Watson, Ian - Novel 16 (4 page)

 
          
Alex
wasn’t entirely sure. He hoped to find out. ‘Come on!’

           
Deborah was the first to pass
through the Ishtar Gate. Alex followed close behind.

 
          
He
felt, oddly, as though he was entering his own head; and that once in, he might
never find his way out again. But then, he doubted he would ever want to leave.

 
          
The
Processional Way, also known as Victory Street, stretched straight as an arrow
into the distance. Its centre was paved with white limestone flags and the
edges with slabs of milky-veined red breccia. On both sides the street was
hemmed by high, blue-glazed walls. Snarling lions in red, white and yellow
tiles marched along both walls out from the heart of the city.

 
          
The
wall of lions on the right cut off any view of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace and the
Rainbow Gardens. But that was no big disappointment. Before he could tackle the
greater wonders Alex felt that he needed to come to terms with the common
streets, the populace. No survivalist should be without immediate food and
lodgings. First establish your base. Explore outwards in concentric circles.
Gawping could come later. Unobtrusively he patted the pouch of shekels under
his tunic.

 
          
So
when they reached the end of the lion walls, where Victory Street crossed the
Libil-hegalla canal, he glanced only briefly back at the south face of Neb’s
palace, which was now exposed to view. He merely registered the colonnaded
tiers clad in so many trees and flowering shrubs. Like a camera he snapped the
scene, but didn’t develop it. As yet he had no real context for that palace. No
experiential framework, as they say.

 
          
The
rest of the party stopped on the bridge and stared. But not Deborah. She
understood.

 
          
One
thing which did catch Alex’s eye and numb him for a while, however, was the
sight of the Tower of Babel half a mile to the south-west. The sprawling base
wasn’t visible, but most of the upper circuits were. Babel looked enormous, far
bigger than he had imagined. The air seemed to shimmer and ripple around the
tower as though the whole of the district containing it - indeed, the very
fabric of the city - was somehow warped and distorted to accommodate such bulk.
To Alex’s eye the tower looked less a Babylonian ziggurat than the building as
painted by Brueghel.

 
          
Once
across the bridge, Alex and Deborah plunged down one of the side streets. The
street soon branched, putting out side shoots rigidly to right and left like an
espaliered peach tree. Their progress was no plunge now, but a sidle through
increasing numbers of Babylonians going about their business. The main
triumphal thoroughfare had been fairly deserted. After all, it led only to the
exit. No doubt on feast days people processed there, but otherwise their feet -
mostly bare feet - left the broad, well-paved avenue alone.

 
          
These
narrow side streets, the veins of the city, were surfaced not with flagstones
but with compacted rubbish - just as if strips had been cut from a bulldozed
refuse dump and laid between the blank house walls. Strips which were
excessively, generously thick. The road level - a gastronomic rather than a
geological stratum composed of dried apple cores, cabbage stalks, gnawed ribs
of pork, fish bones, date stones, pot fragments, rags, bits of old rush
matting - rode knee- to waist-high above the doors of houses. Side-steps were
hewn to give access to the homes; and Alex wondered whether his notion that
these streets consisted of strips cut from a refuse dump and laid like pastry
lattice on the cheesecake of the city was quite so absurd. So much solidified
rubbish couldn’t have accumulated and risen tide-high in only five years. More
like fifty years. And while on the subject of tides, what a mess there would be
if the Euphrates ever broke its banks and flooded the city! Water would pour
down these steps cut from ancient dreck, into every doorway.

 
          
Babylon,
it seemed, had been rebuilt as a
used
city, a second-hand city, even though its civic structures gleamed.

 
          
The
dominant odour of these streets was a kind of vegetarian halitosis: armpit of
Brussels sprouts, with a soupQon of donkey dung and urine. This might be perfectly
comforting and friendly, were you a rabbit. The meaty and fishy elements must
be scavenged nightly by stray cats and dogs - by rats too? - or bare feet would
tread upon a lawn of maggots.

 
          
Had
rats been introduced? Had they gravitated mysteriously across the intervening
desert sands, scenting the Hamelin of new pickings without fear of poison bait?

 
          
The
nostrils of Babylon’s passing citizenry did not, by and large, twitch to the
aroma of their native paths busily and appreciatively like bunnies’. If the
flesh of the streets exhaled a compost-heap body odour, a fair number of
passers-by - those who were modestly prosperous enough - deployed a whole
battery of counter-smells, an olfactory palette of aromatic gums, fragrant
oils, musk, sandalwood, patchouli.

 
          
Many
men wore only a kilt, striding along stripped to the waist. (A few owned no
more than a breech- clout.) Others sported cloaks fastened at the shoulder with
a duffel peg; one or two, who walked arrogantly, boasted embroidered robes.
Some men were cleanshaven but many wore beards, often stylishly waved. Wavy
hair fell loosely over some men’s shoulders, though turbans were also popular,
and one saw the occasional fez. Richly robed fellows swung walking sticks
jauntily.

 
          
Women
were in smocks or loose, ankle-length shawls. Their hairstyles varied: plaited
and coiled like a turban, or done up in a bun. Some buns were huge, and netted
in a snood. Some faces were lavishly painted. Kids raced along the street
almost naked, boys and girls alike; but then they still were alike, except
beneath the
cache-sexe
of their
abbreviated loincloths.

 
          
‘We’ll
have to visit a perfume vendor, too,’ said Alex. ‘Before long, eh? Shall we?’

