Wolf Whistle

Here, on his lands below the Sabine Hills, Arbil was surrounded by all manner of dismal trees, home to all manner of verminous creatures, and he mourned the vast unbroken flatness that was Babylonia. Except Babylon was dying. The great metropolis sat back while other cities sniped at its trade, and found the price for complacency was slow obliteration. Soon it would be nothing but a ghost town, a shadow of its mighty past, and a man with sons must change or shrivel with it. Arbil was not a surrenderer. That gutless peacock, the self-styled Augustus, now there’s a defeatist, he thought, and he might fool Romans with his tales of his glory, but by Marduk he did not fool Arbil. He called it an empire, yet would not fight wars. What a prick. He fobbed his people off with temples paid for by other mens’ campaigns and sold it back to them as a ‘Golden Age of Peace’. He was nothing but a conman.

Which was all to Arbil’s good. As a result of those pacifist policies, the first thing to dry up was the hitherto steady stream of prisoners of war, the traditional source of slave labour upon which the Roman economy depended. When Arbil heard about the practice of leaving babies on midden heaps, he knew at once he had a goldmine on his hands, a perpetual source of income, and he’d hardly have to work at it. He’d chosen a site not too close to Rome, yet private enough, from which to operate, and naturally this was subject to Babylonian law and none of that namby-pamby stuff the Romans professed to enforce. If a wife kills her husband, she is impaled. If a son strikes his father, his hand is cut off. If a couple commit adultery, they are tied up and thrown in the river. Simple, but effective. There was never any trouble on Arbil’s property.

Even from a distance, a stranger approaching would see that this was not the standard design of four wings round a central courtyard. A short-toed eagle for instance, cruising for snakes and frogs and lizards, would have a better view, and he would see a shape not dissimilar to his own silhouette. A stubby head, the remains of the original building, with a garden as its eye, and beyond, a broad stocky body, the earliest of the many extensions. Splayed from the middle, he would see eight long blocks, huge ‘wings’ of wings either side and, finally, a splayed tail block at the end. However, there would be too many people milling around, quite literally hundreds, for the short-toed eagle’s comfort and he would move on, skimming the ridge of the hill in his search for juicy reptiles.

Arbil would not have been among the buzz of humanity caught in the scan of the eagle. The weather was invariably foul and he spent all of the winter and much of the spring closeted indoors, swaddled in a long woollen mantle over numerous ankle-length robes. There were times when he would have swapped half his fortune for a Babylonian drought, even the odd swarm of locusts would have been more comforting than this bloody damp. Why go out in it? He had men for that. Overseers. Physicians. Managers for the various wings. Eunuchs to look after the girls once they reached puberty. Arbil had enough to do without supervising the supervisors. In fact, his whole organization was structured round routine, and that included his personal life.

First he would summon his wife and make love to her (twice, if he could manage it). Next he would bow to the rising sun. Then he would pray to Marduk. So powerful was this patron god of Babylonia that Arbil’s bedroom was devoted entirely to his holy symbol, the dragon, and it was from the dragon Arbil drew his strength. He patted his ample girth and smiled. His stamina, now! That came from the goddess Ishtar, whose eight-pointed star he’d had inlaid with ivory over his bedhead and it was to Ishtar that he turned every morning. (Twice, if he could manage it.)

After breakfast, he would bathe, for without his body perfumed and massaged, without his rebellious straight hair crimped in the traditional style and his beard snipped and curled as he liked it, he was in no fit state to reel in one of the many tentacles of his organization and absorb the latest news from the city. After all these years away from the motherland, he still baulked at mingling with men who wallowed like hippos in communal bathwaters and who worshipped gutless pagan gods.

He must have been daydreaming, maybe he’d even fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew was his wife saying ‘Arbil, Arbil! Are you all right?’

‘What?’ His vision was fuzzy, his mouth was dry. ‘Of course, I’m all right.’ He looked round. How did he come to be in his office? Wasn’t he in his bedroom just now? He never came into this, his favourite room, painted blue like the night sky to show up the gold in the lamplight, before his ablutions were complete.