Twilight in Babylon (44 page)

“You are Khamite?” he asked, finally.

“Part,” she said.

“The other part?”

“Marsh dweller.”

He nodded. His head was shaved, so Chloe didn’t know if he was black-haired, brown, or fair. His skin was evenly tan, his eyebrows medium dark, and his eyes curiously flat, emotionally guarded and garden-variety brown.

Cheftu opened the door, and Asshur greeted him. With relief, Chloe noticed. They spoke about the weather, exchanged news of the towns, and then refreshments arrived. Chloe hadn’t asked for any, but maybe the
lugal
had. It was sweet and minty tea, minus the leaves—the only connection to the modern Middle East Chloe had known.

“You may speak before her,” Cheftu finally said. “What is on your mind?”

“You are a son of Jepheti?” Asshur asked.

“Great-grandson,” Cheftu said. “Jepheti lives still. He moved across the green sea to the islands there.”

“Your people, do they age?”

Cheftu raised a brow in question.

Asshur leaned forward. “Did Jepheti ever mention standards? Carved? Set into the earth?”

We aren’t discussing behavior,
Chloe guessed.
Standards, as in notices? Like the ones standing outside Ningal’s court?

Cheftu shook his head, in thought. “No. But Jepheti was conscious of what he ate, and no one was allowed to drink his water.”

“You have his water!” Asshur almost came out of his seat.

Cheftu’s sleepy-cat gaze narrowed. “His water was finished before I was a man.” He leaned forward. “Why do you ask me these things?”

Again, Asshur looked at Chloe. “I will not speak of sacred matters before one who is cursed and ignorant.”

“She is half-Jepheti,” Cheftu said. “And only half-Khamite.”

Chloe bit her lip to keep from reminding them she was still in the room.

Asshur rose. “I cannot.” He looked at her. “It is no disrespect to you, ma’am, but only honoring the wishes of my male human forefathers. Kham was cursed. Banished. He had no part of the continuing line.”

Chloe glanced up at Cheftu; he wanted her to go. He wanted to know what Asshur was talking about, and her leaving was the only way he was going to get it. In this way, they were a team.

“Well,” she said, “I will go visit the gates of the underworld, then.”

*      *     *

The sledges were lined up in front of the royal residence like taxis. Chloe climbed in and told the driver where she was supposed to go. Uruk was a beautiful, colorful city, more subdued than Ur and Larsa, but maybe that was because, on the whole, the population was older. Not many children ran in the streets, and Chloe saw a lot of sledges—exactly like taxis—taking people back and forth between the municipal buildings and temples.

“What are those?” she asked the driver. Before each of the doorways were huge stones, planted in the ground, and intricately inscribed.

“Judgment standards,” he said. “That’s the judicial complex. Each judge commemorates his best decisions by writing them on stone. That way, you know what to expect. Some are harder on civil cases than criminal, some specialize in contract law, or land negotiations. You save time and costs if you know to whom to appeal.”

She wanted to ask if they had plea bargaining, but couldn’t translate the concept. The sledge stopped beside a public park. “The gate to the underworld is right down those steps,” he said, pointing to a hole in the ground. “Did you bring an offering?”

Chloe was stuck; she hadn’t.

“If not, these are the finest watchers,” he said, pulling back a blanket on the seat beside him to reveal crude figures with enormous eyes. It was hard to tell which was male and which was female. Chloe exchanged a few beads from her belt for a purportedly female “watcher” and dismounted.

At least it wasn’t Rolexes,
she thought. Though in Saudi Arabia, it was usually Cartier knockoffs that the taxi drivers sold.

No one else seemed to be around. There weren’t guards or priests, nothing and no one.
I just go in, I guess,
she thought, and took the steps downward.

*      *     *

“Tell me of this water of your forefathers,” Asshur said. The look in his eyes was lustful, more so than when he’d looked at Chloe the night before. Cheftu sensed all the travelers from Ur had been manipulated, but to what purpose? “Where did he get it? When did he begin to drink it? What age was he when he fathered his first child? When did—”

Cheftu held up his hand. “I don’t know the answers,” he said. “I am sorry, but I cannot help you.” It was true; Kidu’s memories were hazy at best. Not thought processes so much as emotions and reactions. Hence Cheftu’s inability to control them very well. Though he had dodged a number of green-eyed women. “What do you seek?” he asked Asshur.

