Babylon (12 page)

He should have believed. Herodotus had been describing the
hieros gamos
 or ‘sacred wedding’ that we temple-maidens still rehearsed. And if here, off-world, our rehearsals were confined to mime, on Earth it was a different matter. There, in our capacity as sacred prostitutes, we slept with the Illuminati, the new kings of Babylon and the known universe.

It was strange. I had never really taken in the fact that I would be expected to enter into shameless liaisons with men for whom I felt nothing. That particular, but crucial, aspect of serving the Goddess had had as little to do with my decision to volunteer as had the enticements of money, gifts, and other endowments. And I knew that, for Cliticia, it had been the same. Something else had seduced our hearts, something other, a mystery that my young life had for so long been struggling unsuccessfully to comprehend.

I held out my arms and began slowly to rotate, so that I seemed to offer up my embrace to the four corners of the great city.

‘The sacred wedding!’ I proclaimed. ‘What gods should we offer ourselves up to, I wonder, now that we’re
bona fide
harlots?’

‘Oh, give over, do,’ said Cliticia. I stopped rotating. Cliticia sat where I had left her, about a dozen yards away. She had propped her chin in the balls of her palms and was staring resolutely at the ground, ostentatiously fed up with the long wait.

I knew things would never be the same. My precipitate nature had brought me to the place I had longed for. But what I discovered I wanted, more than anything, was to be back in Victoria Park, with Cliticia leaning against my shoulder, and Babylon only the distant, romantic prospect that had brought us together—a prospect so distant and indistinct that it would never actually be realized.

I descended the plinth and walked back to join my friend. Once again, I sat down beside her.

I stared down the tracks, towards Lord Azrael.

‘Did I ever tell you about Barbarossa?’ I said.

Cliticia shrugged. ‘Are you going to?’ she replied, less than wholly interested.

‘You’d call him an imaginary playmate, I suppose,’ I continued, undeterred, while making a casual evaluation of Lord Azrael’s patrician figure. ‘The kind you don’t let on about. The kind you get scolded for...
indulging
in.’ I frowned, rooting about in the undergrowth of my memory. ‘I first met him when I was about five years old, I suppose. He lived in the wardrobe that stood at the foot of my bed.’ I looked askance. Cliticia’s downcast eyes had glazed, but whether out of boredom, or because she had redirected her gaze inward to better focus her concentration, I couldn’t tell. ‘One night, the wardrobe door opened all by itself, as if by magic. I was scared of the dark, then, and I hid under the sheets. But I could feel him standing there, looking down at me. He was, he was—’

‘A bit of a masher?’ said Cliticia.

‘He was like Lord Byron,’ I said. ‘Like Duke Bluebeard. Like... like
Heathcliff.’

‘And then?’ said my friend, more eagerly now.

‘I was scared,’ I said.

‘I
wouldn’t ’ave been,’ said Cliticia, defiantly, as her eyes once more swam into focus. ‘I’m not frightened of
nuffink.’

‘Do you know what Cathy says,’ I continued, remembering a favourite passage from one of my favourite books. ‘She says: “My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.’” I turned abruptly to face her. ‘Cliticia, I
am
Heathcliff!’

‘Daft is what
you
are,’ muttered Cliticia.

We fell silent, occupied only in watching the train as it steamed towards us.

‘Cheer up, sport,’ said Cliticia after a while, in an effort to strike a note that might lift us both out of our melancholia. ‘You did the right fing. Coming ’ere to Babylon ’as been what’s
necessary
for us two, I reckon.’ She put her arm around me. I let myself relax, and rested my head against hers. ‘You never know,’ she continued, rocking me a little, ‘you might meet up with your ol’ mate Barbarossa.’ She gave a little giggle. ‘Or even ’eathcliff. You never know, do you!’ Like me, she was looking down the track to where our two accomplices waited to flag down the train. ‘It’s destiny, ain’t it?’ she concluded. ‘Destiny. Yeh. Bleedin’ fate.’

