Zuri

Babylon was not breathing — it was suffocating.

The oncoming wind from the Mesopotamian desert brought no freshness, only a scalding, copper-red dust that settled on the lips with the taste of iron and dry clay. The air hung heavy with the thick, sticky stench of boiling asphalt — the bitumen used by thousands of workers to cement baked bricks across the giant terraces. For Amytis, this city had become a majestic cage lined with azure glaze. Three years had passed since she left the cool, fog-shrouded mountain forests of Media. Three years since she became the wife of the great Nebuchadnezzar. And for three years, her womb had refused to receive his seed, remaining barren like sun-scorched clay.

Beyond the carved balconies of her chambers, an infernal rhythm raged uninterrupted from dawn to dusk: the clatter of bronze chisels, the groan of wooden winches, the shouts of overseers, and the heavy laments of slave work gangs. Nebuchadnezzar was building the Gardens for her. The king was driven mad by love and his own helplessness. Only last night, he had come to her chambers himself — mighty, smelling of cedar resin, sweat, and heavy royal oil. He held her against his broad chest and whispered words of tenderness, but his embrace only weighed on Amytis, and in the eyes of the master of the world read the same hidden, burning anguish. He was trying to raise artificial mountains amidst the parched plain, if only to bring a smile back to his wife's pale face. But dust from the construction site ate into the silk of her garments and clogged her nostrils, while the priests of Marduk in the main temples whispered ever louder behind closed doors that the gods of the plain had rejected the foreign queen.

Amytis lay on an ivory couch, her face buried in a sweat-warmed pillow. Every movement was an effort; her body felt foreign, heavy as lead.

"They sacrificed white doves again, My Queen," a quiet, low voice sounded right beside her ear, like the rustle of dry palm leaves.

Amytis did not even flinch. The only person whose presence caused her no physical pain was Zuri.

Zuri was no ordinary servant. The blood of soft Babylonian or Egyptian women did not run in her veins. She was a gift from a warlord — a Nubian from the dark, unreachable lands beyond the First Cataracts of the Nile, where gods have no names and magic is blended with blood and raw earth. Tall, eerily graceful, and slender, she looked as if carved from blue-black ebony. A serpentine, predatory fluidity marked her movements. Her eyes — two frozen drops of amber resin — held an unblinking, heavy gaze devoid of human submission. Zuri was a witch who had brought an ancient, dark force from the African swamps, and her true master was not the king's will, but a deep, poisonous desire for her proud, fading mistress.