Magic City

by Paula Guran

  Joaquin bumps my shoulder with his fist. “Basketball practice. Tomorrow. You’re in, right?”

  “Yeah, sure. And listen, thanks for—”

  He waves it off. “Later.”

  He and his boys take off and then it’s just Rita and me standing there in front of the school.

  “I’ve still got an hour before I need to get work,” she says.

  I nod, even though I don’t see where this is going.

  She shakes her head. “So, are you going to ask me to have a coffee with you?”

  That takes me off guard, but I catch up quickly.

  “Absolutely,” I tell her. “Do you know a good place?”

  She takes me by the hand and leads me off toward Mission Street.

  Have I mentioned how much I love this place?

  Charles de Lint is an award-winning full-time writer who lives in Ottawa, Canada. With thirty-nine novels and thirty-five books of short fiction published, he is known as a master of the contemporary fantasy genre. Recent books include Seven Wild Sisters, a novel for middle-grade readers published in February 2014 by Little, Brown; and young adult novels Under My Skin and Over My Head, published by Penguin Canada in 2012 and 2013, respectively. A proverbial Renaissance man, de Lint also loves to paint, and has been a professional musician for many years, writing original songs and performing with his wife, MaryAnn Harris. For more information, visit his personal website at www.charlesdelint.com. He’s also on Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter.

  The City: Ancient Babylon, some time after 1760 BCE and before 1595 BCE.

  The Magic: A creature who could be a guardian angel, but is equally capable of the demonic, enters a woman’s life.

  ALCHEMY

  Lucy Sussex

  Three figures walked in single file in the evening heat haze besides the Euphrates River, heading homewards.

  All women, shawled, hunched by the baskets on their backs. The last, youngest and smallest, was further slouched by the year-old baby riding on her hip.

  As if the sun had blinked, now an extra figure suddenly appeared, appended to their procession. Where day met night, before the sun god disappeared through the doors to the underworld, can be a time where strange things happen. The three women had taken a risk staying so late to gather sweet rushes outside the city gates. Now returning with their baskets dripping and laden, they knew that they must hurry, lest something untoward sneak into the city with them.

  The third woman, her nostrils full of the scent of leaves and rhizomes on her back, her mind occupied by the problem of how to preserve that smell, nonetheless heard behind her the extra set of shuffling footsteps. Some field worker, some beggar? Though very tired, and with extra work ahead of her that night, the processing of the sweet flag besides cooking the evening meal, she let her mind fix on the sound.

  Suddenly she realized what about it was so strange—it was an exact copy of her own footsteps.

  She reeled in a turn, saw the bent figure, the shawled head—and nothing beneath the fringes of woven wool. For a moment she and the demon were face to face, his disguise rumbled. Then in a flap of confusion, shawl transmogrifying from fronds of hair to great feathery wings, he shot away and up.

  Her mouth opened wide—she could scream, but that would wake her baby. Worse, it would alert her companions, her censorious sisters-in-law, that she had somehow, by her actions, drawn the attention of the spirit world. She closed her mouth, turned again, as the three trudged towards the city gates, the watching guards, the safety of a walled city state, a relatively new thing in the world: Babylon.

  From above, the demon watched her, biding his time. His name was Azubel, a name not written in cuneiform on the clay tablets kept by the priests in the temples of Babylon, and before that, old Sumer. He was not part of their spirit world as they perceived it—or, more to the point, as they had shaped it, like they took the Mesopotamian clay and made it into bricks, jugs, writing tablets, everything useful to an aspiring civilization. He might be useful to the Babylonians, he knew that. But it would require a transaction, something in return. Something that would make it worthwhile that he, an immortal, should invest his time and power in these creatures doomed to die amongst their clay-dust. Whatever that something might be, he had a notion it could be in that hindmost woman, shuffling along with her load of reeds and drowsing baby.

