Daughters of Babylon (36 page)

“But I cannot think of these things now,” she said aloud to the one-room lodge. “I have come too far and seen too much of goodness. I have found amidst the turbulence, pockets of such tenderness that I wonder how the heart doesn’t fly apart.” She walked toward the glow of warmth in the crackling log fire. “And I have known love.”

On the morning that the soldiers set out from the Castle of Blois to arrest her, she’d issued her final, incontrovertible order to Arturo. That he leave her, that he make haste southwest to the court of Poitiers, to Aquitaine, and gather all written evidence of what they had created—every sestina, septime, octavo, rubielo—especially the rubielos. Bilqees and Wiley would assist him in the task, and the collection was to be taken by him and no other to Catarina at
Reine du Ciel
. Should events at Queen of Heaven darken, there were sister priories dotted across the mountainscapes of Aragón, Castile, and Navarre that would hold their proof. And she instructed that all of them: Arturo, her knight; Bilqees, her
femme de chambre
; and Wiley, court jester, were to take such remuneration as required from her private coffers to effect their freedom. The Court of Love was…

The Court of Love…

She could not even think the rest of the sentence.

The fire seemed to be growing hotter, though she’d added no new logs. Her face felt like it was burning, and the layers of skirt suffocating. Eleanor backed away from the hearth, one step, then another, and from the soles of her feet, she felt a kind of upward thundering, as of hooves gaining speed on a straight, solitary road.

She looked down at her slippered feet peeking out from beneath the black gown and envisioned them as the cloven feet of a satyr or fawn. She imagined them as delicate and tendriled like the dryads of the sweet pea and the English hedgerow. She walked around the room, weaving through heavy furnishings on the broad plank floor made of oak from this very forest and thought she caught a rhythm, the heartbeat of a people and language not her own, though one she’d come to love; and in that flow she saw, like jewels scattered cross a river bed, words. English words.
Palavres anglais
, as they would say in the old dialect. And though she had no writing implements—these would come, they would surely come—she spoke the words to air, into particles of space:

A version of myself beyond I draw

in soft iambs, I am a Queen divine

and erring, both…

And the twelve-point buck came to the window, and between the dots of her fingertips, he pressed his moist nose to listen.

“It’s a narrative and reverse narrative,” Silvina said, sitting on a bar stool at the base of the stairs.

“What is?” Gavriel asked, seated beside her.

“All of this.” She swept her arm in a large, counter-clockwise circle that took in the hundreds of cascading pages taped to the walls of the central stairwell. “Everything that I gathered here is not only patterned, it’s part of a cohesive whole, even though about 40% of the poems were written centuries ago—I’m guessing, at the time of Eleanor.”

“Are you sure? According to Viv, everything was written in the seventies by the people who lived in this house. Apart from my poems and translations, of course.”

“But what about Arturo? Did he live in this house or at
Reine du Ciel
?”

“I don’t know. There’s nothing about him anywhere. I asked Viv where she found his work. She laughed and said, thin air.”

“I don’t think she was joking. How does it feel to translate him?”

“I can only do a few at a time. There’s an intensity about his work that feels like, I don’t know…pushing uphill into a headwind. Poets have to feel comfortable with emotion, but this guy…ooph.” Gavriel shook his head

“I felt it too. It was beyond grief or personal heartbreak, it was like he was mourning an aeon. But your work interlocks with his, I can show you. Where he expresses despair, you create with hope. Where he’s groping, you find toeholds. What was that term you used once—corresponds? It’s that, like a partimen dialogue poem.”

“Wow, you are a quick study.” His expression turned thoughtful, almost sad. “Shall we go on with the tour?”

“Yes.” She got off the stool, and the water in the tumbler she held started to swirl.

“Careful.” Gavriel grabbed her arm. “You’re not as recovered as you think.”

“I can see that. It feels like the whole house is rocking.” Silvina took hold of the bannister and focused on the water until it stilled. “I should be okay now. I promise not to let go of the railing.” She led him halfway up the stairs. “And if I topple, it’ll be straight into you.”

He returned her grin. “Deal.”

“So, here’s the short lesson. Full Spectrum is an oscillation at a very high frequency. You can apply it to any thought stream, any situation, whether it’s family life, an economic system, conflict, romance. The base assumption is continuous, infinite uplift, sourced from positive—that is, forward moving—emotion.” She swept an arm along the seven column headings at the top in sequential light spectrum colours and turned to continue the sweep on the opposite wall. “Appreciation, Curiosity, Audacity…”

“Humour twice?”

“Yes. Five-two ratio, always. Now because seven frequencies are set up as mirror images, once you’ve inputted the data, you can spot weak areas right away. Then, with minor adjustments, you can start up, repair, or strengthen the flow.”

Gavriel pointed at two oval sheets of paper, facing each other at the top of the stairs. “What do these mean, Crest and Trough?”

“They are a way to define pairings. For example, boh, who is Blythe, and a guy named Wiley Forrest both wrote a lot of satiric poetry. Wiley, who feels like someone from way back, has a stronger grip on Humour, both Universal and Personal, so I’ve placed his work on the Trough wall, at the base of oscillation where momentum builds. Blythe’s sits at the Crest across from him because she says the last funny thing that can be said on a topic before it collapses to redundancy or sarcasm.”

