The City: Ancient Babylon, some time after 1760 BCE and before 1595 BCE.
The Magic: A creature who could be a guardian angel, but is equally capable of the demonic, enters a woman’s life.
Three figures walked in single file in the evening heat haze besides the Euphrates River, heading homewards.
All women, shawled, hunched by the baskets on their backs. The last, youngest and smallest, was further slouched by the year-old baby riding on her hip.
As if the sun had blinked, now an extra figure suddenly appeared, appended to their procession. Where day met night, before the sun god disappeared through the doors to the underworld, can be a time where strange things happen. The three women had taken a risk staying so late to gather sweet rushes outside the city gates. Now returning with their baskets dripping and laden, they knew that they must hurry, lest something untoward sneak into the city with them.
The third woman, her nostrils full of the scent of leaves and rhizomes on her back, her mind occupied by the problem of how to preserve that smell, nonetheless heard behind her the extra set of shuffling footsteps. Some field worker, some beggar? Though very tired, and with extra work ahead of her that night, the processing of the sweet flag besides cooking the evening meal, she let her mind fix on the sound.
Suddenly she realized what about it was so strange—it was an exact copy of her own footsteps.
She reeled in a turn, saw the bent figure, the shawled head—and nothing beneath the fringes of woven wool. For a moment she and the demon were face to face, his disguise rumbled. Then in a flap of confusion, shawl transmogrifying from fronds of hair to great feathery wings, he shot away and up.
Her mouth opened wide—she could scream, but that would wake her baby. Worse, it would alert her companions, her censorious sisters-in-law, that she had somehow, by her actions, drawn the attention of the spirit world. She closed her mouth, turned again, as the three trudged towards the city gates, the watching guards, the safety of a walled city state, a relatively new thing in the world: Babylon.
From above, the demon watched her, biding his time. His name was Azubel, a name not written in cuneiform on the clay tablets kept by the priests in the temples of Babylon, and before that, old Sumer. He was not part of their spirit world as they perceived it—or, more to the point, as they had shaped it, like they took the Mesopotamian clay and made it into bricks, jugs, writing tablets, everything useful to an aspiring civilization. He might be useful to the Babylonians, he knew that. But it would require a transaction, something in return. Something that would make it worthwhile that he, an immortal, should invest his time and power in these creatures doomed to die amongst their clay-dust. Whatever that something might be, he had a notion it could be in that hindmost woman, shuffling along with her load of reeds and drowsing baby.
He had not meant to scare her, merely to get closer, to get a sense of her thoughts. They had a special savor, distinct as musk: an unusual mind was here, working on a different level from those around her. She had been acute enough to detect his presence despite the crude disguise. That was interesting. Enough to keep him from the immortal’s curse, that of being eternally bored? Possibly. But he would have to proceed carefully, he could tell that. He would watch invisibly, and then reveal himself slowly, to see how she would react.
Over the next moon, he followed her, as focused as a hunting bird on its prey.
He observed her at the street markets, among all the other good housewives. Accompanied by her shadows, the watchful sisters-in-law, she bought her family’s daily provisions, or ordered delivery of larger purchases: a new water barrel, a load of straw for fuel. She sat at a market stall herself, in the perfumer’s quarter, in front of her many stoppered jars. She was not a good saleswoman, her mind puzzling over the details of perfume-making even as the customers filled her ears with trivial questions. Which suited them best, the myrtle-wash, or the honeysuckle? He overheard their chatter and also the deeper, unvoiced questions: Will this keep my husband home at night? Will this keep him interested in me? She was even oblivious to the outstretched hands, clutching items of barter, the customers finally paying, until a sister-in-law pinched her into alertness, once even openly slapped her.
He nearly slapped back, because he was beginning to realize how important were the thoughts behind those dark-brown eyes: their brown study so easily turned towards something darker, which would come to be called the black arts. Her thoughts made a beginning, no more than her baby’s stumbling steps, towards his special interests, for which no word yet existed in all of Babylonia. It did in Egypt, the land where he had spent the last thousand years. He could trace the lines of the hieroglyphs that spelled it out: Khemeia. The word meant black, a good thing, named from the soil alongside the Nile, and by extension, as surely the floodwaters spread over the delta, to the land of Egypt itself. Black earth, fertile as an enquiring mind, into which ideas could be seeded, notions of a dark, powerful art.
