by Anthology
“We’ve got to keep this confidential—the three of us,” she went on. “The danger is far greater than you think. The rumor is already rampant among the slaves that Jipfur is guilty.”
“What?” said Kish. “So soon? It was only this evening that—”
“I didn’t start the rumor,” said Betty. “But that’s exactly what Jipfur will think if he learns that the slaves held a mass meeting—”
“Meeting? When? Where?”
The three of us stopped and Betty pointed back to the hillside trail over which we had come. “That’s where I’ve been she said. “There were hundreds of slaves gathered in the darkness. I didn’t get close enough to make myself known, and I left early. A group like that is sure to be full of spies.”
“The Serpents were there, no doubt,” said Kish. “They’re Jipfur’s information agents and high-pressure men.”
Betty said that the meeting didn’t promise any action, but everyone agreed that Jipfur was the only man who stood to gain by Slaf-Carch’s murder. Everyone aired his grievances against Jipfur but no one could see any chance for a rebellion.
“The peasants were there, too,” she said, “and they complained of oppressive taxes that they were frightened into paying—”
“By the Serpents,” said Kish. “Those peasants are so superstitious that any fake magician can intimidate them.”
“All in all,” said Betty, “the people are in a fighting mood. It spells trouble ahead for a certain headstrong young patesi named Jipfur.”
Kish and I escorted Betty to Borbel and hied ourselves on to Babylon before daybreak. We entered the palace separately, hoping to escape notice.
I had just closed the heavy wooden door of my room when a knock sounded. A guard escorted me to Jipfur’s council room.
Jipfur sat at the head of the ebony table between yellow candles, looking sleepless and worried. Three or four of his advisers were talking with him as I entered. He scowled from under his tousled black hair and barked at me.
“Hal, your position as patesi’s attendant has ended. The troubles are cropping up too fast in the complaint department, and so—”
He paused for a draft of air through his thick lips. I stared at him, thinking how his thick, handsome face would have looked if I had plunged that knife in his back.
“Since you were a protégé of Slaf-Carch,” he said, “I hereby promote you to the rank of Minister. You begin work tomorrow.”
CHAPTER VI
Rumors swept through Babylon like a devastating sandstorm: Slaves and peasants who had been loyal workers for Slaf-Carch were harboring angry suspicions. They were holding secret meetings.
This news sifted through the glazed hallways of Jipfur’s palace with the chill of an oncoming blizzard.
Jipfur called the Serpents in for a session behind closed doors. The business end of the palace became a chaos of conferences—some with bankers and merchants—some with military guards—some with alley rats. The magnificent Jipfur was in a jam, and he reached out for moral support in all directions. He doubled his military guard. He increased his Serpent gang from three to six.
Meanwhile I took over the duties of Minister of Complaints, a job that was ninety-nine percent hot water. My appointment was a clever maneuver on Jipfur’s part, aimed to quiet the complaints of Slaf-Carch’s old followers. For it was well known that “Hal, the young foreigner” had stood in good stead with Slaf-Carch.
But I had no panacea for the growing unrest. I could feel trouble coming on. It came—a year of it—in a series of roaring avalanches.
Jipfur spent six violent weeks reorganizing, and among other changes he was forced to appoint two additional clean-up men to take care of his own offices. They were needed to scoop up the thousands of clay tablets that he smashed all over the floors. Tablets were pulverized by the ton in his constant shifting of business deals and countermanding of orders.
Jipfur, I soon realized, was on the ragged edge of cracking up.
My new office, located in the business end of the palace, gave me an inside track on his affairs. He was at once the most interesting and the most perturbing case of human explosion I ever witnessed.
Back of it all was Slaf-Carch’s mysterious voice. Whether it spoke to him daily or only at rare intervals no one knew. But all the wealth and power in Babylon can’t soothe a man If he thinks that the uncle he murdered is watching over his shoulder, waiting for a chance to vociferously bawl him out in public.
