Magic City

by Paula Guran

  Nonetheless, he would return.

  Immortals being somewhat careless with time, the waiting period he allowed for her to reflect on his offer stretched into years. When he found Tapputi again, there were silver strands in her hair, and gold hung from her ears and neck. Her mortar and pestle were metal now, high quality. Even her house was in a better quarter, larger, with extra rooms built onto the roof and courtyard. For extra children, he supposed. He tallied her offspring, noting a difference between the older ones, lanky and half-grown, alike as lentils except for their slight differences in height. The younger were chubby, unformed, but cast from a slightly different mold. He guessed she had not married again for looks, and these additions were cute in the way of all small children, but distinctly homely. And there were only two of them, spaced well apart. A plain but considerate man sired them?

  In the market, her former sisters-in-law sold her perfumes, from a larger, well-situated stall, helped by her eldest son. She had clearly kept them on her side, yet out of her hair. Most days she worked at home, except when making special deliveries, not only to the temple of Aruru, but also the major houses of worship of Marduk and Ishtar. The reason why occupied most of her courtyard: a huge tinaru with appendages of copper and glass.

  Behold a new thing in the world—a distillery, for taking the raw matter of flowers, boiling them, condensing the vapor and extracting the essential oils. And she had done it all by herself! Azubel felt a glow of pride at the aptness of his choice, the untutored intelligence of his prospective pupil. What else might she be capable of, when bonded with him? The possibilities stretched out in his mind: alternate Babylons, a Mesopotamian empire that would never fall. Yes, that was one way he could buy this woman, so capable at abstract as well as practical thought. But also he knew he had to engage her feelings, be personal, for a true marriage of minds and much more.

  Alchemical, he nearly added, though that word will not come into existence for over a thousand years, and not in all the possible timelines that stretch like a web from Babylon to the future. The Arabic article added to the ancient Egyptian word khem, its hieroglyph recurring through papyrus tracts on the arcana of embalming, glass and dye making, metallurgy, all practices which mingled heavily with magic. From al-chemy derived, eventually, chemistry, Azubel’s specialty, the art of elements and their interactions. A great knowledge, two-edged, dangerous: it could reveal the secrets of the cosmos, or turn humans destructively on each other. The choice was theirs—the temptation of power, the real story behind Adam and Eve.

  They got it badly wrong there, he thought, as humans always seemed to do. Consider the prophet Enoch and his fable of giant babies, which had so unnerved Tapputi. Catching a rumor, a whisper, of Azubel and his fellows, during his mad wanderings through the Middle East, he wove a tale from it. Enoch’s words gained currency, were recorded in writing, part of the swirling mass of words slowly forming what would someday become the Bible. Through the luck of history and its stories, the book of Enoch failed to become part of the Biblical canon, though it had more than a grain of truth to it, unlike most tales of gods and men. Enoch raved of a host of fallen angels teaching women secret knowledge, black arts: the manufacture of cosmetics to enhance sexual allure; enameling; dye making. In return the angels gained sexual favors, human wives. Enoch was a misogynist, forever blaming women for his misfortunes, his impotence. Azubel knew better: temptations were for either gender, and women were not particularly easy. In his chance rare encounters with other spirits, he had heard far more boasts about beautiful bright boys.

  Alchemical marriage: where two elements unite, or the earthly and the spiritual, to produce something much, much finer—like gold. What might he and Tapputi make together, if she would just give in to him, accept his proposal?

  As he had done before, he watched and followed her, waiting for the chance to reveal himself. It came on a day she had dressed with particular care, with a basket prepared of wares for her best clients, the temples. Her older children were capable enough to mind the youngsters, but as she was almost outside the house, the littlest girl threw herself at her mother, insisting on accompanying her. Tapputi could have disentangled herself with a slap, leaving someone else to deal with the ensuing tantrum. Instead she let the little hands stay clinging to her skirts, the chubby feet follow her.

