Whores of Babylon, page 26
‘Not born yet,’ muttered Perdiccas.
‘Never mind! According to an oracle book, thus it shall be.’ The king shuffled his buttocks and farted. ‘Eratosthenes will visit Egypt. He will observe that the sun stands directly overhead at noon on the summer solstice in the town of Syene. Whereas at the same time in my own city of Alexandria, several hundred miles north, the sun is seven degrees away from vertical . . .’
The king expatiated for a while. When he concluded, all eyes turned towards Alex.
He was expected to argue against this? It sounded as though Eratosthenes had calculated the size of the world correctly!
The only opposing argument Alex could think of was that the world which he and King Alexander inhabited was actually an elektronik pattern within a piece of future tekhne. Babylonia was the whole of the world, and no bigger than the box which stored it.
Wouldn’t this be blasphemy? Blasphemy punishable by impalement?
‘Well? We wait, agog.’
Alex opened his mouth with no idea what to say. He was saved by a commotion outside.
Outcry. A crackling roar.
A guard ducked inside the tent. ‘Pardon me, sire! General Perdiccas - ’
The general rose, seized a sword, and hurried out. While the tentflap was open it was plain that the pile of creosote bushes was blazing; red firelight enflamed the night.
The king chucked Alex under the chin. ‘Argumen- turn ex machina, as the well-shaved Roman barbarians will phrase it!’ He too rose and grasped a spear. As he did so, a martial transformation came over him. ‘Perhaps the lions have come to us!’ he roared, and strode swiftly out.
Muzi armed himself and followed. Antipater too, and servants. Alex, still chapleted with golden leaves, also took his leave of the tent.
Near the bonfire Anshar was wailing and beating his breast. A strange horse stood quivering, streaming in the sudden heat. By the horse stood Nettychin.
The general intercepted the king: ‘It’s another messenger for Master Muzi, sire. The fool thought wild beasts were chasing him. At the bottom of the hill he lit a brand. To alert us he threw the brand into our wood.’
‘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.
9
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.
