Babylon

by Richard Calder

  But immortality sets impossible standards to live by, and Nebuchadnezzar’s visionary metropolis had struggled to maintain, not merely her graces and charms, but her very integrity. The new, or, what was to me, the ‘modern’ Babylon, was still recognizably Babylon the Great of old, but it was also an apocalyptic city, a place of ruins and dead roads, chaotic, distorted as an image in a fairground mirror, and informed by a particularly virulent strain of giganticism.

  Rubble lay all about. Hearing the crunch of gravel, I looked behind and saw that Cliticia had emerged from the same archway as his lordship and I had. Mr Kirchner was by her side.

  The transition had been seamless. One moment, we had stood before Christ Church’s altar, and the next, had found ourselves beneath one of the august northern gates of the city’s perimeter wall.

  ‘Shamash,’ continued his lordship, ‘is the god of the sun. That is, my god.’ He took off his chesterfield and slung it over his shoulder. Beneath, he was attired rather like a sporting gentleman, in tweed reefer and rather dashing peg-top trousers with turn-ups and a military stripe. He dug into the reefer pocket, pulled out an armband and handed it to me. ‘Would you be so kind as to help me, my dear?’

  I slipped the armband over his wrist and along his arm, then adjusted it so that its elasticized sides found purchase around his bicep.

  He inspected it, just as Cliticia and Mr Kirchner drew alongside.

  ‘You see, Miss Fell?’ he said, pointing to the armband and the symbol it displayed. ‘A black disk with twelve radial sig-rune spokes. It is a sun wheel. The symbol of the Black Sun.' His face grew fervent. ‘The Black Sun shines above the Midnight Mountain. No human can see it—yet it is there: its light is within us, illuminating the path that men must follow if they are to find salvation in a weak, corrupt, feminine world.’ I recalled the vision of Marduk grieving over the collapse of the Babylonian empire until the goddess Ishtar commanded the stars to shine a new invisible light. That new light shone out of his eyes and poured out of his breast, as if the Black Sun resided in his heart. I took a step backwards. Paracelsus considered blood a condensation of light. And I knew then that Aryan blood was just that—the hard, bejewelled light of the Black Sun! ‘And you may find salvation, too, Miss Fell, if you choose to step from the left-hand path.’

  Mr Kirchner put his arm around Cliticia’s waist. She smiled, dewy-eyed, as if she had perhaps known him for longer than I had suspected. Long enough, at least, to develop an admiration for him. Perhaps even to indulge in an affaire de cœur.

  I regained my composure. Ever since Cliticia had suggested we run away, I had known what I was getting into. I had to show his lordship I wasn’t afraid. After all, I was a bluestocking. Not some silly little chit. I was a bluestocking who could, and did, wear white silk stockings and went tight-laced. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘You’re from the Island in the North. I know the legends. I’ve read all about them.’

  ‘Mmm. She’s really clever,’ said Cliticia.

  ‘You’ll call both of us “sir” while you’re here,’ said Mr Kirchner, rather brusquely.

  ‘I am Lord Azrael,’ said his lordship, ‘and this,’ he added, nodding towards his servant, ‘is Malachi.’ Once again, he took me by the arm. I glanced over my shoulder and took one last look at the ivy-festooned city wall. It was built of burnt bricks. And from my school lessons, I knew that the bricks would conform to a standard measurement of three-quarters of a yard in length and a yard in thickness, and that they would be joined with bituminous mortar. To my left and to my right, the wall stretched out into the distance, a die-straight line interrupted only by the nearby inter-dimensional Gate. Flanked by towers whose crumbling turrets betrayed the traditional layers of reed matting that afforded drainage, the Gate was little more than a black hole in space. And though I knew that Akkad, a region of marshlands, palms, fig-trees, and hyenas, lay on the wall’s farther side, I could see nothing—not even an afterimage of my own native world, which I instinctively knew lay as close as the wall itself. The Gate was not, of course, one used, or sanctioned, by the Illuminati; it had been forced open by some hermetic means known only to the Men; and now, to cover our tracks, it had sealed itself behind us.

