Daughters of Babylon (41 page)

He nodded. “That is correct.”

“A bridge?” Blythe said. “Where?”

Silvina’s eardrums began to pound.

“Between the work of the Daughters of Babylon and the future,” said Gavriel. “Is that how the agreement was worded?”

“Precisely,” said Malvine. “I think we can agree, given the splendid unfolding of recent events that the bridge is built and looking sturdy. Gav, you will also recall that co-ownership was part of the deal.”

“As long as I agreed to the co-owner, yes.”

“She is, at the moment, sitting to your right. Silvie, in thanks for what you’ve achieved, the house is yours in perpetuity with Gavriel, if you’re interested.”

Silvina and Gavriel stared at one another. “Her?” he said, at the same time that she said, “Him?”

Blythe burst out laughing. “That is one hell of a negotiation, Karin, or whatever you said your name was.”

“You can both take time to think about it, of course.”

“I have no objections,” Gavriel said.

Silvina recalled the day she met the poet, when the attic stairs were down, blocking the bathroom. No, it was her last night in Toulouse when he stood in the rain—no, no, no! It was way, way before that. “Me neither,” she said. “As long as we fix those attic stairs.”

THREE YEARS LATER

The private jet, a refurbished DC-3, took off from the airport in Montego Bay and smoothly headed west toward Mexico. Sometimes, the plane was full of squealing happy children; it seated twenty-four plus crew comfortably. At the moment, there were only two passengers: Silvina and Gavriel, on their way to visit Las Cuevas, Veracruz. Gavriel was working on a poem.

“So how are the honeymooners?” he asked, without looking up from his laptop.

“Doing great, thanks. How’s the poetry?”

“Mmph?” He’d stuck a pen between his teeth and was looking something up in an enormous poetry reference book beside him.

“That good, huh?” She undid her seatbelt and reached under the seat for her carry-on.

“I’m working on a new form. The kids are gonna love it.”

She was certain they would. Gavriel Navarro had an enthusiasm for teaching poetry to children that had transformed him. His change in direction had been as dramatic as hers when she met Thomas Haggerty, fell crazily in love, and married him. Their two-week vacation in Jamaica with her beautiful stepkids, James and Rayna, had been a first anniversary gift from Grandma Blythe. From there, Tom and the kids would fly to Toronto, while she and Gavriel visited the first Mexican Navarrosa Centre for Poetry and the Arts in Business. The original school, now in its second semester, was a beautiful complex at Queen of Heaven built between the ruins with a cable car to Cerabornes and bike trails through sheep country to St. Jacques.

Gavriel had a special fondness for the Mexican school, built on the land that had once been the Delgado-Obregón sugarcane plantation. With the old colonial family bankrupted by falling sugar prices, their land destroyed by narco wars in the nineties,
El Centro Navarrosa
, a working plantation and school, was on its way to becoming the Latin American model for education and enterprise. All corporate clients who wished to attend the program, affiliated with Tri-Partite Academy and Full Spectrum Training, had to support a street kids program and a youth employment initiative, both for ten years. Queen of Heaven already had a three-year waiting list.

Silvina opened her tablet and scrolled through emails. “I have two pieces of happy news. Do you want to hear them now or later?”

“Now, of course.”

“Thanks to the influence of our Canadian poet friend, Alain C. Dexter, we’re going to have a Navarrosa Centre in northern Ontario, probably by next year.”

“Get out! Where, exactly?”

“My Dad’s old fishing lodge, Twice Past Sunset, is Crown land and available for leasing. It’s only a few hours from Brougham College where Alain teaches. He’s agreed to be a guest instructor. He even wrote a septrois to celebrate the venture.”

“Could I see?”

She handed him the tablet, knowing what would come next.

Gavriel pored over Alain’s message that was two-thirds business, one-third poem. “This is amazing. Septrois is one of the hardest poetic forms. If you don’t find the right seven-line host, it just sounds stupid.”

She laughed. “You poets, you’re all madmen.”

Next, from her carry-on, she brought out a flat rectangular box that held three smaller boxes nested in velvet. “These are from Olivier, the jeweler-hardware store owner in Cerabornes. They are only samples, but I think he’s done a great job, and they’re much more representative of the Navarrosa spirit than dead roses in plastic. Mine fell to powder, by the way.”

Now she had his attention. The silver lockets, heart-shaped, oval, and cartouche, rested on
rubielos de la Cérida
, written by Arturo de Padrón eight centuries ago.

