《Unprecedented: The Life of Enheduanna, the First-Known Writer》


 Chapter 1

    2250 BCE


    Urim, House of the Great Light, Giparu of the En


    Lady, my Lady! Queen of Heaven, Moon¡¯s Daughter, Jeweled, Shining, Keeper of Signs and Shibboleths. Inanna, my sweet. Come to me now, dear goddess. Lend me your honey to moisten my lips. Let the air of your wings fill my lungs, the fire of your eyes quicken my breast. Give me the strength to remember, for I am old.


    Oh, but I am old, my Lady! Younger than you, of course, but I feel as though I too was there when Father Enki gave each god his due and you the remainder. My eyes are sore from the dust you kicked up when you rose from the Land of the Dead. My belly aches, and when I run my hands beneath my gown I swear I can feel the scars of the dragoness whose grandson filleted her to make Heaven and Earth.


    Does that sound a bit grand to you, O Lady and Lord, O Lioness Without Equal, that I should compare myself to the gods? That I should speak so to one who has hung in the sky since time began, who has brought cupbearers high and mountains low according to her whims? Well, what sense in modesty? I have never been modest, and I will not be modest now, though I am old and feeble, though I can feel your sister¡¯s breath hot and dry on the back of my neck. If my brother¡¯s son is a god on earth, as he says he is, then what does that make me, who came before him, who has seen four kings sit upon the Throne of Thrones?


    I am your greatest servant and your greatest poet. The Land Between the Two Rivers has never seen my equal, nor will it again, and my name and my songs shall ring for a thousand thousand years. I am the En Kheduana, High Priestess of the Ancient and Most Holy City of Urim, Chief Wife of the Moon, sister and daughter of kings. My father was of the People of the Mountains, they whose tongue is now spoken from the steppes of Elam to the brink of the Lower Sea, but my mother was a queen of the Black-Headed People of the South, who speak the tongue of the gods. I have seen wars beyond counting and the rise and fall of cities. I have been cast out, spat on and disgraced and returned victorious. I have pressed my face to the chests of conquerors and bounced a living god on my knee.


    You have helped me before, goddess. When everything was taken from me, it was you who brought it back. When I was two, you made me one. Yours is the power to ravel and unravel, to weave and to snarl, and all my long life I have been caught in the tangles of your weft. I have pleaded with you and cajoled you and cursed you and praised you, in my heart and my mind and with trembling clay-stained hands. Now, in the dark of my bedchamber, in the quiet of the night and the quiet of my life, I call on you one last time. This time, for once, my wish is a small one, and my dreams small dreams. I ask only that you help me remember.


    I want to see them again one last time before I die, before your sister grips me in her claws and takes me to the House of Dust. I want to see my family: my father, the King of the World, my ghostly mother, my sweet fool brothers. Those I taught and those I learned from. The men I might have married, the god I did marry, the man who tried to destroy me and all the others. I feel them around me, goddess, though the night and the bed I lie in are empty, though my bedchamber is dark. Lady, my Lady! My Inanna. Come to me.


    2285 BCE


    Akkade, Great Household of the True King


    This land has never been whole.


    It was not whole when the four Old Ones fashioned the first men of clay, nor after the Great Flood washed it clean, nor after my father came and forged from it his Empire. Between the Swift River to the East and the Slow River to the West, there have always been cities beyond number, each with its god and each with its king. Kings were cheap in this land before my father made them his governors, and so were gods. Only I, who has dedicated my life to kings and gods both, would dare admit it. (If in the wanderings of my mind I should blaspheme a little, my Lady, I know you will forgive me. You are the source of kingship and the lioness of war, but also the queen of cheats and charlatans and clowns, and if anyone can forgive an old woman the occasional lapse of propriety, it is you.)


    In the time before my father, each petty king looked towards his neighbor cities as towards a plump roast of meat or a maiden with a flyaway veil. And whenever one of those kings felt he did not have enough slaves, enough flocks, enough concubines, enough mountains of lumber and bushels of wheat, despite evidence to the contrary, there was war. Since my father and his sons crowned themselves Kings of the World, there has still been war. The only difference is that now we call it rebellion.


    Though my father took away the crowns from rich men, he could not stop them wanting to get richer. That is the folly of men, to kill each other for what they already have, and no folly is greater than to want to become a king. I have known enough of them to know that. Once, I envied kings. Once, my most precious dream was that I would marry a king, that I would give birth to one. Now, I pity them. I pity all men, in fact. If I woke up a man tomorrow, Great Lady, old as I am, I would cut off my parts and join your menwomen to dance for shekels in the streets. Their life is not an easy one, but their mothers must sleep well knowing they will never be kings.


    Kings beyond counting had we, and cities and gods besides, but in this land there are only two races, as there are only two Great Rivers: the Black-Headed People of the South and the Mountain-Men of the North. And there are two languages as well. Emengir hums with all the sounds of the South: the plashing of river mud, the buzzing of marsh flies and chafer beetles when they gorge on fallen fruit. When I pray in Emengir, the South prays with me; I can hear the mother sheep calling to their little lambs, the rain that breaks the drought and the trilling of nightjars. Then there is the Lishanum Akkaditum, which was mine from the cradle, and that is equal parts susurrus and rockslide. I hear in it shields beating on spears, death-rattles and battle-cries, the thunder that flashed from the eyes of the Mother Sea Dragon in days of old. Yet this was the language of my first words, the language now spoken in commerce and government across the wide world! Perhaps as one who speaks to the gods regularly, I am biased towards their language. But I of all people should not play favorites.


    Like my brothers, I am a child of both peoples, both tongues. My eyes are the eyes of a Northerner, green like my grandfather¡¯s garden in Azupiranu, and my hair the rich black of the South--though more silver now than black, if truth be told. But I wear my silver hairs as I wear the crown of the En. Silver is only right for a woman who married the Moon, whose name is Moon, who owes her life and livelihood to you, Inanna, the Moon¡¯s daughter. With the passing of the years I have begun to resemble the name I chose for myself, and I cannot begrudge the gods that.


    My father, too, resembled the name he chose for himself. That was Sharru-kin, ¡°True King.¡± In my memories he seems as broad as he was tall. I remember well his arms, hairy arms thick with scars from his endless campaigns. I remember his blade of beard and his single dark brow, and between them eyes so bright you might almost believe half the tales told of him. Whatever his name was before he conquered the world, he put it to the sword when he was little more than a boy and I never found it out. Though his sons and his daughter had a king for their father, he did not.


    ¡°My father was a gardener,¡± Sharru-kin says in the officially sanctioned song, ¡°And my mother I never knew.¡± This was a way of politely implying she had died birthing him. More likely her pimp had forced her to give him up so she could turn a profit instead of nursing a babe. Recently, in no small part thanks to my industrious nephew, the story has arisen that my grandmother was not a common whore or adulteress but a hierodule, one of your own priestesses, Inanna, who gives men pleasure for the glory and profit of your temple, though the name such women cry out as they ride their patrons in my father¡¯s rocky homeland is not Inanna but Ishtar. (If my father were really the son of one of your Holy Ones, the Set Apart, my Lady, it would lend a delicious symmetry to the story of his life and mine. This is why I consider it too beautiful to be true.) Suffice to say that my father was a man of low birth, who rose as high as anyone could have dreamed and then far higher, from a gardener¡¯s bastard to a king¡¯s cupbearer to the founder of an empire. He had that quality I loathe in men and which so many men have, that hunger to have everything. But I forgive him for it, only because he began with nothing.


    How did he do it? How did the boy who wiped dribble from the chin of feeble Ur-Zababa in Kish become the broad and bearded expanse that occupies my childhood memories? The Song of Sharru-kin says that you and my father were lovers, Great Goddess. That he covered you with kisses and made you pant and squeal until you promised him the world from edge to edge. That you sent a dream to Ur-Zababa to make him promote his delivery boy to cupbearer, and another to the boy himself in which you made your further plans known by drowning Ur-Zababa in a river of blood.


    That you loved my father, Goddess, that much is certain, or else how to explain his successes? But I have long questioned whether the more colorful stories of you and Sharru-kin were true. Your Dumuzid, the Good Son, whom you loved and for whom you weep each year when the wells go dry, was young and sweet, a tender youth whose hands were more like to hold a shepherd¡¯s crook than a sword. He was no warrior, and after he dared call himself king in your absence, he grovelled before you and accepted your punishment. Having shared your bed with a god like that, could you have really done the same with a man like my father?


    Perhaps my father was gentle like Dumuzid once. That I cannot say. When I try to picture him as he was then, with a new beard dusting his chin and another man¡¯s gold in his ears, pouring his king¡¯s wine, with eyes the same color as mine but twice as bright, I wonder if I have been listening to too many songs myself. The truth is that I don¡¯t know the truth. When one¡¯s father sits on a throne, one does not ask him what it was like to run errands for the last man to sit there.


    In the song of my father the King of the World, the feckless Ur-Zababa sets trap after trap for his servant Sharru-kin, which he easily thwarts with the guidance of his beloved Ishtar. He sends Sharru-kin southeast to visit another king, mighty Lugal Zagesi, with secret instructions that Lugal Zagesi murder his guest. Again, a woman steps in on my father¡¯s behalf, foiling the plot and saving my father. Not a goddess, but the sweet wife of the Lugal, who nurses feelings for the handsome stranger, who knows her True King when she sees him.


    In the Song of Sharru-kin, the True King is the only king. The others are cowards, though not so cowardly that they do not seem like fitting enemies for the hero. Impervious to harm and irresistible to women and goddesses alike, my father takes the throne of Kish in the South with little fuss and rallies his Northern kinsmen to his cause. Lugal Zagesi, my father¡¯s greatest rival, who conquered four cities of the Black-Headed People, whose ambition and greed are unparalleled except by Sharru-kin himself, puts up a terrific fight. But my father crushes him in the end as he crushed all resistance, as he would try to crush the numberless cities and kings and gods of this land into one whole.


    I am old now, and know that songs are written by whoever still has hands to hold a stylus when the dust settles. I know also that songs are prettier than life. The song says that Lugal Zagesi¡¯s wife betrayed her husband to help my father out of love. It is certainly true that after the greatest king of the Southerners was dead, after my father paraded him under a yoke through the city of Nibru and hung his head from the doorframe of the House of Enlil, he married the dead man¡¯s widow. But it is also true that he gave her a new name when he married her, an Akkadian name to match her Akkadian husband and his new Akkadian Empire: Tashlultum, which means ¡°I Took Her As Plunder.¡±


    I never knew the name my mother¡¯s first husband called her by. No doubt my father could barely pronounce it. I never knew the name she had from birth, no more than I knew my father¡¯s birth name. He killed both names and hid them from the prying eyes of his children and his people. Neither of my parents was the person they were born as. My mother never spoke to us of her old life as a queen in the southern marshlands. I learned of her past in history lessons, when my tutors extolled the virtues of Sharru-kin and the obstinate pride of his predecessors, who dared to stand against their rightful overlord. I heard of Lugal Zagesi when singers composed the song of my father, for the glory of his Empire and the weight of his gold in their pockets. The first time a harpist sang that leid for us, we were all assembled in the Great Household, our family of six with its slaves and retainers and all the other noble families sworn to my father. I looked from my father to my mother and back again, over and over, my father in his golden crown and crimson robes, my mother splendid in the jeweled flowers and leaves of the South, but in neither one of their faces did I see a single mote of truth. When the song turned to their secret bond of love my father nodded and grunted his approval, and I Took Her As Plunder with her wan cheeks laid her ring-laden hand on the head of my little brother Ibarum and said nothing, nothing!


    It is a strange thing, to have characters in a song for one¡¯s parents. Of course, it is a strange thing to have a king and a queen for one¡¯s parents as well. But I have never known any other sort of mother or father than a silent queen in her heavy jewels and a man who called himself the King of the World. When we were small, my brothers and I used to play at being other things than princes and a princess. In the hot, damp air of Akkade, by the fountains and gardens of our father¡¯s new capital, we became frogs and fish, gods and infidels, potters, perfumers and the captains of ships. As a grown woman I have often seen the common-born children of Urim play in the Gardens of the Moon, and their games are much the same as ours were then, though I notice that the boys often wish to wear spiky crowns of palm-fronds and carry sticks for swords, and the girls twine flowers in their hair and pretend they are of gold. That was the one game my brothers and I never played. We would be ugly Humbaba with his mane of coiled guts or hairy bull-strong Enkidu before we ever played at being Sharru-kin and Tashlultum. There are things too close to the heart.


    En, High Priestess, is my title, and Kheduana is Southern-talk and means Jewel of Heaven, also a title of the moon my husband. But I did not always have this name, no more than my mother and father had theirs. I did not become En Kheduana until I was fifteen years old and married the moon. When I was born to the widow of my father¡¯s rival in the seventh year of his reign, the name he gave me was Khedutum, which in Northern-talk means ¡°Joy.¡±


    Two sons of the King of the World were born before me and two after me. Having a Sumerian woman for his queen, all my father needed was a Sumerian son to cement his rule over the North and the South, and my mother I Took Her As Plunder was so obliging that within a year of their marriage she gave him two. They came forth from her belly on the same day, two boys with one face between them, like the two brothers who guard the left and right doors of the House of Dust. The firstborn twin was called Rimush, a fitting name, for it means ¡°Foremost¡±, or ¡°Goes at the Front¡±. The second was called Manishtushu, ¡°Who Is With Him¡±, since he came into the world behind another. I was next, and two more boys would follow me: Ibarum, Friend, and Ilaba¡¯ish-takal, Trusting in the God Ilaba.


    The birthing of Ilaba¡¯ish-takal when I was ten years old was my mother¡¯s final act in the world. It was a nursemaid who took me in her arms and told me gently that a new brother lived but my mother had died. Being a child I was excused from entering full mourning. I was not made to dress in rags and ashes and sit apart from the other members of the Great Household, nor to cut my face and body with the ritual knife. But on the day of her burial I stood beside the grave and listened to the droning of the lamentation priests and poured libation oil on the earth at the proper moment, and when my brothers wept I did my best to join them.This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    In the years since that day, I have often wondered whether my mother went to the Palace of Dust willingly, knowing that her duty to the True King was fulfilled, his line secured and his family established. I wonder as well to which gods my mother prayed and with what words, that she was able to give the conqueror who killed her husband four sons. Was it to Nin Khursang the Wild Cow, Lady of the Sacred Mountain, or to Enlil the Creator? Was it to you, Inanna, who loved my father and his cities, the one he was born in and the one he built? Which god gave Tashlultum their favor? Who bestowed on her such a blessing as the man who took her as plunder, and drove a knife into the heart of her name? And which god was it that let her die with her children still children?


    My mother is a glittering shadow of my earliest childhood, a phantom like the gidim of old stories, with mouths so dry they cannot speak. Joy, my father named me, though I fear I brought not much to Tashlultum. I can remember the fine linen of her robes and the shape of her jewels, beautiful, worthy of any young girl¡¯s envy, but I do not remember her holding me. I remember a fleeting hand on my shoulder, like the light touch of an insect, and smiles when I did as I should, when I remembered to bow before an important guest or did not stumble over a prayer. She is said to have been beautiful. My memories are hazy, but when I think of her I feel that her beauty was never really hers. It was the kind she wore or put on, not the kind she had. It was her title as Queen of Sumer and Akkad, South and North. It was her makeup and the priceless jewels of her ancestors which she had been allowed to keep after the conquest. Her golden foliage did not bloom from her so much as swallow her, like a tangle of costly weeds shadowing an abandoned house from view.


    Once when I was very young, I came up behind her as she was walking from the shrine of Enlil and Ninlil and hugged her legs, tightly, and she froze very still and lay her hand on my head and said, ¡°You startled me, Khedu.¡± I looked up at her with expectant eyes but she spoke no more, only fixed me with a gaze that made my cheeks flush pink and my arms drop to my side, that made me turn and run with stinging eyes. When I was young, this was painful to me. Now that I am old, I forgive her. The gods dealt Tashlultum a Northern family and a Northern king, but she was of the South; there was marsh-water in her veins. Though my hair was as black as hers, and her sons beneath their coppery curls had her brown eyes and not our father¡¯s green ones, we had Akkadian names, and the language in which we politely greeted our father was again, Akkadian. How she felt for Lugal Zagesi I never knew, but he gave her no children and his murderer gave her five.


    My mother is a shadow in my memory, and my father the great looming shape that casts it. Of my brothers, what remains? I remember Rimush and Manishtushu sitting on stone steps in the palace courtyard with their arms around each other¡¯s shoulders, one whispering in his twin¡¯s ear words that made the other boy giggle and blush. I remember the first time I held little Ibarum, how small and light he was, how I kissed the tufted top of his head. I remember clutching a toy that belonged to Ilaba and him laughing as he chased me through a field calling, ¡°Khedu! Khedu!¡± No one has called me that, it seems, in ten thousand years. I remember all these things, yes, but only as I remember how the demons chased Dumuzid to the house of the crone Billulu, how Enlil and Enki and their wives fashioned the first men. My family have become no more than characters in a song, words in a story, crumbling clay that folds around a lacuna in the shape of a girl named Joy.


    I scarcely remember her, Khedu, that girl I was, that princess of a new kingdom. No priestess¡¯s aga had yet wearied my head. My earlobes that now sag from long years of earrings were taut in those days. My skin was smooth and brown, my hair pure Sumer-black, but instead of my mother¡¯s plain Southern bun I wore the three-plait style of Akkad, one braid down my back and one on each side in front. Like all Northern girls I wore the veil from the time of my first bleeding, draped over my head and down my back, but I often failed to raise it to my face in the presence of men, with a willfulness that I masqueraded as mere carelessness.


    I was proud, in those days, proud of my father and proud of myself. From an early age I had more education than most women can claim to. I had tutors to teach me letters and mathematics, geography, history and song, proper courtesy and the language of the South. While my brother Rimush learned to be a king and the other three learned to be princes I was taught to weave, to play the harp and the double-flute and the game of twenty squares, and to praise the gods. It was then that I first learned hymns to you, my Lady, and to all the other gods besides. I learned their words and stories and feast-days, whose amulet would cure a stomach ailment and whose would soothe a fever, who accepted bullocks in sacrifice and who preferred kids.


    Every one of our gods had a city, and each city and god had two names, one in the language of the South, one in the language of the North. In the Northern language of my childhood, the Sun was named Shamash, his sister the Eastern Star was Ishtar, and their father the Moon was Sin. But in the soft babbling words of the South, sun and moon were Utu and Nanna, and the goddess of the Eight-Pointed Star was Inanna. Akkade was your city, Ishtar¡¯s city, and I was taught to praise you from my earliest girlhood. But no one told me that the mystery of the gods is to have two selves, not only two names. I did not learn then the Sumerian songs of Inanna of the wetlands; only those of warlike Ishtar. If I ever thought of Inanna, I just assumed she was the same as Ishtar under another name, and all her stories the same as well. Only later, in your country, did I learn that to sing of the two as interchangeable was to see a reflection in clouded bronze, the truth distorted.


    However incomplete my learning, I impressed my tutors, the wise masters of Umma and Lagash, Nippur and Mari, whom my father hired for his children. I displayed an especial talent for learning language, and was conversant in Emengir well before my brothers. I often teased Rimush that he ought to change his name from Foremost to Hindmost given his struggles with Emengir, and once made him so angry that he chased me into the boughs of an apricot tree.


    I was proud, in those days. I am proud still, but it was easier then. Pride always comes easy to those who have accomplished little but been given everything. All the other young noble ladies of the Great Household of Akkade wanted to walk with me in the gardens, to weave with me, to sit beside me at banquets. And I felt the gaze of young men everywhere, hot and persistent like desert flies. As we grew, the young ladies around me began to speak of marriage, of their fathers sending messages they were not allowed to hear, or hosting guests beyond the limits of their own apartments. They giggled and tossed their braids as they wondered whether their husband would be handsome or stingy, wealthy or cruel--and whether he would be of the North or South, for my father was not the only one to have chosen a spouse from the other end of his new world. There was a girl, Urballu by name, who was serene in all this and took no part, only because she had been betrothed to the firstborn son of the Governor of Nippur since the day of her birth and had never had to wonder who she might marry. And I, too, was removed from these dawdlings, but for a different reason. Though I was young and beautiful, no man offered himself or his son to me. My father¡¯s Empire was still new, and I its only princess. The world waited with breath held to see what my father would do, and me, foolish, stupid child, I only played and sang and ate dates in the gardens, and thought my father would never marry me to anyone because there was no one who dared suggest it.


    All except that one. Goddess! Help me to see him. Help me to remember him in his glory, to remember how dark his beard and brow, how hard the line of his jaw. He had bright, flashing teeth and his father had given him a bright, flashing name to match them; he was called Baramu, which means Many-Colored. A young man and a member of our court, our Great Household, he was Northern to the bone and his father a staunch supporter of mine. They had ties to Azupiranu, the city of my grandfather¡¯s birth, and when my father rose up in the South the people of the Saffron City were not the last to join him. Baramu¡¯s father enjoyed a position on my father¡¯s cabinet and Baramu enjoyed the company of my brothers and all that the bright new city of Akkade had to offer: its hawks and hounds, its crimson-walled gardens and its gates of gold and lapis, its wild parks and marshes thick with crocodile and elephant, buffalo, ostrich and gazelle, its fountains in the shape of Ishtar, pouring out water onto the driest of lands forever and ever.


    I remember the first time he looked at me. It may not have been the first time, for all that, but I remember as though it were. I was at the Feast of Gerra, when the air is thick with meat smoke for the Lord of Fire. My father, though he turned our world upside its head, was wise enough to keep the old festivals as they were, and so in the new hall of the palace of Akkade we feasted just as any king and his court would have been in an older city. I had been seated with the other ladies of the Great Household, across the room from the men. Ilaba¡¯ish-takal and Ibarum sat beside me, with their nursemaid close beside, but the twins were old enough now to sit with the men. Across the room I saw them in their royal crimson, with their golden armbands and oiled beards, laughing. My father, too, was laughing, and when Sharru-kin laughed the entire table of men would roar to match him.


    I did all the little things one does without thinking of them. I smiled at something another woman had said to me, I took a fishbone out of my mouth and placed it delicately on my golden dish, I reached for the long straw to my beer. Then my eye lifted again to my boisterous brothers and the other young men, but this time, one of them looked up at me. He saw the girl Khedutum, the girl Joy, the Princess of the World. And I saw the whiteness of his teeth and the sharpness of his eye and Many-Colored, Baramu, inclined his head at me and smiled and it was then that I felt something I had never felt before moving within my breast. I did not know what it was at the time, but now I recognize that it was you, Goddess. I had worshipped at your shrine a thousand times since I was old enough to walk, I had clapped my hands as the tigi-drums pounded and the dancers whirled for you and pressed my lips to the feet of your cold stone idol in my kingly father¡¯s name, but I never felt you in your own city. Never, until that moment. After that, you were with me always, even as you are with me now. I suppose I have Baramu to thank for that.


    But he could not speak to me, only smile, not with my brothers beside him, not with my father and all the rest in the room. Baramu was dwarfed by the twins, who were clearly on their way to reaching our father¡¯s stature. So he did not say anything that night at the Feast of Fire. He bided his time.


    It was several days before he was able to approach me alone. I was rarely alone at the palace; I had my tutors, my servants, my friends among the other young ladies, my brothers. But he found me in the gardens one day, when the sun was high. I had just come from a harp lesson and I was still carrying the instrument beneath my arm when I heard someone call me by name. When I turned, my heart leapt again to see the man from the banquet in a deep bow before me. I asked him to rise and tried to keep my features still. I did not reach for the hem of my veil to draw it across my mouth and nose (as I so rarely did, contumacious thing that I was!) and was aware it could be perceived as an insult; that I was regarding him as beneath my station, the same way I would not cover my face for a male slave. But there was a smirk playing about the corners of his mouth; he was not insulted or cowed, it seemed, only amused by my boldness, as I was, in truth, amused by his own.


    ¡°Please remind me of your name,¡± I said, as haughtily as I could manage, and he told me who he was and I pretended not to already know, not to have asked the ladies at my table who he was the moment our eyes met at the Feast of Gerra.


    ¡°Come with me, Great Lady,¡± he said. ¡°I would speak with you in private.¡±


    ¡°My father and my brothers would not be pleased,¡± I said, which was true.


    His smile broadened and he said, ¡°If they find out that I was speaking with you alone, you can tell them anything you like. Tell them I forced you to come with me, and they will cut off the hand that led your wrist. Tell them that I am a madman who talks to himself and you happened upon me and decided to listen. Only speak with me, Lady, please.¡±


    I could tell that this was a man as marvellously enamored with himself as with me: a dangerous combination. He beckoned, and with heart pounding and the nameless feeling throbbing inside my chest I would later call Inanna, I followed. Thinking back on it now, I cannot help but be reminded of those stories in which your Dumuzid calls to you from outside your mother¡¯s house and bids you sneak down to meet him in the fields. But at the time I thought only of Baramu.


    We stopped in a cool and shadowed place behind a wall whose bricks showed leaping re¡¯em bulls. The air was thick with the smell of flowers, mute testament to the reach of my father¡¯s conquests: roses brought from the East, poppies from the West, water-lilies from the South, spindly Northern orchids. ¡°I wanted to come to you,¡± Baramu said, ¡°And not to your father, because I want you to know what I intend.¡±


    ¡°And what is that?¡± I asked, though a part of me already knew.


    ¡°When I saw you at the banquet I wondered at once why no man has asked for your hand.¡±


    ¡°You know why that is,¡± I said. ¡°No man wants the King of the Four Corners of the World as their father-in-law.¡±


    ¡°Nor I,¡± said Baramu, laughing. ¡°I will admit that much. Your father is a formidable man. I have seen the way other men hang on his every word, laughing only when he laughs and scowling when he scowls. But when I see such things I think, perhaps your father tires of this kind of treatment? Perhaps he is only waiting for a man to be brave enough to look him in the eye? For a king is no more than a man, after all. No matter how heavy and grand the crown or the name he wears.¡±


    ¡°You speak freely of the True King,¡± I said, and could not help myself from smiling.


    If he is the True King, as he says he is, my words will do nothing to change that. Many men dream of being king, and sons who are kings, and king¡¯s daughters, but I dream only of you.¡±


    ¡°Me,¡± I said.


    ¡°My father is not as wealthy as yours, true,¡± said Baramu. ¡°But I would treat you well. I would give you anything you asked. I would love you until the end of your days and give you strong sons to cherish you. You are a king¡¯s daughter, but if you were my wife, you would be a goddess.¡±


    I did not know what to say. ¡°I am not a goddess,¡± I said. ¡°And I cannot choose my own husband. You should be talking to the True King, not to me.¡±


    ¡°Talk to him on my behalf,¡± he said. ¡°Tell him you want to marry me.¡±


    ¡°I have not said yes,¡± I said.


    ¡°You have not said no,¡± he said. Then he took my hand in his and laid it on his chest.


    And what did I do, daughter of the King of the World, young beauty that I was? I drew my hand away. I blushed and pulled my veil up to cover my face, as though of a sudden I cared, as though I did not want to be seen with him. I thanked him and bade him goodbye and I left him, goddess, I left him, I left him.


    Foolish youth! I should not have been as I was. I should not have pretended to a modesty I have never seen the point of. My father was the only king in our broken land, and I the only princess, a girl without equal--so why, then, did I not behave as such, when my skin was still the smooth brown of untouched river mud, when my breasts were still as firm and high as new spring tubers, when I had beauty enough to be bold? Of all the gods you should know, my Lady, you whose affairs and appetites are the stuff of legend, that I should have kissed him on the mouth. I should have kissed him then in the garden of my father, in the garden of his new city of the land we called one land, and felt the scratch of his thick black beard against my lips, and I should have reached to the nape of his neck and unbound his hair and run my fingers through his dark curls as they streamed across his shoulders. I should have let him take off my dress and let him lay me down among the flowers my father conquered, and I should have let him conquer me in turn, take from me that thing, that priceless thing I protected and guarded all these long years, diligent as any Chief Wife of the Moon should be, until it dried and withered like a fig unplucked, no use to anyone at all! I think these things, Goddess, as I have thought them for years, as I have dreamed them, and I can feel my body''s meager juices start to rise, but it is too late. My desire is like the waters of the Slow River in a drought year, that will not reach the mark nor bring the boats afloat.


    There is no use in these thoughts, sweet though they may be, for I am not the girl I was. Baramu is old somewhere, just as I am, if he is not dead. And whether he is or not, I do not doubt he married some governor''s daughter or foreign princess who gave herself to him whenever he asked, who bore him strong sons and lovely daughters, while I lit the lamps and fed the statues of the gods, while I filled my nostrils with incense for a thousand thousand years, while I with soured womb laid blessings on the bellies of pregnant women, while I felt no embrace but the cold silver light of the night.


    When the artisans paint my likeness or carve it in stone I am brown and black, healthy, a maiden, so I know I must have been one once. But I am old and turning silver and I do not recognize myself in those images, though I pay for them from my own coffers and commission them with my own hand. If I remember a mother''s hand on a shoulder, a man¡¯s hand clasping a maid¡¯s, it is not my shoulder, or my hand, it is Khedu¡¯s, Khedutum¡¯s, a girl long dead. Dead as the king my father, dead as your Dumuzid is, my Lady, for six months of the year, and dead as his good sister Ngesh-ti-nana for the other six. A character in a song.

 Chapter 2

    You, Inanna, are a young girl and a woman and a crone all at once. That is the wonder of the gods, that they can be so many things without effort, when we poor mortals struggle to be more than one thing at a time. You never lost your girlhood, as I did. There never came the day when your whole life changed as did mine. When the girl named Joy became a memory, when the lacuna ended and the lines took up again. Was I already old then? Perhaps I became an old woman when the king my father¡¯s steward came for me, with two guards hefting spears at his left and right, while I was eating figs with my ladies in the shade of an acacia tree. The day the steward bowed before me and told me to come with him, that my father had requested my presence.


    I should have demanded to know the reason why. I should have turned and ran and let them chase after me, hot on my heels as the gallu-demons chased Dumuzid through the desert. I should have cursed or spat or called for help or god or Baramu. But I was a girl, and girls never think anything will happen to them, never realize they will not be girls any longer. Princesses most of all. So I did not ask why my father had sent armed guards to escort me to him, nor why his steward placed a firm hand on my shoulder as he led me away.


    I bid my friends farewell and followed as he led me through the garden gates with their bronze inlays, up the many steps and down the long corridor with its dizzying bricks of red and blue and gold and black and white. We walked past stone lions and garish painted demons, eagle-headed guardians clutching pinecones and pails of holy river-water, goggle-eyed Pazuzu with his serpent penis and his talons pointing up and down, the mantra of the augurs, as above, so below. We walked past the slaves and servants of the Great Household, past courtiers who stared at me more than usual, whose eyes almost burned the semblance of modesty into me, across sparkling tiles that spelled out again and again SHARRU-KIN THE GREAT. We walked past my father¡¯s throne room, past the stair to his private apartments, past any place where he might normally have received me.


    And I did not ask ¡°Where are you taking me?¡± No, not until we had passed out of the Inner Gate, and the Lesser Gate, and the Outermost Gate, so that we were out of the palace altogether. Not until I saw the king¡¯s private docks on the Idiqlat and the shining city beyond it. Not until I saw the great longship with white sails and a red hull roped there and the figures that stood beside it with a brace of guards, splendid in their robes of royal red, in their shining jewelry of amethyst and lapis, malachite and carnelian. Two small boys and two strapping young men, beside a king like a sword.


    Then I asked it, when I saw my family. ¡°Where are you taking me?¡± and the steward did not answer, and gripped my shoulder tighter. Then I asked again, and again, and my voice cracked and grew frantic and I fought to pull away from the steward¡¯s grip but the guards laid their hands on me as well, and for the first time in my short and stupid pampered life, I knew fear.


