Daughters of Babylon (23 page)

The phone kept on ringing. And ringing.

“Hello? Hello?”

Ring
ri-i-i-i-ng!
Ring
ri-i-i-i-ng!

Silvie rolled over in bed, pushed hair from her face, and stared at the Big Ben alarm clock on the bedside table.

Ring
ri-i-i-i-ng!
Ring
ri-i-i-i-ng!

The clock read twelve minutes past seven, and the alarm hammer was not knocking itself out between the two gongs. The only phone in the house was in the
foganha
, and there was no voice mail, no automated pick-up, no answering service.

Ring
ri-i-i-i-ng!
Ring
ri-i-i-i-ng!

“I’m coming, I’m coming, hold on, for cripes’ sake.” She climbed out of bed, wearing an oversized red Canadian beaver T-shirt, and stumbled downstairs. “Hello?”

“Sil? Did I wake you?”

“Blythe?”

“I woke you. I know it’s only seven, but if you were in Toronto, you’d already be checking your messages—okay, that’s a poor analogy, since it’s midnight here, and we’d be in the same time zone. But if you were in Toulouse, it would be seven in the morning there too, and you’d be submitting reports in your usual…er, um…timely and effective manner.”

Silvina had known her employer long enough to move past the urge to blurt, “Have you been drinking?” and say instead, “I’m awake.”

“Good.” Blythe sucked in a lungful of air that sounded like she was smoking, but it was just a symptom of her inebriated respiratory. “I’ve been thinking, and I don’t want to keep thinking. I’d like to go to bed and sleep this day off.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

“Apart from a 37% drop in stock prices? No, that doesn’t count, TSX had rallied by mid-afternoon. It’s the floods in Alberta, pipeline damage—not that we have a school there. Maybe we should. I like Alberta—the Stampede, not so much.”

“Blythe…” Silvina pulled a bar stool from the island and placed it so she could either see out the window or rest her forehead against the wall. “I’m here, how can I help?”

“Have you gone through everything yet?”

“In the house, you mean? Good Lord, no, though I did make a small dent yesterday. There’s an amateur theatre group in St. Jacques that is taking all the prop material—they’d like posters too, but I think I can sell those. And I met with the parish priest in Cerabornes, nice man. He’ll take clothes and household items for their jumble sales and missions in Africa.”

“Father Aloe?”

“No, Father Rudy. Father Aloysius passed away a few years ago.”

“Sorry to hear that. We didn’t like the guy much. He didn’t like us, all that pre-marital going on. We called him
‘allo
of Perp Succ, he was a jerk…but I am sorry to hear he’s dead.” There was a sound of liquid sloshing into glass. “So what about journals, photo albums, that kind of stuff? Are there many?”

“The house groans with them, especially the attic. But they’re not in any kind of order. I opened a trunk yesterday, and there were notebooks wrapped in curtains and tucked inside tube socks. You know those sheer beige drapes you used to see in suburban bay windows all the time? Viv wrapped her theatre scrapbooks in those drapes.”

“Whose were they?”

“I have no idea. I’ve already given them to the church. Was I supposed to save them?”

“You gave her scrapbooks to Perpetual Succour?”

“No, the curtains and tube socks. I’m still at the stage of trying to make space. Apart from the
foganha
, there is no space in this house. I feel like I have to walk sideways and hold in my stomach.”

“I think I’ve told you, Viv’s a pack rat, though I worried she might have turned a new leaf. I need you, Sil, to find a specific set of journals, and I’m using that term loose, loose, loose. They could be binders, spiral notebooks, those exercise pads kids use when they’re learning to print. I hope mice haven’t eaten them. Anything written by boh.”

“Beau?”

“b-o-h, lower case, boh. That was me, Blythe o’ the Haggerty.”

Silvie laughed. “Blythe ‘o the Haggerty? That sounds so Braveheart-ish.”

“Oh, it was. We were deep into mythology. Celtic, Norse, Anatolian—sturdy goddess warrior types, none of that sairy gapphic apple grove…gairy, Sapphic…airy Sappho, apple grove stuff—shit!”

Spillage, Silvina guessed. What Blythe was going on about, she had no idea. She also needed to use the bathroom. “I’ll look for the journals, no problem. What do you want me to do when I find them?”

“Call me. Doesn’t matter what time of day. Leave a message on my cell.”

“Okay, and then? Ship them?”