  Her destination was the great temple of Ishtar, goddess of love and war, perched atop its ziggurat, an artificial mountain reaching for the sky. He watched from above as she entered, climbing the steps slowly, her speed hampered by her child. Finally she stopped on a flat mezzanine that was slowly being turned into a garden space. Here she set down her basket, and engaged in a long negotiation with a young, fat, bedizened priestess. The little girl first sat by, docile, then wandered off to investigate the green waving plants. Azubel plucked a small feather from the underside of his wing, and blew it into the child’s path. As she stretched her hand out for it, he blew again, sending it out of reach. So ensued a pouncing, leaping chase. Tapputi could hardly stop it, as the haggling had reached its critical phase. Even the priestess was beginning to look puzzled: where did that raptor feather come from, and on a still day, too! Until came the moment when he sent the feather soaring over a thick cluster of infant date palms. The child leapt to catch it, tripped on landing—and fell headlong over the edge.

  It was not far to fall, but enough to break young unformed bones, leave a cripple.

  He soared downwards, and just as the child was about to hit the hard courtyard bricks, scooped her up in his arms—And hovered, just above the ground, giving Tapputi and the priestess, who had rushed to the edge and stood peering agonizedly over, a full view.

  He dropped the child, who landed on her two bare feet, and immediately burst into ear-splitting wails. Stray worshippers and temple slaves rushed toward her, oblivious to him. Such a lucky child, to fall and not be hurt! He trod air, above the cries and coos. Up above, Tapputi would be rushing too, except that the priestess had fainted heavily into her arms. All she could do was glare at him.

  Her gaze mingled anguish and fury but part of it said: You again!

  Working at night had started for Tapputi from dire need: child-free time! Then it had become habit, a time and place that was hers alone, where she could think and experiment. So as usual, that night, under the bowl of moon and stars, Tapputi tended her still. Beside her sat her eldest daughter, old enough now to watch and learn—until the long hours of darkness became too much for her, and her head drooped onto her mother’s knee.

  “Now we can talk,” she said, to the creature again watching from her wall.

  The great bird-head inclined softly in agreement. She could nearly have fainted herself, to see her child in the arms of the demon; although her mother-love was powerful enough to propel her over the roof herself, to grapple with the creature, even if she fell in a heap of shattered bones. Instead she had been forced to attend to an arm-load of heavy priestess. She had half-expected the demon to shoot up and away, stealing the child as a delayed revenge for her refusal. But to deposit her safely, before making his exit? Beware of the supernatural granting favors, for something is always asked in return.

  It was like her haggling with the priestess all over again, she thought. An introductory offer had been made, a show of apparent good faith. Now she would have to respond, counter if necessary.

  “Am I in debt to you since you rescued my child?”

  “Assuredly,” came that voice, never unpleasant in her ears, and even more so now she had reason to feel gratitude to it.

  “I am married again, you know.”

  “That I know.” It was hard to read that voice, but it sounded amused.

  “Does not the code of Hammurabi the all-wise decree that an adulteress be thrown in the Euphrates, tied to her lover? You with your wings could just fly away, and I would drown.”

  “If tied to me, you would rise on my wings . . . ”

  With anyone else, she would snort: a likely stor
y! But she had seen those wings in action, their strength and, she imagined, their softness, like a scentless petal.

  “I believe you,” she finally responded.

  “In any case, my proposal is not for an earthly marriage.”

  She almost laughed. “Thank the gods for that! What would a woman do with two husbands at once? Double the trouble and never any peace!”

  She cocked her head, listening to the sound of breathing from the room with the marriage bed, where her husband lay alone. “Men get jealous. Old as he is, he would fight you, though he could not put up more than a child’s fight.”

  “So you did get the good husband you deserved? A Dumuzi for your Ishtar?”

  “Divine love is for the gods. Or for your children.” She reached down and stroked her daughter’s hair.

  His head turned, he preened a wing feather with his beak.

  Male vanity! she thought.

  “I got a man quiet and calm. Kind, even. A coppersmith—he made the retort.”

  “And I thought it all your own work.”

  “Oh Tapputi, my grandmother, had some ideas in that line, experimented, as did Tapputi, my mother. And a cousin of mine, dead several summers back, got closer. But yes, mostly my own work, to make the most beautiful perfume.”

