Watson, Ian - Novel 16 (6 page)

 
          
‘Not
even enslaved for one day?’

           
‘That thing’s no use to you.’

           
‘It’s useful to someone.’

           
‘Maybe it’s just blank.’

           
‘And someone wants to copy
something? Steal some knowledge, smuggle it out? In which case, returning this
to its owner mightn’t have been a bright idea. It might have been a damn
dangerous idea.’

 
          
‘How,
if you hadn’t opened it?’

           
‘I might have felt the shape inside.
That overseer with the whip might have thought I had. We might have been
followed and murdered.’

 
          
Deborah
whistled softly. ‘You’ve really persuaded yourself. You must be mad. Will you
please get rid of the thing?’

 
          
‘I
can’t do that. This is important - but who to? You’re in on it too, you know.
You’re involved.’

 
          
‘Oh
no I’m not. You don’t bind me - with a bit of tape.’

 
          
I do, he thought, if I don’t throw the tape
away. Which I won’t do.

           
Sol
must be mad
,
must I?
Alex must be
mad? Maybe so. There had to be something a bit schizoid about becoming a
Babylonian.

 
          
Inside
his sleeve Alex clutched the wrapped cassette, though not so fiercely as to
crack the twentieth- century plastic case.

 
          
‘Let’s
get another beer,’ he suggested. ‘Let’s loosen up. Or should we try the wine?’

 
          
‘Shit,’
she said; referring precisely to what?

 
          
* * *

           
Later, they found rooms in a sprawling
three-storey inn between
Sin Street
and
Marduk Street
, near the Greek Theatre.

 
          
The
inn was called 'Between the Skin Shops’. On one side was a reeking fuller’s and
tanner’s, where cloth fresh from the weaver’s was cleaned and thickened in
solutions of alkaline ash obtained from combusted reeds; and where pigskins
were steeped in baths of alum and gallnut, bated with dung, and tanned with
oil. On the other side stood a striptease parlour. Two kinds of skin, each of a
different stripe. Thus the servant, who showed them upstairs, explained
amusedly.

 
          
Alex’s
room was small and bare with a window overlooking the central earthen
courtyard, where a quartet of donkeys wandered aimlessly and from which a
solitary date palm rose, its uppermost fronds shading part of the roof. A
curtain of reeds, tied to one side with cord, hung in the window. Alex could
carry his straw pallet up to the roof if he liked to sleep out under the stars.
Many guests did, to enjoy the cool of the night; the rooms could get stuffy. Otherwise,
his lodging contained a wooden chest with no lock, a piss- pot - the toilet
proper was downstairs, a platform over a pit, though with the luxury of a
bitumen seat - and several small lamps of sesame oil standing on a shelf:
shoe-shaped lamps with the wick sticking up through an eyelet hole on top. A
handful of sulphur matches lay in a roughly hollowed-out stone.

 
          
The
public rooms downstairs all had doors of reeds, but guests’ doors were stout
wood. The first thing Alex did when his door was shut was to take a good Greek
knife from inside his tunic and cut a brick loose low down the dingiest wall.
He prised the clay brick out, scraped a hole behind, and pushed the wrapped
cassette inside. He replaced the brick, swept the scrapings into a little
pile, then pissed in the pot, carefully soaked a nub of cloth and used hot
urine to make mud to seal around his excavation. He felt quite proud of his
guile. The result would pass casual scrutiny. He scuffed the rest of the
evidence around the floor, and rubbed his hands clean.

 
          
He
lay down on his pallet and slept.

 
          
At
the evening meal downstairs he and Deborah encountered half a dozen
fellow-guests. The meal was taken in a large chamber with spiral columns
supporting the weight of the floor above; though not entirely. A quarter of
the dining room was open to a darkening though unthreatening sky.

 
          
Four
of the other guests were traders from
Upper Babylonia
, due to tramp home next morning, leading their mokes. The traders
conversed in Babylonian and mostly ignored the visitors. One other guest was a
well-fleshed muscular black man who described himself whimsically as a Nubian,
though his Greek vowels spoke of
Georgia
or
Alabama
. The last guest was an Indian, from actual
India
, far fringe of Persian trade. This man,
Gupta, spoke Greek thanks to Alexander’s conquering armies. He and the Nubian,
Nabu, had arrived in
Babylon
a week or so earlier.

 
          
Over
supper Alex warmed to Nabu, though he distrusted skinny brown Gupta, whose
eyes darted shiftily, often in Deborah’s direction. Gupta seemed to be at once
evasive and snoopy, the sort of person who would sneak into your room while you
were out - just by accident, of course! the wrong door! When animated (as he
was later) his dark eyes shone, his neat white teeth flashed, and his tongue
was a pink rose petal. Otherwise his features remained furtively anonymous, a
mask of bland characterlessness. Yet all the while he watched, and kept his
ears cocked. Oddly, Deborah seemed to prefer him to the wholesome Nubian.

           
The meal consisted of unleavened
bread, thick lentil soup dished out with a terracotta ladle, followed by tough
roast mutton and lumpy turnip, with figs and yoghurt for afters. The guests ate
with bone spoons and single-pronged bone forks, out of pottery bowls and from
wooden platters. Two torches, of reeds dipped in bitumen, quickly burned all
the moths they attracted through the open gap. A chorus of frogs croaked from a
garden pool in some other house.