“Can the pairs switch places?”

“Oh, yes. Every pairing is an oscillation within the greater wave, and there’s no leader/follower, it’s just movement. That’s what I meant when I linked you with Arturo. If he were still around, you could choose to dip into the dark stuff, and his work would lighten. There’s no right or wrong, no better, worse—and most importantly, no competition. That’s what we accentuate at Tri-Partite and my division, FST. The concept does not exist at these frequencies.”

“What’s the worst that can happen?”

“Good question! You see how there’s a gap at both ends of the stairwell. If the momentum of full spectrum isn’t maintained, someone can fall off the cliff, metaphorically. Taking you and Arturo as an example, something he did or failed to do in Trough position might have caused that printing screw-up with your
Light Stalker
book. But as a result, you could strike up a great working relationship with the printer who repairs the damage, and boom, the momentum is going again, and you’re now Trough while Arturo Crests.”

Gavriel lifted random pages from various rows. “This is cool. No one’s work seems to be exclusively in any one column.”

“That’s right. It’s an amazingly even spread of participants, which tells me this was…or is a deeply strategized, abundance-based system. And it seems to source from form poetry, that strict stuff where you count all the syllables and rhymes, whatever. The variety of forms is kind of boggling, even for me.” She tapped on the central column. “Here, you’ll find the most concentrated pairing, Inclusiveness with Inclusiveness. In FST, we call it the All in All, the most powerful part of the wave where acceleration and lift kick-up.”

“Upward spiraling,” he said, scanning the poems and fragments. “Sestina, septimes, octavos, septrois…a few of these are new to me, too. What’s this—
rubielo de la Cérida
?”

“Oh, gosh, this had me stumped, but I had to crack it because, look, the greatest concentration of rubielos is here at the center, Heart, green light of the spectrum. I eventually landed with the translation,
rubā’ī of Ceres
. Goddess poetry,
Femme de la femme
. Demeter, Inanna, Ishtar, Ceres, they were all aspects of the Goddess of grain and abundance. La Cérida may have been an old dialect name for her.” Silvina grinned. “Ceres would be the Chick, capital C, that stimulates eternal lift, if you get my drift.”

“I get it.” He laughed a little, not as much as she would have liked at her spontaneous rhyme.

“Rubais, I mean, rubaiyat, as I’m sure you know, are ancient poetic forms from Persia, Turkey, the Arab countries. But here’s the funny thing.” She leaned a forearm against the wall and riffled through them. “The poems labeled as rubielos are free verse, almost conversational, but they’re all interconnected. Each one seems to pull from the center of a predecessor in theme, which grows the next rubielo and the next, until, taken together, you have something like the scales of a snake or a dragon, overlapping, elongating, eternally oscillating. Whoever wrote these rubielos, Gavriel, they are vibrant. There were times I thought I could see the words dancing. That probably sounds crazy.”

“Not at all. That’s what the best poetry does,” Gavriel said. “Then all of these other forms spin off the rubielo serpent like stars from the center of a galaxy or water from a whirling fountain.”

“Exactly. And what’s also hot is that the forms build on numerical strength as well as that Fibonacci shape you’re describing. Sestinas are based on the number six, septimes on seven, octavos on eight and so on. There’s even a glosa by Alain C. Dexter that reads as if Eleanor wrote it. Makes me think he might be a closet shaman, too.”

Gavriel looked at her. “Now I understand why you passed out.” He descended the stairs, holding the railing. “I need to think for a few minutes.” He sat on a stool and guzzled water until the glass was empty.

“Careful, you could get cramps.” She laughed. “But seriously, I feel more energized than ever, as if I could fly off a mountain or lift an ocean liner with one hand.”

“Tripping a little, are we?” He set the glass on the floor and eyed her askance. “You feel like Superwoman.”

“I do, and why shouldn’t I? What we have here, Gav, is a genius system, a poetically-based creation of superior human beings, the core of a society where everyone is included, everyone enjoys life at optimal capacities that just keep getting better.” She slapped the wall a bit harder than she intended. “
This
is the Tower of Bab-El. It’s the reason Blythe, Viv, and whoever else, gave themselves the title Daughters of Babylon. It also explains why, when the poetry died and the friendships fell apart, Viv had her heart set on traveling to Tel-Hemat with Dr. Shira—”

“
Nooooooo, Silviiiiinaaa
!” Gavriel leaped off the stool, arms outstretched, his face contorting like a diver with the bends.

“—zi.”

“You called?”

The air had turned oily. Silvina could feel it, slimy and oozing, on the surface of her skin. There was a faint briny smell like seaweed, like an ocean beach at low tide. But otherwise, the presence of Dr. Tariq Shirazi was as real and indisputable as Gavriel’s had been an instant before—except the walls of the stairwell were now bare, and there were no barstools at the bottom, and Gavriel, poet-shaman, was moving around the ground floor, arms and legs slowly flailing as if he were tangled in an underwater marsh.