Gabatha mouthed an obscenity that put his prior efforts to shame. “Summon those guards here,” he got out finally. “They’ll throw their spears when I give the order, or I’ll geld them with my own fingernails!”
The lad departed.
Enkidu had quietly taken another rod in hand, good and hot. Now he leaped forward, swinging the weapon at the eunuch’s neck. Amys was in front, but the eunuch was larger and taller, so that there was room for an angled blow. Flesh sizzled.
The man screamed—no mute, after all!—and seized the rod.
Amys, freed now, instantly leaped for Gabatha. She butted him in the soft stomach so that he skidded back, off-balance. His gross backside barged into the brazier, upsetting it. Bright embers scattered across the paved floor as the merchant landed solidly in their midst. He bellowed.
Enkidu felt a touch. Amys had grasped his hand.
But the eunuch was moving. Enkidu shoved Amys away with a force that sent her staggering—just in time for the thrown rod to miss her. The iron grazed Enkidu’s shoulder, burning him, and landed beyond.
“Out!” he shouted at her.
With that contact NK-2 verified that the girl was host to no entity—and never had been. All his trepidation had been for nothing!
But where, then, was the galactic representative?
But more of Gabatha’s household guards were there, and in a moment they had both Enkidu and Amyitis captive.
Gabatha was in the process of picking himself up. His face was livid—and so was his posterior, where it showed through the burn-holes.
“Hold her there!” he cried, his flabby lips trembling. He half-stumbled, half-hobbled through the door and toward a wall down the hall—a wall covered by a great tapestry.
“What about this one, Master?” the eunuch asked, indicating Enkidu as he rubbed his scorched neck.
Gabatha hardly paused. “Let him come and watch this,” he said without turning.
Two guards dragged Amys along. Her head was down again and he still could not see her face.
“I want this slut dead! Dead! DEAD!” Gabatha cried, his voice rising hysterically. “Since I first set my eye on her she has brought me nothing but ill chance. Bring her to the water room!”
Gabatha himself jerked up a corner of the tapestry. Behind the woven scene was a small door.
The water room.
Enkidu could guess what it was for. He cried out in protest, but the eunuch was not to be caught off guard again. He stopped Enkidu at the first step.
One guard opened the little door. Two others shoved the girl through it head first. A gasp escaped her—but the sound of it was cut off by the slamming door.
“Hoist the sluice gate!” Gabatha cried, his voice shrill with urgency and excitement.
A slave sprang to an alcove beside the door. There was a circular crank there, similar to those used on drawbridges. “Don’t!” Enkidu cried at the slave. “Don’t turn it!” But he was impotent to stop Gabatha’s revenge.
The shrill screeches of women reverberated down the hall. Ishtar was coming to the rescue! Or whatever she had in mind. But she had reached only another room in this extensive house, and there was still considerable scuffling.
“Open the sluice!” Gabatha cried again.
The eunuch held Enkidu while the slave at the wheel gave it a full turn. He was forced to watch, though there was nothing to watch, horrified, and helpless.
There was no audible roar of water from the river. Only a long, final silence. Enkidu realized dimly that the walls and doors were too thick for those in this hall to hear the lethal rush of liquid down the sluice and into the chamber.
Gabatha broke the silence after some moments, with a satisfied sigh. “Over so soon. Well, now it’s done. Now she’s drowned, may my luck change!”
Enkidu, stunned, fought the full import. As in a dream that did not concern him he saw Tamar step naked into the hall, followed by her nude horde. Even the eunuch gasped at these wild natural beauties.
The priestess spotted Enkidu. She spoke to him as though they two were alone in the hall.
“Tammuz!”
NK-2 was in no condition to rejoin the battle with TM-R. The enemy would vanquish him in minutes if physical contact were maintained between the hosts. He had to get away!
Fortunately his host wanted no further part of TM-R’s host. Guidance was easy for the moment.
Out! Out! Out! he urged.
CHAPTER 16.
Enkidu, driven by horror, fled Gabatha’s house. Tamar tried to hold him, but he shoved her away in his blind rush to escape, and lost her in the crowd of men and women filling the house.
A full moon rode high in the east, casting its pale yellow light and deep shadows upon the streets and the distant celebrants and the cubic houses. The Milky Way spread out above, a luminous, tattered veil, bringing to mind another night he had walked alone in the streets of Babylon. Now, as then, he felt an eerie camaraderie with that vision, as though the stars were something more than mere light to decorate and alleviate the monotony of night. He felt an unreasonable urge to rise up to one of those stars, and live there, joining with other entities…
From one end of the street hooves clopped restively against the solid-packed debris and brick fragments. In the moonlight and the fitful glare of the torch of a passer-by he made out a bearded man in a faded soldier’s tunic of foreign cut. And a pie-bald horse.
It looked very much like a Persian.
“Enkidu!”
He jumped, but it was not the horseman who had called. Tamar had wrestled her way out of the house, and now came purposely toward him, garbed as before. No—he saw now that she had donned a loose robe whose color was subdued in the moonlight, to the point of invisibility. Two or three of her women trailed her, pulling on similar apparel and studying the horseman with an interest that seemed reciprocal.
Enkidu waited dully as she approached. But he had a sudden, irrational premonition: he must not let her touch him. Something—perhaps his childhood shedu voice—was warning him of dire consequence… if.
“Enkidu—I’m going to be terribly busy now that the city has changed hands—”
“Changed hands?” He glanced again at the soldier.
“You don’t know? Look around you. The Persian is here.”
“Yes, I see him.”
“I mean all the Persians. The host of them. Gobryas’ men are inside the walls now—”
“Gobryas?” He edged away as she edged near.
“Cyrus’ general. Cyrus himself will no doubt be here soon…”
Enkidu stared at her, jerked for a moment from his general state of shock. “They’re inside? Where is the fighting? The pillage?”
Yet the Hebrew slave had said something—and where there was one Persian, there could be a thousand more. He recalled how indifferent the residents of Babylon had seemed to the threat of Cyrus, though the man had already had impressive successes in the field. Could it be—could it possibly be—that Cyrus had kept Babylon waiting only in order to take her at the right time? That he had waited as one waits for a medlar—for that precise moment between ripeness and rot when one may with profit bite into the fruit?
The old wonder and awe of Babylon remained. She was a lovely, careless woman, who needed the guiding hand that her own ruler had failed to hold out to her.
“Elsewhere in the city, what there is of it,” Tamar said, answering his question after a long pause. She, too, was contemplating the Persian soldier speculatively. “But no one is eager to go out and get killed over an issue already decided. So long as their homes and places of business are not looted, they will not give the conqueror much trouble, I think. Cyrus is not one to permit indiscriminate pillage.”