    ¡°Where are you taking me? Where are you taking me?¡± I said it over and over. It was the only thing I could think to say, the words became my own mantra. Perhaps the gods would answer. As above, so below. I thought of the story of the rape of Lady Wind, whom Enlil dragged crying and pleading from her father¡¯s house, who bore him Nergal and Ninazu and Enbilulu, gods of death and stagnant water, of deception and tears. But my father was before me, and the rest of my family as well! I scanned their faces but my father was a chunk of diorite, my twin brothers princes, my other brothers boys.


    As one the guards and steward bowed before my father, forcing me likewise to my knees. My father! My father, the True King. Had I done something to offend him? I scarcely knew how to speak to him, and could think of no reason, unless--but it was impossible. There had been no one in the gardens to see Baramu and I, I was nearly sure of it, unless Ishtar herself had seen it, unless the shade of my grandfather still lurked in gardens, whispering advice to the planters. Could my father¡¯s wrath have been roused so quickly? And if it had, what was the reason for this strange pretext? For the ship, which I now saw was fully staffed with oarsmen on either side and bore a carven image of Ishtar at its head?


    Foolish girl! Why think of Baramu? That was over already, his many colors wasted, and the mind of the True King made up and your fate sealed like a stamp in wet clay on the lip of an oil jar. The guards and steward stepped away from me, keeping their heads inclined and never turning away from their King.


    ¡°It is ten days¡¯ sail from Akkade to Ur,¡± said my father the King, using the northern name of the city I now call Urim. He did not move towards me. ¡°Down the Idiqlat, then west along the coast to the mouth of the Purattu. The preparations have already been made. Lugal Kaku of Ur shall receive you and lead you in triumph to the House of the Great Light, the Temple of the Moon. You shall have every comfort along the way, women to attend you and guards to protect you. Your brother Manishtushu has agreed to be your escort.¡±The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.


    Manishtushu stepped forward and took my hand. ¡°You should rejoice, sister. You are to be married.¡±


    My heart stopped. Married! I remembered the foolish prattle of the other young maidens of the court, who whispered and giggled to one another about my twin brothers, who dreamed of spreading their legs to let strong young princes in and spreading them again to push strong young princes out. I was a princess, I was the princess, the only one, Princess of the World. And who was this Lugal Kaku? Lugal, Great Man, was a name my father had not managed to kill altogether, though he had changed its meaning. The petty kings of Sumer were all Lugal before my father took away their crowns, and now they were Lugal still, but it meant governor, not king. Was I to be married off, then, to the Great Man of Ur? I had seen several of the Lugals of the South when they came to lay tribute before my father at court, but I could not place this one¡¯s name or face. For all I knew Lugal Kaku was as fat as a water buffalo, as old as Utnapishtim who ate the Plant of Life. I thought of Baramu and my hand on his chest in the gardens of the palace. It seemed to have happened a long time ago.


    ¡°The En of Ur, the Chief Wife of the Moon, is dead,¡± said my father. ¡°An ancient woman, sister to Lugal Kaku¡¯s grandmother. It has long been custom for the kings of Ur to name ladies of their bloodline to the office of High Priestess. But now Ishtar has smiled on us, and Lugal Kaku, a true friend of his King, has made me a gracious offer. Ur is the pride of my Empire, the greatest port of the South, and Sin its greatest god. The Moon must have a wife in Ur and she must have the blood of kings. But now there are no more kings in Ur, nor princesses. There is only one true king in this land, and only one king¡¯s daughter.¡±


    My eyes widened. ¡°Father,¡± I said, only the one word, though in that instance, more than ever before or after, he was not my father but my king. I broke away from my brother¡¯s comforting hand. I took a faltering step backwards and said, ¡°Please.¡± Though in my heart I was saying Baramu, Baramu. Every city had a god, and each male god had his High Priestess who planned his festivals and led his praises and fed and clothed the statues of his temple. In the cities of goddesses, like my father¡¯s own, it was the king himself who was married to the goddess, who lavished gifts on her temple and claimed to rule by her favor. But though a king could share his bed with Ishtar as much as with his rival¡¯s widows and any other plunder, the mortal wife of a god could have no mortal lover. It was not to a governor husband that my father was condemning me; it was to the cold light of the moon, and I was not certain which was worse.


    ¡°I will not,¡± I said softly. Then, louder, ¡°I will not do it! Please, Father--Manish, Rimush, I¡­¡± I fought to keep my voice from breaking, and my words when they came out were the petulant words of a spoiled child. ¡°I don¡¯t want to be a priestess. I¡¯ve never even been to Ur! I don¡¯t want to leave Akkade, or you, or--¡± Baramu, Baramu, Baramu! At court my mother had taught us to refer to Sharru-kin as ¡°my king¡± and Highness, but now I called him Father, only Father, in the hopes that he would feel it in his heart. But his heart was the heart of a king, as hard as the bones of the Zagros Mountains.


    My father placed his hand on my shoulder. It was a simple gesture, such as any father might give his daughter, yet I had never felt anything so heavy. His eyes met mine, and he said, ¡°You will do as your king commands you. You will go to Ur and marry the moon god and care for his temple. You will claim the Enship of Ur and bring the South firmly to your family¡¯s side.¡±


    I looked upon them, my family, who had been told about my marriage before I was. I wanted to shriek and tear my hair like your unnameable sister beneath the earth. I was not sure whether to feel relieved that one of my brothers would be with me. ¡°But father,¡± I said, blinking back tears. ¡°It--it has long been my wish to marry. To give you grandsons.¡± Perhaps if I reminded him I was a girl still, and worth something to him? But of course, it was because of my value that he had already sold me.


    ¡°I have four sons,¡± he said. ¡°I shall have grandsons aplenty who carry my name. Say your farewells.¡±


    My two little brothers ran to me. I knelt down to hold them and told them I would visit them, that they would see me. My father held out his arm, stiffly, and I kissed him as I kissed stone idols in the temples of the gods, with a dry and solemn duty.


    I turned to my eldest brother. Rimush took my face in his hands, already rough with the business of learning to be king, and looked at me, and in his eyes I saw a pity that made me want to weep. ¡°It is not easy for us, who found empires,¡± he said, and I knew that he meant it. ¡°We stand alone, so that others may come after. There will be princes and princesses alike in this land, someday, but now there is only you. You are the Princess of the World. The only princess. Who is fit to be your husband?  No governor or his son is good enough for you, nor any foreigner from over the mountains. Would you marry one of your brothers like the red heathens of Musur? You, poor maiden, are the blood of the True King, and you have no fit husband but a god.¡±


    After that there was nothing I could say because I knew that he was right. At least, he seemed right at the time. I was proud, in those days, though not so proud that I did not have the same dreams and desires as any other young girl. So I took Manish¡¯s offered hand and boarded the ship, thoughtfully provided with a retinue of slaves and retainers, with my bridal chest and my offerings for Lugal Kaku packed away with my hatred and resentment for ballast, with my girlhood dissipating like steam. And that night I wept on a linen bedroll as the light of my betrothed streamed in through the window.

 Chapter 3

    Help me, Inanna, Lady of the Largest Heart, to remember the voyage from the city of my father to the city of your father, from Akkade that was my home to Ur--Urim--that would be.


    I spent ten days aboard the ship, just as the king my father had promised. It was my first time on a boat aside from little pleasure barges that paddled up and down the Idiqlat for an afternoon, and my first journey out of the city of Akkade. For the first four days I was sick with longing and anger and the motion of the floor beneath my feet. I barely left my bed, though I slept little, and everything I ate came back up within the hour. The three women my father had given me attended me tirelessly in this time, and I reflected that if my father could be cruel, at least he was true to his word. My head lolled on the pillow. I looked at them through fever-dulled eyes and thought, my wedding present.


    The two younger ones were close to my own age, meek and retiring creatures. One was a hook-nosed Northern girl with the unfortunate slave-name of Zumbu, Mosquito, and the other a beauty whose smooth dark hair and skin might have belonged to one of the Black-Headed but whose name of Elamitu, Elamite Woman, marked her as being from the East and not the South. The eldest of the three was a Sumerian woman called Igiru, Heron, for her gangly limbs. It was she who spent the most time at my bedside during those first four days on the water. Igiru would murmur softly to me for hours as I tossed and turned. She would wipe my brow with a damp cloth and tell me stories of the South in her own Southern tongue, of Urim which had been her home before she was sold to a slaver band to pay her father¡¯s debts. Her eyes would well with tears as she told me of the glorious gates of the House of the Great Light, of the Gardens of the Moon even finer and more expansive than my father¡¯s gardens in Akkade, of the nighttime chorus of crickets and frogs among the reeds, lit by the lanterns of the pole-boats and the soft glow of marsh gas. She had prayed to Nanna the Moon that she should return to his patron city before she died, and now her prayers had been answered, and she knew that I would love it as she did. When I closed my eyes and Zumbu or Elamitu came with fresh beer or a plate of food, Igiru would shush them and tell them that the egir-turra, the little princess, was sleeping.


    With their help, I grew stronger. I was sick until I was not sick, until my bleeding heart had bled itself dry. I started to eat more and began to leave my bed for a few minutes at a time, then a few hours. I walked along the deck in the bright sun and watched the world go by from the side of the boat, as the galley-master chanted and the oars heaved and splashed in endless rhythm. The waters of the river were sometimes green, sometimes brown, sometimes blue, but always deep with possibilities. Leaning against the wooden railing I watched the water for glimpses of fish or turtles or gods. I thought of leaping over the edge and slipping under the waves like a fish-tailed kuliltu, like the seven Apkallu who taught mankind. But there would be no such easy escape for me. I was no swimmer, and this river was not called the Swift for no reason. If I tried to escape that way, I would end up on the riverbed with Lahmu and Lahamu of the lovely curls, and the world and my family would be short a princess.


    In those first few days Manishtushu, my escort, divided his time between roaring at the ship captain, gambling with the sailors and guards and drinking whatever wine there was aboard. He commanded the two younger of my slaves to his bed, I am sure, and perhaps even Igiru as well, though he had the courtesy not to let me see him do it. He came to my bedchamber once or twice, though I do not remember if he spoke to me. If in my haze of grief and weariness I saw a tall broad-shouldered shadow standing over me, I thought of my father the King of the World and was sick anew. To his credit Manish seemed to understand this, and kept his distance from me until I could speak again.


    When I was ready, Manish helped me to forget where I was going and what I would never see again. We had not brought with us a set for the game of twenty squares, but he scratched a simple grid into the ship¡¯s deck with his knife so that we could play with date-pits as markers. There were no instruments aboard, but we sang our favorite stories in time with the clapping of our hands and the endless slap of the oars against the waves. It helped to laugh at the boasts of the vainglorious fox who claims his pissing in the river is the reason for the tides, at the mighty warrior god Ninurta being bested in battle by a turtle. We had a laugh or two at your expense as well, Inanna, though we called you Ishtar when we sang of how you broke the roller-bird¡¯s wing because his tiny cock could not satisfy you, so that he cries to this day ¡°Kappi! Kappi!¡±, ¡±My wing! My wing!¡±


    Though they looked so much alike, I had always felt that my twin brothers regarded me differently. Rimush with his watchful gaze and furrowed brow made me feel like a child. Manishtushu, though he was my brother and a prince, was almost a friend to me, and never more than in those ten days on the water.


    On the last night of our voyage he came to my chamber after the evening meal with a wineskin and two goblets. ¡°My wedding present, sister,¡± he said. ¡°As red as the land of Musur where it was made. I would have waited for the wedding feast, but a vintage this fine should be savored by the bride herself, not divided up between the whole host of guests.¡± I did not say what I was thinking, that he wanted it for himself and had probably drank his own supply already. But I thanked him all the same.


    We went up to the decks to drink in the cool night air. Before long my face was warm and my smiles easy, and my brother¡¯s eyes were glassy and his hair tousled. It was then that we had our first glimpse of Ur in the distance. I saw the silhouette of the great temple looming against the stars, and the glimmering of the city¡¯s torches, themselves an array of stars fallen to earth. High above us, my husband-to-be strutted and puffed in his silver glory, and cast a road of light across the water to show us the way to his Great Household. It was so beautiful that I almost began to look forward to it. I thought of waking Igiru but decided to let her sleep. She would have plenty of time to see the city of her girlhood, for I was determined to keep the three women my father had given me in my service when I took my place as En.


    Manishtushu stroked his pointed beard. ¡°Do you know why I am here, Khedu?¡± he asked.


    ¡°To be my escort,¡± I said.


    ¡°Yes,¡± said Manishtushu seriously. ¡°When Father told us he was planning to make you En, Rimush and I both offered to see you safely down the river. We did not want you out of our sight. But Father did not want his heir to leave his side, not even for twenty days. He has his eye on the nomads of Martu to the west of the Slow River, and he wants his heir to bear witness to how he makes war. He may call himself King of the World, but the world is big and the Empire is small. Smaller than his ambitions, at least.¡±


    ¡°But you were free to go,¡± I said, understanding.


    My brother sighed and ran his broad fingers through his reddish Northern curls. ¡°We are exactly alike, Rimush and I. Sometimes even Father cannot tell us apart. I am as strong as him, as tall as him. I can shoot as far and run as fast--farther, sometimes, and faster. I have studied the gods and cities of the Empire and the foreign lands beyond it. Yet my brother will be a king, and I will not. He is The One Who Goes in Front, and I am He Who Is With Him. Even by our names, he is first and I am second.¡±


    ¡°If Rimush should die without a son, you will be king after him,¡± I said. I could not quite understand how my brother was feeling. I had known Manish and Rimush all my life, so I knew the slight difference in the width of their noses, the freckle that one brother did not have, but there were times when even I saw them together that the two princes seemed to be one, Foremost become Secondmost and Secondmost Foremost. I did not know what that was like, to have a reflection. I had always been the only one like me.


    ¡°And what is the likelihood of that?¡± asked Manishtushu bitterly. ¡°The governors of every city from Ninua to Eridu will bring him their daughters and sisters and nieces, they will lay their own wives naked at his feet if it means the good graces of the King of the World. Already he has proposals of marriage. The Lugal of Nibru sent a bard to sing to us about his daughter¡¯s every mole and hair and dimple. By the time he finished the song I felt like I had fucked her myself. In a month¡¯s time the palace will be hosting an Elamite prince whose sister has just reached marrying age, and Rimush--you know how dreadful he is at languages--he says he is keen to meet the girl, but he cannot even pronounce her name! He just grins like an oaf and calls her Elamitu, like your slave-girl, when he asks me if I think her ass will be as round as the Elamite ambassador¡¯s wife¡¯s.¡± I had rarely heard my brother speak so coarsely, but he had always been the kind of man who laughs at his own jokes, and he was laughing now.


    ¡°I hope no secrets are kept from Rimush about his own marriage,¡± I said. My brother stopped laughing and drained the rest of his wine. For some time we were both silent, and the sounds of the ship rose to fill in the gaps in our conversation; the rhythmic slap of oars against the water¡¯s surface, the creaking of the mast, the distant chant of the galley-master beneath us keeping time.


    ¡°You are lucky,¡± he said finally, and now it was me who laughed.


    ¡°Lucky?¡± I asked. ¡°In what way am I lucky?¡±


    ¡°You will be married against your will, as many girls are, but not to a man,¡± said Manish. ¡°No drunk will beat you, no palsied grandfather will force himself on you. No conqueror will Take You As Plunder and give you a name to match.¡±


    ¡°No man will love me, either,¡± I said softly.


    ¡°The gods will love you,¡± said Manish. ¡°You will sing their praises and tend their altars. You will bring joy to the hearts of their worshippers, and they will love you as well. I envy you. Do you realize that? Rimush pities you, I think, and Father doesn¡¯t much care how you feel, but I envy you.¡±


    I shook my head and turned away from him, not certain whether I wanted to laugh or cry but certain I did not want him to see my face. ¡°If you envy me so, you could become a priest,¡± I said.


    I heard my brother laugh again, a shadow of my father¡¯s roar. ¡°Never,¡± he said. ¡°Could you imagine me in a fleecy itqu, with my head and chin shaved clean? I should have to keep away from bronze and water, lest I laugh at my reflection. I could never give up women and hunting and wine. I could never give up wanting to be king.¡±


    ¡°Is it so wonderful to be a king?¡± I asked. I had only ever known one, and I did not like him much.


    Manishtushu was quiet. Then he said, ¡°I don¡¯t know, in truth. But it is all I have ever wanted.¡±


    I turned to look at him then, my brother, He Who Is With a Him who was not there yet who was with us both, always, the shadow of a prince and beside him the shadow of a king. Manishtushu rose and stretched and picked up the empty wine cup.


    ¡°I bid you goodnight, sister,¡± he said. ¡°Send one of your women to me, would you? The Elamite, perhaps. We can pretend we are Crown Prince Rimush and his foreign princess of the unpronounceable name. I¡¯ve been told I bear a certain resemblance to him, in a certain light. She will never know the difference.¡± He laughed bitterly, and I pretended not to have heard both the joke and the request.


    The priests say that the waters of the Two Rivers are so sacred that if a man is accused of a crime, he will sink beneath the water if he is guilty and float if he is innocent. I think it is a wonder anyone floats at all. We are all guilty of some crime, of some cruelty. Some may sink faster than others, but we all have enough sins and heavy hate in our hearts to carry us down to the bottom. I could not know then what my brother was capable of. I could not know then what he would do. But that night I saw him laid bare, and, wrapped in self-pity as I was during that voyage, for the first time I felt sorry for my brothers. It was bad enough they were men, but to be the sons of a king suddenly seemed almost as cruel a fate as my own.


    In the morning I awoke to the sound of voices and the scent of Ur.


    Every city has a smell all its own, and the air of Ur is not like the air of the Akkade. I knew this at once, from the moment my eyes first opened on the morning of my wedding. Akkade smelled like cardamom and rosewater, fresh paint and spilled wine. It was ever a city of hollow beauty, a city of empty threats. But Ur is a city by the sea, and like all cities by the sea it smells chiefly of her. Even beneath the smells of asses¡¯ dung and limestone dust and the lingering scent of war that is so hard to wash away. Even here and now, in the heart of the temple complex, when the wind sighs I can still feel it in the air, so much salty water like the tears I shed for the girl named Joy. And I felt it that morning, the insistent sea pressing so close around me, worrying, prodding, pushing me up onto the shore.


    I rubbed my sleepy eyes as Zumbu and Elamitu led me to a basin of fresh river water, and Igiru readied her pots of cosmetics and perfumes. ¡°Shall I have not a single day to rest, nor to see the city that shall be my new home?¡± I said.


    ¡°We were instructed to ready you for the ceremony as soon as we arrived in Ur, Lady,¡± said Zumbu dutifully. I sighed. My father had thought of everything, it seemed.


    The shock of the water¡¯s chill woke me swiftly enough. After my bath I sat numbly on my bedroll as my ladies painted my lips and eyelids. They draped me in a golden robe in the Sumerian style, which leaves the right arm free. Elamitu and Zumbu, as they were not Sumerian and had never served a Sumerian lady, stood back and let Igiru work on my hair. She combed out my long plaits and rolled my Sumer-black hair with its Akkadian curls into the simpler style of the South. She gave me no cloth to drape over my head. I touched the nape of my neck, its nakedness unfamiliar, and wondered whether the women of the South eschewed the veil out of pride or lack thereof.


    When Igiru was finished with my hair, she went to a chest beneath my bed. ¡°From your mother,¡± she said, and my breath caught in my throat when I saw the glittering things she was drawing out. A mantle for my shoulders, long strings of carnelian and lapis polished so that they gleamed. Bold earrings in the shape of crescent moons. A wreath of golden leaves for my brow and a matching set of bangles for my wrists, and, most exquisite of all, a flowered hair-comb, the kind that makes a cluster of flowers on long stems seem to spring from the top of a woman¡¯s head. These were not just any wedding finery but my mother¡¯s finest jewels, saved from the sack of Umma. No one had worn them since she had, and I was shocked they had not been buried with her, as many of her possessions had been. ¡°From your mother,¡± Igiru had said. Perhaps Tashlultum had known her only daughter might one day find herself in a city of the South. Igiru began to dress me in the jewelry, clucking and cooing that I would be the most exquisite bride that Urim had ever seen.


    At last, she stepped back and beamed at me as though I were her own child. ¡°You are beautiful,¡± she said. ¡°Like Inanna when she makes herself beautiful for Dumuzid.¡± She fetched me a piece of bronze and I saw that I was beautiful--or, rather, the effect of all the things I wore was beautiful. Like my mother, I had become a thing of borrowed glory, a trellis choked in golden foliage. My brown flesh, though it glowed in the morning light against the gold of my gown, was cold and clammy to the touch. And in my own eyes, becomingly darkened as they were with your secret formula that we call ¡°let-him-come,¡± I could read nothing, recognized nothing.


    Zumbu smiled and mumbled some words of blessing at the ground. Elamitu blessed me in her own language, in the name of a goddess called Kiririsha. I know more of the gods and their ways now, of course, but even then I wondered if this foreign goddess was one I knew by a different name, and whether she or any of the gods was watching me today.


    Aboveboard Manishtushu and all the guards and slaves were lined up along the sides of the ship, and I realized for the first time that the distant chiming of the rowers and their master, so familiar I had all but ceased to hear it, was gone. The men bowed when they saw me, and my brother gasped. He opened his mouth to say something, but I looked at him with the slightest trace of a furrow in my brow and he was silent. He bowed his head and took me by the arm and led me down the ramp that had been unrolled for my convenience, with my three women trailing behind with their heads down and their hands clasped in front of them, all except Igiru, who was weeping, digging fiercely at her eyes with the heels of her hands like a woman slicing onions, though whether she wept for me or at the sight of her longed-for home city I did not know.


    We had come out the mouth of one river and sailed east to the mouth of the other, where lies the walled city of Ur--Ur, which I must remember not to call Ur but Urim. The city gaped before me, stony and splendid, an undulating mountainscape of clay, bright-eaved merchant¡¯s palaces and slapdash hovels and between them palms and beds of salt-grass,  irrigation rivulets spanned bridges thin as needles. Off in the distance loomed the mighty House of the Great Light, clearer now than it had been by night, that was to be my home. I inhaled that sharp scent of a city so utterly unlike Akkade, a city that was older than I could imagine, that was so old it lived for the glory of its own self and not its king. I realized then, as I descended to the stones of Urim, that I must not be the first princess to arrive here by boat. I was one in a long line of king¡¯s daughters, a long line of outsiders, of visitors flaunting their own power, as I was to be only one in a long line of Ens. I wondered if the old En before me had thought of me as she drew her last rattling breath, or of all those who came before her, stretching out their dusty hands from the Great Below to welcome her.


    There was a crowd of curious onlookers waiting to see us at the docks, men and women and scrawny children. They withdrew from our guards, pure Akkadian in their leather jerkins and pointed helmets, and murmured and bowed when they saw my brother in his royal finery, with his sword buckled at his side. Scanning the crowd I saw the same attributes repeated again and again; dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes. Women in one-sleeved dresses with a black knob of hair and a black line connecting their brows, men bare to the waist in long skirts, bald or short-haired, many without beards. In the great festival processions and slave markets of Akkade, I had been accustomed to seeing different kinds of people. Aside from the Northerners and Southerners of the Land Between Two Rivers, there were many others from the foreign kingdoms of mountain and plain: the slender brown Elamu of the East and the hawk-nosed Amurru of the West, lisping Suteans, beardless Hurrians and fair-haired Guti, Lullubi tribesmen with their long queues. But in this crowd I saw few who were not Sumerian, scarcely a head that was not Black.If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    I looked upon them, who were my kinsmen by blood if not by else, into whose city I had intruded, the daughter of a man from another land who called himself their True King, who had raised me to their highest office without my knowledge or consent. I looked on them, but when they looked at me I blushed and could not meet their eyes and longed for the comfort of my veil. Yes, Inanna, I, proud and unrepentant En Kheduana, who has spit in the face of conquerors and felt the shuddering sobs of kings, I tell you that I could not meet their eyes! It was not that I was modest, though many probably took me for such. It was that I did not yet know what they wanted from me. It was too much all at once; the surprise of the marriage pact and the voyage, the new city, my bridal vestments that already were beginning to stifle and itch in the sweltering heat. I needed time before I could face them, time before I could look into their eyes and know if they saw me as a friend or foe, as a priestess or an infidel, a princess or a weak young girl from a powerful family. It was with relief that my slaves helped me into a curtained palanquin, which was lifted up by the men who had come with us on the ship, with my brother and his guards marching at the head of our little procession and more slaves bringing up the rear with gifts of goodwill for Lugal Kaku and the Temple of the Moon. With a long sigh that rattled my shoulders, I drew the curtain and settled onto the cushioned divan within beside my slaves, pretending not to understand the murmurings in Emengir that drifted through the air around me.


    ¡°That¡¯s her that will be En,¡± I heard them say. And ¡°Sharru-kin¡¯s daughter,¡± and over and over, ¡°She looks small. She looks so small.¡± I almost laughed at this. I was a young girl; did they expect me to be eleven cubits tall like Gilgamesh? But then, my father is almost that tall in my memories, and my mother has shrunk nearly to the size of a votive idol, or one of those tiny bronze mannikins that are buried by builders to bless the foundations of a new house. I suppose this is how it is, with characters in songs, with kings and their womenfolk, with monsters and heroes and gods too. No one is more beautiful or more imposing or more frightening than they are before you see them. In truth we are none of us very large, not the king, not the gods, not anyone, but a story can make us seem so.


    Our little procession began to move through the streets. My heart pounded as I began to wonder when we would approach the House of the Great Light where I would meet my bridegroom. Igiru¡¯s face was shining, and she smiled as she whispered to me how much I would love the city of Urim, how excited she was to finally be here. Her words were cut off by a commotion from outside; a clamor of voices so different from the other sounds I had heard in the city that it startled me.


    ¡°What is that?¡± Elamitu asked.


    Igiru nodded gravely and said, ¡°They always find the brides,¡± more to herself than to any of us.


    Yes, Inanna, we heard them before we saw them. My long life has taught me that this is always so with your creatures, but I did not know it then. At the time all I knew was the shrill piping of flutes, the stamping of feet, the beating of the small hand-drum called the tigi. And I heard jubilant voices raised in song, but this was a Southern-tongue of a different kind than I had ever known. It was not the accent of Urim, which I knew from one of my tutors, nor the accent of Nibru or Kish. It was almost a separate language all its own. It seemed to flow at a different rate, as though this tongue and the Sumerian I had heard before were two rivers with two different levels of silt. It was so unfamiliar that I could barely determine the meaning, except that I heard your name, Inanna, not only once but many times. They were praising you, I did not doubt, though who they were remained to be seen. ¡°Who are they?¡± I asked my Sumerian slave-woman, and she said, ¡°The wonder of Inanna. Look, Princess. My words will do them no justice.¡±


    I lifted the edge of the curtain as high as I dared.


    What can I say of my first glimpse of the menwomen of Inanna? Growing up as I did in one of your cities, my Lady, I had heard whispers of your strangest children. In Akkadian we called them assinnu, buggerers, and though the young men of the Great Household might mock the lisping speech and swaying walk of the menwomen, they knew better than to doubt their power. It was the first assinnu, Asushunamir, who saved you from your sister¡¯s clutches in ancient days, and they were ever in your favor after that. I had heard it said that any man who sought the assinnu at Ishtar¡¯s temples and lay with one would be blessed with good luck and health. When I was a young girl this seemed frightening and mysterious. Now that I am an old woman and know something of their ways, I am certain that it was the assinnu themselves who started this rumor.


    I had never seen their ilk before, but it was clear to me at once what they were and what they were not. I beheld that the source of the music was a ragged band moving towards us on foot. They wore the one-sleeved dresses of the South in a chaotic mix of colors, fabrics and styles, bright as birds and with all their noisy self-importance. Their eyes and nails were painted as well as any lady of my father¡¯s court, but their plucked chins were hard, their hips narrow, and most had no breasts. Some of them were going bald at the front of their heads but they all wore the low bun style of the South, and a few even wore flower-shaped jewels like my own, though as they came closer I saw that these were not gold and lapis but chipped and painted pottery. They clapped their hands and bared gap-toothed smiles that made our guards scowl and grow tense. They were blocking our path, and my heart pounded as I wondered what it was they meant to do.


    Their song came to a frenzied close. Then they whooped and clapped and said as one, in Emengir that I had no trouble understanding, ¡°A blessing! A blessing for the bride!¡±


    Leaping and laughing and calling out their intent to bless me, I found them oddly beautiful. Perhaps it was simple relief at knowing what they wanted. Perhaps it was because their beauty was so unlike any other beautiful thing in my life. I had been called beautiful that very day by Igiru, but it was only because I was a bride and wore ancient and beautiful things, not any lightness in my heart or joy in my face. My father¡¯s capital city was called beautiful, but only because it was new, and my mother was called beautiful only because she was Queen. These haggard, motley creatures were not beautiful to me because it seemed right that they should be, but because they looked as though they had been trying at it, as hard as they possibly could.


    Manishtushu scowled. ¡°Begone!¡± he cried. He waved a fly-switch at them like a stunted whip. ¡°Do you fools not know in whose way you stand? This is not any bride but your city¡¯s new High Priestess, the future wife of the Moon himself, and the daughter of your True King besides. Let us pass!¡±


    The menwomen did not move, but some of them exchanged knowing glances. ¡°Future wife of the moon,¡± said a tall, thin one in a purple dress, sucking in her teeth. ¡°Shall we have another in the sky beside him soon? Two moons would be bad for the galaturra¡¯s business. If the men of Urim could see our faces clearly by night, we should never make so much as a penny.¡±


    The other menwomen cackled, and a look of rage passed over my brother. ¡°Marsh-slime,¡± he said, and added some words in Akkadian that I had rarely heard before but which made the menwomen whoop all the louder.


    ¡°I said begone, or my men will cut the male parts from the female parts of you,¡± said my brother menacingly, and the guards placed their hands on their swords.


    ¡°Too late for that,¡± said a willowy youth in green, and another roar of laughter rose from the crowd. The one in purple proudly tossed back her head with its crown of cracked clay flowers.


    ¡°We pilipili, cross-dressers, are the servants of your beloved Ishtar, Northman,¡± he said. ¡°We may not be as sweet and mild as her hierodules, nor our titties as big neither, and we may call her by a different name, but we are hers, and command your respect. Down here where the marshwater rises, Ishtar reigns supreme. This is Moonfather Nanna¡¯s city, but all the South is his daughter Inanna¡¯s. No other god has more Southern cities to their name than she.¡±


    The guards exchanged an uneasy look and I lifted the curtain higher still.


    ¡°What do you want?¡± asked my brother uncertainly.


    ¡°We are the galaturra, the little ladies of Inanna. It is custom here that we bless every bride in this city on her wedding day,¡± continued the purple-robed manwoman. ¡°Inanna-Ishtar has granted us the use of her powers. She makes a poor man rich and a rich man poor, She makes the weak strong and the strong weak, She is a noble lady and a noble young man, just as we are. If we are not permitted to bless a bride¡ªand most especially, if we are not compensated for that blessing¡ªwe reserve the right to bring the goddess¡¯s wrath down on whoever has denied us our due.¡±


    ¡°Inanna¡¯s sweetness lends her cruelty strength, and her cruelty lends her sweetness strength,¡± said a manwoman in a gown of blue and yellow stripes. ¡°I am sure your little princess would agree. Ask her when she is done watching from the palanquin.¡± He raised an arm in my direction and I recoiled from the curtain, letting it fall. I was not sure if it was exactly forbidden for me to see them, but I was embarrassed to have been seen spying. Perhaps I was also afraid to see by what my brother might do to them if they continued to give him trouble.


    My upcoming wedding must have put my brother in a charitable mood, for I heard him call one of the slaves to fetch a measure of gold shekels for the galaturra. ¡°Make it quick,¡± he spat, and I heard the pipes and drums begin anew.