He vocalized the word, a soft breath: Khemeia! What might it be in translation to Babylonian? The more he looked at her, the more he had a sense that he was about to find out. He had assayed the minds around her, and knew now she was the most intelligent person in Mesopotamia, a civilization bursting with new ideas, unlike static Egypt.
So he watched, amassing information. She was good at her perfumer’s craft, for despite the apparent absent-mindedness, the inattention to social chit-chat, the customers kept returning. That slap had been powered by genuine anxiety: her sisters-in-law knew her skills, and were even a little in awe of her. Afraid of her, even?
He tracked her to her home, the typical mud brickwork of Mesopotamia forming a house of the poorer sort: one storey, the streetfront blank wall. She worked in her courtyard, the household’s center. Here was domesticity: fowls fussing and clucking in their pen, sacks of lentils or barley, a child’s leather ball, its stitching half unpicked. Her trade was also carried out in this space, with myrtle leaves steeping in a clay trough, a well-used mortar and pestle, flower petals drying in the shade on wicker racks. No husband, he observed, but small children. A widow, as ripe as a fresh date, dark, small, and rounded. The eyes she circled with kohl each morning were almond-shaped, as lustrous as her hair in its long plaits. She looked ready for love, for another marriage?
Slowly, gradually, he let her sense his presence. A flash of a wing in the corner of an eye, a shadow, as he flew overhead in the full sun. She showed no sign of fear after that first encounter; she even seemed not particularly surprised at his return. He habituated her to seeing him, and soon they were, if not nodding acquaintances like the market stallholders she greeted every day, approaching a familiarity. She knew him by sight; and also that nobody else around her had this privilege, this special visitant. So, as a Babylonian woman would not do with any other male who was not a relation, even though this male had wings and a raptor’s head, she twitched aside her shawl and met his gaze. It was an unspoken communication, a glance that held, but never approached the contest of a stare. Moreover, it coolly appraised; much like his own.
On one rare occasion when she was alone, without infants, or her attendant chaperones, he followed her. She wore her best beads and carried a basket of wares. Her destination? The temple of Aruru, the mother goddess, the maker goddess, a fashioner equally of children and clay. Even the holy places of this city needed perfumes, incense, to mask the foul stench that any human settlement creates. In Babylon as in Egypt, to be sweet-smelling was considered next to godliness. And, like many things in this supremely practical culture, incense could have another function.
In a quiet back courtyard of the temple, she met with a priestess at once motherly and gauntly ascetic. There she presented a package wrapped in leaves. The priestess unwrapped it, put it to her nose and sniffed: incense, top quality, and so reserved for libanomancy, divination from smoke. Then, as he watched, a ritual progressed, culminating with a handful of incense being scattered into a small brazier. A cloud of sweet-smelling smoke ascended to the heavens, in a cluster: a favorable divination. As she left the temple, smiling to reveal one crooked tooth, he let himself become visible to her for a moment. Her jaw set, but she did not look surprised.
This coy flirtation had to stop. Tonight, to meet with her, and put forward his proposition.
Late on that warm night in old Babylon, she tended the tinuru, the household clay oven. The embers were banked, and a pot seethed above them, boiling the day’s harvest of delicate petals. Peripherally she registered the scents of her surroundings: the fresh straw from the pen where the fowls dozed; the clay water tubs full of steeping myrtle leaves; the powdered sweetbark, the labor of her mortar and pestle. All seemed safe, cozy—except for the monstrosity, a man with wings and a falcon’s head, watching from atop the encircling brick wall.
She eyed him as she worked, noting that he had not flickered out of vision, as previously, but remained, a silent presence. Wanting: what? Without being too specific, like those customers of hers who really wanted love potions, she had queried the priestess about her visitant. From the equally guarded reply she knew he could be a demon, or an ilum, a personal protective spirit. Such was small wonder in Babylon, where, as befitted the greatest city in the world, three worlds co-existed: heaven, earth, and the afterlife.
That was one thought in her mind, amongst so many others. She was a mother, a businesswoman, with continual demands on her time. Of most immediate concern to her now were her experiments in perfumery. It is easy to steep the perfume out of flowers, and so make a wash for the hair. But can you capture the essence of those flowers more permanently, fix the fragrance? The pot wobbled and spat, and temporarily she forgot her visitant. She lifted the lid, sniffed at the condensate. How best to collect it, concentrate it? Through her eyelids she saw his head move slightly, following her action intently. To herself she voiced: Ah! Whatever he wanted, it involved her, and the experiments of her perfumery.
