Succubus in the City (16 page)

It sits in a perfect Eastern orientation, just as it had along the Nile in a hall built especially to show it off with a pool situated at just the distance where the river would have been. I reached out and touched the stones carved when I was a girl and used as a place of worship when I was being trained as a priestess myself. The path winds through the claustrophobic rooms and with the crush of visitors on a Saturday there is little time to linger. Still, Nathan did not rush, and managed to ignore the shrieking child running up and down through the room. He caressed the stones reverently, his fingers barely brushing the rough-hewn surface as if it were skin.

“So so old,” he sighed. “And I can’t read the hieroglyphs. Which is frustrating.”

“Neither can I,” I said before I realized quite how strange that statement would be today.

He only looked at me and smiled wryly. “You know, knowing you, I’d almost believe that you might.” I felt the compliment in his voice.

“Hey, you in there, you’re holding up the line,” someone said from behind us. So we had to observe in haste, appreciate on the fly, one minute per millennium, until we exited the third and final room.

“Do you want to see the ancient Near Eastern exhibits?” he asked after we’d finished the Egyptian wing. “That’s the Babylonian and Sumerian and Hittite exhibit, which was my area of study in grad school.”

“But you didn’t finish,” I said gently, wondering what I should do. Go? Say that I wanted to see the Roman statues? No, that would be ridiculous, if I wanted statues at least I should choose the Greek—or something modern.

“I’m technically on leave and in dissertation. I could still finish,” he said, and I could detect just a hint of resistance in the hopelessness in his voice.

“Sure,” I agreed cheerily. “I’ve never seen that wing.” Which was perfectly true. I’d avoided it like it was infected with the Spanish flu in 1918.

We went to the Babylonian wing. Great stele and slabs of black basalt with bas relief figures lined the dimly lit walls. It was cool and quiet.

“Look, here,” Nathan said, squinting at one of the giant slabs. I recognized my great-grand nephew’s chief adviser’s face.

Nathan pronounced something that sounded vaguely familiar but garbled. “Of course, we don’t know how it was really pronounced.” His voice was full of excitement. “No one alive today has any idea of how the language actually sounded, but my professors were among the best in the world. Though I won’t vouch for my accent.”

I looked at the writing carved deep into the rock and I realized that he had been trying to read aloud for me in the original. No, clearly they had no idea of how the language had sounded. I wanted to correct him, to speak out the words the way they should be said, the consonants softened and the vowels more complex than Nathan’s gibberish.

My mother tongue
, I thought. I wanted to reach out and stroke the stone, connect with my very personal past.

He would want to know how it was really said. I knew that, but I kept silent. I could almost hear Eros dripping sarcasm in my head.
If you’re going to be stupid and go on a Saturday date with him the first week, you might as well go correct his Akkadian as well. After all this time you should know that men like to show off for women. They like to be experts. If you insist on showing them up, they leave.

I hadn’t taken Eros’s advice before, either, and it hadn’t mattered.

For some reason, though, I hesitated. Not Eros, but my mother’s voice came back to me—and her Akkadian was as elegant and refined as her brothers’ tutor could manage. “Even a great king, even your father, needs to be reassured that he’s right. That’s what they want from us, child. Not our ideas, but our confidence. Because they often don’t have quite enough of their own.”

Mother was right, and I bit my tongue.

“This writing says that this was erected by the grand vizier to King Ea-mukin-sumi, in the year of his illustrious reign, to advise the people of this…place…that the following is due to the gods and to the Great King, and to his divinely appointed representatives and their overlord,” Nathan continued, with only a few hesitations.

Some of the words were not quite the English equivalents I would have chosen, but I had to admit that he was more accurate than I would have anticipated.