    ¡°Princess!¡± the menwomen called. ¡°Light of the Moon, and bride! Show us your face, that we may bless you!¡±


    Shaking and with flushed cheeks, I lifted the curtain all the way and received my blessing.


    It was a song first, in that same twisting dialect that I could barely interpret, punctuated with their shouts and whoops. Now and again they switched back to the Emengir I knew to call me ¡°Beauty of Beauties!¡± and ¡°Blossom of the Desert!¡± and ¡°Daughter of the King of the World!¡± and I heard over and over again Inanna, Inanna. Perhaps this entire spectacle was a wedding-gift from you? After all it was on that day that you became my new kinswoman. But at the time I could only sit with burning cheeks, while beside me Igiru clapped her hands and Elamitu and Zumbu stared in wonder.


    When the song was ended, the beautiful ones bowed their heads and placed their hands at their mouths. The one in purple said, ¡°May your life be long and may you find joy in the House of the Great Light.¡±


    ¡°And try not to be disappointed on the wedding-night if your bridegroom cannot perform the duties he owes you,¡± said another with a stifled giggle.


    ¡°And as for you, O prince of the broad shoulders and the fine thick beard,¡± said a third, pointing to my brother. ¡°If you desire a wedding night of your own during your stay in our city, we are skilled actors to a girl. The bloody sheet of course will cost you extra, but if your cock is as large as your reputation--¡±


    Manishtushu waved his sword at them. Screaming with laughter, they scurried off in a dozen directions, clapping hands on each other¡¯s backs and talking animatedly in their strange dialect. And I knew not what to make of them.


    I was still thinking of your menwomen when the palanquin came to a stop. During the rest of our journey, Igiru tried to satisfy my curiosity. She told me they had spoken the truth: these beings were your servants, concentrated in a house of their own at the Eana, your temple in the neighboring city of Unug, called Uruk in the North. They wandered the streets of Unug and Urim, blessing brides by day and conducting other business by night. As they were between the male and the female, Igiru explained, so they were between the realm of gods and the realm of men. If they felt they had been treated fairly by the bride and her family, they could make her bear strong, healthy sons; if not, they could curse her womb with barrenness, make her children die in the cradle.


    ¡°But they have blessed me. Does that mean I shall bear sons for the moon?¡± I asked. Igiru gave me a small, weak smile and said no more. In the perfumed haze of the palanquin, which swayed back and forth with the movement of the men who carried it, my eyes fluttered and my mind drifted. Only half waking, I imagined myself impaled on the point of the crescent moon. I saw myself lying on my back and giving birth to moon after moon that floated forth from between my thighs, silvery-wet, each one filling the room with more light. I was dreaming of holding a round, cold moonlet to my breast when the palanquin came to a stop and a burst of fanfare from the trumpeters announced that we had reached our destination.


    My brother drew aside the curtain and helped me out of the palanquin. I stood, grateful for the fresh air, my dress sweaty, my head dizzy, my makeup beginning to melt and run in the heat. It was by now nearly nightfall, and we stood at the outer temple gates with all the city of Urim spread out behind us across the flat plain of the marshland. The city crawled with torches like a nest of fireflies, and Utu, the sun, whom until recently I had been accustomed to calling Shamash, was a clot of swollen red light on the horizon.


    We stood before two doors taller than any I had ever seen, taller even than the doors of my father¡¯s palace in Akkade. Standing across from us, before tiled walls inscribed with the names of the moon and all his kinsmen, was a group of men: slaves and bald-headed priests, some in the flounced robes of their office and some, I was shocked to discover, naked and bearing libations, their bodies shaved as bald as their heads. They surrounded another man with a round belly that hung over a skirt that touched the floor.


    ¡°Crown Prince,¡± said the fat man with great reverence. ¡°We are honored by your presence.¡± He stepped towards my brother, making the Southern gesture of obeisance as he did so, with his hand at the level of his nose. ¡°I am Lugal Kaku, ruler of this city and friend of your father.¡±


    Manishtushu¡¯s face darkened, and I felt a sharp twinge of my brother¡¯s pain. Then he said, ¡°I am not the Crown Prince, friend Lugal. That title belongs to my brother Rimush. I am Manishtushu, Sharru-kin¡¯s second son. No doubt it is the resemblance between us that has confused you.¡±


    A slave mopped Lugal Kaku¡¯s sweaty brow. ¡°Of course,¡± he spluttered. ¡°Forgive me, Highness, I saw a bronze image of your brother when it was sent to adorn the Gardens of the Moon, and I thought--I did not mean to--¡±


    Manishtushu made a gesture as though brushing flies out of the air. ¡°No matter,¡± he said. ¡°It is not me you are here to see.¡±


    ¡°Princess,¡± said the Lugal, stepping forward. ¡°I hope that your journey has not been too taxing. We have been awaiting your arrival with the greatest excitement.¡± I lifted my chin and looked him in the eye. It was easier to look at one Great Man than the crowds that thronged in the streets of Ur.


    ¡°The journey was tolerable,¡± I said. He was as fat as I had guessed he might be, though even in my dazed state I could not mistake him for a water buffalo. Neither could I mistake him for a king, though he had been one once. He spoke some fine words to me that I barely heard, about beauty and the blood of kings. My blood was king¡¯s blood. What did that make his? ¡°When shall I be married?¡± I asked him.


    Lugal Kaku smiled. His teeth were black from the rot of sweets. ¡°You are anxious to assume your Enship, I see.¡±


    I nodded, for it was true that I was anxious. Like many brides before and after me, I could not wait to lay myself down in my bridal bed. Unlike most brides, it was not so that I could enjoy the embraces of my new husband, but so that I could sleep.


    ¡°The moon is already high,¡± said the Lugal. ¡°And the lords and ladies of my court have assembled within to bear witness. We shall conduct the ceremony at once. Truly the city of Urim is blessed today to have such an En. Ningal, the Great Queen, the goddess of the reeds and wife of the moon who is your counterpart in Heaven, could not herself be more lovely on this day. You are as radiant as Inanna of the dark and curving lashes, as beautiful as Nin Khursang, the Wild Cow, when she...¡± His voice trailed off into nonsense as he compared me to one god after another. Pulled by hidden teams of slaves or, like the tides, by the will of the Moon, the great doors began to open. I felt a rush of air, not the sea-tang air of Urim but temple air, moon¡¯s air, the air that I would breathe with the rattling gulps of a spinster for the rest of my life. The air I breathe even now, Inanna, as I lie awake in a bed I have never shared. I looked to my brother, to my slave women, to the guards, and followed the retinue of Lugal Kaku into the yawning doors of the House of the Great Light, surprisingly dark for all its grandiose name, as the priests took up a wedding chant.


    So it was that I was married.


    Of the ceremony itself I do not remember how long it lasted, what words were said by the priests, who led me behind a partition to change into the priestly flounced sulukhu. Nor do I remember with perfect clarity the moment when the cold perfume was poured on my head and I became Nanna¡¯s chief wife on earth, the mortal counterpart to his heavenly wife Ningal. But I remember sitting on my bridal pillow in a haze afterwards, scarcely moving or speaking, as the noble lords and ladies of Ur kissed my cheeks or my hands and murmured their blessings and gave me their gifts. I received heaps of jewelry and perfumes and gold, pots of beer, bushels of wheat and bundles of leeks, cases of dates and duck¡¯s eggs, spotted leopard pelts from Amur, falcons tied to their perches, young slave men and women who wore no clothes that I might see their value for myself. Everything they gave would be donated to the Temple, of course, minus what Lugal Kaku skimmed off the top for himself. I was permitted to keep only the blessings, and I kept as well the gifts given to me by my family: the three slaves from my father, my mother¡¯s jewels, a pot of costly ointment from Rimush. Manishtushu¡¯s gift I had already received: not just the costly wine from Musur, but his comfort to me during the voyage.


    My brother got drunk at my wedding. Ferociously drunk, angrily drunk, drunk enough that he dribbled into his beard, that he roared at Lugal Kaku¡¯s men near as loud as Sharru-kin and grabbed the flesh of passing slave-women without caring if I saw. I tried to speak with him, to comfort him, but his face was a mask of pain and I knew it was the words of Lugal Kaku that has cut him to the bone. His name was He Who Goes With Him, and in some way Rimush had gone along to Urim with us, the shadow of a prince at another prince¡¯s heel.


    I, for my part, was barely someone I recognized. I moved like a fish in drought-mud, trapped and sluggish, for my name was not even my own anymore. The one part of the wedding ceremony that stands out clear in my mind is the moment when I received my new name.


    ¡°Khedutum, daughter of Sharru-kin,¡± said the priest, pausing from his litany. ¡°What name have you chosen to be known by?¡±


    And I replied quietly, ¡°Kheduana.¡± I had chosen it during the voyage to Urim. ¡°Jewel of Heaven¡±, a poetic name of the Moon. And the priest nodded and went on with the ceremony. It was an entirely typical name for an En. I knew that my predecessor, Lugal Kaku¡¯s great-aunt, had taken the name Galusakar, the Great Crescent, and I have learned since many others before her who had been White Light or Glory of the Night or other such lunar nonsense. My new name was unlikely to raise an eyebrow, but I did not choose it to glorify the god I was marrying. I chose it because, though it was a Sumerian word, the first part of it was the same as Khedutum, which was my Akkadian name, my birth name. I thought I could keep my father from killing it as he had killed the names of so many others, even his own. I thought that if I saved Khedu I would save my old life, and I would never leave the warm palm groves of Akkade, not altogether. I thought that I could keep myself from changing into something I did not recognize.


    Of course I was wrong then, as I have been wrong about many things. I could not save my old life, nor stand against my father¡¯s singular power to erase the names of those around him. I am not Khedu any longer. I am not a proud, smooth-skinned girl. I have white showing in my plaits and wrinkles on my cheeks, and my nephew is already grooming his young daughter as my successor for the inevitable day when the Lady of the Great Below comes to collect me. I am not the only princess in the world any longer, you see. I am a relic of the past, a virgin bride who lives like a widow and feels like a statue. The moon¡¯s hag, the moon¡¯s spinster, as wrinkled and light-fearing as the bats that roost in the rafters of the temple. Perhaps I shall ask Elamitu to hang my body upside-down when I die. Perhaps when the time is right I shall flap down to Ereshkigal¡¯s house on my own leathery wings.


    Yes, my lady, I dare to think your sister¡¯s dread name. Eresh-ki-gal, Lady of the Great Below. ¡°Sweet is her praise¡±, as the old saying runs to keep her at bay. I remember her name, though I must not say it aloud, just as I remember the name of the girl Khedutum, though I must not say it, I must not bring back that phantom nor remember the gardens of Akkade all those years ago, before I wore the aga, before I wrote my first song, before Lugal Anna smote me across the cheek, before, before, before¡­


    The last remnant of my old self died that night, was engulfed and extinguished in the House of the Great Light. I became En Kheduana, a priestess of Nanna and a resident of Urim. I became the woman that I am. Everything that has happened to me since, both the bad and the good, has been because of that day, the evening of my wedding, when the cold perfume of the priests splashed over the sleek part in my hair, trickled down my brow and neck and stained my gown and washed away my name.

 Chapter 4

    The night of my wedding I slept little, yet dreamed much. I dreamed that the moon danced in the street with our bloodstained nuptial sheet like a bridegroom. I dreamed that my mother and father came to lay flowers in my lap and bless me on my wedding day, but when they touched me I shrank by slivers until there was nothing of me left, only a dark place in the sky between the stars. I dreamed that I sprouted a beard of many colors, and Inanna came to pluck it out.


    The private chambers of the En in which I slept that night were as richly appointed as my own in Akkade, but they stank of perfume and beneath it, the sick-sweet smell of an old woman (how I pause and smile at the memory of my young nose wrinkling! How much more like an old dragoness¡¯s den does the giparu smell now I have slept here for fifty years?) Just as Rimush followed my brother, so it seemed that Galusakar followed me.


    Drifting in and out of sleep, lying in the dark bed of En Galusakar and all those before her, I wept for the gardens of Akkade I would never see again, for the hotness in my breast that could not be quenched and the faces of my brothers. I wept for Baramu whom I had barely known because I knew that now I never would. I wept for my mother for the first and only time, but for my father I had no tears.


    I wondered whether it was right to curse one¡¯s father, especially when one¡¯s father is the King of the World. The priests who taught me the name and purpose of each of our many gods had only hinted at the use of curses against one¡¯s enemies. There were spirits who were not the friends of man but who could be used by one man against another, summoned with incantation and manipulated with sacrifice, though when I asked the priests to teach me to call on such beings they would scowl and shake their heads. When I was young my nursemaids always forced me to wear apotropaic amulets, in case some enemy of my father¡¯s named me to Lamashtu the Deformed One or Lilitu the Screech Owl, bloodthirsty slayers of children. And there was a woman brewer called Pazris who sold ale to the palace kitchens that even the young noble ladies of the court would visit. She knew every secret rhyme and rite, not only to make a man love you or to make yourself more beautiful but to make hideous things happen to your enemy, to give her leprosy and bloody stools, to make her hair fall out, to make her be raped by dogs. If some misfortune befell one of the daughters of my father¡¯s Great Household, for a few weeks gossip would swirl through the Gardens of Akkade as to who had put the curse on her, and for what reason.


    But I had never been to Pazris seeking triumph over my rival. I was Princess of the World, and had none. So the only curses against my father that escaped my lips that first morning were vague, malformed ones, stunted by my lack of knowledge and my own feeling of guilt over uttering them. ¡°May he suffer as I have suffered,¡± I whispered, and added, ¡°By Shamash,¡± because the Sun was justice, and if anyone could recognize that I had been dealt injustice it was him. ¡°May he be alone, as I am alone. May Ishtar--¡± but I was so young that I trembled even to utter your name, and the rest of that curse died in my throat. I should have mentioned Sin, though I should have called him Nanna in his own city. Any married woman knows well enough how to manipulate her husband, but I had only been married a few hours, and no one had yet taught me such tricks.


    I was startled from this reverie by a knock on the door. ¡°Enter,¡± I said. My stepson had only just begun to rise, and in his first pale rays I beheld Elamitu.


    ¡°Another early morning,¡± I said. ¡°Am I to be married all over again?¡±


    Elamitu giggled. She was near my own age, yet she never seemed more like a child than when she laughed. ¡°Visitors, Mistress,¡± she said. ¡°Shall we ready you?¡±


    ¡°I suppose there is no escape,¡± I said as I brushed the hair out of my eyes.


    Together, my three women dressed me for my guests. My wedding dress, if I would ever see it again, was nowhere to be found, and the priestess robe I had donned during the ceremony had been sent away to be washed of its perfumed oils. That left a single robe and simple pair of leather sandals which my women had found at the bottom of a chest. They smelled of the same musk as the rest of the room, and neither fit very well. When the time came to style my hair and Elamitu and Zumbu stepped back for Igiru to work on me, I beckoned them close again.


    ¡°I will wear the three braids of the North,¡± I said. ¡°They have an Akkadian En, now. they may as well know it.¡±


    There were two women in priestess¡¯s robes like mine waiting for me outside my bedchamber, standing still as stones with their hands clasped before them. They may have been among the crowd of well-wishers and supplicants at my wedding ceremony, but there had been so many and I had been so numb that I could not place either of their faces. One was tall and mannish, with broad shoulders and a plain, good-natured face. The other was shorter and stockier, with a large bust and a twisted frown. As I approached they put their hands at their mouths, the shorter woman never breaking her scowl.


    ¡°Good morning, Zirru Kheduana, and welcome to Urim and your new home,¡± said the tall woman. ¡°I am Ugunu, the Mistress of the Tablet House, and this is Baranamtarra, the Mistress of Litanies.¡± I could not help but notice that this Ugunu had addressed me not as Egir, Princess, nor as En, but as Zirru, which meant only ¡°Priestess.¡± The other woman said nothing, but judging by the look on her face it was not from lack of things to say. It was a calculated and hostile nothing that made me uncomfortable.


    ¡°We have brought you breakfast,¡± Ugunu said merrily. She held out a covered basket to me and lifted its lid, revealing two small, plain rolls inside.


    ¡°Thank you,¡± I said, accepting the basket.


    ¡°Come with us, Priestess,¡± the other woman barked. ¡°It is time for your lessons.¡±


    ¡°Lessons?¡± I asked.


    ¡°You must learn how to serve the god you have married before you can put the rolled cloth aga on your head and become En,¡± said Ugunu. ¡°You were proclaimed En a bit more...abruptly...than most women in the past. You will live here in the giparu, but for the next year you will attend lessons with the junior priestesses, and observe the priests and priestesses of the temple complex at prayer, before you can take on your official duties.¡±


    Yet again, it seemed, a decision had been made for me, but I was actually grateful for this one. At least I would not be expected to know how to be a High Priestess from the very moment of my arrival. ¡°I will do whatever is asked of me,¡± I said. ¡°You should know that I have been educated in my father¡¯s house at Akkade. In geography, history and mathematics, and I can read and write in the languages of North and South.¡±


    ¡°As befits a girl of your august dynasty,¡± said Baranamtarra sneeringly.


    ¡°What of my ladies?¡± I asked, ignoring her. ¡°Will they remain with me in the giparu?¡±


    ¡°Your slaves, you mean,¡± said Baranamtarra. ¡°You must dismiss them. The temple has its own servants, and it is good for the younger priestesses to learn to serve their seniors. No En has ever kept slaves in the giparu.¡±


    I scowled. ¡°Lugal Kaku said that I would keep all the gifts given me by my family,¡± I stammered. ¡°My father--¡±


    ¡°Is not here,¡± said Baranamtarra. ¡°Now come. We do not often have to punish the young priestesses, but if you do not come to your lessons when called, we will do what is necessary.¡±


    ¡°Where is my brother, Manishtushu, the son of the True King?¡± I asked. ¡°I demand to see him. He cannot have left yet. Where is he?¡±


    Baranamtarra and Ugunu exchanged a look. Then Ugunu said gently, ¡°He is being hosted at the palace of Lugal Kaku. You will see him when he is to leave. Now come, child. We will not ask you again.¡±


    ¡°When he comes, I will make him ensure that my slaves stay here, in the giparu,¡± I said.


    Ugunu stepped forward and took my arm. ¡°No harm will come to them,¡± she said. ¡°I know that they are dear to you. We must learn to make changes here and there to our usual order of things. You are an En unlike any we have had before.¡±


    ¡°Indeed,¡± said Baranamtarra, and she turned and walked towards the door.


    Someday, Ugunu explained to me as we walked, a few steps behind Baranamtarra, I would be chief overseer of the temple¡¯s faculties, but until I assumed my duties there were many I had to follow and learn from. The House of the Great Light was not just one building but many. There was the temple proper, with its shrines to Nanna and to lesser gods, and the giparu where the En resided, but there was a host of workshops and scribal rooms ranging out towards the city of Urim. Everyone in Urim visited the temple at some point or another, whether it was to place an offering-statue on an altar, to request a prayer for a sick child, to train as a scribe at the Tablet Houses. ¡°It is the most important place in Urim,¡± said Ugunu. ¡°We have a saying here, in the South: ¡®The strength of my god completes my strength.¡¯ Without a temple, no city can ever be great. No king can lay claim to great deeds, nor any man, nor any woman either.¡±


    ¡°I know another old saying,¡± said Baranamtarra ahead of us, without turning around. ¡°¡®This above all do the gods hate: one who is wealthy and demands more.¡¯¡± I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came forth. Ugunu began to babble about some particular facet of the temple¡¯s organization, and I tried my hardest to listen.


    In the days to come I would spend many mornings with Ugunu, practicing my cuneiform on tiny squares of clay until my stylus was blunted and my hand and eyes ached. I would perfect the rolling of a tiny cylinder seal with which to sign my approval. I would meet and speak at length with Lulakhtanak, the hawkish head of the Boys¡¯ Tablet House, and handsome Ningtuku who led the libation priests, as well as the priests who oversaw the Houses of Coppersmiths and Potters, of Jewelers, Bricklayers and Crofters, of all the other workshops whose artisans made goods for the temple and the city. And I would meet lesser priests and priestesses, messengers and servants of the temple household, so many names I was sure I would never remember them all. The House of the Great Light reminded me of my father¡¯s Great Household, and I wondered what the court of Lugal Kaku was like if this was only his city¡¯s temple. The idea that all these people and all their labors, a complex hierarchy of business and prayer and the business of prayer, was organized around me was a desperately strange one. I kept expecting to see a king step out of the shadows, tall and bearded like my father and brothers, and tell me he was the ruler of the temple. Or else I expected to hear the booming voice of Nanna my husband giving me his orders, revealing me as another servant, following out the tasks handed down to me from a higher authority. But the only revelation I received was that I had much to learn. O, Inanna, how many times did I learn that painful lesson in my first few weeks as En!


    I spent much of my time with Dubsang, the High Steward, who was to be my chief functionary when I became fully the En of the temple. In the interim between Galusakar¡¯s death and my ascension he was performing most of the En¡¯s duties, and the strain seemed to be taking its toll on him, for I never knew a man who walked slower nor wheezed as often. He was as stooped and wrinkled as I imagined old Father Enki, and seemed to be forever sponging sweat from his bald head.


    Men, even priests, were not permitted inside the giparu, so my first lesson with Dubsang happened outside on the lawn. I waited for him in the shade of an acacia tree. When I saw how even the walking stick he used wobbled and swayed, I decided at once that I would go to his own chamber myself for our future meetings. I got up to take his hand and guide him to the cushions I had laid beneath the tree, and had Zumbu fetch us a pot of beer. It felt like it took ages for him to lower himself down to the seat, receive the pot from Zumbu, slurp noisily through the long straw, clear his throat and finally ask me, ¡°Tell me, Princess, have you had training in the running of a household?¡±


    ¡°I have,¡± I said. He asked me to repeat myself, which I did, more loudly.


    He nodded and went on, ¡°A king¡¯s court may be his Great Household, but a temple of the gods is a greater household still. The House of the Great Light is the heart of Urim. The farmers work the land, but for many leagues the land itself belongs to the temple: every field of barley and emmer, every head of cattle and brace of goats, every shaduf well and irrigation ditch. Each spring at harvest-time, the farmers tithe a portion of what they produce to the temple. This the temple trades for raw materials from other lands: incense and perfume, copper and bronze, wood, gold, lapis. With these goods, the temple artisans of the House of Goldsmiths and the House of Weavers and all the rest fashion yokes for the farmers¡¯ oxen, statuary to glorify the city, strings of beads for beautiful ladies like yourself. And who do you suppose is the one who ensures that each man in this system works according to his pay and is paid according to his work? That each order is recorded without error, and each shipment received untampered, marked by an unbroken clay seal?¡±


    ¡°The En,¡± I said. I was thankful that I had been allowed to witness some of the mercantile goings-on of my father¡¯s palace. As a girl I had once sat on Rimush¡¯s knee and listened raptly while he negotiated the delivery of a shipment of cedarwood from far Gubla, and Manishtushu often spoke to me of his dealings with wine merchants, a business which, perhaps fittingly, my father had placed him in charge of. But these were in Akkade the affairs of the king, not the High Priest or Priestess. The House of Ever, as Ishtar¡¯s place in Akkade was called, was so much less complicated than a Sumerian temple. I had visited it for the Akitu and your other great festivals, and it was no more than a shrine and a small scribal school, two or three fat priests who wore too much kohl and a handful of scurrying temple maidens who laughed behind their hands. That place had no workshops, no layman tradesmen overseen by abacus-clutching priests. No High Priestess walking among them making marks on a bit of clay. As I listened to Dubsang¡¯s droning voice, I began to wonder why the city of Urim even needed Lugal Kaku. To offer the Enship to the daughter of his king, I thought wryly. I had not seen the city¡¯s governor since my wedding day.


    There were many days in which I did nothing but follow the lesser priests around and watch them as closely as I could, mouthing words along with them, placing my feet in the places they had stepped. In this way I learned all the many rituals of Nanna and the lesser gods of Urim. I learned to feed and clothe the statues of the temple, especially the statue of Ningal, the Great Queen, who was Nanna¡¯s wife in Heaven as I was his wife on Earth. When the words had been spoken to open her mouth and eyes and milk had been poured over Her blank, dark face, the porous stone absorbed it as though she were really drinking the offering. The very first time I did this I had to stifle a laugh behind my hand because the mad image had come into my head of the goddess slurping her milk greedily, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand and belching in pleasure. The priests looked at me and I turned my face and pretended to be coughing on dust. I had not yet learned that a little laughter at the gods of Sumer is the only way to worship them. The fear of making a mistake was still too sharp, and there was no one who gave me that fear more than Baranamtarra.


    As Mistress of Litanies, Baranamtarra knew all the hymns and sacred songs of Nanna; the urshemmas and balbales, the adabs and ululumamas. It fell to her to teach me what she knew, that I might someday lead the priests and priestesses in song.


    On our first lesson together in the giparu, Baranamtarra asked me to sing a song of the gods. I stood dutifully and said, ¡°I confess I do not know any such songs in Sumerian, but I can sing you one to Sin, the Northern Moon god.¡± I opened my mouth to begin, but Baranamtarra cut me off.


    ¡°You will not sing that here,¡± she snapped. ¡°Nor any other Northern song. Here you will learn to praise the Moon our god in our own language, in Emengir and Emesal.¡±


    ¡°Emesal?¡± I asked. The word was strange to me. Eme meant language, but sal could mean ¡°fine¡± or ¡°high-pitched¡±.


    Baranamtarra shut her eyes and began to sing a hymn to Nanna. Her voice was rich and sonorous, much more lovely than I had expected. I found that I could not follow the exact meanings of her words and was reminded at once of Inanna¡¯s menwomen and their queer dialect.


    ¡°Only women may use Emesal,¡± Baranamtarra explained. ¡°It is the language of the sacred priestesses of Sumer. You shall learn it from me.¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t the menwomen of Inanna, the ones who call themselves galaturra, speak Emesal amongst themselves as well?¡± I asked. ¡°I heard them on my first day in Urim, when they gave me their blessing.¡±


    Baranamtarra scowled. ¡°That lot. A motley pack of scoundrels if ever there was one. Yes, the gala use it as well. But this is not Unug or Bad-tibira; it is not one of Inanna¡¯s cities. They have no place here.¡±


    ¡°They said that all the South was Inanna¡¯s country,¡± I said.


    Baranamtarra¡¯s eyes narrowed. ¡°You are not one of them. You are En, and what they believe should not concern you. You must praise Nanna above all. You are his chief representative, the first among his earthly wives. Now, we will begin with the balbale, a simple form used in praise ceremonies and typically accompanied by flute and drum. Repeat after me...¡±


    Baranamtarra would snap and correct me instantly at the slightest error. Sometimes her hands clenched and I was sure she wanted to hit me but dared not. I always felt a heavy knot of dread in my stomach each time I was to see her, and left her presence relieved.


    There was a song that gave me a damnable amount of trouble that she made me repeat over and over again for weeks, until I was ready to retch from the sound of the first words. It described in detail the herds of cattle held in the grazelands of the Moon. ¡°Again,¡± she would shrill. ¡°Again!¡±


    I closed my eyes tightly and pressed my fingers into my temples to quell my head¡¯s throbbing. ¡°His great cattle pens are four in number. The cows are driven together in herds for him. His various types of cow number¡­¡±


    ¡°How many?¡± asked Baranamtarra sharply. ¡°You must remember. How many?¡±


    ¡°Thirty¡­¡± I panicked, wracking my brain for the precise number. ¡°Thirty-nine thousand and six hundred,¡± I said at last with a burst of relief. ¡°His fattened calves are one hundred and eight thousand. His young bulls number one hundred and twenty-six thousand. His sparkling-eyed heifers number fifty-thousand five hundred. His white cattle are--¡±


    ¡°Fifty-thousand four hundred,¡± said Baranamtarra. ¡°His sparkling-eyed heifers number fifty-thousand four hundred. Start again, at the beginning.¡±


    Meekly I tried to protest, but she gave me a sharp look and said, ¡°Again.¡±


    I took a deep breath and dug my nails into my palms. ¡°Why must I remember the precise number of cattle in the fields in a song written hundreds of years ago,¡± I said, despairing, ¡°When I must also learn from Dubsang and his scribes how many head of cattle there are this year in the actual fields owned by the temple?¡±


    ¡°This song is older than the room in which we sit,¡± said Baranamtarra sharply. ¡°You must learn it because it is part of the Litany of Nanna. Again.¡±


    ¡°Aren¡¯t there any newer songs?¡± I grumbled.


    At this, Baramatarra surprised me by smiling, though it was a smile without warmth or affection, as thin and bitter as a melon rind. It was the smile one gives to a child who has proved themselves touchingly naive. She answered my question with one of her own. ¡°Who writes the songs of Nanna?¡±


    ¡°People from a long time ago, or else the gods themselves,¡± I said bitterly. ¡°You¡¯ve said as much.¡±


    Baranamtarra stood up straight. ¡°The Ens,¡± she said. ¡°The former Ens. Every word we study in this room was written by an En such as you will be. If you want there to be new songs praising Nanna in new words, if you want to extend and embroider the great Litany of the temple, by all means! But first you must learn all the songs that came before. Otherwise your own songs will have neither power nor music.¡± I stared at her for a moment, processing this new information. I imagined an old Sumerian woman in a flounced robe counting cows, and it was not until Baranamtarra startled me by slapping fiercely against the wall with her hand and shouting ¡°Again!¡± that I started over once more.


    The words of the prayer-songs of my predecessors flowed on, endless and babbling like the waters of the Slow River, which I now called the Buranuna. In Nanna¡¯s temple there were special prayers for each phase of the moon; for Nanna when the moon became a crescent, for Ningal when it was full, for both when it was new. And every evening there was a moonrise prayer accompanied by sacrifice. As En, I must lead both. Baranamtarra gave me exactly one week to learn these ceremonies through watching the junior priests.


    Oh, how well I remember that terrible eighth night! I think I shall never forget how my heart pounded and how I glanced back and forth from the stone altar-slab stained with animal¡¯s blood to the naked libation-priest, from the priestesses in their flounced robes to Baranamtarra like a rough-hewn chunk of diorite, her face blunted into more cruel of a shape than usual in the dim half-light of the temple¡¯s inner sanctum. How the little goat they had brought was so white he shone like a piece of Nanna himself fallen down to earth, how his eyes were the color of his blood I would spill, how he bleated in fear when he smelled the air, rank with the sacrifices come before him. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.


    I had watched a week¡¯s worth of pigs and goats die under Baranamtarra¡¯s and Ugunu¡¯s practiced hands. I had watched the underpriests skin and butcher these animals, donated by the farmers of Urim. I had seen their guts taken to the Reader of Signs for extispicy, I had seen their bodies turn on a spit and smelled and eaten their roasted flesh. Yet in spite of all I had seen, I stumbled over the words of the prayer that night. When I did, Ugunu supplied the words for me in a whisper that the dark chamber of the temple amplified into a rush of wind. My hand shook as I gripped the long knife, slippery in my sweaty palms. I felt more sweat trickling down from under my arms and breasts as the priests lifted the goat onto the slab and held it down by the legs, as the priestesses took up a chorus and shook the rattles they carried.


    I had never killed anything before. In Akkade, the only meat I saw was spiced, braised and plated. Yet I knew I had to do this, and what was more, as the rattles grew more frenzied, I knew that I must look at it. Oh, Inanna, I tell you, after all the horrors I have seen in this world I never wanted to close my eyes more than that very night, that night I killed a goat for the first time! It seems so foolish to think of it now, when I have slaughtered goats beyond counting in the name of the gods, and pigs, sheep and cattle besides, when I have wiped the grease of the evening¡¯s sacrifice from my lips more times than I can count. But I was terrified that night. Terrified not of the god I served and married, but of his servants. I did not want them to see their En for a weeping girl. I am the daughter of a conqueror and the sister of princes, I thought as I placed one hand under the bleating goat¡¯s chin and lifted it, as I lay the bare blade across its tender throat. My father did this to men, to kings. Surely I can do it to a white goat? And when I gritted my teeth and slashed with the blade I thought, how many men has my father killed? My brothers are joining him in his campaigns to the West--have they killed men?


