“So, let’s go on with my life,” he said. “I worked at the Court as soon as I left the tablet house, and then my writing and reading were of the utmost importance. I knew all languages. I saw many strange documents and old letters in Sumerian and was useful to the King’s regent, Belshazzar. No one much cared for Belshazzar, as I said. He couldn’t hold the New Year’s Festival, or the priests didn’t want him, or Marduk wouldn’t do it, who knows, but he wasn’t destined to be loved.
“Yet I can’t say this made for a bad atmosphere in the palace. It was fairly congenial and of course the correspondence was endless. Letters were pouring in from the outlying territories complaining about the Persians being on the march, or about the Egyptians being on the march, or about the stars as seen by various astrologists predicting very bad or good things for the King.
“I became acquainted in the palace with the wise men who advised the King on everything, and liked listening to them, and realized that when Marduk spoke to me, sometimes the wise men could hear it. And I also came to know that the story of the smile had never been forgotten. Marduk had smiled on Azriel.
“Well, what secrets I had.
“So look. I am walking home. I am nineteen. I have very little time left to live and I don’t know it. I said to Marduk, How could the wise men hear it when you talk to me? He said that these men, these wise men, were seers and sorcerers just as were some of our Hebrews, our prophets, our wise men, though nobody wanted much to admit it, and they had the power as I did to hear a spirit.
“He sighed and he said to me in Sumerian that I must take the utmost care. ‘These men know your powers.’
“I’d never heard Marduk sound dejected. We had long ago passed the foolish point of me asking him for favors or to play tricks on people, and now we talked more about things all the time, and he frequently said that he could see more clearly through my eyes. I didn’t know what this meant, but on this day when he seemed dejected I was worried.
“ ‘My powers!’ I said sarcastically. ‘What powers! You smiled. You are the god!’
“Silence, but I knew he was still there. I could always feel him, like heat; I heard him like breath. You know, the way a blind person knows that someone is there.
“I got to my front door and was ready to go in, and I turned around and for the first time I actually laid eyes on him. I saw Marduk. Not the gold statuette in my room. Not the big statues in the temple. But Marduk, himself.
“He was standing against the far wall, arms folded, one knee bent, just looking at me. It was Marduk. He was completely covered in gold as he was at the shrine but he was alive and his curly hair and beard seemed not made of solid gold as they were on the statue but living gold. His eyes were browner than mine, that is, paler, with more yellow in the irises. He smiled at me.
“ ‘Ah, Azriel,’ he said. ‘I knew it would happen. I knew it.’ And then he came forward and he kissed me on both cheeks. His hands were so smooth. He was my height, and I was right, there was a great resemblance between us, though his eyebrows were set just a bit higher than mine and his forehead was smoother, so he didn’t look so mischievous or ferocious by nature as I did.
“I wanted to throw my arms around him. He didn’t wait for me to say it. He said, ‘Do it, but for that moment maybe others will see me too.’
“I hugged him as my oldest friend, as the dearest to me in the world next to my father, and it was that night I made the mistake of telling my father that I talked with my god all the time. I should never have done it. I wonder now what would have happened if I had not done that.”
I interrupted. “Did anyone else see him, to the best of your knowledge?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, they did. The doorkeeper of our house saw him and all but fainted dead away to see a man all covered in gold paint, and one of my sisters looking down from the lattice above saw him too, and an elder of the Hebrews got a glimpse of him for a moment and came flying at me later that night with his staff, claiming he had seen me with a devil or an angel, and he did not know which.
“That’s when my father, my beloved, sweet, good-hearted father said, ‘It was Marduk, Babylon’s god, whom you saw.’ And maybe that is why…that is why, we are here now. My father never meant to hurt me. Never. He never meant to do a cruel thing to anyone in his life! He never meant it! He was…he was my little brother.
“Let me explain. I have figured it out. I was the eldest son, born when my father was young, because the deportation from Jerusalem had been hard on our people and they married quickly to have sons.
“But my father was the baby of his family, the little Benjamin beloved by everyone, and somehow or other in our family I fell into being his elder brother, and treating him as such. As eldest son I bossed him about a bit. Or rather, we became…we became as friends.
“My father worked hard. But we were close. We drank together. We went to the taverns together. We shared women together. And I told him, drunk that night, how Marduk had talked to me for years, and how now I had seen him, and my personal god was the great god of Babylon himself.
“So foolish to have done it! What good could have come of it! At first he laughed, then he worried, then he became engrossed. Oh, I never should have done it. And Marduk knew this. He was in the tavern but so far from me that he had no visibility, he was vaporous and golden like light, and only I could see him, and he shook his head ‘no,’ and turned his back when I told my father. But you know, I loved my father, and I was so happy! And I wanted him to know. I wanted him to know how I had put my arms around the god!
“Stupid!
“Let me return to the background. The foreground is suddenly too hot for me and it hurts me and stings my eyes.
“The family. I was telling you what we were. We were rich merchants and we were scribes of our Sacred Books. All of the Hebrew tribes in Babylon were in one way or another scribes of the Sacred Books and busy making copies for their own families at all times, but with us it was a very large business because we were known for the rapid and accurate copy. And we had a huge library of old texts. I think I told you, we had maybe, I don’t know, twenty-five different stories about Joseph and Egypt and Moses and so forth, and it was always a matter of dispute what to include and what not to. We had so many stories of Joseph in Egypt that we decided not to give all of them credit. I wonder what became of all those tablets, all those scrolls. We just didn’t think all those stories were true. But maybe we were wrong. Oh, who knows?
“But to return to the fabric of my life. Whenever I left the court of the palace, or the tablet house, or the marketplace, I came right home to work all evening on the Holy Scriptures, with my sisters and my cousins and uncles in the scriptoria of our houses, which were big rooms.
“As I told you, I was never very quiet, and I would sing the psalms out loud as I wrote them, and this irritated my deaf uncle more than anyone. I don’t know why. He was deaf! And besides, I have a good voice.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Why should a deaf uncle get so upset? But he knew I was singing the psalms not as I just sang that one for you, but as one would sing, with cymbals, dancing, you know, with a little bit of added dash, shall we say, and he wasn’t so happy about it.
“He said that we were to write when we were to write and to sing the Lord’s songs at the appropriate time. I shrugged and gave in but I was one for cutting up all the time. But I’m giving the wrong impression. I wasn’t really bad…”
“I know what kind of man you are, and were then…”
“Yes, I think by now you do, and maybe if you thought me bad you would have thrown me out in the snow.”
He looked at me. His eyes weren’t ferocious. The brows were low and thick, but the eyes were plenty big enough beneath them to give him a pretty look. And, it seemed to me that he was warmer and more relaxed now than earlier, and I felt drawn to him and wanting to hear everything he said.
But I wondered: Could I throw him out in the snow?
“I’ve taken many lives,” he said, plucking the thought right from me, “but I would not hurt you, Jonathan Ben Isaac, you know that. I wouldn’t hurt such a man as you. I killed assassins. At least when I came to myself that was my code of honor. That is my code now.
“In my early days as the Servant of the Bones, as the bitter, angry ghost for the powerful sorcerer, I killed the innocent because it was my Master’s will and I thought I had to do it, I thought that the man who had called me up could control me, and I did his bidding, until the moment came when I suddenly realized that I did not have to be a
