Daughters of Babylon (25 page)

Bilqees had been Eleanor’s lady-in-waiting for only a month, replacing the nervous wife of a Limousin knight Louis appointed, whose tendency to drop trays of cosmetics turned out to be early symptoms of leprosy. The King had been so horrified by exposure to the dread disease he accused the woman of witchcraft and wanted to burn her. Eleanor, incensed, apprised him that leprosy had been creeping its way through the royal bloodlines of Jerusalem for years, which he would know if he weren’t spending so much time face down on the cathedral floor, and where the flakes of their diseased skin were known to accumulate. Within the hour, Louis was boiling himself in caustic baths and barking orders to arrange sea passage home. Her husband thus occupied, Eleanor visited the ailing French woman, already abandoned by her husband and children, and gave her funds to travel to a colony in the Judean hills where treatments were said to be humane and the residents tolerant. Then she brought Catarina with her to the slave market run by Coptics, and it was Cati who first noticed the long-limbed woman in chains with skin like dark honey and burnt almond eyes with long black lashes. That her eyes reminded them both of a certain Anadolu never needed to be put into words.

Eleanor made inquiries and learned that the woman was thirty-eight years old, though she looked a decade younger. She spoke eight languages, was well-versed in mathematics and astronomy, and had been a slave since the age of twelve when her parents fell afoul of the sultan in Baghdad and were drowned in the Euphrates in weighted reed coffins. She haggled the merchants to half the asking price—“Her molars are missing, look at those flat feet. She can’t have much life left in her”—and covered her nakedness with a plain linen robe when the chains were cut and the deal done. During their carriage ride home, she gave Bilqees her freedom, offered her the position of lady-in-waiting, which the woman accepted; and she saw Catarina smile, truly smile, for the first time in months.

The
Santa Clara
took another great heave, and a greasy meat pie slid off the platter in the direction of Cati, who slapped a hand to her mouth. Bilqees set the wine on the table and tipped her head. “Do you hear that, Milady?”

“Hear what?”

“The pace of drumming in the rowers’ galley has changed.”

Bilqees was right. The POOM-poom-poom, POOM-poom-poom that had filled the aural background of their dinner was now a single beat: POOM, POOM, POOM, POOM. Eleanor became aware of pressure in her ears. The
Santa Clara
began to pivot, and in the next instant, the starboard portholes burst their shutters, and sea water sluiced in. Cati leaped from her chair, screaming. Arturo took hold of Eleanor’s arm, while Bilqees gathered Catarina into hers.

“To the door, hurry, hurry,” the Persian woman said. “There’ll be rowboats. We can’t stay in here.”

Raisins and almonds skittered, while the four of them zigzagged across the floor of the listing ship through water already to their knees. Bilqees managed to push Cati to within reach of the door when there came a loud cracking and the low-pitched groan of timbers, and the ship overturned, hurling them like kindling. The tar that sealed the portholes and planks snapped like hinges of clam shell, and the chamber filled with the cold briny waters of the Mediterranean, trapping its occupants inside.

Gavriel Navarro’s stone cottage sat nestled in a bend of the river named for St. James the Apostle. “Make yourself at home,” he said to Silvie. He placed a cloth carrier bag on the breakfast bar and from it pulled a pastry box tied with string. “These apricot beignets from
La Sorcière
are still warm. I’ll make us a Spanish omelet later.”

“Sounds fabulous, thanks.” Silvie sipped her take-out coffee and looked around while Gavriel ducked, literally, through a door to the bedroom. He was over six feet; the door wasn’t.

The place was like an upgraded seventeenth-century tradesman’s cottage with open beams, plaster walls, and flat screen TV mounted above a flagstone hearth. Behind the wrought iron dinette set were an electronic keyboard and two guitars on stands, classical and electric. There was a stack of books on the floor and a box beside them, piled with cameras.

“Looks like you’ve settled in for awhile,” she said, when he returned with a pile of folders.

“What do you mean?”

“The instruments. That’s a lot to carry on holidays.”

“I’m between homes at the moment.” He gestured toward the living area with modular leather sofa units and a large, glass-topped coffee table mounted on granite. “We’ll have more room to spread out over there.”

A slender soft-cover book lay open, pages down, on the coffee table,
Dead to
Rights: A Circularity of Glosas
by Alain C. Dexter. Silvina picked it up, kept her thumb in the page, and riffled through it. On the title page was an inscription:

Gav,

a bro in the struggle.

Thx for everything!

Alain

“Wow,” Silvie said, “you know Alain Dexter?”

“Yes, he’s a friend—Canadian, like you.” Gavriel was sorting through the folders he’d spread across the sofa. “Do you know him?”

“Not personally. I don’t read poetry, but he is our Golden Boy.” She set the book down to the page where he’d left it. “When my grandmother came to Canada from Finland, she cleaned house for the Brougham family who founded the college where he teaches. We may have attended a few of the same cocktail parties. That’s my six degrees of separation story.”

Gavriel looked up at her.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing.” He set four stacks of unbound paper on the table, facing her direction. “I think this is more or less correct.”

Silvie moved her coffee to the floor and leaned forward, scanning the typed pages. “What am I looking at?”

He tapped the first stack on her left. “These are the poems I translated from Arturo, the Galician.” He tapped the second. “These are random quotes, like affirmations, and fragments of verse. We don’t know who wrote them. They were in a variety of languages and old dialects. Viv spent years and a small fortune having them analyzed. Those coded letters in the margin represent the languages, and there’s a legend on the last page.”

She read the top lines aloud. “
Everything is a loop. We became for a while a single eye
. What are they talking about?”