    The goat did not die a clean death that night. I did not cut it deep enough, so that instead of falling flat against the slab and dying it screamed hideously and its hot blood splashed over my gown. I lost hold of it, stumbling backwards and nearly falling, ashamed and horrified all at once. One of the priests who was holding the animal down came to my aid and the goat¡¯s alike, bending back its neck with one swift crack. Its legs kicked out at me a final time before it went limp, dousing both me and the priests in a fresh rain of blood, and I stepped so far back I bumped into the naked libation priest. In my dazed state I wondered why he was not the one who performed the sacrifice, when surely it would make more sense to have someone who did not wear robes? My own were bloody, heavy with stench and wetness, and the blood was black in the dim light of the priests¡¯ lanterns and of Nanna streaming down through the skylight in the temple ceiling. Was he proud of his little wife, of her little miseries? I stood there drenched like Ningal¡¯s milk-sopping statue, unable to move, unaware of whether the priests were looking at me. I stared numbly at my soiled robes and my nostrils curled as I remembered the night in Akkade, two or a thousand years before, when I awoke warm and sticky and covered in blood, black night-blood just like the goat¡¯s. Then I had thought that I was dying, that in spite of my amulets a curse had been laid on me and Lamashtu had pulled out my guts with her teeth and I was dying. I summoned my nurses with screams and wailing, and when they had lit their lamps and come running they scolded me for making a mess, and helped me bathe and showed me how to use a rag to stop myself up each month when the blood came. But now I would be doused in blood each night, I would slink back to the giparu with my cheeks burning not only from shame but from the light of the Moon and the stares of his priests and priestesses. Their ministrations had made me so conscious of them, of the endless opportunities for mistakes, that I had begun to forget why I was really there, and whose servant I actually was.


    I was so numb from shock that I could not end the prayer, so Ugunu said the final words, lifting her hands to the sky, and the male priests began the task of butchering the dead goat. I backed away, never taking my eyes off the altar and the scene before me. My hands crept across the wall behind me and found the corridor that led outside the temple. I turned and ran. Yes, Inanna, like the foolish girl I was I bolted from the temple of my husband, from all of them. And I heard someone running after me.


    I had hoped that perhaps I could make it back to the giparu and change my clothes with some semblance of dignity before anyone saw me again. But I had only made it just outside the temple when a sharp voice called ¡°Priestess!¡± and I froze in terror. I knew that voice well from days of hearing it drone the litanies of the Moon. It was Baranamtarra.


    I turned and saw her striding towards me purposefully, the flounces of her robe shaking with every step. Her face was hard to see in the dark, but her intent was clear. She walked right up to me, so close I could feel her breath, sickly-sweet from chewing fennel seeds. Her every word quivered with loathing as she said, ¡°You will do better tomorrow night. Nanna will not suffer such an insult a second time. Get back to the giparu and change. And another thing. You will never run in the House of the Great Light again. Never.¡± Then she slapped me, hard, across the mouth.


    I raised my hand to my stinging cheek, too shocked to speak. I slunk away from Baranamtarra, and could not even meet her eyes. In that one instant, stained with blood and embarrassment, I felt smaller than I had ever felt, smaller even than when the people of Urim remarked that I was no giantess, no goddess. I realized then the truth of my situation. It came to me in waves of pain that broke against me in time to the throbbing of my cheek.


    I was nothing. I was a spoiled and privileged girl who had never done anything for herself, who had been treated like the rarest of treasures, simply because of who her father claimed to be and what he might do to anyone who said otherwise. I could eat goat prepared by servants off golden platters but could not kill one without making a disgraceful mess. I was not in Akkade anymore. This was Shumeru, the land of the South, the oldest of all the realms of men, where Ninlil, An, Enki and Nin Khursang breathed life into their little clay mannikins and set them down to raise the first cities from the muck and reeds. Even Lugal Kaku, fat and foolish though he was, had claim to a lineage that stretched back to before the Great Flood, to gargantuan god-kings whose reigns lasted tens of thousands of years. My father¡¯s father was a gardener. The paint was still wet on the eaves of Sharru-kin¡¯s palace, the clay barely dry on the tablets that proclaimed him True King, Only King, King of the World. I thought of the fox in the old story that my brother and I had sung aboard the ship to Urim, the foolish and arrogant fox who claims to cause the tides with his little stream of urine. Could it be that the grand, united Empire into which I was born was no more than a drop of piss in a roaring river, and my father was the fox, a braggart claiming to rule a land that was too old and too broken to ever be whole?


    I am a princess, and I have always felt like a princess. I have never known how not to feel like a princess, not truly, not even when I had lost it all, not even now, when I feel older than the mud bricks of Eridu and twice as weather-beaten. And that night, I still felt like a princess--but I did begin to wonder, for the first time in my life, how much my title was really worth. So I scurried away from Baranamtarra like a scullery-maid, like a slave-girl, and I went back to the giparu and ran my hands over my blood-sticky face as if to remind myself it was still there.


    Igiru was waiting for me in the dark of my bedchamber laying out my clothes for the next morning. ¡°Mistress, what has happened to you?¡± she asked in alarm. I mumbled something about the sacrifice, that it was the goat¡¯s blood and not my own, and she furrowed her brow in concern and laid her hand tenderly on my cheek and began to help me out of my soiled clothes. She called to Elamitu and Zumbu in the next room and asked them to draw a bath for the little princess. I had liked it when she called me that on the boat to Urim, but I did not like it now.


    When my bath was done I put on the clean robe Igiru had been laying out for the next morning. Then I thanked the three women and said I would lie down for a time, and they left the room, Igiru without losing the worried expression on her face. When they were gone I placed my hands over my eyes and lay there for I know not how long.


    Eventually I realized how hungry I was, and that the goat must have been prepared for dinner by now, along with all the other offerings for the gods of the lesser shrines--not just other animals but plates of vegetables and cheese, the nightly feast of the temple priests, skimmed off the top of the farmers¡¯ tithe. I was so embarrassed to see Baranamtarra or Ugunu or anyone that I could barely imagine returning for dinner, but the gnawing in my stomach soon won over my pride.


    As I crept down the hill from the giparu with only a small oil lamp to guide me, picking my way slowly through the dark, I heard voices. One of them, I realized with a jolt of terror, was Baranamtarra. I dove behind a cluster of bushes and covered the tiny flame of my lamp with my hand, hoping she would pass by, but the two speakers did not seem to be moving anywhere.


    ¡°I cannot do it!¡± Baranamtarra was saying, and there was no mistaking her strident tones. ¡°The girl will drive me to the Palace of Dust!¡±


    ¡°Quiet, fool,¡± said another voice. I was sure it was Ugunu. ¡°The hour is late and you are loud enough to wake the dead.¡±


    ¡°Would that I could,¡± said Baranamtarra. Her voice sank lower. ¡°To lose our Lady Great Crescent was sorrow enough, but to have her replaced with this...this upstart, that is too much to bear. This woman has not been chosen by the gods but by our fat and too-friendly Lugal, for his own glorification. When En Galusakar, may the gods grant her rest, was taken sick, no prayers were offered to Nanna to aid us in the selection process, no goat was slaughtered for the omens spelled out in its guts. The priests, as bald as the vultures they are, sent word straightaway to Lugal Kaku, which he passed along to his beloved True King. For the most holy office in the most southerly of cities, the True King has sent us a Northerner. A curly-haired mountain girl born of a lowborn butcher and his whore! We may as well have given the Enship to a jenny-ass.¡±


    I could hear Ugunu¡¯s sharp intake of breath. ¡°You should speak more carefully of our king. You never know who might be listening. Sharru-kin would have you flayed along the banks of the Buranuna if he heard you speaking so.¡±


    Baranamtarra was livid. ¡°I don¡¯t care what Sharru-kin would do if he heard me. He is not here, nor even his drunk of a son, only his wretched daughter. The wrath of Nanna will come down on the city of Urim for this, mark my words. Nanna will not suffer so unfit a wife, just as I will not suffer to kiss the robe of a foreign En. It is an insult to the god we serve.¡±


    ¡°Do you think I don¡¯t know that?¡± Ugunu¡¯s voice rose, and it shook me. I had never heard her speak so forcefully. ¡°Do you think I want this girl to lead us? What I want doesn¡¯t matter, and neither does what you want. Think what En Galusakar would do if she were here, sister. She was a compassionate woman, with an open heart. She would not blame this girl for her father¡¯s blasphemy. She would have found it in her to love her.¡±


    There was a pause, and I could imagine Baranamtarra shaking her head in sorrow, her shoulders quaking with rage. Then I heard her voice again, saying, ¡°She loved the gods too.¡±


    ¡°So do we all,¡± said Ugunu gently.


    Baranamtarra¡¯s words were a hiss, a puff of dry air. ¡°Then why must we serve the whims of kings?¡± After that, there was silence.


    A week before, perhaps even a night before, I would have wept yet again. But I had done so much weeping since I left Akkade I was desperately sick of it. There comes a time when you try to cry and realize you don¡¯t have any more tears. There comes a time when the cruellest blow strikes, when the coldest blade is drawn against you, and you simply say ¡°I must change something.¡±


    But I did not know what to do. To whom could I turn in my distress? Manishtushu was gone back to Akkade to lurk in Rimush¡¯s shadow. My slaves would listen, but what advice could they give me? And the priests and priestesses of the House of the Great Light, I was quick to realize, were not my friends. So who, then, remained to me? Who would be my friend in my hour of need? Of course you know the answer, my Lady. You better than anyone.


    I waited until I was sure the two senior priestesses were gone. Then I rose and uncovered my little lamp-flame, ignoring the pain in my stomach for a moment, and walked back to the temple of Nanna I had so recently fled, my footfalls sounding against the tiles of the pathway. It felt peculiar to walk alone. Even as a girl in Akkade there was someone with me almost always: a nursemaid, a gaggle of ladies, a servant, at least one brother. Should I have found some night guard to escort me? Then I remembered that I was En. If they saw me walking with an escort in the dead of night, what would that say to Baranamtarra and Ugunu? What would they think of an En who was afraid to walk freely in her own temple?  They would think her a scared foreign girl and not the wife of a god, if they did not think that already, if the priests and priestesses were not already finishing their dinner and laughing about how I had embarrassed myself and run. I realized this, and I walked alone through the great doors and down the corridor, past the basin of holy water, past the shrines of lesser gods and the statue of Ningal that I fed with milk, back to the inner sanctum of the moon.


    The air inside was still heady with incense and the blood of the goat I had killed at moonrise. I had never been here alone before. And yet, I was not alone, not really ever--the place before the altarpiece was crowded with little clay offering figures with their round, staring eyes, proxies pouring out endless prayers for the men and women who had placed them there during the day. I stepped past them gently, lifting the hem of my robe so as not to disturb them and feeling like a giant among lesser men, as tall as Gilgamesh and Enkidu. I approached the high altar, the dark stone stained darker in places, and placed my lamp on it.  I looked up into the great skylight and bathed my face in Nanna¡¯s streaming light. And I began to speak.


    It was not a curse this time, but a prayer. I wondered if there was much difference between a prayer and a curse after all. (It was not the last time in my long life that I would wonder this, my Lady, as you who have heard all my songs can attest.)


    ¡°God of the Moon,¡± I said, ¡°My only wish is--¡± What? To serve you well? To be a good En? ¡°To be happy here,¡± I said at last. ¡°Help me to be En. Help me to make the people of Urim love me. Help me to love them. Help me to survive here, far from home.¡± High above, my husband shone in the sky. He seemed not to have heard me.


    ¡°Jewel of Heaven,¡± I called to him. ¡°Bringer of Justice. Illuminator.¡± I translated these names from Akkadian to Sumerian. I had heard them in prayers to Sin, and Nanna was not Sin. Was He not, though? Both shone equally bright. I was a new princess in a new land; would he listen more closely if I gave him new titles? I closed my eyes tightly and let the words flow from me. ¡°Lord of the Rushes and the Stars,¡± I called him. ¡°Cold and Shining Lantern, Puller of the Tides, Watcher Over North and South, Pride of Urim, Pride of Akkade, listen to me, protect me, help me! If I must be En, then let me be En. Let me be a better En than any before me or after me. Do this for me and I will sacrifice to you. I will glorify you with my words and my deeds, with every step I walk and breath I take. Take me in your hands, shape me into your true servant. Your greatest servant that has ever lived.¡± I let my words pour into the night sky like bats. I did not know where they were coming from, yet still I prayed. I prayed with hands lifted to the skies, until my words had all flown into the dark and I was chanting Nanna, Nanna, Nanna. If he could not help me, his newest and youngest bride, what power did he have? My god¡¯s strength completes my strength.


    I fell to my knees at last, exhausted. The temple seemed to have swallowed all my prayers, though whether they were swallowed by the god¡¯s ears or by his unfathomable gullet I could not say. My lamp guttered and then went out, and it was truly dark then, except for the wan half-light of the moon, that light that can be seen but never felt. The sun¡¯s light is all passion, both life and death. It brings fields of grain and blossoms and fruit, but it makes the earth dry and cracked, it kills men who become lost in the desert or labor too long without water, burns and shrivels their flesh. The moon¡¯s light brings neither life nor death. It only guides, gentle as a mother¡¯s hand, allows us to see our way safely in the night. Utu, the Sun, is the one who judges, but his father the moon passes no judgment. He only looks down on us and watches.


    As he watched me, I remembered the harsh words of Baranamtarra. How would I deal with her, this woman who held power over me, who tormented me, who called me an unfit wife for the god? Who called my father a lowborn butcher and my mother a whore?


    What would my father do, in this situation? My father, who took his rival¡¯s widow to wife and named her His Plunder. My father, who put down a rebellion in the city of Kazallu so violently that it was said that after Sharru-kin¡¯s army passed through there, no bird could find a place above the ground to perch. Ugunu had spoken of flaying along the Slow River, and after all, I was the En. As I could move alone, so I could act alone. For a moment my heart pounded as I realized just what I was capable of. There were at least a handful of guards here whose loyalty I could count on. Some were so devout they bowed almost to the floor when I scurried past them. They might vanquish my enemy for me in the name of the moon, and I would never need to force a mangled curse past my lips again.


    What would my mother do? She would bow and bend and make herself lovely, that I did not doubt, but she would say nothing. She would not protest against bad treatment, she would not protest against hard work, and she would live out her Enship as silent and cold as Nanna. But I did not want to become like my mother. There was a heat in my breast that I did not want cooled by the moon¡¯s silver beams.


    And my brothers--well, my brothers would be Sharru-kin all over again. They did not suffer being mocked. It was only a year or two ago that a young man of the Great Household had spread an ugly rumor. Naqu had it from one of my father¡¯s concubines that the young Crown Prince had summoned her to his bedchamber, only to send her away in disgrace after spending himself the moment she placed a hand on him. Whether this was true or not scarcely matters. When Rimush managed to trace the story to its source, he beat Naqu so savagely that the young man walked with a limp ever after, and the concubine in question I never saw again. Rimush was of course a prince, and the eldest prince besides, almost as far beyond reproach as one could get, but I was sure even if he were in my present position he would find some way of getting even with Baranamtarra, with Ugunu, with the whole lot of them.


    As the moonlight worked its own way through the ceiling of the temple shrine, I thought to myself that there must be another way. If the way of silence and the way of violence were not mine, then what was? How would I, Kheduana, answer cruelty? Perhaps it was mere weakness or fatigue, but I knew that I had had enough of cruelty, and I would not answer it with more. Neither, however, would I bow. That has never seemed to me fitting for a princess, or a queen, for anyone. I looked up at the moon and gritted my teeth, knowing what I would do. And I tell you, Inanna, though I had not yet found your truth, though I had not yet found even my own, though I wore no aga and was little more than a foreign usurper in the eyes of they who would be my servants, I tell you that my Enship began the day I followed the light of the moon and decided which way I would go.


    The next night I killed the goat more quickly, though I still splashed some blood on myself and still my stomach heaved when I smelled it. But I did not run. I said the final words of the prayer, and when all was done I walked, as slowly as possible, and held my head high and smiled at Ugunu, who smiled back, and Baranamtarra, who did not.


    At dinner I did not eat, much as it pained me not to. I put the food I was given into my little basket and took it back to the giparu instead. I did not even eat it the next morning, when, ravenous, I devoured my first little roll in two bites. I had a lesson in litanies with Baranamtarra, and I threw myself into it, rattling off the praise of the moon god as passionately as I ever had. And when we stopped for lunch, I called Baranamtarra¡¯s name.


    ¡°Yes,¡± she said. Only the one word, yet I could tell even that pained her.


    ¡°Begging your pardon, I was wondering if you might do something for me.¡±


    ¡°Speak,¡± she said.


    I gestured to the basket I carried. ¡°I have some bread, a pot of clarified butter, and a dish of olives that I have saved from my dinner last night. It is not much, but I wish to lay it as an offering at the grave of En Galusakar. Would you show me the place where she is buried?¡±


    The look on her face was almost worth the pain in my stomach. She could not have been more shocked if I had asked her to show me the grave of Dumuzid himself. ¡°I...I know the place well,¡± she said. ¡°She is interred beneath the giparu, like all of the former Ens.¡±


    Beneath the giparu? I tried not to show my astonishment. ¡°Thank you,¡± I said. ¡°Would you be so good as to take me there now?¡±


    Baranamtarra adjusted her robes and said stiffly, ¡°I will. But not now. Wait until nightfall. It is forbidden for daylight to enter the place of the Wives of the Moon.¡±


    The rest of the day continued as normally, in lessons, work, and ritual. But I did not eat dinner that night either, adding my share to the basket. When I returned to the giparu after the sunset prayer, I stood outside to wait for her, holding tightly to my basket of food, determined not to give in to the gnawing pain in my stomach.


    She came to me, a shuffling dark presence bearing a tiny light before her, just as she had said she would. She said nothing, but took me by the hand and led me inside the giparu. To my great surprise, we walked into my own bedchamber. Baranamtarra set down her lantern and said ¡°Help me with this.¡± I realized she was gesturing to the bed.


    Together, we pushed the bed to the far side of the room. I almost cried out in surprise to see, in the dim light of the oil-lamp, a dark passageway yawning unknowably down into the floor. Baranamtarra took up her lamp and stepped confidently into the pit, and I realized that there were steps cut into the earth. She walked down a few more steps, then turned and bid me follow her, which I did with some trepidation. I wondered how impossibly old this stair was, how vast the chamber beneath would be--and, of course, how long I might have gone without knowing it was underneath my bed. Would the good priests of the Temple of the Moon have waited until I was dying myself before telling me where the graveyard of the Ens was?


    As we walked down the steps and into the earth, the dark grew deeper and thicker in spite of the bobbing lantern, the air stale and cool. Before long there was no sign of the bedchamber behind us, so I gripped my basket and kept my eye on Baranamtarra and her lantern, lighting the way before me. ¡°Would you tell me of her, En Galusakar who came before me?¡± I asked. ¡°What was she like?¡±


    Baranamtarra did not speak for a moment. Then she said, ¡°She was kind, and very wise. She was old enough to be my mother, yet we often ate together in the Gardens of the Moon, and some nights we would sit awake for hours talking. Her wits were sharp almost until the end of her days. The people loved her, as well. On the feast-days of the moon she would ride through the streets of Urim in a litter, smiling at everyone she passed, and the people would call her name and throw garlands of flowers into her lap. This is the place.¡± She stopped so abrubtly that I almost bumped into her. I could tell that the ceiling above us was higher than in the passageway, but other than that I could discern nothing about the room. The lantern illuminated only Baranamtarra¡¯s hands and face. Beyond that was emptiness, a perfect and palpable darkness that seemed to stretch on in every direction, so thick I could feel it on me like a cloying sheet of fabric. We might as easily have been at the bottom of the sea, or between two stars, so perfect and utter was the black that surrounded us. Where is Nanna? I thought desperately. The light of the Moon had led me to this place, but it was not here. I gripped the basket tighter and steeled myself. I was the daughter of the King of the World and wife of a god besides. I would not shirk from the darkness underneath my own bed.


    Baranamtarra knelt and placed the lantern on the ground. In the tiny ring of guttering light it produced, I could see a few little grave markers nearby, stones inscribed in tiny bird¡¯s-foot markings.


    ¡°This one is En Galusakar,¡± said Baranamtarra, gesturing to the nearest. I wondered how she could tell, and how she seemed so confident in this place. I looked on the marker she had indicated with wonder. Here she was, my predecessor, somehow carrying more weight than all the others because, alone of the uncounted Ens before her, I knew her name. I guessed that she had been buried while I was floating downriver towards my new home. And it was my last home, as it had been hers. Someday I would be in the dark of this chamber beside her, and Urim would claim my bones as it had claimed my life.


    ¡°It seems strange to be so far from the light of the moon,¡± I said, approaching En Galusakar¡¯s grave.


    ¡°Since before there was writing to mark their graves, the Ens have always been buried here,¡± said Baranamtarra. ¡°One day we will run out of room, and then, perhaps, the Ens shall be laid to rest in another place, but there is still space for many graves here. You will join them, in time.¡±


    How many are here? I wondered. Grateful that she could not see my face, I knelt before the grave of En Galusakar. I placed the contents of my basket beside the marker, pouring out the little clay pot of melted iab onto the earth, and whispered a prayer of rest, of thirst quenched and hunger satisfied. I noticed with some surprise that Baranamtarra got to her knees and joined me, though her prayer was so soft I could not hear the words.


    ¡°May the gods grant that I can someday be as good of an En as she,¡± I said, rising to my feet.


    Baranamtarra picked up her lantern and stood up. ¡°You were not chosen by the gods,¡± she said sharply. Her words rang in the cold stillness of the chamber.


    ¡°No,¡± I said. ¡°But I will be the En. That is something neither of us can change.¡±


    Baranamtarra nodded slowly, then took my hand and turned away towards the foot of the stairs. She began to ascend them, more slowly this time, and did not let go my hand as she walked. In spite of the darkness that obscured us both, I felt as though she was seeing me for the first time.


    I did not eat dinner the next night either. I made sure Baranamtarra saw me place the food into my basket, and that night I pushed aside the bed with help from Zumbu and Igiru and walked down the steps alone, holding my own lantern, though it took me several passes of my light before I found the right grave marker, and I knew it only because the last offering I had left was still there. The next night, I noticed at dinner that a much larger helping of food was given me than before, enough that I could go to bed full and still have some left over to bring to my predecessor in what became a nightly ritual. And after a time I started to be brought three rolls in the morning instead of one. Baranamtarra never had many words for me, but she never struck me again after that day.

 Chapter 5

    On the day I first put on the aga, we experienced a rare miracle: it rained.


    Ugunu clapped her hands and cried that it was a sign from the gods. Baranamtarra nodded her head in stiff approval. I inhaled the fresh scent of water and wind and felt lighter than I had in a long, long time. The rain only lasted a few minutes, and in only a few minutes more the puddles it made on the tiles and cobblestones had vanished in the sunlight, but that smell lingered, clinging to me like the words of a hymn or the presence of a god.


    The priests and priestesses of the temple came before me one by one to show their deference to my Enship, and each new bow I met with a stiff nod of my own. I was grateful to have finally transitioned from zirru to En, to have mastered the tongue-twisting poems of Baranamtarra, to have learned from Dubsang how many shekels a barrel of azaggur-fish was worth and from Ugunu every nicety of writing, yet I was not happy, not altogether. In my flounced robe and heavy earrings and the new weight of my rolled cloth headdress, yet unfamiliar, I felt in that moment as though my life¡¯s story had been written for me. I had begged Nanna to make me his En, and En I would be. I would serve the Temple and the Moon. I would press my name and my approval into clay using the cylinder seal that now hung from a cord around my neck. I would watch young girls grow old and old women die around me, and I would grow old as well. I would bear neither sons nor daughters nor know the touch of any earthly husband. Some say the moon, with his pitted and pockmarked face, is a stone; I too would be stone, a remote monolith in a corner of my father¡¯s empire, a pillar untouched by passion or emotion. I had not cried in many months.


    I watched the women of the temple uncertainly. Among the priestesses now under my authority were girls of all sorts; some were highborn, the cousins or nieces of Lugal Kaku, while others were the daughters of herdsmen, potters and fishermen. There were jolly ones who grinned when they greeted me, and nervous ones who flitted around me like birds, smoothing the fringes of their robes. There were stout matrons and skinny old crones and maidens no older than me, and some of the ones still in training were younger still. But these were not the young ladies of my father¡¯s court. These were Black-Headed girls, with blunted nails and ungainly frog-cry names like Gukkalibla and Sangkakbadbad. They moved with a rolling, wide-stepping gait from years of wading in the marshes and spoke of helping their fathers spear crocodiles as if describing a walk through the Gardens of the Moon. As we dined on simple temple fare their mouths would water as they talked of grilled snake and frog¡¯s legs and turtle soup. I had never been one of them, and now that I was no longer a zirru but the En, the one and only En, I never would. Alone I stood and alone I walked out from the temple sanctum to see the crowds that had gathered around the House of the Great Light for the occasion.


    Many of the people of Urim who assembled to see me that day, and I knew that some had been waiting hours to see me. They sat hunched together in groups, gossiping around dwindling cookfires and bouncing children on their knees, but when the drums of the priests announced that I was emerging, every person leapt to their feet for a glimpse of me. I waved to them and smiled as graciously as I ever had, and wondered if I still looked small to them. If I always would.


    I realized that I was standing in the very place Lugal Kaku had stood when he gave me his welcome a year before, and that the Great Man of Urim was not here. Certainly if he had been he would have made his presence known. To his credit, just days before I had received a messenger from him enquiring after my health. I had smiled and said that I had learned much and looked forward to fully assuming my duties. I did not trust the man, and especially when he wasn¡¯t in the room with me. If my father had sold me South, Lugal Kaku had bought me, and I did not even know my own price.


    The crowd moved towards me. I watched them warily, the young, the old, men and women, and remembered my first glimpse of the people of Urim long ago. There were even nobles here beneath canopies held by slaves, women with jeweled leaves and flowers rising from their heads, men in helms sporting ears and hair rendered lovingly in gold.


    ¡°A blessing, Enship!¡± an old man at the head of the crowd wheezed. I met his awestruck gaze and grasped the hand he was reaching out to me. ¡°May all the blessings of Nanna the moon be with you,¡± I told him.


    ¡°Please, bless me, Enship!¡± said another man, whose eye was covered by a bloody bandage. A woman with a swollen belly and a little boy beside her with a scrap of cloth about his waist were quick to follow, with the woman asking that a prayer be said for her unborn child. Then there was a woman with sores on her face and a man with his arm around his young wife and a rich man whose slaves were pushing others out of the way so that he could stand at the head of the crowd.


    ¡°May all the blessings of Nanna be with you,¡± I said, again, and again, and again.


    They held out their hands towards me, a forest of outstretched brown arms, a wall of desperate flesh, clutching, groping. I clasped them, one after another, and muttered ¡°The blessings of the moon.¡± I gave them every blessing they asked for, though in truth I did not know whose blessings I was giving, my own or Nanna¡¯s. I felt no more holy than I had the day before. All I felt was tired and thirsty and hungry, but I kept on grasping hands until I felt a hand myself, a gentle one on my shoulder. It was Ugunu.


    ¡°Come inside and eat with us, Enship,¡± she said. ¡°You look exhausted. It would not do for you to tire yourself so on your very first day as En.¡±


    ¡°But there are so many more,¡± I said. ¡°I am not done.¡±


    ¡°You will never be done,¡± said Ugunu gravely. She beckoned me to follow her back inside the temple, and it was only with reluctance that I tore myself away from the cries of ¡°Bless me! Bless me!¡±


    It was a special occasion, and so we ate more richly than usual: trays of hot bread and roasted meat and boiled duck¡¯s eggs, pots of beer, wine, iab-butter and olive oil, firm round cheeses flavored with leeks and mustard seeds. The Buranuna had been kind to the temple¡¯s fishermen, and there were besides endless varieties of fish, from the striped ab to the long, slippery gubi, not roasted on a spit over the flame as my father¡¯s people did in the North, but propped on sticks around the fire¡¯s edge. I reflected that even in something so simple as the proper way to cook a fish the people of North and South differed in how they made use of the rivers¡¯ bounty. But our hunger was of course the same, and I even found myself sampling a bit of watersnake.


    After I dined with the priests of the temple I got up to leave, and was not surprised when no one followed me. I knew I must get used to walking alone, so it was alone that I left the feast and went to the Gardens of the Moon. I do not know exactly what I hoped to find there. Perhaps it was a memory of the gardens of my youth, the gardens of Akkade, that led my feet in that direction, even though the temple¡¯s gardens were modest in comparison with those of my father¡¯s palace, even though the air carried nothing for me, neither the rich spices and perfumes of the Great Household of Sharru-kin nor the drifting tones of a young boy calling ¡°Khedu, Khedu¡­¡± If only the scent of rain had stayed just a little longer. That, too, was gone by now, replaced by the swollen smell of vegetation in the sun.


    I walked along a tiled pathway, in the shade of acacias and fruit trees. There were no fountains here as in the gardens of my youth, but this place did have its own unique charms: stone memorial stelae erected by the Ens of the past, and statues besides. I stopped to regard a bronze statue of a broad-shouldered man with a fiercely pointed beard. He held a sword stiffly in one hand and his inlaid eyes were eerily lifelike, beneath a brow that was a carven slash in the metal of his face. It was a face I knew. I realized with a start that it was meant to be my brother.


    I could have almost laughed. This was the statue Lugal Kaku must have seen when he mistook Manishtushu for Rimush upon his arrival! I looked at the statue and thought of Rimush; wondered how he was faring, whether I would receive a message from him soon, whether I would ever see him again. Then I pretended it was Manishtushu instead, and thought of him, my sweet, angry brother, shepherding me to my heavenly bridegroom. I sat down next to the statue and leaned against its solid, sun-warmed leg and felt alone, exquisitely and extraordinarily alone.


    Once again, I heard them before I saw them. They were not playing music this time, but they were talking as they strode through the gardens, their words as sharp and quick as ever, punctuated by peals of laughter. When I saw them at last in their bright motley, fanning themselves with palm leaves and resting their hands on each other¡¯s shoulders, I hailed the galaturra in their own dialect, which now at last I understood.


    They shrilled their admiration. ¡°How much you have learned since you came down from the bridal palanquin!¡± cried a tall one, and I recognized her as the same one who had spoken so boldly on the day of my wedding. ¡°Every blessing and good fortune to Your Holiness, Mighty En.¡±


    ¡°Thank you,¡± I said. I remembered the last time they had blessed me, and how strange it seemed that it was now I who was giving blessings to the clamoring people of Urim. ¡°Will you sit beside me?¡± I gestured to an empty place on the other side of the statue. The tall manwoman smoothed her skirts and settled next to me gingerly. Several of her sisters flopped down beside her with considerably less propriety.


    ¡°And who is this gentleman?¡± one of them asked, gesturing at the statue.


    ¡°My brother, the Crown Prince,¡± I said.


    ¡°The very same who led you through our city streets the day we gave you your blessing?¡± asked another of the menwomen.


    ¡°No,¡± I said, surprised they had even remembered. ¡°They are twins, my elder brothers, alike in every way.¡±


    The tall galaturra opened her mouth to say something, but another, who appeared to be the eldest of them, held up her hand to silence her. ¡°Have mercy, have mercy, he is her brother. She does not want to hear about it!¡±


    They laughed then, and to my surprise, I laughed with them. Then I asked their names.


