Garden of Madness (7 page)

“I saw you enter and cross to the wall in your usual way.”

The flutter became a crawling up her back. How many nights had Ying watched her from silent shadows?

Ying squinted into the sun, rising above the courtyard wall. “I finished before you returned. There was no one else.”

But there
had
been someone else. “You may return to your work.” Again, that little flame of resentment flared behind Ying’s eyes. Tia dismissed her with a wave of her hand and left the courtyard.

Ying had seen no one before her, including Kaldu. Shadir had been there when she jumped from the city wall. Tia recalled his words, his tone. Had he known Kaldu’s body lay mangled nearby? Had he tried to keep her from it? She had seen no blood on Shadir’s clothing. Would not such a struggle leave signs?

She must find the asû who had been summoned to the garden to examine the body.

A twinge of uncertainty dogged Tia’s steps. Should she be so preoccupied with the death of a nobleman when her own husband also lay dead in the palace?

But Shealtiel’s death was expected, the culmination of a long illness, and she could not quash her curiosity nor her fear to sit in mourning. Not when her father might be in danger.

The asû assigned to the palace did not spend his time in a temple, as was customary for the profession. Instead he had his own chambers in the palace and was expected to care for any and all in need, from slave to king. Tia had long desired to help care for his suffering patients, to ease their pain, but Shealtiel did not approve of what he called her “gruesome interests.” He preferred her to keep to her studies and leisure.

She found the asû bent over his latest patient, a court official’s wife. Seluku’s short, wide build was a source of amusement for children and adults, earning him the nickname “Mouse.” Indeed, his pointed nose and two prominent front teeth did not help.

Seluku barely acknowledged her, so intent was he on his procedure. Tia should have been offended, but instead his work drew her to the bedside.

The woman was not conscious—whether intentional or not, Tia did not know—and her breathing was labored, with a strange warbling on the intake.

Seluku glanced at Tia, then indicated a thin lead tubing at the foot of the bed. She placed it in his extended hand.

“Her chest is filling with a death demon.” He held a flint knife in his small right hand. “We make an incision here, in the fourth rib.”

He spoke like one of her tutors and she watched, unflinching. The knife slit the woman’s skin easily. A trail of blood followed the incision. The woman’s body twitched, and Tia stepped forward to lay a calming hand on her shoulder. She seemed insensible to Tia’s touch, and Tia longed to relieve her discomfort.

“We insert the tube.” He angled it downward, watched the patient’s face as he twisted it into position. “And let it drain.”

Indeed, it did drain. A foul, yellowish fluid that must certainly be deadly. Tia stroked the woman’s hair, spoke softly. “And she will live?”

He pulled two amulets from a pouch that lay across a chair and began to swing them over her body. “If the hand of the god wills it.” A gentle chant escaped his lips and Tia did not interrupt his prayers. Did the gods truly intervene on behalf of man? She found a cloth and jug of water and bathed the woman’s fever-flushed forehead.

After Seluku finished and dressed the incision, he mixed a paste of some sort of powder and water and placed a small amount against the inside of her cheek. “For the pain.” He gathered his supplies, then asked, “You have come about Kaldu?”

Perceptive little mouse. “Two questions.”

His lips twitched in amusement and he secreted the amulets in his pouch.

With her hand still on the woman’s brow, Tia plunged forward. “How long do you believe the body lay before it was found?”

“And the next question?”

“What kind of weapon did such damage?”

Seluku watched the woman for a long moment, then turned and pushed past Tia, out of the chamber. Tia whispered a few words of comfort in the woman’s ear, then followed.

He waddled along the darkened corridor and spoke without turning. “You have a healer’s heart and strength of stomach, Princess.”

She glowed under his praise. “I am very interested in seeing those in pain healed. I do not care to see harm come to the body.”

“Yes, and one body in particular.”

She caught up with him as they emerged from the corridor into a courtyard and touched his arm. He slowed and turned. “Seluku, what can you tell me?”