 
          
Deborah
wrinkled her nose, for a moment just like a rabbit. ‘Greeks don’t wear perfume,’
she said. ‘It’s effete.’

 
          
He
was sure she was teasing. ‘I bet they do here, Deb. I just bet they do.’

 
          
Hitherto
all the whitewashed house fagades had been blankly private save for the single
vaulted archway which gave access sunkenly into shadows; and then only on the
side of the street which faced the cooler north. Yet the walls, which continued
on from one building to the next, weren’t featureless. They were built in a
saw-tooth style, in and out, in and out, so that the sunshine - where it reached
into the street - cast bands of brightness and shadow. The walls on the sunny
side were a chiaroscuro of slats like a long louvred window set on its side, as
though a sudden jerk on a rope running the length of the houses might have
swung all the bands of clay bricks at once, rendering the interiors breezy and
visible.

 
          
Realistically,
of course, in that unlikely event the houses would just have tumbled down - as
indeed their highest elevations seemed already to be doing bit by bit,
resulting in frayed, crumbling crenellated battlements up top.

 
          
One
house was scaffolded precariously with poles and rope. Builders were hauling up
baskets of clay from a damp greasy mound tipped in the street, partly blocking
it. The men were repairing a section of slumped roof and parapet wall. Grown-up
kids playing mud pies, for real.

 
          
‘I
bet they guarantee those repairs at least till the next thunderstorm,’ said
Alex, nodding aloft. ‘Albeit a year from now.’

 
          
‘Adobe’s
a
good
building material. It’ll
outlast steel and glass.’

 
          
‘Should
they slap it on while it’s wet?’

 
          
‘Become
a builder. Find out.’

 
          
He
nudged her. ‘Talking of men wearing perfume,’ he whispered, ‘I hear the local
Macedonians have all gone Persian.’

 
          
‘So?’

 
          
‘You
said that was effete. You seemed to disapprove.’

 
          
Briefly
Deborah looked confused, but then she laughed. ‘Look, Alex, where I come from -
came
from, I mean - guys could bathe
in asses’ milk, should they find a convenient ass. And many did. They could
wear bones through their noses and raspberry jam on their cheeks. It only
bothers me as a visiting Greek lady, see? If it attracts you, do it. Find
yourself.’

           
Oh,
I will,
he thought - and felt ashamed, of naivety. Not for the first time
it occurred to him how his own home community had been fairly puritanical in
its codes of behaviour . . . But wasn’t Babylon, too, in its own way? A woman
who murdered her husband for the love of another man wasn’t just locked away.
She was impaled alive. Supposedly.

 
          
Obviously
a law like that wasn’t carried out to the letter.

 
          
Or
was it?

 
          
A
crashing and clanging issued from the next doorway. A pall of fumes arose from
the house’s hidden courtyard, smutting the blue sky overhead; Alex concluded
that this particular building must house a factory or a smithy. (Unless, which
was less likely, the place was on fire within and the frenzied occupants were
trying to beat out the flames with swords and chains and hammers.) No other
sign gave notice of a workshop. No clay tablet trodden with duck’s-foot
cuneiform letters was inset by the door. How did the locals know where a place
was? Or whose place was whose?

 
          
From
here on much of the rest of the street was sky- soiled on the north-facing
side; and more intermittent Nibelungish din soon reached his ears from within
the walls. Half a dozen houses - not all quite in a row - were anonymous
foundries or blacksmiths’.

 
          
‘This
must be the Street of the Smiths, but how does anybody find the right Mr Smith?
I don’t see any signs.’

 
          
‘I
guess,’ said Deborah, ‘if you have business here, you already know.’

 
          
‘That
isn’t much help to a newcomer.’

 
          
‘Why
should there be signs on everything? The thing itself is its sign.’ She waggled
her hand. ‘Do you need signs on your fingers telling you which is which? If so,
you’re in trouble. And so is anyone with you.’

 
          
Alex
experienced a quick chill of implied threat. He said nonchalantly, ‘There
mightn’t be any signs, but have you noticed how everyone’s walking in the same
direction? That’s been true of all streets since the bridge. No one going the
opposite way.’

 
          
‘Isn’t
it obvious?’ she asked. ‘With streets so narrow?’ Again Alex felt he had
suffered a minor defeat. Too many of these, he feared, might erase Deborah from
his life - like a message rendered nonsensical by too many errors.

           
He was rescued from discomfiture by
donkeys. (And Deborah, one moment cool and languid, was panicked the next by
these same beasts, as David Copperfield’s Aunt Betsy Trotwood would be goaded
into a tizz, a passion, by the mischievous antics of donkey boys and their
wicked quadrupeds, two thousand and some years later.)

 
          
Laden
with swaying bundles, a gang of donkeys - the only
team
work was that imposed by the confines of the houses - came at
a canter, buffeting pedestrians out of the way while urchin muleteers played a
hopeless game of tag behind, trying to catch hold of tails and avoid the
hammer kicks of hooves which would surely ensue. Further up the street one
incompetent lad still sprawled amidst the slippery mound of clay which had
created a bottleneck, causing separation of boys from donkeys, and donkeys from
their braying senses.

 
          
The
leading donkey sideswiped Alex with its swag- gery flanks, which were both
belly-bountiful in their own right, like those of some huge hairy child
suffering from kwashiorkor, and swollen besides by bundles of trader’s booty
tarpaulined under a sheep fleece. A small package of dirty cloth tied with cord
slipped out from under the fleece, to fall at his feet.