Daughters of Babylon (28 page)

Eleanor did as she was asked and returned with a small lacquered box.

“Open it, please.”

Wrapped in fleece was a silver brooch, a seahorse inlaid with ruby, sapphire and diamond. It was the seahorse worn by the woman who came to Eleanor in the flooding ship.

“This was your grandfather’s first gift to me. He said he dreamed of seahorses for weeks before we met. Now it is your time for dreaming.”

Eleanor folded her fingers around the brooch and pressed it to her heart. “Thank you.”

“There is one other thing before you bring me those beautiful great-granddaughters. My name.”

“Your name? I have never known it.”

“That is because the carrion pickers, the Blessed Eugene vultures who deplore the womb and joys of life, are already ensuring that the beloved of William, Guillaume IX of Aquitaine, is lost to history. Names have power, Álienor. Identities have power, and none more so than to those who own them fully. They will try to do the same to you. You must keep your name and identity strong. Be remembered, and keep this place,
Reine du Ciel
, safe in your heart for when the pyres across Europe start burning.”

“I shall do everything in my power,
Mamie
.”

“I know you will. And now, my name.”

“Is it safe for you to utter?”

“Oh, yes. It is a simple name, one that would have caused far less trouble than the epithet they gave me. I am called Rivette, the little shore.”

On the eastern shore of Isla Mujeres, off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, the Nagual Lupo Sanchez held up his infant son Ívano, both of them facing the ocean, and pronounced:

This is who you are!

You are the Dawn of Life

who chased the Sun to where

she hid in the Cave of Shadows

afraid of her own heat

with the message,
‘Rise! Rise!’

Ívano wriggled his naked bottom, arched his strong, brown back and sent a golden stream arcing high into the Atlantic. The shudder of pleasure when he was done reverberated through his father’s arms, down his torso and legs to the heart of Mother Earth, who smiled.

“Well done, Papucho.”

Lupo laid the boy, ten kilos now of sweet fat and dimples, onto a
rebozo
woven in deep rainbow stripes. He turned, squatted, and lifted him, sling-like, onto his back, then wrapped the long cloth around and up over his shoulders in the manner that travelers of the People of the Essence had been doing since they were first storied into Being. He walked to the café/general store, Manuelita’s, that served as the local post office and asked the kind proprietress who gave them leftover
frijoles
, tortillas, and canned milk at the end of the day, “Anything?”

Manuelita pulled out a drawer from behind the counter and riffled through the same General Delivery envelopes that had been there yesterday. “I’m sorry, Lupo.
No hay nada
.”

From Isla Mujeres, they ferried to Cancún and from there, walked south through the province of Quintana Roo, hitching rides sometimes on flatbed trucks carrying sugar cane or in station wagons driven by pale missionaries with blond, freckled children. On the day that the former appointments secretary to President Richard Nixon testified at the Watergate hearings, Lupo and Ívano arrived at Santa Rita Corozal in northern Belize. He carried Ívano up twenty-two stairs of a Mayan pyramid between stone effigies of helmeted beings with flat snouts and heavy-lidded eyes and said:

This is who you are!

You are
jabalí
, Wild Boar

who parts the grasses that bow

and flutter in subservience to Wind

and knowing you are servant

to none, cry out, “
See! See!
”

In Palenque, Lupo descended with Ívano twenty-five meters into the Temple of the Inscriptions to the tomb of the great poet-king Pakal, where nine dynastic guardians stood watch and spoke on behalf of the guardians:

This is who you are!

You are Jaguar of the silent

paws and twitching whiskers who

travels the corridors of Nagual to the

hearts of the bewildered and

counsels, ‘
Hear! Hear!
’

For over seven months, Lupo and his son had traveled with no possessions, not even his machete, a circuit of 2200 miles from La Venta, center of the Olmec heartland on the Gulf of Mexico, northeast to Isla Mujeres, sloping downward through ancient Mayan centers in a boomerang shape toward the Zapotec kingdoms, northwest through jungles held by land-reform rebels to the Toltec power sites of Teotihuacán and Tula. They were on their second lap; Lupo had worn through eleven pairs of huarache sandals. Ívano had sprouted eight teeth and outgrown three clothing sizes. Still, there was no news from home.

In Monte Albán, greatest of the Zapotec cities, high above the Oaxaca Valley, Lupo and Ívano circumnavigated the Great Plaza along an unmarked oval, and Lupo said:

This is who you are!

You are Black Road, rift

of the Milky Way, from

between your great Void the

game of Life spills out, and you

remind us, ‘
Laugh! Laugh
!’

At the volcano of Popocatepetl, after a two-month trudge through the jungles of Puebla where both father and son caught and walked off malaria, Lupo rocked his sleeping boy, looked up at the snow-capped peak, and said:

This is who you are!

You are Smoking Mountain

consort to Iztaccihuatl, defender

of peace, volcano of passion

who serenades his beloved

tenderly, ‘
Sing! Sing!
’

In the city of Puebla, a street vendor gave each of them a cup of iced
horchata
, a milky drink of ground melon seeds, because Ívano was such a delight to behold—“
Mexicano guapito, tú eres
bonito!
”—the vendor was still singing his jingle as they walked away, slurping their drinks. In the central post office, Lupo set his barefoot son on the cool tiled floor, Ívano could stand now, and asked the clerk to check General Delivery for mail addressed to Lupo Sanchez. The young man retreated to a room behind the grille and emerged with a postcard of painted clay pots in the Veracruz market. It was written in English with a green ball-point pen and dated yesterday.