  I felt a tug. Lord Azrael began to squire me down the rubble- strewn incline towards the city streets. ‘Poor Malachi,’ he whispered, conspiratorially. ‘He does so like to play the martinet. But his recommendation, I think, is pertinent. We must observe the little proprieties, must we not?’

  Despite my earlier tergiversations, I had decided that I didn’t much care for Mr Malachi. But what I could not for the life of me understand was why I could not bring myself to dislike Lord Azrael, too.

  Like the earthly Babylon of old, the city had been built upon a grid. Its streets formed a network of perfectly straight lines stretching out north, south, east, and west as far as the horizon. The city’s first architects—forbidden, like all men, to enter the new world—had trained female slaves captured during the campaigns of 601-587 BC to do their bidding. Their works, though much faded, were still evident. Mesopotamian Babylon had preserved the same essential features throughout her long history; and here, at the city outskirts, at least, the same applied to the Babylon that existed off-world.

  Cubic houses, flat-topped and windowless—their stark, terracotta outlines picked out by moonlight—bordered a road that receded into deep blue shadows. Ranged about the houses were mysterious alleyways paved with flagstones, small, overgrown gardens, and enclosed courtyards harbouring deep, echo-filled wells.

  Cliticia and I sat by the roadside, our backs propped against a truncated marble column. The column was decorated with mosaics: geometric patterns of processional figures, some human, some bestial, some obscene. There were graffiti, too. Many seemed quite recent and had evidently been scored into the stone with a penknife—political slogans, as far as I could make out, relieved, here and there, by a heart, a few sets of initials, and a Cupid’s arrow.

  Lord Azrael and Mr Malachi stood by the railway lines that ran down the middle of the street. I looked south, to where the lines merged with the vanishing point of our destination: a sawtoothed horizon comprised of ziggurats surmounted by a bloated moon. The moon neither waxed nor waned, nor did it cross the heavens; it simply remained where it was, night after night, like a great Chinese lantern above the tiny, distant buildings—a goddess brooding over her deathly still world. I looked north. A train was approaching, the locomotive’s thick, blue-grey column of smoke rising higher and higher until it bisected the lunar face, in much the same way that the plume from Cliticia’s cigarette snaked across my eyes, lips, and nose.

  ‘Malachi reckons it’ll take us as long as twelve ’ours to reach the encampment,’ she said. ‘But it’s the Citadel I really want to get to.’

  ‘That would take even longer,’ I said. ‘We’re in the middle of a vast continent—the only landmass on this world. It’s bigger even than Africa, or the Americas. And the city covers almost a tenth of it.’

  ‘Yeh,’ said Cliticia. ‘It’s a whopping great place, I know that.’

  ‘The city’s growth,’ I added rather primly as I made a show of waving away her smoke, ‘has followed an exponential curve that reflects Babylon’s ever-growing influence over earthly affairs.’

  ‘You’re not at school now,’ she said, irritably stubbing her cigarette out amongst a pile of potsherds.

  ‘I thought you wanted me to help you?’

  ‘Don’t need to write reports now, do I? Don’t need to worry about the selection committee, either. The old life belongs on the other side. So no airs an’ graces, eh?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I folded my arms.

  I got to my feet. Walking a little way down the road, I came to the plinth of another broken column. Lifting my skirts clear of my white, side-buttoned boots, I ascended the little scree of rubble that sloped from the plinth’s side until I stood on top of the plinth itself. A breeze caressed my cheeks, a cool, refreshing breeze tha
t whistled as it insinuated itself into countless dusty wells and the cracks in the adjacent stone houses. From somewhere came the sound of a door idly banging against its jambs. But apart from the breeze, the door, and a few distant, barely heard evocations of loneliness that were as likely to have been imagined as real, all was silent.

  ‘Just think,’ I said, staring straight ahead and away from Cliticia, ‘women built this city.’

  ‘Listen to the little Radical,’ she said, dryly.

  ‘But it’s true.’

  ‘Don’t look like anyone’s been doing much building lately.’

  And that was also true, of course. Nearly all construction had been halted in the late eighteenth century, following the Black Order’s first incursions.