 
          
Serving
at table was a middle-aged woman with peculiar habits. While they ate she
shuffled around the circuit of the walls, halted, shuffled six paces onward,
halted, all the while muttering to herself, ‘Hummum, hummum, um-hum, um,’ like
someone engaged in a strange penance. Periodically she darted in to the diners
to hover over them, inspecting, before returning to her previous station. Alex
figured her for an obsessional neurotic, captive of innumerable phobias. She
wore several amulets on strings around her neck: little clay figures of a goat,
a dog, and a drum.

 
          
‘Ah’m
goin’ to become a scribe,’ confided Nabu, patting his belly affably. Tt’s a
fine life, a scribe’s. Ah’ve seen ’em goin’ about their lesser business, and ah
bet there’s lots of big important business too.’ Deborah looked derisive.

           
‘Compiling the records of the city.’
Alex gave an approving nod. Information was power.

 
          
‘What
kind of records?’ asked Gupta quickly. ‘How do you know there are any records?’

 
          
‘Yes,’
said Deborah. ‘The only records might be the price of yesterday’s cucumbers.’

 
          
‘Brothers,
sister,’ said Nabu, ‘we all know there have to be records of a different sort;
though we don’t speak of it. Otherwise, why are we all here?’

           
‘Mum-mum, mum-mum,’ muttered the
serving woman. She darted closer. ‘Mum!’ she said emphatically, warningly.

 
          
Abruptly
Gupta’s hand snaked out. He caught the woman’s robe, forcing her to bend.

 
          
‘Ha
ha!’ he exclaimed. ‘You sound hungry. Don’t you get your dinner till we finish?
Do you get the scraps?’ With two fingers of his free hand, chopstick-style, he
snatched up a small hard onion left in his soup bowl. Nimbly, two other fingers
prised the woman’s mouth open and in popped the onion. Then Gupta released her.

 
          
She
scuttled directly to the nearest flambeau and spat the onion on to the heart of
burning tarry rushes. Then she resumed her progress, silently. One of the
Babylonians said something, pointed, and all four chortled.

 
          
‘What
you do that for, man?’ cried Nabu.

 
          
Deborah
looked alert, excited; and it was to her that Gupta said, ‘I did it so that I
could peep inside her mouth.’

 
          
‘Are
you a doctor?’ asked Deborah.

 
          
‘No.
Though I could have been. That woman hasn’t said a comprehensible word in my
hearing in the last ten days. Now I know why.’

 
          
‘How,
if you aren’t a doctor?’

 
          
‘Anyone
could see, respected lady, that her tongue has been torn out at the root!’

 
          
‘What?’

           
‘Ha ha. My little joke.’ His eyes
shone. ‘I fooled you, did I not? You don’t mind that. It doesn’t offend you. It
thrills you, yes?’ He stuck his own tongue out of his mouth, arching it up towards
his nose. The top of his tongue tickled the tip of his nose. Abruptly as a
toad’s or a chameleon’s, his tongue withdrew.

 
          
‘In
my country,’ said Gupta, ‘we do many wonderful things with our tongues. Some
wise men divide, with a knife, the left and right side of the tongue. They
stick their two tongues separately up their two nostrils and, deprived of
oxygen, they meditate. Other wise men swallow their tongues for ten minutes.
Yes, right down the throat! Then they disgorge. Of course, first you have to
spend months and years stropping your tongue like the leather belt on which you
sharpen a knife - so as to lengthen it. I’m not a doctor, splendid lady, but a
magician. A magician needs to know a lot about the body. Sometimes he must hide
things inside it and be able to retrieve them at will. I can hide a big pearl
behind my eyeball. Sometimes a magician must bend and flex unbelievably. Yes,
the wonders of the body! All its hidden secrets! Your own body is a wonder,
graceful lady. Your neck is the upraised white gorge of a goose as it honks at
heaven; your shoulders are its breasts. I could teach you to swallow all manner
of long objects. Stiff snakes, steel blades, hollow bamboos all the way down
to your belly.’

 
          
Deborah
smirked.

 
          
Gupta
switched his attention to Alex. ‘Do you want something hidden, sir? Gupta can
hide it for you.’

 
          
Alex
felt himself flush.

 
          
‘Anywhere
at all!’ Gupta clapped his hands; but summoned no sudden jewel or genie. ‘I can
hide it in full view of your face and you’ll not notice. In fact,’ (and he
showed his hands, front and back, both bare), ‘see, I’ve already hidden it.’

 
          
If
Gupta had seemed shifty to begin with, now he was bold; as though earlier he
had been busy furtively rearranging circumstances in the dining room by the power
of glance alone, and now everything was to his satisfaction.

 
          
‘What
was it that I hid? Ah, that is the mystic secret.’

           
Alex said, ‘I used to be a juggler.
I juggled with knives. I tossed knives at targets representing people who were
acting offensive.’

 
          
Nabu
hastily intervened: ‘Say, Gupta, can you give us a jugglin’ show?’

 
          
But
the Indian continued staring at Alex with a mixture of resentment, eccentric
hilarity, and - yes - licence to do as he pleased.

 
          
‘What
is hidden? Where, and why? Gupta always knows the secrets. He looks,’ (saying
which he scanned Deborah) ‘with eyes which see through walls, through reeds,
through bricks. Through stones, through cloth, through skin.’