Day of the False King (5 page)

But he became suddenly aware that water
scorpions and long-limbed spiders of disgusting hairiness were glaring
at him from the river’s edge. The scorpions clicked their foreclaws,
advancing toward him stealthily. The insects in Babylonia were immense,
he discovered — the largest he had ever seen. He looked around suddenly
to find that a legion of spiders and beetles, mantids and other
crawling things encircled him. He jumped to his feet with a small cry.
At his movement, the insects skittered back a few paces, only to begin
inching aggressively again in his direction as soon as he was still.

Fighting down feelings of immense disquiet,
he took himself back to the dung fires where the other merchants slept;
the insects did not follow him to where the flames flickered.
Nevertheless, he was uneasily aware of their flat, opaque eyes, staring
at him from the grasses. As the night passed, Semerket made sure to
move and flail his arms about from time to time, if only to convince
the creatures that he was still awake.

The moon was settling low over the horizon
when Marduk reappeared. He tapped Semerket on the shoulder and nodded
with his head in the direction of the gates. Semerket got to his feet
and followed him silently into Is.

Just off the main square, Marduk opened the
door onto a small tavern. Its vaulted ceiling was black with the soot
from centuries of unvented cooking fires, its ancient murals obscured
by grease. Marduk led him to the rear of the tavern, where two men
waited, their faces veiled by the black scarves that distinguished them
as Isin rebels. Semerket sat on the bench opposite them, while Marduk
took his place against a far wall.

Semerket voiced his thanks for meeting him
and signaled the tavern owner to bring some beer. Served in a large
bowl, syrupy and unfiltered, it had a scum of fermenting husks floating
on its foamy surface. The tavern-master brought them long flexible
reeds so they could suck out the clearer liquid at the bowl’s bottom.

“I’m Semerket,” he said after they drank.

“We know who you are,” said the taller man
curtly.

“May I know your own names?” Semerket asked
after a moment.

“Why? So you can tell the Elamite usurper
who we are?” asked the taller man with a sneer.

“I’m sorry. I only meant —”

The shorter man interrupted tersely. “Just
what do you want?”

“I’m looking for a woman and a young man,
both Egyptians. I heard that Isins attacked them — that the boy was
injured. I don’t know the woman’s condition. Can you tell me if you’ve
made any raids recently?”

“Not so often as the Elamites would have you
believe,” answered the taller man carefully.

“Not as many times as we’d like,” insisted
his comrade.

Semerket rapidly calculated in his head.
“This one would have happened some ten or twelve weeks ago.”

“Where?”

“To the northwest of Babylon.”

The men looked at one another. “No,” they
said simultaneously.

“How can you be sure?”

“Because the Elamites retreated there, to
protect the capital. It’s too dangerous to make raids with so many of
them around — not worth the risk.”

Semerket’s voice was suddenly harsh. “Have
you ever killed women in your raids?”

“Maybe,” said the taller man.

“Elamite
women,” the other
clarified.

“What about an Egyptian one?” Semerket asked.

“Are we supposed to sort one from another,
then, nice and tidy?” the taller man asked with a short laugh.

“Besides, we have no quarrel with Egypt —
that is, until we met you.”

Semerket blinked. “Why? What have
I
done?”

Hot words bubbled to the men’s lips. “We
hear you bring Pharaoh’s greetings to Kutir. You’ll talk of treaties —”

“And ‘friendship between nations’ —”

“Pharaoh will send him gold —”

Semerket impatiently interrupted their
litany of grudges. “The alliance between Babylon and Egypt has existed
for centuries. Only good comes from it, whoever rules.”

“Your pharaoh shouldn’t negotiate with an
invading criminal,” said the taller warrior, slamming his fist down on
the table.

“Who should he negotiate with?”

This question seemed to disconcert the two
men, and they shot uneasy glances at one another. “With the Heir of
Isin,” said the shorter one. “The real king here in Babylon.”

“All right,” replied Semerket in a
reasonable tone. “Take me to him. Show me his capital, that I can bow
before his throne. Parade his armies before me, that I can measure his
might with my own eyes.”

The men would have spoken harsh words, but
from the corner of his eye, Semerket saw Marduk slightly shake his
head. The men swallowed their unuttered sentiments with difficulty.

