1Eleven years after the army stood still, Cyrus came down out of the mountains toward Babylon. In those years he had taken Lydia in the far west, and its rich king Croesus with it, and all the lands between. Now only Babylon was left, the greatest city on the earth, sitting behind walls so thick that a chariot could turn on top of them.
2Inside those walls lived many peoples who had not chosen to. The kings of Babylon had a custom. When they broke a nation, they carried off its best people, and its gods as well, and set them down by the canals of Babylon to work. So the city was full of the taken: men of Tyre and of Elam, and the people of Judah, whose city Jerusalem had been burned some fifty years before.
3Now hear of one house among them. The family is imagined. The things that happened around it are written on the clay of that time and in the books of the people of Judah.
4There was a boy named Asa, thirteen years old, born by the canal. He carried bricks. His father Joah carried bricks. In the back of their one room, on a bed by the wall, lay his father's mother, Tirzah, who was close to sixty, worn old by the brick yards, and almost blind.
5She had been a girl of twelve when Jerusalem fell. She had walked the whole road to Babylon behind a rope, four months, and she had not forgotten one day of it. She spoke of her village as if she had left it that morning. It was on a hill, with a well under a fig tree, and the well had a name.
6Every year since Asa could remember, she had asked the same thing. "Is there word? Do they say we may go home?"
7And every year his father answered her. "Soon, mother. They say next year. A man at the kiln heard it from a scribe." Or: "The king has a new counsellor, who favours us." Or: "After the harvest, they say."
8None of it was so. No one at the kiln had heard anything. Joah was a gentle man, and he could not bear to tell his mother that she would die beside a foreign canal. So he gave her a little hope each year, as you give a sick person broth.
9When Asa was small, he saw her face lift each time. By the time he was ten, he saw that it no longer lifted. She still asked. She listened to the answer with her blind eyes turned to the wall. Then she said, "Yes, my son," in a flat voice, and asked for water. She had found him out years ago. She did not shame him by saying so. But she had stopped believing anything that was told her in that house, and Asa understood, without having words for it, that his father's kindness had left her quite alone.
10In the autumn of Asa's fourteenth year the war came close. The king of Babylon was Nabonidus, an old strange man who had lived ten years away in the desert and let the great feasts go unkept. He had lately brought the gods of all the lesser cities into Babylon for safety, statues by the cartload, and their own priests cursed him for it. His son had governed for him in those years.
11For a month there had been only rumour. Then one morning the criers went through the streets beating drums. A great victory! The army had met the Persians at Opis on the Tigris and thrown them back. The city was safe. There was shouting and beer in the brick yards.
12Two days later the first men from Opis came in at the north gate, without their shields. There had been a battle, they said. It had not been a victory. Many of the people there had been killed. And Sippar, the next city up the river, had opened its gates without a blow, and the king had fled.
13The city changed in an hour. Asa saw a rich woman running in the street with her hair down, carrying a silver jug. Everyone knew what happened when a city fell. Babylon knew better than anyone, for Babylon had done it to all the others.
14His father came home grey in the face. "There are boats going down the canal tonight," he said. "A man will take us to the marshes for all we have. Or we stay and bar the door. I do not know which. I do not know anything."
15From the bed, Tirzah spoke. They had thought she was asleep.
16"I have seen a city taken," she said. "I will tell you what it is. First the gates. Then the fire. Then they go from house to house. The old and the sick are not worth the rope." She said it calmly. "Take the boy to the marshes. Leave me water."
17"The criers say—" Joah began.
18"The criers said a victory." She turned her face to the wall.
19They did not go that night; the boatman wanted more than they had. They barred the door and sat in the dark. Toward midnight there was a great noise from the direction of the river gate, a roar of voices, and then, strangely, it did not grow. No bells. No glow of fire on the sky. Only the sound of many feet, in step, going through the streets toward the temple quarter, and then quiet.
20It was the quiet that was hardest. They sat listening for the screaming to begin, and it did not begin.
21At first light Asa stood up. "I am going to look," he said.
22His father caught his arm. "You are not. We will wait until we hear."
23"Hear from whom?" said Asa. "The criers? The man at the kiln?" He had not meant it to sound as it did. His father's hand dropped. "I am small and I can run. If it is as grandmother says, I will be back before they reach this street, and we will go by the canal and swim if we must. But one of us has to see it with his eyes."
24He slipped out. The streets were empty and all the doors were shut. He went by the alleys toward the Processional Way, keeping close to the walls, ready to bolt.
25At the corner of the great street he stopped. There were soldiers. They were mountain men with wicker shields, and they stood in a line along both sides of the way, all down its length, facing outward. They were not doing anything. At the gates of the great temple there was a double rank of them. A priest in white came out of a side door with a basin, as priests did every morning, and walked across to the altar court. The soldiers let him pass.
26Asa watched for an hour from a doorway. He saw a Babylonian baker come out, look about, and begin setting up his stall with shaking hands. He saw a soldier buy a loaf, and pay.