“And then it goes on to list the taxes due and various regulations of public life, and who was allowed to wear certain…” Here he hesitated while he puzzled out several words that specified the two lower grades of jewelry, neither of which I, as a member of the royal household, would be permitted to wear. In fact, the first highest grade (which I was permitted as the daughter of the King, but my mother was not), and the second highest (which were permitted to all the King’s women, and all dedicated priestesses serving any main temple site) were not mentioned in this document, which certainly implied that it had been from some outlying neighborhood or even a fairly prosperous village outside the capital.

“Costume jewelry,” was the term he finally decided on for the translation, and my respect for his abilities went up a fair bit. So he understood the concepts and was trying to translate correctly, accurately, and allow for idiom and embedded meaning rather than lecturing me on the various regulations of who could wear which gemstones. Which I certainly knew better than he did, though I was impressed that he understood that the concept had been important in my world.

“But here, later on,” he continued, pointing to another portion of the slab, “it also says that the overlord, under the direction of the vizier and the King and the Priests and Priestesses, are to provide just settlement of disputes and to keep the village safe. That the overlord is responsible for the maintenance of the two wells and the road, and that these must be kept in good repair and that all people of the Kingdom shall have free access.” His eyes glittered and his entire face glowed. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

He had certainly translated accurately, but I couldn’t see why it was wonderful and said so.

“Because it shows that even then, so many thousands of years ago, the government and the nobility had responsibilities to the people in return for the taxes and work the peasants paid. That it was not all top-down management, but that the common people were acknowledged to deserve certain benefits for supporting the structure.”

“Well, of course,” I said, still confused. “Isn’t that what civilization is? Orderly society has to exist at every level or there is chaos.” Not only had I been trained as a king’s daughter (though an extremely minor, disposable one), but I had lived through the kind of chaos that occurred when the social order broke down. The cruel and violent extorting what they could, the majority suffering in frustration, the collapse of any kind of trust or humanity had been horrifying. Even the most destructive wars had rules; the world where the social contract failed was more frightening than the mustard gas in the trenches nearly a hundred years ago. I certainly know, having lived through all of them and then some.

Nathan Coleman looked at me and smiled. His eyes were deep sapphire and full of mystery. He reached out a hand to my hair but drew back from actual touch. “You are so good, Lily. You don’t even accept a world where some people are beyond redemption.”

I’m a succubus,
I thought.
I know more of Hell and evil and the possibilities of redemption and damnation than you could imagine.

And then I had to pull back, back to the immediate now, back to the thought of the first date and how much I enjoyed Nathan’s company and how I didn’t feel like he talked down to me although he had no idea I knew anything at all about this ancient world and he nearly had a Ph.D.

I was good at shoving the memories aside, locking them away until I could take time in private to sort them out. Sometimes the only way to survive so long was simply an act of will, to concentrate only on the now and force all other considerations aside.

I’d never been to a museum with a man before, at least not a man I liked and found attractive. In my first centuries as a succubus I loved the fact that I could have any man I chose. Once. And I took advantage of all the bennies, all those beautiful, strong, well-dressed men. I loved my power over them. I reveled in the fact that at the right times they could not resist me, none of them could.

Over the years I had begun selecting men who would not be missed, who deserved their fate, whose elimination would benefit the women around me. I felt like the protector of my sex, weeding out the undesirables.

And the truth was, even though none of the girls counted it, I’d had one boyfriend once. Niccolo had been a castrato in Venice. Satan and the girls agreed that the fact that he wasn’t intact meant that it wasn’t a real relationship. Satan always insisted that She discounted the relationship because of the hormones, not the actual cutting. Since his hormonal levels were never in the range for a normal man, he couldn’t respond to my succubus pheromones; my being a succubus didn’t make him lust insanely for me, and so the fact that he loved me didn’t count. To Satan. And even to my friends.

Well, maybe Niccolo and I didn’t exactly have a porn DVD sex life, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t love, and caring, and morning coffee. And sex too, and he took care to please me in what ways he could, and there were plenty. The truth is, I had had better sex with a castrato than I had with ninety percent of the men I picked up and delivered. More like 99.999 percent, actually.