    ¡°My name is Kankala, Perfume,¡± said one in yellow, ¡°Because I am twice as sweet and three times as costly.¡±


    ¡°Inanna-shudug, the Touch of Inanna,¡± said another. ¡°Because that¡¯s what I deliver.¡±


    ¡°Eresh-gunu,¡± said the eldest one. ¡°Because I am Painted Like a Queen.¡±


    ¡°And I am called Garashang, Leek,¡± said the tall one beside me, ¡°Because I¡¯m as tall and slender as a young leek stalk.¡±


    ¡°I thought we called you that because you grew up in the muck,¡± said the one called Kankala.This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    The others chuckled. Garashang gave Kankala a patronizing smile. ¡°Forgive me, sister,¡± she said, rolling her eyes. ¡°I forgot for a moment that you sucked milk from Nin Khursang¡¯s own teat in the House of the Lofty Peak.¡± Garashang turned to me. ¡°They mock me because I grew up deep in the marshes, but I am not ashamed to say that I was born in a woven reed hut. That my cradle was a coracle, and the waters of the Buranuna rocked me. I did not feel dry land beneath my feet until I came to Urim to be among my sisters.¡± She smiled, remembering. ¡°I must have been your own age, Little En, perhaps even younger.¡±


    ¡°How did you come to join the galaturra?¡± I asked. ¡°I must confess I know little of your ways.¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t you have our kind in the North?¡± asked Kankala.


    ¡°If you mean in the temples of Ishtar, then yes,¡± I said. ¡°In fact, they figure prominently in one of her legends.¡±


    This seemed to fascinate them. ¡°Which one?¡± asked Garashang.


    ¡°The story of Her Descent to the Netherworld,¡± I said. They looked at one another as if sharing some secret between them that I was not privileged to know. Inanna-shudug reached forward and patted me on the wrist with a hand heavy with jewelry. ¡°Very well. I am interested to hear how your Northern Ishtar differs from our Inanna. Do you know the story well?¡±


    ¡°Akkade where I was born is one of Ishtar¡¯s cities,¡± I said. ¡°I was raised on her stories. That one is very serious.¡± And they threw back their painted heads, Inanna, and they laughed at me! Of course now as I remember it I want to laugh along with them, as I had before. But, young and foolish as I was that day in the Gardens of the Moon, I could only gape and feel embarrassed.


    ¡°Inanna is made to be a fool in that tale,¡± said Eresh-gunu. ¡°She goes down seeking to steal power from her sister, the Queen of the Underworld. But her sister tricks her into removing all her clothes, knowing they are the source of her power, by telling her it is a requirement that all those who enter the Palace of Dust do so nude. And then she hangs her from a hook like a slab of meat.¡±


    ¡°But when Ishtar died and went to the Netherworld, no life could flourish on earth,¡± I said. ¡°Asushunamir, who was the first manwoman, a creature neither male nor female, was sent to bring the Water of Life to revive her. When he did, Ishtar¡¯s sister, the Queen of the Underworld, She Whose Name May Not Be Spoken, put a curse on Asushunamir and all his kind. ¡®The food of the gutter shall be thy food, and the sewers of the city shall be thy drink. The threshold shall be thy habitation, and the besotted and the thirsty shall smite thy cheek.¡¯¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know any Asu-so-and-so,¡± said Kankala dismissively. ¡°And all that sounds a bit too grim. Besides, it was two beings neither male nor female sent to give Inanna the Water of Life. A galaturra, like us, and a kurngarra, those are more like tumblers, dancers. They swallow fire and swords, and I mean real swords, dear, not the other kind. You will find both of us in Inanna¡¯s temples. Father Enki made us from the dirt beneath his fingernails, and we went down to the Palace of Dust and listened to the woes of the Queen of the Dead, and soothed them. And we weren¡¯t punished for it. We were blessed. We are the most sacred and wonderful creatures in all the worlds, because Inanna owes us her life, and we owe ours to her. Life can¡¯t survive without Inanna, and no matter what trouble the old bitch gets herself into, we¡¯re always there to pull her back to safety.¡±


    ¡°I still do not think it is a very funny story,¡± I said stubbornly. ¡°Especially when she makes Tammuz--Dumuzid--die in her place.¡±


    ¡°Then you have not seen how we perform it here in the South,¡± said Garashang. ¡°Oh, if only you had been in Unug this past New Year¡¯s, for the Akitu Festival! Our sisters came from miles and miles around, all of us wearing our finest robes and clapping and singing and shouting. People wore masks and painted their faces wild colors, men dressed as women, children dressed as kings, women dressed as beasts. We drank and danced and fucked until the sun went down and came up again. Here in the South we believe that it is good to laugh, and especially at the gods.¡±


    ¡°I didn¡¯t say I never laughed,¡± I said, a bit frustrated. ¡°And we have funny stories about the gods as well, in the North. Do you know the story of Ishtar and the roller-bird?¡± With the utmost satisfaction, I discovered that they did not. So I told it to them. And although I had to explain the part about the bird¡¯s call sounding like ¡°My wing!¡± because that only makes sense in Akkadian, they whooped and clapped when I was done and told me they loved it, that they would share it with their sisters when they got home. Then they told me, with much talking over one another and interruption, a truly filthy song that started out like a solemn hymn but turned out to be about Dumuzid trying to seduce his sister Ngeshtinana in the pasture by pointing out the rutting of sheep to her. As it came to an end Kankala started bleating like a lamb and Garashang leapt on top of her, thrusting and snorting, and I laughed as I had not laughed since Akkade, with simple pleasure.


    I wiped tears from my eyes and said at last, ¡°But you never answered my question. How did you come to join the galaturra? All of you? Garashang, you say you were not even born in Urim. So how did you end up here?¡±


    ¡°Like calls to like,¡± said the one called Eresh-gunu. ¡°How did you end up here?¡±


    I was startled, once again, into silence. I have rarely been spoken to as your menwomen speak to me. They have a remarkable mixture of disdain and respect for authority that is unlike any other group of people in this world. But then, they are themselves regarded with a mixture of disdain and respect. People mock the galaturra for their freakish appearance and lewd behavior, but they also respect their awesome power over luck and fertility, their connection with the world of gods. They are both one and the other, in-between in all things, and contrariness is as much a part of their nature as it is a part of the nature of their Mistress.


    Inanna-shudug smiled. ¡°We are none of us ashamed,¡± she said. ¡°It¡¯s just that there is little to tell. One knows these things from an early age. I joined the temple of Inanna as a young man, because when I saw Inanna¡¯s girls strutting through the streets one day, they were the loveliest things I had ever known, and all I wanted was to be like them. I was engaged to be married at the time, but I broke off the engagement that very day. Her father was furious, but when I explained my reasoning, he calmed, knowing I could never be the son-in-law he wanted. And so I went to the temple and changed my name, and I have never looked back.¡±


    ¡°Since I was a child, everyone told me I was a galaturra,¡± said Kankala dismissively. ¡°I swayed so much when I walked and lisped so much when I talked that everyone was calling me one even before I was. When I left home to join the temple of Inanna, my parents were overjoyed. I was the youngest of twelve, you see, and they were worried they would have to sell me to the slavers to pay for all those weddings.¡±


    ¡°And from birth, I was formed differently on the outside as well as within,¡± said Eresh-gunu. ¡°Partly male and partly female. Many of our girls have an operation, you know, to take away that which is neither their own nor Inanna¡¯s. But I never even needed that much.¡± She gestured to her broad, hairless face and the small breasts beneath her gown.


    ¡°And for me?¡± asked Garashang. ¡°When I was twelve or thirteen years old, I used to wrestle with another boy in the shelter where our families docked our poleboats. At least, at first we wrestled.¡±


    ¡°She always was a randy little thing,¡± Inanna-shudug cackled.


    Garashang silenced her with a look, and continued, ¡°After my father caught us together, well, he knew what I was, and so did I. There was no other thing to do but seek out my sisters.¡±


    I nodded. I wondered what that must be like, to choose to leave one¡¯s home, to know there was a place you were born to fill. ¡°You were sure of yourselves. Your path was clear ahead of you,¡± I told them, and shrugged. ¡°I am a foreigner, placed here by a father who did not think to tell me when he was sending me away. A priestess, a High Priestess, among gods I know less than I think I do, and people whose every custom is strange to me. But I am glad we have had this time together, to get to know one another. I want to know Sumer. I want to know Urim, not just the House of the Great Light but its people as well, and its gods. I want to become part of this city. I have been a stranger here too long.¡±


    ¡°Like calls to like,¡± said Eresh-gunu again. ¡°Are we so different? We found each other, but you have found us as well, sister.¡±


    I smiled, and sat for a moment in silence. Though this place was called the Gardens of the Moon, they did not lack for sun, and the heat felt good against my skin. I reflected that my time in Urim was making me darker. My skin, which had always been the light brown of dried brick, was now closer to the color of the wet river mud before it is packed and shaped. Closer to the color of the Sumerian menwomen that sat beside me and shared my laughter. Realizing no one was around to look at me, I took the aga off my head and let my braids tumble down over my shoulder, spilling a fresh wave of heat across my skin.


    Garashang placed her hand on my shoulder. ¡°We have spent all this time swapping stories of the gods, but would you like to hear a story of men--of women, in fact?¡±


    I nodded, and Garashang began, ¡°You are not the first Northern woman to come to Urim, nor the first to rule here. You may be the first En of Northern blood, but once we had kings of our own, and in those days we had a queen as well. She died hundreds of years ago. Her name was Puabi.¡±


    ¡°Puabi,¡± I repeated the Akkadian word, smiling. ¡°That means ¡®Word of My Father.¡¯¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know who her father might have been,¡± said Garashang, ¡°But she was a Northerner, just as you are, and she kept that Northern name. Her husband was our Lugal, and when he died without an heir she ruled in his place. She was both priestess and queen, and Urim prospered under her rule. No other city could match ours, in those days. The House of the Great Light groaned with the weight of tribute, and Nin Puabi bathed herself in spiced perfumes from further than red Musur. She was famous for her beauty, her wealth, and her wisdom, and though her hair was curly and her eyes green, the people of this city loved her. In fact, the legend says that Puabi¡¯s ladies loved her so much that when she died, fifty of them agreed to die with her. They all drank poison and were laid in the tomb beside her, in the jeweled flowers of the South.¡±


    I blinked, incredulous. ¡°All fifty of them drank poison rather than live without their mistress?¡± I did not think Elamitu and Igiru and Zumbu would drink poison at my behest, nor would I want them to follow me.


    ¡°That¡¯s what one story says, yes,¡± said Garashang. ¡°Of course, there is another tale that says that it was Puabi who loved her ladies too much to leave them behind in this world. This is a very different story, a story which involves fifty wailing women and two priests...one with strong arms and one with a cudgel.¡±


    I shuddered, and Garashang laughed. ¡°A joke, Enship! A joke, to lighten the mood.¡±


    ¡°That isn¡¯t a joke,¡± said Kankala languidly. ¡°I mean, they really do say such things. The truth is nobody knows how the fifty ladies died, or whether there were fifty of them, or two, or none. Puabi is in the ground six hundred years or more. But her legend lives on.¡± She adjusted one of her beaded bracelets. Then she looked at me and added, ¡°There was a time when a woman of the North made the South flower. Perhaps that time has come again?¡±


    I smiled. I wanted to ask if they knew anything about the great Sumerian queen Kug-Bau, whose line had ruled Kish until my father and Ishtar drowned her grandson in a river of blood. I wanted to search my half-remembered history lessons for queens of the rocky North to match Puabi¡¯s greatness. I wanted to sit there, laughing and trading stories and songs, for the rest of my life.


    My reverie was interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps. I looked up and beheld one of the priests, his shaven head gleaming in the evening sun. ¡°Begging your pardon, Enship,¡± he said. ¡°It is almost time for the moonrise prayer. Also there is a messenger here to see you from the oil merchant Lubalasanga. He finds himself unable to meet your order in the time agreed upon previously and requests that you give him more time. Another messenger from our own Temple workshops requires your seal before he can be dispatched to Lugal Kaku¡¯s personal treasury.¡±


    The galaturra rose to their feet. ¡°We will see you again, sister,¡± said Inanna-shudug. ¡°Come to to Unug up the river, to the Eana, the Great House of Inanna and Her Heavenly Grandfather An, whenever you find the need. You are always welcome.¡± They embraced me, one by one, and swept off across the gardens. I could still hear their raucous laughter long after I could no longer see them.


    How much I wanted to follow them! How badly I longed to linger telling stories in the sun, to dance and laugh and kiss men with them, to call them sister, a name which still sounded strange to me. I had been a sister, but never had one. But regardless of whose sister I was or was not, I was En, and there were other matters that required my attention. I rose to my feet and followed the young priest back to the temple, back to my Enship, back to the path my life had taken. Like calls to like. The words of Eresh-gunu echoed in my head long afterwards, even when I had slipped exhausted into my bed, listening to the silence of dead Ens slumbering beneath me. Was there anyone truly like me?

 Chapter 6

    My Lady, you are the goddess of the moment. As Inanna of the South you watch over love, and as Ishtar of the North over battle, and for this reason some might think you two beings instead of one. But I, your greatest poet, who brings together gods in order to bring together lands, I have looked closely and found your true nature. I have never fought in a battle, nor have I made love, but I have spoken at length on both subjects with those who have, and I can say with certainty that in both cases there is a moment¡¯s wild ecstasy; a total release from identity and surrender to the seething tide of emotion. That is where you live, Inanna, in the moments of passion that give life its sharpness and clarity. Moments; a laugh that goes on longer than common sense dictates, an acrid flush of fear that tenses the muscles.


    My life, my Enship, is so many of these moments, all strung together like beads of lapis on a necklace. When I die they shall lay the rope of my life with its blue moments across my dead breast, some pale and feathery as a summer sky, others dark and turbulent as the Two Rivers. It is a whole brace of moments by now, so long they shall have to loop it around me like twine, like a rope on a ship¡¯s mooring, like the golden vines my mother wore. I shall go down into the earth in a shroud of petrified memories, and if your dark sister asks me to strip I will not take it off, because I have heard that tale, and know her tricks.


    Once I became En the moments began in earnest, and those moments stand out all the more because against them, the bulk of my life has been so monotonous. There were the daily sacrifices and the daily prayers, petitioners and offerings to be received, letters to be written, letters to be read, accounts to be balanced. But I remember the burning grasp of Inanna, so achingly alive, when I heard a large chorus lifting their voices together, or when I watched a leper or a cripple praying earnestly in the temple shrine, his eyes welling with tears when my priests and I offered him water and bread. It never troubled me to tend to the poorest and weakest and sickest of Urim, nor to see them and greet them in the temple, and whenever I appeared in public before a crowd, as I did for the festivals, I did not care which hand touched mine. Is that strange, Inanna, that I could look upon a man with rotting teeth or open sores or a limb swollen to twice its normal size, but killing a goat made me weak and dizzy? Perhaps it was a little remnant of my father in me, my lack of squeamishness where human beings are concerned. Or perhaps Nanna had heard me that night in the temple, and it was by the grace of my husband that I was becoming stronger and more suited to my role.


    The most curious thing about being En is that the En is like a king and a servant at the same time. She must rule her temple and serve her god, serve her city and rule her priests. A king must serve as well, serve the needs of his people, though many kings do not know this and their people suffer the more for it. But an En-priestess is at once the mistress of the temple and the subordinate of the Lugal, the mistress of the people and the dutiful wife of a god. My power was a thing to be cherished, but it did not extend beyond the walls of the House of the Great Light.


    Especially in the earliest days of my Enship, there was so much to do that I had little time to be sad. I was too busy to miss Akkade, to think of my brothers, to realize that I had no true friends among the priests and priestesses. My days were spent at the work of being the En, and what little free time I had was spent in the company of my slave women, Igiru, Elamitu and Zumbu. The three women I brought from Akkade were not the temple¡¯s only slaves--there were several, especially in the workshops of the temple artisans--but by and large the workforce of the temple was made of freedmen servants and the priests and priestesses themselves, who did not balk at any labor. Though I did not tell my women myself, I was sure they had caught wind of how close Baranamtarra had come to dismissing them, and of how I had pleaded for them to be kept on. Whether out of a desire to keep a low profile or because they wanted to show me the same loyalty I had shown them, or for some other reason unknown, my women clung to my side and were rarely found beyond the giparu.


    Over time I began to realize that the other workers of the temple were avoiding them, or the other way around. I could tell that the temple¡¯s own servants whispered amongst themselves if I walked by with one or more of my women in tow. They did not think it proper for an En to have her own private slaves. I might have been inclined to agree, but I kept them in my service for several reasons. Firstly because even if there was a part of me that hated my father, I was determined to cherish the last gift he had ever given me. Secondly, because I was very fond of all three, and the sight of them made me more glad than any of the Sumerian clergy who now surrounded me. And lastly, and most importantly, I felt responsible for the women. It was I who had brought them all this way to serve me--should I abandon them in a strange city, as my father had done to me?


    One day when Zumbu was approaching the giparu with a basket of laundry on her head, I noticed that something was amiss before she had even reached the threshold. While she had one hand up to steady the load, every few steps she would stop and raise her free hand and wipe her face with it. Concerned, I walked out to meet her. As I drew closer, I quickly realized that she was crying.


    ¡°What has happened?¡± I asked her as she swallowed another sob.


    Zumbu placed the basket on the ground beside her. She had to work to force the words out. ¡°They laughed at me, Mistress!¡± she said finally. ¡°I went to wash the clothes in the river and the other women were there washing already--the two servant girls who mind the priests¡¯ day robes and the fat one who works for Ugunu--they saw me and they said something to me, but I didn¡¯t understand. So I asked them to repeat it, and they walked away and laughed at me!¡±


    I reached up to help her steady the basket and placed my other hand on the back of her shoulder. ¡°They are cruel to laugh,¡± I said. ¡°You have only been here a few months, and before this you never served in the South. They cannot expect you to understand every word they say.¡±


    ¡°I will not have them laugh at me any longer!¡± said Zumbu, and I was taken aback at her forcefulness. ¡°You speak the language of the South. Please, Mistress, teach it to me!¡± she begged. ¡°If I am to work here, I must know it.¡±


    So it was that Zumbu¡¯s lessons in Emengir began. Every morning I would give her a simple phrase to practice, and every night I would test her on it. Igiru did her part, and promised to speak to Zumbu only in Sumerian when they worked together during the day. Sometimes when Zumbu was arraying my hair or drawing my bathwater I would point to objects, one after another, and ask her to supply the Sumerian name. She applied herself to the task with a ferocity that made me both proud and surprised, for when I first met her I had thought her the most timid and placid creature alive. It seemed that just as Nanna had awakened something peculiar or unknown in me, so he had awakened Zumbu.


    Elamitu poked her head in on these lessons every now and again, but their content never seemed to hold her. Like my brother Rimush, she had not the gift for languages. Even her Akkadian bore the lilting accents of Elam and was broken sometimes, though never more so than when I asked her about her homeland. ¡°Liyan is ship-city, Urim, too, ship-city,¡± she would say, and ¡°Kiririsha is Lady of Liyan.¡± I thought this Kiririsha of the challenging name was a queen or priestess, perhaps some Elamite En, for the longest time, until I remembered that Elamitu had blessed me in her name once. Kiririsha was no En but a goddess, the city of Liyan¡¯s patron deity. Yet when I asked Elamitu if she disliked finding herself in a foreign temple, if she ever longed for the shrines of her own goddess, she would only shrug and say ¡°All gods are same.¡±


    Elamitu was complacent, in those days. She still is, in fact, though age has bent her back and made lines in her lovely brown face. For all her wrinkles and aches, she is happy doing what she has always done, and now as then she does not wish to buy her freedom, though I have offered to grant it a thousand times. She is the only slave I have ever known who refused to take payment under any circumstance. When I offered Igiru and Zumbu a shekel for a job well done, they would pocket it with many thanks, but Elamitu would only hold up her hands and say ¡°No, no,¡± in a way that embarrassed me. In childhood I was taught that slaves were misfortunate, and that the gods did not decree any man should be a slave forever. In my old age, I know that even a High Priestess may fall on hard times, and even a princess can be bought and sold. Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!


    The nomads of the desert have a saying that ¡°once a man has seen Death, he will gladly accept a fever,¡± and the reverse is true as well. To one who has never known true suffering, lesser hardships seem greater and greater ones are simply unimaginable. In my youth I pitied Elamitu that she wanted to stay the comfortable slave of a kindly mistress because, poor young fool that I was, I could not fathom what was yet to come. I had not yet smelled the black smoke nor heard the scrape of Lugal Anna¡¯s blade against the door.


    So I, too, became complacent. I became En. I praised Nanna and fed Ningal and slaughtered goats and put my seal on shipments of clay pots and dried fish. I left offerings to Galusakar and the other dead Ens who slumbered forever beneath my bed, lavished gifts and compliments on the priests so they would trust me, prayed for the people of Urim and clasped their hands so they would love me.


    My girlish dreams of motherhood, of queenship, began to fade farther and farther, though I was still troubled from time to time by the thought of a life I might have lived but was not living. The sudden whipping of wind against my robes might set my flesh prickling and burning, and if I heard some petitioner¡¯s child wail or saw some man with his arm around his wife, it could make me sullen for an afternoon or even days. Sometimes I caught myself staring a little too long at the smooth, dark bodies of the libation priests, and I would duck my head and throw myself into the litanies of Nanna until I was almost shouting. There, too, were moments, and though moments can cut like a blade at first, what makes them moments is that they pass. I would always come back to being En, to the temple, to my life and what had become of it.


    As whole years began to melt away, I realized that I no longer stumbled over the names of the junior priestesses, nor quavered when I slaughtered goats in sacrifice. I developed a genuine taste for water-snake and turtle. And though I wore my Northern braids, always, I rarely used my native language anymore, even with Zumbu, who had to ask the other servants to repeat themselves less and less frequently. Yet when she asked me for a particularly difficult word in Akkadian and I had to pause a moment before saying, ¡°Secretive, to act secretively?...ah, puzra epesu,¡± it was then that I truly knew I was becoming Sumerian, that Slow Buranuna¡¯s silty water was leeching into my bones. I was becoming like my mother, not only a woman of the Black-Headed People but an enigma, as silent and penitent as the votive statues in the temple sanctum amongst whom I walked with ever-more purposeful strides. My youthful petulance cooled, and I was not who I had been.


    In the third year since my assumption of the Enship and the fourth since I left Akkade, I decided to try something I had heard was the right and duty of the Ens but which I had never done before. I decided to write.


    Do you believe I never would have been a poetess, Inanna, were it not for those children? I was walking past the low garden wall on my way to the midday meal when I heard the peals of their laughter, saw their brown faces smiling in the sun. I had watched children playing in the Gardens before, of course, and many times after. Were it any other day I might not have stopped or even looked at them. I might have walked on, letting their silvery laughter follow me and haunt me for a day or two, but never looking, letting the moment crash and break like a wave. But I did look, that day, and I noticed two things: firstly, that there were five of them, four boys and a girl, and secondly that they were playing at a game I used to play with my brothers. The two larger boys each had another boy sitting on his shoulders and prodding him like a donkey-driver, and they were running back and forth after a goat¡¯s-bladder ball, cheering and whooping and making quite a mess of the flowerbeds in the process.


    The girl chased along with them after the ball, laughing, but she was soon quite out of breath, and when she sat down in the grass to rest she looked up at me and the look of wonder in her face split my heart in two. She pointed at my head, at my aga, and shouted at her friends to stop their roughhousing, never taking her eyes off me. The boys stopped playing abruptly, and the two who were riding the others jumped off to the ground and stared at me just as the girl was staring. They made the Southern sign of respectful greeting, of the hand at the level of the nose, and backed away until they were hidden behind a copse of berry bushes. The awed respect in the eyes of the boys I could almost tolerate--but that girl! How could she be so fearful of me, how could she look at me as though I was the Wife of a God, and nothing more? Didn¡¯t she know that she was me?


    When Ugunu saw me later that day, she could tell that I was shaken. ¡°Is something troubling you, Enship?¡± she asked gently. She was nearly as tall as Igiru and always took long strides, but she slowed her pace so that she could walk with me the rest of the way to the feasting hall.


    ¡°No,¡± I said. ¡°It is nothing.¡± I did not speak much of my true feelings, not to anyone, though I felt them churning inside me like another life.


    ¡°The next festival of the Crescent Moon is approaching, Enship,¡± said Ugunu. ¡°Baranamtarra and I have conferred and we would like to ask your Enship if you will compose a song to celebrate the occasion.¡±


    ¡°A song,¡± I repeated dully. It had never occurred to me to compose a song before, even though learning to sing them had become so large a part of my life.


    ¡°Many of the past Ens were poets as well as singers,¡± said Ugunu. ¡°And the Litany of Nanna can never be too long when the glories of Nanna are endless. Think on it and see if any inspiration strikes you.¡±


    I told Ugunu that I would consider it, and so I did. At night when I at last had time to myself, I would go to the temple sanctum as I had that night so long ago, when I asked my husband the moon to make me his greatest living servant. And I would gaze up at him, a thin sliver that cast but little light of yet, and think on his endless glories.


    It was true that the city of the moon god was prospering. There had not been a poor harvest since my Enship began, and the four corners of my father¡¯s Empire grew closer, it seemed, every day. In reviewing the temple¡¯s finances I had seen us gain access to copper and tin from the North, wine and costly cedar and boxwood from the West, stone mined in the East, fine goldwork from the other cities of the South. I was aware of both men and women of Lugal Kaku¡¯s Great Household who had taken a Northern spouse, and merchants of the Northern mountains who had set up shop here to capitalize on Urim¡¯s wealth. Some of the tribute carts brought to the temple of late were pulled by creatures like asses but larger and stronger, and I was told they were a cross between the ass and an animal from the far East that ran like the wind itself. Certainly I could talk about these things in a song to celebrate the god. Certainly I had much to thank Nanna for. Was I not adjusting well to my role as En--did not the people of Urim clamor for my touch, and did not Baranamtarra look on me with a tolerance that, if it was not approaching love, was not approaching hatred either?


    But my mind kept turning back to the wide eyes of the girl in the gardens and the pain in my belly, the knotted lump of loneliness and sorrow. There were words I had been unable to say for so long that I felt I might have to scream to be delivered of them. I carried my sorrow with me out of the temple and to bed. The next day when the sun was high, I did not let the words escape my lips as they had before, as when I cursed my father or pleaded with the open sky. I took a stylus in my right hand and a piece of clay in my left, as Ugunu had taught me, and I let my hand do the speaking and the screaming for me.


    I matched the rhythm of my words to one of the songs I knew, slapping my hand against my thighs to keep time, singing it softly aloud to myself. It took several days and many pieces of clay, but when the Festival of the Crescent Moon came, Nanna looked proudly down on his young wife as she raised her voice in a song that was, for the first time, her own.


    I have never been quite as other women were. Some women marry potters or fishermen, carpenters or princes. Some, like you, Inanna, marry shepherds. My husband was a stream of light and a pale eye in the heavens. And when he finally gave me a child, it was no earthly baby, but a song.

 Chapter 7

    In the sixth year of my Enship, when I was twenty-one years old, I received an urgent summons from a messenger who asked me to follow him at once.


    It was Igiru who delivered the summons to me, saying the messenger was waiting outside the giparu and that he seemed terribly distraught. I lay down my stylus with a bit of reluctance, for I had been composing another hymn to Nanna and did not like to be interrupted during my writing, but I knew that Igiru would not have asked me to come with her unless it was truly a serious matter. I followed her to the giparu¡¯s door, where I beheld none other than Lugal Kaku standing under the acacias. It was alarming enough that the Lugal of Urim was here, as he so rarely came to see me himself, but even more alarming was the fact that he was not surrounded by a brace of courtiers and servants, nor even any guards that I could see. He wiped his brow uncertainly, as though he had forgotten how to do it himself, and fixed me with a look of concern that unnerved me all the more.


    ¡°Greetings, friend Lugal,¡± I said. ¡°I confess I am surprised to see you. May I inquire as to the reason for your visit?¡±


    ¡°Great Enship,¡± he said gravely. ¡°If you will forgive me, is there perhaps a more private place for us to talk? The news I have come to deliver is, I am afraid, of a rather sensitive nature, though it will soon reach across the Land Between Two Rivers.¡±


    There was a small building adjacent to the giparu where I received visitors from outside the temple: merchants, tenant farmers and their agents whose gender barred them from the giparu proper. I had even met with Lugal Kaku there in the past on his rare visits to the temple. I wondered why the Lugal had come on his own to the very door of my private apartments--to show me how serious his news was? Or perhaps he was pompous enough to think I would allow him into the giparu. In any case I led him to the reception chamber and offered him a seat at one of the fine chairs, carved of imported cedarwood, taking another of them for myself. When he was seated, he gave a deep sigh.


    ¡°Oh Enship, it is with a heavy heart and the deepest sorrow that I must relate to you this news,¡± he began. I groaned inwardly. Lugal Kaku¡¯s speech was always like this, as florid and excessive as the man himself. Whenever he started speaking to me I wished I could take a knife and trim the fat from his words to get at the meaning underneath.


    ¡°Speak, friend Lugal,¡± I said.


    He dabbed at his bald head and said some more pretty words in which I caught the phrase ¡°your father¡±.


    I sat up in my chair. ¡°My father?¡± I asked. ¡°Has some ill befallen him?¡±


    ¡°Even so, Enship,¡± said Lugal Kaku. ¡°We had a letter from Akkade signed and sealed by your brother Rimush. Your father, the True King--he is dead.¡±


    There is an old song where a god uses a spell to turn away his enemy¡¯s arrows. He calls to the materials of the arrow, one by one, and disperses them with the power of his words. ¡°Shaft, go back to the tree you were carved from! Arrowhead, go back to the quarry! Twine, go back to the gut of the sheep! Feather, return to the bird!¡± And the arrow flies apart and never makes its target, ceases to even be an arrow, because it has gone back to being all the things it used to be. In that moment I wanted to dismantle Lugal Kaku¡¯s message and all that came with it just so. I wanted to speak those words before the bolt of his truth struck me, before my emotions swelled up again like rising river water, before my life was changed forever. Words, leave my ears, go back to his lips. Rage, go back to my heart. Sorrow, go back to my belly. Princess, go back to the palace, aga leave her head, robe leave her body, little girl, be a child again, and play. Then there would be no message, there would be no change. My words had a power that I cherished, but not that kind of power.


    I was not exactly sad to hear that my father was dead, but neither was I happy. He had been cruel to me, and I remembered all too well how he had sent me away without telling me his plan for me, how I had cursed him with tear-stained cheeks. I cannot say that I loved him, or that I love him now, as young women are meant to love their fathers, but in that moment I was sorry I was not with my brothers, and I was angry all over again at him for sending me away to marry the Moon and live in His temple far from Akkade. He was my father, yes, but he was also my king, the only king I had ever known, and his Empire was my world.


    At that time, my father had been King of the World for over fifty years. A lifetime for some, and for those who toil with the dust of mines in their lungs or the harsh sun boiling their backs, even longer than a lifetime. He died a man of seventy, older even than Ur-Zababa of Kish, who was so riddled with disease and infirmity that his own people mocked him as The Pissblood. But Sharru-kin had always been in my mind the great mountain of my childhood, changer and rearranger of names, the fearsome presence whose shadow was so vast and so dark it covered all the Land Between the Two Rivers. I felt that shadow on me even now.


    ¡°These past several years it has been my pleasure to watch you develop into a highly capable En who calls Urim her home,¡± Lugal Kaku said, and I listened numbly. ¡°But we are all at the mercy of the gods in the end, and no man can know what they will ask of him next. Let me assure you that I will take care of all the necessary arrangements for your trip to Akkade.¡±


    I raised my eyebrows. ¡°My trip to Akkade?¡± I repeated.


