Watson, Ian - Novel 16 (42 page)

 
          
‘What
news by night, fellow?’ bellowed Alexander.

 
          
Apparently
Nettychin did not recognize his king, or else he was too distraught to care. He
stomped forward and addressed himself to Muzi.

 
          
‘Dire
tidings, Master! Your daughter is well. Your wife is dead.’

 
          
Muzi
gaped. ‘What daughter?’

 
          
‘Dr
Cassander cut a baby girl from the Mistress. The Mistress died from loss of
blood.’

 
          
Thessany,
dead
? Alex could hardly comprehend.
At that moment all hopes died, all love froze over. All futures ceased to
exist.

 
          
‘Lord
Gibil came to our house. I offered to follow Anshar, who had told me the way
and the landmarks. Distracted, Lord Gibil agreed. I owe the Mistress a shekel
for ever. I am her good and faithful servant; and will be so to her daughter. I
borrowed a horse; I rode. Night fell and wild dogs howled in the wastes. The
land was as dead as my heart, poisoned by snakes and scorpions. The dust of
dead bones clogged my nostrils. The horse ran wild as if to dash itself from a
cliff in sacrifice. Each rainbow hue of day was extinguished for always. When
the moon rose, its light was feeble and leprous. I heard a dragon pursue me, to
sting me in the heart. I came to this place.'

 
          
That
bloody butcher, Cassander!

 
          
Alex’s
rage focused upon Muzi - Muzi who had dragged him from the city on this stupid
expedition of prestige which bid fair to end in Alex becoming the king’s
catamite for a night.

 
          
‘You
useless prick,’ he snarled at the husband, who stood in shock. ‘You honourable
hero. Lioness-fucker.’ (Muzi’s eyes widened.) ‘And now the Pandar of your
wife’s slave!’

 
          
Almost
on Alex’s lips: ‘Whose baby do you think it is?’

 
          
Muzi
bared his teeth and jerked his sword towards Alex. ‘Arm yourself! If Thessany’s
dead, then so are you. Get a weapon, slave.’

 
          
‘Kill
me unarmed,’ said Alex. ‘Run me through. Screw your sense of honour and your
promise to the dog-god. I don’t care.’

 
          
‘Stop
this at once!’ shouted Perdiccas. ‘For shame!’

 
          
The
king seemed stimulated by the quarrel. ‘What passions run riot here!’ he
exclaimed, somewhat squeakily. He hawked to clear his throat, and continued in
firmer voice. ‘You shan’t fight this fellow, Master Muzi! A fine way to win a
wager, by killing the object of it. I was already tussling with this man - I
have prior claim.

 
          
‘I
am, of course, deeply sorry about your wife,’ he added. 7 knew the grief of
Hephaestion’s death. Aye, knew it - and overcame it.’

 
          
Muzi
lowered his weapon. ‘May I ride away, sire? Will you accept this slave as a
gift to my king?’

 
          
‘He
isn’t yours to give tonight. And tomorrow we must all hunt together. A king -
like a god - must soar above mortal sorrows. Likewise those who serve him.
There exists only one immortal tragedy, of which all human misfortunes are but
reflections warped in the glass of life. That tragedy is the death of empires -
in the broadest sense. It is that doom which a king forever fights.’ A tear
squeezed from Alexander’s eye.

 
          
Muzi
dropped his sword on the ground, and approached Alex. ‘We’ve all got our
sorrows, boy. So it seems.’

 
          
‘I
just can’t believe she’s dead,’ mumbled Alex.

 
          
The
king discarded his weapon. He draped an arm across Alex’s shoulder. T begin to
perceive the true tender nature of your grief - shared so exquisitely with your
master. Let me console you.’ He began to pull Alex towards the royal tent.

 
          
‘Is
the debate to continue?’ asked Muzi in confusion.

 
          
‘Bugger
that,’ said the king. ‘I’ve quite lost interest in words.’ He hauled Alex
inside the tent. No one followed.

 
          
When
King Alexander reached the royal bedding, however, he sprawled across it.
Drunkenness triumphed. He passed out.

 
          
Alex
sank down on the carpet. For a time he regarded the abandoned feast, then he
crawled from one wine-cup to another, draining them all. Dizzily he curled up.

 
          
Tomorrow, he thought, I shall die.

           
And
then he thought: My daughter. O my daughter.

           
The thought had little substance.
Daughter was only a word, which soon became meaningless.