A child’s moan came from the rooms opening onto the courtyard, its door a dark cave in the firelight: “Ummum.” [Mother].
She answered, softly, reassuringly: “Martum.” [Daughter].
Her shawl stirred, and the baby woke briefly, reaching for one soft breast. He took a mouthful, drowsed on the nipple.
Both children subsided before she spoke again, quietly, as if to herself: “I know you have not come for my children.” The demon on the wall nodded, as if she were not speaking to him for the first time.
“You have been watching every move I make. You had the opportunity to take them, but no.”
The raptor head nodded again.
“And demons carry off virgins or princesses, not humble housewives, mothers . . . ”
Her tone was deprecating, as if to say: Desirable? Me? Her hair was tousled in its plaits after a long working day, and the kohl she applied this morning had surely faded. But as she spoke she knew well that he had not followed her through Babylon for an idle reason. Desirable? Of course she was, somehow, to this strange, unknowable male.
“You watch my perfume-making as closely as I do . . . so do you want my recipes then? My fine scents, my salves?”
“Well-observed . . . ” he finally said. To her his voice sounded not like the harsh cry of a hawk, but rather soft and hissing, like a resinous log in flame. “Tapputi-Belatekallim, of the perfumers.”
Now that he had finally greeted her, she made the formal obeisance of response. And added: “Also daughter of Tapputi, herself a perfumer.”
“With brewers and bakers of uncommon ability in your family too! People who take materials, observe them, mix them, watch them transform, then refine the results.”
“Isn’t that what a good artisan should do?”
“Others think differently, they follow tradition. Your lineage has enquiring minds. You promise to be the greatest of them.”
Her head was bowed, but she listened intently, though she suspected these flattering lines were a lure. “Really?”
“One day the King of Babylon will want your perfumes.”
“Says who?” She tried to sound unconcerned, but she was as hooked now as an Euphrates perch.
“My name is Azubel.”
“Are you a demon or an ilum?” she shot back, though from the priestess she knew the distinction between the two could be small, the categories of godliness and demonic being fluid.
“A lamassu.”
She drew in her breath quietly. An ilum was merely a spirit of varying power. A lamassu was something stronger: a guardian angel. Tread carefully, she thought. A wrathful lamassu was equally capable of the demonic, with worse consequences.
“A lamassu? Mine?”
“If you will have me.”
“I have a choice? To your proposal, that sounds like a marriage proposal?”
“It is . . . if you want it.”
She poked the fire, added more fuel, temporizing whilst thinking hard.
“You must know I am a widow. Do you also know my sisters-in-law want me to marry again within their family? They have a cousin already picked out—a lout and dolt.” She spat into the embers. “A young girl never has a choice in her husband. My family decided for me, as is the custom. So I got a man fiery and raging, and babies all the time—until the river fever took him. Do you think I want that again?”
“Your husband’s family aim to keep your perfumery for themselves. They love your knowledge.”
“You observe well,” she said. “But did you also see my gift of incense to the priestess? It was large, because it paid for two divinations. The first, for my enterprise. The smoke clustered as it rose: that is the sign I will succeed.”
“I saw the priestess throw a generous handful of incense into the brazier, on a windless day—it could hardly do else but cluster.”
She touched the amulet of Aruru at her neck. “If the goddess thought otherwise, she would have sent the smoke to the left, and so indicated a bad omen.”
“Of course she would. And what about the second divination?”
“A more expensive one, for when my in-laws come, and seek the omens for their marriage proposal.”
“Let me predict,” he said. “The brazier will just happen to be placed near a draft, that day? Or the incense scattered scantily?”
“It is not for me to question the diviner’s art,” she said piously.
He laughed. “You are clever—and also practical.”
“Is it too much to want a good husband?”
“It is all you deserve. And more. That I can give you. Do you want to know how to solve the problems with your perfumery, so that its products will be the greatest ever produced in Babylon, and the world?”
Although she was really flattered now, she kept her tone slightly mocking, unbelieving.
“You do not offer me jewels?”
“Because that is not your bride-price. Your price is knowledge. Khemeia, as the Egyptians call it. It is up to you to supply the Babylonian name.”
She stood, awkwardly, dropping her poker. From the top of the wall, he launched himself down, landing silently as an owl, his great wings near spanning the little courtyard. She looked at the feathers, imagined the touch of them on her bare skin, then met his gaze, the unblinking golden eyes above that hooked beak, fashioned for tearing, maiming, killing.