    ¡°That you may attend the funeral, to be with your family in this time of great difficulty,¡± He said. His voice was sopping with concern. ¡°I have taken the liberty of outfitting a ship for you, with every convenience befitting an En. Though all of Urim will sorely miss you and await your return most anxiously, you may at least be sure that your reunion with your family will be a smooth one.¡±


    I was speechless for a moment, partly because I was shocked at his boldness and partly because I wanted to go. I longed so badly for the place where I had spent my childhood: the painted palace and fragrant gardens, my brothers, the yard behind the shrine to Ishtar where was kept the grave of my mother. The balakhu-tree I helped plant in the gardens must be flowering and tall by now, and Ibarum and Ilaba must be young men. And Baramu, Baramu whose name I had not even thought in ages may still be there, I realized with a small jolt. But how could I possibly trust Lugal Kaku to return me to them? I remembered all too well the last time someone had forced me to get on a ship.


    If I went, it would be over a month before I returned, and by that time who knows what changes Lugal Kaku could bring about in the temple hierarchy? Already he had made a habit of sticking his nose into my business. His messengers came sniffing after my accounts like jackals, making polite inquiries after my dealings with the merchants of Unug and Bad-Tibira and Urim when he himself was never anywhere to be found, not even at my investiture as En. I had no doubt that if I left for Akkade, business deals would be struck without my knowledge, officials and priests would be suddenly moved up or down within the ranks or replaced altogether. And I might even return to find a young Sumerian girl with my aga on her head. ¡°Lugal Kaku,¡± I began, ¡°I am humbled by your generosity and consideration but--alas, I must decline your offer.¡± Sharru-kin had not asked me whether I would get on his ship or not. Neither had Lugal Kaku, for that matter, but there was a difference. Khedutum in the Great House was a girl; Kheduana in the House of the Great Light was the wife of a goddess. ¡°I cannot leave,¡± I continued firmly. ¡°My place is here, in Urim. I can mourn the True King my father just as well here as in Akkade. Besides, Dubsang my High Steward is an old, old man and cannot shoulder all my responsibilities.¡± This was something of an understatement, as poor Dubsang had been growing weaker and more forgetful by the day and was probably soon to die himself, but at this moment I did not need Lugal Kaku to know that.


    I detected in the Lugal¡¯s steady gaze the faintest trace of annoyance, and I realized that, knowing me as little as he did, he had not expected any obstinacy or protestation from me. What did he think, that I would become delirious and pliable upon the death of a father I had not seen in six years, who had sent me to the edge of the sea to live my life as a virgin bookkeeper?


    ¡°My Lady,¡± said Lugal Kaku with the greatest reverence. ¡°I would be happy to arrange for a new steward to share Dubsang¡¯s burden in your absence.¡±


    How bold! I thought. It was he who had put me here to curry favor with my father, but now that he knew he could not control me, I was useless to him and he wanted me gone. Perhaps he would have been rid of me sooner. Perhaps he had been biding his time since my arrival, waiting for my father to die so that he could nudge and prod me out of the Temple like a bleating lamb. I reflected that it was the death of his great-aunt that had brought me here in the first place. For Lugal Kaku, every new death presented an opportunity.


    ¡°You said yourself, friend Lugal, that Urim is my home,¡± I said. ¡°I will stay here, and I will see that all of Urim mourns with me the loss of their True King.¡±


    ¡°Of course,¡± said the Lugal, and I could not help but notice he had never spoken so bluntly. ¡°Know that Lugal Kaku is your true and abiding friend here in Urim, and that you have the use of my ship should you change your mind in the coming days.¡±


    ¡°If you will forgive me,¡± I said, rising from my seat. ¡°I wish to begin my mourning.¡±Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.


    ¡°We will all mourn the passing of our True King,¡± said the Lugal in echo of my own words, but there was no sorrow in his voice that I could hear. When he rose I noticed that his robes were cut from the same rich cloth as ever, and he still wore his jeweled rings and golden armbands--the finery of a Lugal, or a king, but not of a man who is in mourning. I was reminded, Inanna, of your Dumuzid, who arrayed Himself like a king when you were lost to the Underworld. The slack-mouthed gallu hordes that followed you out of the House of Dust passed over your servants, the lesser gods who had abased themselves with rags and ashes, but they fell upon vainglorious Dumuzid and chased him into the desert. I could only hope the same for Lugal Kaku of the rotting-sweet words and poisonous schemes.


    I resented the fact that it had been he who had been the first to tell me this news. I told myself that perhaps it wasn¡¯t true. Perhaps it was a lie, a scheme concocted by the Lugal? But at midday Ugunu came to call on me in the giparu, and when she held out her hands to me I knew that he had spoken the truth.


    In days, the temple complex and Urim itself was buzzing with the news that my father was dead and my brother had succeeded him. I thought of Rimush, so strong and proud and fearsome, a king at last as he had always wished to be. And I thought of Manishtushu, and how much his suffering must have increased now that Rimush was not Crown Prince of the World any longer and he himself was still a prince as before. I told myself I would write a letter to them, and that I would say a special prayer for both my brothers--for Rimush, that he might enjoy a long and peaceable rule, and to Manishtushu that he might find peace in being the brother of a king. But first I had to avoid the vainglory of Dumuzid, who disrespected you when you died, and follow instead the good example set by Sharra your hairdresser and Lulal your singer and Ninshubur your faithful steward.


    I met with my priests and drafted arrangements for a special funerary prayer accompanied by many sacrifices. Sharru-kin had been King a long time, but the memory of the priests of Nanna was longer, and there were songs and rituals in place for the death of a Lugal of Urim that we agreed would be fitting tribute. ¡°Though he lived far away from Urim, we must not treat him as though he were only the king of a foreign city,¡± I said. ¡°He was the True King, and through our piety, the people of Urim must be reminded of this.¡± I spoke more because of my suspicion of Lugal Kaku than from any affection for my father and his rule.


    Before the ceremony in my father¡¯s honor was to begin, I went to the giparu to abase myself. I would follow the ancient rituals for the family members of a dead person; one of the only pieces of my former life¡¯s teaching that served me well in Urim, for these rituals are so old as to be scarcely different in North and South. Had I still been in Akkade my whole household would have mourned, but I forbade Elamitu and Zumbu and Igiru to emulate me. Even if I desired all Urim and beyond to remember who their king had been, I could not bring anyone to do what I was about to do when I barely wished to do it myself.


    In private, I smeared cookfire ashes on my face and arms and undid the braids in my hair. I took off my aga and my earrings and bracelets and put on a plain, soiled robe which I had borrowed from one of the kitchen women. Thus attired, I took up a ritual dagger from the temple and held the blade against the edges of my nostrils and the outer corners of my eyes. I had sharpened the knife to so fine an edge that I barely felt the cuts I made. When I was done, I could feel streams of blood coming down my face, thick and hot. Some got into my eye and I allowed it to burn, blinking fiercely but fighting the urge to wipe it away. Hiking up my skirts, I made more small cuts along the sides of my buttocks.


    That is how I entered the temple to sing an ershemma for the dead man, the dead king, my father, before each god¡¯s shrine: ragged and filthy and without ornament, with my own blood drying on my face and legs, staining my robe from inside and out. The priests and priestesses of the House of the Great Light eyed me in stony-faced silence, and I wondered as I beat the drum in time to my own chanting if they remembered, as I did, another night when I stood in this same place covered in blood. It had not been my blood then but the blood of an animal, and I had not sang the songs of lamentation--I had run, and been struck by Baranamtarra. If she was thinking of that night she gave no sign, and I remembered with a sort of wincing irony that Baranamtarra couldn¡¯t strike me tonight even if she wanted to. To touch or speak to a mourner was to bring down the taint of death on oneself.


    After we made the necessary offerings, I accepted the worst portions of the meal at dinner and sat apart from everyone. For two weeks I was relieved from my duties and could have no contact with other people. Even my slaves could not attend to me in this time, and Elamitu and Zumbu and Igiru went to sleep in the servant¡¯s quarters to avoid any chance of accidentally attainting themselves. If I had been in Akkade I would have been permitted to touch and speak with my family only, but it was worth it to know that I had beat Lugal Kaku at his own game, he who had had the audacity to come to me alone and in person to break the news, as though he were some favorite uncle and I a child. I did not doubt there would be missives from my family informing me of my father¡¯s death and brother¡¯s ascension which would mysteriously turn up just as soon as my mourning was over. Yes, I could handle two weeks of being alone.


    After all, was nothing new. I was En. I stood alone under the cold light of the moon and in it found my strength. Two weeks of bleeding and dirt and silence was a small price to pay for the knowledge that no man would ever force me to disappear over the horizon on a boat, ever again.


    Just as I suspected, when the two weeks of mourning were over, when I had bathed myself at last and changed into my typical clothes and recalled my women to the giparu, there was a message waiting for me at sundown.


    ¡°Apologies, Enship,¡± the courier began. ¡°This arrived for you days ago, but we had strict orders that we were not to disturb you by delivering it until tonight, on account of you beginning your mourning.¡±


    ¡°Who is it from?¡± I asked, though I was sure I already knew.


    ¡°The Great King of North and South,¡± the messenger replied. ¡°Rimush, son of Sharru-kin.¡±


    I accepted the small box with a hand that shook more from anger than trepidation. ¡°In the future,¡± I said in careful, measured tones, for I was very close to losing my temper, ¡°When you are delivering me a message, and someone other than myself gives you a direct order, you will tell me of it before you carry it out. Is that clear?¡±


    ¡°Yes, Enship,¡± he said nervously, and scurried away into the darkness.


    I stepped beside to a wall-lamp to read in the fading light. Holding the box close to my eyes, I saw that the lump of clay across its seam had been embossed with a seal. There you stood in all your glory, with streams of life-giving water and tree branches emanating from your shoulders like wings, the horns of a divinity on your head and the braids of Akkad hanging down over your breast--Ishtar, goddess of my father¡¯s dynasty and city. Trembling, I opened the box, cracking your brittle clay body in two. I took out the tiny square tablet inside, pressed all over with triangular ridges and bumps. Softly, I read aloud the first words of the incantation that begins all letters:


    ¡°Speak, messenger, to my sister the En Kheduana, Chief Wife of the Moon at Urim. Tell her that her brother Rimush, the King of the World, says this:


    ¡®Beloved sister, our father has been claimed by the gods at last, and I have taken the throne after him. Know that we your family in Akkade have not forgotten you. I assure you that under my rule, you will enjoy my continued support in your position as En, and no force will be able to remove you. With our father¡¯s death, it is more important than ever that we be vigilant in protecting his legacy. Our king has done something unprecedented; a thing that has never been done before. Though Sharru-kin has gone to the House of Dust, that which he created must not suffer the same fate. We must hold together the many cities of the Empire that he forged, and in that you have a vital role.


    ¡®May my lady know this!¡¯¡±


    I lay the letter down with a shaking hand. Know that we your family in Akkade have not forgotten you. Yet they did not offer to come to Urim, and I knew I would have no safe passage to Akkade either. I had felt I was becoming a Sumerian, a true Black-Headed Woman of the South, but this letter was a reminder that my family was in Akkade, not here.


    We must hold together the many cities of the Empire that he forged, and in that you have a vital role. It was these last words of my brother that troubled me. What was my vital role? I had the love of the people of Urim and the god of Urim, but how was I to hold together the cities of the Empire? I remembered with a twinge how Lugal Kaku had tried to brush me off like a nuisance. What might happen to me next? I was not Sumerian, and these Sumerians knew it.


    But I am Sumerian, I thought. I am as Sumerian as Akkadian. I had one parent of each country, I speak both tongues, I have raised my voice in song to the gods of both. And the people of this city reach out their hands to me. They love me.


    They only reach out for their En, another voice in my head chided. They love their god and the office you hold, not you. Nanna might just as easily have another bride, and their reaction would be the same. This was Shumeru, the Black Land, and it was older than my father¡¯s aspirations of glory, older than Empire, older than man. Perhaps it was not any special kingly glory that marked members of my father¡¯s bloodline, only the aspiration to it. And after all, if Urim were independent as in days of old, I would no longer be its princess. Lugal Kaku¡¯s fathers had been kings since Utnapishtim¡¯s ark floated upon the waters of the Deluge, and in every other city of the great Land Between the Two Rivers, there was a man just like him; a Great Man of ancient pedigree and long, bitter memory, waiting for his chance. I remembered how bitterly Baranamtarra had called me upstart when I first arrived at the temple, how slow she had been to grant me even grudging approval. Ugunu had not approved of me either, she had just been better at hiding it. For the first time in a long while, I felt the beginnings of fear.


    Then I heard the distant blast of horns, and I felt that fear like a cold blade between my ribs.


    Close behind came a crash of breaking pottery and the sound of running feet. In the doorway I beheld Igiru, her face obscured by darkness but clearly frightened. ¡°Forgive me, Mistress,¡± she sputtered, ¡°I was startled and broke a water-jug.¡±


    ¡°No matter,¡± I said gently. Then, trying to keep the fear out of my own voice, I asked her, ¡°What is that sound?¡±


    Igiru stood as perfectly still as the heron whose name she bore. ¡°The horns of the city guard,¡± she said, her voice barely above a whisper. ¡°War has come to Urim.¡±

 Chapter 8

    In the distance we saw flames, bright pinpricks like stars fallen to earth. I remembered the story of Gugalanna the Bull of Heaven, your mighty champion with his body of stars and horns of fire, who descended to Unug from the firmament to rend Gilgamesh apart. The points of torchlight ranged along the outer wall of Urim, far from the temple but not far enough to comfort me. If I listened carefully I could hear the shouts of men, and what I fancied was the clattering of swords. War had come to Urim like a lion, stalking in the night and pouncing on ignorant prey.


    Born in an Ishtar-city to a conqueror father, my entire life had been lived in the shadow of war, the memory of war, but what did I really know of it? The god Ninurta, dealing death to the Seven Champions with his talking mace and hanging their heads from his chariot. Songs of my father¡¯s glories, parades for his triumphant return from the border countries of the Foreigner. Games my brothers played with sticks and later with real swords, training against one another for hours until they sweated and bled and cursed. But a story or a song or a game was not a real war. I had never tasted even a morsel of that bitter and poisonous dish, and now my heart was pounding as the horns sounded and the people of the temple swarmed around me, a flurry of barked commands and hurried ministrations.


    I had a thousand questions on my lips. What was happening? Who was attacking us? Why? When would they reach the House of the Great Light? But there was no one I could ask, for no one knew. Then someone asked me a question: a young priest, his bald head glistening in the torchlight, asked me, ¡°What are your orders, Enship?¡± I realized that even though I felt like a frightened maiden I was still En, and it was to me they looked for guidance.


    I turned my face towards the sky and let the light of the moon pour down on my face. It was a three-quarter moon, halfway between the crescent of my husband and the full roundness of Ningal, my sister-wife. ¡°Pray,¡± I said. ¡°Gather all the priests you can into the temple, and other men besides. Raise your voice in song to Nanna and Ningal, to the gods of Urim.¡± They have never failed me yet, I wanted to add.


    With the help of Ugunu and Baranamtarra, I herded all the women of the temple into the giparu. But there was one among them we could not find, and I spent a few panicked moments running with my robes lifted off the ground, calling ¡°Zumbu! Zumbu!¡± I found her close to the Gardens of the Moon, cowering in the arms of one of the young men who worked the bellows in the House of Metalworkers.


    ¡°It is not safe here,¡± I told them. ¡°You should come back to the giparu with me. The other women are there already.¡±


    ¡°I will not leave him,¡± she said, and I felt my stomach drop when I saw the look in her eyes. Perhaps they had come to love each other during my mourning period, when Zumbu had had to sleep in the common servants¡¯ quarters and not the giparu. If it were any other time, I might have found it charming that the blossoming of love had been the result of my ceremonies for the dead.


    ¡°Young man,¡± I said to the man who held her. I realized I sounded like an old crone when the man was probably a few years older than me. ¡°Can you protect her?¡±


    ¡°I can, Enship,¡± he said. He was terrified of me, I realized. He could not even meet my eyes. But he held on to her fiercely, and there was a dagger at his side. I wondered where he had taken it from, for he was certainly not permitted to wield one himself--most likely it had come straight off the anvils of the Metalworkers and was meant for shipment elsewhere.


    I sighed, the aga heavy on my head. ¡°I will not force you to come with me,¡± I told Zumbu. ¡°But know the danger you might be in.¡±


    ¡°I do, Mistress,¡± she said, and they clung to each other even more tightly. I allowed myself one small glimmer of envy, crushing it just as quickly as it rose.


    ¡°I must go,¡± I said. ¡°May Nanna watch over you both.¡± And with my brow furrowed in worry, I turned and left them. Again I deferred to the wisdom of the gods. My husband must be the only one who could answer any of my questions now.


    My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of many voices clamoring over one another. Stepping out into the open I beheld the doors of the great temple sanctum and a crowd that was not made up of priests. The people of Urim were coming to the temple, streaming past the gates in pairs and groups and alone.


    A small group of temple guards was trying to control the crowd, their spears pointed menacingly downwards. I ran to them. ¡°Allow these people in and remain by the gates,¡± I ordered them. ¡°But see that the gates are kept open all night, and the doors of the temple as well.¡±


    I went to the temple myself. The priests were already there, singing a song that I knew, and I realized with a manic burst of laughter that it was the song about the cattle of the moon, the song Baranamtarra had once forced me to practice again and again. My pace towards the altar was impeded by the tugging of hands at my robes. Around me the men and women and children of Urim were prostrating themselves, mingling with the giant-eyed votive figures who prayed in endless stillness before the temple shrines. I pressed on through the wailing crowd with my head high, tugged like the tides by the inexorable pull of the moon. Someone pressed a rattle into my hands, I did not see who. Raising my hands and my voice, I prayed.


    We prayed all night. That morning as the priests fetched animals for sacrifice, I received a messenger from the front who confirmed my deepest fears. Urim was in open rebellion against my brother¡¯s rule, and the army at the gates was Rimush¡¯s. Apparently while I mourned my father, Lugal Kaku had been scheming, making another opportunity from a death.


    It all became clear to me as I listened to the words of the messenger. Urim had longstanding alliances with the nearby cities of Lagash and Unug. Lagash was another pride of my father¡¯s Empire; it rivaled Urim for power and strength and was dedicated to the cult of Ningirsu-Ninurta the Warlord, Slayer of the Seven Champions. Unug, called Uruk in the North, a lesser city of Inanna¡¯s whose power had long-faded since the days when it was ruled by giant Gilgamesh, was entirely dependent on Urim. I had heard it said among the temple¡¯s administrator-priests that the Lugal of Unug was ruled by Lugal Kaku first and my father second.


    Though he was only a boy when his father ceded Urim to Sharru-kin, Kaku had nursed resentment towards the Empire all his life, and I cannot say that I was surprised to discover this, for I never heard a genuine word from the man¡¯s mouth in all the years I knew him. In secret he had made a plan for rebellion with Kikuid, the Ensi or governor-priest of Lagash, and with the Lugal of Unug. His arrogance as limitless as his pride, Kaku then sent word to my brother in Akkade that these three cities would govern their own selves as in ages past. No more tribute would be sent to Akkade, no men of Urim would march for the Akkadian cause against Martu or Elam, and the word Lugal would revert to its original meaning of King.


    But the messenger said something else that gave me a strange, bright jolt of hope: ¡°We have heard, Enship, that the King himself stands at the head of the Akkadian host. Rimush has come to put down this rebellion in person.¡± Only when I heard that my brother had come did I realize my hunger and eat. Only when I heard that the King of the World led the host outside the city walls was I able to return to the giparu, embrace Elamitu and Igiru and sleep.


    By the mercy of Nanna, the rebellion against my brother¡¯s rule did not reach the House of the Great Light after all. Most of the fighting happened outside the walls of Urim, and later, when my brother¡¯s army breached those walls, in the streets of the city itself and in the Great Household where Lugal Kaku had his court. The siege of Urim went on four nights and a single day in total. The arrival of relief forces from Lagash intensified the fighting briefly, but once the walls were breached there was little hope for Lugal Kaku¡¯s men, and little for my brother¡¯s generals to do but pile high the bodies. What I know of the fighting I learned in snatches from petitioners, priests, couriers. War had come close, and it would come closer still in my lifetime, close enough to taste, but at the time I maintained as much as I could the blissful unawareness of such things. I made sure we shared our food and water with those who had come seeking sanctuary in the temple, and only allowed the women to leave the giparu when I was certain it was safe.


    The walls of Urim are strong, and the cities of Urim and Lagash and Unug are ten days or more by water and even longer by land from Akkade. I am sure that Kaku and Kikuid felt safe, believing that Rimush was an untried boy and their own cities too far and too mighty to be brought back into the Empire. Given enough time, perhaps they would have sent soldiers to fetch me out of the temple as a hostage. Perhaps they had forgotten me, and thought my brothers would as well. I was grateful for the rigorous training Northern cities gave their soldiers, grateful that my brother had come to crack open Kaku¡¯s walls and with them his power. If I had learned anything from my tutors about my father¡¯s conquests, it was that he suffered not disloyalty. I did not doubt Rimush was the very image of Sharru-kin in this regard, and would extinguish an ancient and noble bloodline long before he would forgive a traitor. If Lugal Kaku had succeeded thus far in holding onto his head, he would not do so long, and whoever my brother appointed to be the new Lugal of Urim, it would be no blood of Kaku¡¯s.


    On the sixth day since the horns sounded, when the people in the temple had begun to drift back to their homes and life was beginning to return to normal, a courier came bearing the Akkadian royal seal of Ishtar rampant, to announce that my brother was coming to me at last. I wore the jewels of my mother along with my aga and had Igiru and Elamitu brush my hair until it shone. And I paced in the audience chamber, unable even to sit down, only standing still when my brother¡¯s guards came in and made their obeisance before me.


    ¡°Rimush, son of Sharru-kin, King of Akkade and King of Kish,¡± said the steward who had entered with them. It had been so long since I heard the full royal address that I had nearly forgotten that Shar Kishati, ¡°King of Kish¡±, was a play on words in Akkadian. It had been Sharru-kin¡¯s royal title before he built Akkade for his new capital, but Kishati was close to kishatu, giving it the double meaning ¡°King of Everything.¡± King of the World.


    The guards parted and there he was at last in his crimson robes. My brother, the King! He looked older, his beard longer and fuller, his muscles more pronounced than I remembered. But his eyes were the same, his mouth, his brow; he was still the mighty figure of bronze who stood watch over the Gardens of the Moon, the elder brother who watched over Khedu the child in the Gardens of Akkade. Dropping all pretense of formality, we embraced one another.


    ¡°Little sister,¡± he breathed. I drank in every word of his Akkadian, marvelling that my native tongue had become foreign to my ears. ¡°I was worried. We did not have word from your temple until after the siege began. If Kaku had harmed you...¡± His arm tightened protectively around the small of my back.


    ¡°I could not write you at first because of my mourning,¡± I said, with my face pressed against his breast. He was wearing perfumed oil but beneath it he smelled like any man would after two weeks¡¯ march through the desert. I did not care. ¡°Lugal Kaku did not harm me, though he kept your message from reaching me until my mourning was over. He tried to send me back to Akkade when Father died, but I refused him.¡±Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.


    Rimush drew back from me and smiled. ¡°You are your father¡¯s daughter,¡± he said. ¡°A true princess. And High Priestess besides. He would be proud to see you today.¡±


    I wanted to say that the only way I could make Sharru-kin proud was by doing exactly as he wanted, but I held my tongue.


    ¡°Manish is back in Akkade,¡± he said. ¡°When he heard that Ur had rebelled he wanted to come to war with me, for your sake, but I left him there to manage the Great Household.¡±


    ¡°I understand,¡± I said. I wondered faintly if Manishtushu would see this as another slight or an increase in his responsibilities.


    ¡°You are safe now, I swear it,¡± he said fiercely. ¡°You shall be safe so long as I am King of the World. You need not fear Lugal Kaku and his schemes any longer. I have taken the rebel lords prisoner, and many others besides. A third of the people of Ur, a third of the people of Lagash and a third of the people of Uruk.¡±


    I gaped at him. ¡°A third of the people?¡± I repeated, thinking of the petitioners who sang all night in the temple with me. It frightened me that he had said ¡°people¡± and not men. ¡°What crime have they done?¡±


    Rimush crossed his arms, which I noticed were marked here and there with scars. ¡°They rebelled against me,¡± he said, sounding suddenly like a petulant child. ¡°Their cities must pay the price, so that their children and their children¡¯s children remember it when my son and grandson have the throne. I will exact tribute from them, replace their lords with those loyal to my throne, and punish their men, women and children appropriately.¡±


    I waited for him to explain, my heart pounding a dull rhythm of dread. Then he said, ¡°We have need of stonecutters to the far west and north. It is a long journey, but I have enough loyal men pledged to my cause to escort these traitors across the desert and oversee them at their work. For as long as it may take.¡±


    I stepped backwards. ¡°Brother,¡± I said, as delicately as I could manage. ¡°This is how you would punish three traitorous governors? By displacing their people, sending them far from their families, their cities, their gods, forcing them to work? Is it just that the people should suffer for the crimes of their leaders?¡±


    In that moment I saw something in my brother¡¯s face that frightened me more than anything I could have imagined. I saw Sharru-kin. ¡°It is not my business to be just,¡± he said. ¡°It is my business to be King. I leave the judging to Shamash. Let them feel his rays burning them as they labor in the camps I have established, and think on what it means to rebel against the True King.¡±


    I thought of the children of Urim I had blessed, the cripples whose hands I had taken, the offerings laid before the altars of the gods with the greatest reverence no matter how meager. Then I imagined them being shackled and marched into the desert, never to see the marshes of Urim or the altar of Nanna again, and it was too much for me to bear. I found myself blinking back tears, and I heard my voice saying, ¡°They had kings here a long, long time before we came, brother. You must understand that if you are to rule them.¡±


    Rimush looked shocked. When he spoke again his voice was louder, harder, dangerous. ¡°Once I told you to remember you were the Princess of the World, and perhaps you need reminding, little sister. Perhaps you have been left to languish in the South for too long. You talk as though you are one of them, a Southerner. Ur is your home now, yes, but Akkade is your family. Ur betrayed you, Lugal Kaku betrayed you. What do you think he would have done to you if I had not come to save you?  Whose side are you on?¡±


    I sighed. ¡°Our side, brother,¡± I said. ¡°Always.¡±


    Rimush gave me a sidelong glance. ¡°Our father did a thing no man had done before,¡± he said. ¡°See to it that you honor and cherish his legacy as much as I.¡±


    I nodded gravely. ¡°Perhaps I, too, shall do a thing no man has done before,¡± I said. And my brother gave me a look that was very nearly pleased, though he held it a moment too long, as though searching for something in my face that he was not able to find.


    O, Inanna, why am I cursed with long memory and long life, with the power to remember the things I did not say but wished to? I should have thrown myself at my brother¡¯s feet and pleaded l¨¡ mat¨¡r, add¨¡niqa: please, no more. I should have told him that this land was never whole, has never been whole, and fifty years of calling my father True King did not make it so, did not wipe away the memories of a thousand thousand years of self-rule and self-pride. But I never said this to Rimush. Perhaps it is just as well, for would he have even listened to me if I had? Rimush was not the kind of man to seek a woman¡¯s counsel, even an En. He was the kind of man who looks at the women of his own household as something precious, a faience bowl to be carefully stored and delicately handled. The kind of man who would fight in public for the honor of his sister but who visits whores in private and does not look them in the eye. O, Inanna. I feel guilty whenever I think of the things my brother did to his people, to his Empire, to our world, but I feel guiltier still when I think of how I loved him.


    The only men I ever loved, the only men I ever allowed myself to love, were my twin brothers. I want to say I love Ibarum and Ilaba¡¯ish-takal, just as I want to say I love my father, but in truth I barely know them, they were only children the last time I saw them. Over the years I gleaned from Rimush and Manishtushu that Ibarum became a priest in Nippur under the name of Shu-Enlil, and Ilaba married some Lugal¡¯s daughter and settled with her far from Akkade, on the estate of some rebel lord my brother had displaced. I wish them the joy I was named for, but I do not know them enough to love them. And I know I do not love them because I can find no fault in them. When I think of them they are blameless, smiling entities, bright eyes below tousled curls, a rill of mirthful Akkadian like thunderheads moving across the sky. No sin, no crimes, no cruelty to be found, and that is how I know they are not human beings but my own hollow imaginings, empty chaff blowing in the wind.


    I loved Rimush, who watched over me from afar, and I loved Manishtushu, who could not overcome the sorrow of being who he was, but they were monsters and fools and tyrants. I will admit I do not know much of the ways of men, but it seems to me that so are they all.


    If I could not spare the people of Urim from Rimush¡¯s wrath, I at least succeeded in sparing the people of the temple complex, under the pretext that as En I could not afford to lose them. In the end Rimush settled for common herders and fishermen unaffiliated with the temple to march into the desert while he and his generals returned to Akkade, and I cursed the limitations of my power.


    Gradually the priestesses and priests returned to their normal schedule of prayer and sacrifice. Zumbu reappeared in the giparu. I did not ask her where her young man was, nor did she mention him to me. But I noticed that she seemed quieter than she had been before the rebellion, and there were nights when she slipped away from the giparu while I lay awake in the darkness, pretending not to hear. I thought of the songs of Inanna and Dumuzid¡¯s love affair, and smiled to myself that there was someone in the temple who was happy in spite of all that had happened.


    I received goodwill offerings of iab-butter and oil from Meshnannepada, a high-ranking merchant whom my brother had appointed the new Lugal of Urim. When he came to greet me I had to fight to keep from laughing at the irony of his name, because Mesh Nanne pada is Emengir for ¡°Young One Chosen by Nanna,¡± and this upjumped merchant lord was anything but. Still, my brother could have done far worse; he could have, for instance, made an Akkadian Lugal, and I did not think Urim¡¯s people would suffer both an En and a Great Man of Northern blood.


    Urim had been prosperous before my brother¡¯s army came. Now its walls were in ruins and some of its greatest estates had been burned, or else given over to Akkadian retainers. There were fewer goats to sacrifice and our evening porridge was made from emmer, the rough grain that is raised to feed livestock. I sent as many workmen as could be spared from the workshops to assist in the repairs of the city walls, which was not many, but I saw to it that they carried the crescent standard of the horned moon, so that any passers-by would know it was me who had sent them. I found myself communicating not with the same familiar merchants and landowners but with Northerners, or else the cousins or sons or wives of the men I had once known. Some messengers and couriers I knew began to appear more frequently, picking up the work of two or three, while other familiar faces I did not see any longer, and still others were new faces who barely spoke a word of Sumerian, forcing me to conduct business for the first time in my native tongue. It was become a different Urim, a strange mix of my past and present and of a future as yet unknowable. The thought of my brother¡¯s vicious punishment for the subjects of the rebel lords still throbbed in me like a gadfly¡¯s sting, and worst of all I could not help but think that in trying to protect me, to ¡°save¡± me, as he put it, Rimush had made things harder for me. Did he truly believe that in breaking down the walls of Urim and sending its sons and daughters into the waste, he would make the people of Urim more loyal to their King? I feared the resentment that might be brewing in the streets of Urim for the Empire, and what might happen when they remembered that the En was the king¡¯s sister, the conqueror¡¯s daughter. When petitioners came to the temple to pray for their kin who had died outside the walls or been sent to my brother¡¯s camps, I made sure they had food and water and that I was seen offering libations and making sacrifices myself. I organized a vigil for the dead, inviting anyone who wished to attend, and hoped it was enough, though I knew it could never be.


    What more could I do, Inanna? I did these things from a combination of guilt and sympathy and fear for my own self, a fear which beget even more guilt over the things my brother had done. Rimush believed I had a role to play in keeping the Empire intact, in protecting the legacy of our father, but he did not seem to know what it was. Did I? As I slaughtered white cattle in the moonlight, laid hands on men who had lost limbs or eyes in the rebellion, chanted in time with the throbbing drums of the temple sanctum, I began to think on how I could make Urim a city of the Empire and not a city that stood alone. I must keep my word, and do a thing that had never been done before.


