Twilight in Babylon (13 page)

“Today?”

He nodded.

“Now?”

He nodded again.

Chloe patted her hair, braided and hanging over her shoulders like rope. “Sure. Why not?” Why was she nervous?
Because if I knew the future, I’d be even more scared?
The sore on her head throbbed, as though the weight of her thoughts irritated it.

“Are you well?” Nimrod asked. “Um, both of you?”

Chloe nodded. “Lead on.”

They left the wide streets by the commonwealth offices and joined the crush that passed through the narrow lanes leading to the waterfront. Chloe had a sense of great familiarity, though she’d never left the marsh.

Artisans and craftsmen did their work by open windows; butchers skinned and sliced while blood ran in the streets; storytellers, dancers, and acrobats performed for small groups, passing a basket hat for their day’s beer; women and men hawked their wares of herbs and elixirs, fruits and vegetables; the air was dense with the honks of asses, the squawks of geese, and the smell of sheep dung.

The smells of urine, cardamom, and sweat swirled like fabric around them. The press of bodies was tight. Tents sheltered sleeping infants or working children. Women fed their babies, youths relieved themselves, and, everywhere, people talked.

Chloe understood every word used on the street. This struck her as odd; an experience she’d never had. She averted her eyes from those unfortunates who waited in the shade of the walls, legless, eyeless, tongueless, handless, hoping for the mercy of strangers.

Nimrod’s hand on her back was firm, assuring. Though he wasn’t tall, he projected a great sense of charisma, and humans naturally made way for him. They reached out to touch Chloe’s hair, her skin. They murmured it had been a long time since a Khamite woman had passed their way.

She knew everything they were saying. All the calls, the cries, the conversations. Nothing was cloaked in mystery. Chloe was dizzy again.

“Here,” Nimrod said, pushing her toward a dark alley. “The diviner’s house.”

The houses were ramshackle, stacked on top of each other like collapsing cereal boxes.
What were those?
Children and goats wandered the streets. Trash was piled in the streets, for these people had no courtyard to compost it. Flies and dogs fought for the rotting remains. Underneath the stench of garbage, Chloe smelled the tang of salt. The port.

“The sign for diviner,” Nimrod said, pointing to a scratched emblem on the mudbrick wall. “Ninhursag, the goddess of the earth. Her crone is here.”

Chloe felt the hair on her neck stiffen. She halted.

“Go in,” Nimrod said. “Since I’m a male human, I’m not welcome.”

“I just… go in? No appointment, no gift?”

“Give her some of those round things. She trades in food.”

Chloe was extremely reluctant. “I’m out.”

“She won’t hurt you, though she is enormous. I’m going to the wharf, I’ll be back to walk you home.” He smiled, a stretch of white in the mass of his black beard. “Are you fearful? The gods just pass judgments, but that doesn’t mean they have baked the future in clay. You have nothing to fear.”

“My future is negotiable?”

Nimrod smiled. “This is Ur; everything is negotiable.”

She nodded. Opened the door. Stepped inside.

“Ah, Chloe,” a chilling voice said. “We meet again.”

Chloe peered through the darkness in the room; it was almost tar, compared to the sunlight outside. “Have we met?”

The voice laughed, not kindly. “Still adjusting, I gather?”

“To? Adjusting to what?”

The creature, Chloe could see it—her—now, was seated against one wall of the room. She took up the entire space, shaped like an ancient statue of the earth goddess, all pendulous breasts and hips, with gaudy bright lips and black-circled eyes.

Those eyes looked through her.

“Ohmigod,” Chloe said. It all rushed back.

The first time Chloe had seen this woman, she’d been a child in Cairo with her sister. The woman had given Chloe a necklace that had been her destiny. The second time had been in ancient Atlantis. She’d given Chloe a ring. And a third time in a marketplace in Jerusalem. “You,” Chloe said.

All the pieces fit together in that instant. Chloe had time-traveled and taken over the body of a marsh girl. How and why, she didn’t know. But this woman knew everything, Chloe was certain. “Cheftu?” she asked.

“Greetings to you too, Chloe. You’re yet such an American, rushing, always in a hurry. Can’t even be courteous and inquire about my health. Mimi would be horrified, she taught you better.”