Dearest Nagual
,

Dely has returned to us. She is sitting up and eating bean soup and wants to know when her two favourite “muchachos” are coming home. Everyone is well. Bill says hi!

Your friend, Karin Albrechtsson

Silvina learned that she was homeless at Moulin l’Internet, a cybercafé that used to be a flour mill in St. Jacques de la Rivière. The massive stone wheel that once ground wheat, oats, and barley into flour for pilgrims and residents of
Reine du Ciel
now lay flat in the center of the turret-shaped café, with computer carrels like slices of a bundt cake around its perimeter. A century-old gingko biloba tree grew from the hole in the middle of the wheel toward the high vaulted ceiling, spreading its branches amidst the filtered light of stained glass windows. The acoustics of the café, which might have been mellifluous with two violas and a cello, amplified and threw back Silvie’s cell phone conversation with Midfield Property Management like an out-of-tune bell choir.

“I didn’t fill out-
out-out
the form,” Silvie and her echo were saying to Hello-my-name-is-Jessica in Toronto, who’d put her on hold five times and cut her off twice, “because I’m in the Pyrenees-
ees-ees
and I’ve been offline. I have not been ignoring your messages-
ges-ges
.”

Three windows were open on her laptop screen. One was the yellow MPM Claims for Damages pdf; another was a slide show from the
Toronto Star
, dated three days ago, entitled, “100-year Storm Deluges Toronto”. Two Australian backpackers halfway round the wheel were scrolling through the same slide show, thanks to Silvie having gasped, “What do you mean, flooded? I live on the twenty-seventh floor!” and were joking about the ambiguous headline—“A hundred years, that’s a lotta rain, mate!”

Silvie had stopped the slide show at image 14 of 68. It was an aerial shot taken from a helicopter over Lake Ontario of a needle-shaped highrise during the worst of the storm’s pummeling. The plate glass walls that reflected cerulean blue on clear days were gunmetal gray, except for one jagged, apartment-sized hole, black as a rotted tooth, halfway up the building into which the Great Lakes storm was pouring her meanest. The photographer would go on to win awards; he had even captured fork lightning as it pierced the building’s basement like a javelin from Thor.

The third open window on Silvie’s screen was an email from Jack, a personal claims lawyer she used to date, offering to represent her in the class action being filed against MPM, the builders, engineers, architects, and City Hall. The inundation of Silvie’s condo had damaged thirty-two other suites and exposed structural flaws in the two-year-old highrise that promised to keep Jack and his peers luxuriating in billable hours for the next decade.

“Yes, of course, I will fill out the form now that I have it, but it’s going to take me a few hours. I can’t see what’s been thrown into a Toronto Dumpster from here, can I?” Silvie hit the print button. “Yes, I understand the flooded storage unit is a separate claim.” Four copies. A printer across the room hummed to life.

It didn’t much matter that she’d woken up with a sinking feeling on an otherwise glorious day, or that her eyes were drawn obsessively to the eight stained glass windows that divided the café into quadrants and again, shooting ever-shifting beams of ruby, emerald, sapphire, and citrine into the room like a kaleidoscope. Round and round she swiveled, phone to ear, taking in the knights and ladies dancing, feasting, and making merry in sloped meadows ablaze with wild flowers. In every second window there was a queen, probably Eleanor of Aquitaine, a circlet of gold in her strawberry-flaxen waves, wearing simple gowns of lavender and pale rose. In the window closest to Silvina, the queen stood beside her throne, one hand resting on the back, the other pressed to her lower belly, head thrown back in an expression of rapture, unassailable joy.

The call to MPM finally ended, Silvie turned off the phone. She typed a quick reply to Jack. “Thank you for taking the lead on this. Do, please, set things into motion. I’ll be checking messages at least twice a day.” She saved the aerial image of the home she’d lived in for only fourteen months before the Toulouse gig came up and shut down the computer.

Silvie was coming around the mill wheel with the printed documents when the café door burst open and a woman came through. She wore parrot earrings and wooden bangles on thin, deeply tanned arms and a bright orange dress. She was carrying a clipboard.

“Are you Silvina Kestral?”

“I am.”

“Thank God! Toinelle pointed out your car, said to look for a woman who looked like the queen. I thought she meant Elizabeth. What do I know? I’m from California!”

The Royal Palace
Paris, France
AUGUST, 1151 A.D.

Eleanor stood naked before a full-length oval mirror, arms extended at shoulder height, hands and fingers draping loose. Bilqees stood behind her, bare midriffed, in a deep blue divided skirt of the
harram
and a bustier ornamented with small silver coins that jingled and lifted the pomegranate smoothness of her breasts. Her fingers rested lightly on the Queen’s pelvic bones.

“We haven’t even begun,” Eleanor said, “and I already feel like we’re sinning.”

Bilqees slid her middle fingers inward along the smile of Eleanor’s lower abdominal muscles, then back again to her hips, down a finger’s length and along the tops of her thighs until they met at the springy-haired Y-juncture. Eleanor felt a tingle along the lines she had drawn like baby birds nipping.

“This is your sacred cradle,” said Bilqees, “from which all movement, measurement, and thought begin. In my culture, we begin training these muscles from the age of three, adding archery, poetry and sciences as the muscles strengthen.” She cupped her hands at Eleanor’s hips. “Now, lift up from the waist, pulling in your breath. That’s it, very good.”