“Torture—Daria?” I replied. “How? She sings us into a coma?”
“I’ll stall her,” Aly said. “You go up and tell the others. Make sure she can’t see them planning an escape.”
I raced inside. Cass and Marco were at a window in the back of the house, looking down over the outer wall. When I told them about Daria’s arrival, neither of them reacted much.
When I leaned out the window and looked down, I realized why. Directly below us, tracing all three sides of the building, was a wide moat.
“Any ideas?” Cass asked.
“It would be pretty easy to swim across that,” I said.
“Not so fast,” Cass said. From a plate of food, he took a hunk of unidentifiable leathery-brown dried meat and tossed it out. The water roiled with green scales and beady black eyes. A long, crocodilian jaw snapped open and shut.
“Welcome to Paradise,” Marco said softly. “Paradise Prison.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CALCULATIONS
ELEVEN DAYS.
That was how long we’d been gone. Not in Babylonian time, but real time. Back-home time. In Babylon, it had been just under three hours.
Aly had done the calculation. Now she was sitting with Daria at the rooftop table, running quickly through English words. Whatever paranoid idea Aly had had about torture and spying had faded pretty fast. The two of them had become instant BFFs. Well, BFs. I’m not sure how you could define that second F—forever—in these messed-up time frames.
Cass, Marco, and I paced the floor, waiting. Marco’s mouth was full. He’d eaten nearly all the food. Now he was swigging a green fruit liquid. “How can you eat at a time like this?” I demanded.
“Stress makes me hungry,” Marco said.
Daria stared at him. “Food. Hungry. Marco eat.”
“Good, Daria!” Aly said, furiously scribbling images with a bit of coal on a piece of tree bark.
“She sounds like Torquin,” Cass said.
“She’s about a million times smarter than Torquin,” Aly replied.
And about a trillion times better looking, I thought extremely silently.
“Where’d you find the cool writing tools?” Marco asked.
“Daria brought them,” Aly said. “She really wants to learn.”
I eyed her warily. “A minute ago, you thought she was a spy.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Aly said. “We’re bonding.”
Daria was looking intently at Marco. “Marco like meb’dala? Tasty good?”
“Aaaah!” Marco said, putting down his flagon. “Tasty good!”
Aly gave Daria an impulsive hug. “This girl is amazing! She picks things up from context. And she doesn’t forget anything.” Aly quickly drew crude stick figures behind bars in a prison cell, crying. “We—Cass, Marco, Jack, and me—are prisoners?”
“Prizz . . . ?” Daria looked closely at the drawing, then shook her head. She pointed to the food, then gestured toward the nice house. Taking the bit of coal, she drew four stick figures standing tall, smiling, with more stick figures around us on their knees with bowed heads.
“Are you saying we’re guests?” Aly said, gesturing grandly around the house and giving a happy, thumbs-up gesture. “Guests?”
“Guests . . .” Daria said. “Yest. I mean, yes.”
“If we’re guests, why the guards?” I said, still pacing.
While I spoke, Daria was drawing an enormous soldier. His teeth were gritted, his sword pointed to a shriveled little man wearing a crown. “Persia,” she said, pointing to the soldier. “You? Persia?”
Aly’s smile faltered. “No! We are not from Persia! We are from . . .” She gestured into the distance. “Never mind.”
“From Nevermind. Ah.” Daria nodded. “You are . . . ?”
She drew a stick figure surrounded by stars and mystical symbols, with lightning emerging from its fingers. “What the heck is that?” Marco asked.
“Magic,” Cass said. “I guess the king figures we’re either Persians or awesome magicians. Process of elimination.”
Marco shook his head. “We’re not magicians, Dars,” he said. “But we do have natural star power.”
Daria looked confused. She thought for a minute then struggled for words. “You . . . coming to . . . us. Now.”
“Yes, go on,” Aly said, leaning forward.
“No . . . other . . . guests . . . comed,” she said.
“Came?” Aly said. “No other guests came? No other guests have come?”
Daria pulled around the dried bark and began to draw.
“The symbol for ten, three times . . . ” Aly said. “Thirty? Thirty what?”
