‘You are not drinking wine?’ he inquires, belatedly.
She waves the offer away, with her hand and with her plait. ‘I never drink,’ she says.
‘Even though the wine in Babel is so good?’
‘I didn’t know it was.’
He nods, raises his goblet like a torch, toasts her, toasts the unicorn.
‘I’m glad you find something to admire in our city,’ she says.
‘I find many things.’
‘We wouldn’t guess that from what you say about us.’
‘It isn’t what one says.’
‘What, then? What one does? By every account all you are doing is planning to build your own city somewhere else.’
‘I could hardly plan to build it here.’
‘So it is true?’
‘About the city, no. I intend — that’s too grand a verb — I think, only of a tower.’
‘A temple?’
‘Just a tower.’
‘As a memorial to your brother?’
She has moved closer to him. He can distinguish the smell of her hair from the rest of her, and it reminds him of the smell of Abel’s scalp, when Abel was more fragile than an egg, a veined transparent oval of warm blood and sour milk — a new thing.
She notices a dark flicker in his eyes, like the memory of grief, or worse, the memory of the memory of grief. Sadden me, her own eyes plead. Sadden me until I cannot bear it.
‘As a memorial to myself,’ he says.
‘You are a vain man?’
He shrugs. ‘No more than the common. But I must have somewhere to be buried.’
She is not sure that she follows. ‘Why would you choose to be buried in a tower? In the hope that your soul will ascend more quickly to a god?’
‘I am not thinking of my soul. I care only about my body.’
‘You wish to be conspicuous in death?’
‘No. Merely comfortable.’
‘And the earth will not do for that?’
Very well, he decides, you have worked hard enough for this — I will sadden you. He takes a sip of wine, religiously, showing her a spotless hand; then draws a spotless sleeve across his mouth. He is a paid performer: he knows how startling the effect is, of fine linen on an ancient face.
‘I have a terror of death,’ he says, ‘which is equalled only by the revulsion I feel for earth — actual earth, the crumbling substance, the stone-deaf clod itself. It is likely that the first of these impieties is a consequence of the second. Clearly, whoever loves silence must love soil. But as there is nothing I can do — nothing I will do — to reconcile my noisy thoughts to the unechoing quiet of unpeopled nature, to the certain prospect that mud will muffle them, that a mulch of droppings and manure, blind seeds and the broken legs of spiders, will swallow the last leakings of my blood, soundlessly, without a gulp, as it swallowed my brother’s, then I must at least shuffle my alarms, try to separate what I dread of death from what I know of slime. Better to be walled up in a high cold tower — for it is not freezing that I fear; it is only incubating heat that makes a worm of me. Better to be imprisoned for all time in a swaying ziggurat of icy stone, with the din of the city below, and not a slug to leave its trail across my throat…’
Sadden her? He has so comprehensively saddened himself that he is already mourning his passing, and has not the wherewithal to resist the girl when she puts her face closer still to his, stays the agitation of her plait, and presses her lips to the very ground along which the obscene slugs have slid their silver.
VI
On the top floor of the House of Hearsay and Hermeneutics, meanwhile, where Sisobk the Scryer keeps an antique room (though he would much rather, from the point of view of personal management, keep an antique face, like Cain’s), the prophet Moses has persuaded Yahweh to shake open the gates to hell.
The prophet Sisobk knows what happens next, is familiar with every smoking fissure in the earth, but he is not the less frightened or incensed for that. He climbs the table, puts his little fingers in his ears, beholds Korah’s shaven shadow advancing down his wall, watches Korah’s laden mules troop across his floor, but cannot, will not, hear the cries as the carpet opens wide its weave beneath their feet, devouring Korah and Korah’s wife and all who appertain to them, yea, even unto their shirt-buttons.
A terrible thing.
A New Thing.
A Newish Thing…
Sisobk the Scryer has Cain-longings on him and can scarcely wait for the sulphurous earth to close over again so that he can quit the table and prepare himself to go out.
This is not as strenuous a procedure for Sisobk as it is for some. He dries the perspiration underneath his arms with a scrap of papyrus torn from his feet, and picks at any crusts of foam which are still left around his mouth from the previous night’s fit. That completes his toilet.
It isn’t necessary for him to shave. For all that he has a bullock’s shoulders and an old bear’s stoop, it is a boy’s fluff that covers his face, a stripling’s moustache that stains his lip. In Babel, where they like a prophet to sprout a forest on his chin, because that’s how prophets are described in stories, Sisobk’s sparseness goes against him. Despite the voices that issue from his body, speaking tongues hitherto unheard; despite the parchment bandages he walks in instead of sandals; despite ecstasies and epiphanies in the course of which he has been known to fall down the twenty-two hundred steps of the ziggurat to the God Whose Name Has Been Mislaid, without splintering a single bone; despite such overwhelming testimony to the conscientiousness with which he pursues his calling, Sisobk the Scryer cannot command an audience in excess of ten when he guesses birthdays in the park, so inflexible are the Shinarites in the matter of prophets having beards.
One way of circumventing this prejudice, you would think, would be for him to change his job description. Sisobk has already thought of this himself — or at least he has anticipated our thinking it — hence his current choice of Scryer, which is of course inaccurate in as much as Scryers meet the promise of the what-will-be in the wall-eye of a crystal ball, an object which Sisobk neither owns nor craves. But it is not his experience that Shinarites care about the niceties of prognostication: in Babel you can tell fortunes or you can’t. Nor is he confident, anyway, that any description adequate to his genius can be found. He is not a seer — seers specialise in spiritual insights, sniff the sacred. Mystics implicate themselves in mysteries. Visionaries are addicted to extravagant fancies, spend weeks in bed, hungry, willing on fevered dreams. Pyromancers risk serious damage to their hands. And prophets — do not prophets speak for deities? The only deity Sisobk cares to speak for at present is Cain — a deity in the sense that he has stood up to a deity — but how do you convincingly speak for someone who won’t let you so much as speak to him?
Sisobk shuffles out, on paper feet, into the street. He would not be much of a visionary or a seer, he would be a poor mystic and an even poorer prophet, if he did not know where Cain was. He does not bother to say: ‘I see a theatre.’ He knows the theatre well. He has suffered many a rebuff outside its doors. The whereabouts of the dressing rooms, the suspiciousness of cleaners and janitors, present somewhat more of a problem, but nothing serious. The advantage of a repulsive appearance, however little it fits the prophetic category, is that while men may call at you, few will want to put out a hand to apprehend you.
He decides against knocking. Cain will only ask who is that, Sisobk will only reply Sisobk, and Cain will only say go away.