Besides the hot coals of guilt that scorched the bull moose’s backbone, there was the stab of defeat through his heart—assuming he had a heart. Temporarily he had lost Betty. And I’ll never forget the volcano of rage that roared out of his office that morning when his aristocratic sister dropped in to ask him why he had postponed assigning the yellow-haired slave wench, and then tried to kid him about it.
“There will be another fall, Jipfur,” the voice of Slaf-Carch had said.
Those words were the torch that lighted Jipfur’s mind—the blowtorch that ignited his actions during the year’s seasons that followed.
Across a ten-foot patch of palace wall a clay calendar was built. This was Jipfur’s crafty device for impressing Betty with his lustful will. He transferred her from Borbel to this palace, presented her with a dainty brass hatchet, and commanded that she chop out a number from the clay calendar for every day that passed.
The ring of the little brass hatchet would frequently bring Jipfur striding out to the calendar, smiling arrogantly at her, gloating that time was marching on. Another fall would come.
This daily exercise became the bane of Betty’s existence.
“I could sink that hatchet in his dizzy skull,” she confided to Kish and me.
Kish and I breakfasted with Betty these days. Our threesome, wedged into the morning’s schedule before the big shots were up, was the bright spot of the day. Betty said it was all that kept her courage up.
Nominally, her job was to manage the table service for Jipfur, his sister, and their clique of dignitaries—and to take care of the calendar.
But her knowledge of diet and her skill at preparing unheard-of dishes soon won for her the enviable position of Supervisor of Culinary Arts.
“You’re both coming up in the Babylonian world’ Kish remarked.
“And why not?” I commented. “We may be foreigners, but Betty’s heart and soul are right here in Babylon—”
“No!” Betty exclaimed. “I want to go back home!”
“Home?” I said, in blank surprise at her outburst. “Do you mean Borbel?”
“I mean home,” she said. “My own land—my own times!”
I stared at her in amazement. She suddenly gave way to tears.
I couldn’t have been any more surprised if Slaf-Carch had whispered in my ears. There she sat sobbing, like a child. At this moment she was a child.
Neither Kish nor I knew how to handle an emergency of this kind, ’ but Kish quickly excused himself, and I sort of brushed her eyes with my handkerchief. Then my arms were around her and I was kissing her.
That moment would have cost me a visit to the lions’ dens if Jipfur had burst in on us. But he didn’t, thank Marduk and all the little gods! And so, out of that unfinished breakfast, came a new understanding—and for a short moment a new plan of action.
“Betty, if I just had a timetable of the return trips, we’d get aboard the first train.”
I shouldn’t have said it, for I only brought back the hopelessness of our situation more cruelly. But then and there Betty told me something that offered a tiny clue—not what you’d call a floodlight of hope, but a spark.
The time device had appeared before her eyes once—possibly twice—since she had been stranded here. It had happened two years ago—she had seen the hoops of light flash down on a hilltop. And again, not so many months in the past, she had seen a midnight flash descend to the top of the Tower-of-Babel ziggurat that might have been—
“The rule, you know,” she said, “was that t
he time device would seek out the highest points of a landscape.”
“I’ve no doubt the thing has hopped all over the Fertile Crescent. But how we’re going to know when and where—”
“It’s really quite impossible,” she said. “I needn’t have mentioned it.”
And with that our spark of hope burnt out. We scarcely mentioned the matter again, though Betty once alluded to her momentary weakness as a silly fear that she might get appendicitis or have to have a tooth pulled—and she hated Babylonian doctors. But concerning her real fear—the growing terror of Jipfur—she said not a word.
There was one thing that I knew to do, and I did it.
My new position ranked me high above the common slave I had once been, and invested me with the authority to employ personal servants. I handpicked a dozen men, gave them a clear description of the luminous time hoops that might come out of the sky—much to their bewilderment—and stationed them on hilltops and ziggurats to keep watch, maintaining day and night shifts.