 
          
Alex
had won no contest of wits, nor even shared the king’s bed, yet Alexander still
insisted on including him in the next day’s adventure.

 
          
The
following morning the hunting party rode like the wind across the scrubby plain
beyond the hills, with Tikki and other hounds bounding alongside. Alex was
mounted on lira’s mare; Irra had been left behind at camp.

           
The riders startled goats grazing on
the sagebrush and the grey-green creosote shrubs. Antelope, nibbling at owl’s
clover and mallow, scampered off; but no lions were spied. In brakes of
mesquite and brittlebush big cats bad left no scent lingering for the dogs.
Eventually they reached a hillocky ridge, laced with wandering minor canyons,
and cast around for a while; but only a lone fox slunk away.
Noon
came and went.

 
          
By
mid-afternoon they came to an oasis of a thousand trees where a family of
elephants were feeding. Here the hunters watered their mounts and rested while
the horses packed grass into themselves, the party keeping a watchful eye on
the great grey cows and the bull lurking deep in the foliage. No lion contours
rippled the long grass. When they set out again, Antipater spotted a buzzard
spiralling lazily down. Two miles on, they found the remains of an elephant
calf. Wild dogs fled at their approach. A few buzzards bounced aloft. The corpse
wasn’t yet reduced to bones and hide; flies festered on remnants of meat which
weren’t yet dried to jerky. Nearby they found lion spoor. The hounds chased off
to the east, but after another mile they checked and cast about in vain.

 
          
‘On!
On!’ cried Alexander. ‘To the end of the earth, where Oceanus flows!’

 
          
And
they rode on.

 
          
They
had ridden like the wind before, but now the farther eastward they went the
more did a wind from the east oppose them, fitfully at first then ever more
gustily, stirring up devils and snakes of dust. By late afternoon the terrain
ahead looked like a hazy mirror of the land behind which their horses’ hooves
had just beaten.

 
          
Now
they were riding into the sun, which bloomed redly as it sank behind dust
veils. Perdiccas called a halt. The party reined in. The general drank water
from a flask and spat.

 
          
‘We’ve
come too far, Majesty. The gods thrust us back.’

 
          
‘The
very story of my life,’ the king commented sourly. ‘Will no one ride on?’

 
          
‘Into
Apsu?’ asked Antipater. ‘Into the abyss?’

 
          
‘Pah!
We are Greeks, you and I.’

 
          
‘This
is
Babylonia
, with its own gods.’

 
          
Was
this place really near the edge of the world? Was there an actual edge, a great
plunging crevasse boiling with fog? Alex strained to see ahead, but now the air
was a dirty distorting glass.

 
          
‘I’ll
ride.’ He thumped his horse with his heels.

 
          
As
he urged the mare onward she whinnied and shied. He persevered but soon felt
nauseated. The ground seemed to become a mass of separate dots which moved
further and further apart. The mare’s hooves were sinking. She had to pluck her
feet free with each new step; she snorted with terror. Alex could hardly
breathe. Emptiness rose up from the interstices of the world, suffocating him.
He felt sucked dry, hollowed out, a husk. Soon, helpless, he wilted over his
mount’s neck. The mare struggled about and carried him back.

 
          
When
he rejoined the others he could feel himself fill out again with substance.

 
          
‘He
fainted,’ remarked the king. No one else commented.

 
          
The
party finally arrived by moonlight at the ridge, and could urge the horses and
themselves no further. After sharing the rest of their food with the dogs they
dossed down on the ground under saddle blankets.

 
          
In
the dawn light a roar awoke them.

           
Down on the creosote flat walked a
full-maned lion.

 
          
Hastily
they organized. They armed. They rode down in two groups, with the hounds
whistled ahead to harry and block. The riders spread out till the lion,
snarling at the dogs, was inside a loose circle. Perdiccas, Antipater and Muzi
dismounted and threw off all clothing but their loincloths. The king stayed
seated, watching.

 
          
‘You
too, faint-heart!’ Muzi shouted at Alex. ‘You
too:

 
          
So
Alex slipped down from his mare and soon stood naked but for a strip of cloth
and a sword.

 
          
However,
he faced no real danger. For it was Muzi who dashed wildly and rammed a spear
through the lion’s throat, killing it.

 
          
In
which Alex waxes eloquent, and the
 
lady vanishes

 
          
Where
to end? Where better than with the death of a lion and the death of a lady?