    My god¡¯s strength completes my strength. I remembered how Baranamtarra had softened when she saw me paying homage to the old En Galusakar; how the people of Urim had stared and muttered at me when I was a Northern princess but cheered and held out their hands when I was En. My father and brother knew only one way of ruling a people: fear. But being En had shown me that there were other ways, that a people¡¯s love, a people¡¯s unity, was in their god. If I was to keep the Empire together I must show that I knew what Rimush did not. As the Ishtar-fountains in my father¡¯s gardens poured endless water onto a land of endless dryness, so I must pour out love onto a land that was thirsting for it.


    It was several weeks after the departure of my brother from Urim that I sent for one of the scribes of the men¡¯s Tablet House, a young man named Sagadu. I asked him to go at once to the overseer priests, to Ugunu and Baranamtarra, to Lulakhtanakh and Ningtuku, to my poor old doddering Dubsang, the most learned men and women of the temple complex. ¡°Ask them to name all the cities of the South, and the patron gods of those cities. List the names on clay and bring this list back to me.¡± Then I sent for a messenger and asked him to go to the nearby temples of Lagash and Unug and to ask the high priests there the same. ¡°And remember me to the menwomen of Inanna¡¯s temple at Unug,¡± I said. ¡°Ask them to send word of Inanna¡¯s exploits, her traits, her powers.¡±


    And when these two men had gone, I sat down turning a stylus in my fingers and wracked my brain for the great cities and gods of the North. There was Akkade, of course, which belonged to Ishtar who loved my father. Eshnunna, gateway to the East, whose god Tishpak the Thunderer was brought by the Hurrians. Borsippa had Nabu, and Sippar was dedicated to Shamash, the Lord of the Sun, whom I had called only Utu for so long now I barely remembered his other name. But remember I must.


    For each city I must find a man who had been there, who could describe its temple and god to me. And once I had, for each city I would write a hymn, as I had written to Nanna, in both Akkadian and Sumerian. How long it would take me, I did not know; I knew only that when my words had been written I would teach my priests and priestesses to sing them; I would send them across the Land Between the Two Rivers so that they could be sung in every city besides, and make it known that Rimush their king and En Kheduana, High Priestess and Chief Wife of the Moon at Urim, had decreed it so. Because no city stood alone in the Empire. Because my father and my brother only knew one way of keeping men together and it was not enough, had not been enough, or else they would not have rebelled as soon as my father died. Through my writing, I would not only embroider the Litany of Nanna as Baranamtarra had suggested. I would write the Litany of the Empire, the Litany of the World.

 Chapter 9

    The North is a land of many gods, as well you know, Inanna. But in the South there are as many gods as frogs, as many gods as reeds rising from the riverbanks. In my correspondence with the priests of other cities and my exploration of the temple¡¯s own archives, I learned of gods that I had never heard of before: Muati and Enten and Gunara, Kabta and Kulla the gods of bricklayers, Utta the Spider Woman, goddess of weaving. Not every one of them had a city of their own, but even the least of them had prayers and favored offerings, a shrine in some sheltered corner, a person who owed them their life.


    I worked at this new undertaking in collaboration with the scribes of the Tablet House. Sagadu had the blessings of Nisaba, goddess of writing; he was bright and quick and rarely made errors, and after a time I appointed him my personal scribe. The task of writing songs to the gods of the North was my own, for no one knew them as well as I, but Sagadu was a vital help in the work of dedicating songs to all the most holy shrines of the South.


    To Old Grandfather Enki of most ancient Eridu, I dedicated a song.


    To Great Enlil, Lord Wind, god of Nibru, whose House there had once worn the head of my mother¡¯s first husband, I dedicated a song.


    To Ninlil, Lady Wind and Great Mother of the Grain, of Shuruppak the Healing Place, I dedicated a song.


    To their daughter Nanshe, the Wind Upon the Waves, goddess of the port city of Sirara, I dedicated a song.


    To Ningishzida of Gishbanda, who rose from the dead, and to Ningirsu-Ninurta of Lagash, the mighty warrior with the heads of the Seven Champions adorning his chariot, I dedicated songs.


    To the temples of Nisaba of the Stylus at Eresh and of Nin Khursang the Wild Cow at Kesh, I dedicated songs.


    To you, Holy Inanna, who has more cities than any other god in the South, to your shrine at Bad-Tibira which you share with Dumuzid your husband, at canal-watered Unug which you share with An your father, at Adab, at Kish, at Zabala and Umma, I dedicated songs.


    I was not content to write a song for one god who was not my temple¡¯s own. Once I began the quest I had set for myself, once Nanna opened my ears and allowed me to do so, it was as though I could not stop. Over the course of my long life, I have written 42 hymns to as many gods and cities of North and South. Each writing was a new task taken up, with its own challenges and peculiarities, yet none gave me so much difficulty as the hymns I wrote to you, to Inanna; including the very last I have written, that one which is different from all the rest.


    As Sagadu and I scoured the temple library we were dizzied by your titles. I saw you called Lioness and Warlike and Dragon, which put me in mind of my father¡¯s Ishtar-backed victories, but other, more inscrutable sources called you Honey-Tongued, Sweet-Mouthed and Heavenly Mother. How could there exist such contradiction, and how could it exist with the most powerful and widely-worshipped goddess of the South, the one of whom it was said ¡°all the South is Inanna¡¯s country¡±? I could not risk getting your character wrong or misrepresenting you in my songs. Your worshippers would never open their hearts to the words unless they recognized you in them. I did not know you yet, my lady. Not truly. I did not know that Inanna is within, the goddess of the unquiet heart, and the South is the heart¡¯s country. But I sought you in tablets and the stories of priests, in songs and in the other temples with whom I began an earnest correspondence, that I might learn as much as I could to better praise them.


    It was not easy. The responses I received from other High Priests and Priestesses ranged from flattered to amused to incredulous. A letter from the High Priest of Ningishzida at Gishbanda was brutally short: ¡°Ask the En Kheduana, Chief Wife of the Moon at Urim, why?¡± Many did not write back at all. But the High Priest of Ninurta at Lagash wrote down the Seven Songs of the Seven Champions for me, and the Chief Wife of Enki replied with a detailed description of her divine husband¡¯s temple, and the galas of Unug sent an envoy to treat with me in person.


    When I went to the reception chamber with Sagadu at my side, his clay and stylus ready, I had hoped that I might see a familiar face. The temple of Inanna and An at Unug was the home temple of the band who had sat with me in the Gardens of the Moon and blessed me on my wedding day. But I had not expected that my visitor would be a certain tall and slender galaturra whom I recognized at once.


    ¡°Garashang,¡± I said, smiling and rising to my feet.


    ¡°Sister,¡± said the manwoman, and embraced me. I could not help but think of Rimush, the last person who had called me sister, though his voice had carried a different tone. ¡°We hope that you are recovering since the rebellion was put down.¡±


    ¡°Business is returning and the walls are nearly rebuilt,¡± I said. ¡°But Urim is not as it once was.¡±


    ¡°Nor Unug,¡± said Garashang. She flicked her wrist dismissively, making the bangles on her brown wrist jingle softly. ¡°A third of our men were marched off to the desert to die and a third were made into eunuchs. You can imagine what this has done for our business! Inanna¡¯s coffers are running at a record low. We eat emmer porridge and share one pot of lipstick between us.¡±


    I frowned. ¡°I will see if I can put together an offering for you. There must be something I can give--¡±


    ¡°You will do nothing of the sort,¡± said Garashang, cutting me off. ¡°Inanna crawled to the netherworld and back. Her temple will survive a minor rebellion, and her priest-priestesses will survive a little hunger. We always have before. Now then. You wanted someone to tell you about Inanna and Her nature? Why do you not simply come yourself to the House of Heaven at Unug? It is not a far journey, and you know we have invited you before.¡±


    My cheeks flushed under Garashang¡¯s unremitting gaze. ¡°I wish that I could,¡± I said. ¡°But there is so much to be done here...each year brings with it new challenges, new work. I am always needed, year after year. I fear for what the temple might become if I were not here.¡±


    ¡°You don¡¯t know how not to work,¡± said Garashang. I blinked, surprised and a little unsure of her meaning. ¡°You were brought up to be one thing, and one thing only. Then you were told you had to be a new thing, so you have thrown yourself into that with every fiber of your being. You are a wonderful En, that much cannot be denied. But you are still a princess, and still a young woman, and I know that you still remember how to laugh and how to dance.¡±


    I was stunned. ¡°You speak with great wisdom,¡± I said.


    ¡°Eresh-gunu told you that like calls to like,¡± said Garashang with a crooked smile. ¡°If my words sound wise, it is only because I know what it is like to be two things. As does Inanna. ¡®I am a woman, and I am a noble young man¡¯, she says in an old song, a song I might have sung myself. In the North she is Ishtar, the raging lioness who fans the battlefield with flame. Here in the South she is Inanna, the playful maiden who teases and chases her lover. When she gets her way, she is sweet, so wonderfully sweet, but when her wrath is roused it is terrible to behold. The virgin and the harlot, the mother and the maiden, the bride and the groom and everything in between. If you are going to write a hymn to Inanna, you will have to understand this first and foremost. Now, have you ever heard the story of Inanna and the Divine Powers?¡±


    ¡°I have not,¡± I said, marvelling that there were still so many Southern stories I did not know. I beckoned Sagadu forward and asked him to take down what Garashang said.


    As we listened, enraptured, Garashang spun a wondrous tale of Inanna and old Father Enki, how she got him drunk and swindled him out of the me, the markers of civilized man. At the mention of Enki¡¯s drooping jowls and white head I thought wistfully of old Dubsang who had been my High Steward. The Queen of the Great Below had claimed him at last some two months before my audience with Garashang, and his replacement, a dour fellow named Adda, inspired in me none of the same affection.


    ¡°Then there is another tale,¡± said Garashang at last, ¡°That tells a different story. And what you must understand about Inanna is that there is always a different story. There is always another version of events, and if you are wondering which is true, the answer is: both. Now, in the early days of Creation, when the world was young, old Grandfather Enki gave each god his due. He gave the sun and justice to Utu, the moon and comfort to Nanna, and he passed out the numberless me: inventions and offices, behaviors and ways of being, all the things that make the Black-Headed People civilized, setting us apart from the wild Lullubi clans or the towheaded Guti. But Grandfather Enki was old even then, and senile. He forgot his little granddaughter Inanna! And after all was done she came to him complaining, saying, ¡®Give me something to do, give me power!¡¯


    ¡®And Father Enki said to Inanna, ¡®The whole world is already made. The only thing I can give you now is the power to unmake. You shall have the power to straighten what is tangled and tangle what is straight, to make a poor man rich and a rich man poor, to turn a man into a woman, and a woman into a man. It only takes a moment for a life to change, so you shall be the goddess of change, the goddess of the moment.¡¯¡± Garashang paused, smiling at me. ¡°So you see,¡± she continued, ¡°Both stories are quite true. Inanna holds all the Divine Powers herself, and she also holds nothing but the power to undo what the other gods have already done. Because that is where true power lies: not in titles or property or blood or wealth, but in change. You can measure the power of a god, or a man--or a woman--by what they can change. By what they do that has never been done before.¡±


    I smiled too, understanding. ¡°That would make me very powerful indeed,¡± I said, laughing. ¡°Though it would seem from the tepid responses I¡¯ve been getting from other cities that not everyone agrees with you.¡±


    Garashang shrugged. ¡°Not everyone understands the cult of Inanna, and even those who worship her do so in their different ways. But we menwomen of Unug know what you are trying to do. And you will always have our support, that much we promise you.¡±


    I have mentioned the time I first felt your presence Inanna, and many other times after. But I think that was the day when I first understood that what I had been feeling all those years was you. That was the day I found Inanna in myself, and after that any poem I tried to write flowed forth like water from a fountain.


    The whole temple was soon abuzz with word of my peculiar literary efforts. Every priest and priestess had their opinion, and though I was aware of the whispers and rumors, none of them dared to confront me directly. None except Baranamtarra.


    ¡°Enship, why do you not expend as much energy on the Litany of Nanna as you do the Litanies of these other gods?¡± she asked me one day after the evening¡¯s prayer, when I had said I was hurrying back to the giparu to finish a particularly striking stanza. ¡°Why waste your time and your talents on writing about the gods of every other city?¡±


    I shrugged. ¡°Because the South is one land, and I wish the Black-Headed People to see it as such. Many of the people of Urim have never been beyond their city walls. With these songs I hope to cast their gaze upwards and outwards, over the walls and across the Land Between Two Rivers.¡±


    Baranamtarra scowled. ¡°Yet you are writing songs for the Northern gods as well.¡±


    ¡°North and South must learn to see themselves in one another,¡± I said. ¡°The people of Urim are every bit as worthy as the people of Akkade. Just so, when night falls Nanna lights up his beloved Urim no more or less brightly than Sin lights up his city of Kharranu.¡±If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    Beside her, Ugunu beamed and said, ¡°It is truly a thing no man has done before!¡±


    ¡°Hardly surprising, when one considers her family,¡± said Baranamtarra pointedly as I turned back towards the giparu.


    As my work began to consume me, I began to spend less time in the giparu unless I was sleeping or waking, during the day preferring to write at the Tablet House where Sagadu could attend me. I became inured to the comings and goings of my own slaves, so engrossed and engulfed was I by the monumental task I had set before myself.


    Until the night Zumbu woke me with tears in her eyes.


    ¡°Mistress,¡± she said gently, shaking my shoulder. I blinked and rubbed the sleep from my own eyes, confused. Zumbu had never done so bold a thing as to wake me in the middle of the night. ¡°What is it?¡± I asked her. She was holding an oil lamp under her chin, and in the ghostly light I saw her eyes shining and red.


    ¡°Oh, Mistress,¡± she said, and fell into a fresh wave of weeping. It was so unlike her to weep freely that I was immediately alarmed.


    I rose from the bed and placed my arm around her shoulders. ¡°What is wrong?¡± I asked. ¡°What has happened?¡±


    ¡°It is many-colored,¡± she said. For a moment, still half-asleep, I could not figure out what she was talking about. Then she said, ¡°He waits for me now, outside the giparu.¡± And I realized that the Sumerian word she had used for ¡°many-colored¡±--shuba--was a man¡¯s name. The name of her young lover.


    There are moments when I know, truly, why the Black-Headed People like to laugh at the gods: because they like to laugh at us.


    I was awake then. ¡°You will leave with him,¡± I said, not sure if I was asking her a question.


    She nodded. ¡°He wants to marry me but he cannot afford to buy me from you. So he told me we would leave tonight. He told me not to tell anyone. But I did not want to leave without saying farewell.¡±


    ¡°Where will you go?¡± I asked.


    ¡°He worked his father¡¯s farm before he was apprenticed to the Metalworkers,¡± she said. ¡°Rimush sent his father and brothers to the camps, so now it is only his old widowed mother there, and she can barely manage by herself. On his last visit she begged him to return. He would have gone anyway for the sake of his mother, but he has asked me to go with him.¡±


    ¡°You love him,¡± I said.


    She nodded. ¡°I do,¡± she said, with some hesitancy. Then, ¡°And--there is more.¡± She glanced down at her belly and I knew what she meant.


    ¡°He will have to marry you, and soon,¡± I said.


    ¡°We cannot be married unless I am free,¡± said Zumbu, a bit of her old defiance creeping into her voice. ¡°In the country, no one will know. We will tell everyone we are man and wife, and the child will inherit his grandfather¡¯s land.¡±


    ¡°You have served me well for years now,¡± I said, rising to my feet. ¡°Would you do one more thing for me?¡±


    ¡°Anything, Mistress,¡± she said. And I asked her to fetch me my robe and my aga.


    Outside the giparu, Shuba was waiting beneath the stars, just as she had said he would be. When he saw me he threw himself on the ground, but I bid him rise at once.


    ¡°I understand that you wish to marry this woman,¡± I said.


    Not lifting his eyes from the ground, he stammered, ¡°Yes, Enship. But forgive me, if I--¡±


    I held up a hand to silence him. Then I turned to Zumbu. ¡°I should have offered your freedom to you long ago,¡± I said. ¡°I was foolish not to, and I hope that you will forgive me. Have you any of the money saved that I gave you?¡±


    ¡°I have,¡± she said. She produced a single silver shekel from a pocket in her dress.


    Taking the coin from her, I said, ¡°Then you have bought your freedom from me, for I have decided to sell you at a fraction of what you are worth. Once you were given to me as a wedding gift. Now, here is my wedding gift to you.¡± And I handed it back to her. Speechless, she turned to Shuba, who had forgotten to be awestruck and was grinning at me in the moonlight.


    ¡°Come, quickly,¡± I said. ¡°Before the priests and guards awaken. They will think there is another rebellion on or somesuch nonsense. Follow me to the Temple of Nanna.¡±


    I knew the words to perform a wedding before Nanna well enough, having witnessed many in the very same spot, beginning with my own. The chrism I poured on their heads at the end was not the bridal perfume but a pot of libation oil, since I did not have time to fetch anything better, but they did not seem to mind.


    ¡°Give my farewells to Elamitu and Igiru,¡± she said. ¡°They knew that this day was coming, but it pains me not to see them before I go.¡±


    ¡°I will,¡± I said. With tightness in my voice, I said, ¡°Take care of each other. I wish you both the joy that I was named for.¡± But they did not know what I meant.


    She turned back to look at me once as they passed under the temple gate. That was the last time I ever saw her, she who had been mine once, who had been my wedding present. Zumbu, the Mosquito, and the Many-Colored. A fine, strange pair they made, and I meant what I had said that I wished them only joy, though I felt a pain in my chest as I watched them go, though I lay down in my bed that night and thought of my own life and where it had led, and dreamed of many colors streaming and a baby at my breast. And though it brought me pain then and brings me pain now, I hope that I remember the look on Zumbu¡¯s face on the night of her wedding for the rest of my life.


    After the departure of Zumbu I did not write for a time. Igiru, who was becoming more stooped than any heron should as time wore on, told me that I was to be commended for my compassion. I had every right to do with a slave who had confessed intent to run away as I wished. I could have had her thrown in the river to be judged by Buranuna¡¯s waters, or beaten with sticks and dragged through the temple, or any number of other options that, I reflected, would probably have been the first recourse of Rimush. Hearing this I offered Igiru and Elamitu their freedom on the spot, but both of them smiled and politely declined, which made me feel even worse.


    Baranamtarra, her delight at my having one less personal servant transparent, appointed a new one to me from the temple¡¯s own stock in collaboration with Adda my High Steward. Ilum Palilis was her name, the daughter of a temple servant woman trained in arrayment. Hair was her mother¡¯s specialty and supposedly hers, though she seemed untried and skittish and the first time she took hold of my hair she handled it as though it were a nest of asps. I would not let her touch my head at all until she learned from Elamitu the braided style of Akkade, for I still would wear my hair no other way.


    It was Sagadu who jolted me out of this despondency and returned me to my writing, and all he did was step outside to receive a letter that had just been brought to the library as we were going over the harvest records from the previous year. I rubbed my temples and asked if he might read it to me, for my eyes were tired from poring over the tiny markings, and Sagadu obliged.


    ¡°Speak, messenger, to my sister the En Kheduana, Chief Wife of the Moon at Urim. Tell her that her brother Rimush, the King of the World, says this:


    ¡®I had the pleasure of attending a festival at which your song for Ishtar of Akkade and the House of Ever was premiered. You write with great passion and our father would be pleased to hear the lengths to which you are going to unite the people of his Empire towards a common cause. Your ingenuity is to be commended. Yet I notice you insist on stamping your own name at the end of these songs, along with the words ¡®my King, a thing has been done which has never been done before¡¯. Though ostensibly a supplication to me, I cannot help but be reminded of the inscriptions that kings place on the great statues and stelae they commission. Do you feel that this is appropriate, little sister, for the singers to call out your name as they come to the end of their melody? I cannot agree that the name of an En, however unique her writings, deserves to be memorialized so. High though your station may be, humility is more becoming of a woman, lest our enemies begin to think that it is your legacy, and not Sharru-kin¡¯s, that you seek to perpetuate.


    ¡®May my Lady know this!¡±


    I sighed. ¡°Always he speaks of my father,¡± I said aloud, more to myself than to Sagadu. I rubbed my temples even harder.


    ¡°My own brother is the same way,¡± said Sagadu wryly. Then his eyes grew wide as he realized how familiar he had become. ¡°Enship!¡± He stammered and placed his hand at the level of his nose. ¡°Forgive me, I did not mean--I do not wish to--¡±


    I smiled. ¡°It is alright, Sagadu,¡± I said. ¡°You need not be so formal around me. You sat with me while Garashang spun her yarns about Inanna, you searched the temple¡¯s archives for old songs and helped me write the hymns to Nanshe and Ninurta. We have shared stories of the gods aplenty; why not share our own stories?¡± And I told him a little of my brother; how stiff and unyielding he was, how he had always watched over me and sought to emulate our father in everything. It felt wonderfully strange to speak of such things aloud--and not just aloud, but to a man. I had not had anything resembling a friend since the foolish, giggling girls of Akkade.


    In return, Sagadu told me of his own father, who had been a scribe. ¡°Every man in my family has been either a scribe or a priest--and as you know, all priests must begin as scribes--as far back as the days of Gilgamesh. My father died when I was very small, but all my life my brothers have been impressing on me his legacy, making sure I did nothing to besmirch his name. Since I completed my training and became a scribe at the Tablet House, it has been even worse, for one of my elder brothers now serves the temple of Urim as head of the libation-priests.¡±


    ¡°Not--your brother is Ningtuku?¡± I asked incredulously.


    ¡°The very same,¡± said Sagadu. ¡°And every chance he gets he berates me to be careful. He is...concerned about my being appointed your Chief Scribe.¡±


    ¡°Why should he be concerned?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Because he doubts my abilities,¡± said Sagadu, a little bitterly. ¡°He is passionately worried that I will make some error that will grievously upset you, and believes this will somehow bring down an unending curse of shame for ten generations on our family.¡± He laughed.


    ¡°You have been an excellent scribe to me thus far,¡± I said. ¡°And I am pleased that you told me these things.¡±


    Sagadu suddenly could not meet my eyes. ¡°Thank you, Enship,¡± he said.


    I was silent for a time. Then I asked him, ¡°Sagadu...what do you think of my songs? My writing them to the gods of other cities, I mean?¡±


    ¡°What do you mean, Enship?¡± he asked.


    ¡°I mean, do you think it is a wasted effort? That it will not bring about any change in the Empire, nor get the people of the Land Between Two Rivers to see themselves in one another?¡±


    ¡°Not at all,¡± said Sagadu. ¡°It has already brought about a change. You have managed to rouse the ire of a King, and that is no small feat.¡±


    I smiled and picked up the harvest records to begin again.


    Only then did my spirit quell enough for me to return to my writing. And it was well that I did, if my aim was to help preserve and unite the Empire. Rimush¡¯s reign was marked by trouble from the start. No sooner had the rebellion of Urim and Lagash been quashed than my brother faced additional rebellions. There were other Southern cities that saw the death of Sharru-kin as an opportunity to throw off the Northern yoke. Even some of the Northern cities sought their independence from the Empire, such as troublesome Kazallu, already destroyed and rebuilt once in my father¡¯s reign.


    In putting down these rebellions, Rimush, the Foremost, would have made our father proud. He suffered no insult and showed no mercy. If a city announced that they would give no more tribute to Akkade nor swear fealty to an Akkadian overlord, they would find an Akkadian army at their walls within a fortnight. Rebel leaders were paraded in stocks; their lands were divided amongst loyal retainers of the Great Household at Akkade, their heirs made eunuchs and their womenfolk given to the soldiers. Men were taken from their own cities and gods and families and marched across the desert to cut stone until they died. Sharru-kin ruled the world through fear, and Rimush was quick to show it that the son was made in the image of the father.


    My brother was a King of the World in every sense. His resolve was like a lion¡¯s, his will of diorite, and his wrath as terrible as Ishtar¡¯s. But for all that, his reign was not long. He sallied forth on campaign after campaign to crush those cities that rebelled against him, yet all along the Queen of the Great Below was waiting for him with claws outstretched. But Rimush¡¯s death was not to be found on the battlefield or behind the barricades of Umma or Adab or Zabalam. She was at home in Akkade, closer than he could have dreamed, and when she found him she did what no traitorous Lugal or Ensi had ever succeeded in doing: she took him by surprise.


    I was not there. I had no knowledge that would have helped my brother. I only broke the seal on the letter that delivered the news, and I must tell you truthfully, Inanna, how I wept when I read it, how my voice cracked so that I could no longer read the words aloud. I had said that I was done with tears, and while it is true I never again cried for myself, I could not help but cry for him, though I was not certain whether I cried for Rimush my brother or Rimush my king. If I were not so weary today and my eyes so dry I might weep for other kings as well, for the whole lot of them, wretched as they are. How pitiful their greed, how hideous their cruelty, how transient their glory.


    Later it was written in the official account of his reign that ¡°seals and sealed letters¡± killed my brother Rimush. Beginning with my father, our dynasty has developed a custom of creating polite circumlocutions for ugly truths (I might also mention how the historians detail extensively Rimush¡¯s victories over rebel cities, yet leave out mention of those cities he was unable to bring back into the Empire, and those cities where resentment still festered like a sore no matter how many of their sons he castrated or flayed or sent to the camps to die a desert death). The song of Sharru-kin my father talks of secret love-pacts and clever hoodwinks when it means betrayal, usurpation and rape.  Likewise, that ¡°seals and sealed letters¡± killed Rimush means secret alliances struck among courtiers of the Great Household of Akkade, hushed meetings and plans laid. It means the shocked and strangled cry of a king, and a dagger in the dark.


    Eight years did Rimush sit on the throne of Akkade, the throne of our father, the throne of the King of the World. And when he died, leaving no son, the One Who Goes In Front was succeeded by the One Who Goes With Him, who had been with him all these many years. Waiting.


    And I with ashes on my hands and blood drying on my face became the sister of a second king.

 Chapter 10

    I called for guards to be posted double at the gates of the temple as soon as I received word of one brother¡¯s death and the other¡¯s ascension, before I even began my mourning. My heart lurched in fear, remembering the distant fires that had accompanied my father¡¯s death, and the terrible price Rimush had taken from Urim. But the people of Urim did not rise up again. There were no fires in the dark, no horns of alarm disturbing my sleep. Manishtushu, I quickly discovered, was a more popular king than my brother. No doubt it was because of the reputation he had been able to cultivate during Rimush¡¯s reign. Though he and Rimush looked alike down to their every hair, the people of Urim and the cities beyond knew which brother had sent their sons to die hauling stone in the desert and which brother had not.


    When Rimush marched into city after city to put down rebellions, it was Manishtushu he left behind to oversee the Empire, and he had done so shrewdly. If Rimush insisted on forcing his rebellious subjects to work, Manishtushu decreed that some of these teams of men would help rebuild cities that had been damaged in war. And it was Manishtushu who turned Rimush¡¯s eyes and sword eastwards towards the underprotected Elamite kingdom of Barakhshe, a military venture which proved so profitable for the Empire that Rimush¡¯s appellations began to include ¡°Lord Over Elam¡±. Whether this was all Manishtushu¡¯s doing or whether he was prodded and coached by a team of clever advisers, I cannot say. I have a much easier time imagining my second brother spearing ostriches and betting on bullfights and winking at young ladies than I do imagining him going over accounts and settling trade disputes. But whatever the source of his wise decisions, they served him well, for he faced neither dissent nor uprising when he took the throne upon the death of his twin.


    It is a sorrowful thing to bury a brother, even a brother such as mine. In the early days I was despondent. I sang numbly and without feeling, spoke little and wrote even less than I had after Zumbu¡¯s departure. What did not make it any better was that Manishtushu himself was eerily silent on the matter. How I would have welcomed some affection from my surviving elder brother! How I longed to hear his laugh and feel the warmth of his arms again, to trade stories of the gods with him on the deck of the ship bound for Urim. But his only missive to me was cold and full of duty; strikingly similar, in fact, to the one Rimush sent after our father died. You will be protected. All shall be well. Honor our legacy. Hollow platitudes, words carved in clay and spoken with a lead tongue.


    That he of all people should admonish me to safeguard our family¡¯s legacy is laughable, Inanna, perhaps the richest absurdity I have faced in all my long life, a greater farce than your sister tricking you into removing your clothes, or Dumuzid diddling his own sister in the sheepfold. Even if one reads the official accounts of my brother¡¯s reign--even if one does not know the truth, as I do--it is plain that Manishtushu cared more for Manishtushu than for Akkade or the Empire or his family. The song of Manishtushu does not even mention the reign of Rimush. In the typical swaggering fashion of a king, he instead describes ¡°all the lands which my father Sharru-kin left to me,¡± as if the whole world had sneezed or rubbed grit from their eyes only to find that eight years had passed between the True King¡¯s death and his True Son¡¯s ascension.


    And the new king¡¯s name, Who Is With Him, now suddenly bereft of its former meaning in the absence of a twin brother, began increasingly to be interpreted in a different way. Now in the royal seals and inscriptions of my brother his name was not parsed ¡°Who Is With Him,¡± a simple descriptor of a second-born twin, but ¡°Who Is With Him?,¡± a defiant rhetorical question suggesting the primacy of Manishtushu over all other men. Manish, it appeared, has inherited our father¡¯s talent for erasing and changing names. Once defined even in name by his brother, the newly crowned Manishtushu proudly proclaimed that no man deserved to stand with him. Perhaps no man did, now that Rimush had gone to the Palace of Dust. But all this was only a sampling of what was to come, for it was in the second year of Manishtushu¡¯s reign that I finally saw him as a king.


    I received the message announcing his visit with joy, marvelling how the Empire had grown quiet enough for the king to pay a visit to his sister, rather than march to liberate her in time of war. Just as when Rimush had seen me, I agreed to meet in the En¡¯s audience chamber, and I wore all my finery so that my brother would see. Ilum Palilis, crouching delicately, offered me a burnished copper mirror towards the end of her ministrations, and I had to smile and pretend I was pleased when in truth I was dismayed by something the girl had no control over: how old I looked. My earlobes had begun to droop from the weight of gold. There were lines on my brow and near my eyes that I did not remember, and my skin, though it glistened with perfumed oil, was not quite so smooth as it once had been. With my tongue I poked the hole in the hollow of my cheek where a tooth had been. I was now thirty years old, a grown woman who would no doubt be a mother several times over if I had led a different life. Would Manishtushu even remember me? (Ha! If only En Kheduana then could see En Kheduana now, double her age, she would die of fright. Then, I pouted and sulked that I did not look fifteen. Today, I would face down Anzu the Griffin with a marsh-boy¡¯s throwing stick if it meant I would look forty.) But when the herald announced the king and my brother walked into the room, my heart pounded and my smile gleamed and I forgot all about my concerns over my appearance.


    ¡°It¡¯s really you,¡± I said, and for a moment I had to choke back tears, so much did he look like Rimush, whom I had last seen in this very room and would never see again.


    ¡°It is,¡± he said. ¡°It is a great joy and a great relief to see you, sister. Enship.¡± And though his voice sounded strange and hollow, I stepped forward to embrace him just as I had done with Rimush all those years ago. Manishtushu had come to me as Rimush had done, in the fringed red robe of a Northern king, with golden armbands on his wrists and biceps and a golden band holding back his hair. There was more than a little gray in that hair, I was surprised to note. Though I could tut and worry at myself growing older in the mirror, my brothers had always stayed the same age in my mind.


