Twilight in Babylon (6 page)

He kicked open his door and stomped into his cold, dark house. The courtyard smelled like stale fish, and Guli couldn’t be bothered to light a fire. He slumped onto the bed and felt the palm fronds sag a little more. “In a week I’ll be sleeping on the floor,” he muttered. Somewhere in the branches above him, in the cursed palm fronds that were plastered over with mud for a roof, insects scurried.

“I hope you go to Ulu’s house and nest in her expensive fake hair,” he said to them, then pulled the blanket over his head and turned on his side.

The fronds slipped a little bit more. A revision: He’d be on the floor in three days.

*      *     *

The three of them walked in. The girl kept walking, through the courtyard and back into the room where she’d left her belongings. She slammed the door. Kalam and Ningal exchanged glances. “Wine, sir?”

“Yes, I think some of the northern date palm would be nice.”

Kalam hurried off to the kitchens to rouse a slave. Ningal sat down in the chair, sighed heavily, and stared up from the courtyard. The stars were sprinkled like precious silver drops on the breast of a Khamite woman. He hadn’t seen any Khamite women, not for years, not until today. Chloe, as she called herself, didn’t recall anything about her parentage or location, but she was no ordinary marsh girl.

In the last generations, her skin testified, her roots had been with the First Family, albeit the least favored son Kham, and probably—Ningal tugged at the tuft of beard just below his lip—someone fair. A father from the mountains, perhaps? A mother from the desert? At any rate, the girl was extraordinary to look at.

“Your wine, sir,” Kalam said, giving Ningal the choice of two hammered gold cups. Ningal selected the one closest to him, showing Kalam he was a trusted aide. Ningal tasted its sweet depths.

“Join me,” Ningal invited the man.

Kalam pulled over the chair Chloe had sat in earlier and took a drink of wine. Though Kalam pretended to like it, Ningal had him figured as a sour-mash man.

Wine was sweet, but as Ningal aged and fewer of the things that used to delight him continued to, he enjoyed its sweetness. Sour drinks were for young men with fire in their bellies and burning ambitions. Like his young aide. “What did you think of tonight?” he asked Kalam.

“She made a fool of herself,” he said.

Ningal nodded.

“I doubt she will stay through the night. Probably will sneak out before dawn and lie in wait by the grazing grounds for her flock. If they are her flock. Who knows, she could have stolen them. Idiot female.”

Ningal tugged at his beard. “What did you think of the council’s reactions?”

“I am glad the
ensi
didn’t take time from her day to listen. I felt bad enough for wasting the
lugal’s
evening.”

“How do you think it could have been bettered?” Ningal took another sip of wine. Sweet, sweet. And a little sharpness there. Cloves? He swirled the taste around his mouth.

Kalam snorted, leaned forward so his elbows were braced on his knees. The fringe of his kilt caught the light from the few torches, and Ningal found himself fascinated by the shimmer of gold. “If she had spoken well, it would have helped. If she had taken guidance from an artisan for her makeup or dress, it would have helped. If she had remembered anything, it would have helped.”

“What if she hadn’t vomited on the
lugal
?”

Kalam glanced over at the kilt the slaves would launder in the morning, and he would return, shamefaced, to the
lugal
by lunchtime. “That was the finishing touch on a disastrous evening. But by then, it was a farce. So it almost fit.” Kalam grinned ruefully as he sipped his wine, too caught up in the memory to remember to hide his grimace at its taste. Ningal looked away from the fringe and back at the night sky.

Wind rustled the tops of the palms in the courtyard and whistled around the clay pots set on the roof to catch the seasonal rains. “Can I get you anything else, sir?” Kalam asked.

“No, no. You go on home,” Ningal said. “Thank you.”

Kalam rose and set his goblet on the tray. “Dawn?”

“No, let’s sleep late. What time is my first judgment tomorrow?”

“After lunch.”

“And you have to return the cloak. I need to send some letters, hmm, let’s say two double hours from dawn.”

“Thank you, sir. Good morning.”

“Good morning to you, too.”

