E. Hoffmann Price's Fables of Ismeddin MEGAPACK®

by E. Hoffmann Price

  That was her story, and he did not see any need of arguing. And rather than sit there drinking coffee while Lilu plucked an eight-stringed oudh and sang “Zabiyyat,” Cooper went out. He did not want to think too much of Mr. Burleigh. He wanted to find some way out of the maze that had hemmed him in ever since Harût and Marût had spoken in the Pit. But he feared that there was no way out.

  He wanted to talk to a white man. An American, that is. There were few Europeans in Mosul, but they do not count. A coffee-house loafer guided him to the archaeologist’s camp, which was well outside the limits of Mosul.

  Men were beating a drum and chanting a bawdy song. There was the smoke of burning brush and dry dung. Then Cooper saw the glow among the mounds and the shapes of khaki tents. He gave his guide a rupee and went on toward the fire.

  Dogs yapped, came toward him, snarling. “Hi, there!” he yelled, then cursed the animals in Arabic.

  The tall man at the fire leaped to his feet at the sound of an American voice. He stood there, curved pipe in his hand, chin outthrust, as he squinted into the gloom.

  Cooper said: “I’ll be damned! Kane! So you made it to Mosul to dig. They didn’t tell me your name.”

  Roger Kane caught his friend’s hand. “Last I heard of you, you were in Oklahoma. Say, Iraq’s done well by you. You look fine, fellow!”

  “Considering this damn climate, I feel fine, too.”

  Kane called for fresh coffee. There were cigars, carefully sealed against the desert dryness. Cooper refused the camp chair and squatted in the sand. Funny how an American voice made the Well of the Angels seem improbable. But it was odd, Burleigh’s sudden illness.

  Finally he said, “Looking for anything in particular? Or just gambling? When’d you leave New York?”

  “You bet, I’m looking for something specific, which is what I guess you mean,” Kane answered. “In this business you don’t just dig at random, or throw a tomato can out of your tent and dig where it drops. It’s a science today.”

  “You mean enlightened guesswork. Not entirely science.”

  Kane nodded. “Naturally, there is some uncertainty. Just as there is in oil drilling. Though much less than there was a dozen or twenty years ago.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Cooper’s laugh was grim. “I’ve held down a desk job ever since we left school, except for two years in the field. Executive, hell! But it’s not so bad. Well—what are you looking for?”

  “A temple tower. The oldest temple site in all this country!” Kane sat up and leaned forward; enthusiasm animated him. “The place was a ruin when Dar Sharrukin was founded. We’ve just translated inscriptions that tell of what was a tradition in those days.”

  Cooper was impressed in spite of himself. Here was a man tracing a site that was legendary when some scribe had made wedge-shaped marks on a clay tablet perhaps five thousand years ago.

  “Temple tower?”

  “Sure.” Kane brought his hands closer together as he raised them, edgewise and palms inward. “Ziggurat. Terraced tower. Like those Mexican pyramids, only steeper. Like the Tower of Babel must have been.” His eyes gleamed, his voice rang as he went on. “Not far from here is the place where they built that tower. The plain of Babil, the confusion of tongues. Think of it, fellow! Here, right here, five thousand, six thousand years ago, a man tried to outwit God and fate.”

  He stopped short. “Sorry—I always rattle when I get going. Can’t talk to Arabs. They think I’m crazy, of course.”

  “Listen.” Cooper frowned. “Do you think there was an actual Tower of Babel? That someday you’ll find the ruins of it?”

  Kane stroked his chin, shook his head slowly. “No, I don’t. I think it’s a legend based on a mighty fool’s attempt to kick loose from fate. Like Gilgamesh and his quest for immortality. Or else it warns against the folly of trying to step clear of the…of the fence that destiny puts around us. I think—”

  He started, amazed at the succession of changes in Cooper’s expression.

  Cooper demanded, “When did you get this job?”

  “Why?” Kane frowned. Something was wrong with Cooper! “What do you mean, ‘get this job’?”

  Cooper could not explain the fear that had closed in bit by bit during Kane’s remarks. It alarmed him, hearing a man just from the States saying, “—fool’s attempt to kick loose from fate—warns against—trying to step clear of destiny—”

  Cooper stuttered, “When did you first learn of this place to dig?”