“No, no, no, don’t do that! Hang on. Keep them somewhere.”

“All right. Blythe, I need to go. Was there anything else? Any TPA updates?”

“What?”

“Tri-Partite, FST? Any good leads on the instructor screening?”

More liquid being poured. “They’re useless, they’re all useless...”

Silvie’s head was beginning to ache. It wouldn’t be long, she knew from experience, another drink or two, before Blythe turned weepy and references to a place that sounded like Cue Vaitch began surfacing. Only now Silvina was at Q of H, and while she could appreciate the nostalgia factor for a rich, lonely woman four years short of seventy, there wasn’t much she could see here worth weeping about.

“I promise to call you as soon as I find anything.” Silvie peered through the kitchen window to the junipers growing from the cracks in the escarpment across the road. Morning mist blended the edges of their blue-green boughs into the café au lait limestone, like an Impressionist water colour. The place was pretty, she had to grant it that.

She heard the sound of a motorcycle approaching from Cerabornes with a powerful engine, much louder than a moped. Within a few seconds, it came into view. The bike was a deep silver-plum shade, futuristic, and gorgeous; the rider wore jeans and black leather. He slowed the bike, turned into her driveway, and parked beside the Lexus. He turned off the engine, removed his helmet and came toward the door.

“…I’ve probably told you this a million times, how Viv and I—”

“Gotta go, Blythe, sorry!” Silvie hung up the phone and raced upstairs.

The knock on the door wasn’t as annoying as the ringing phone, but it was persistent. After tending to necessities, she whipped off the beaver T-shirt and replaced it with a turquoise sundress with hardly any wrinkles, ran back downstairs, and flung open the door.

“Hi,” said Gavriel Navarro. “Sorry I couldn’t make it yesterday. Have you been running?”

A day’s sail west of Acre
The Mediterranean Sea
MAY, 1149 A.D.

Seamen, whose memories outlast the clay and parchment of chroniclers, were calling it the wildest season on the Mediterranean since the collapse of Delphi in the year 363, when a handful of oracles to Apollo escaped on a leaky boat and should have drowned—
would
have drowned if only the magicians in service to the Byzantine emperor had sorted out their curses.

“One of them Pythians,” Eleanor overheard a bo’sun say, “the captain tol’ me, she caught a lightning bolt bare-handed—no, not even with her hands. Middle of a storm, she leaps right up outta that skiff and catches it between her teeth like a dancer to a long-stemmed rose. And then she takes it with both hands, snaps the lightning bolt in two, sends both halves, now spitting mad and twice as dangerous, back to the wizards what sent ’em.”

These days, there were no Pythians, no oracles to the sun god and magicians in the Byzantine court were admitting to nothing, so people were blaming witches,
le streghe
, as the Sicilian crew on the three-masted
barca-longa
called them. Moorish, heathen, Norman,
cristianos
, didn’t matter—witches was witches. Haggish women, they were, who conjured hail and thunderstorms and freakish waves that rose out of nowhere, attacking ships like boots to an urchin’s backside, and flinging them to splinters, drowning all good souls aboard.

Eleanor sat on the deck of the
Santa Clara
beneath a fleece blanket in a tense, leaden twilight, pondering these things. Arturo de Padrón sat beside her, writing. It was their first full day at sea since leaving Acre, Palestine with the sister ship,
La Purezza
. The reduced French entourage of less than forty souls could have fit on one
barca-longa
, but Louis had thought it prudent, given the rough waters, that the king and queen of France travel separately. Eleanor, in the privacy of her thoughts, applauded.

The last of the French nobles of the Second Crusade may have traveled home in shame and disappointment—
les ignobles sans queue
, no tail, like the king, the crueler punsters were saying—but Pope Blessed Eugene III remained as devoted as ever to routing the enemies of Christ. He was, after all, a friend to Abbot Suger, who, one year ago, congratulated Louis on the deft handling of a disobedient wife by spiriting Eleanor to Jerusalem and stifling all further efforts to annul the marriage.