  He had not meant to scare her, merely to get closer, to get a sense of her thoughts. They had a special savor, distinct as musk: an unusual mind was here, working on a different level from those around her. She had been acute enough to detect his presence despite the crude disguise. That was interesting. Enough to keep him from the immortal’s curse, that of being eternally bored? Possibly. But he would have to proceed carefully, he could tell that. He would watch invisibly, and then reveal himself slowly, to see how she would react.

  Over the next moon, he followed her, as focused as a hunting bird on its prey.

  He observed her at the street markets, among all the other good housewives. Accompanied by her shadows, the watchful sisters-in-law, she bought her family’s daily provisions, or ordered delivery of larger purchases: a new water barrel, a load of straw for fuel. She sat at a market stall herself, in the perfumer’s quarter, in front of her many stoppered jars. She was not a good saleswoman, her mind puzzling over the details of perfume-making even as the customers filled her ears with trivial questions. Which suited them best, the myrtle-wash, or the honeysuckle? He overheard their chatter and also the deeper, unvoiced questions: Will this keep my husband home at night? Will this keep him interested in me? She was even oblivious to the outstretched hands, clutching items of barter, the customers finally paying, until a sister-in-law pinched her into alertness, once even openly slapped her.

  He nearly slapped back, because he was beginning to realize how important were the thoughts behind those dark-brown eyes: their brown study so easily turned towards something darker, which would come to be called the black arts. Her thoughts made a beginning, no more than her baby’s stumbling steps, towards his special interests, for which no word yet existed in all of Babylonia. It did in Egypt, the land where he had spent the last thousand years. He could trace the lines of the hieroglyphs that spelled it out: Khemeia. The word meant black, a good thing, named from the soil alongside the Nile, and by extension, as surely the floodwaters spread over the delta, to the land of Egypt itself. Black earth, fertile as an enquiring mind, into which ideas could be seeded, notions of a dark, powerful art.

  He vocalized the word, a soft breath: Khemeia! What might it be in translation to Babylonian? The more he looked at her, the more he had a sense that he was about to find out. He had assayed the minds around her, and knew now she was the most intelligent person in Mesopotamia, a civilization bursting with new ideas, unlike static Egypt.

  So he watched, amassing information. She was good at her perfumer’s craft, for despite the apparent absent-mindedness, the inattention to social chit-chat, the customers kept returning. That slap had been powered by genuine anxiety: her sisters-in-law knew her skills, and were even a little in awe of her. Afraid of her, even?

  He tracked her to her home, the typical mud brickwork of Mesopotamia forming a house of the poorer sort: one storey, the streetfront blank wall. She worked in her courtyard, the household’s center. Here was domesticity: fowls fussing and clucking in their pen, sacks of lentils or barley, a child’s leather ball, its stitching half unpicked. Her trade was also carried out in this space, with myrtle leaves steeping in a clay trough, a well-used mortar and pestle, flower petals drying in the shade on wicker racks. No husband, he observed, but small children. A widow, as ripe as a fresh date, dark, small, and rounded. The eyes she circled with kohl each morning were almond-shaped, as lustrous as her hair in its long plaits. She looked ready for love, for another marriage?

  Slowly, gradually, he let her sense his presence. A flash of a wing in the corner of an eye, a shadow, as he flew overhead in the full sun. She showed no sign of fear a
fter that first encounter; she even seemed not particularly surprised at his return. He habituated her to seeing him, and soon they were, if not nodding acquaintances like the market stallholders she greeted every day, approaching a familiarity. She knew him by sight; and also that nobody else around her had this privilege, this special visitant. So, as a Babylonian woman would not do with any other male who was not a relation, even though this male had wings and a raptor’s head, she twitched aside her shawl and met his gaze. It was an unspoken communication, a glance that held, but never approached the contest of a stare. Moreover, it coolly appraised; much like his own.

  On one rare occasion when she was alone, without infants, or her attendant chaperones, he followed her. She wore her best beads and carried a basket of wares. Her destination? The temple of Aruru, the mother goddess, the maker goddess, a fashioner equally of children and clay. Even the holy places of this city needed perfumes, incense, to mask the foul stench that any human settlement creates. In Babylon as in Egypt, to be sweet-smelling was considered next to godliness. And, like many things in this supremely practical culture, incense could have another function.