           
A death which at first seemed to
equate with the death of love and even the death of meaning. Of love, arrived
at by a strange route yet arrived at none the less and now lost. Though never
really lost. Always with Alex now, like an arrowhead lodged non-fatally in his
chest near his heart - which would throb and twinge for the rest of his life,
or perhaps for five or twenty years until it worked its way out, reminding him
whenever it pained that he was still alive, that Thessany had been alive, that
they had touched.

 
          
Alex
is writing this in Greek upon waxed boards; many of them. If this were an
orthodox tale it should end in catharsis or in celebration - a great discovery
might be made.

 
          
But
death alone ends our own rambling stories, and will end the world’s history. We
can never know our own death, thus we can never know the end; nor the whole.
When a person is dead they cannot look back and survey the terrain of their
life. Likewise when a culture is dead it cannot look back on itself.

 
          
For
a while after Alex’s return to
Babylon
he thought about suicide. This was perhaps
a salve for his soul, a consoling indulgent elegiac tune which he played upon
his heartstrings: a threnody for Thessany, requiring the player to remain alive
so as to be able to continue playing.

           
Should he walk by the waters where
the Jews wail? Should he hurl his body from
Babylon
Bridge
to drown himself amidst the spinning
coracles?

 
          
If
he did so, would he wake up elsewhere?

 
          
This
sort of death by drowning - as opposed, say, to being butchered by knives or
torn apart - presupposed that you might possibly wake up elsewhere; that there
existed somewhere else, such as some different plane of being, where you might
revive.

 
          
No
doubt you wouldn’t wake up at all. No doubt you wouldn’t know anything more
about matters or about yourself, ever again, than you knew when deeply asleep
in the dead of night.

 
          
Thessany
had written a will and had it witnessed by a magistrate, and in her will she
had given Alex back his freedom; which seemed a dubious gift when he felt that
he was her slave for ever, should he choose to go on living. The will meant
that Muzi had no hold over him; nor any obligations. Alex was cast out of
Muzi’s house without ever setting eyes on his daughter, if the baby was indeed
his.

 
          
Gupta
met him and took him back to Kamberchanian’s inn, promising that he could live
there free for as long as he liked, till he felt able to help out with business
at The Eye of Horus next door; the Indian hinted that he had squirrelled away a
few ingots from the robbery of Hephaestion’s tomb.

 
          
Before
long it occurred to Alex that if Hephaestion deserved a memorial, why, so did
Thessany. And this memorial - of words, not marble - would take months to make,
and make well, so that through it Thessany could come alive again.

 
          
Soon
he began to write; a process which Gupta observed indulgently, then laughed at
somewhat.

           
With the death of not-yet-sainted
Thessany Gupta seemed to have withdrawn his emotional support for Alex's
suspicions of Babylon as a phantom of future
tekhne
, a brothel of
elektronik
klones
.

 
          
‘Who
are you writing for?’ Gupta asked him. ‘When you finish your labour of
Herakles, will you have finally delivered a report to someone somewhere else?’

 
          
Sporadically
during his labour Alex felt that he was a mad program fulfilling itself in a
mad machine, which itself mimicked the mad machine which was the world, the
universe . . .

 
          
Alex
was Andromeda chained to the rock of
Babylon
, stalked by time the ravager.

 
          
Andromeda.
Prometheus. Christ. The holy trinity - beauty, science, soul - nailed to the
stony trunk of time as the storm of years swept onward. And from all their
wounds, suffered or yet to be suffered, blood dripped to paint the shape of
history.

 
          
The
idea of suicide as an escape route to somewhere else now shrivelled away. If
what Alex wrote in Greek on boards was merely an account of an imitation of
reality, whereas elsewhere a more authentic world existed, in what way did his
work differ from most writings - even histories - which established other, more
deeply envisioned worlds into which the reader might escape? Obviously Babylon
the fabulous must be more real - in the sense of being more ideal, truer, more
determined to endure - than any other world which had given birth to it, from
which Babylon’s inhabitants had fled, leaving behind perhaps originals of
themselves who might come to feel in time that
they
were the echoes and copies.

 
          
One
often wants to believe in another, more heightened world - without any
evidence whatsoever, or only tenuous, suspect evidence. Hence the origin of
faith.

           
But here in Babylon was life. This
was life; no other. There was nowhere else but here, but
Babylon
; just as for the original historic
Babylonians there was nowhere else. Likewise for a Roman in Caesar's
Rome
. Or for an American in
America
. Where you are, is the only place. Is life
itself.