  She knew she sounded prideful, but rightly so.

  “Just as well—my husband can do little work now. He gets sore, can barely move some days. I make him salve, and I’m getting better with each batch I distill.”

  “But not good enough,” he said.

  The words hung in the air between them. In the silence, she listened to her husband again. She felt affection—but nothing more, not like in the hymns of Enheduanna that the Ishtar devotees sang.

  “You mean, to cure him? Is that what you offer?”

  “I can offer you an empire of knowledge.”

  Tapputi knew haggling. At a crucial point the negotiator must show their goods, to prove their worth before any contract is entered into, even the riksum [marriage contract]. Very slowly, she edged her daughter’s head off her knee and onto a pillow of sacking stuffed with wool for carding and spinning.

  “Show me! And then see if I’ll buy!”

  “Bring your best incense, then!”

  She darted to her storeroom, finding the leaf-wrapped packet by feel and smell in the darkness. Pausing only to throw her shawl over her head, she rejoined him. He swooped down, took her hand in his: a cool, dry, strong yet gentle grasp. Then he shot upwards again, she with him. Her plaits whipped around her, the fringes of shawl blew into her eyes, but she held her fragrant package tight. Their passage negotiated the lazy night breezes to the temple atop the ziggurat of Marduk, the chief god, the highest point in Babylon. Alighting on the flat roof he released her. Spread out before them was the city, the walls, the slow coils of the Euphrates, but also the darkness of the Mesopotamian plains.

  “Why are we here?” she asked, adjusting her shawl.

  “To see the future.”

  “Divination?” She held the packet out to him.

  “But not like any you know.” He was glancing down intently, and now he swooped again to the lower levels of the ziggurat. When he returned, he carried a brazier in one unprotected hand, the embers still glowing a dull red. Although her fingers were shaking, she had undone the leaves; now he took the incense from her, and threw all of it into the brazier. Dense, sweet-smelling smoke surrounded them, obscuring the stars above them, and below, all the world she knew, her Babylon. He took her hand again, and as if the moon had risen, the smoke lightened around them, to daylight, though it was hours away. His other hand moved as if he wove, like a woman at her loom.

  “What are you doing?”

  “There are lines here that lead to Babylon’s futures. But they break, fork, rejoin . . . ”

  Futures, she thought. More than one. From the look of it, his weavings were not easy work. His muscles tensed, he clicked his beak irritably. Slowly around them shapes formed, at first as inchoate as any smoky whorl that a diviner could read to have meaning. Then she gasped, as the shapes suddenly solidified into the clarity of the experienced, either in the waking world or in the dream. They looked down on Babylon in dawn light, its great gates closed, the walls bristling with armed men. Towards the city advanced the chariots and spears of an advancing army.

  “As beautiful as an army with banners,” he said. “Except if they are someone else’s army. Have you ever heard of King Sennacherib of the Assyrians? Your children’s children’s children will. He will come like a wolf upon the sheepfold, to sack and burn Babylon.”

  She flinched a moment, yet kept her grip on his strong hand.

  “Now watch what you could do about it, if you had the power of Khemeia.”

  A crack, as from the walls, lightning struck, again and again, at the Assyrian king in the leading chariot. It knocked him sideways and onto the earth, scorched and dead.

  “Tapputi, you could command that lightning, if you say the word. You have all the ingredients here for it, if you knew how to mix them, make the transformation into exploding fire.”

  “War is the goddess Ishtar’s work,” she said.

  “She is also the goddess of love.”

  Tapputi hesitated. Under their feet was the temple roof. They were within the confines of a holy place, and any apparent impiety could be fatal, even with a lamassu at her side.

  “I worship the gods of Babylon, that is only right. I sell my incense in the temples of Ishtar and Marduk, to glorify their names. But I wear the talismans of Aruru, the divine Mother and Maker.”

  “So?”

  “So war is not for me. And my perfumes are not made as love-charms, either.”

  “What do you want, then?”

  “Show me your salves instead! Show me how I can cure my husband, save my daughters from the pains of childbirth, stop the river fever!”