Unbidden a memory surfaced for her like a dumpling in a boiling cook pot.
“That ragged, foreign prophet!” she cried. “The one the priests threw out of the city five summers back! He prophesied bad angels seeking mortal women for their wives, offering them occult knowledge, and breeding giants on them! Isn’t an ordinary baby big enough, when you’re kneeling on the birth-bricks, feeling as if you’re about to split open?”
She clutched her infant to her, and ducked under his wing towards the house, shouting: “Begone! Begone!” The poker out of reach, she threw the nearest possible weapon, a pot containing vinegar. It smashed against the brick wall as Azubel flapped upwards and out of the way.
Pandemonium!—the baby wailed, the hens clucked hysterically, the older children woke, shrieking. On the wall was now a stain, spreading like blood.
“Go to sleep,” she said to all and general, including her nosy neighbors. “It was just a nightmare.”
From far above, Azubel watched the scene in the courtyard, like a common Babylon market toy, a child’s clay model of a house, in miniature. Why did these mortals get things so wrong? He could have had her then and there, but for the wretched, flea-bit, self-styled prophet Enoch, for whom stoning out of Babylon was clearly too good.
Nonetheless, he would return.
Immortals being somewhat careless with time, the waiting period he allowed for her to reflect on his offer stretched into years. When he found Tapputi again, there were silver strands in her hair, and gold hung from her ears and neck. Her mortar and pestle were metal now, high quality. Even her house was in a better quarter, larger, with extra rooms built onto the roof and courtyard. For extra children, he supposed. He tallied her offspring, noting a difference between the older ones, lanky and half-grown, alike as lentils except for their slight differences in height. The younger were chubby, unformed, but cast from a slightly different mold. He guessed she had not married again for looks, and these additions were cute in the way of all small children, but distinctly homely. And there were only two of them, spaced well apart. A plain but considerate man sired them?
In the market, her former sisters-in-law sold her perfumes, from a larger, well-situated stall, helped by her eldest son. She had clearly kept them on her side, yet out of her hair. Most days she worked at home, except when making special deliveries, not only to the temple of Aruru, but also the major houses of worship of Marduk and Ishtar. The reason why occupied most of her courtyard: a huge tinaru with appendages of copper and glass.
Behold a new thing in the world—a distillery, for taking the raw matter of flowers, boiling them, condensing the vapor and extracting the essential oils. And she had done it all by herself! Azubel felt a glow of pride at the aptness of his choice, the untutored intelligence of his prospective pupil. What else might she be capable of, when bonded with him? The possibilities stretched out in his mind: alternate Babylons, a Mesopotamian empire that would never fall. Yes, that was one way he could buy this woman, so capable at abstract as well as practical thought. But also he knew he had to engage her feelings, be personal, for a true marriage of minds and much more.
Alchemical, he nearly added, though that word will not come into existence for over a thousand years, and not in all the possible timelines that stretch like a web from Babylon to the future. The Arabic article added to the ancient Egyptian word khem, its hieroglyph recurring through papyrus tracts on the arcana of embalming, glass and dye making, metallurgy, all practices which mingled heavily with magic. From al-chemy derived, eventually, chemistry, Azubel’s specialty, the art of elements and their interactions. A great knowledge, two-edged, dangerous: it could reveal the secrets of the cosmos, or turn humans destructively on each other. The choice was theirs—the temptation of power, the real story behind Adam and Eve.
They got it badly wrong there, he thought, as humans always seemed to do. Consider the prophet Enoch and his fable of giant babies, which had so unnerved Tapputi. Catching a rumor, a whisper, of Azubel and his fellows, during his mad wanderings through the Middle East, he wove a tale from it. Enoch’s words gained currency, were recorded in writing, part of the swirling mass of words slowly forming what would someday become the Bible. Through the luck of history and its stories, the book of Enoch failed to become part of the Biblical canon, though it had more than a grain of truth to it, unlike most tales of gods and men. Enoch raved of a host of fallen angels teaching women secret knowledge, black arts: the manufacture of cosmetics to enhance sexual allure; enameling; dye making. In return the angels gained sexual favors, human wives. Enoch was a misogynist, forever blaming women for his misfortunes, his impotence. Azubel knew better: temptations were for either gender, and women were not particularly easy. In his chance rare encounters with other spirits, he had heard far more boasts about beautiful bright boys.
Alchemical marriage: where two elements unite, or the earthly and the spiritual, to produce something much, much finer—like gold. What might he and Tapputi make together, if she would just give in to him, accept his proposal?