  In a quiet back courtyard of the temple, she met with a priestess at once motherly and gauntly ascetic. There she presented a package wrapped in leaves. The priestess unwrapped it, put it to her nose and sniffed: incense, top quality, and so reserved for libanomancy, divination from smoke. Then, as he watched, a ritual progressed, culminating with a handful of incense being scattered into a small brazier. A cloud of sweet-smelling smoke ascended to the heavens, in a cluster: a favorable divination. As she left the temple, smiling to reveal one crooked tooth, he let himself become visible to her for a moment. Her jaw set, but she did not look surprised.

  This coy flirtation had to stop. Tonight, to meet with her, and put forward his proposition.

  Late on that warm night in old Babylon, she tended the tinuru, the household clay oven. The embers were banked, and a pot seethed above them, boiling the day’s harvest of delicate petals. Peripherally she registered the scents of her surroundings: the fresh straw from the pen where the fowls dozed; the clay water tubs full of steeping myrtle leaves; the powdered sweetbark, the labor of her mortar and pestle. All seemed safe, cozy—except for the monstrosity, a man with wings and a falcon’s head, watching from atop the encircling brick wall.

  She eyed him as she worked, noting that he had not flickered out of vision, as previously, but remained, a silent presence. Wanting: what? Without being too specific, like those customers of hers who really wanted love potions, she had queried the priestess about her visitant. From the equally guarded reply she knew he could be a demon, or an ilum, a personal protective spirit. Such was small wonder in Babylon, where, as befitted the greatest city in the world, three worlds co-existed: heaven, earth, and the afterlife.

  That was one thought in her mind, amongst so many others. She was a mother, a businesswoman, with continual demands on her time. Of most immediate concern to her now were her experiments in perfumery. It is easy to steep the perfume out of flowers, and so make a wash for the hair. But can you capture the essence of those flowers more permanently, fix the fragrance? The pot wobbled and spat, and temporarily she forgot her visitant. She lifted the lid, sniffed at the condensate. How best to collect it, concentrate it? Through her eyelids she saw his head move slightly, following her action intently. To herself she voiced: Ah! Whatever he wanted, it involved her, and the experiments of her perfumery.

  A child’s moan came from the rooms opening onto the courtyard, its door a dark cave in the firelight: “Ummum.” [Mother].

  She answered, softly, reassuringly: “Martum.” [Daughter].

  Her shawl stirred, and the baby woke briefly, reaching for one soft breast. He took a mouthful, drowsed on the nipple.

  Both children subsided before she spoke again, quietly, as if to herself: “I know you have not come for my children.” The demon on the wall nodded, as if she were not speaking to him for the first time.

  “You have been watching every move I make. You had the opportunity to take them, but no.”

  The raptor head nodded again.

  “And demons carry off virgins or princesses, not humble housewives, mothers . . . ”

  Her tone was deprecating, as if to say: Desirable? Me? Her hair was tousled in its plaits after a long working day, and the kohl she applied this morning had surely faded. But as she spoke she knew well that he had not followed her through Babylon for an idle reason. Desirable? Of course she was, somehow, to this strange, unknowable male.

  “You watch my perfume-making as closely as I do . . . so do you want my recipes then? My fine scents, my salves?”

  “Well-observed . . . ” he finally said. To her his voice sounded not like the harsh cry of a hawk, but rather soft and hissing, like a resinous log in flame. “Tapputi-Belatekallim, of the perfumers.”

  Now that he had finally greeted her, she made the formal obeisance of response. And added: “Also daughter of Tapputi, herself a perfumer.”

  “With brewers and bakers of uncommon ability in your family too! People who take materials, observe them, mix them, watch them transform, then refine the results.”

  “Isn’t that what a good artisan should do?”

  “Others think differently, they follow tradition. Your lineage has enquiring minds. You promise to be the greatest of them.”

  Her head was bowed, but she listened intently, though she suspected these flattering lines were a lure. “Really?”