  He could have thrown his raptor head back and screamed, but that would have alerted her to the difficulty of her request. Teaching her how to make gunpowder to use against the Assyrians was easy in comparison: the Babylonians already refined one necessary ingredient, saltpeter. But medicine of the sort Tapputi craved—anesthetics, the antibiotics that would cure her husband, or the quinine to prevent Babylon’s epidemics of malaria—would happen nearly two millennia in the future. The timelines were, as much as they could be, consistent as to the date. To summon such far visions would be to negotiate a web of possibilities, in which each year created more complexity: anything could happen, mostly disastrous for his purposes.

  He probed, near the limits of his abilities, and struck gold: a hospital in Babylon that he could show Tapputi. It was far in the future, but a facility fully equipped, at the cutting edge of its times’ medicine. Though he could only dimly perceive it, he pulled as hard as he could, bringing the vision into view. The mists re-formed, and the Mesopotamian plain came into view again, this time in the glare of midday. Now they seemed to hang in open air, no ziggurat below them, nor a city. Instead was desert, a mix of ruins and furious activity, as an army made a semi-permanent camp.

  “Tents,” she said. “Like the desert nomads.”

  To one side was what had drawn him to this future, the mobile field hospital, but her gaze had seized on the great war-vehicles, bigger than elephants, that propelled themselves across the sand. Ancient paving and brickwork cracked beneath them. Others, equipped with shovels at their fronts, dug into the ruins with the force of a hundred laborers, instantly making trenches, defensive positions. Men wearing clothes as pied as beasts—ochre, brown, sandy—rode the war-vehicles, shouted directions.

  “These are soldiers? No armor, and dressed like barbarians! And so pale, like those slaves sent in tribute from the north, whose language nobody could understand.”

  As if in response, a soldier below took off his helmet, to reveal bronze-colored hair, and skin as pale as fresh milk. He wiped his brow, kicked a pebble at his feet. It flipped, revealing bird-scratc
hes of text: cuneiform.

  Tapputi drew her breath in a hard gasp. “Where are we?”

  “On the site of Hammurabi’s Babylon.”

  “Have they no respect for the law? For the great law-giver?”

  “About as much as the Assyrians.”

  She had closed her eyes tight. “I don’t want this vision! Send it away!”

  Easier said than done, he thought, for the waft and web of the far future entangled them in a complex knot, from which numberless possibilities diverged. He tried to feel his way back, cautiously, but the scene of martial desecration remained fixed in front of them. He let go of Tapputi, to use both his hands; she opened her eyes, staring at him. It felt as if he, a divine being, had no more power than a fly caught in a spider’s snare. Angry, he struggled, at first cautiously, then desperately, with all his strength.

  A line snapped, freeing them, but at the same time sending them tumbling through clouds of incense and fleeting visions. He was just able to grab Tapputi’s shawl, pulling her into his arms as they flapped through scene after scene of this unwanted future Mesopotamia.

  —Another of the huge war-vehicles, attached with rope to the enormous statue of a broad shouldered, mustached man, pulling at it, trying to drag it down. A small crowd watched: recognizably Mesopotamian, with their dark hair and eyes, their olive skin.

  “Why do these men look like Babylonians but dress like barbarians?” Tapputi cried.

  With a crash the statue toppled, falling to the paving and cracking.

  “Their god must have abandoned the city, to allow such impiety! Pulling down his statue!”

  “He was . . . their king.”

  Same thing, her gaze said. He dipped his wings, towing her away from this vision and straight into another, in which a convoy of war-vehicles lumbered along a narrow city street. From an alleyway shot a smaller vehicle, small as a chariot, in it a young man, silent, intent, his lips moving in prayer. He struck the leading war vehicle head-on, and moments later both ignited in a massive explosion, a fiery cloud that mixed with the holy incense so densely it even obscured the tips of Azubel’s wings. Tapputi screamed and Azubel turned, desperate to get them away from this malign future. He saw a gap in the smoke, a point of what might be starlight, and headed for it as fast as he could fly. Night, blessed peace, and old Babylon— prosperous, intact, and sleeping.