As he had done before, he watched and followed her, waiting for the chance to reveal himself. It came on a day she had dressed with particular care, with a basket prepared of wares for her best clients, the temples. Her older children were capable enough to mind the youngsters, but as she was almost outside the house, the littlest girl threw herself at her mother, insisting on accompanying her. Tapputi could have disentangled herself with a slap, leaving someone else to deal with the ensuing tantrum. Instead she let the little hands stay clinging to her skirts, the chubby feet follow her.
Her destination was the great temple of Ishtar, goddess of love and war, perched atop its ziggurat, an artificial mountain reaching for the sky. He watched from above as she entered, climbing the steps slowly, her speed hampered by her child. Finally she stopped on a flat mezzanine that was slowly being turned into a garden space. Here she set down her basket, and engaged in a long negotiation with a young, fat, bedizened priestess. The little girl first sat by, docile, then wandered off to investigate the green waving plants. Azubel plucked a small feather from the underside of his wing, and blew it into the child’s path. As she stretched her hand out for it, he blew again, sending it out of reach. So ensued a pouncing, leaping chase. Tapputi could hardly stop it, as the haggling had reached its critical phase. Even the priestess was beginning to look puzzled: where did that raptor feather come from, and on a still day, too! Until came the moment when he sent the feather soaring over a thick cluster of infant date palms. The child leapt to catch it, tripped on landing—and fell headlong over the edge.
It was not far to fall, but enough to break young unformed bones, leave a cripple.
He soared downwards, and just as the child was about to hit the hard courtyard bricks, scooped her up in his arms—And hovered, just above the ground, giving Tapputi and the priestess, who had rushed to the edge and stood peering agonizedly over, a full view.
He dropped the child, who landed on her two bare feet, and immediately burst into ear-splitting wails. Stray worshippers and temple slaves rushed toward her, oblivious to him. Such a lucky child, to fall and not be hurt! He trod air, above the cries and coos. Up above, Tapputi would be rushing too, except that the priestess had fainted heavily into her arms. All she could do was glare at him.
Her gaze mingled anguish and fury but part of it said: You again!
Working at night had started for Tapputi from dire need: child-free time! Then it had become habit, a time and place that was hers alone, where she could think and experiment. So as usual, that night, under the bowl of moon and stars, Tapputi tended her still. Beside her sat her eldest daughter, old enough now to watch and learn—until the long hours of darkness became too much for her, and her head drooped onto her mother’s knee.
“Now we can talk,” she said, to the creature again watching from her wall.
The great bird-head inclined softly in agreement. She could nearly have fainted herself, to see her child in the arms of the demon; although her mother-love was powerful enough to propel her over the roof herself, to grapple with the creature, even if she fell in a heap of shattered bones. Instead she had been forced to attend to an arm-load of heavy priestess. She had half-expected the demon to shoot up and away, stealing the child as a delayed revenge for her refusal. But to deposit her safely, before making his exit? Beware of the supernatural granting favors, for something is always asked in return.
It was like her haggling with the priestess all over again, she thought. An introductory offer had been made, a show of apparent good faith. Now she would have to respond, counter if necessary.
“Am I in debt to you since you rescued my child?”
“Assuredly,” came that voice, never unpleasant in her ears, and even more so now she had reason to feel gratitude to it.
“I am married again, you know.”
“That I know.” It was hard to read that voice, but it sounded amused.
“Does not the code of Hammurabi the all-wise decree that an adulteress be thrown in the Euphrates, tied to her lover? You with your wings could just fly away, and I would drown.”
“If tied to me, you would rise on my wings . . . ”
With anyone else, she would snort: a likely story! But she had seen those wings in action, their strength and, she imagined, their softness, like a scentless petal.
“I believe you,” she finally responded.
“In any case, my proposal is not for an earthly marriage.”
She almost laughed. “Thank the gods for that! What would a woman do with two husbands at once? Double the trouble and never any peace!”
She cocked her head, listening to the sound of breathing from the room with the marriage bed, where her husband lay alone. “Men get jealous. Old as he is, he would fight you, though he could not put up more than a child’s fight.”
“So you did get the good husband you deserved? A Dumuzi for your Ishtar?”
“Divine love is for the gods. Or for your children.” She reached down and stroked her daughter’s hair.
His head turned, he preened a wing feather with his beak.
Male vanity! she thought.
“I got a man quiet and calm. Kind, even. A coppersmith—he made the retort.”
