Watson, Ian - Novel 16 (17 page)

 
          
Some
Macedonian and Persian soldiers guarded the way aloft, but hindered no one. A
party of fine ladies in rich array were gossiping halfway up the flight, while
servants held plume-fans over their heads. A trio of magi in black robes and
conical hats descended, deep in conversation: astronomers, astrologers, Mar-
duk’s men?

 
          
Alex
mounted to the first terrace, strolled along some way, then climbed another
marble stairway to the second tier: palm trees, ferns, ivies, and fountains. He
explored one tier after another, finding himself amidst thickets of jasmine,
miniature forests of conifers, a sand garden of succulents, then oranges, bays
and avocados in massive terracotta urns. Watercourses ran everywhere, plashing
in falls from level to level, sparkling skyward in fountains. Here was an
obsidian statue of a sphinx, there of a winged bull, further on an elephant. At
the rear of each terrace columned arcades gave access to the palace proper.

 
          
To
be a gardener in
Babylon
, upon the
Hanging
Gardens
! To forget about the ‘little scroll’, and
about Thessany and Marduk and money! He had passed several gardeners at their
tasks. Here was another: a frail old man, sprinkling the flagstones of the
fifth terrace to still any dust.

 
          
‘Good
day, gardener!’

 
          
‘Good
day to you, Greek.’ The man’s shoulders were bent, his hands were slow; there
were liver spots upon the wrinkled skin.

 
          
(‘Grandad,
shouldn’t you be resting in a rocking chair on some back stoop with a rug over
your knees, instead of labouring in
Babylon
?’)

 
          
The
gardener had emigrated to
Babylon
as an old, tired man! Didn’t he care that he would die here all the
sooner? Did
Babylon
represent for him a death wish? Amidst this
riot of growth, here in these gardens which were the very antithesis of decay?
How could that be?

 
          
‘What
are you looking at, Greek?’ The gardener began to cough: a dangerous, wheezing
noise, worse than that sick man in the marketplace.

 
          
‘Are
you all right? You’re old.’

 
          
The
gardener spat, scraped sputum with his sandal, then grinned, gap-toothed.
‘Everyone dies, lad. The young king himself lies dying within, and he’s just
thirty-three. But that’s from fever . . .

 
          
‘Listen,
lad. The cells in any body replace themselves only so many times - there’s a
limit, isn’t there? A city or a kingdom is just a body writ large. What if
there’s some natural limit in the
polis
,
the state, just as there is in any animal body? The
polis
that I left,’ (and Alex took him to mean
America
) ‘it seemed to have reached a limit. Its
limits as a body . . . Think on that.’

 
          
Was
that right? Was that what the gardener had learnt here in
Babylon
? This insight so vital to the university at
Heuristics, namely that any society had an inbuilt limit to how long it could
perpetuate itself?

           
The gardener glanced around, as if
pleased at his powers of observation, half expecting applause from flowers and
the clapping of leaves; and Alex remembered his suspicion that all events were
being observed by tiny lenses, recorded by minuscule microphones. Had the
gardener’s wit and wisdom already been logged by computer, far away at
Heuristics, underground?

 
          
Or
was that bit of wisdom what the gardener had come here already determined to
learn, so as to console himself for his own imminent departure from the world?

 
          
Many
strange things were happening in this city; strange tides of consciousness were
being drawn up as if by an ancient - yet younger - moon which once shone over
the original
Babylon
.

 
          
‘Alexander’s
dying,’ mumbled the gardener, ‘but that’s just fever . . . Some of the common
soldiers rioted yesterday. They wanted to know the truth. Whether he’ll die.
They fear the future without him. The king’s shield-bearers and immortals were
hard put to pacify them. Only when they saw him did they calm down . . .’ The
old fellow was fantasizing, telling an old man’s maundering timeless tale - of
yesterday, or of his youth, or of two thousand and more years ago.

 
          
Far
away down the leaf-clad terraces beyond parapet after parapet, Alex thought he
spied Deborah walking - with Shazar, the priest of Sin! He gripped the ivied
balustrade. Really, the figures were too far away to be sure; now a banyan tree
eclipsed them.

 
          
Still,
he was about to depart in haste, to zigzag down pell-mell from tier to tier to
try to intercept the walkers if he could - or to trail them, he wasn’t sure which
- when the gardener said, ‘Why don’t you visit him, then?’

           
‘Visit whom?’

           
‘Alexander, of course.’

           
‘But. . . he’s the king! You don’t
just visit a king.’ ‘You’d be surprised. I know a thing or two, working up
here. Didn’t I just tell you a delegation of troops visited him yesterday?’

           
‘But . . .’ (‘But he doesn’t really
exist!’) ‘But he’s dying,’ said Alex, mindful of any microphones.

           
The gardener chuckled. ‘He’s been
dying for long enough. Must get boring. He might appreciate a visit from a
compatriot. Anyway, you Greeks are supposed to be such a democratic lot. Well,
that was once upon a time . . . Now you have to grovel and prostrate yourself
and make obeisances.’

 
          
‘Do
you mean I can really visit Alexander?’

           
‘S’pose so. You can always ask. Me,
I’m only one of his gardeners.’

           
This was incredible. Alexander the
Great lay dying somewhere in this very building, maybe only a hundred paces
distant . . . Alex knew this. Of course he knew it. Yet he had never imagined
that Alexander was really here.

