onto the street, should such a disturbance ever occur in his sleepy tavern.
“Who forbids it?” asked the astrologer.
The innkeeper shrugged. “No one
My ears pricked up. “Who are you talking about?”
Finding his Greek inadequate, the innkeeper addressed the astrologer in Parthian.
Mushezib’s face grew long. “Our host says the temple is … haunted.”
“Haunted?” I said.
“I forget the Greek word, but I think the Latin is ‘lemur,’ yes?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “A manifestation of the dead that lingers on earth. A thing that was mortal once, but no longer lives or breathes.” Unready or unable to cross the river Styx to the realm of the dead, lemures were said to stalk the earth, usually but not always appearing at night.
“The innkeeper says there is a lemur at this nearby temple,” said Mushezib. “A woman dressed in moldering rags, with a hideous face. People fear to go there.”
“Is she dangerous?” I said.
Mushezib conversed with the innkeeper. “Not just dangerous, but deadly. Only a few mornings ago, a man who had gone missing the night before was found dead on the temple steps, his neck broken. Now they lock the gate, which before was never locked.”
So this was the nocturnal menace Darius had warned me about, fearing even to name the thing aloud.
“But surely in broad daylight—,” began Antipater.
“No, no!” protested the innkeeper’s wife, who suddenly joined us. She was almost as big as her husband, but had a scowling demeanor—another type suitable for the stage, I thought, the innkeeper’s irascible wife. She spoke better Greek than her husband, and her thick Egyptian accent explained the Alexandrian delicacies among the Babylonian breakfast fare.
“Stay away from the old temple!” she cried. “Don’t go there! You die if you go there!”
Her husband appeared to find this outburst unseemly. He laughed nervously and shrugged with his palms up, then took her aside, shaking his head and whispering to her. If he was trying to calm her, he failed. After a brief squabble, she threw up her hands and stalked off.
“It must be rather distressing, having a lemur so nearby,” muttered Antipater. “Bad for business, I should imagine. Do you think that’s why there are so few people here at the inn? I’m surprised our host would even bring up the subject. Well, I’m done with my breakfast, so if you’ll excuse me, I intend to return to our room and spend the whole day in bed. Oh, don’t look so crestfallen, Gordianus! Go out and explore the city without me.”
I felt some trepidation about venturing out in such an exotic city by myself, but I needn’t have worried. The moment I stepped into the street I was accosted by our guide from the previous day.
“Where is your grandfather?” said Darius.
I laughed. “He’s not my grandfather, just my traveling companion. He’s too tired to go out.”
“Ah, then I show you the city, eh? Just the two of us.”
I frowned. “I’m afraid I haven’t much money on me, Darius.”
He shrugged. “What is money? It comes, it goes. But if I show you the ziggurat, you remember all your life.”
“Actually, I’m rather curious about that temple of Ishtar just up the street.”
He went pale. “No, no, no! We don’t go there.”
“We can at least walk by, can’t we? Is it this way?” I said.
Next to the inn was a derelict structure that must once have been a competing tavern, but was now shuttered and boarded up; it looked rather haunted itself. Just beyond this abandoned property, a brick wall with a small wooden gate faced the street. The wall was not much higher than my head; beyond it, I could see what remained of the roof of the temple, which appeared to have collapsed. I pushed on the gate and found that it was locked. I ran my fingers over the wall, where much of the mortar between the bricks had worn away. The fissures would serve as excellent footholds. I stepped back, studying the wall to find the easiest place to scale it.
Darius read my thoughts. He gripped my arm. “No, no, no, young Roman! Are you mad?”
“Come now, Darius. The sun is shining. No lemur would dare to show its face on such a beautiful day. It will take me only a moment to climb over the wall and have a look. You can stay here and wait for me.”
But Darius protested so vociferously, gesticulating and yammering in his native tongue, that I gave up my plan to see the temple and agreed to move on.
Darius showed me what he called the Royal District, where Semiramis and Nebuchadnezzar had built their palaces. As far as I could tell, nothing at all remained of the grandeur that had so impressed Alexander when he sojourned in Babylon. The once-resplendent complex, now stripped of every ornament, appeared to have been subdivided into private dwellings and crowded apartment buildings.
“They say that’s the room where Alexander died.” Darius pointed to an open window from which I could hear a couple arguing and a baby crying. The balcony was festooned with laundry hung out to dry. The surrounding terraces were strewn with rubbish. The whole district smelled of stewing fish, cloying spices, and soiled diapers.
If there had ever been an open square around the great ziggurat, it had long ago been filled in with ramshackle dwellings of brick and mud, so that we came upon the towering structure all at once as we rounded a corner. The ziggurat had seemed more mysterious when I had seen it the previous night, from a distance and by the beguiling