From month to month I checked up on them, rewarding the alert ones, discharging the indolent. At last I had a faithful staff who understood what was wanted. Years might pass, but if ever the time hoops began to strike in this vicinity, these men would break their necks to get word to me.
Betty had a case of homesickness that was pitiful to see. Perhaps it all stemmed from her fear of Jipfur. Every new square she chopped off the calendar sharpened her dread of Babylon, quickened her hopes of going back “home.”
On the day we secretly designated as Christmas she was deep in the blues. For three years she’d passed Christmas without giving it a thought—a natural thing, considering that the first Christmas was still five and a half centuries in the future.
But this time nostalgia had her in its morbid grip, and she couldn’t free herself until she resolved to do something about it—something to express good will—even to her worst enemies—in the old familiar Christmas spirit.
I had a bright idea that we give gifts, and I went to no end of trouble to fix up something very special. Out of the best metals and chemicals I could bring together I constructed a small but powerful dry cell battery—one that would fit the vocoder. (I thought it was high time for the ghost of Slaf-Carch to break his long silence!) Imagine my consternation, a week after “Christmas,” to discover that Betty had emptied half of the battery’s contents and was trying to grow a hothouse flower in it.
She gave Kish and me each an ivory comb—really fine gifts for these times. She bestowed trinkets on several of her palace friends. But most oddly, she took great pains in carving a small neck ornament for Jipfur. From a thin sheet of brass she made a chain of letters that spelled “Bull Moose.” Of course only she and I knew the meaning of the ornament, though we tried to share the joke with Kish.
From then on Jipfur always wore the neck piece, though ignorant of its meaning. It was comical to see him try to restrain his immense pride. He was so sure this signified a growing bond of love between him and his yellow-haired slave girl that Betty suffered weeks of bitter regret for her overflow of good will.
Rumors began to fly. It was quite possible, by Babylonian law, for a girl to be lifted out of slavery if any free man cared to marry her. Perhaps Jipfur had postponed his assignment of the yellow-haired foreign girl last fall for a very special reason!
The more I heard of this talk the more anxious I was to see the red flash of time-hoops.
There was just enough winter in this semitropical valley for the more savage side of civilization to hibernate. But the warm winds of planting time soon unleashed the furies of Babylon’s pent-up frictions.
A storm of distressing news swept into our palace. There was talk that Jipfur’s Borbel estate was slipping out of his control, that many of Slaf-Carch’s old slaves were getting out of hand.
And there was stronger talk—whispering that Jipfur had never washed the bloodstains from his hands, and the gods were growing angry.
Even his staunchest friends who had shouted his innocence from the housetops admitted that he had been criminally negligent about the matter. He should have at least forced a conviction and execution upon some promising suspect.
These gruesome suggestions, I am sure, took root in Jipfur’s imagination. The evidence cropped up unexpectedly one morning.
It was one of those dismal mornings with slow rain dripping rhythmically along the arcade of the inner garden. Betty and Kish and I had agreed at breakfast that nothing ever happened on a day like this.
What might have happened, an hour later, if I hadn’t chanced to walk past the library, will never be known. Crossing through this secluded corner of the palace I heard a clatter of clay tablets. I rushed in. Strangely there were no candles burning—the only light filtered through the closely packed shelves of Babylonian literature along the narrow windows.
Jipfur stood squarely before the shelves with, a sturdy shepherd’s crook in his hands. He was using the crook-end on the stacks of clay tablets, jerking them down. A heap of them were broken on the floor, and out of that heap came a painful groan.
“Kish!” I cried.
Jipfur whirled on me, swung the shepherd’s crook at my head. I ducked. The thing struck the wall and more plates of clay clattered to the floor.
Before I could catch any meaning out of this mad turmoil, Jipfur was bouncing tablets off my head and I was rushing him with fists. A missile cut me across the forehead and for an instant I thought I would join Kish and the rubbish heap on the floor. I sank for a count of three—my hand closed over a four pound slab of dried clay—my fingertips caught it Up by its fancy cuneiform indentations—my arm let it fly.