He worried his bottom lip with those two teeth and scanned the courtyard, as if to ensure their privacy. “No more than I told you last night. The wounds were inflicted by something other than any blade I have seen. The skin was torn, such as wounds from an animal. As to the time of his death . . .” He squinted up at the sky as though reading the hour. “I would say he was not long dead when you found him. The evening was cool but the body was warm. The blood had not yet dried. Certainly he had not lain more than an hour or two.”

Tia took this information and fitted it into the facts she already knew. But Seluku was not finished.

He drew close, his head reaching only to her chin, and his eyes darted right and left. “I have never seen an animal capable of this attack in the palace.”

Was he probing for information, or did he have a theory of his own? The family secret was so well kept, she did not even know who was privy to it.

Tia chose to misinterpret his comment. “I will be careful, Seluku, thank you.”

Bony fingers gripped her wrist. “If this—animal—is loose, it will kill again. And it must be stopped.”

He knows
. By Marduk, he knew and he was serving Tia a warning. The words spawned a nausea his procedure had not. She extricated her wrist from his web of fingers, her own hand shaking. “Yes. Indeed.” All she could think to say, but the words held no meaning.

He straightened, as if they had been talking of nothing but potions and charms. “You will accompany me again, to visit the sick?”

She smiled.
If the desire to heal ever overcomes my fear of the queen
. “Perhaps.”

His glance at the sky reminded her of how far the day was already spent. Shealtiel’s burial would occur at sundown, and she could not afford to offend his family, not with her marriage request still unanswered.

Tia took her leave of Seluku, stretching neck muscles grown tense. Her questioning had yielded little information, and it would not be long before news of Kaldu’s death would spread. She was her father’s only protection.

And she was running out of time.

CHAPTER 8

Darkness fell upon the Jews’ Shabbat, and Tia hurried to join the family assembled in the first courtyard inside the palace arch. Twelve chariots and their horses circled and waited for passengers. An evening burial was odd, but the Judaean vassals insisted on burying their dead within twenty-four hours. Shealtiel had been piously faithful in life; of course he would be in death.

That Tia had been excluded from all preparations was not surprising. His family had accepted her only as a token of good faith between families, a relationship long since degenerated. She had never been a daughter to Marta, nor a sister to Shealtiel’s siblings. Now she belonged to no one.

Amytis joined her at once, clutched her arm, and dragged her toward the lead chariot.

“Tia, you are his wife.” Her tone was like a slap. “You should have been among the first to arrive.”

Amytis’s perfume lay heavy and Tia’s eyes teared. “I had some business to—”

“Your business is here. Acting the part of a royal daughter.”

Marta glared from the second chariot at her wayward daughter-in-law. Did she wish Tia had not attended? Beside Marta, Pedaiah’s gaze fixed beyond the palace arch, as though nothing here was worth his attention. She would not wait to catch his eye.

It was a strange relationship, her father’s hold on the world, this forced alliance between the vast Babylonian empire and the tiny province of Judaea. Nebuchadnezzar subjected entire nations to his reign, turned kings into vassals, but somehow those he trampled retained his respect. The Jews had been decimated in their own land, with even their great temple destroyed, over forty years ago. Her father had brought the best of them here to Babylon to ensure the cooperation of those left behind in their ruined land. Though captives, many held positions of prominence, like Nebuchadnezzar’s own chief advisor, the Judaean Belteshazzar, though Tia had seen little of him these seven years. And the family of King Jeconiah enjoyed special privileges, despite their father languishing in prison, for some reason known only to her father, or known to him once, when his mind was whole.

Still, the Jews resisted assimilation into Babylonian culture. They kept their holidays, their feasts, their rituals. They refused to eat certain foods, dressed according to their old ways, and most significantly, held tightly to their “One God,” as though they had brought him here from Judaea and the Babylonian gods were nothing.

All the same, Tia had been wed to Shealtiel, and the family had been invited to reside in the palace. Such connection made today’s burial procession a royal event.

Tia climbed into the foremost chariot alongside Amytis. Sitting within, wrapped in heavy robes, was the peasant whose life had become one of deceit, simply because he strongly resembled the king. Tia bent to give him the obligatory kiss but did not meet his eyes. They had never spoken, and his presence was reserved for the occasional public wave from the palace balcony. Or a funeral procession. Compared with her father, he was like an empty shell.