Kalam let himself out, and Ningal forced himself up and over to the door, then he thought better of it. He walked back to the far wall and sat down on the dirt floor. Slowly he stretched to touch his feet. A few more tries, and he laid his nose on his knees. The muscles in his back and arms and legs eased out, long and hard, but it took more time than it used to. He was still bent double when he sensed the movement.

She was dashing across the courtyard, fleet and nearly silent on bare feet. What she’d decided to take, she’d tied up and balanced on her head. A flicker of gold—she was holding the bangles she’d bought tight against her forearm to keep them from jangling.

He stared at her.

She froze, then slipped into a crouch and slowly turned around, peering into the darkest corners of the courtyard. She felt his gaze. She met it. Chloe looked away, but she didn’t turn toward the door. Instead she set down her parcel and let go of her bangles. They rushed down her arm with a melodic ring. She walked toward him, with the long-legged sway of marsh women, shoulders back, breasts and chin thrust out, hips moving to the left, then the right. Her hair covered her like a cloak, falling past her waist. With every step she chimed softly. In one movement she sat, cross-legged, black within the night except for the glitter of her bracelets and the white gleam of her teeth and eyes.

“I don’t recall ever feeling that way before,” she said to him. “Knowing people were laughing at me, and not because I was taking a stand for something in which they didn’t believe, or any other great cause, but because I was foolish. Ignorant. Stupid.” She picked at the dirt in front of her. “Well, not stupid, because stupid means I haven’t the capacity. There’s no truth there. I do have the capacity. I just don’t… know.”

“What don’t you know?” he asked softly, also sitting with crossed legs.

“Anything. The words they used, the terms, the concepts. It’s like I almost remember it, but it’s changed, or it’s different, and I can’t quite make the connection. When he, the
lugal,
asked how we kept track of fields, I—” She moved her arm to her hair and tucked a black strand behind her ear in a whiff of light perfume. Pomegranates and sesame, he realized. Not perfume, exactly. But seasoning, like the cloves in the wine.

“You didn’t know how to count?” he asked.

“It’s not like that. If I don’t know something, my mind is just blank. But this was so many pictures.”

“Pictures like what?”

She drew on the ground, shapes like—3, 4, 5, 6, 7—but she drew with her finger, and made her marks horizontally and backwards. There was no relation to the writing of a reed on clay, when the reed was moved vertically and properly from right to left. What she drew wasn’t even pictograms of old, just… lines that curved. “What are those pictures of?” he asked.

“These aren’t the pictures, not exactly. But they are part of them, like this.”

She scooted back, so he could see more of the dirt. With her hand steady, she made more incomprehensible marks. “Speed Limit 55.” “Don’t mess with Texas.” “Must be 18 or older.”

“Is this how your village counted, perhaps?”

“Then what are these marks?” She drew again, but these were straight lines crossed at the tops and bottoms, or intersected. I II III IV V. “They aren’t irrigation channels or anything. They came to my mind when he said counting.” She looked up at him. “I just don’t understand.”

Ningal looked at the markings she’d made. Her hand had moved without hesitation as she drew them, just like it had moved when she signed her contract for the lease. “How did you sign the lease again?”

“He said just make a mark, so I did.”

“Do it for me.”

She looked at the dirt, and with confidence and a little flourish she wrote CBK, linking the letters together in a way none of the others had been.

Ningal scratched his head.

“Do you recognize anything?”

“I must confess, I don’t.”

Dejected, she began to brush the dirt away. “It’s why I can’t stay.”

“Because you have your own marks, and no one else does?”

“I can’t be ignorant. I can’t
not
know.”

Ningal, in the centuries that comprised his life, had been many things. A barber and surgeon, a scribe, an estate manager, a fisherman, a tradesman and a Father of Tablets. In all his time, he had never seen any other markings besides the ones of his people, the Black-Haired Ones, the Sumerians. It set them apart, helped them irrigate fields and promote trade. They could write, they had a language.

He kept a list of all the words he’d ever heard, just so someone would know. In the Tablet House that had been his, on the Blue Street, there were shelves and shelves of his work. Words gleaned from every edge of the Black-Haired Ones’ world.

He’d never seen of, nor heard words he didn’t recognize as being theirs. And never in a thousand courts of the gods had he seen someone else scribble and call it something.

Did this girl need an exorcist? Or was this a gift from the gods?

