Babylon

by Richard Calder

  The lower belly assumed a gentle convexity; the flesh was drawn in and up; the rib cage protruded; the diaphragm swelled; and then the abdominal muscles contracted and rolled towards the pubic bone. As both girls again took a deep breath, the operation was repeated, slowly, at first, but then with increasing speed and vigour until the movement became a nervous jiggle that mimed the dying spasms of a wounded animal brought to ground.

  Coin belts clinked and rattled; bracelets spun about wrists like miniature hoops; heavy, gold necklaces bruised agitated bosoms; and the single, tear-shaped pearl that hung from each girl’s ferronniere flew from side to side, a white glutinous comma amidst an oratorical riot of wanton, otherwise unpunctuated, locks and tresses.

  The drums reached a crescendo.

  The girls spun on their bare feet and then, running on their toes, ascended the altar steps. On reaching the predella they went down on their knees at a point where the antependium had been polished and almost worn away by millions of votive kisses. Their foreheads touched the floor. And then they sat back on their haunches, raised their arms, and leant backwards, hips elevated by the cushion of their heels, crowns resting on cold, black marble.

  The music stopped.

  The only sound to fill the perfume-laden air was the dancers’ sketchy breathing. And marking time, their bellies—covered in a patina of sweat—rose up and down like two pairs of bellows feeding the thin, reedy music of their lungs. The taut, abdominal flesh trembled, stage-lit by the bright-red, rather sinister, umbilical jewellery.

  Sister Ethelbertha clapped her hands. Not in applause, but in a single act of command.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘Better. Better. But you still need to practise veil work, of course. Oh, I can assure you: there is much, much work to be done.’

  With strands of hair matted to their faces, the dancers got to their feet and walked down the steps, grumbling sotto voce.

  ‘You may rest for a few minutes,’ Sister Ethelbertha said to them. And then she took my arm and drew me to one side out of earshot.

  ‘Perhaps, in the coming days, you might like to help me, Sister Madeleine? It is refreshing to come across somebody who understands history and the importance of celebrating our past.’

  ‘That would be a great pleasure,’ I replied, really not knowing what else to say.

  ‘There are so many things to be prepared. The communion milk, for instance. And the perfuming-pans this year simply must have the right constituency of cinnamon, patchouli, and myrrh. And then, for the dancers, of course, there will have to be the depilatory pastes. So hard to get in the present crisis! And let’s not talk about how difficult it’s been to acquire a new sacred python after all the fuss we had when the last one died!’ She looked over her shoulder, somewhat wistfully, I thought. ‘I remember when I was like them.’ She turned her head about and her eyes again locked with mine. ‘I remember when I was like you. Naive. Innocent. But something has changed. Things aren’t the same.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Nothing is the same.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, beginning to feel uncomfortable. ‘But I’m afraid I have to be going. I really shouldn’t have come here. I have to—’

  ‘Perhaps change has been going on for such a long time that we simply haven’t noticed,’ she continued, disregarding my attempt to bid her goodbye. ‘But the Daughters of Ishtar are not as they were. And neither is Babylon/

  ‘Please, I simply must be—’

  ‘First came the Daughters of Cain,’ she said, once more continuing as if she had not heard me, ‘and then the Daughters of Ham. They found a patroness in Ishtar, who founded Babylon. And when Babylon fell—’

  ‘Our descendants emigrated to the new Babylon,’ I said, deciding that it might be politic to humour her until I could find an appropriate moment to make my escape.

  ‘Is that when it started to go wrong?’ she said. ‘When our religion became a secret cult? When we sent our emissaries to Earth Prime to seduce the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Romans, in the name of Astarte, Tanith, and Venus? When the men who called themselves Gnostics, Manichaeans, Assassins, Templars, and Freemasons banded together behind closed doors to plan and execute our will?’

  ‘They were our slaves,’ I said, allowing a faint, contemptuous smile to briefly animate my lips. ‘The Goddess’s chief power has always been to inspire and govern the loves of men.’

  ‘She is the soul of the world,’ said Sister Ethelbertha, in an outburst of piety. Then she frowned, unsure of herself. ‘But what is she now, compared to the monster we have created, those heretics who came together to form the Illuminati? So often, these days, it seems that we serve them. Is that what Ishtar has become—a mere handmaiden to the Illuminists, a slave to men?’