“I asked Olivier to select his three favourite rubielos. I’d have probably chosen the same myself.”

Gavriel looked up, and his eyes shone with that deep woods intensity that always made her swoon a little. “I never imagined that Arturo’s words would be read again.”

“Read and loved, never to be forgotten.” She took back the tablet.

While she was in Jamaica, Silvina had downloaded a new app called “On This Day in History”. As the jet descended toward Veracruz, the latest post appeared in her Inbox:

On this day in 1189 CE, King Richard I of England, also known as Lionheart, released his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, after sixteen years imprisonment by her husband, Richard’s father, Henry II. Eleanor was sixty-seven and would live another fifteen years, working tirelessly for a better, kinder world.

“Thank you,” Silvie whispered, looking out across the turquoise Gulf of Mexico. “Thank you.”

Creating the meta-world of
Daughters of Babylon
has been a twenty-year adventure that began with sitting on a kitchen floor far from home and wailing, “I can’t do this anymore!” to a sunny August Saturday when the book, astonishingly, was finished. I would like to thank every person, place, and circumstance that brought me to this Saturday, and single out a few, in particular.

Many books have been written about Eleanor of Aquitaine, and a surprising number of letters to the queen of France, and later England, survive 800 years after writing, most of them chastisements at her behaviour by humourless clerics and scholars. To our great fortune, however, a new book has been written that shines a kinder, more intelligent light on an incredible woman. Thank you, Helen Castor, for writing
She-Wolves, The Women Who Ruled England before Elizabeth.
  I am forever grateful for the depth of your research, unstinting attention to detail, and your willingness to challenge attitudes that should have been mothballed centuries ago. The events I portray from Eleanor’s life, while based on fact, are fictional and/or conjectural, though in many cases, this required toning things down for believability. Such a life that woman lived! Any factual errors, of course, are completely mine.

One of the principal characters in
Daughters of Babylon
, Gavriel Navarro, is a poet and friend in real life, who not only encouraged me to finish the book but dared me to, in writing, in two of his published volumes of poetry. In depicting Gavriel, as with Eleanor, I fictionalized an extraordinary person whose real-life adventures and depth of spirit, one could never seriously hope to plumb or capture. To reread
The Wind and the Sea: Poems and Reflections
on the Voyage of No Return
was pure joy, and I thank Gavriel for excerpting
Daughters of Babylon
in his second book,
Fire and Earth: Poems and Reflections on the Nature of Desire.
For those of you with an interest in the esoteric and indigenous, I highly recommend Gavriel’s most recent book, cowritten with Norman W. Wilson PhD, called
A Shaman’s Journey, Revealed Through Poetry
.

Among the serendipitous joys of this journey, has been meeting Lauren Bradford, artist, jeweler, life enthusiast, and founder of Heartsmith, a company devoted to creating high quality lockets. Lauren has been a champion of this book since she first heard the title, and like me, she believes that the marriage of lockets to poetry is a most natural pairing. Heartsmith’s “Live in the Momentum: The Navarrosa Collection”, based on
Daughters of Babylon
, now offers rubielos (medieval form poems with connections to the Goddess) written by the medieval knight you met in this book, Arturo de Padrón. You can find these works of art at
www.heartsmith.com
.

Finally, I wish to thank Tim C. Taylor for being the kind of publisher and editor that every writer dreams of, and seldom finds. I truly did not know the meaning of the word “anachronism” until he’d pointed out, with great kindness, how adept I am at writing them. Tim is a staunch supporter of the idea of restoring poetry to the modern mind; he is a fan of Eleanor; he’s never anything less than cheerful and helpful—and very often, funny. To feel so championed in the final laps of a writing project is, like I said, the stuff of dreams.

And now, a word about the poetry. It is my fondest hope that if you weren’t already a lover of verse, that
Daughters
of Babylon
may have sparked an interest. I’ve introduced a number of medieval forms because they are amazing, and invented a few, for the fun of it. In the following pages, you will find, for your reading pleasure, original sestinas, septimes, septrois, octavos, glosas, satiric rhyming couplets, mitotes, and sonnets, all of which contributed in ways large and small to the energy of this novel and its grateful author.

From 'Daughters of Babylon'

Written by boh,
resurrected by S.K.

“For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted and at two or three removes, when we know least about it.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay, “The Poet”