Twilight in Babylon Read Online Free PDF Page B

black, or you are tall and graceful as a willow and I’m shorter and wiry as copper, we are kin. One mother, one father to us all. That is the humanity, that is the spark of the divine in each of us which we must protect.” He sipped from his beer. “When a brother thinks he’s more divine than his brother, it is the seed of trouble.”
    Images flashed through her mind, so fast and so saddening she felt as if she’d been hit in the face. Brother against brother, cousin fighting cousin, splits because of gods worshiped or economic policies embraced. Planes, bombs, boats, guns. Blood, everywhere.
    “Chloe, are you well, female?” Ningal asked.
    She met his gaze.
    “You turned as white as river foam. Does your head hurt?”
    She turned the drinking tube away from her mouth. “I’m fine. It’s just a lot to take in at once.” So many things in her head that she didn’t know, but she understood. Words with pictures filled her with such emotion, of places and humans she’d never even guessed. But she knew it, knew them. The foreignness was familiar. Chloe turned the tube to her again, and took a small sip to cleanse the bitterness from her mouth.
    “Forgive me a justice’s ramblings,” Ningal said. “You must be hungry, tired, I brought all of those people to groom you, but you know how to do it yourself, obviously—What do you need? Want?”
    A Big Mac and an order of fries.
She kept her mouth tightly shut. “I need to take care of my sheep,” she said, rising with the bag of pomegranate peels.
    “Of course, should someone go with you?”
    “No, I will be fine,” she said. The tablet of her sheep was tied into her skirt, which, though dirty and scratchy, was hers. “I’ll be back soon.” She slipped out the door into the street. It joined with the other, the big street that led past the multicolored hill, beneath the gate, and out to the grazing grounds. The clumps of people seemed to pay less attention to her this time, and Chloe felt a little more at ease. But there were so many!
    Outside the gate a few shepherds watched the sheep, but casually. Chloe saw that animal skins were rigged on posts, making a fence around the territory. She walked up to a reclining shepherd. He was carving something with a small knife and didn’t look up. “I’m here to see my sheep,” she said.
    “Which ones are yours?”
    “That one and that one,” she said, pointing. “They have only been here a few… hours.”
    He glanced up at her from beneath interwoven eyebrows. “I remember. Eight and four and one. What are you going to do?”
    “Mark them.”
    He grunted and continued his carving. Chloe took her pomegranate peels to the water and opened a small vial of sesame oil for which she’d traded her fish-blade knife. With bleats and baas, she called her flock and chased them down to make her mark on them. It was almost twilight by the time she hurried beneath the archway, down the main street, and into the quiet lane on which Ningal lived. The people had started cooking fires in the streets, eating their meals and entertaining themselves in the open.
    They have no homes, she thought. If not for Ningal, she would be one of them, crouched in the filth of the street trying to sleep.
    Kalam opened the door for her. His gaze took in the bright yellow of her palms and the mud stains on her knees and chest. “There is water still in the tub,” he said.
    “Thank you,” she said, and walked quickly through the courtyard and into the room.
    As she stepped from the tub—again—there was a knock on the door. “Come in. Enter,” she said.
    “The tradesmen await you,” a girl said.
    Chloe picked up her skirt, then discarded it in favor of a clean sheet with which to dry her body. She trailed the girl and found herself in a well-lit room. The people who had followed Kalam in were there, waiting.
    Cloth and bangles, bottles and brushes, they were all laid out for her to see. The tablet with her sheep was in her hand,