  ‘What about the railways?’ I said, defensively. ‘The line from Liverpool Street to Babylon was opened about a year after we were born. You can’t say that nothing’s been done.’ I put my hands on my hips in a fit of Cliticia-esque temper. ‘I’ve always thought that women can do anything if they choose to put their minds to it.’

  ‘They made a lot of ol’ Paddy fishwives honorary members of Babylon for a few years—just long enough for them to get the job done. Big deal.’

  ‘Could you have done it?’

  ‘Me?’ she spluttered. ‘Temple-maidens like us don’t work. Not that kind of work, at least. We’re not allowed to.’ I heard her sniff. ‘Thank bleedin’ Christ.’

  Wobbling on my heels, I attempted to take stock of the desolate urban landscape that surrounded me. But the more I looked, the more everything seemed to swim in and out of focus, the city’s pastel shades dissolving into a panorama of undifferentiated line, mass, and dimension. I had thought that I would enjoy a better view from the vantage point of the plinth. Instead, I had had my line of sight impeded by some kind of atmospheric disturbance, the horizon shivering as if behind a tremulous veil. It was, I knew, warmer in the south, and convection—or whatever anomaly created by the cold heat of an alien moon produced a commensurate effect—had blurred the mauve air to tease my eye with unresolved perspectives.

  Herodotus had visited Babylon in 458 BC. By that time Nebuchadnezzar had been in his grave for over a hundred years and the city was in decline. And yet it still had had the power to inspire awe. In Book One of the Histories he had written: ‘It lies in a wide plain, a vast city in the form of a square with sides nearly fourteen miles long and a circuit of some fifty-six miles, and in addition to its enormous size it surpasses in splendour any city of the known world’ But however vast the original Babylon might have been, this reproduction was almost incomprehensibly vast— an architectural graveyard where the styles, innovations, and rhetorical gestures of the modern, as well as ancient, worlds were memorialized in a stupendous vista of crumbling stone and dust. The Modern Babylon was truly the most awe-inspiring city known to man, even if it was, for the most part, dead and, of course, as mad as the great king who had built it.

  I continued to gaze south, narrowing my eyes so as to take in the endlessly receding lines of blasted masonry; gazed across oceans of stone, brick, slate, and tangled iron. The rippling, convective air could not quite mask Esagila: the complex of buildings from which the great ziggurat Etemenanki rose as it had in the days of Nimrod to point an accusing finger at the sky. ‘The temple is a square building, two furlongs each way, with bronze gates', it has a solid central tower, one furlong square, with a second erected on top of it and then a third, and so on up to eight. All eight towers can be climbed by a spiral way running round the outside, and about halfway up there are seats and a shelter for those who make the ascent to rest on. On the summit of the topmost tower stands a great temple with a fine large couch, richly covered, and a golden table beside it. The shrine contains no image and no one spends the night there except, as the priests of Bel say, one Babylonian woman, alone, whoever it may be that the god has chosen. The priests also say—though I do not believe them—that the god enters the temple in person and takes his rest on the bed... ’

  He should have believed. Herodotus had been describing the hieros gamos or ‘sacred wedding’ that we temple-maidens still rehearsed. And if here, off-world, our rehearsals were confined to mime, on Earth it was a different matter. There, in our capacity as sacred prostitutes, we slept with the Illuminati, the new kings of Babylon and the known universe.

  It was strange. I had never really taken in the fact that I would be expected to enter into shameless liaisons with men for whom I felt nothing. That particular, but crucial, aspect of serving the Goddess had had as little to do with my decision to volunteer as had the enticements of money, gifts, and other endowments. And I knew that, for Cliticia, it had been the same. Something else had seduced our hearts, something other, a mystery that my young life had for so long been struggling unsuccessfully to comprehend.

  I held out my arms and began slowly to rotate, so that I seemed to offer up my embrace to the four corners of the great city.

  ‘The sacred wedding!’ I proclaimed. ‘What gods should we offer ourselves up to, I wonder, now that we’re bona fide harlots?’

