

  “We don’t need to have this conversation now,” Cheftu said. “I’ll dig the hole. You sleep.”

  When she woke up with a stomachache and diarrhea, he pointed her toward the hole. Water, at least, was plentiful.

  After three days, Chloe had reached tolerance level. Her diarrhea had turned into something else and she feared dehydration. On the fourth morning, she didn’t get up.

  “I think you have dysentery,” Cheftu said. “We have to get you out of here.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “At least in Kish, you would have food and shelter. Chérie, I am so sorry to have put us in this position, I—”

  She put a finger to his lips. Her hand felt almost too heavy to lift. Dysentery was serious, even in the twentieth century. “It was my suggestion.”

  “God did not bring us here to die in this stupid stinking hole,” he said. “Building some fool’s dream of escaping the gods’ punishment! We’ll head north, I don’t care if we find Nimrod or not. I’m not going to let you… get sicker.”

  She was falling asleep, or passing out. They felt the same. She heard Cheftu say he’d be back; he was going to find someone in authority.

  Her dreams were horrible: roaches crawling on each other, fighting for room. Rats turning on each other because of hunger. Chloe woke, it was dark, Cheftu was s
till gone. She crawled to her hole. Cheftu found her there. “We’re saved,” he said. “I found the designers of everything! We can live with them and be above all of this.”

  Sounds lovely, she thought.

  “They have work for us, not slave labor, but skilled tasks. Chloe—chérie, is that blood?”

  She nodded.

  * * *

  Chloe woke up in a different world.

  Inside the Esagila.

  There wasn’t sunlight, but there were sesame-oil torches burning and a fresh bed of palm fronds. Her clothes, filthy beyond belief, were gone, replaced with a new woolen skirt. Cheftu had bread for her, beer.

  She was too weak to lift her head.

  “It’s an apartment building,” she said in amazement when he told her where they were. “The haves stay inside, the have-nots, out?”

  “It is completely different here,” he said. His voice was less sure than she recalled.

  “It’s certainly luxurious. What’s troubling you?”

  He smiled and patted her clasped hands. “Nothing, now that you are well.”

  “Where did the food come from?”

  He didn’t meet her eyes. “Bartering.”

  “With what? Because of my wisdom, we don’t have anything.”

  He grunted. “I have to leave, to work.”

  “What are you doing?”

  He kissed her cheek and left.

  Leaving Chloe puzzled, but too relieved to pursue it.

  She was up and around in a few days. Considerably thinner—and most of what she’d lost was muscle off of the marsh girl’s lean body. There was no way to see what was going on; claustrophobia clawed at her. She begged Cheftu to take her out, or with him to work.

  They climbed twenty flights of stairs from their rooms, to reach the opening to the outdoors. Chloe fought vertigo. She could see all of Bab-ili, and much of the plain, from here. Wind threatened to carry them both away, so Cheftu held her around the waist as they looked around.

  “This can’t be Iraq,” she said. “Look at it.”

  Green, blue river, and green. At the edges of the green, she saw a swath of silver before the desert began. Mostly, green. “Turn around,” he said.

  “Oh no.”

  It became so clear, instantly. How Iraq became the barren wasteland. A whole forest of palms had been cut, the light wood was perfect for making molds for brick, for the infrastructure of buildings, for firewood, for looms, for arrows. The bark could be shoes, or flooring, or roofing, or stripped into fiber for ropes, or soles, or thread. On the outskirts of the northern and eastern tent cities, was another. A logging city.

  Palm trunks looked like toothpicks from her position, but Chloe could see where the soil was eroding without them to anchor it. “What’s the silver?” she asked.

  “Salt.”

  Fortunately, the wind had blown the oil cloud away from them, though Chloe knew it would come back—in just a few weeks, after it had wreaked destruction on the rest of the world.

  Thousands of people worked on the building, lived in their tents and beneath the sun. They scurried and stumbled. Chloe wanted to cry. “We can’t stay here, Cheftu. There isn’t enough space for everyone. Even when they finish this, it’s not going to accommodate all these people.”

  “It’s not designed to,” he said. His tone was grim. “You don’t want to know, chérie. Trust me.”

  “Why are we here? Where can we go?”

  “I have to work for a while,” he said. “It is part of my agreement.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Do not worry,” he said. “It will be fine.”

  His tone wasn’t convincing.

  * * *

  “Good morning, Cheftu,” his overseer greeted him.

  “Is it worse today?” he asked.

  “Another fifteen outbreaks.”

  Cheftu knew the only people who “mattered” were those who could afford to buy a location under some palm-tree awning. Those who couldn’t just died, uncounted. Worse, their bodies were dumped in the one direction Cheftu had steered Chloe away from looking. The stench of the mass graveyard blew away from the Esagila, but Cheftu had smelled it.

  He followed the asu out the door and into the stinking heat. So many things he chose not to observe—he was focused on eyes.