I had earlier taken off my bonnet, discarded it, and then let down my chignon. Since then, Cliticia had rarely missed an opportunity to run a hand through my heavy, waist-length hair. ‘Fate?’ I said, as I heard her sigh and felt yet another such caress, as cool as the breeze that swept through the ruins. ‘Yes, perhaps it is fate.’ But something was wrong. Something was profoundly wrong. I was in a dream world where all the angles, planes, and dimensions of my once familiar life were skewed, and if fate had decreed that matters should be so, then fate was a cheat, a fraud, and a charlatan.

I looked up at the sky. The moon was so brilliant that its nimbus blanketed out the stars. If, of course, there were any stars in that black, alien expanse.

The train sounded its whistle. I looked up. Lord Azrael and Mr Malachi stood on the track waving their arms.

The train roared across a devastated landscape. The Babylonian railway network traversed the city, its main lines running out of the interdimensional Gates that lay to the north, south, east, and west, allowing both passenger and freight services from Earth Prime to travel directly to their respective destinations off-world. The trains, along with thousands of miles of track, were, of course, owned and operated by the Illuminati. But not the train I travelled on. It was one of several that the Men had sequestered for their own purposes.

The compartment, if not luxurious, was quite comfortably appointed. It resembled (or at least, so I would suppose, for I had only previously travelled on the London Underground) the first- class compartment of a train out of Paddington or St Pancras. I sat next to the window. The drapes—pulled back and secured with golden cords—were flush against my cheek. Made of thick, red velvet, they might have been originally designed for a house of assignation. The door to the compartment was closed, the windows that gave onto the connecting corridor screened by a similar set of drapes.

I leant forward a little and allowed my left temple to rest against the dirt-streaked windowpane that separated me from the world outside.

For the past few hours, the city had begun to change. It still manifested the ruined porticos, truncated columns, armless statues, and rampant vegetation that characterize, both in myth and fact, the symbol-strewn landscapes of all dead cities. But the debris of the millennia had lately been reconstituted into something less ancient. The skeletal outlines of Gothic cathedrals, Baroque palaces, and neo-Palladian villas began to jump out at me from the jumble of architectural forms, like isolated phrases of meaning in a half-understood foreign tongue; and if the stelae, winged bulls, djinn, war gods, and other tokens of ancient Mesopotamia were still much in evidence, then examples of iconography celebrating the Black Madonna and my own patroness, the Magdalene, complemented them.

‘Are you enjoying the scenery?’ said Lord Azrael.

I studied his reflection in the window. I would not have called him a handsome man, though he was, as they say, ‘regularly proportioned’, and what is more, he exuded the kind of gracious but uncompromising authority that seemed to promise... But no; I would not allow my thoughts to travel down
that
road, I decided. There was still so much I did not understand; so much I had to be wary of. I averted my gaze from his reflection and renewed my scrutiny of the city.

Flora was sparse. The palm trees that had erupted from the shattered paving that carpeted the city’s perimeter (trees that had doubtless been transplanted from Earth) were here reduced to odd, random brushstrokes of green, yellow, and brown that enlivened a canvas otherwise notable only for its stagnation and inertia. Trailing plants, creepers, and convolvulus, were more abundant. They entwined columns and porticos, smothered ghostly façades, or else snaked across rubble-littered piazzas. But all in all, Babylon’s vegetable life—at least, as it was represented here—offered little to excite my interest.

The fauna, however, was wonderful. An hour or so ago I had pressed my nose to the window as a flock of flying cats had filled the sky: little, golden-fleeced sphinxes that, disturbed by the approach of the train, had taken wing from the dilapidated roof of an abandoned railway station, and then as rapidly disappeared. Ever since, I had hoped to see another such sight, if not of pretty, human-headed cats, then of some other example of the absurdly exotic wildlife that was rumoured to haunt Babylon’s desolate precincts.

‘Are you—’ said Lord Azrael, about to repeat himself. He was determined to intrude into my thoughts.

‘What,’ I cut in, ‘do you want with us?’ Apart from the clickety-clack of wheels over rails, the train was silent; so silent, I could hear his lordship’s every breath. Cliticia and Mr Malachi had taken a separate compartment. The only other passengers were the handful of lightly armed men who patrolled the corridor. I turned my head and gazed at him, defiantly. But he disdained to meet my gaze. I let my attention drift, idly inspecting the carpetbag that I had earlier stowed in the luggage rack above our heads. It was strange to reflect, but it seemed to me that a photograph of the scene would, to the untrained eye, have revealed nothing more untoward than an uncle taking a favourite niece on a trip into the country. I continued to bide my time, determined to show that I, too, could affect indifference.