“How did you learn,” she asked him, pulling him back into the courtyard and away from the dusty memories of the Tablet House. “Who taught you?”

“My father is wealthy. He sent his sons to the Tablet House.”

“School?”

Ningal was stunned, but he answered. “Yes, school.” How did she know that word? It was new!

“How long were you a student?”

He laughed and was surprised at how loud the sound was at this time of day. “From the day of my ninth birthday, every day from sunup to sundown, until I was twenty.”

“No days off?”

“Six days a month. The gods’ feasts, you know.” But perhaps she didn’t.

“And your father was wealthy, so he could spare you from the family business.”

“We’re shipwrights, and my father wanted us to be more.”

“I’ll stay here on one condition,” she said, her eyes suddenly bright. Greener than they’d looked this afternoon—in fact, he’d thought they were brown. They were luminous. Every muscle of his body was tense with awareness, anticipation. Ningal felt like a fish—strung along and snared at the exact, right moment.

“Which condition?”

“Let me go to the Tablet House.” She leaned forward, and the sweetness of pomegranates and sesame washed over him, the clink of her bangles suggested a seductive beat. “I’ll be a good student. I’ll learn quickly. I won’t cause any fuss. I’ll make my own lunch. Just let me go.”

“Why do you want to learn how to write?” he asked.

“Because, because… if you can write, you can read.”

“One would hope.”

“If you can read, anything is possible. You can go anywhere, be anything. Nothing limits you. Nothing.”

“You’re a female. An attractive one,” he said. The wine must have loosened his tongue, freed him to say what he thought instead of what he should only say. “Crook your finger and any one of a thousand men will give you anything you want, take you anywhere you desire to go, open the world to you.”

She sat back, her legs shifted to the side, her arms crossed before her. “I don’t want a man’s world. I want my own.”

“You have no desire for a mate?”

She looked to the side, her profile to him. She wasn’t a marsh dweller; her nose was too strong, her neck too long. Neither were the strength of her chin and straightness of her forehead from the molelike people who had tilled the land since Before. Skin like hers hadn’t been subject to the unrelenting sun for thirty years. She was an imposter, this marsh girl, but she didn’t seem to know it. “I can’t answer,” she said finally.

Ningal knew he was too old to feel shut out, especially over a creature he’d plucked from the mud, what, yesterday afternoon? He straightened up and tensed his muscles one last time before he stood. He rose to his feet.

“Wait,” she said, seated yet. He looked on the top of her head from here. Light shimmered over her hair, caught the glimmer of color still on her eyelids, and focused on her lips. They were bare of paint, and ripe.
I need to get to the temple,
Ningal thought.
I need to bury these feelings in the appropriate vessel for passion and lust, not in this child, who is the age of my great-great-grandchildren.

“It’s not that I won’t tell you, it’s that I can’t. Of course I want a mate, but… what I want, who I want, is so specific I can’t put it into words.” She reached a hand up, and he helped her to her feet. They looked eye to eye at each other; he felt her pulse in the hand he held. Her gaze was that of a woman of knowledge. He knew in that instant she was aware of how she made him feel.

He stirred the same feelings in her; in her eyes, he saw she wanted him. He felt it in her touch.

Ningal released her hand, stepped away, and smiled at her. “It’s late for me,” he said. “Sleep well, female.”

“Can I get into school?”

“It’s never been done. Female humans don’t attend the Tablet House.”

“No,” she said, her voice firm, her eyes definitely green. “Female humans
haven’t
attended the Tablet House.”

Ningal smiled, then climbed the stairs to his bed. For this dawn, to be wanted was enough.

Good day,” Chloe said to Kalam and Ningal, as they sat beneath the shade in the courtyard. “How was everyone’s rest?”

A slave offered her some beer and bread, and Ningal gestured for her to join them. Kalam seemed surprised to see her, but he hid it beneath a simpering glance. “I want to attend,” she said to Ningal. It was all she had dreamed of: those marks that looked like marsh birds’ feet in the mud, making sense! Being able to count, to write, to read! How glorious that could be! “When can I start?”

Kalam turned to Ningal. “What does she mean?” he said in an undertone.

“I want to attend school.”