“That’s what I’m hoping you can figure out.” He pointed to the third. “These are the poems I’ve written since Viv and I met—not all of them, of course. Just the relevant ones.”

“How did you meet her?”

“Facebook.”

Silvie snort-laughed. “Get out! Facebook? Did she Like your poetry page or something?”

“Yes. What’s wrong with that? You should Like my page.”

“And you should attend my Getting Real with Social Media sessions.”

Gavriel gave her something like a glare. “Maybe I will.”

“No offense meant, sorry. So, what’s this fourth stack?”

“Satiric verse, my least favourite, written by someone named Wiley Forrest. They were composed in Middle English, you know, from Chaucer’s era. Viv did the translating, she may have had help, I don’t know.”

Silvie let her gaze slide back and forth across the pages. “Are all of these three, the Galician, multi-language, and satire from the same time frame?”

“We believe so, yes.”

“Why did you put your contemporary verse in the middle?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you spent some time sorting, you laid them out carefully. I’m wondering if there is some order beyond chronology that I’m missing.”

“I see.” Gavriel reached for his coffee. “Viv noticed in my poetry, there are phrases that correspond to Wiley Forrest.”

“The guy you don’t like. By correspond, you mean you used the same phrases?”

“No, she believed there was something like dialogue going on. I don’t see it myself, but she was pretty adamant, so maybe I placed them this way…in Viv’s honour.”

Silvina picked up the Wiley Forrest stack and riffled through the thirty or so pages. Some had short poems, only five or six lines; others were several pages long. She noticed words like Interlace, Septrois, and Rubielo, placed as subtitles beneath the poem title and fanned a few pages out to show Gavriel. “English, French, Spanish, I’m guessing. What do these terms mean?”

“They are poetry forms, like a sonnet—you know what a sonnet is.”

“
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
.” Silvie winced at her own LA-la-la LA-la sing-song. “Sorry, I had horrible English teachers. A poetry form has rules in meter and rhyme and whatever, right?”

“Right. Well, these forms, which you’ll find in the Galician translations, and the satire, don’t exist in modern times. It’s not that they fell out of popularity like the glosa, which your Alain Dexter resurrected, by the way—they don’t exist anywhere.”

“Is that a big deal?”

“To poets, yes.”

“Have you written these forms yourself?”

“A few, but I’m not a big fan of form poetry.”

Silvina experienced an uncomfortable sucking sensation between her ears, the kind one feels when a door is closed in a pressurized cabin. She ran her hands along the edges of the paper. “Were these printed on tractor feed paper, that old tear-off stuff?”

“Yes. Viv only used her desktop for this work. Apart from Skype and general topic emails, we never shared anything online.”

“Why? Is there some kind of Poetry Intelligence Agency, some Poem Land Security who might feel threatened by—” Suddenly, Silvina burst out laughing, and it wasn’t just a passing giggle. Hilarity had erupted from nowhere and was ricocheting through her insides like pinballs. The more she tried to pull it in, the louder the wails and caterwauls and sputters of, “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m laughing,” followed by quavering in-breaths and brand new spurts of cackle-snort with teary eyes and runny nose.

Gavriel stared as if she were having some kind of seizure—or faking one. Eventually, he ducked into the bedroom and returned with a box of tissues. He yanked out a clump and handed them to her.

“Th-Thank you.” She wiped her face, took a few breaths, and sipped coffee. The worst of the episode seemed to have passed. The swirling in her mid-section was still going on, but it felt more playful than absurd, pinballs turned to dolphins calmly circling. “I don’t know what that was about. Please, don’t take it personally. I’m sure this is all very…” She waved a hand but couldn’t think of a word to describe any of it. “I think I’ll have that apricot beignet now.”

Sea water filled the captain's cabin in the overturned
Santa Clara
, trapping inside two ladies-in waiting, one poet, and the queen of France. Eleanor pushed through fluttering waves of purple silk, searching for somewhere to breathe. Pages of poetry that Arturo never had the chance to read drifted like belly-up skate fish, while the poet tore at a porthole too small to swim through. Bubbles rose from Catarina’s nose and mouth as she flailed in terror across Eleanor’s field of vision. Of the four, Bilqees seemed the most focused. She crept along the mess ceiling below them like a salamander, searching, prying, scrabbling at the cracks between timbers.

Whether time slowed or the mind broadened at the threshold of death, Eleanor couldn’t tell. But in this state beyond panic that was not quite surrender, she saw that she’d been dying like this for years, a bug trapped and treading in resin slowly growing solid.

“
Mamie, Grand-mère,
help us!” she cried from her heart, “This is not how things should end. I’ve not yet tasted ecstasy. You and
Grand-père
savoured every day, and all I’ve known is anger and frustration. I am a daughter of Aquitaine, I carry your passion in my blood, and I’ve pledged to bring these friends home with me. If I must drown, save them, at least.”

While Eleanor pushed aside floating clay bottles that once held wine, a woman swam toward her with silver hair rippling. She wore a mantle of gray held with a jeweled seahorse brooch, and her arms outstretched.

“
Mamie,
have I died?”

“You are not dead yet,” said her grandmother, who swam with elegance, just outside her reach, like a mermaid. “I heard your call.
Álienor, ma petite fille,
enough of this drowning!
Soyez La Dangereuse
. Be the dangerous one. Ecstasy is pulled from blood and bone, it is your birthright and your hope.” The woman’s crystal blue eyes burned with white fire. She rippled past and slid a bony hand that felt like seaweed across Eleanor’s cheek. “Your tears belong to the ocean now, leave them behind. You are Queen, remember…the Queen, you are…be dangerous, the Queen…it’s all you need, remember…”