Daughters of Babylon (12 page)

At that moment, the door flew open, and Karin and Malvine burst into the room, chatting and laughing, carrying baskets with long-stemmed flowers and honeycomb peeking out from beneath squares of cotton.

“…and then he said, you should have told me what you wanted the first time.”

With fresh shrieks of laughter, their heads came together, hands on each other’s shoulders; they looked like a feminine
Arc de Triomphe
.

Lupo had never noticed the women side by side, away from the other witches. Both were petite and curvaceous, one raven-haired with multi-coloured ribbons woven through her braids, the other platinum blonde in a touristy sombrero with red pompoms. In their matching playfulness, they reminded him of the West Highland White and Scottish terriers of the Black & White Scotch whisky ads.

On impulse, to counteract, perhaps, a sudden inappropriate craving, Lupo Sanchez lobbed both rubber balls toward the women. Without the slightest break in her engagement, Malvine extended an arm and the blue striped ball plopped neatly in her basket. Karin Albrechtsson didn’t see the balls coming. The red one hit her on the right front pocket of her denim cut-offs and fell to the floor.

She caught it on the second bounce and pulled the ball up to her shoulder. Karin had stopped laughing. She looked toward the men, not knowing which of them had thrown it. She turned slightly at the waist and with a practiced overhand, threw the ball at Lupo. He caught it, and he caught the look in her eye.

The events that followed would be unobservable to anyone untrained in the ways of nagual. They might feel an awkward silence or the sensation of time slowing down. The technical term, translated from the ancient tongue, would go something like:
magnetic rock shatters, shower-song pours over parched land.

Malvine LaVendrye, of course, observed it all, and her laughter too fell away. She glanced toward the window where the toloache blossoms bobbed jauntily in a nonexistent breeze, then to the nagual. She raised her eyebrows slightly:
Am I seeing what I think I see?

Lupo Sanchez dropped his head.
I’m afraid so.

Prieuré de Reine du Ciel
Pyrenees, southern France
PRESENT DAY

Wi-fi, wireless, it was an honest mistake, coming from a man who’d spent his life digging up 3000-year-old fertility goddesses with a toothbrush and sieve. The 1940s-era radio in Viv’s bedroom crackled magnificently and must have been a comfort during the Cold War years. What disturbed Silvina as much as the isolation was discovering that she had no numbers in her head, not even the main switchboard number for Tri-Partite Academy, her employer of twenty years. Speed dial and texting had wiped that part of her memory clean.

It took Silvie half an hour through long distance operators to obtain the TPA switchboard number. Blythe’s home and mobile number were both unlisted. It was 8:30, Monday morning, Toronto time, so the chances were fairly good that Blythe would at least be in the building, if not at her desk. Silvie would find out as soon as she finished the slow, rotary dialing of twelve numbers.

Someone answered before the second ring. “Hello?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I must have the wrong number.”

“Silvina, is that you? Thank God!”

“Blythe? Is something wrong?”

Her employer never answered phones, even her cell, without identifying herself. And the hello had been incredulous, hesitant; it didn’t sound like her at all.

“Wrong? No, nothing’s wrong.” Her laugh was a nervous hiccup. “It’s just that when I saw the number on call display—there was no name, it just said ‘out of country’—I had the awfulest feeling that it would be…well, of course, it couldn’t be. Why are you calling on Vivian’s phone?”

“You know this number by sight?”

“It was my number too for seven years.”

True enough. Among Blythe’s singular skills was a photographic, bordering on pathologic, memory for numbers. She’d admitted once that she trained herself not to look at licence plates while driving, or her head would be so cluttered she couldn’t sleep or function in meetings. But still!

“I’m using Viv’s phone because none of my technology works here. There’s no dial-up, nothing. Even my adaptor plugs don’t fit the wall sockets.”

“Good grief, how are you going to function? Does Alphonse know?”

“Not yet. I’ll call him later today. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I suppose one advantage is that the publishers and agents and whoever else has been clamouring for access to Viv’s life can’t bother me.”

“But you and Viv communicated by email.”

“We did, and we talked on her mobile. She’d mention once in a while that she was in a coffee shop or a winery, but she never said it was by necessity.”

“No, she wouldn’t,” Blythe said. “So, apart from archaic wiring, how is the house? At one time, there were eight of us living there, and we had no indoor plumbing. Can you imagine?”