Daria pointed to the sun. She pulled her fists together and shivered as if freezing, then fanned herself as if swelteringly hot. Then freezing again.
“The sun . . . cold hot cold . . . ” Aly said.
“I think she means a year,” I said. “The sun travels in the sky, and the weather changes from cold to hot and back, in one year.”
“Is that what you mean, Daria?” Cass asked. “No visitors—no guests—for thirty years?”
“Thirty years is two thousand seven hundred years for us,” Aly said. “That would be about the time Ancient Babylon split off from our time frame. They’ve had no visitors because the rest of the world moved on.”
“So no trade?” Cass said. “No goods or food from outside?”
Marco shrugged. “Those farms outside the city are pretty awesome.”
“So, wait,” I said. “What happens if you go to the next town over? What’s there now?”
Daria looked at me blankly.
“Guys, this is all super-interesting but can we cut to the chase?” Marco said. “Daria, can you get us to the Hanging Gardens? Hanging. Gardens?”
Daria looked helpless. Not being able to answer everyone’s questions seemed to agitate her. She looked pleadingly at Aly. “Teach. I. More. Bel-Sharu-Usur is will here be.” Her eyes began to roll wildly.
“I think she’s imitating that weird guy behind the throne,” Cass said. “He’s coming, maybe?”
“Bel-Sharu-Usur . . .” Aly murmured. “That’s the same guy as Belshazzar—like Nabonidus for Nabu-na’id. And Belshazzar was the king’s evil son!”
“Sun . . . ” Daria paused, then gestured toward the eastern sky. “Go up . . . Bel-Sharu-Usur . . . come.”
“He’s coming in the morning?” I asked. “What’s he going to do?”
Daria shrugged. She glanced again toward the guards. Seeing that they were out of eyesight, she crossed her eyes and made a disgusted face. “Bel-Sharu-Usur . . . ucccch.”
“I don’t think she trusts him,” I said. “Sounds like he’s the one in charge of finding out who we are. If anyone’s spying for the king, he’d be my guess. She reports on us now, and Bel-Sharu-Usur comes to check for himself tomorrow.”
“Daria . . .” Aly said. “You’ll give him a good report?” She did a set of pantomimes—pointing to us, imitating Bel-Sharu-Usur, thumbs-up, and so on.
Daria nodded uncertainly. I could tell she still had a tiny bit of suspicion. “We have to convince her to trust us totally,” I murmured. “She doesn’t want to be burned.”
“Me . . . you . . .” Daria clasped her own two hands together. “Teach.”
Aly glanced at me gratefully. “Yes. That’s what Jack was saying. I will stick with you, Daria, for as long as it takes.”
The two girls started in, batting words around like crazy. Aly was an awesome teacher. But the sun was going down and before I knew it, I had drifted off into a dreamless sleep.
When I awoke, the sun had completely set. I felt as if I’d been asleep for hours. I could hear Marco and Cass in the other room playing some kind of game. Aly and Daria had stood from the table, laughing and chattering.
“It was great to meet you . . .” “Please enjoy food . . .” “I will give a good report, but you must be careful . . .”
I couldn’t believe it. Daria was not only be
autiful and unbelievably talented, but probably the smartest person I’d ever seen. She’d picked up passable English in just a few hours.
“She’s amazing,” Aly said as she sent Daria on her way through the front door. “Her vocabulary has grown like crazy—colors, articles of clothing, names of animals and plants. By making faces, I was able to teach her the words for emotions—and she got it all!”
As I listened, I noticed she left a small, leather pouch on the table. I grabbed it and ran for the door.
Daria was already far down the pathway. I burst outside, shouting “Hey! Daria! You forgot—”
I jerked backward as if I’d run into a pole. Mainly because I had.
One of the guards stood over me, his spear still held sideways, where he had blocked my path, like a baseball player bunting for a single. He grumbled something in a language I didn’t understand. “What’s he saying?” I asked.
Aly was standing in the door, looking stunned. “I don’t know,” she said. “But at the rate we’re going, our kids will be growing up in the twenty-fourth century.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE DREAM
I HAVEN’T HAD the Dream in a long time.
But it’s back.