  ‘Oh, give over, do,’ said Cliticia. I stopped rotating. Cliticia sat where I had left her, about a dozen yards away. She had propped her chin in the balls of her palms and was staring resolutely at the ground, ostentatiously fed up with the long wait.

  I knew things would never be the same. My precipitate nature had brought me to the place I had longed for. But what I discovered I wanted, more than anything, was to be back in Victoria Park, with Cliticia leaning against my shoulder, and Babylon only the distant, romantic prospect that had brought us together—a prospect so distant and indistinct that it would never actually be realized.

  I descended the plinth and walked back to join my friend. Once again, I sat down beside her.

  I stared down the tracks, towards Lord Azrael.

  ‘Did I ever tell you about Barbarossa?’ I said.

  Cliticia shrugged. ‘Are you going to?’ she replied, less than wholly interested.

  ‘You’d call him an imaginary playmate, I suppose,’ I continued, undeterred, while making a casual evaluation of Lord Azrael’s patrician figure. ‘The kind you don’t let on about. The kind you get scolded for... indulging in.’ I frowned, rooting about in the undergrowth of my memory. ‘I first met him when I was about five years old, I suppose. He lived in the wardrobe that stood at the foot of my bed.’ I looked askance. Cliticia’s downcast eyes had glazed, but whether out of boredom, or because she had redirected her gaze inward to better focus her concentration, I couldn’t tell. ‘One night, the wardrobe door opened all by itself, as if by magic. I was scared of the dark, then, and I hid under the sheets. But I could feel him standing there, looking down at me. He was, he was—’

  ‘A bit of a masher?’ said Cliticia.

  ‘He was like Lord Byron,’ I said. ‘Like Duke Bluebeard. Like... like Heathcliff.’

  ‘And then?’ said my friend, more eagerly now.

  ‘I was scared,’ I said.

  ‘I wouldn’t ’ave been,’ said Cliticia, defiantly, as her eyes once more swam into focus. ‘I’m not frightened of nuffink.’

  ‘Do you know what Cathy says,’ I continued, remembering a favourite passage from one of my favourite books. ‘She says: “My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.’” I turned abruptly to face her. ‘Cliticia, I am Heathcliff!’

  ‘Daft is what you are,’ muttered Cliticia.

  We fell silent, occupied only in watching the train as it steamed towards us.

  ‘Cheer up, sport,’ said Cliticia after a while, in an effort to strike a note that might lift us both out of our melancholia. ‘You did the right fing. Coming ’ere to Babylon ’as been what’s necessary for us two, I reckon.’ She put her arm around me. I let myself relax, and rested my head against hers. ‘You never know,’ she continued, rocking me a little, ‘you might meet up with your ol’ mate Barbarossa.’ She gave a littl
e giggle. ‘Or even ’eathcliff. You never know, do you!’ Like me, she was looking down the track to where our two accomplices waited to flag down the train. ‘It’s destiny, ain’t it?’ she concluded. ‘Destiny. Yeh. Bleedin’ fate.’

  I had earlier taken off my bonnet, discarded it, and then let down my chignon. Since then, Cliticia had rarely missed an opportunity to run a hand through my heavy, waist-length hair. ‘Fate?’ I said, as I heard her sigh and felt yet another such caress, as cool as the breeze that swept through the ruins. ‘Yes, perhaps it is fate.’ But something was wrong. Something was profoundly wrong. I was in a dream world where all the angles, planes, and dimensions of my once familiar life were skewed, and if fate had decreed that matters should be so, then fate was a cheat, a fraud, and a charlatan.

  I looked up at the sky. The moon was so brilliant that its nimbus blanketed out the stars. If, of course, there were any stars in that black, alien expanse.

  The train sounded its whistle. I looked up. Lord Azrael and Mr Malachi stood on the track waving their arms.

  The train roared across a devastated landscape. The Babylonian railway network traversed the city, its main lines running out of the interdimensional Gates that lay to the north, south, east, and west, allowing both passenger and freight services from Earth Prime to travel directly to their respective destinations off-world. The trains, along with thousands of miles of track, were, of course, owned and operated by the Illuminati. But not the train I travelled on. It was one of several that the Men had sequestered for their own purposes.