“And I thought it all your own work.”
“Oh Tapputi, my grandmother, had some ideas in that line, experimented, as did Tapputi, my mother. And a cousin of mine, dead several summers back, got closer. But yes, mostly my own work, to make the most beautiful perfume.”
She knew she sounded prideful, but rightly so.
“Just as well—my husband can do little work now. He gets sore, can barely move some days. I make him salve, and I’m getting better with each batch I distill.”
“But not good enough,” he said.
The words hung in the air between them. In the silence, she listened to her husband again. She felt affection—but nothing more, not like in the hymns of Enheduanna that the Ishtar devotees sang.
“You mean, to cure him? Is that what you offer?”
“I can offer you an empire of knowledge.”
Tapputi knew haggling. At a crucial point the negotiator must show their goods, to prove their worth before any contract is entered into, even the riksum [marriage contract]. Very slowly, she edged her daughter’s head off her knee and onto a pillow of sacking stuffed with wool for carding and spinning.
“Show me! And then see if I’ll buy!”
“Bring your best incense, then!”
She darted to her storeroom, finding the leaf-wrapped packet by feel and smell in the darkness. Pausing only to throw her shawl over her head, she rejoined him. He swooped down, took her hand in his: a cool, dry, strong yet gentle grasp. Then he shot upwards again, she with him. Her plaits whipped around her, the fringes of shawl blew into her eyes, but she held her fragrant package tight. Their passage negotiated the lazy night breezes to the temple atop the ziggurat of Marduk, the chief god, the highest point in Babylon. Alighting on the flat roof he released her. Spread out before them was the city, the walls, the slow coils of the Euphrates, but also the darkness of the Mesopotamian plains.
“Why are we here?” she asked, adjusting her shawl.
“To see the future.”
“Divination?” She held the packet out to him.
“But not like any you know.” He was glancing down intently, and now he swooped again to the lower levels of the ziggurat. When he returned, he carried a brazier in one unprotected hand, the embers still glowing a dull red. Although her fingers were shaking, she had undone the leaves; now he took the incense from her, and threw all of it into the brazier. Dense, sweet-smelling smoke surrounded them, obscuring the stars above them, and below, all the world she knew, her Babylon. He took her hand again, and as if the moon had risen, the smoke lightened around them, to daylight, though it was hours away. His other hand moved as if he wove, like a woman at her loom.
“What are you doing?”
“There are lines here that lead to Babylon’s futures. But they break, fork, rejoin . . . ”
Futures, she thought. More than one. From the look of it, his weavings were not easy work. His muscles tensed, he clicked his beak irritably. Slowly around them shapes formed, at first as inchoate as any smoky whorl that a diviner could read to have meaning. Then she gasped, as the shapes suddenly solidified into the clarity of the experienced, either in the waking world or in the dream. They looked down on Babylon in dawn light, its great gates closed, the walls bristling with armed men. Towards the city advanced the chariots and spears of an advancing army.
“As beautiful as an army with banners,” he said. “Except if they are someone else’s army. Have you ever heard of King Sennacherib of the Assyrians? Your children’s children’s children will. He will come like a wolf upon the sheepfold, to sack and burn Babylon.”
She flinched a moment, yet kept her grip on his strong hand.
“Now watch what you could do about it, if you had the power of Khemeia.”
A crack, as from the walls, lightning struck, again and again, at the Assyrian king in the leading chariot. It knocked him sideways and onto the earth, scorched and dead.
“Tapputi, you could command that lightning, if you say the word. You have all the ingredients here for it, if you knew how to mix them, make the transformation into exploding fire.”
“War is the goddess Ishtar’s work,” she said.
“She is also the goddess of love.”
Tapputi hesitated. Under their feet was the temple roof. They were within the confines of a holy place, and any apparent impiety could be fatal, even with a lamassu at her side.
“I worship the gods of Babylon, that is only right. I sell my incense in the temples of Ishtar and Marduk, to glorify their names. But I wear the talismans of Aruru, the divine Mother and Maker.”
“So?”
“So war is not for me. And my perfumes are not made as love-charms, either.”
“What do you want, then?”
“Show me your salves instead! Show me how I can cure my husband, save my daughters from the pains of childbirth, stop the river fever!”
