Daughters of Babylon (32 page)

She untied the string from the top bundle and took out the first few notebooks, dated April-June, 1975. She sat crosslegged on the floor and leafed through them, recognizing a girlish version of Blythe’s every-which-way handwriting.

She quickly took out another two or three bundles, and felt again that strange sense of a solid highway line, no passing, drawn through the middle of her. On this side, all the traffic of Silvina’s ordinary—and come on, girl, give yourself some credit!—successful life motored on, including her twenty-year association and friendship with a woman considered by
Fortune 500
to be the 128th most influential entrepreneur in the world.

In all those years, Silvina had never seen Blythe read anything that wasn’t a financial report, newspaper, or business magazine. On the other side of the solid line, where Silvie couldn’t go, was a woman forty years younger who tended apricot trees and hoed zucchini and called herself a Daughter of Babylon. And from the look of every notebook Silvina had skimmed, so far, the only thing “boh”, Blythe o’ the Haggerty, wrote was poetry.

Friday morning at sunrise, the Moulin d’Internet had no other customers but Silvie. She sat before her laptop on the mill wheel, beneath the gingko biloba with an extra-large coffee nearby. The divided highway sensation had not gone away. A part of her was certain she’d stayed awake all night reading Blythe’s journals. She also had a memory of joining the Navarrosa poets at their bonfire around midnight, sitting beside Gavriel on a log, their thighs touching, aware of eyes like lightning bugs flitting in the darkness, fixed on both of them. But when she woke, spread-eagled, on the top of the covers, she was still in the tear-stained blouse and grubby shorts she wore for hauling and packing. It was the kind of dislocation she’d suffered often as a kid, when doctors wanted to medicate but her grandmother refused. “It’s just growing pains. Let her be.”

Typing emails, Silvina ached in every joint. To Blythe, she forced enthusiasm:
I found what you’ve been asking for. Many volumes, in good shape! Awaiting direction. Thanks, Sil

To Dr. Shirazi:
I’ve finished crating the art and history books that belong to you. Total weight, more than eighty kilos. Please advise on where and how you’d like them shipped. All best, etc.

The Delivery Failure message appeared within seconds. She checked the email address for Dr. Shirazi that had pulled up automatically against the one she kept in her BlackBerry. They were the same and appeared correct. She resent the message to an address attached to Tel-Hemat, his archeological dig in Iraq. Again:
This message cannot be delivered. Account unknown.

Silvina’s sandaled feet were freezing and her fingernails blue, although the cybercafé wasn’t cold. She felt an overwhelming urge to shut down her computer and hit the road, testing the limits of her pretty yellow Lexus. She Googled the Tel-Hemat website. The banner photo of terraced ruins in desert appeared within seconds. The headline on the cover page read:
Has the original Tower of Bab-El been found?
There was a sidebar photo of a much younger, smiling Dr. Shirazi holding up a clay goddess figurine with the caption, “5000-year-old Inanna oversees restoration of her Temple.” Clicking through the pages, the latest updates Silvina could find, in the form of,
this comment has been deleted
—they’d all been deleted—had been posted three years ago.

Keep going. Keep going. Returning to the Google home page, she typed in the text box, Dr. Tariq Shirazi, and held her coffee mug with both hands. The name brought up more than half a million hits, but the first, from the archives of
The New
York
Times,
was enough to wield the blow that Silvina had felt coming in her bones:

Death of Esteemed Archeologist Confirmed…arrested by Saddam Hussein for espionage during the first Gulf War, convicted, imprisoned in Baghdad. Diplomatic efforts to secure his release unsuccessful. In 2006…transferred to an undisclosed location where he died from untreated wounds inflicted during torture...excavations at Tel-Hemat, Shirazi’s lifelong passion, believed by many to be the site of the original Tower of Babel, have been bulldozed.

The obituary was six years old.

Daughters of Babylon

I know a place

of resolution, of repose

whereupon a Queen

may lay her burdens

down and from their roots

observe a freshening

orchard, brooks of silver

trout and deer, fair leaping

where the man she lovéd

into being takes her hand

and walks in tranquil

dawn beside her.

—“Rubielo de la Cérida”,
A rubā’ī of Ceres, authorship
uncertain, attributed to
E. of Aquitaine

Talmont Castle
Duchy of Aquitaine
MAY, A.D. 1173

The clouds were moving in like galleons under full sail from the west—tall-masted thunderheads, bruised purple and pewter-gray, thinly outlined in crimson. Eleanor stood at the cliff’s edge, overlooking the cove. The tide was going out. The dense razor grass of the dunes, waterlogged an hour ago, was now wind-pressed toward the hillside, blades rippling like lute strings.

The queen paced back and forth along the shoulder-height wall of the castle’s private courtyard, outside the battlements. The thin fabric of her headdress swirled and slapped, refusing to stay pinned. Holding the linen at her throat, she worked the strategies and counter-plans again and again through her mind until they blurred, until they liquefied, then fear rushed in and she could not remember them at all. At last, she heard the stout oak door open, and she swung around.

“Thank God!”

The knight with touches of gray in his dark hair bowed. “Milady.”

Eleanor rushed into Arturo’s arms, as if he were the embodiment of sea come to greet her. Solid and broad-shouldered, born to a fisherman, the son of Compostelle, he was a knight, after all, to St. James. “I thought you wouldn’t come. I feared they’d set an ambush.”