  I nodded. ‘It sometimes seems that that is what we have become,’ I ventured. There were slaves and there were slaves, of course. There were slaves to Mammon, but as I knew, perhaps, too well, there were slaves to love, too. ‘We are the playthings of the rich,’ I concluded. ‘And we flaunt their wealth before the poor. No wonder some men come to sympathise with the philosophy espoused by the Black Order.’

  ‘Yes!’ she said, her eyes widening. ‘You do understand!’ She put a finger to her lips. ‘But not so loud.’ Her eyes darted right, then left. And then she gave me a gentle push. My back came into contact with the shiny, cool marble of the curving walls. ‘All this ceremony—all these ancient rites that we practise: what good are they when the reality of contemporary life is essentially ignoble? It is terrible to think it, but I do believe that the Age of the Third Sargon is coming to an end.’ She came nearer, and, inclining her head to one side, whispered conspiratorially: ‘The hieros gamos has become corrupt. In ancient times, it was the most significant rite of the new year: the sacred marriage between the king, who represented Ishtar’s paramour, Tammuz, and the Goddess herself. Since then, a king—no matter from what city, or country—must become the lover of the Goddess of love and death if he is to retain and extend his power. But if the Illuminati claim descent from Tammuz, then one thing is sure: they no longer exercise his beneficent power.’

  ‘They’re not like their Sumerian and Babylonian forebears,’ I said.

  ‘No, not at all,’ she said.

  ‘They don’t take on the identity of the god,’ I said. ‘They don’t consummate marriage with a priestess who incarnates the Goddess and then magically re-fertilize the land.’

  ‘They just want to fuck,’ she said, spitting out the expletive with a degree of venom that was frankly shocking.

  ‘England is sterile,’ I said, my voice as low as hers. ‘A wasteland. But whose fault is that?’ I shot her a guilty look. ‘We’ve made them sick, haven’t we?’ I added. ‘We’re the ones who’ve poisoned their minds.’

  ‘It’s the nympholepsy,’ she said. ‘After old Babylon fell, and we languished off-world, how else were we to reclaim Earth Prime but through witchcraft?’

  Feeling her hot breath on my cheeks, I turned my head to one side. But she still pursued me, so close now, that I felt as if I were being toyed with by a vicious, wild animal. Her hair was crisped and crimped and surrounded her head like the black aureole of a sphinx. Her lips were painted blood-red, the eyes elongated by means of an antimony pencil, so that they seemed Oriental, almost feline.

  ‘I wouldn’t really want to make anyone sick,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard some girls enjoy it, but—’

  ‘In days gone by,’ she said, ‘we would distil philtres—potions that turned men into lapdogs. Our emissaries would enter courts and palaces and leave madness in their wake.’

  ‘And thus it was that men would come to serve Ishtar,’ I said, quoting from the scriptures.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Though not all did, of course. The nympholepsy had a dark side. It could turn men against us, too. Which is why we are here today, preparing to honour one of our martyrs.’

  ‘Amen,’ I said.

  ‘These days the nympholepsy has become a plague and spreads out of control
. It is Earth Prime’s revenge. Shulamites have controlled the world by controlling men, but now those select few who were our confederates have broken free of our fetters. They control us.'

  ‘It’s true, I said. ‘Once, we were the Illuminati’s queens—their honoured mistresses and muses. But what are we now?’

  ‘Their cocottes,’ she said. ‘They use us, and Babylon, in the way that we once used them: to extend and maintain power. Our power has gone—forever, perhaps. We meant to poison the world, but in doing so, we poisoned ourselves, too.’

  Perhaps that is why I am the way I am, I thought. Perhaps one of my ancestors was a Shulamite who had fallen from the Order, someone later Fells never talked about, or perhaps weren’t even aware of. Maybe, after several generations, the nympholepsy had simply awoken in me, the last of the Fells, who carried her ancestor’s poisoned blood in her veins.

  ‘It would have been better if we had prevailed,’ she continued.