Chloe locked her knees; she was afraid she was going to fall over. The woman spoke
English.
“How am I here? Why?”

“I have a message for you,” the woman said. “As I seem to be your personal oracle—”

“The Crone of Ninhursag!” The marsh girl had met this woman also. Two destinies.
She always knew I would come?
Chloe touched her head, the wound that hadn’t healed, even now.

“It’s gratifying that you have some useful memory. Do you want your message or not?”

Chloe nodded.

“You may not feel that way after I tell you, but that’s none of my affair. Here it is: You will not find him. You are not ready.”

Cheftu? It must be. “How do I get ready?” she asked.

The crone closed her eyes. “You have your message. Leave me now.”

“No, one question, please, please—”

She opened one eye. “What?”

“How am I here? Why?”

“The mercy of God,” the crone said. Then she began snoring, and her eyes rolled up like window shades.

Mercy?

Chloe stumbled out of the incense-choking room and into the street.

Nimrod touched Chloe’s arm, and she almost jumped out of her skin.
I have jumped out of my skin,
she thought.
Into whose
? “A mirror, I need a mirror. Please.”

Nimrod searched her face. “Of course, anything I can do to help. But Chloe, only the
ensi
has a mirror.”

“Water, then. So I can see my reflection.”

They walked with indecorous speed to the city gate, then farther out to the edges of the irrigation channels. Barley climbed into the air, and watchers kept an eye on the ears, wary of rust—
samana.
The first sign would send the city into a panic of prevention.

Chloe didn’t care about any of it. She had to see what she looked like.

“This is as clear as you will find,” Nimrod said, stopping a few feet in front of her at the edge of an irrigation ditch. “Come look.”

Kingsleys don’t quit,
Chloe said to herself.
That statement has gotten me into a shitload of trouble these past couple of years. Oh God
—Nimrod’s hand on her arm steadied her, and Chloe knelt, braced her hands against the moist, warm levee, and opened her eyes.

She stared at the face that looked back her. Minutes ticked by as she watched it. When she spoke, her voice was soft and slow. “My Mimi warned me of this one night when she’d dipped too many times into the fruitcake after Christmas. She said my family had been plantation owners for quite a while. Blood had gotten a little confused, what with sassy young slaves and rascally old slave owners. She said that blood was somewhere in my veins, and I wouldn’t know when it was going to show up.

“She had
no
idea.”

Nimrod looked into the river with her, and Chloe looked at his face, really looked at it, with her twentieth-century eyes. He seemed to be East Indian, with silky black hair and liquid eyes, delicate features that were well proportioned. And she, she…

“I’m black. Dark, anyway. Cheftu is never going to find me. Even if he came here, he’d never recognize me. This is too much of a change.”

“You’re not dark. One of your parents was dark-skinned, but the other was fair,” Nimrod said. “Look at your hair.”

She looked at it, dark, thick, heavy, but not kinky curled. She leaned into the water, looked closely at her eyes. Green, startlingly so in such dark skin. But Nimrod was right, she wasn’t black. A mulatto, with skin no darker than mocha, and features that… well, were hers. What had the marsh girl’s face looked like? There seemed to be nothing new in Chloe’s features, no trace of the other girl at all.

Chloe was still tall, still slim, and still had big feet. She sat down on her haunches and looked across the stream at the flat line of the sky. Or the land. It didn’t matter, they were both flat. One was green and brown, the other blue. Both with the topography of a pancake.

Nimrod sat next to her. “You’re the other one now, aren’t you?”

She nodded. “I’m Chloe.”

“She was Chloe, too.”

She looked at him. “Yes, I guess she was.”

He looked into her eyes. “You look changed, more scared. And your eyes are a different color.”

“A different color?” Her eyes had always been green—regardless of circumstances.

He moved his head, looking at her with detached observation. “Usually one is green and one is brown, but at this moment, both are green.”

“I’ve had mismatched eyes?” Chloe asked. What did it mean? What—

“Very pretty actually. Striking,” Nimrod said. “But now they are both green. And… But what is wrong? Didn’t you know what you looked like?”

Not really.
Chloe rubbed her eyes and face, while she tried to get a grasp of her situation.
I’m mulatto, my eyes are changeable—how did it happen?