  Kane answered, “Professor Hardy and I were at work on the ninth of August. One of our richest alumni just happened to drop in a moment after we finished a translation of some tablets dug up years ago. I never saw a man so moved. He’d never had any interest in archaeology, but in a flash he’d financed us. A hundred thousand dollars! Hardy, poor old fellow, couldn’t stand the climate. So I came out alone.”

  Cooper lurched to his feet. “I must have eaten something tonight. Damn cucumbers. See you tomorrow.”

  And as he stumbled through the gloom he began to make allowance for the time difference between New York and Mosul. The calculation shocked him. A millionaire backer had financed Kane on the very day and hour when he, Cooper, had for the third time declined the warning of the Angels.

  But when he finally neared Mosul the fear lifted from him. Cooper argued, “Coincidence. Suppose I’d thought otherwise down there in the Pit. Kane’d still have translated the inscription. Or his friend the professor would have. If not that night, then later. And if not that backer, then someone else.”

  He felt better now that he had clearly severed Kane’s good fortune from that bargain in the Well. After all, it was not remarkable that Kane, speaking of the Tower of Babel, should use terms referring to man’s attempt to break the shackles of destiny.

  CHAPTER IV

  In the several weeks that followed, Cooper and Kane rebuilt that close friendship which years had almost buried. The oil exile began to find a certain fascination in despised Mosul. He would ride out of an afternoon, when the reports were in the mail to Bagdad, and watch Kane’s crew of Arabs. They were digging into the mound that archaeological science picked out from the other rubbish heaps which dotted the burned, brown plain.

  Bronzed men, stripped down to loin cloth and turban, gleamed with sweat. Baskets of earth passed from hand to hand, down the long line. The first man chanted, “A basket, O brother, a basket!”

  The next, swaying in time, would sing, “A basket, by Allah, a basket!”

  And the last man, finally, droned at the dump, “Yea, by God, a basket!”

  More song than motion, more motion than work; but slowly the mound was wearing down. Brown men like these had built Babylon and Nineveh and Kalah and Asshur. These called themselves Arabs, but who knew what blood was in them?

  One day Cooper saw a squad of Iraqi soldiers lounging in a shed thatched with palm leaves. “Why the army?” he asked Kane, who patiently waited for the first sign of something that had not perished from time.

  “Won’t be long now. Every basket of earth will be sifted. Every pottery fragment taken up by hand. A lot of things to be photographed in place. Lots of others reinforced so they won’t break when taken up.”

  “That still doesn’t explain the troops,” Cooper said, chuckling.

  “You never saw an Arab who believed it was wrong to steal what grows in the ground. There’d be hordes of looters by night. Looking for antikas. It’s not just what they’d steal, but what they’d ruin.”

  That evening Cooper ate at Kane’s camp. Good old American canned goods! He had his choice. Peaches. Chili. Beans. Sausages. He thought, “I’m damn well fed up with loobiya, humus-bi-tahini, Daoud Basha, and the rest!” There had been a letter that day from Bagdad. As soon as a relief man could come to Mosul, Cooper was to take Mr. Burleigh’s place. Such
unheard of upsetting of seniority indicated certain and early promotion.

  Several considerations made Cooper uncomfortable. He had to settle one, at least. So he drained the juice from his dish of canned peaches, and tried to seem casual when he asked, “Ah… um…it seemed… uh…damn funny the way your… um…millionaire was right on hand the evening you were reading that tablet. The one and only tablet that had a story that could knock him loose from his bank roll. Suppose,”—Cooper forced a laugh—“you’d not worked that night, or he’d not called? One of you could have dropped dead. If he had, this work might’ve been delayed a dozen years.”

  Kane gave Cooper a sharp look. He slowly set his coffee cup on the folding table and sat up straight. “Do you know, that was the most uncanny thing. I’d have mentioned it to you, but I thought it’d sound—well, silly—if you get what I mean—as if I believed some curious tailor-made bit of fate had elected me.”

  Cooper noted the sudden thumping of his pulse. A tightness of his throat. He already knew all but the details. “What?” he croaked.