“My years are counted in centuries,” Asshur said.

Centuries, plural?

“I do not deceive you. I was the last child born Before the Deluge.”

Cheftu blinked, the Deluge that was now accorded the status of legend?

“Lives were long for humans and their kin. Men matured slowly, having fewer children much later, learning gradually, but more, for they had many years to do so. The First Father was 930 when he died, and he didn’t have his first son before 130 years.”

The numbers were familiar to Cheftu the scholar; the story was familiar to Kidu the mountain man.

“Where do you think the knowledge of the Black-Haired Ones springs from? No one family could learn about animals, land, metals, medicine, and writing in a single generation—unless such a generation were hundreds of years old. Ziusudra’s children were, are, that generation. You said my uncle Jepheti is well-aged, yet still he travels.”

Cheftu had told Chloe Ziusudra wasn’t Noah, but he was beginning to doubt himself. If only the names of Noah’s children, three sons, would come to Cheftu’s mind. “What do you want? What do you seek?”

“Holy water,” Asshur said, standing slowly. “Water that confirms life, sustains it.”

The fountain of youth.
The phrase flew through Cheftu’s mind, but it wasn’t attached to anything else. “How do you know what it is?”

“I’ve seen it, I’ve heard about it. It’s a very special water,” he said. “It has these properties…”

*      *     *

The caverns were damp, deep, deep beneath the earth. In a land that was hugely oil deposits and mosquito breeding grounds, Chloe was astounded to find this space. No wonder the old mothers had thought it was the gate to the underworld. “It’s certainly clammy enough,” she muttered to herself.

The walls were illustrated with sloppy depictions of pregnant women and wild, horned animals. “Oh my gosh,” Chloe breathed in astounded English. “These are cavemen paintings!” She’d been to caves in Spain and France where the hunters and gatherers of previous millennia had written their stories in pictures on the walls of the places they lived. Iraq had had cave dwellers? She touched the drawings, almost to check if they were dry; the colors were still so vivid, the illustrations kinetic. Were they old, even now?

After all, she was barely IN historical time the best she could figure. If Cheftu didn’t recognize anything, then either little green men were responsible for civilization, or there was another explanation.

These days, Chloe didn’t bet on either option being the answer.

She walked on.

Torches had blackened the walls and ceilings throughout the cave, and she wondered for a moment how long ago that had been, when man first figured out fire. “Not that I want to find out firsthand or anything,” she said out loud, just in case Someone was listening.

On the floor in the next room, she found the watchers. Hundreds, maybe thousands of the big-eyed statues and plaques, paintings and dolls, faced forward, staring through an archway.

“Ohmigod,” Chloe muttered as she picked her way through the field of votives. “This is it, Cheftu, the gateway out.”

She walked up to the archway—a natural one, misshapen, and plain, and looked around. Of course, there wouldn’t be a blue light or anything—it was the wrong time of the year. But… “There are no symbols,” she said to herself. As she looked into the room beyond it, she heard the trickle of a stream, water hitting a pool. Faint, but distinct.

She was thirsty. Cool, fresh water would taste great after the months of warm, marshy Euphrates water.
That’s why they made beer here,
she reasoned.
Anything to disguise the flavor of the water.

The stream ran down the wall from some higher, hidden source, then fell into a small pool. Enough to splash her face and fill her stomach. “That’s weird,” she said, as she watched it flow. “Maybe it’s not water?”

*      *     *

Cheftu had heard the
lugal
out, but he still doubted the man’s veracity. But what motivation could there be for such a patently false story? He dropped his gaze.

“You doubt me?”

“You tell me that somewhere there is a stream where the water is too cold to drink, it foams as it falls, and it can’t be taken away in containers or skins, but must be consumed at the source.”

“We think there is some connection between the snows of the mountains and the water,” Asshur said. “It’s sacred water, and the sources for it are dried up. Were there any ponds or pools, maybe grottos beneath the earth, that you remember in the mountains?”