“There’ll come a time,” whispered the
shorter man between clenched teeth, “when you will do exactly that.”

“In the meantime,” replied Semerket, “it’s
Kutir who’s the latest strong man in Babylon. That’s your word for
king, isn’t it — ‘strong man’? But we Egyptians are a practical people.
When this Heir of Isin sits on the Gryphon Throne, I can guarantee that
Pharaoh will negotiate with him. Until that time, however…”

Realizing that this would be all the
information he could get from them, Semerket rose to his feet, and
waited at the door while Marduk spoke to the two men alone. The men
shot dark glances in his direction. Semerket could hear the reassuring
timbre of Marduk’s voice as he sought to calm them. Semerket went
outside into the street to wait for his “slave.” When Marduk emerged
into the dark a few moments later, they did not speak as they made
their way back to the riverbank.

THOUGH THEY WERE STILL a good
fifteen leagues away from Babylon, the river soon became dense with
little round ships all converging on the capital at once. When Semerket
exclaimed at their number, Marduk remarked that the Euphrates seemed
desolate to his eyes.

“Trade hasn’t recovered since the invasion,”
he told Semerket. “Merchants are still suspicious of the Elamites, and
most have stayed home in their villages this year.”

Semerket was skeptical, for hundreds of the
round leather boats encircled them, laden with their disparate cargoes.
A heap of furs lay piled in one boat, while another carried the skinned
and fly-covered corpses of recently slaughtered sheep. Some bore
sweet-smelling spices, or cut flowers, or mounds of seeds. Babylon and
its surrounding cities were home to over a million persons, and their
provisioning was a massive logistical effort.

“No wonder the Elamites covet this land,”
Semerket said, “if this is so ‘desolate’ a year for trade.”

At that moment, another of the river ships
pulled alongside their own. The craft held ten or twelve huge clay
jars, with dark stains of honey running down their sides. The honey’s
spicy tang floated to him, vaguely reminiscent of wildflowers. So
strong was the scent that it bordered on the pungent, and Semerket
imagined that he could taste the honey’s sweetness in the very air.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Marduk and the wine merchant bow
their heads and make a holy sign. Then he noted the strange priestly
robes that the boat’s pilots wore.

“Is that the costume of your beekeepers?”
asked Semerket.

“What did you say?” asked Marduk with a
short, disbelieving laugh.

“There, on that boat that just passed?”

“They’re embalmers, Semerket,” Marduk
explained. “Each of those jars contains someone who’s died — probably
on their way to be placed into their family crypts.”

Semerket had heard that honey preserved
flesh almost as well as Egypt’s natron, but had never imagined the
bizarre burial customs that accompanied the notion. A sudden chill ran
up his spine, and he shuddered. Despite his resolve never to allow
himself to imagine such things — for by thinking them he might give the
thoughts existence — he could not stop the sudden onrush of images that
blazed in the recesses of his mind…

Would he find Naia’s body, or Rami’s, in
such a jar? He could imagine how it felt to reach into the jar’s dark
ooze, how the honey’s cool stickiness would close around his fingers,
clinging to his arm as he searched for a clump of slimed hair…how he
would seize it in his fingers, pulling the body into the light…seeing
the honey running down her forehead —

Semerket cried out, wincing.

The others in the boat gazed at him with
concern, but he did not see them, too horrified by his vision. Fiercely
he commanded himself to put the images from his mind. Naia was
alive
.
If she were dead, he would have
sensed
it. He would not,
not
find her in one of those terrible jars. Pain abruptly radiated from his
forehead. His viscera churned and bile rose in the back of his throat.
Marduk held him as he vomited weakly into the Euphrates.

A touch of river fever, Marduk said
soothingly, a common affliction for foreigners visiting Babylon.
Semerket accepted a dose of stomach-cleansing elixir that the wine
merchant produced from his pack. But Semerket knew that it was not his
fever but the horrifying vision looming so suddenly before his eyes
that had caused him to retch. He prayed silently to all the Egyptian
gods, hoping that he had not glimpsed the future.