 
          
Did
King Alexander actually exist? Or was the old man merely indulging in a joke, a
piece of addled geriatric humour in which he too half believed?

 
          
Of
a sudden Alex’s own problems receded far off. Deborah and Shazar fled to a far
corner of his mind, became distant dolls. Thessany and Kamberchanian’s bill
diminished.

 
          
‘If
you don’t believe me, lad, go down to the terrace below. Ask a guard.’

           
‘I will.’

 
          
*
* *

 
 
          
Yes.
Yes. And yes.

           
Alex was searched for hidden weapons
- though he had surrendered his dagger voluntarily. He was clad in borrowed
cloth of gold in case his tunic itself was poisonous, or lest it offend
Alexander’s fevered eyes. An unaccountably merry chamberlain instructed Alex
how to kiss the tips of his fingers, and to bow, then to follow through by
falling upon his knees, on which he must shuffle forward.

 
          
‘His
Majesty’s in a wry old mood today,’ confided the chamberlain, as Alex rehearsed
how to grovel for the sixth time. ‘Sometimes he feels better. He gets up.
Dresses in a lion skin and brandishes a club like Herakles. Or else he’s Hermes
- winged sandals, caduceus, big-brimmed hat. Or Ammon - slippers and purple
cloak and horns on his head. Sometimes he wears a flowered frock; and then he’s
the goddess Artemis. But not today.’

 
          
Flanked
by two guards - one an immortal in glorious embroidery, his spear butt shaped
like a pomegranate; the other a bowman in red and blue - the chamberlain led
Alex deep into the palace, to left, to right, confusingly, towards the
presence. Rich vases, polished ivory, and carved jade stood everywhere,
lootings of India and beyond. The floors were sprinkled with scent and sweet
wine. Myrrh and incense burned.

 
          
Arriving
before double doors of carved teak, the chamberlain stamped his staff. The
doors opened upon a spacious room, the ceiling supported by various imitation
palm trunks made of mud brick. Filmy muslin curtains rippled across the windows
as a light breeze blew in, but the air here too was sweet with scent, spilt
wine and frankincense - so sweet that the aroma seemed more like that of
sickness.

 
          
The
bed where the king lay was great and golden, with claw-and-ball feet and a
canopy overhead. A purple cloak lay crumpled on a silver sofa, with gold torque
and armbands and scarlet ribbons perched upon the heap.

 
          
Alex
prostrated himself on the Persian carpet - where some woven monarch was
dropping a dead fish into a tree-shaded pool — and crawled across the wool-
knotted water.

 
          
‘Stand
up,’ a voice said wearily.

 
          
Alex
beheld Alexander, plumped up on soft pillows, wearing a silken gown embroidered
with dragons, jewelled rings on all his fingers.

 
          
The
king didn’t
look
fatally ill. But
then, hadn’t he been sick of this same fever for the past five yars? He didn’t
look thirty-three - more like forty-three - nor a dashing, muscular conqueror,
either. But then, he was only an avatar of Alexander. He was stout and jowly
with long ringleted hair and sad dark eyes, glinting nevertheless with a sharp
intelligence; an intelligence imprisoned in pillows and sickness. Did he have
rouge on his cheeks - and on his lips too? His chin was flabby and beardless.

 
          
Majolica
bowls of ripe fruit and candies and flasks of wine surrounded the bed; sticks
of incense fumed lazily. Alex was reminded of Nero, of Aubrey Beardsley’s
drawings, of some Borgia pope - phantasms from the future. Alexander, it
seemed, had succumbed to Persian luxury. Scrolls lay on his bed: maps of
empire? No, graphs, doodles, charts of cryptic symbols. Alchemical diagrams,
astrological horoscopes. Perhaps. Or exercises in heuristic futurology.

 
          
Alex
wondered whether the king was drugged, like a seer or sibyl.

 
          
He
wondered whether the king would eventually be killed by his own guards - or
given an overdose by his physician - and replaced with someone younger, also to
be kept abed in a semi-drugged state. Allowed to rouse occasionally and caper
through the corridors dressed up as Artemis or Herakles. For a moment the
frightening, presumptuous thought crossed Alex’s mind: what if he, Alex, was
somehow to be the next Alexander?

 
          
If
this king’s body seemed half paralysed and comatose, what of his brain?

 
          
The
king stared at Alex. His rouged lips moved: ‘Few enough come to visit the
maggot in the apple . .. Wine!’

 
          
A
serving woman bowed, poured, sipped from the jewelled goblet, waited a while;
then since she wasn’t writhing on the floor in agony she held the vessel to
Alexander’s lips, tipping it up for him. Gulping, he drained the goblet, though
dribbles ran down his chin, to be mopped up by the woman with a napkin.

 
          
‘Ambassadors,
petitioners, magi with their cures . . . What’s yours, Greek? What’s your cure
for the world?’

 
          
‘Babylon,’
said Alex. ‘Babylon is the cure.’ He believed this. Even more so,
paradoxically, now that he had actually set eyes on the king.

 
          
As
though the wine - or whatever drugs were in it - had inflamed the sinews of his
vision, the muscles of his mind, King Alexander spoke again in a singsong
voice:

 
          
‘We
have heard tales of the morning of the earth - and of its golden afternoon,
which we presume must be the twentieth century following upon some unborn
Messiah, or the thirtieth or the fortieth or the hundredth. And we have heard
tales of the long, long evening of decay. Perhaps with assorted rises and falls
in between: new barbarisms, trips to the stars, who knows?