Daughters of Babylon (31 page)

Arturo rose to poke the fire. Bilqees nodded with a slow smile. Wiley’s single eye rolled over them all. “Methinks a less contentious topic might be in order,” he said.

“Methinks the same.” Eleanor laughed and sipped her claret, a clear red wine from La Croix du Cinq Diamants in St. Jacques de la Rivière. “Wiley, you play the fool well. You stir up the sloth of ambitious courtiers who dread your keen eye. All this business of courting my husband’s dream of a sea-to-sea, Anglo-Norman empire while ensuring the autonomy of duchies exhausts me, as I’m sure Arturo and Bilqees will attest.

“Nonetheless, despite my warring sons, despite ‘that Clifford woman’ as my supporters call her who fills my husband’s head with notions of conspiracy, despite the fact that too much of our revenue sails to England to finance English wars, we have revived, here in Aquitaine, the Court of Love that began with my grandfather.

“Our Christmas
fêtes
leave no belly unfed, the country songs and dances are revived across the land. We are blessed with resident poets and troubadours from across Europe, Persia, the Arab and Byzantine kingdoms. It is only in our realm, they say, that verse lives, that its pulse can be felt in the soles of the feet.” She leaned toward Arturo who’d returned to his seat and touched his cheek with the back of her hand. “No small thanks to you, poet of my heart. I still have the first one, do you know that? The poem in the clay cylinder.”

The pulsing in Arturo’s jaw slowed. “You do me too much honour, Madame.”

“Quite the contrary. Now, I do not fool myself that this grandest of duchies with our unsurpassable wealth in fruits and grain, forest, sea, and pasture can remain unscathed while forces of ambition, envy, paranoia, and greed swallow hearts around us. But I am willing—nay, committed to taking whatever action is necessary to preserve the seeds we’ve planted here, and to find some small corner of the world where they can rest undisturbed until time and space aright themselves.”

Wiley spun the chair across from her backwards and straddled it. “You speak with alacrity and foresight, Milady. Our task, now, is to call down the powers, the second of two steps.” He looked at Bilqees who, in her sixties, still turned the heads of everyone she passed. “I have seen you achieve this with your dance, transforming a room, erasing conflict. You say it is mathematical.”

“It is,” she replied. “My dancing, like your jest, sources from the realms that precede manifestation. We do not tamper with harvests already sown.”

“Is there a name for these realms?” Eleanor asked.

“In Greek, it is
metanoia
, forethought or preconception,” Bilqees said. “In Arabic, sacred geometry. In my tongue, it translates roughly as ‘the goddess become’.”

“Leaping ahead, coming back toward,” said Wiley, nodding. “In Gaelic, we call it Summoning the Intelligences or the Elements—fairies and elves, to the humbler folk.”

“These poetic forms you are about to teach us,” the Queen said. “Are they dangerous?”

“They can fall flat, like a house of straw.”

“If all is carried out to the best of one’s abilities, is success assured?”

“Of assurances I cannot speak, but failure can be incrementally weakened until—” He closed a fist, opened it, palm up, and there sat a dragonfly, live and shimmering, with translucent emerald wings. “—it becomes your ally.”

Arturo crossed himself and looked away. “With all due respect, Madame, I believe that whatever this satirist-conjurer has in mind is not a worthy pursuit for a Queen twice wed to thrones of enormous power, and one who has vassals by the thousands ready in an instant to lay down their lives.”

Eleanor picked up the kestrel wing feather again and turned it over in her hands, feeling the precision of shaft and vane, the downy barbs that capture pockets of air to keep the bird in flight. “Arturo, my friend, I love you dearly, always will. In some other life, perhaps too many to count, I am certain we have shared extraordinary adventures. And God knows, as Aquitaine’s principal composer of love poetry, you have singlehandedly fertilized more wombs, my own included, than three centuries of invading knights.”

Wiley barked with laughter, and Arturo flushed a deep aubergine.

She pressed on. “But do not speak to me of power, for what you describe and have observed more closely than anyone alive is the power to lord
over
, to humiliate, to hold down and silence like a sack of unwanted kittens in a river till they drown—and, yes, I have wed such ignominy twice—the second, for a time, in love. As for vassals, I have far more interest in subjects who are willing to thrive and grow the land and dandle healthy grandchildren on their knees. If such desire be conjuring, so be it.” She took a sheet of parchment and placed it in front of her. “Wiley, please, teach me what you know.”

Silvina gripped the phone with both hands. “I’m well, Dr. Shirazi, thank you, what a surprise! I’ve wanted to call or email you, but there have been a few turns of events.”

“Nothing too serious, I hope.”

“Taxing and a royal pain, but no loss of life or limb, thankfully. How are you? Where are you calling from?”

“From Tel-Hemat, I’m pleased to report, standing at the twin pillars, the very Gate of God herself. At this hour of the day, when shadows lengthen, one can imagine the exact proportions of the cataclysm that brought the Temple down.”

“Excellent! And has excavation begun?”

“Not yet, but I have a full team of diggers, basket boys, and all the technical expertise I need to commence work in a day or two.”

“That is good to hear.”

“Now, I shan’t keep you. My reason for calling is to ascertain if there’s anything you need from me. Are the people of Cerabornes and St. Jacques cooperating? Are you making headway with all that Vivian and I have imposed upon you?”

Silvie filled him in on what she had donated to the church, village library, and the amateur theatre. “I haven’t sorted through her personal memorabilia yet. If the major drama schools don’t want them, I’m thinking eBay and donating the proceeds to charity. What were Viv’s favourite non-profits? I don’t believe we have a list.”