  Whatever illness had taken hold of the wealthy grew only in their children, and it bloomed like sunflowers in their eyes. The patient became temperamental, listless, unable to eat, unable to release poisons from his systems, dropped weight, then went into a coma. Cheftu was ancient enough to let those coma patients die. They couldn’t take nourishment; they wasted away. Thus far, the disease seemed unstoppable. But it wasn’t spreading quickly, and it didn’t seem to be contagious.

  It hadn’t seemed to be contagious.

  To make things easier for the families of the sick, when an individual began to show signs of the illness he or she was delivered to one part of the camp. The makeshift hospital was more primitive than anything a Pharaoh would have allowed on a campaign.

  These people had invented writing, Cheftu reminded himself. It took centuries more for them to discover sanitation. And even then, in most European cities, they forgot those basic tenets for generations. I must not judge. Assist. That’s all.

  Pay off his debts—so Chloe could have comfort, they both could have food—and find a place to go.

  Cheftu examined his fifteen new patients. Their median age was older than the first batch. He watched as a mother spoon-fed her daughter milk. The daughter was almost of marrying age, yet could no longer speak, just stare with sunflower eyes. A huge copper pot kept the milk warm, so all of the patients could be fed by their families. Cheftu shuddered to think what it must cost them to have access to it. Mercenaries controlled the Esagila.

  Two patients passed on quietly during the afternoon.

  Cheftu walked home through the masses, and wondered why they slaved, for what purpose. The building was growing, the speed of construction was staggering. If they’d built the pyramids this quickly, every town would have had one. Sunflower eyes, all in different stages of progression, stared back at him from tents and lean-tos, from prone positions and from sitting.

  He climbed the inner stairway to the room he shared with Chloe, and Cheftu felt the ache of disillusionment. Where was God?

  He handed her bread, some beer, and sat down with a sigh.

  “I met the neighbors,” she said after kissing him hello. “A nice couple. Samu and Ela.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Ela is a weaver and Samu is something in construction. Ela will introduce me to the head brick painter when I’m feeling better. It’s strange, but they don’t have any children either.”

  Cheftu grunted and finished his beer. His hair was growing back, a good couple of inches already. It was shaggy, and with the way he carried himself when he walked in, the overall picture was of a whipped bear. Chloe leaned forward and kissed him.

  He kissed back, but he was distracted.

  She slipped over to his lap, and kissed him again, rubbing the muscles of his shoulders, opening herself to him body and soul. He gave what he could, but whatever troubled him still did. She pulled him onto their rush bed and held him. “Talk to me.”

  “It’s deception,” he said.

  She stroked his temple and listened.

  “The people think the gods are sending another Deluge. Every one of them, as best I can figure, has an imprinted memory of the great flood. They know their families lost their possessions, their lives.”

  He sighed. “The people who designed the Esagila, they did it to outwit the gods. That is the claim.”

  “What is the deception?” she asked when he didn’t go on.

  “No flood is coming. It’s just a means for the poor and downtrodden to build a mansion for the wealthy and powerful. They sell food the poor have to buy. Any comfort is gotten through indentured servanthood. It will never end.”

 
“The company store,” Chloe said. Then she sang him the song: “Sixteen Tons.”

  “So it’s a practice that doesn’t end?”

  She’d never heard him sound so worn-out. “What are you doing, to pay them back for all of this.”

  “Being a doctor.”

  Chloe squeezed her eyes shut. Cheftu had forsaken medicine. For years he’d worked as other things—mostly in management. Though in David’s court, it was the position of counselor. “I’m sorry.”

  “I am also.”

  It seemed too pat to tell him she loved him. So she showed him again, with her body, her mouth, her words, her cries, her tears.

  And they slept.

  The first time Chloe thought something might be odd about Samu and Ela, was at dinner. While Cheftu had been out working, breaking his heart, Chloe had been developing her franchise idea with the help of Ela, another female. An accountant. Part of Ela’s plan was to have various wealthy people over for dinner and introduce them to the sausage balls.

  Ela, as Chloe’s business partner, was underwriting the dinners; i.e., she was finding meat. Chloe didn’t ask. She just hoped, if it was rat, it didn’t carry rabies.

  Twenty people came—the family, extended, and one or two of their cousins. The cousins worked in the sun and lived in the tent cities. They thought they were dining with the gods.

  They began to eat, and someone spoke to Chloe—in Aztlantu, a version of Greek she knew. Reflexively, she answered. Then everyone began speaking in Aztlantu, on cue.

  When Cheftu asked her how it had gone, she wasn’t sure if the language shift was her imagination or reality. But it couldn’t be reality. Could it? Just because she hadn’t heard any other languages didn’t mean they weren’t out there.

  But…? So she didn’t say anything—knowing his wife might be losing her mind wasn’t going to help Cheftu. Just my imagination, running away with me, Chloe reasoned. Again.

  She knew that every death from the sunflower-eye illness wearied Cheftu even more. He’d lost his appetite, he didn’t initiate sex, and he wasn’t sleeping. Worse, he’d ceased to pray.