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON
the ramparts of Babylon came into sight. For hours, they had seen a
cloud of smoke growing on the horizon, so thick that it blanketed the
city from their view. At first Semerket thought the smoke was from war,
that Babylon was in ruins, and he raised a fearful finger, pointing.
But Marduk assured him that what he saw were only the emissions of a
hundred thousand hearths and altars.

“Babylon will never be destroyed,” Marduk
muttered resentfully. “She survives as she always has.”

Semerket looked at him, surprised to hear
the sudden acidity in Marduk’s usually calm voice. But Marduk did not
notice his glance, and continued speaking in the same low, sour tone.

“Babylon the withered strumpet, opening her
skirts to every swaggering invader. This time the Elamites think
they’ve conquered her. But they’ll only end up as soft and vitiated as
the Kassites. You wish to know the real reason Babylon’s walls are
intact, Semerket? She gives herself freely to anybody with an army. She
alone will prevail in the end.”

“You sound like a spurned lover,” Semerket
said.

“Do I?”

“What is it, Marduk? Are you bitter because
you have no armies of your own? Tell me what I don’t know.”

Marduk’s voice was withering. “Some moonlit
night in front of the campfire, perhaps,” he said.

The smoke and haze thinned as they drew
closer to Babylon, and Semerket discovered that the Euphrates actually
flowed through the center of the city. On the right side of the river,
as tall as a pyramid, the ziggurat called Etemenanki dominated the flat
landscape from all perspectives. Seeing Semerket’s expression of awe,
Marduk regained some of his good humor and explained that the name
Etemenanki actually meant “the cornerstone of heaven.” The tower was
not in reality a temple, he said, but an observatory dedicated to all
the sixty thousand gods in the Babylonian pantheon.

“I thought the ziggurat belonged to
Bel-Marduk,” Semerket said.

“The Lord’s temple is actually on the other
side of the river. See there — the building covered in gilded tiles?
That’s where he’s worshipped. But it’s true the Golden One sleeps every
night in a room at the very top of Etemenanki.”

Semerket craned his head to squint at the
distant level to which Marduk pointed. The highest tier, painted a
shimmering azure, seemed impossibly far away, melting without effort
into the sky above. It was no wonder that the Lord of the Universe
chose to sleep there, for it seemed the exact place where earth became
heaven.

“It’s where he couples every night with a
different virgin,” Marduk added casually.

Semerket tore his eyes away from the
ziggurat to look at Marduk in shock. In Egypt, the invisible gods were
colossal figures, many cubits tall — the reason why the Egyptians, in
fact, constructed their temples on so grand a scale.

“And the maidens survive such an ordeal?”
Semerket was incredulous.

Marduk regarded him quizzically. “Of course.
They’re considered very lucky women for a man to marry. But, then,
they’re very beautiful, too, as you can imagine; only the best are
chosen for the Golden One.”

“Has any of them…um…ever described their
night with the god?”

It was Marduk’s turn to be shocked. “Not
only would that be sacrilegious, Semerket, but tasteless as well. I’m
surprised at you. What human words could ever describe such an
experience?”

“What words, indeed?” murmured Semerket
ironically. The maidens’ collective silence was certainly a very
convenient tradition. With a start, he suddenly wondered if Bel-Marduk
would demand the comfort of virgins during his trip back to Egypt. He
certainly hoped not, for he had no wish to become a procurer, even for
a god. And if the Lord of All did indeed desire such companions, where
was he supposed to find them on the dusty roads of Mesopotamia? He
sighed, resolving to deal with the problem when it arose.

By now, river traffic surrounded them
utterly, and forward motion on the Euphrates came to a halt. Semerket
became irritated to find himself confined in an unmoving boat in
mid-river. Standing up, he gazed far ahead to see what the holdup was,
only to observe yet another wonder — a solid stone bridge that spanned
the entire breadth of the Euphrates. He gaped at the continuous stream
of vehicles and pedestrians that traversed it from one side of the
river to the other. It was quite the most amazing feat of engineering
he had ever seen, for the bridge was almost an entire furlong in
length. In its center an immense gangplank of wood spanned the two
stone piers that made up its bulk, and he saw that it was through this
relatively small gap that all the river traffic was being funneled;
hence the delay.