27He ran home and told it. All of it, as he had seen it. "They are standing guard at the temple. They are not going into the houses. I do not know why. I do not know if it will last. But I saw a soldier pay for bread."
28His grandmother had sat up on her bed. "You saw this."
29"With my eyes."
30"What colour were the shields?"
31"Brown. Woven, like baskets. Why?"
32"No reason," she said. "I only wanted to hear whether you would answer quickly." And for the first time in years she turned her face toward the room instead of the wall.
33So Babylon was taken without the breaking of a gate. It is written that seventeen days later Cyrus himself came into the city, and that the people laid green branches in the road before him. Not all of them loved him. Many were only glad to be alive. But the feasts were kept, and the markets opened, and no house was burned.
34That winter a new rumour began to go about among the taken peoples, down by the canals. It was said that the Persian king meant to send the captive gods back to their own cities. And it was said, more quietly, that he meant to send the people too.
35Joah heard it at the kiln. This time it was true that he heard it. He came home with his eyes shining, and knelt by his mother's bed.
36"Mother. There is word. They say we may go home. They say the king has ordered it."
37Tirzah lay still. "Yes, my son," she said, in the flat voice. "After the harvest, I suppose." And she asked for water.
38Joah knelt there with the cup in his hand. Asa, in the doorway, watched his father understand it at last. He had told her forty times, out of love. Now the thing had come, the one true thing she had waited fifty years to hear, and he had no way left to give it to her. He had used up the words. They sounded the same in his mouth as all the other times.
39His father went out into the yard and sat down among the brick moulds with his head in his hands.
40Asa went after him. He was fourteen and did not know what to say to a grown man weeping. He said, "I will go and find out."
41It took him nine days. He was a brick-boy, and no one tells a brick-boy anything. He hung about the gates of the treasury of the great temple, where the plunder of fifty years was stored. He carried loads for nothing so as to be let into the outer court. He listened. And on the ninth day he saw a thing, and stayed to see all of it, and then walked home slowly, putting it in order in his head. For he had learned from his father's mistake, and he knew he must not make it sound better than it was.
42He sat down on the floor by his grandmother's bed.
43"Grandmother. I am going to tell you what I saw today. Only what I saw. Some of it is good and some is not."
44She said nothing, but she was listening. He could tell by her hands.
45"In the court of the treasury there were tables set out. On the tables were cups and bowls of gold and silver, hundreds, very old. A Persian officer stood there with a scribe. There was a man of our people with them, a lord, in a good coat. I asked a porter his name and he said Sheshbazzar, a prince of Judah. The Persian counted the cups out to him one by one, and the scribe marked each one down, and our man's servants packed them in straw. I asked the porter what the cups were. He said they were the vessels the old king took out of the temple in Jerusalem. They are being sent back. I saw them counted. I touched the straw."
46Her hands had gone still.
47"That is the good part. Here is the rest. Not everyone is going. I heard men of our people saying so in the court. Many will stay; they have houses here now, and trades, and Jerusalem is a ruin with jackals in it. No one will be given food for the road. It is four months, the way you came. The ones who go will have to build everything from the ground. And you are old and cannot see, and I do not think you could ride so far, and I will not tell you that you could."
48She was quiet for so long that he thought he had killed her with it.
49Then she said, "Jackals."
50"That is what the men said."
51"There were always jackals. We heard them from the roof." She put out her hand, feeling for his face, and found it. "Your father never once put a jackal in it. It was always milk and honey and next year." She was crying, and smiling at once. "So it is true. They are counting out the cups. Oh, my child. It is true."
52She did not make the journey. She knew she could not, and she did not ask him to pretend. She lived until the spring. In those months she was different. She talked with Joah, truly talked, for the first time in years, and he sat by her bed in the evenings and did not tell her anything that was not so, and found there was still a great deal to say.
53Before she died she called Asa to her and gave him what she had. It was not much. She told him the road, stage by stage, as she had walked it behind the rope, every river and every town, in order, from the far end to the near. And she told him the name of the well under the fig tree.
54"The tree may be dead," she said. "I will not tell you it is there. But the well will be there. Wells do not go anywhere. When you have drunk from it, say my name over the water. That is all I want."
55Later in that year the first company set out from Babylon for Judah, some thousands of people with their donkeys and their bundles and the temple cups packed in straw. The books of that people tell of it. Joah went, and Asa walked beside him. Others of the taken peoples were leaving the city by other gates in those same weeks, with other gods wrapped on carts, each toward its own river and its own hill.
56At the gate there was a press of people, and a clerk at a table who seemed to be counting them as they went through. Asa noticed him because he was not a Persian. He was a Babylonian, a thin clever-looking scribe with clay on his fingers, and his stylus was still. He was only looking, very hard, at each face that passed, as if he needed to be sure of something.
57Asa thought no more about it. The road was in front of him, four months of it, and the names of its rivers were in his head, in order, and at the far end there was a well.