“Sort of. It’s a charming little place, middle of nowhere. She’s put in some upgrades, and with the windows open, the most amazing smell of cedar and eucalyptus blows through. It’s like living in a hope chest.”

“Yes, I remember that smell and the physical ache of missing it for years afterwards. There is nothing like the air of the Pyrenees. I remember too when lupins appeared overnight like purple armies, poppies fluttering like sheets of red silk, the taste of apricots fresh from the tree…” There was warmth, this time, in her laughter. “Listen to me, going all nostalgic. Tell me, Silvie, what of your task? Any sense yet of how much of your summer this is going to consume?”

“Not really. The parlour has floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and pillars of hat boxes. If the boxes contain hats, clearing it won’t take me long. There are armoires in the bedroom crammed with theatre scrapbooks and silk gloves and old handkerchiefs. I’ve only popped my head into the attic. It looks like a prop room with trunks, clothing racks and old lamps. Her study will be the biggest challenge. I don’t think she ever threw away a receipt—or filed one.”

“She always was a pack rat. Have you met any of the locals yet?”

“Apart from the chauffeur, no, though I am planning to visit Cerabornes within the next hour. Shops close at five, and the only food in the house is from a gift basket, most of which I’ve eaten.”

“Really? Who’s it from?”

“Some shop, I don’t remember.”

“Well, there used to be a couple in Cerabornes who owned a jewelry store. Their names were Louis-Bernard and Orsine. They were ancient then—or maybe they were only in their fifties and looked old to us. If they’re still there, would you remember me to them? They used to call me
La Canadienne Solitaire
. They were the sweetest people.”

“Of course, I’d be happy to.”

“Hold on, I’m going to tell Liz I’m not taking calls.” In less than a minute, she was back on the line. “So these publishers, what do you know about them?”

“I don’t have the names in front of me, but they’re major houses from both the UK and the States. They offered healthy advances, too. She turned them all down.”

“Did she tell you why?”

“She said they were only looking for theatre rag—who slept with Burton, who partied with Princess Madge, that sort of thing.”

“So you don’t think they wanted to know about the Daughters.”

The air thickened, and Silvie’s lungs compressed as if she were breathing coal dust in a low-ceilinged room. It was no great haunting, just her normal bodily reaction to emotion. Known as synesthesia, some called the neurological cross-wiring of sensory perceptions a disorder. When her high school essays got flagged for including the smell of world events and the guidance counsellor had determined she wasn’t a smart ass, he recommended meds or electro-shock. Her grandmother was incensed. “Nobody electrocutes my granddaughter! It’s growing pains. She’ll grow out of it.” She didn’t, but over the years, Silvina had learned to work with it.

Coal dust meant defensiveness. From Blythe’s perspective, they were nearing dangerous emotional territory, and if Silvie answered too quickly, the conversation would fall apart. She waited until the air cleared before saying, “I can’t imagine that anyone would care about a few young people who gardened organically forty years ago. Anyway, it’s all on Google.” That last bit wasn’t quite true. Plenty was missing about those peculiar years at
Reine du Ciel
, but the statement was enough for Blythe to relax and change the subject.

“What about her legal and financial contacts? Have you been in touch with them? I know she had a theatre agent who was devoted to her.”

“The agent died last year, and according to Dr. Shirazi, she fired her attorney and accountant about six months ago.”

Timber wolf cornered, thunderbolts, translucent, frozen, held in check
. Silvina needed to eat soon. Low blood sugar worsened the condition.

“According to whom?” Blythe said.

“Tariq Shirazi, her fiancé.”

There was a sharp intake of breath, and she heard a word softly spoken.
Tar
.

“When were you speaking to him?”

“Yesterday. He let me into the house, gave me the tour.”

“And where is…Dr. Shirazi now?”

“En route to Cairo, and from there to Iraq.”

She heard a muffling, like a hand placed over the phone, and Blythe shouting, “Not now, Liz! Tell them I’ll call back in five!” She came back on the line. “Sorry.”

“No worries. I need to get going anyway.”

“Silvie, wait. Listen to me. I know I’ve been a little bitchy since you agreed to being Vivianne’s executrix, but I have my reasons. I wish I could go into them, but I can’t. I honestly cannot.”

Silvina curled loops of telephone cord around her finger. “I’m listening.”