He could have thrown his raptor head back and screamed, but that would have alerted her to the difficulty of her request. Teaching her how to make gunpowder to use against the Assyrians was easy in comparison: the Babylonians already refined one necessary ingredient, saltpeter. But medicine of the sort Tapputi craved—anesthetics, the antibiotics that would cure her husband, or the quinine to prevent Babylon’s epidemics of malaria—would happen nearly two millennia in the future. The timelines were, as much as they could be, consistent as to the date. To summon such far visions would be to negotiate a web of possibilities, in which each year created more complexity: anything could happen, mostly disastrous for his purposes.
He probed, near the limits of his abilities, and struck gold: a hospital in Babylon that he could show Tapputi. It was far in the future, but a facility fully equipped, at the cutting edge of its times’ medicine. Though he could only dimly perceive it, he pulled as hard as he could, bringing the vision into view. The mists re-formed, and the Mesopotamian plain came into view again, this time in the glare of midday. Now they seemed to hang in open air, no ziggurat below them, nor a city. Instead was desert, a mix of ruins and furious activity, as an army made a semi-permanent camp.
“Tents,” she said. “Like the desert nomads.”
To one side was what had drawn him to this future, the mobile field hospital, but her gaze had seized on the great war-vehicles, bigger than elephants, that propelled themselves across the sand. Ancient paving and brickwork cracked beneath them. Others, equipped with shovels at their fronts, dug into the ruins with the force of a hundred laborers, instantly making trenches, defensive positions. Men wearing clothes as pied as beasts—ochre, brown, sandy—rode the war-vehicles, shouted directions.
“These are soldiers? No armor, and dressed like barbarians! And so pale, like those slaves sent in tribute from the north, whose language nobody could understand.”
As if in response, a soldier below took off his helmet, to reveal bronze-colored hair, and skin as pale as fresh milk. He wiped his brow, kicked a pebble at his feet. It flipped, revealing bird-scratches of text: cuneiform.
Tapputi drew her breath in a hard gasp. “Where are we?”
“On the site of Hammurabi’s Babylon.”
“Have they no respect for the law? For the great law-giver?”
“About as much as the Assyrians.”
She had closed her eyes tight. “I don’t want this vision! Send it away!”
Easier said than done, he thought, for the waft and web of the far future entangled them in a complex knot, from which numberless possibilities diverged. He tried to feel his way back, cautiously, but the scene of martial desecration remained fixed in front of them. He let go of Tapputi, to use both his hands; she opened her eyes, staring at him. It felt as if he, a divine being, had no more power than a fly caught in a spider’s snare. Angry, he struggled, at first cautiously, then desperately, with all his strength.
A line snapped, freeing them, but at the same time sending them tumbling through clouds of incense and fleeting visions. He was just able to grab Tapputi’s shawl, pulling her into his arms as they flapped through scene after scene of this unwanted future Mesopotamia.
—Another of the huge war-vehicles, attached with rope to the enormous statue of a broad shouldered, mustached man, pulling at it, trying to drag it down. A small crowd watched: recognizably Mesopotamian, with their dark hair and eyes, their olive skin.
“Why do these men look like Babylonians but dress like barbarians?” Tapputi cried.
With a crash the statue toppled, falling to the paving and cracking.
“Their god must have abandoned the city, to allow such impiety! Pulling down his statue!”
“He was . . . their king.”
Same thing, her gaze said. He dipped his wings, towing her away from this vision and straight into another, in which a convoy of war-vehicles lumbered along a narrow city street. From an alleyway shot a smaller vehicle, small as a chariot, in it a young man, silent, intent, his lips moving in prayer. He struck the leading war vehicle head-on, and moments later both ignited in a massive explosion, a fiery cloud that mixed with the holy incense so densely it even obscured the tips of Azubel’s wings. Tapputi screamed and Azubel turned, desperate to get them away from this malign future. He saw a gap in the smoke, a point of what might be starlight, and headed for it as fast as he could fly. Night, blessed peace, and old Babylon— prosperous, intact, and sleeping.
At the top of the ziggurat of Marduk again, he released her. The brazier had been kicked over, igniting the trailing fringes of Tapputi’s skirt. She snuffed out the smoldering wool, her eyes wide with the witnessed horror.
“That chariot, the one that charged. The young man in it looked like my eldest son, grown into adulthood.”
Down the generations, Azubel knew, Tapputi’s line would persist in Mesopotamia. But better for her not to think her distant descendant might have exploded into flame before her eyes.
“And what happened to him! It was worse than the Assyrian! Was it your Khemeia too?”
“Its descendant.” Petrochemicals . . . She was silent, biting her lip.