  ‘The Illuminati rule through promulgating the idea of the Shulamite—our so-called ‘mystique’—not the lust that we inspire. And the world should be ruled by lust, not by ideas. But the days when we could look forward to driving the world mad with lust are long gone.’ She shook her head, ruefully. ‘In this time of decadence,’ she continued, ‘the only men we truly infect with nympholepsy are those in whom it inflames a lust for—’ She bit her lip. ‘I speak, of course, of our new lovers, the Black Order.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ I said, putting my hands on her shoulders and trying to push her away.

  ‘But you understand,’ she said, her whisper becoming a hiss. ‘I know you understand. The others—’ She cast a glance at the recumbent dancers and musicians. ‘We must be friends, you and I,’ she concluded, as she again looked into my eyes, her own by now reddened, as if she had recently scoured them with pumice.

  Her upper lip trembled. She threatened to make an embarrassing scene.

  I pushed her a little harder, then, ducking my head, sidestepped, and slipped out of harm’s way.

  ‘I really have to go. I have an audience with the Serpentessa. And I haven’t even changed!’

  She looked at me oddly. ‘You’re not wearing the star. Or even the snake anklet.’

  I put a hand to my neck, as if shamed into modesty.

  ‘I didn’t receive one, I—’

  ‘But all novices receive a star.’

  ‘I lost it. It was when—’ I was about to lie and repeat my well- worn story of near escape when she began to fiddle with the clasp of her necklace.

  ‘Take it,’ she said. She held the necklace out, its star-shaped pendant dangling from a long, fine chain. ‘Take it, please.’

  I took it, and in a rather ill-mannered way, I fear, almost snatching it from her grasp, so eager was I to put the Lady Chapel behind me and rejoin Cliticia in the big world upstairs.

  I half-turned to leave, then, knowing I had been too peremptory, paused, opened my fist, and looked down at Sister Ethelbertha’s gift. The necklace was made of electrum. Its pendant—a six-pointed star—was the emblem of Sheba, star of the morning and evening, of life and death. It represented our world, the planet Venus. Not the second planet from the sun, but the true Venus: the mysterious planet that for something like two and a half thousand years had harboured Babylon and her sacred whores.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said.

  ‘May Ishtar protect you,’ she said, taking my hand within her own and pressing it so that my fingers closed over the golden star. ‘May she protect us all,’ she added, her red eyes speaking of sleeplessness and furious, incarnadined dreams.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The antechamber was perfectly quiet. It was sealed from the rest of Ereshkigal by two sets of thick, ironbound doors. The atmosphere it evoked was more consistent with a hermit’s cell than a waiting room at the apex of a ziggurat populated with young, chattering harlots. But if I listened very carefully, I seemed to be able to hear the sound of dripping water, as if from a broken pipe, or an unseasonable outbreak of rain. It was a subterranean sound, and I almost felt as if I were back in the Lady Chapel. And then the sound stopped, and I heard only Cliticia’s breathing. Its steady, barely perceptible rhythm was like a sleeping child’s, if lacking the essential ingredient of a child’s peace.

  We sat facing each other on a marble bench that followed the circumambient walls. For the last fifteen minutes or so, our mood had alternated between boredom and acute unrest, until we had resolved the conflict by lapsing into our present state of catatonia, content to do nothing apart from twiddle our fingers and stare expressionlessly into each other’s eyes.

  My thoughts were a beehive of confusion. I thought of Lord Azrael. I thought of his wolfish face. I thought of Beauty and the Beast, fierce, unholy forests of shadow and sin, and chateaux of adamantine night. I thought of Catherine Howard, Nell Gwyn, the Marquise de Brinvilliers, Charlotte Corday, and Carmilla Karnstein. I thought of—

  ‘They don’t ’alf talk funny round ’ere,’ said Cliticia, breaking the silence.

  ‘Talk funny?’ I said, stirred from my daydreams.

  ‘Those girls we passed in the corridor,’ she said.

  ‘But weren’t they speaking Babel?’ Babel wasn’t a language; it was an English dialect. If some of its vocabulary and idioms were remnants of Akkadian and Aramaic, it was for the most part composed of slang culled from the demi-monde.

  ‘Babel?’ said Cliticia.

  ‘Caterwaul, I believe you call it,’ I said, making some concession to the demotic.

  ‘Oh,’ said Cliticia, ‘you mean pussybabble.’

  I inclined my head towards her, not sure whether I had heard correctly.

  ‘Pussybabble?’