‘What do we want with you ?’ he said at last. ‘Do you really not know? Or do you merely feign not to know?’ He laughed, gently. ‘Oh, Miss Fell, I think you know a great deal. In fact, I think you are a young lady full of surprises.’ I said nothing, surrendering myself to the train’s soporific rhythm, and aware, too aware, of how indecently close his body was to mine. ‘You mentioned the Blue Island, for instance.’ He put his feet up on the seat opposite. ‘The Blue Island,’ he mused, as if to himself, savouring the taste of the words as he might an after-dinner cigar. My eyelids began to droop. But as I let my body succumb to weariness, my mind seemed to grow keener, teased out of doubt and made increasingly hungry for his lordship’s quiet, considered words.

‘The Blue Island is located at the North Pole,’ he continued. ‘In the Hindu Puranas it is called Svita-Dvip, and it is home to Meru, the Midnight Mountain. But the world knows it more familiarly as the Hyperborean land of Thule. Half a billion years ago, Thule was home to my ancestors, a race of people originating from the planet Sumi-Er, in the solar system of Aldebaran. But there was another planet in Aldebaran: Sumi-An, home of the lesser races. The people of Sumi-An followed us across space. And they made their home in Antarctica.’

The city was being eaten up, its mad architecture dispatched to the accompanying roar of the engine and the clatter of the rails. The vast precincts of Eridu and Uruk were long since behind us. The all-female realms of Zemargad and Sheba—presided over by the goddess of love and death—far ahead. If half a billion years separated Lord Azrael from his ancestral seat, I could almost believe an equally inconceivable distance separated me from my own home.

‘North and South poles,’ he resumed, ‘were thus colonized by antithetical civilizations. Ours was patriarchal. We worshipped the sun. But theirs was a goddess-oriented civilization. Their allegiance was to the moon.’ He paused and took breath. ‘From the North comes true humanity. The North is the wellspring of pure, Aryan blood.’ After taking in another lungful of air he exhaled so forcefully that I almost thought I could hear his elegant, Dundreary whiskers rustle—a barely perceptible sound akin to that of thistledown in the wind. ‘Alas, a tilt in the Earth’s axis brought an end to that Golden Age. It necessitated another migration. Some Aryans came to North Eurasia, and, later, a second wave settled in the now lost continent of Atlantis. And it was in Atlantis that the Aryans committed’—his voice dropped an octave—‘
miscegenation
.’ He fell quiet, the air between us tangy with ozone, as if after a thunderstorm. ‘Yes,’ he began again, after several tense seconds. ‘Those Aryans mixed their blood with the races of proto-Negroes that had left the South Pole to colonize the world. These miscegenators were not
my
ancestors, you understand. My forefathers were those who had left Thule for North Eurasia. And they chose to cleave to the pure, solar ideals that they had brought with them from Sumi-Er.

‘The half-breeds, that is, those descended from the unholy union of Sumi-Er and Sumi-An, are those who gave birth to history and the first cities. You call them Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians. But in truth, they were the scions of a dark, malignant race that hid their designs behind the cloak of “civilization”. For thousands of years, they have poisoned this planet. Poisoned it using their proxies of Christianity, Capitalism, and Socialism. Poisoned it with
Democracy,
which is the rule of the common herd—the rule of the hyperfeminine Dark Mother! But we true humans, we Aryans, we pure unsullied remnants of those who once ruled this Earth, long ago retreated to our ancient homeland in the North. There, from our underground city of Agartha, we sally forth to make war against the inferior races and their Shulamite cult. It is only when we have purified the planet that the supermen of old—those whom we call the Hidden Masters—will make themselves known and the link that has been lost between Man and Cosmos will be forged anew. Then there will come an end to this Kali-Yuga, this Iron Age, this Ragnarok. Then the new Krita or Satya-Yuga will dawn. The Taurean age!’