  “Oh, all right,” Kane agreed after a moment of hesitation. “There was a fire half an hour later. Clay tablets didn’t have a chance. What the firemen didn’t break, the water destroyed.”

  Cooper frowned. “You had your notes or you couldn’t be digging here.”

  Kane raised his hand. “They were burned. I’m going pretty much on memory, deduction, general knowledge. All we had was the man’s check. We couldn’t ever have gotten anyone else to back us.”

  “Well, you had him.”

  Kane still had his queer, puzzled look. “That’s the fantastic quirk. He could have changed his mind, you know. We were afraid that he would. That sudden flare of enthusiasm didn’t seem natural. Hardy and I sat up all night when we weren’t pacing the floor. That fire, you know. How would our man feel when we told him that we couldn’t go over the evidence again? When we had nothing left to fan his enthusiasm again?

  “We had the check, but you can imagine how much chance we had of keeping it against his will. Two schoolteachers. We’d not dare offend a prominent alumnus or take advantage of his momentary lack of judgment, if he saw fit to call it that.”

  “Well—you’re here. It worked out.”

  “He died that night, without ever knowing of the fire. Heart failure. He’d recruited some football talent, and settling some matter of eligibility proved too much for him. So I am here, and everyone still wonders how a rumor ever got us this fund! Crazy, don’t you see, a fellow with athletics on the brain dishing out for archaeology!”

  Cooper felt as though he had been clubbed over the head. His release from Mosul was too closely tied to Kane’s arrival. The linkage frightened Cooper. It was diabolical as Burleigh’s sudden failure of health. He, Cooper, had won a way of kicking off the shackles of kismet, and he was frightened.

  Something evil lurked over him. He could feel it.

  But he did not know how certain this was until he said to Lilu, “Tomorrow we go to Bagdad. Tomorrow, and this is the last of Mosul.”

  Now that liberation was near enough at hand for him to name a day and an hour, he knew that only hope that made him see any day-to-day good in that dingy town, that tangle of mean bazaars sweltering under a pitiless sun. It was not until Lilu spoke that he knew how he hated Mosul, how he had hated it every day since that night at the Well; how his seeming tolerance had only been an expression of triumph over fate.

  Lilu said, “I cannot leave Mosul.”

  He stared at her. “What?”

  The moon had risen just high enough to clear the parapet of the housetop. At the farther end was a narrow bar of light that slowly widened. Lilu was a vague, lovely shape in the luminous shadows of the corner.

  “I cannot leave Mosul!” She swayed toward him, caught his shoulders, and cried, “Do not leave me here! Not alone! Do not leave me buried in the sand and the deadness.”

  This plea was beyond understanding. Lilu’s tears were warm on his hands when he gently thrust her from him and said, “Here, here, don’t cut up like that! Now, why can’t you go?”

  “Because I can’t. I lied to you. I was sent to you. By Harût and Marût. I’m not a human woman. I am one of those who walk by night. One of the lilin.”

  Bit by bit he understood. She was one of the spirits of the night, like Lilith, who had loved Adam. And Lilith’s kin had loved mankind ever since. She was bound to Mosul, one of those assigned to that locality. The Angels of the Pit had given her a form substantial enough to endure daylight. They had sent her to keep him company while he waited to take the first step out of the circle of destiny. But when he made that step he would have to leave her. She would once more be a shadow that haunted ruins and waste places, a fleeting, lovely thing that became vaporous and vanished with sunrise.

  There was no way out of it. Lilu sadly said, “If you go to Bagdad, I will not see you again. All the daylife I have won will be lost, and I will cry among the mounds, cry with the owls and the jackals, and the Arabs will make signs and take refuge with Allah when they hear me.”

  He said, “And if I stay, I’ll go crazy in this louse-bound town. I’ve lived on the hope of leaving. But I can’t leave, not without you.”

  He meant that. The loveliness of Lilu had grown on him. She was unlike any woman he had ever known or fancied. Least of all was she like any native woman. These were either very young, very lovely, and very stupid; or else shapeless, shrill-voiced, dirty, and offensive to eye and heart. The Kurdish girls of the mountain tribes—Lilu might be one of those, though that was not quite plausible.