  ‘That’s what Mum calls it. But whenever I’d start to talk that way I’d get a rap over the knuckles. Dark talk, she’d say. Witch talk. Talk fit only for those that follow the left-’and path.’

  ‘The path of Queen Lilith,’ I said. ‘The path of the sphinx.’ We Shulamites had always been witches, but not all witches were sphinxes. Sphinxes worshipped Ishtar’s shadow. And such worship was considered morbid, taboo. Solitary, unwilling to conform to accepted moral standards, and indifferent to societal obligations, young women who unabashedly proclaimed themselves Lilith’s servants were often confined to special temples for the erotically insane. ‘What exactly were those girls “pussybabbling” about?’

  ‘Dunno.’ Cliticia sighed. ‘Mum was strict. And pussybabble’s real weird. I’ve never been able to get my ’ead round it.’ Indeed, it had sounded like an idioglossia: a private language accessible, perhaps, only to those who had become Lilith’s initiates. ‘I wish I ’ad learnt it, I can tell you.’

  ‘But why were they speaking it here?’ I said.

  ‘Dunno,’ she said, ‘I’ll ’ave to ask Gabrielle. But if you ask me, this ’ole Ereshkigal place is a bit’—she scratched her head, then put a finger to her temple and rotated it, first this way, and then the other—‘wonky. Know what I mean?’

  The doors opposite those by which we had entered slowly opened. A head emerged.

  ‘She’s ready to see you,’ said a girl whose fresh-faced looks belied the manner of one who had obviously attained her majority. She opened the door a little more so that her entire profile was revealed. Her manner of dress readily identified her as a nurse from the Nightingale School, on secondment to Babylon, perhaps, to investigate the distinctive nature of female maladies off-world, such as catalogued by the doctors at the Salpêtrière in Paris.

  ‘But please, please,’ she said, her fluent English qualified by a colonial accent, ‘keep your voices low, and don’t say anything that might unnecessarily distress her. She is very ill.’

  We got up and smoothed out the creases in our fresh, white tea gowns (we had discovered them, amongst dozens of other discarded clothes, in our apartment’s wardrobes and cupboards) and then followed the nurse into the audience chamber.

  The chamber was big. Its lamps were turned down and b
lue shadows shrouded the sparse furniture and fittings, though not sufficiently to hide the magnificent canvases that hung from the walls and, at the far end of the room, the daybed upon which the Serpentessa lay, her beautiful face lit with the repose of one who seemed ready to leave this world for one far, far better.

  The nurse ushered us forward. I held my breath, the sharp concussion of our heels against the parquet floor impertinently loud as we proceeded deeper and deeper into the room’s hallowed interior. Most of the furniture was covered in white sheets; the air was still, to the point of being crisp; and the silent, run-down clocks suggested that the Serpentessa might be a protégée of Miss Haversham. The nurse came to a halt, just a few feet from the daybed—a piece of mock-medieval furniture crafted by Morris and Co. It was as firm and heavy as a slab of granite.

  ‘They are here, Madam,’ said the nurse in a hushed voice. The Serpentessa slowly opened her eyes. The pupils were huge. Black as midnight, and almost completely displacing the irises, they betrayed the effects of belladonna. The edges of the eyelids had been painted with antimony. The eyelids themselves were blackened with kohl. Our mistress had, it seemed, only enjoyed a brief flirtation with oblivion, and remained very much alive.

  She too wore a tea gown, but one far more elaborate than our own. It was long-sleeved, high-waisted, full at the back, and trimmed with hundreds of lace ruffles and ribbons. Its long, elaborate train cascaded onto the floor and rippled about our feet, sending up a musty odour, like a wedding dress that has been kept too long in a damp attic.

  She closed her eyes. ‘Tristesse,’ she said, her voice faint, distant, as if it had been carried over an immeasurable stretch of water, ‘are you sure the drapes are closed? My head, oh my head ... ’ Her anxieties were groundless; heavy velvet curtains had been pulled across the length of the far wall. With pained effort her eyelids flickered, and then re-opened. After blinking two or three times, she seemed able to focus. ‘Madeleine and Cliticia,’ she mused, as if recognizing us for the first time, ‘the girls who escaped capture. Yes. I wanted to speak with you.’ She twisted her head about so that she faced her nurse. ‘Tristesse, leave us.’