Every time I’ve traveled through time, it’s been because I initiated it. It happened on the twenty-third of December. I was pulled through an archway. There was blue light, rushing wind. I had to do it. Every single time. Now, I go to bed as a red-haired, fair-skinned woman in Jerusalem and wake up where I don’t know, as someone I don’t know, and when I don’t know? What’s with that? I thought I knew the rules. Why did they change? Why am I here? How did I get here?

Cheftu… was he snatched out of our bed too, or is he in Jerusalem yet, wondering what the hell happened to me? And what did that woman say, I wouldn’t find him because I wasn’t ready?
Chloe touched the wound on her head; how did it fit in with anything? Smoke. For just a second she thought she smelled smoke.
What happened to my life?

“Chloe, are you well?”

“I, I just didn’t think God was capricious. Why else would I be here?”

“Of course the gods are capricious! The rains come or they don’t; there is too much water or not enough. The rivers rise, they fall, they do whatever they want. No amount of sacrifices or pleading makes any difference. We build temples and offer bribes but… we are their playthings. Their slaves. The gods are nothing
but
capricious. That’s why you have personal gods and demons. They intercede for you.”

She looked up at the cloudless blue sky. “Are you saying there is no reason for things?”

“Of course there is a reason,” he said. “That is why you have diviners and search for omens and read the stars and the sheep’s liver and interpret the birth of spotted lambs. There’s a reason, we just don’t know it.”

“I hate that attitude.”

“Hate it, love it. It’s truth.”

“Wherever this is, this is definitely the Middle East,” she muttered. “I’d know that kind of fatalism anywhere.” She put a hand on Nimrod’s silky arm. “Who is the king?”

But the word didn’t come out in… whatever language this was. Which means there is no such term in this language, that much I’ve learned in these years. “Draw me a picture of the land, would you?”

Nimrod shrugged, then drew it: rivers, south sea, mountains, and desert.

“Do you know what the edge of the water looks like over here?” she said, pointing to the land to the west.

“It’s the desert, there is no water’s edge besides that one. And it is like this, approximately.”

She saw curves, straight lines, nothing recognizable. “What about the other side of the sea, the other bank? How wide is it there?”

“A great, long distance. Wider than the whole of Shinar.”

A huge, wide sea. Indians someplace close. No mountains, no hills, nothing but flat, flat alluvial plain with two rivers twisting through. Two rivers and a plain. The cradle of civilization.

“Ohmigod. The Tigris and Euphrates.”

“Yes, yes. The rivers.”

She stared at the map. “Babylonia. Ziggurats.” She spoke in English, whispering what she hoped were notes of sanity to herself. “They’re not stepped pyramids, they’re temples built high so they don’t get flooded. I’ve time-traveled to… Iraq. When? Why? It’s not the right time of year… I didn’t choose this… I—”

“Are you well, Chloe?” he asked.

“No, I’m not.”

“Can I do anything?”

“Turn back time?” she said with a grimace. “Not really, Nimrod.” She sighed. “I’ll be fine, I have to be. Thank you. Please, please swear to me that you will never tell anyone of this conversation?”

Nimrod looked at her with cocker-spaniel eyes, long-lashed and trustworthy. “If it is that important to you, I swear I will never tell, no matter what the bribe. I will go to my grave with your secret. Both of you?” he asked with a smile.

Chloe looked away. “Thank you.” Neither of them spoke, the sounds of the birds and the flowing water filled in the space.

“I need to get back to the city,” he said at last. “You shouldn’t stay out here alone. You could get lost at twilight.”

I’m lost in history,
she thought.
Alone. What’s twilight matter?
“I’ll be behind you directly. I just need… a little time to think.”

He stared at her a few more minutes, but Chloe couldn’t… couldn’t do anything except hold on to the reins of her racing mind and hope.

“Be safe,” he said, and left.

She stared at the water, at the face that was and wasn’t hers, the eyes that were green now, but apparently changed frequently. “Just when you think you know the rules, they change.”

*      *     *

Rudi looked at the sketch she’d made of the night sky, then consulted her charts.

The new star was firmly in the quadrant of Ur. The records were scarce, for observing the stars began only after the Deluge. The language of that time had been sparse, but she could understand that it was, indeed, a new star.