SCENE FIVE — TWO RIVERS The gold dims to a soft, focused amber. The courtiers fade into shadow. NABU sits on a low stool, tuning a beautiful lapis-inlaid Babylonian lyre with mathematical care. AVIVA sits across from him on a stone bench, turning the heavy gold cuffs on her wrists, feeling their weight like manacles. NABU. (plucking a bright, perfect chord) You're doing it again. AVIVA. Doing what? NABU. Holding your breath. Every time you look at the walls. Or the gold. Or me. Like a bird that's found the cage door and is waiting for it to snap shut. AVIVA. It is a cage, Nabu. It's only plated in gold. NABU. It's safety. (he sets the lyre down) My family came down from the northern hills three generations back. Nothing up there but dirt and mudslides and praying for rain that never came. Down here? The irrigation works. The bread arrives every single morning whether you've earned it or not. (he gestures around) And the music — Aviva, the music here has structure. Rules. Mathematics. Listen. He plays a stately, ascending Babylonian melody — genuinely beautiful, but rigid, intellectual, every interval squared off. NABU. It climbs to heaven like a ziggurat. One perfect brick laid on the next. That is how you praise an empire. (a little defensive) The court master says what you do "lacks discipline." So show me. Let me hear what you were humming by the river. AVIVA. (quietly, looking away) It doesn't lack discipline. (beat) It lacks a ceiling. She closes her eyes and sings a raw, unaccompanied fragment of the river melody — low, aching, full of bent notes that simply do not exist in the Babylonian scale. Anah... b'shvuyah... NABU. (the lyre forgotten, struck still) The — the interval. It bends. It doesn't climb like a stair. It moves like water around a stone. (almost to himself) I didn't know a voice could do that. AVIVA. It's the sound of the river. My mother taught it to me. Her father taught it to her, in a temple that doesn't exist anymore. (she opens her eyes) It's a song about a home I have never seen. NABU. (softly, looking at his rigid lyre as if for the first time) I've lived in this city my whole life. Ten thousand musicians inside these walls. And I don't think I have ever once heard a song that aches. (beat) Everything here is a shout of victory. We have no chord for... for missing something. For wanting what's gone. AVIVA. (after a moment, gently) Then let me teach you one.
