Daughters of Babylon (29 page)

Feverish red splotches appeared on the Queen’s neck and hot high colour to her cheeks, recalling her to episodes with Louis she would rather not remember.

“I am now going to guide the movement of your hips,” Bilqees went on. “You may breathe freely, but keep your waist and awareness high. Imagine your shoulders as the top of a tree, with you observing all that goes on below.” She pressed her thumbs into Eleanor’s flesh, and tipped her pelvis forward. Then she applied equal pressure with her fingers and the cradle tipped back. “Good, good, keep breathing. This rocking, we call cradling, is the movement of pure thought. Feel your arms as branches, your fingers the leaves, extending toward light.”

After a few minutes of cradling, the pockets of cruel heat dissipated, and Eleanor felt lighter, as if air were flowing through her bones, and to her mind came summer days in Aquitaine when they sent out the falcons, leather jesses fluttering; the lapping waves at Talmont where shoes were never worn; standing ankle deep in the foam, aching to design currents of water and sky with her own hands and heart.

“Remember who you are,”
Grand-père
used to say, spinning her, straight out, round and round, while she shrieked with fear and pleasure.

“What shape are you drawing from your cradle, milady?” Bilqees asked.

The queen drew in a deep breath, eyes closed. “A circle, I am drawing a circle.”

“And now?”

A long ripple of satisfaction blew from her lips. “A cockleshell, from the outside in…a spiral shape.” She opened her eyes a crack and peered at her hardening nipples. “Oh, my!”

“Waist lifted, milady, stay high—and now, what formation?”

Eleanor gazed at the tall, slender reflection of herself. Her skin tone had deepened to an opalescent pink and her eyes held lustre, while hips undulated in slow, graceful movements. “Eight,” she said. “I am drawing a prone figure eight.”

“Yes. It is what the ancient Greeks called
apeiron
, Infinity. You are drawing the infinite, inviting the roots of Creation to plunge into your sacred cradle…it is you who sends creation, once invited, out again to the furthest reaches, wrapping like vines and opening in trumpet blooms of white, deep purity—aroused, to receive again all that you desire, in abundance, all you can imagine, ever climbing—”

There was a rap on the door. Eleanor and Bilqees ignored it, but it came again.

Eleanor sighed and felt the bludgeoning weight of being queen again. Bilqees released her hold of Eleanor’s hips and handed her a robe on the way to unlocking and opening the door. It was Catarina.

The eyes of the younger lady-in-waiting widened at the sight of her Queen standing at the mirror, whose form she’d bathed and dressed hundreds of times. The absence of raiment was nothing new, but something in her Lady had changed.

“Madame?” She curtsied. “Forgive the intrusion.”

“Not at all, Cati, what is it?”

“We have received confirmation that His Highness the Duke of Normandy will be arriving within the hour. I have come to help you dress.”

Petals burst open in the cradle of her thoughts like a morning glory to the sun. “At last, we meet Henry, of whom I have dreamed.”

The brisk tanned woman from California shot out an arm. “I’m Glorianne Iverson, president of the Gavriel Navarro Worldwide Fan Club.”

“How do you do?” Silvina said.

“I’ve come to give you this.” She handed her a clear acrylic cube about four inches square with a dried, dark red rose inside. “It’s a Navarrosa. We give these to all of Gav’s translators, workshop presenters, and as awards to our poetry winners.”

A rose corpse, was her first thought. Sleeping Beauty in fake glass. “Thanks,” she said, “so, erm…how many translators does he have?”

Glorianne tapped her chin. “Let me think…last count, thirty-four—Icelandic, the latest.” She glanced down at Silvina’s zippered laptop case. “Have I disturbed your on-line time?”

“Nope, I’m finished.” She slid the damage claim docs in with the computer.

“Oh, good. I only need two minutes of your time. There are lovely little café tables outside, remind me of San Diego. I’m a Sacramento gal myself. I understand you’re from Canada?”

“Yes, Toronto.”
But with no home
. Silvina followed Glorianne outside and sat with her beneath Moulin de l’Internet’s dark green awning.

“I went to Toronto with my high school marching band in 1991. I was lead majorette. We stayed at the Royal York Hotel.”

“That must have been fun.”

“It was a blast.” She paused. “Something strange has happened, and I need to ask you a favour.”

“Go ahead.”

“You know about the Navarrosa weekend coming up, day after tomorrow?”

“I do.”

“And you know it’s going to be down in the orchards at Queen of Heaven. Well, this morning, the caravans, tent and Porta-Potties were delivered. After they were set up, the guys tried to drive out and discovered the parking lot and most of the access road were gone.”

“Gone?”

“Yes. Sunk, as in sinkhole, a crater the size of four swimming pools. Luckily, there was enough clearing in the woods for the drivers to get out, but there’s no way we can expect 318 people from around the world to enter the site from there, let alone park their cars anywhere nearby. I’ve talked to the local police in the village up the hill—what’s it called?”

“Cerabornes.”

“Yeah, and they’re okay with people parking along the road on the east side where your house is, but they’d like as many of the vehicles as possible to use your yard and driveway. We’d also need to use the path behind your house for coming and going, from Thursday to Sunday. They’re all decent people, no doomsday hippie freaks or anything.”

“Sure, that’s fine. Why would the parking lot sink? There’s been hardly any rain.”
Not like the century storm in my city.

“Collapsed ruins, apparently. This place is riddled with tunnels and catacombs and what-not. They say it happens a lot.” Glorianne flipped through pages on her clipboard. “Would you like me to draw up a waiver, in case someone trips on your property and threatens to sue?”