“Don’t stay in that house. Rent a car, pack it with as much as it will hold, find a B & B somewhere. St. Jacques must have something by now. You can even expense a percentage. Just don’t stay in that house.”

Blythe’s tendency to control was nothing new; Silvie felt more annoyed than worried and had no intention of mentioning the 30-year-old, one-speed bicycle with saddlebag baskets she’d found in the shed. “I appreciate your advice, but there’s a perfectly good deadbolt, and a wooden plank that takes both hands and my full body weight to slide across the door.”

“Shoot, it’s Beijing, I can’t miss this call. We’ll talk later. Let me know when you’ve made arrangements.”

Silvie had intended to ask Blythe for her unlisted cell and home numbers but didn’t get a chance. She stood in the
foganha
, holding the receiver and heard a second click. Someone else had been on the line.

Las Cuevas
Veracruz, Mexico
SUMMER, 1972

At the first rise of crescent moon, carrying only an empty gourd tied to a rope at his waist, the Nagual Lupo Sanchez visited the furthest series of caves for which the village was named. An hour’s hike through maguey cactus, prickly pear and other barbed and thorny succulents, the caves he sought had never been dwelling places for humans, and the curanderos and naguales who’d frequented their chambers over millennia left no rock art or artifacts. The succession of domed rooms, though equal in grandeur to those of San Luis Potosí, had thus far escaped the attention of spelunkers and the Mexican Tourist Board. Snakes and rabid bats helped in that regard; so did the subtler biting things.

He slid on his belly through a horizontal crevasse in total darkness, feeling his way through air pockets, changes in surface texture, and gurgling patterns of water. Not that there was much chance of taking a wrong turn when, like the steps of cathedrals and places of pilgrimage, the crystal-studded basalt had worn to accommodate the human form. Lupo simply shimmy-crawled through the only narrowness that granted passage until his hands met air, and then he pulled himself forward, folding like a taco to release one leg at a time.

There was no natural light in the domed chamber known as
La Boca de Bruja
, Witch’s Mouth, where stalactites thick as a man’s thigh dripped from the ceiling to their stalagmite counterparts in a saline pool to create echoing, arrhythmic plings like a surrealist’s bell choir. Lupo had brought flashlights and pitch torches in the past: he knew of the 1200-foot drop on the far side of the chamber, and the guano-slickened cat walk along the edges that could take a person into deeper auditoriums or allow them to peer into the bottomless and see all of one’s conjurations about hell and damnation, but he hadn’t come to explore his soul. And his was not the kind of vision that required light rays and retinas to meet. Lupo held out his gourd.

No insights came inside the cave. No rockets of inspiration fired while he walked home, soaking wet and shivering. Not until he was in his hammock beside Dely—
delicada y sabrosa, su amante preciosa
—who’d received his gourd with the precious drops and hung it from a sacred place; who’d welcomed his sodden caresses in a tangle of cotton mesh and warm wool
serapes
, while their infant son Ívano slept in his own little hammock; not until he’d reached the blissful rocking state between wakefulness and sleep, did the toloache who’d sneezed her knowledge at him and cave waters…

outside the circle of the ages

like cousins

ridicule awaits, rampages

combine and offer up…

…cantilevered histories stretching and compressing, folding and unfolding through a single drop from aqueous, the multi-breast stalagtites,
tetas
, She-cave is Shaddai to Hittites of Anatolia, precious Baal to the Phoenicians, seafarers of great Cana, Spider woman, she would be Chalchiuhtlicue to the Toltecs, consort of primordial nagual who dispenses Feathered Serpent knowing, crystalline the seeds among great rivers of the Maya and Mixtec, of Chimu and last Inca…single drop in the gourd of awareness enough for you to form a pearl, from thence to spread and travel sands of stone and time, to rise through edifices built by slaves, their muscled, sinewed muteness thrown to moats of snake-filled water, sad reward for toils done, the ramparts heaped with faggots for the burning and for archers, battlements, and architects of war they are—save one, save one—all gone…a Court of Love passed on, a single house, built not from cards yet joyfully a game from Gate of God, Bab-El, for none can be destroyed by utterance, a play of knave and queen and jester dealing freely, throw you One, I do, and W—no, double You! where Two and Three make Five, the women of the Sultan Eight—they eat divine of nectar and a bun, dance, yes, abundance, yes, I, la Cérida, grant you Thirteen spiral wishes—