Another chariot held Tia’s two sisters and their husbands. An assortment of officials followed Marta and Pedaiah, in honor of the Jewish royal death, along with Shealtiel’s sister, Rachel, and younger brothers. Tia peered across the courtyard for a glimpse of Nedabiah, who would soon be her next husband, and gripped the edge of the chariot.

“You are not ill?” Her mother’s eyes narrowed, more disapproving than concerned. “I have told you that your ridiculous nighttime excursions are not healthy—”

“I am well, Mother.”

In truth, something like sickness did seem to hover. Was it only the upheaval of her new widowhood? Worry for her father and Kaldu’s strange palace death? It seemed something more, an oppression begun last night after the dream, and had not yet lifted.

They started off down the ramp, and the chariot lurched over an uneven paving stone, knocking Tia against Amytis. She pushed Tia upright and Tia again gripped the chariot wall.

In the street a six-wheeled wagon drawn by a team of brown workhorses held the huge terra-cotta burial urn. Tia turned her face from it, unwilling to dwell on Shealtiel’s body secreted inside. Two slaves stood on either side of the urn, holding it upright as the wagon wheeled through the still-crowded Processional Way. They followed, and in the chariots behind them, laments began.

Tia’s nightly run afforded her only the barest glimpse into its streets. To be on the ground, among the people, assaulted her senses in ways unaccustomed. She bit her lip to maintain her solemnity but felt the stares of the people and wished she could stare in return. The Processional Way, the massive thoroughfare built by her father, began at the Ishtar Gate and continued through the city, past the soaring tower of Etemenanki, with its seven tiers to match the Gardens, then stretched to the hazy horizon where it met the outer wall.

They rolled through the crowds, who made way for their convoy with their own laments, to honor the dead. Tia gazed on citizens, both rich and poor with their dirty tunics, and merchants with their wagons loaded with timber and wine. A cart of oranges caught her eye and she could almost taste the tang of the juicy fruit. It was all so . . .
real
. So different from the palace. But so removed, she might as well have been only the statue of Ishtar paraded in the annual Akitu Festival procession.

Though Tia would have tarried, would have reached her hands to the outstretched fingers of those they passed, still she wished the moon would rise faster in the east to hurry them along. A goat pranced back and forth on the end of a rope, and Tia felt a restless kinship with the animal. She shifted in the chariot and drummed her fingers along its walls. Amytis jabbed her with an elbow, then bowed her head.
Too interested in my surroundings for a properly grieving widow
. She stilled her body and stared ahead.

At last they reached the burial ground, a collection of royal tombs at the southern edge of the city, and alighted to stand at its edge.

The crowd formed around the tomb given to the royal family. Marta and Pedaiah joined her, and Amytis dropped back to stand with the Babylonian officials, as was fitting. Behind them, Rachel and Nedabiah held hands. But Tia did not belong with either group, not the family, nor the Babylonians, and she held herself apart.

They waited for slaves to complete the laborious process of removing the heavy urn from the wagon and transporting it to the tomb. The night air was damp and heavy, and Tia lifted the hair from her neck. Pedaiah stepped to her side. She could feel his tense anger, strung tight beside her. Would he welcome her sympathy?

“I am sorry for the loss of your brother.” She said it quietly, as it was meant only for him.

He glanced at her and then away. “Are you?”

Perhaps he guessed her small measure of relief in her freedom. Tears stung her eyes at her own callousness. She formed her words slowly, thoughtfully. “I know that you loved him. And he spoke often of you.”

At this, Pedaiah let out a small breath. “Did he?”

“He wished for you to live in the palace with the rest of your family.”

Pedaiah studied the slaves, sweating over their cargo as they dragged it toward the brick tomb. “He knew that could never happen.” The declaration was like a judgment, a sentence that brooked no argument.

Is the great Pedaiah too proud for that?

Tia kicked at the dirt with the toe of her sandal. “Shealtiel also knew what you thought of him.”