And it’s changed.
It does not begin as it always has, with the chase. The woods. The mad swooping of the griffins and the charge of the hose-beaked vromaski. The volcano about to erupt. The woman calling my name. The rift that opens in the ground before me. The fall into the void. The fall, where it always ends.
Not this time. This time, these things are behind me.
This time, it begins at the bottom.
I am outside my own body. I am in a nanosecond frozen in time. I feel no pain. I feel nothing. I see someone below, twisted and motionless. The person is Jack. Jack of the Dream.
But being outside it, I see that the body is not mine. Not the same face. As if, in these Dreams, I have been dwelling inside a stranger. I see small woodland creatures, fallen and motionless, strewn around the body. The earth shakes. High above, griffins cackle.
Water trickles beneath the body now. It pools around the head and hips. And the nanosecond ends.
The scene changes. I am no longer outside the body but in. Deep in. The shock of reentry is white-hot. It paralyzes every molecule, short-circuiting my senses. Sight, touch, hearing—all of them join in one huge barbaric scream of STOP.
The water fills my ear, trickles down my neck and chest. It freezes and pricks. It soothes and heals. It is taking hold of the pain, drawing it away.
Drawing out death and bringing life.
I breathe. My flattened body inflates. I see. Smell. Hear. I am aware of the soil ground into my skin, the carcasses all around, the black clouds lowering overhead. The thunder and shaking of the earth.
I blink the grit from my eyes and struggle to rise.
I have fallen into a crevice. The cracked earth is a vertical wall before me. And the wall contains a hole, a kind of door into the earth. I see dim light within.
I stand on shaking legs. I feel the snap of shattered bones knitting themselves together.
One step. Two.
With each it becomes easier.
Entering the hole, I hear music. The Song of the Heptakiklos. The sound that seems to play my soul like a guitar.
I draw near the light. It is inside a vast, round room, an underground chamber. I enter, lifted on a column of air.
At the other side I see someone hunched over. The white lambda in his hair flashes in the reflected torch fire.
I call to him and he turns. He looks like me. Beside him is an enormous satchel, full to bursting.
Behind him is the Heptakiklos.
Seven round indentations in the earth.
All empty.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE TEST
“I DON’T GET why he doesn’t just fall over,” Marco whispered.
Bel-Sharu-Usur walked briskly up the stairs, with Daria tagging along behind him. Behind her was a gaggle of wardum with fans made of palm fronds and sacks of food and drink. The entourage for the king’s son.
His eyes never rested in one place. He reeked of fish, and something sickly-sweet, like athletic ointment. His hair was dark at the sides and white down the middle, giving him the appearance of a drunken skunk. At the top of the stairs he looked over the city and took a deep breath, blasting us with a gust of foul air.
“Dude, what was on the breakfast menu?” Marco said. “Three-day-old roadkill?”
He gave Marco a twisted expression that could have been a smile or a sneer, then began babbling to Daria.
I eyed a large vase on a wall shelf. From this angle I could see the eyes of a bull and the hindquarters of some other beast. I’d put Daria’s pouch inside that vase for safekeeping. It contained some feathered needles, maybe for knitting. I made a mental note to give it to her at some point when Bel-Sharu-Usur wasn’t all over her.
Aly trudged out from her bedroom, looking exhausted. “What’s that smell?” she murmured.
As Bel-Sharu-Usur barked questions at Daria, the odor of his tooth decay settled over us like smog. Inches away from him, Daria nodded respectfully and (remarkably) managed not to barf. She seemed to be giving him a long report about us, as we nervously ate fruit that the house wardum laid before us on a table.
“Do you understand what she’s saying?” I whispered.
“No,” she replied. “I was teaching her English. She wasn’t teaching me Babylonian.”
Daria and Bel-Sharu-Usur went at it for a few minutes in rapid Aramaic. Finally Daria turned to us with an exasperated face and said, “He will walk us.”
“Walk us?” Aly said. “Like take us on a tour?” She walked with her fingers out over the rooftop.
“Nice!” Marco said. “Tell him we love gardens. Especially hanging ones.”