She watched homing pigeons thrown from the deck of
La Purezza
, some hundred yards away, their wings flapping madly to catch the evening currents. They could be en route to Crete or Greece, any of a thousand northwesterly ports, but she perceived their instincts arrowing toward Tusculum, in the Alban hills outside Rome from which Pope Eugene sent missives with equal fervour across Christendom, inviting any and all evidence of black magic, white magic, and any other nefaria that reeked of Satan’s handiwork. Three, four, five birds at a time, they were an aviary onslaught, a barrage of cylindrical messages of twenty words apiece. She imagined the papal scribes in Tusculum yawning as they pressed with flat iron yet another unprovable assertion of bony female figures seen traversing the full moon, gray tangled locks and withered teats aflapping. The captain of the
Santa Clara
, thankfully, was thriftier with his messenger birds.

“I wonder if our friend ever considers the possibility of the pigeons being intercepted,” she said to Arturo, who sat with parchment on his propped knees, ink pot wedged between chair slats. Friend was their code word for Louis.

He wrote a few more lines before replying. “I’m sure he does, but the messages are cryptic and carry no royal seal. He could deny anything.”

“God knows, he has mastered that skill.”

Arturo was kind enough to ignore the remark.

It was hard to believe sometimes that the scrawny boy who’d once spied on her through the window of her grandfather’s
chatillionte
was now her scribe and personal attendant. He was nineteen now, older than Louis when he took the throne. In a strange, seemingly endless, turn-around-and-come-again, it became Arturo’s turn, after her abduction from Antioch, to restore life to Eleanor. He’d been squire to Sir Isidore since the massacre at Cadmos, though she’d not known Arturo was part of the entourage to Jerusalem until they’d been on the road for a week.

For days, she lay in shock and depression in a closed, wheeled litter. They traveled as commoners, displaying no banners or finery. Another forty or so followed a few days later on the Feast of St. Matthias, the official departure date, but they too kept themselves inobtrusive, a far, sad cry from the thousand who’d set out,
oriflamme
blazing, from Vézelay, three Easters ago.

Eleanor had no memory of traveling through northern Syria. She floated in and out of consciousness, hovering near death, and it was said that Louis genuinely feared losing her. By the third morning, he’d ordered the restraints on her ankles to be removed and insisted the curtains remain open during cooler hours of travel. At the borders of Lebanon, dysentery swept through their camp and swiftly claimed Isidore, her kidnapper, and two pilgrims, a newly married couple, sparking in Louis a fear of divine retribution that nearly overwhelmed him. He was unable to sleep at night until someone, not Arturo—“I made sure I was tending horses, otherwise I’d have thrashed him to death”—administered forty lashes; and he wore a hair shirt beneath his monk’s robes that in the heat of the desert caused such irritation that he moaned to himself for hours, rocking back and forth on horseback. Pain had become the king’s official mistress.

Arturo earned Louis’s favour by becoming the first and only person who could bring colour to Eleanor’s cheeks. He walked alongside her litter playing a lute he’d purchased in Antioch and reciting poems he’d learned in Court and in the marketplace and stables, or poems he’d written and set to music by campfire, or made up on the spot. When the bloody flux hit their camp and the king and his subjects lay retching in pools of their own vomit and excreta, only three people remained healthy enough to tend the rest: Eleanor, Arturo, and Catarina, the young Zaragozan who’d lost her mother and sister at Cadmos and who rode La Pistache bareback through the slaughter to deliver the news to the queen and her vanguard.

Now there was no Anadolu pony—the queen knew in her bones that La Pistache was gone, but worse, she had also lost her two best friends. Eleanor had known Jocelyne and Marie-Thèrese since her First Communion in Aquitaine; they’d been her
femmes de chambre
since the day of her coronation. Even with Sir Isidore dead and buried in a hasty roadside grave, no one, not even Louis dared speak openly of the women’s fate. Only Arturo had the courage to pick up the gauntlet. With his budding minstrel talents, he composed a
partimen
, a poetic dialogue, between an asthmatic flesh merchant in Constantinople and two female attendants from the Temple of Venus. He read it to Eleanor in a grove of date palms at an oasis in north Palestine. Throughout the telling, she wept and might have fallen again into depression; but at the end of the tale, when the women are sold, Venus Herself descends to assure them that all separation is prelude to union, all suffering the promise of joy. The first thing she did after covering Arturo’s face with wet, teary kisses was to seek out Louis, who was in his tent, studying maps. The accumulation of atrocities and build-up of guilt had come to weigh so heavily upon the king’s shoulders that agreement to her demands fairly tumbled from his mouth. “Yes, wife, you may take the Galician boy as your scribe and that Spanish girl as your lady-in-waiting.”