“Take me home,” she said. “To my house, before the sun rises. I must tend my still, and when my children wake, make their breakfast. You can keep your lightning and your Khemeia. I want nothing of it.”
He had hoped for a bridal flight from her. Now, her hand in his again, he flew her down to her home, the courtyard. She lifted her daughter to her feet, holding the half-awake child, her eyes still drooping, in a fierce embrace. And watched him as he flew away.
He did not forget Tapputi the remaining decades of her life, but kept his distance from Babylon. He returned to Egypt, tried to shake their obsession with embalming without success. Then, because she would always be a wavelength, be attuned to him, he heard an unmistakable call from her.
He found her this time in the royal palace, in a room of her own, the door guarded by courtiers and her zealous female descendants. In the anteroom mourners were preparing for a major funeral, in rehearsal. They prostrated themselves as the King of Babylon was ushered out, having made his farewell to the greatest perfumer in the world.
He slipped past, and into her presence. She lay on a simple bedstead, but wearing all her gold jewelry. She was old now, but like a date, the wrinkles were merely a surface decoration for the great sweetness within.
He sat beside the bed, folding his wings neatly behind him.
“I did tell you the King of Babylon would want your perfumes.”
She smiled, that crooked tooth again.
“Better than any divination. I even was appointed palace overseer for perfume. With an assistant to help me.”
Though there never was the meeting of two minds between them, still they were pleased to see each other.
“Did anybody buy your lightning?”
“Not in this time. There was, Tapputi, nobody like you.”
“I was widowed several summers after I last saw you. He died in great pain, with my hand in his.”
He reached out, similarly took her withered little paw.
“He said I was the best wife a Babylonian could have. Because I was faithful when I could have saved him?”
“I could have given you more than lightning. You know that.”
“But then I would not have done what I did all by myself!”
“And you did achieve much. Your fame will last forever.” He will ensure—as Babylon is burnt by the Assyrians, and built up again, to face yet another set of conquerors—that in the mess of cuneiform tablets one will survive, with the name of Tapputi, the perfumer. The first distiller, and thus, the first chemist.
“It was all I wanted.” She breathed, her voice becoming tired. “Not that I wasn’t tempted by your knowledge. Or you. You were ever the most beautiful thing I saw.”
A long silence, her breaths coming far apart now, and shallow.
“Can I touch your wing?”
In answer, he stroked it across her face. That smile again.
“Now that I have no time to use it, can I know about the lightning? And other, more peaceful knowledges you might know?”
“Is this a proposal?”
“If you want it to be so, from an old woman, then yes.” Even near extremis, she could surprise him. He wrapped his wings around her, moving so that his beak was just above her own hooked nose, and her open lips. She gazed up into his eyes, gave a faint nod. He put his beak to her lips, then struck deep into her mind. In this deep kiss, the real alchemical marriage, the union of minds, knowledge passed between them, his tirhatum [bride price], her sheriqtum [dowry]. She gave him her life, in ancient Mesopotamia, the transient—yet because of that, the most intense—joy: a small girl gazing into the heart of her first flower and inhaling its scent; running alongside the Euphrates, her shawl flowing behind her like a sail; the sight of her firstborn’s wet, wrinkled face; the moment of pure pleasure when her distillery began to work. He in turn gave her what it would take nearly two millennium to discover, the intricate sequence of the elements: hydrogen, helium, all the way to thorium, uranium, and beyond. A great knowledge given freely to the only mind of her era that could appreciate it.
One of these elements could have been named after Tapputi. No matter, too late now. There was a little blood on her lips, but her expression was peaceful, replete. He laid her small, heavy head down, the eyes closed, and took his leave.
Much later, the High Priestess of Ishtar—fat no longer, and also an old woman—found, when preparing the body of her friend, the great perfumer, for burial, a feather clasped in Tapputi’s hand. It had a faint, indefinable, sweet, even heavenly scent. And as the priestess gaped at it, the feather vanished from view.
Lucy Sussex was born in New Zealand. She has edited four anthologies, including She’s Fantastical (1995), shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Her award-winning fiction includes books for younger readers, and the novel, The Scarlet Rider (1996, to be reprinted 2014). She has five short story collections, My Lady Tongue, A Tour Guide in Utopia, Absolute Uncertainty, Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies (a “best of”), and Thief of Lives. Currently she reviews weekly for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Her latest project is Victorian Blockbuster: Fergus Hume and “The Mystery of a Hansom Cab” (forthcoming).