  Cooper began to understand what the Angels had meant when they warned him against shattering the shackles of destiny. He would leave, and he would live, yet much of him would be dead from having abandoned Lilu. If her incredible sayings were true—his gradual acceptance of wonders had finally left him without any power to doubt—then her life, half human and half spirit, was the price the Angels exacted.

  The studied malignity of Harût and Marût gnawed deeper and deeper into him. They had read his heart and his thought, and since there had been no life which meant more to Cooper than his own fever and brandy-twisted wretchedness, they had given Lilu the loan of humanity and sent her to him.

  Ages ago two Kashmiri girls had taught Harût and Marût such depravities and wickedness that Allah had hung the Angels in the Well of Babil. And now they took their vengeance on mankind by teaching deadly magic to each discontented one whose lack of fortitude made him attempt to shatter the shackles of fate. Cooper now knew what the Moslems meant when they said “Maktub.” He knew now the futility of trying to erase or alter what was written.

  Cooper paced up and down the flat housetop. “They warned me,” he said aloud and bitterly. “They warned me three times. God does not allow any evil except when a man insists upon having it; that’s what the Koran says. And I insisted.”

  Lilu said, “Ay wah, sahib! And they knew that you would insist.”

  That whipped Cooper’s fury to a cold flame. He halted, stood there a moment, then turned sharply toward the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” Lilu asked.

  “To curse the Angels,” he answered. “Or to bargain with them.”

  And this time he needed no guide to the Well.

  CHAPTER V

  The descent into the Pit was easy as walking down the broad stairway of the Grand Central Station. Cooper was not alarmed at the facility won by repetition. His fury left him no time for thought. He stood there, waiting for the spirit fire to flame and whirl, and the voice of the silence to ring and trumpet.

  His wrath left him empty of fear or awe. When the moments dragged and there was no sound and no thinning of the darkness, he cursed the Angels and the emptiness. First his voice was shrill, then it cracked, then it became hoarse and he could shape no
more words. They burned in his mind, even though the echoes ceased mocking him.

  The Angels ignored him. He shook his fists at the blackness. He challenged them to come and destroy him. He beat and kicked the sculptured wall of the Well. Finally he cursed Allah, who permitted Harût and Marût treacherous candor to trick harassed people.

  There was no answer.

  His rage made him dizzy. He fell to the sandy floor. For a long time he was without sense or feeling. When at last he began to feel the bitter cold of the dry Well, Cooper was too weary to move. He was not even sure that he had strength to come out of the Pit. He remembered dimly how someone had said that rage distilled a strong stimulant and a strong poison into the blood. This seemed true. The power had gone, and the venom had filtered through him.

  It was then that he heard the voice—not splendid and pealing, but small and fine—a far-off silver whisper. “O Man, we learn the will and the soul of a man by the voice of his wrath, and since there is no fear in you it will be easy to do what there is to be done concerning Lilu.”

  Cooper brushed the sand from his face and straightened up. He knelt and cocked his head a little. The sound was finer than any gnat’s piping, yet each word cleanly shaped; still, its source was uncertain, and it seemed to move, so that there was always danger of missing what followed; “Go to where the dung beetle digs in the droppings of time, yea, even to what is left of the ziggurat that was old when the first wall was laid about Dar Sharrukin.”

  Cooper again noticed the cold and became tense. The two Angels, piping as from some remote corner of space, referred to Kane’s excavation. This made him apprehensive. For a moment he could not understand them. He heard small twitterings, like the jibber of bats and the squeak of mice. The intentness of his listening became painful. It seemed that he was missing important counsel.

  Then he knew that the Angels had been consulting with each other, for suddenly he could hear direct address. One said, “Go and dig and get that silver image whose face and figure are Lilu’s, and take it always with you.” The other piped, antiphonally, “For she is the counterpart thereof, and where it goes she also may go, in any circle within a day’s march.” Then the first voice; “Yea, did we not bring one to dig so that there would be little for you to lift?” And both piped together: “O Man, well do we know the will and soul of a man by the voice of his wrath, and we reward him according to the stature of his soul. The girl is your fate, and have we not delivered her fate into your two hands?”