“Yes, a tour,” Daria said, looking at Bel-Sharu-Usur uneasily. “See us Babylon. He does not say, but I think he must watch you.”
“He doesn’t yet trust us?” I offered.
Daria shrugged. “We must go now. And be careful.”
We rushed out. It wasn’t until we were walking away from the house that I remembered I’d forgotten Daria’s pouch.
“Chicken . . . clucks,” Daria said. “Ox . . . pulls. Pig . . . oinks. Boar . . . snorts. Pine tree . . . grows tall. Sun flower . . . is round. Fence . . . has posts. Temple . . .”
As we walked through the palace grounds, Aly didn’t miss an object. And Daria repeated everything perfectly. Bel-Sharu-Usur hung with them, listening intently. It was impossible to tell what he was looking at or listening to. His strangely disabled eyes flitted all over the place, and it was miraculous he could even walk straight. Still, I could sense that he was noticing every movement, every gesture we were making.
His entourage hung behind him closely. Two wardum fanned him with gigantic palm-shaped leaves, muttering chants and making sly faces when he wasn’t looking. Two others carried buckets of water, stopping to hand him a ladle every few yards. Before us, two trumpeters blew a fanfare at each turn in the road.
All around the entourage, people took a wide berth. Gardeners, workers, wealthy people—all of them dropped into a fearful silence at the sight of Bel-Sharu-Usur.
“He makes me nervous,” Cass said softly.
At the whispered words, Bel-Sharu-Usur’s ears pricked up.
“Dude, anyone ever tell you that you look like a cross between a warthog and a popcorn machine?” Marco asked him out loud, with a broad smile. “Just sayin’. Peace out.”
Bel-Sharu-Usur looked momentarily confused. He glared at Daria, who told him something that made him smile uncertainly.
“I guess she covered for you, Marco,” Cass murmured.
“She’s hot and smart,” Marco said.
“So, you think she’s hot, too?” Aly said.
Daria turned to Marco with a smile. “Not hot. Is cool in the morning.”
I looked at t
he ground to avoid cracking up.
“What do you call this place, Daria?” Aly asked, gesturing around the palace grounds. “Does it have a name?”
Daria thought a moment. “In language of Sumer people, is Ká-Dingir-rá. In language of Akkad people, is Bab-Ilum. Means great gate of god.”
“Bab-Ilum!” Cass said. “Probably where they got the name Babylon. Looc os si taht.”
“Can’t get a word of Babylonic, but it worries me that I’m beginning to understand you,” Marco said.
We walked briskly past a temple whose walls were pitted, cracked, and choked with weeds. A great wood beam along the roof looked about ready to buckle. “This is—was—palace,” Daria whispered. “King Nabu-Kudurri-Usur. Two.”
“Who?” Marco said.
“Nabu-Kudurri-Usur is Aramaic for Nebuchadnezzar,” Aly said. “‘Two’ for ‘the Second.’” She turned back to Daria. “That king lived here?”
Daria nodded. “He was good. Then more kings—Amel-Marduk, Nergal-Sharu-Usur, La-Abashi-Marduk. All lived in palace. Kings supposed to live in palace. But Nabu-na’id . . . no. Lives in Etemenanki.” Her eyes darted toward Bel-Sharu-Usur uncertainly, and she dropped her voice. “Etemenanki is holy place . . . not king place.”
Aly shot me a look. I could feel Cass’s and Marco’s eyes, too. None of us had expected that statement. I knew her English wasn’t perfect, but the tone was unmistakable. Our friend Daria didn’t seem to like the king very much.
Any lingering mistrust of her was melting away fast.
Bel-Sharu-Usur was picking up the pace. We jogged after him, entering a grand tiled walkway, its bricks glazed with blindingly bright blues and golds. Inlaid into the tiles was a procession of fierce lions of smaller gold and yellow bricks, so lifelike that they seemed about to jump out. Bel-Sharu-Usur raised his wobbling eyes to a shining fortress of cobalt blue rising at the end of the processional path. It was topped with castle-like towers, the great protective city wall extending from either side. The trumpeters blew again, nearly blasting my eardrums.
“Ishtar!” barked Bel-Sharu-Usur.