That tablet may have been the Code of Hammurabi, for all I know. If it was, I broke the law. I broke it over the bull moose’s brawny elbow. He yowled with pain.
“Guards! Guards!” he shrieked, and he waved his hands so defenselessly that I stopped my attack. “Guards! Guards!”
Kish stopped groaning, shook off a quarter-ton of debris and raised his head. One eye was swollen shut, the other was wide open.
“Yes! Call the guards!” Kish’s choked voice was bitter, mocking. “Call the guards. Tell them what happened.”
Jipfur’s face was strange to see. It was a study in terror. Jipfur, the mighty patesi, the man of wealth, the patriot with the big voice, the leader of parades! He clutched the shelf with quivering hands, his white lips trembled.
“I’m sick!” he hissed.
Heavy footsteps were pounding toward us. The guards were coming on a run. On the instant Jipfur sprang toward a certain object near the door—a fresh, soft clay tablet still gleaming with moisture. He hurled it to the floor, stamped on it with his sandals to obliterate the writing.
In came a squad of guards, puffing and snarling, ready with battle axes. What was the matter? Had there been a fight?
“Did someone attack you, your honor?”
Jipfur’s eyes turned to Kish, slowly, calculating the delicate balance of advantages.
“There has been a trifling accident, men,” he said in an unruffled voice. “Help that poor fellow up.”
Kish was nearer dead than alive as two of the guards led him away. But he distinctly echoed the word, “Accident!” under his breath—and it was not a kindly echo.
As for the bull moose, he now lapsed into the luxury of raving and ranting like a mad man.
“I’m sick! I’m sick! Take me to my bed and let the gods have mercy on me. These crashing walls have struck a dreadful malady through my bones.”
They led him away, and the whole palace spent the rest of the week praying for him—at his command.
Personally, I had no fear about his pulling through. His injuries amounted to no more than a cracked elbow and some bruises. There would have been a cracked skull if I had had more time. But he had taken such a quick escape to mock-illness that my good work had been cut short.
Babylon gossip took his story at face value, namely that the rain had loosened th
e library walls and caused his stores of tablets to fall on himself and his attendant.
But Kish had another story for Betty and me, as he lay bandaged, fighting death.
The rain, he said, had played its part, but in a different way. A high pile of clay tablets might have killed him instantly. But the dampness stuck some of them and bungled the patesi’s neat plan.
“I caught a glimpse of that freshly written document,” said Kish, referring to the wet tablet that the bull moose had so hastily stamped out. “It bore my seal—Jipfur had faked it—and it confessed that I had murdered Slaf-Carch to give my dear master more wealth. Now the painful memory of the deed drove me to take my own life.”
“Your dear master!” Betty said with a saccharine whine. “He’d better not know that you know.”
“He knows,” said Kish weakly. “He has warned me that if I breathe a word to anyone, he’ll cut my heart out.”
CHAPTER VII
“Get me a new doctor!”
That, as the newscasts of Babylon went, was the quotation of the week. Friends would meet on the streets of Babylon and inquire about each other’s health, and their wives’ health, and the king’s health. When they got around to a certain wealthy young patesi’s health the conversation picked up interest.
“I hear he called in three new physicians.”
“Three! He had all of twelve. He’s calling doctors from all corners of the land. I think he’s crazy!”
“I think he’s guilty!”
And then the conversation would hush down, for it didn’t become common people to make charges that they didn’t have the money to prove.
Kish absorbed all the antiseptic that Betty and I could concoct, and finally got back on his feet.
Jipfur, meanwhile, grew steadily worse.
On the day that I led Kish in for a visit, the bull moose was carrying on like a maniac. His attendants couldn’t quiet him.
“If you came in to accuse me, get out!” he would roar.
“We didn’t,” said Kish mildly. “We came to see how you were.”