“Jepheti would go on long walks, sometimes for days, up in the snow,” Cheftu said, using Kidu’s patchy memory. “That is all I know. Why is it so important?”

Asshur looked at Cheftu, and for the first time Cheftu believed him, or at least believed Asshur believed what he said. “Our people are aging too quickly, multiplying too fast. We’re running out of water, of grain, of occupations. We had to create a police force to keep the poor from killing each other over a cup of water.”

“You think if everyone had this water, it would make things better?”

“Most assuredly. Four children for a household, in the course of sixty years, instead of the reverse. But the water must be consumed from birth, for it slows the process from the start, not somewhere in the middle. Time is running out.”

“What happens if you don’t find it?”

Asshur clasped his hands tightly. “We’ll devour each other like rats. We’ll forsake our humanity. For all our learning and heritage, we are but animals.”

Cheftu looked away from the intensity of the man as he pondered Asshur’s words. “What about the standards you mentioned?”

*      *     *

The water smelled fine to Chloe, but she couldn’t see any reason it should be so foamy. It wasn’t falling a great distance, and it wasn’t churned in any way. “Did someone put soap in it?” she wondered. A finger test proved it was bitter, freezing cold; the deep chill that feels hot at first, then frigid. “I’d have a headache in a second from drinking that.” The kind of head pain you get from slushy margaritas or biting ice cream. It looked like that souped-up water you poured on cuts to keep from infection. What was that called?

Having paid her respects, left her watcher, seen no one and realized the archway was not hers and Cheftu’s pathway out, Chloe started back to the entrance. She tried to, anyway, but the cavern chambers were circuitous, the rooms all looked the same. When she’d stumbled into the watchers’ area for the third time, she felt a twinge of panic.

Follow the art.

Gazelles on one wall led to a pregnant woman portrait in the next room. From there, she went up a slight flight of stairs to another room with a family on the wall. Three women and one man, four children and an old person—at least to guess from the markings. By that measure, though, what would future generations make of Picasso? “There’s a reason he wasn’t painting on the walls,” she said.

A three-pronged fork in the hallway. Torches still burned; she wasn’t scared, this was a peaceful, comfortable place. But odd. “Alice and her rabbit holes,” Chloe muttered. Talking to herself was kooky, but the sound of her voice in this space made it a little less… intense.

She took the center hall, which went straight. “This isn’t the way,” she thought as she passed by several smaller rooms. The hallways opened into a conference-sized room. Off to the side she saw a tiny space with two standing stones.

Actually, one was brick and one was stone. They were carved, just like the judgment stones in the complex of the city. The brick one looked like it had spent some time underwater—the writing was faded, and it was considerably shorter than the stony one.

They must be very old, she thought. The pictograms were recognizable as pictures, instead of the series of markings she was learning at the Tablet House. She took a step closer, then felt a chill.

Was someone watching her? She turned quickly, but didn’t see anyone. Still the eerie feeling stayed, grew.
I want out of here,
Chloe thought, as she retraced her way to the fork in the hall. She took the right-hand branch, up and up and up… and blinked in the waiting sunshine.

The creepy feeling still hadn’t gone away, so she race-walked back to the palace. When she finally stepped into the building she was sweaty and breathing heavily… and feeling quite ridiculous.

It seemed like she had been down there for years, yet it was only minutes.

And it wasn’t the gate to Kur.

*      *     *

“What did he say?” she asked Cheftu later that night when they were falling asleep, the breeze from the river blowing across them. “Why did he need such privacy?”

“He’s an old man, following fairy stories,” Cheftu said. “He’s afraid to acknowledge that death comes for him.”

“Why would he talk to you about aging? I mean, by any account you are young.”

Cheftu sighed, and his fingers played in her hair. “Because my, Kidu’s
grand-père,
lived for hundreds of years. Asshur thinks there is a fountain of youth, a magical elixir that will slow the maturation process and help people live longer, have children later. It’s all about too many people.”

“I have a two-word solution: birth control.”

Cheftu shrugged. “He knows this thing. But making his people do it when they are young, it—”

“So his talk was boring, and his being rude to me served no purpose?”