He had almost known what I was, my Niccolo, and still he had loved me and sang for me and cosseted me. And I never did take his money, though as the leading man in the Venetian opera of the day he was very well paid. No, he thought I was a courtesan, one of the famed red-dressed women of Venice, and I was.

But it didn’t matter in the end because he was found floating in a back canal near the opera house one morning. No purse was found on his body, so people assumed that he had been killed during a robbery. Maybe. It happened often enough. But maybe it was jealousy in the opera, or something about a rich patron of his.

Which was another reason why Satan and the girls always insisted that it wasn’t enough to void my contract. Not because the count paid him and slept with him, but because Niccolo had been truly fond of the nobleman. I had never cared, and in the Venice of that time no one would have noticed. And his relationship with the count did nothing to lessen his love for me.

But the count had been political and very rich and had enemies. Any one of them could have had Niccolo killed as a threat. Or maybe the bravos had been hired by his two rivals in the opera companies—that is how such artistic differences were settled in those days.

“You look so lost in thought.” Nathan called my attention back to the here and now. “What were you thinking about?”

I forced my brightest smile. “Venice,” I said. “How it’s not really Roman, not like the rest of Italy.”

“I’ve never been to Venice,” Nathan said. “But you’re putting me in the mood for Italian food for lunch. Would you like that?”

“Mmmm,” I agreed. “Nothing like pasta on a cold day.”

So we left the museum and took the subway from Eighty-sixth Street to Bleecker and then walked the cold blocks into the West Village, which is packed with Italian bistros that all look like the set of the
Godfather
movies. We chose one at random on the corner of Macdougal, where there were at least three similar eateries, and ended up seated across a red checked tablecloth with a hunk of crusty bread and a dish of olive oil while we perused the menu.

It’s easy to make small talk ordering food. It’s easy to say how the cold makes you want soup and pasta and how you adore cannelloni and how you can’t resist mushroom ravioli. And he talked about how linguini with clams is his favorite comfort food in the world, and I got to tease him because he ordered the veal instead.

“But I don’t need comfort food,” Nathan said, laughing. “I’m with the most beautiful woman in New York and she calls the Babylonian world civilized and supports the notion of reciprocity in the ancient world. The world is so perfect right now that maybe I should have just ordered the tiramisu and called it done.”

I grinned. “Not cannoli, then? Tiramisu has gotten so clichéd. And they have those mini cannoli with chocolate chips in the cheese. I saw them in the case up front.”

“Not prefilled, I hope. Only a Hittite would prefill a cannoli,” he said, rolling his eyes with mock horror.

“Or a Greek,” I added.

We both laughed. And we did end up ordering the cannoli as soon as our meals came. The food was good, too, and we ate before we resumed the conversation.

“So how did you end up at a fashion magazine?” he asked. “After studying Italian at Mount Holyoke.”

I rolled my eyes and wiped my plate with the last bit of bread. I shrugged. “I always liked fashion and I knew someone who knew someone. She set me up with an interview and I started as a lowly editorial assistant.” Which was perfectly true, though saying that I knew Satan, who really did know just about everyone and could guarantee any job, was not precisely first-date material.

Then the cannoli came with our coffees and Nathan took the moment to savor the perfect pastries, their crisp fried shells flaking onto the plates, the cheese so smooth and sweet it was like ice cream that doesn’t melt. Nathan closed his eyes and sucked at the spoon with the abandon of any of my girlfriends. One thing I have learned is that men don’t usually swoon over desserts. They might like them and tuck right in, but they don’t play with the food and don’t lick minute portions almost a molecule at a time, trying to make a truly glorious sugar experience last as long as possible.

Nathan talked like a man and ate cannoli like a girl. He was not one of the Burning Men.

Burning Men do not believe in self-indulgence in any sense. They don’t treat a cannoli like a momentary idyll in the garden of delights. Which, of course, is exactly what a perfect cannoli is. Burning Men punish themselves for pleasure, for experiencing any kind of pleasure or any joy in the world.