Daughters of Babylon Read Online Free PDF

herself.”
    “This is beautiful. I have clients in Toronto who would love this.”
    “My bride prefers to keep her talents quiet, but I shall tell her what you said.”
    Alphonse’s voice swelled with emotion whenever he spoke of “his bride”. He kept a photo on his desk of their wedding day some forty years ago and a collage on his wall of their travels; but there were no recent photos, for Claire-Elise suffered from acute agoraphobia and had not left her bedroom in the suburbs of Toulouse for over a decade. Alphonse, who’d survived two major heart attacks and a quadruple by-pass brought about by work stress, negotiated an early retirement package and sold their mansion in Switzerland weeks before the 2007 economic collapse. He was Silvina’s first graduate in Full Spectrum Training, and her first hire.
    Inside the box was a 5x7 photo in a plain wooden frame. Two rows of young people hammed for the camera on a sloped field with a backdrop of stone ruins and bushel baskets of fruit in front of them. Bell-bottom jeans, Indian cotton skirts, and long hair placed the shot at early to mid-seventies.
    “Who are these people?” Silvina asked.
    “Can you distinguish no familiar faces?”
    There were three men, four women, and sitting in the front row, a boy about six or seven. A woman with a round face and beaming apple cheeks had her arm around the boy. “Is this Claire-Elise?”
    “It is, indeed.”
    “She’s gorgeous.” Silvie peered more closely at the dark-haired child with hands folded in his lap. The Téracs, she knew, had four grown children. “One of your sons?”
    “No, I did not know her then. She was scarcely twenty. He may have been one of the local boys, I did not think to inquire.”
    Silvie felt a tightening of her ribcage. “This is Reine du Ciel ?”
    Alphonse smiled. “Where you will be in twelve hours.”
    “Oh, my gosh.”
    She had been hearing about Reine du Ciel for years, long before imagining that she would one day see it for herself. The Queen of Heaven, a place where apricots grew in unimaginable abundance, where walnut trees dropped nutmeats the size of baseballs, and opium poppies—God’s blood to the locals—erupted from the stony ground like divine, open wounds. According to the only two people she’d known who experienced Reine du Ciel , it was a place without boundaries, an amorphous patch of land steeped in violence and strange passions. “Blythe and I called ourselves Daughters of Babylon,” Viv said, “because of the abundance.”
    “What about the guys?” Silvina asked. “Were they the Sons?”
    “No. The guys never bothered with a name, but we were thick, closer than family.” She shook her head. “I’ve never known anything like it since.”
    Vivian Lansdowne left Canada before Silvina knew enough to ask, what did you mean by thick? What kind of strange passions? When she asked Blythe a couple years later to explain where Queen of Heaven was, she was told the far edges of Aquitaine but further south, before you reach Navarre—“Not there, a little further north,” Blythe said, poring over an atlas. “…hmm, no, that doesn’t look right either”—as if the locale were meta-geographic, some mythic core of sovereignty crumpled in the high valleys between France and Spain. Silvina asked how large was the priory, and Blythe said its lands stretched across the Pyrenees to the meanders of St. James, over tribunals, past witchhunts through dynasties of generations of crumbling Cerabornes. Whatever all of that meant. Trouble was, Blythe only waxed freely on the topic midway through a second—sometimes third—bottle of Château Latour, and if she made it to Spanish coffee, exaggeration would give way to twitches and small choking sounds as if a fishbone had lodged in her throat.
    Sober, Blythe Pendaris, President and CEO of Tri-partite Academy, 128th of Fortune 500 ’s most influential women, hardly mentioned Queen of Heaven and only then as “Q of