“Be calm,” he said. “We routed a few, they were skirmishes of children, but I am here, and all is well.” He ran his hands along her back, briskly at first to warm her, and then with slower strokes from shoulders to waist, to the dip of her lower back and rising.

They kissed each other’s cheeks and mouth, a hungry fervent planting, never stopping long enough to test the heat or depth, knowing only both were there; and with that same synchrony, they let go at the same moment, hands sliding the length of each other’s arms until only eyes and fingers clasped. A court dance, wordless.

“I feared the same for you,” Arturo said. “The castle looked deserted when I rode up, no banners flying. When the servant let me in, I saw no fires had been lit. I began to think it was a trap, and they already had you.”

“Come, let us talk where the wind will not blow our words to Montpellier.” She led him to a stone bench built against the wall. They sat with hands in laps, knees pressed against each other’s, shoulders folded in like a single heart.
We are a single heart
, Arturo had once written in a poem. “How was your journey to
Reine du Ciel
?” Eleanor asked. “Has Cati settled in?”

“The roads are in desperate need of repair. We had to abandon the carriages at Foix and travel the rest of the way by horseback. The lay sisters welcomed us; the priory is holding its own after a harsh winter. Catarina seemed lost at first—she has been your lady for so long—but after a day or two, she started catching on to the rituals and routines.”

“Will there be horses for her to ride?”

“Oh, yes. They have stables, and miles and miles of pasture, as you know.”

“Then our Catarina will make an excellent prioress. It relieves me to know at least one of us is beyond the reach of madness.”

“I wouldn’t underestimate the reach of anything,” Arturo said. “I spent a few days in Cerabornes and then with the shepherds—the Basques have introduced a new breed to the valley, long-haired ivory fleece. You would love them. Talk is, certain families in the village are allying themselves with Count Ramón, persuaded by the proximity of Toulouse and his friendship with your husband that he will deliver them from crippling taxes and conscription.”

“Deliver them? Do they not understand that the King of England views Aquitaine as the fattest of his sheep? Not for meat or wool, fairly bargained—that would be acceptable—but as veins to puncture and bleed, with Ramón his primary leech. And once the able-bodied men are bled away, Louis will march in with his French armies and grind what bones remain for mortar.”

“Some of them do understand. There are still old soldiers who remember, and Cathars who swear, by their various strange means, that your son, Richard
du Coeur Léonine
, is Duke Guillaume himself, transmigrated.”

“I like that idea. It sits well in my heart.” Eleanor smiled, tucking her headdress into place. “Sometimes I dream that Richard was our son, yours and mine. He has your patience, your gifts of word and song. He can charm pearls out of raindrops. How can a boy be so unlike his brothers, especially that insufferable young Henri?”

“I have had the same dream, Milady.”

She looked up at him. “Have you?”

He pressed her hand between both of his. “Many times.”

As recently as five months ago, Eleanor might have stepped onto the intoxicating pathway Arturo had always held open with its harmonies and sweet musics. Yes, she was a queen and married woman, fifty years of age, and she’d known Arturo de Padrón since he was a boy—more than thirty years now. And she cared not a whit for what people might say: there were plenty enough, enemies of her second husband or her first, or this or that disgruntled noble’s wife, who called her Mélusine, enchantress, demoness, and her progeny, the Devil’s Brood. Even Abbot Suger, may he rest far from here, would have regarded her dalliance with a knight, also bound in wedlock, as unsurprising. “The carnal lusts of women,” he loved preaching from the pulpit, “know no bounds.”

But she had not selected Talmont, her family’s summer home, to indulge in romantic fantasy. Rather, it was closest to the sea, if worse came to worst. It was a defunct court, remote, and of no interest to Henry, King of England, or Louis, King of France, who, incredibly, was now sheltering all four of Henry’s sons from their father in his Paris court. Talmont also lay deepest in the heart of Aquitaine among people who loved Eleanor as their Duchess, daughter of their soil, and paid allegiance to no other.

The crisis of loyalties, the heaps upon heaps of double deals and treachery, had reached their breaking point three months ago at Henry and Eleanor’s court in Limoges in eastern Aquitaine. The rare family gathering had begun with promise. Young Henri, 18-year-old future king of England and Normandy, had traveled from Anjou with his young wife, Margaret. Brothers Richard, 16, Geoffrey, 15, and John, 6, were present, and the long-anticipated occasion was a brokering of peace and betrothal for young John. Eleanor and Henry presided over tournaments and banquets almost like the happily married couple they had once been. No mistresses had come along; no mention was made of them.

Peace included a laying down of arms in Maurienne, a duchy in the Savoyard Alps east of Provence. Count Humbert, the ruler of Maurienne, positively glowed at being the center of attention in an assembly that brought great southern rivals: the king of Navarre, the king of Aragon-Barcelona, and Count Ramón of Toulouse, Eleanor’s cousin, a nobleman as ambitious as Humbert himself. The pièce de résistance was the proposal of marriage between Humbert’s daughter and six-year-old Prince John, youngest son of the English king.

The expressions of concord and homage became ever more elaborate over dinner in the Grand Hall, and Eleanor noted, with a twinge of maternal anxiety, how much young Henri, already Duke of Wales, Normandy, and Anjou, enjoyed being treated as the future king of England. At his court in Rouen, he was known mostly for debauchery, for endless tournaments, gaming and feasts that strained the coffers of his nobles who already paid exorbitant tributes to the elder Henry across the Channel.