Twilight in Babylon by Suzanne Frank

when he said counting.” She looked up at him. “I just don’t understand.”
    Ningal looked at the markings she’d made. Her hand had moved without hesitation as she drew them, just like it had moved when she signed her contract for the lease. “How did you sign the lease again?”
    “He said just make a mark, so I did.”
    “Do it for me.”
    She looked at the dirt, and with confidence and a little flourish she wrote CBK, linking the letters together in a way none of the others had been.
    Ningal scratched his head.
    “Do you recognize anything?”
    “I must confess, I don’t.”
    Dejected, she began to brush the dirt away. “It’s why I can’t stay.”
    “Because you have your own marks, and no one else does?”
    “I can’t be ignorant. I can’t
not
know.”
    Ningal, in the centuries that comprised his life, had been many things. A barber and surgeon, a scribe, an estate manager, a fisherman, a tradesman and a Father of Tablets. In all his time, he had never seen any other markings besides the ones of his people, the Black-Haired Ones, the Sumerians. It set them apart, helped them irrigate fields and promote trade. They could write, they had a language.
    He kept a list of all the words he’d ever heard, just so someone would know. In the Tablet House that had been his, on the Blue Street, there were shelves and shelves of his work. Words gleaned from every edge of the Black-Haired Ones’ world.
    He’d never seen of, nor heard words he didn’t recognize as being theirs. And never in a thousand courts of the gods had he seen someone else scribble and call it something.
    Did this girl need an exorcist? Or was this a gift from the gods?
    “How did you learn,” she asked him, pulling him back into the courtyard and away from the dusty memories of the Tablet House. “Who taught you?”
    “My father is wealthy. He sent his sons to the Tablet House.”
    “School?”
    Ningal was stunned, but he answered. “Yes, school.” How did she know that word? It was new!
    “How long were you a student?”
    He laughed and was surprised at how loud the sound was at this time of day. “From the day of my ninth birthday, every day from sunup to sundown, until I was twenty.”
    “No days off?”
    “Six days a month. The gods’ feasts, you know.” But perhaps she didn’t.
    “And your father was wealthy, so he could spare you from the family business.”
    “We’re shipwrights, and my father wanted us to be more.”
    “I’ll stay here on one condition,” she said, her eyes suddenly bright. Greener than they’d looked this afternoon—in fact, he’d thought they were brown. They were luminous. Every muscle of his body was tense with awareness, anticipation. Ningal felt like a fish—strung along and snared at the exact, right moment.
    “Which condition?”
    “Let me go to the Tablet House.” She leaned forward, and the sweetness of pomegranates and sesame washed over him, the clink of her bangles suggested a seductive beat. “I’ll be a good student. I’ll learn quickly. I won’t cause any fuss. I’ll make my own lunch. Just let me go.”
    “Why do you want to learn how to write?” he asked.
    “Because, because… if you can write, you can read.”
    “One would hope.”
    “If you can read, anything is possible. You can go anywhere, be anything. Nothing limits you. Nothing.”
    “You’re a female. An attractive one,” he said. The wine must have loosened his tongue, freed him to say what he thought instead of what he should only say. “Crook your finger and any one of a thousand men will give you anything you want, take you anywhere you desire to go, open the world to you.”
    She sat back, her legs shifted to the side, her arms crossed before her. “I don’t want a man’s world. I want my own.”
    “You have no desire for a mate?”
    She looked to the side, her profile to him. She wasn’t a marsh dweller; her nose was too strong, her neck too long. Neither were the strength of her chin and