  “One day the King of Babylon will want your perfumes.”

  “Says who?” She tried to sound unconcerned, but she was as hooked now as an Euphrates perch.

  “My name is Azubel.”

  “Are you a demon or an ilum?” she shot back, though from the priestess she knew the distinction between the two could be small, the categories of godliness and demonic being fluid.

  “A lamassu.”

  She drew in her breath quietly. An ilum was merely a spirit of varying power. A lamassu was something stronger: a guardian angel. Tread carefully, she thought. A wrathful lamassu was equally capable of the demonic, with worse consequences.

  “A lamassu? Mine?”

  “If you will have me.”

  “I have a choice? To your proposal, that sounds like a marriage proposal?”

  “It is . . . if you want it.”

  She poked the fire, added more fuel, temporizing whilst thinking hard.

  “You must know I am a widow. Do you also know my sisters-in-law want me to marry again within their family? They have a cousin already picked out—a lout and dolt.” She spat into the embers. “A young girl never has a choice in her husband. My family decided for me, as is the custom. So I got a man fiery and raging, and babies all the time—until the river fever took him. Do you think I want that again?”

  “Your husband’s family aim to keep your perfumery for themselves. They love your knowledge.”

  “You observe well,” she said. “But did you also see my gift of incense to the priestess? It was large, because it paid for two divinations. The first, for my enterprise. The smoke clustered as it rose: that is the sign I will succeed.”

  “I saw the priestess throw a generous handful of incense into the brazier, on a windless day—it could hardly do else but cluster.”

  She touched the amulet of Aruru at her neck. “If the goddess thought otherwise, she would have sent the smoke to the left, and so indicated a bad omen.”

  “Of course she would. And what about the second divination?”

  “A more expensive one, for when my in-laws come, and seek the omens for their marriage proposal.”

  “Let me predict,” he said. “The brazier will just happen to be placed near a draft, that day? Or the incense scattered scantily?”

  “It is not for me to question the diviner’s art,” she said piously.

  He laughed. “You are clever—and also practical.”

  “Is it too much to want a good husband?�
�

  “It is all you deserve. And more. That I can give you. Do you want to know how to solve the problems with your perfumery, so that its products will be the greatest ever produced in Babylon, and the world?”

  Although she was really flattered now, she kept her tone slightly mocking, unbelieving.

  “You do not offer me jewels?”

  “Because that is not your bride-price. Your price is knowledge. Khemeia, as the Egyptians call it. It is up to you to supply the Babylonian name.”

  She stood, awkwardly, dropping her poker. From the top of the wall, he launched himself down, landing silently as an owl, his great wings near spanning the little courtyard. She looked at the feathers, imagined the touch of them on her bare skin, then met his gaze, the unblinking golden eyes above that hooked beak, fashioned for tearing, maiming, killing.

  Unbidden a memory surfaced for her like a dumpling in a boiling cook pot.

  “That ragged, foreign prophet!” she cried. “The one the priests threw out of the city five summers back! He prophesied bad angels seeking mortal women for their wives, offering them occult knowledge, and breeding giants on them! Isn’t an ordinary baby big enough, when you’re kneeling on the birth-bricks, feeling as if you’re about to split open?”

  She clutched her infant to her, and ducked under his wing towards the house, shouting: “Begone! Begone!” The poker out of reach, she threw the nearest possible weapon, a pot containing vinegar. It smashed against the brick wall as Azubel flapped upwards and out of the way.

  Pandemonium!—the baby wailed, the hens clucked hysterically, the older children woke, shrieking. On the wall was now a stain, spreading like blood.

  “Go to sleep,” she said to all and general, including her nosy neighbors. “It was just a nightmare.”

  From far above, Azubel watched the scene in the courtyard, like a common Babylon market toy, a child’s clay model of a house, in miniature. Why did these mortals get things so wrong? He could have had her then and there, but for the wretched, flea-bit, self-styled prophet Enoch, for whom stoning out of Babylon was clearly too good.