“Well, she supported a group for disadvantaged youth in Glasgow and a meals for seniors program in Toulouse, I believe. Scroll through her contacts, I’m sure you’ll find more.”

“I’m glad you brought that up. Apart from a wheezing, offline desktop, I have nothing to scroll through. I’ve asked Blythe and Gavriel, and neither of them know what’s become of her laptop or devices.”

There was a heavy pause. “Who?”

“Blythe Pendaris…you knew her as Haggerty. Gavriel Navarro is the man Vivian was working with in the final weeks before she died. You must have met him. He was translating poetry for her.”

“My dear Silvina, I thought we were clear on the issue of involving others.”

The chill in his tone surprised her. “I’m not involving anyone new. Gav already had most of the documents in his possession, and I have them now. Blythe only wants what was hers to begin with, and I’m not going to begrudge her that.”

The archeologist sighed. “I must say I’m disappointed. The importance of discretion simply cannot be overstated. The house you are staying in, free of charge, the legacy you are privileged to investigate, I promise, will bring you untold benefits. I thought you, of all people, would appreciate this.”

“Why? Why me, of all people?”

“Because Viv trusted you profoundly, didn’t she? Trusted you more than anyone she’s ever spoken of. Recall, if you will, what I said the day we met. People will ask you for things, not only the contents of what Vivian and I spent years creating, but also your time and your intelligence. Do not fall into traps of flattery and charm, I beg you. When you fully understand what you are seeing, you will appreciate my caution.”

Silvina doubted it. His scolding made her feel sick and stupid; the only thing she could appreciate was that she was neither. “I will be more careful,” she said, “and now I have to go. Goodbye, Doctor.” She hung up before synesthesia transformed him fully into gray-green sludge with spectacles.

The day seemed to have drawn a solid yellow highway line down the middle with directional posts: Happy People with a Life, that way; you, Silvina, homeless and artful at pissing off old men, this way.

In Viv’s bedroom, she fiddled with the vintage radio until she found the only static-free station. It was playing mariachi music. While the doleful Mexican brass and weeping vocals took the edge off her woes, she poured herself a tumbler of white wine in the
foganha
, dug Gavriel’s book of poetry from the pile in the parlour she hadn’t touched yet, and returned upstairs to the cushioned window seat.

Knees propped, bare toes resting on cool wood, she gazed out at the sun-dappled view through poplars to the orchard brightened by tents and caravans of the Navarrosa event. When she craned her neck over her right shoulder, she could almost distinguish the heap of stones that Gavriel told her was a
chatillionte
, a trysting place. Opening to the first pages of
The
Wind and the Sea: Poems and Reflections on the Voyage of No Return
, she wondered how long it had been since those stones held a space for secrets to be whispered and lovers to tumble into each other’s arms. And then she began to read.

Last night in the distance,

after feeling that I almost had you…

At first, she thought the ceiling above the window seat had leaked. The front of her blue cotton blouse was soaking wet, and the wet was cold. Sunlight still dappled through the poplars, and the Mexican with the fabulous wail in his voice was still singing “
y tú que nunca
fuiste capaz de perdonar
.” How long was that song?

Silvie hadn’t looked at the Big Ben bedside alarm clock before she started reading. It was now ten minutes past six in the evening. The only progression she could measure was that she had finished reading Gavriel’s entire book of poetry in a single sitting. Shaman or no shaman
,
it was the most romantic, heart-wrenching, intoxicating, erotic, tender, soul-searing use of language she had ever floated through.

She glanced at the tumbler of wine on the floor beside the window seat—still full, with beads of condensation suspended on the glass. She touched her cheeks and neck. The wetness all across the front of her were tears.

She swung her legs off the window seat, palms pressed to temples, and weaved across the bedroom to the box of tissues on the mirrored dresser. She’d intended not to look—too late. Her reflection resembled something that had been left on the roadside, made of wax with all the gilt and surface bits dripping, falling off.

Yanking half a dozen tissues from the box, she noticed the framed photograph that Alphonse’s wife, Claire-Elise, had given her the night before she left Toulouse. She wiped the dust off the glass.

They must have been happy times, those seventies. She pressed her finger to a tall, leggy Blythe; a freckled, broadly grinning, ginger-haired Vivian who was eyeing the guy with the guitar and stood slightly turned away from the young man with glasses on the other side. Was that Dr. Shirazi before he became an archeologist, whom Blythe, she was pretty sure, had called “Tar”? She wondered who the boy was, sitting cross-legged in the front row between Marie-Claire and Blythe. If he was seven or eight when the picture was taken, he’d be about Silvie’s age, a little older. Perhaps he still lived in the area. She ought to take the photo to Cerabornes and ask around.

Equilibrium slightly restored, she turned toward the window where she’d left
The Wind and the Sea
face down on the cushion.

The cushion that sat on a wooden structure.

The structure that formed the window seat.

And was probably, because carpenters of old made good use of space, a storage compartment.

She threw the book and cushion onto the bed. Sure enough, there were hinges at the back and neatly carved finger grooves under the lip. Silvie lifted the lid that hardly creaked and smelled the pleasant vanilla aroma of old paper. Inside, filled to the brim were journals of leather and cloth and spiral notebooks and diaries, tied in bundles. Every bundle was dated and labeled with a scrap of butcher paper, “Inklings by boh”, Blythe o’ the Haggerty.