“It’s not my property, there’s no need.” A tiny, diamond-shaped point of intensity was beginning to pulse in the middle of her forehead. Silvina rubbed it.

“Are you all right?” Glorianne asked. “You’re looking peaked.”

“I’ve had better days, it’s just a headache.”

“You need Gav’s poetry. You’ve read his work, right?”

“Haven’t dipped into it yet.”

“You have to read him. He’s better than porn, hotter than romance—do you know he trained as a shaman in the Amazon?”

“Really? A shaman?”

“Oh, yeah, he was only in his twenties, lived with some tribe that’s practically extinct now. That was before the perfume, of course. All of his poems are coded, did you know that?”

“With what?”

Glorianne blinked.

Silvina replayed the sentence. “I’m sorry, I thought you said coated. So his poems have, what, secret meanings?”

“They do. They’re all about universality and self-acceptance. You should drop in to the workshops. I’m sure Gav wouldn’t mind, you letting us tramp through your woods, and all. Let me find you a schedule of events…” She pulled out a glossy brochure with the Navarrosa rose on the cover, which was prettier, freed of its polymer prison.

Silvie scanned the events that began with Welcoming Remarks by Gavriel Navarro, followed by revolving sessions of
Poetry for Beginners, Intermediate Poetry, Master Classes
beside names she did not know. These titles could use work, she thought.

“Are the facilitators paid?” she asked.

“Paid?” Glorianne’s nose wrinkled. “They’re published poets.”

“Well, yes, I should hope so. What I mean is, people pay to come, but are the instructors paid?”

Not the kind of question, obviously, that a volunteer fan club president enjoyed considering. “The poets who come to Navarrosa events,” she said, “sell their chapbooks on-site. The session fees pay admin costs. That’s how it’s done.”

If she weren’t feeling so sorry for herself, Silvie might have smiled. During Full Spectrum Training, at moments like these, she liked to quote Blythe:

“
That’s how it’s done. That’s how it’s done.
I pay myself a nickel every time I hear, think, or speak that phrase, and that accumulation of nickels flowed me my first million.”

She tucked the brochure under the rose. “Thank you, Glorianne. I’ll see how the weekend unfolds…you mentioned something about perfume.”

“Yes, perfume is how Gav made his fortune so he’s able to finance poetry. When he was in the Amazon, he developed a floral essence made from all natural ingredients and sold it to a Brazilian perfumery. He even modeled for them for awhile. You’ve heard of ‘g’, right?”

“Gee? Can’t say I have. I stick to tried and true, scent-wise.”

“Oh, you have got to smell it—to die for! Hold on.” Glorianne slapped a hand on the table, set bangles a-jangling, and dashed off to a nearby Peugeot. She returned with a box of sample bottles nestled in black velvet. The label was a lower case cursive “g”, stylized to resemble the @ symbol. “Here, take two. It’s the least we can do for your kindness.”

“Thanks,” Silvie said, as mounting stress bloomed into, not a headache, but a full-scale synesthesial episode. Glorianne morphed into a carrot with dancing twin macaw guardians, each whispering deep shamanic secrets into her ears while she bounced off like a pogo stick, wiggling her fingers and crying, “Toodle-oo!”

Royal Palace, Paris
Kingdom of France
AUGUST, A.D. 1151

Arturo de Padrón sat in the Great Hall amidst ale-swilling, wench-grabbing, onion-belching Norman boors, supposedly his peers, and wanted nothing more than to find some abandoned stable and curl up with inkpot, quill and parchment. It was a day that would go down in history, when peace was finally brokered between France and the duchy of Normandy, springboard to the British Isles. It was also the day he understood that the birth of a poet can mark the death of the man.

Had there been the slightest fissure, hairline crack; had there been a moment’s pause between the final toll in the marriage of Eleanor and Louis, and the arrival of Henry, Duke of Normandy, with whom they’d been at war for two years, Arturo would have plunged his dagger to the hilt and broken the gap wide open. He would have pressed his palms above his head and dived into the swirling depths fearlessly for the chance to prove he could stand beside Eleanor, his queen, as equal. But there was no such fissure, and the final grains of matrimonial sand were still dribbling when the boulder smashed the hourglass—that is to say, the moment when Eleanor, thirty, and Henry, seventeen, first clamped eyes on one another.

Because Arturo was scribe to the woman and not her royal office, he took notes seven months later at the assembly of bishops, where they dissolved Eleanor’s marriage to Louis on the very grounds the king had refused before abducting her to Jerusalem. Because Arturo was her personal attendant, he had no choice but to assist in the arrangement of romantic trysts in cottages and country inns for the lovestruck couple; and to abide her girlish gossip with Catarina and Bilqees of the stocky, blond, bearded Duke, who, admittedly, sat a horse better than most Franks.

Not until the return of Eleanor to Poitiers, her birthplace, did the Galician feel glimmers of a deeper possibility. Twice, on the barbarous roads from Paris, their coaches were seized by would-be suitors intent on forcing the now available Duchess into wedlock. Thibaud, Count of Blois, Arturo bested in a sword fight at the edge of a wood and managed even to extort a bag of gold for his trouble. But with the second brute, he miscalculated. Geoffrey of Anjou, the swaggering, younger brother of Henry, had the gall to force himself upon his future sister-in-law, as they disembarked at an inn for the night. Arturo pulled him off before he’d managed anything more than a fumbled grope, but once he had the Count on the ground, dagger pressed to his jugular, beading blood, Arturo’s desire to wipe out the Norman royal bloodline one scrawny neck at a time nearly overcame him.

Eleanor had to pull him off. “Arturo, stop! He is fifteen, he is only a boy!”