 
          
Life
sometimes seems to consist of a set of symbols and analogies, as though life is
the key to some other reality elsewhere. But life is all there is. Now that
Thessany was dead,
Babylon
was the only place for Alex to be. His mistress now was
Babylon
. He was the slave of
Babylon
, the whore.

 
          
He
wrote on waxed boards for the sake of dead Thessany but also for the benefit of
Thessany's daughter, who was also his own daughter. Their daughter was a child
of
Babylon
and of nowhere else. In the years ahead
there was time enough to discover how best to see her, how to meet up with her
eventually; how to present her with his own and her mother's story. She would
grow up. Alex would keep his eye on her. In sixteen years or so she might go to
the
temple
of
Ishtar
and he might meet her there; though not to
commit incest. Unless she was as capricious as her mother had been .. .

 
          
He
wrote to inform his daughter about the past, which is the future. If she
believed his tale; if she had any way of understanding it.

 
          
Meanwhile,
farewell to foolish notions of throwing himself from
Babylon
Bridge
.

 
          
On
the contrary, perhaps he would visit the
temple
of
Ishtar
- tomorrow! - to renew contact with the
reality of
Babylon
.

 
          
But
first he would end; first of all. For in
Babylon
, where time is trumped, the end is always
the beginning.

 
 
          
Here.

 
          
Now.

 
          
Not
the end.

 
          
As
I approached the gateway to the courtyard shaded by its cedars of Lebanon, no
guard was keeping watch outside. I could hear the faint chatter of both guards,
within. The lane was deserted.

 
          
A
voice from behind called out, ‘Alex!’

 
          
I
turned; there in the lane stood Thessany.

 
          
Hadn’t
she died after all? Had the whole agony only been a cruel - or necessary! -
intrigue? Had Muzi and Lord Gibil been fooled as well as me? Had Marduk in his
temple needed to be duped by tragic final news? Had the baby girl who remained
in Muzi’s house been a child of beggars, bought new-born? Procured by Gupta,
who had indulged me while I wrote my tale? Who had smiled knowingly, well aware
that Thessany and her daughter were living somewhere in the city incognito?

 
          
Had
Dr Cassander been bribed with some of the ingots which Gupta had failed to
present to Lord Gibil? I never saw Thessany’s corpse. Did Muzi or Gibil ever
see it? Or did they see a dead slave girl, her face recontoured with wax? Or a
body entirely made of wax?

 
          
What
about the terrible convulsions witnessed by the household?

 
          
I
ran to Thessany to clasp her.

 
          
My
hands passed through her body. My body passed through hers.

 
          
I
nearly fell. I staggered back. She still stood before me, smiling wryly now.

 
          
‘You’re
a
holographos
,’ I accused.

 
          
‘No
I’m not. It’s me, all right.’

           
‘Of course you’re a
holographos.
There’s a glass eye
somewhere near. Close by Ishtar’s gate: obvious location! Marduk is showing
you to me. Or someone is.
Why
?’

 
          
‘If
I’m a
holographos
, dear, then either
I’m an image of somebody alive and kicking in another part of town - and why
should I hide my physical self from you? - or else I’m just a memory-image
stored in some little scroll, in which case we could hardly engage in
repartee. So I can’t be a
holographos
,
can I?’

 
          
‘What
are you?’

 
          
‘I’m
a ghost. A genuine ghost.’

 
          
‘But.
. . ghosts don’t exist. Not that sort of ghost!’

 
          
‘In
Babylon
one ghost exists. That’s me. As I lay dying
I remembered what you said in that chariot, when we were robbing the tomb, and
I suddenly knew how to become invisible. I realized how my dead body could stay
there on that blood-soaked pallet - and how my pattern could continue on. I
knew how I could store myself within the pattern of
Babylon
; how I could hide and stay free without the
pattern knowing I was there.

 
          
‘And
I did it. Oh, what a wondrous intrigue this is! Though it’s dodgy too, and
perilous. I have to keep on the move. I have to jink and duck, and mimic not
being here at all. I have to find empty corners and nooks. I have to be a chameleon.
I have to be a pane of glass. I’ve spent ages learning the tricks of staying
invisible so that
Babylon
doesn’t know I’m here. I shouldn’t really appear to you - but I must!
Because you love me; and I love you. Besides, shouldn’t a ghost appear now and
then? Else she wouldn’t be a proper ghost! Alex, you must - ’ She hesitated,
glanced around.

 
          
I
must what? Take lessons from Gupta, then kill myself? So that we might lurk
together evermore as two mischievous ghosts within the pattern of
Babylon
?