    ¡°Wait,¡± he said. I was startled by his reserve. I had expected him to lift me up like a doll, to roar with laughter and spin me around the room, but there seemed to be no mirth in his mood. Had kingship changed him that much, my turbulent, easy-smiling brother, so often angry yet so often glad? As I stood there puzzling over his behavior he turned from me to call a servant into the room, a woman who carried an unmistakable bundle.


    My old lips crack into a smile, like riverbed dust puckering in the sun, when I think of how the nurse carried the babe into the room then, and of the first glimpse I had of my nephew Naram-Sin, who now sits upon the Throne of the World. How amusing, Inanna! How remarkable. The last time I saw my nephew was when he brought his daughter to meet me, in preparation for her own Enship that will follow mine, and he had a chest as broad as a temple door and the muscles in his legs bunched like a wild bull¡¯s. He has the distinction of being the first king of Sharru-kin¡¯s line to call himself a god, to have himself carved in stone not only with the crown of kingship but the horns of divinity. Yet this god was once a king, and before that a man, a boy, a baby in his nurse¡¯s arms. This sharp-bearded and hard-eyed scion of the Northern mountains, beloved of the Moon and the Sun and the Evening Star, used to shriek in the night and dribble food down his chin and shit himself the same as everyone else. Your power, Inanna, your ability to change, is apparent in all things. Only you could take the crawling creature and elevate him to godhood. Only you could take the brother I loved best and turn him black with guilt and blue with sorrow, a pitiful thing with another man¡¯s face and another man¡¯s crown.


    My brother lifted the child from his nurse¡¯s arms with the utmost delicacy. Then he bid her wait outside the door, and she bowed and left us. After she was gone he gave me a proud smile, though I sensed a trace of some darker emotion beneath it, like an unclean odor that is masked by perfume but still creeps into the nostrils. ¡°My son,¡± he said. ¡°My firstborn son. Would you hold him, sister? He has not been held before by a High Priestess. It is a fitting honor for a prince.¡±


    ¡°A fitting honor for a prince,¡± I repeated, though it was an honor I had granted many lowborn children before. I took the infant from my brother¡¯s hands and held him carefully to me. For all his kingly pedigree, he felt no lighter or heavier than any other child.


    ¡°Where is the child¡¯s mother?¡± I asked Manishtushu.


    ¡°At the palace of the Lugal of Urim,¡± he said. ¡°She is a Northerner, of good family, and she was furious when I told her I wanted to bring him here. She would not let me take him from her, so I let her come along for the journey. But you remember the girls of Akkade¡¯s Great Household; she could not come without a whole retinue of hairdressers and manicurists and singers and slaves and companions. The woman has richer taste than Ishtar herself, I swear it before the gods.¡± It was heartening to hear him speak so, but the laughter that followed his words was pale and faded, nothing like the rich roar I remembered.


    ¡°So you have your bride after all,¡± I said, remembering that day many years before when we had shared wine on the boat to Urim. ¡°I should like to meet her.¡±


    ¡°We would be very pleased if you would dine with us at the Great Household of Meshnannepada before we return to Akkade,¡± said Manishtushu, but even he did not seem enthusiastic. His mind was somewhere else; his eyes were not on me but on the child in my arms.


    I bounced the baby a little. It was hard to see my brother in him, but then all babies look much the same. He smiled an untroubled smile at me and closed his eyes, which were a lighter brown than my brother¡¯s, with traces of my own green.


    ¡°He is beautiful,¡± I said. ¡°What have you named him?¡±


    ¡°Naram-Sin,¡± said my brother gravely, and I looked at him in surprise.


    ¡°Beloved of the Moon,¡± I repeated. ¡°That is Kiang-Nanna, in Emengir. It sounds like the name of an En, not a prince. I might have taken that name myself.¡±


    ¡°It is for your sake that I named him,¡± said Manishtushu, and there was a hint of desperation in his voice that made me nervous.


    ¡°Sit, brother,¡± I said. ¡°Why have you come here? You look like Enkidu when he woke from his dream of the Queen of the Underworld. Tell me what is troubling you.¡±


    Manishtushu did not sit, but to my great surprise he went down on one knee before me. It was a gesture more suited to a servant; the only place I had ever seen a king do it was on the seal of our family, before Ishtar herself. I reached up to the seal dangling from the cord around my neck, my personal seal, which named me Chief Wife of the Moon but also Daughter of the King of the World. My brother closed his eyes as if in great pain. ¡°Oh, sister,¡± he said. ¡°Only you, blessed and beloved of the moon, can help me.¡±


    ¡°What have you done?¡± I asked. With a burst of sorrow I remembered Rimush and his cruel vengeance against the people of Urim. I realized I was terrified to hear the answer. What harm had he caused, what life has he ruined?


    Slowly, Manishtushu looked up at me, but he did not rise to his feet. ¡°What I did is unspeakable,¡± he said quietly. ¡°An abomination before the gods. But ever since, the gods have shown me their favor. They have given me a peaceful kingship, they have given me a wife and a son who will be king after me. I have everything I ever wanted.¡± There was a wild intensity in his voice, and I wondered if my brother was drunk. He had not smelled of wine when he embraced me, but he was not acting like the Manishtushu I remembered. I could not remember him ever speaking of gods with anything approaching reverence, and it disturbed me immensely.


    Under my steady, worried gaze, the King of the World¡¯s eyes filled with tears. I rose to my feet and stepped towards him, cradling his son to my breast. ¡°Yes, I have everything I ever wanted, sister; but I cannot enjoy it. I am crippled by guilt. It rules me as I rule the North and South. Therein lies the punishment of the gods, that I should have all I asked them for but never be able to enjoy it. Whenever the sun shines on my face I know Shamash is judging me, whenever the Moon rises by night I know that Sin can see what I did. I named my son for him because he rules the night, because you rule the night through him, and it was by night that I--that I--¡± He began to sob, and in my arms the little Naram-Sin began to cry. I did not know who to attend to, the baby or my brother. A woman only has one pair of arms, even if she is the wife of a god. Why had my brother dismissed the child¡¯s nurse? Thinking quickly, I laid the child gently on the floor beside my brother. Then I put my arm around my brother¡¯s shoulder so he could cry into my breast and crouched so that I could tickle the baby beside him with my other hand. It felt absurd but it seemed to work, for both the baby and the man quietened.


    Manishtushu was quiet for a time, and I gathered up his baby son from the place where I had lain him. Then my brother said, ¡°This is why I have come here, and why I have brought you Naram-Sin, my heir. He will be king after me; I do not want the stain of his father¡¯s grief to mar his reign. You are closer to the gods than any person I know. Than any person I can trust. I beg of you, sister: pray for me, and for my son. Grant him your holy blessing. Ask your husband to forgive me, and if he cannot forgive, at least let him grant me a night with sleep.¡±


    For the first time it seemed I was taller than him, for he was still on his knees and I was standing. Gripping my brother¡¯s hand, I forced him to meet my eyes. ¡°What have you done?¡± I asked him again, my voice steady. ¡°You are my brother, and I will do all you ask of me, but I must know. You must speak it aloud if you are to earn Nanna¡¯s forgiveness.¡±


    ¡°I cannot,¡± he said lamely. ¡°I cannot speak it aloud.¡±


    ¡°You must,¡± I said. ¡°You have come this far. If not for your sake, or mine, then for the child¡¯s.¡± I stepped back, holding my nephew even tighter to my breast, cradling the soft back of his head with one trembling hand.


    Manishtushu¡¯s shoulders slumped. ¡°I killed a man,¡± he said, without looking at me.


    ¡°You fought in Rimush¡¯s campaigns, did you not? I should have thought you had killed many men,¡± I said carefully.


    ¡°Many men, and this one,¡± said Manishtushu. ¡°And it was not in battle that I killed him.¡±


    ¡°Where, then?¡± I asked, a bit more loudly than I intended. The baby was beginning to squirm.


    ¡°In Akkade,¡± he said. ¡°In the chambers of the Great Household.¡±


    ¡°And why?¡±


    It seems so obvious now, looking back on it. How could I not have known? I should have known from the moment my brother walked in with that haggard, ghostly face, the moment he told me the pious name of his son, the moment he began to cry and I saw that he was a lost man, a gidim, a ghost upon the dunes. But O, Inanna, I swear to you that even then I did not know. Not until Manishtushu spoke again, his voice barely above a whisper, and said ¡°So that I could be king.¡±


    Words, go back to his mouth, horror, go back to the pit of my heart, bile in my throat, recede to my belly! It is by the grace of Nanna alone that I did not drop the child when I realized the truth. Perhaps Naram-Sin is beloved of the moon after all.


    ¡°Oh, sister,¡± said Manishtushu. ¡°Enship. Can you forgive me? Can the gods forgive me?¡±


    I was silent for a time. Then I said again, ¡°What have you done?¡±


    ¡°You know what I have done, sister,¡± said Manish. ¡°I see it in your face that you know my crime. Please, I beg you, do not make me say the words aloud. Do not make me speak his name.¡±


    ¡°No,¡± I said, the word flying from my mouth like a broken tooth. ¡°I am asking you, what have you done? What have you ever done in your life for him, for Father, for us? You know better than any man alive that I came to Urim with no joy in my heart. For the sake of our family¡¯s power and standing, I have endured the jeers and mockery of Sumerians who called me upstart and outlander. I have forsworn mortal husband or children and devoted myself to the people of a foreign city and marriage to a cold god. I have set myself the insurmountable task of writing sacred songs to unite all the great temples of our land, which even our brother--our brother whose name you dare not speak--did not appreciate. He accused me of doing these things for my own glory, and perhaps I did, but I did it for his glory as well, and for our father¡¯s, and for the gods and the people too, so that they might look at one another¡¯s works with pride. For the sake of the Empire and the world made whole. What have you done for any of them? Can you say that you have ever done a single act to further the legacy of Sharru-kin, a single act that was not only for yourself?¡±


    Manishtushu ran his hands down his face, a weary gesture. ¡°No,¡± he said. ¡°I...I am a weak man, sister. I craved power. Kingship.¡±


    ¡°So did our father,¡± I said. ¡°I will tell you that nothing I can do will take away your suffering altogether, nor can I swear to you it will not grow deeper. That is between you and the gods, and the gods love not the murderer and less the man who slays his mother¡¯s son. You are right to say that my husband Nanna is all-seeing, but he is also silent. He does not judge the living, though some say when he sinks beneath the earth at dawn he sits with Gilgamesh¡¯s shade to judge the dead. When you die, you shall go before him and speak your case then. But in this life, he will not begrudge a king who seeks penance and a blessing for his son.¡± My throat painfully dry, I searched for words, swallowing several times before I could find them. ¡°And nor shall I. For I have a duty to my people and my god, but first and foremost to my family.¡±


    Since I became En I have never truly been able to take off the aga, and then more than ever, for if I had been a normal woman in that moment I would have been a woman betrayed, a woman undone. I would have fallen to my knees and wailed, like your sister of the long nails and the unspeakable name who yanks her hair out ¡°like a farmer tearing leeks from the ground.¡± I would have fled into the wilderness a haunted, hunted thing, like dark Lilitu when Gilgamesh bore down upon her nest in the khulub tree. Yet I did not quake or wail or fall. I became the En, the wife of a god, and in this official capacity I looked upon my brother and my brother¡¯s killer, the man who had broken my heart. My god¡¯s strength completes my strength. Manishtushu sought the favor of his divine brother-in-law, just as Dumuzid in the tale of your Descent begged Utu your brother to protect him from your wrath. Seeing his arrogance and foolishness, the sun god had no pity for vainglorious Dumuzid, and your husband, your Good Son the Shepherd King, lost his life for it. But Nanna is not Utu, and Kheduana, much as she may wish it at times, much as she may feel you pulsing beneath her breast and behind her eyes, is not Inanna. And even Dumuzid had a sister who offered her life for his.


    My mind a flurry of family and gods and sorrow, I beckoned my brother the king to follow me, and to take the child with him. I took them to the temple, to the innermost sanctum, and I did the only thing I could do. I sang over them the songs of Nanna, my voice reverberating in the silence of the temple. I poured oil and perfume over the brow of my brother and of my little nephew, who gurgled and stared at me raptly, mesmerized by the sound of my voice. I blessed them, and I prayed for them. ¡°Let this man find peace in this life with what he has done,¡± I said. ¡°Let the gods find a suitable penance and let it be not more than he can bear. And this man¡¯s child, let him not be punished for the sins of another. Let him grow strong and bear the crown of a king, and let him learn from the mistakes of those who sat on his throne before him and rule the better for it.¡± I thought of Rimush¡¯s cruelty and of the cruelty he had been dealt and tears rolled down my cheeks, but I continued. Manishtushu had the face of a man lost in the desert who has just been given water, thankful yet too exhausted to express his thanks in words, barely strong enough to raise the water to his lips. ¡°This I pray in the name of Nanna my husband, Shining Beacon of the Night, in the name of Ningal my holy sister-wife, in the name of all the gods and goddesses of Urim, of Shumeru, of Akkad. In the name of the most holy and sacred waters of the Two Rivers and of all the gods who flourish in between them.¡±


    When it was done and I had let my brother¡¯s thanks crash over me like a bitter and stinging wave, when I had bid him farewell and kissed the future god-king¡¯s brow, when I was finally alone with my guilt and my grief, I called a messenger. ¡°Ready a palanquin and a team of guardsmen with supplies to last five days. And send word to the priests that I am leaving,¡± I said.


    ¡°Where are you going, Enship?¡± he asked, with more than a hint of alarm in his voice.


    ¡°To Unug, to the temple of Inanna and An,¡± I said. ¡°To see my sisters. I shall depart tomorrow at dawn and return the night of the fifth day. The House of the Great Light will manage without me.¡± I would tell Elamitu myself that she would accompany me. Ilum Palilis I would leave behind, for I still saw Baranamtarra every time I looked at her, and as Igiru had not been well of late, I thought it best to give her a few days¡¯ respite from her service. But before the messenger could leave, I stopped him with one more request. ¡°Go and tell Sagadu my scribe that he is to accompany me as well,¡± I said. ¡°Tell him we are doing research for my next hymns to Inanna, if you must.¡±


    ¡°If I must?¡± asked the messenger curiously.


    ¡°You must,¡± I said. ¡°Now go!¡± And I turned back towards the giparu in a foul and sour mood. I could tell that even he disapproved of my going, and it pained me. Had not Galusakar or any of the Ens before me ever left the temple now and then? Had the Enship and the weight of the round and heavy Moon ground them into so much dust all their long lives? These women were king¡¯s daughters, king¡¯s sisters; they must have known something of the treachery of men and how painful it is to love a king. Surely they would understand. Surely they would not begrudge me if I chose, this one time, to do something for myself.


    The journey to Unug from Urim takes a single day on foot. Perched in my palanquin with Sagadu and Elamitu and swaying lazily in the morning heat, I was reminded of my wedding procession through the streets of Urim. I drifted in and out of sleep and my dreams were gruesome, fingers clutching at a bloodstained moon and two crowned skeletons marching in an empty place, endlessly, never seeming to get anywhere, the one in back never seeming to catch up with him who was in front. I did not need the interpreter¡¯s art to know what they meant.


    When it became too hot to travel overland we stopped to sit in the shade of a palm grove, my two companions and myself beside the team of men who had carried us, passing around water and a simple meal of bread, cheese and olives. I fanned myself with a fallen palm frond and listened to the sounds of the empty road. There was a roller-bird calling in the distance, and in spite of everything I smiled as I remembered the story of Ishtar-Inanna and the roller. Perhaps the menwomen would ask me to tell it again. I did not know what I would say to them when I saw them, but I hoped they would welcome me as they always had.The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    ¡°Enship, forgive me,¡± said Sagadu in his typical gracious manner, ¡°I have no lack of confidence in the soundness of your command, but I must ask you something. What prompted you to make this journey to Unug? You have not touched the hymn to Inanna and An since Garashang¡¯s last visit. I had thought you were nearly finished with the composition. Is there some flaw in it that you have detected, something lacking that requires that you visit the temple in person?¡±


    His interest in my true motivations intrigued me. ¡°Would you believe me if I told you that I received a divinely inspired dream?¡± I asked him. ¡°That Holy Inanna herself came to me and asked me to go to the Eana at Unug?¡± Seeing him hesitate, I added, ¡°Be honest, Sagadu. I want to know your thoughts, as you want to know mine.¡±


    Sagadu¡¯s eyes widened. He was not used to me asking him questions, I realized. Beside me, Elamitu smiled inwardly as though remembering something. ¡°If I may be so bold, Enship,¡± he said at last, ¡°No. I would not believe you, if you told me that.¡±


    I smiled too, but it was as wan and bitter of a smile as my brother¡¯s, my brother who had half-killed himself, it seemed, when he killed his king. ¡°The truth, Sagadu, is this,¡± I said. ¡°The menwomen of Inanna were always kind to me, since the first day I arrived in Unug. When my heart is heavy, they are always able to make it light again. Recently I have learned some truths that--disquieted me. And that is the real reason I have decided to go to Unug: not to praise Inanna in writing, but to lift my spirits. You are not disappointed, I hope? I know how seriously you take our work.¡±


    ¡°Certainly not, Enship,¡± said Sagadu. ¡°That is a fine reason--did not the gods grant the menwomen their skills in dance and song so that they could make us all a little happier, our troubles a bit less hard to bear? At least, that is what they say when they ask for money.¡± He imitated the peculiar open-handed clapping that the menwomen use to announce their presence, and both I and Elamitu laughed.


    ¡°But Enship,¡± Sagadu said, ¡°There is one thing that still puzzles me. If your reasons for making the journey are as you describe, why have you asked me along?¡±


    To my great surprise and horror, Inanna, I blushed. Like a young girl, like I never married the moon or went to Urim and was still proud as a lioness in the gardens of Akkade! Perhaps it was your teasing, Inanna, as we drew closer to your temple and your people. Perhaps it was one of your moments rising in my breast, a little touch of Inanna peeking out into the open.


    ¡°Because you, too, have always been kind to me,¡± I said. ¡°And you, too, know how to gladden my heart.¡± And Sagadu did not say anything else for the rest of the day, but as I could not conceal my blush he could not conceal his smile.


    When we arrived at the temple gates and made our presence known to the guards, a delegation from the temple came to greet us. I recognized them at once. Robed in their wild colors, faced painted pale and heavy, flowers rising broken and shimmering from their heads, hands flailing with excitement. ¡°Goddess, what a surprise!¡± Kankala crowed. ¡°Our little Northern scamp has come to pay a visit!¡±


    They threw their arms around us all in welcome, even the guards, whose discomfort the menwomen seemed to relish. Lodging was found for us in one of the temple¡¯s outlying buildings where the young priests in training slept. ¡°It¡¯s not a giparu,¡± said Inanna-shudug apologetically. ¡°But then, we would only be allowed to put one foot in one ourselves.¡± Not all the priests and priestesses of the temple were galaturras, but many were, more than I had even realized. I went straightaway to make an offering at your altar, as befitting a visiting High Priest, but as soon as this was done I found myself surrounded by Kankala and Garashang and Inanna-shudug and a bevy of others whose names I did not know but was quickly offered. With many interruptions and wild tangents, they told me of the latest goings-on in Unug. A new Lugal had been posted there after the rebellion against Rimush, just as in Urim and Lagash, but there were rumors that the old Lugal¡¯s son was being raised in secret by supporters of his father, and that he might seek to become Great Man himself when he came of age. Eresh-gunu had passed on to the House of Dust, and I accepted an invitation to pour an offering on her grave the next morning. In her place the chief of the galas, their Amagal or Grandmother, was now Garashang, who had always been closest to the old matriarch. ¡°Amagal doesn¡¯t always go to the eldest among us,¡± she explained.


    ¡°Nor the prettiest,¡± said a young galaturra cuttingly. Garashang took off her sandal and shook it threateningly at the young one, who backed away amid laughter and clapping.


    ¡°Careful now,¡± said Inanna-shudug, placing her hand on my shoulder. ¡°She wields a shoe like Ninurta with his mace Sharur, the Smasher of Thousands. And oh, when she throws it! I swear I¡¯ve seen it round corners!¡±


    I laughed as I had nearly forgotten how to. I laughed and smiled and ate and drank with them. I clapped my hands along with the music of pipes and drums and harps, and when the galaturra pulled a grudging Sagadu to his feet for him to dance with them, I joined them myself, the fringe on my robes flying and whirling as I bounced from heel to toe. I did not tell anyone of Manishtushu¡¯s confession, or how I had blessed my brother who was also my brother¡¯s killer. It seemed safer to keep the secrets of kings close to my heart, or perhaps I was not ready to speak such things aloud. I basked in the warm glow of their love, and was satisfied. When the galaturra told me I must see one of their sacred plays performed, I glanced towards Sagadu, whose interest had been piqued. ¡°I should like to see the story of the descent of Inanna to the netherworld.¡± I knew the story well by now, so much time had I spent in the archives of the temple  for my writings, but I had still never seen it performed. Out of all the many tales of you and Dumuzid, which are all different yet all alike, this one, my Lady, was the one my mind could not keep from returning to.


    The galaturra exchanged glances. ¡°Tomorrow evening,¡± said Garashang. ¡°We shall need a day to prepare.¡± And she would say not another word about it, no matter how much I cajoled her.


    All the following day as I toured the temple complex and made my offering at Eresh-gunu¡¯s grave, I could not keep the evening¡¯s entertainment off my mind. When night had finally fallen and dinner had been cleared away, the galaturra vanished, except for a few of the younger ones, who drew Sagadu and I from our seats at the table with gentle but insistent hands. They led us outside, to a flat space beyond the temple sanctum lit by torchlight and where there were already a crowd forming. Many were priests and temple functionaries, but there were common people mixed into the crowd as well, and as we approached Elamitu inclined her head graciously from where she sat beside two temple servants. With a glance towards Sagadu, I sat down on the ground beside him and watched the empty space between the fires.


    I was by now familiar with the ways of your people, Inanna, so it did not surprise me this time when I heard before I saw. Rattle, hand-drum and flute began to sound in the darkness, and after them came voices chanting in Emesal. ¡°She opened her ear from the Great Above to the Great Below, the goddess opened her ear from the Great Above to the Great Below, Inanna opened her ear from the Great Above to the Great Below¡­¡± using that uniquely Southern expression for turning one¡¯s interest to a new subject. As the voices drew nearer I beheld the senior galaturra of the temple, their robes glimmering. Some had faces painted black on one side and white on the other. Others wore masks such as I had never seen: the bright and motionless faces of dogs and dragons, sheep and fish, waterbirds and fanged Underworld things. They clapped their hands and stomped in time to their own music, and with whoops and yelps the crowd joined them.


    Garashang stepped forward in a golden robe, and I knew at once that she had taken on the role of Inanna. She mimed your toilette, crowning herself in gold, taking up jewels offered by an attendant and painting her eyes and lips in a hand-mirror with wild facial expressions. She gave instructions to a cowed and quavering Ninshubur to wail and lament for her when she went down to the House of Dust. She set off on her long journey, actually pacing around the perimeter of the torches with exaggerated effort. All the while the audience clapped and laughed and murmured to each other and the singers chanted.


    For a moment I began to doubt my once unshakable conviction that the gods of North and South were one, for I had never seen you like this in all my life. I remembered my long-ago conversation with the galas about the differences in Ishtar¡¯s and Inanna¡¯s descent stories, how I had thought it was a tragedy and they had seen it more as comedy. Mighty queen you were in the pantomime before me, yet you were also quite clearly a buffoon. You were arrogant and self-important and did not realize your own pomposity, which made you all the more laughable. I thought of the absurdness of the mighty men and women I had known myself; empty-headed noblewomen and arrogant princes, kings who frothed and raged until their subjects got in line but whom death chased away as waking chases a bad dream. Enraptured by the strangeness of it all, I felt the prickling energy of your presence fill me as the tiny hairs along my arms stood on end. And I laughed, Inanna! I laughed!


    Out of the corner of my eye, for I could scarcely turn myself away, I saw that Sagadu wore a bemused smile. I realized that, having lived his whole life in Urim, he would have had ample opportunity to see such a thing performed before, and I resolved to ask him about it later. There was no time for it now, for Inanna had been admitted through the gates of the Underworld by its doorman, played by a sneering Kankala. At each of the seven gates she was forced to remove an article of clothing, having been told by the doorman that no one wears clothes in the land of the dead--and this was the greatest joke of all, that Inanna should fall for such a simple ruse, since everyone knows that the dead are buried with the possessions they most loved in life. But Inanna succumbed to the trick and soon stood naked before the howling audience, the illusion shattered and the mighty queen reduced to a painted, indignant face above a sleek, glossy body, not quite the body of a man but not a woman¡¯s body either, without hair, without breasts, with only a place of shadow between its legs. I remembered the tales in which you call yourself both man and woman. I began to see why the galaturra love you so, and why they use their own bodies to worship you.


    Now Inanna¡¯s dark sister came out, the Queen of the Dead herself, and it was Inanna-shudug¡¯s turn to whip the crowd into a frenzy. She appeared masked and taloned with sagging breasts made of empty skins, a harridan ripped from a nightmare. Freely Ereshkigal¡¯s black name was uttered; sung it carried not the curse it does when spoken. With lolling tongue and matted hair she pointed her long claw towards Inanna and announced the triple curse that sealed her fate. ¡°I fix on you the eye of death. I curse you with the cry of guilt. I call down on you the word of wrath.¡±


    I watched with a shiver as Inanna curled up and died. Then a wooden post was brought forth and she was raised up again, her eyes closed, her limbs limp, and held against it. With rope bound around her chest and limbs the spirits of the Netherworld displayed her where we all could see her, ¡°a piece of rotting meat¡±. Dark-skinned like the Sumerians who surrounded me, her face painted a shade lighter, closer to my own. Flayed like the generals who stood against my father and brother, dead like both of them or like my garden-dreams of childhood. The audience grew quiet, and the music and chanting softer, muted, except for the aching melisma of a single lamentation-singer. I felt my heart swell and wondered at the power of the performance, to move me to laughter one moment and sorrow the next. Beside me Sagadu shifted uncomfortably.


    But the story was far from over. Old Grandfather Enki, played by Kankala in a ludicrous beard made of sheep¡¯s wool, brought forth a young galaturra and a kurngarra, one of the sword-dancers I had heard the galaturra speak of. They leaped and chattered and beckoned the musicians to brighten their tune. The kurngarra took out a pair of small blades and juggled them, and the galaturra squealed in feigned terror that brought laughter back to the night air.


    I remembered the shameful curse laid on Asushunamir, the Shining One, who served this role in the Northern Ishtar-version of the tale and was declared the ultimate pariah for their trouble. There was no such admonishment here. These two performers descended with no difficulty and came to Ereshkigal¡¯s bedside, where she lay writhing and shrieking in pain. Monster though she was, the pain she inflicted on others came from within, and like doctors prodding their patient¡¯s belly the two servitors of Enki aimed to find the source of it. When she moaned, they moaned. When she spread her claws over her painted eyes, they covered their own faces with their hands. When she yanked on her own hair, they grabbed each other¡¯s hair with tongues sticking out and eyes wild. They sympathized, and for their trouble she let them have whatever reward they asked. Of course they took the piece of meat that hung nearby, really the body of naked Inanna, despite Ereshkigal¡¯s spluttering rage at being so tricked. And they sprinkled the Water of Life and Earth of Life upon Inanna, raising her from the dead.


    The story was flying now into its final act. As Inanna, or Garashang, graciously accepted her clothes and put them on again, the galaturra and kurngarra with a final nod to the audience made their exit. But no sooner had the goddess, a bit humbled by her ordeal yet as glorious as ever, risen to her feet again than a host of menwomen with fanged masks in vivid colors came swooping in after her. These were the spirits of the Underworld, Ereshkigal¡¯s servitors sent to bring her back into her sister¡¯s clutches. As Inanna fled and the music reached a frantic pitch, they passed Inanna¡¯s servant-gods, who had been groveling in mourning per her instructions, their mortifications exactly the same as those I had undergone for my father and, years later, for Rimush. The Underworld demons protested that if Inanna would not come back and be dead in the House of Dust, they must take another in her place, but the proper mourning of all the lesser gods who served her precluded their being taken by the spirits. Of all Inanna¡¯s household only her husband Dumuzid had not mourned her. Played by a gala with a shepherd¡¯s crook in one hand but a crown on his head, the meaning was so clear that I had to smile. Even my father had claimed your divinity as the source of his kingly power. A king too proud to acknowledge his god is no king at all, but a fool.


    Dumuzid pleaded, but his pleas fell on deaf ears, and Inanna cursed him with the same words Ereshkigal had cursed her. The tears came unbidden, rolling down my cheeks. And when Dumuzid¡¯s little sister Ngeshtinanna appeared wrapped in gilded vines, I wept all the more because of how it put me in mind of my mother, even though the similarity could not have been meant, even though her name meant Lady of the Grapevine and it was only fitting she should be so attired. She offered her life for his, six months of the year to be divided between them, and the dark spirits of the Underworld were appeased. With a final apotropaic salute to Ereshkigal, the musicians and chanters brought the play to a roaring conclusion. And when it was done I rose to my feet, I clapped and whooped my approval with as much fervor as any of the motley host of priests and servants and scribes and guildsmen who had gathered for the night¡¯s entertainment. I had known every emotion in those few short hours, it seemed, that I had known in my whole life. Every Inanna-touched moment came trumpeting forth to remind me where I was, and had been, to light my path that I might see where I was going.


    ¡°There is one thing I do not understand,¡± I said to Garashang when the performance was done. ¡°Why did Inanna go down to the Palace of Dust? Do you give any reason for it?¡±


    Garashang shrugged. ¡°She is the doer and undoer, the keeper of the me,¡± she said. ¡°She doesn¡¯t need a reason to do anything. Her reason is not important. What¡¯s important is that we are always there to help her. As she is there to help you.¡± I regretted briefly having asked for such a tale, for a story that was both tragedy and farce, two things, like Inanna, or this land, or myself. It was after all so close to my life, a story of brothers and sisters, kings and death, and perhaps I would have been better off asking them to perform a lighter tale. Perhaps I would have preferred to go to bed that night with a smile on my lips instead of tumbled and confused thoughts, unsure of whether to laugh or cry. Yet I could not argue that in some way it had helped. To see my feelings played out on the stage was magic of a kind I had never known before, and I felt the urge to write come flooding back to me.


    When we returned from Unug, a crowd of my temple¡¯s functionaries was gathered at the gates to receive us. Getting down from my litter I saw my High Steward Adda, Sagadu¡¯s brother Ningtuku, Ilum Palilis (standing apart from the rest but looking proud), as well as Ugunu and Baranamtarra.


    ¡°How has the temple fared in my absence?¡± I asked. And before I could catch my breath I was assailed from every direction by petitions, questions, updates on the status of shipments of goods I had scheduled to receive. The aga of the En was heavy on my head again. As usual, each had their different way of speaking. Adda was brusque and efficient, Ugunu gentle but firm, Baranamtarra persistent and with low expectations. Ningtuku was every bit as polite as his brother, but in between his ¡°humbly begging your pardon¡±s I detected dissatisfaction that would have to be addressed.


    ¡°Another matter that needs your attention, Enship,¡± said Adda, as though it had slipped his mind before. ¡°You will be wanting a replacement to serve you in the giparu.¡±


    All the other words fell away and it was as though the blood had drained from my body. ¡°Where is Igiru?¡± I asked. ¡°Has some ill befallen her?¡±


    Beside me I saw Elamitu stiffen, and Sagadu¡¯s brow furrow. Ilum Palilis, who had been silent all this time, stepped forward, her head inclined.


    My heart began to pound. ¡°Where is she?¡± I asked again.


    ¡°She took ill the day after you left,¡± said Ilum Palilis softly. ¡°And by yesterday, the One Not to Be Named had taken her. She has gone to the House of Dust.¡± Looking down again she pressed a hand over her mouth as though to keep more words from pouring out.


    ¡°She is dead,¡± I heard my own voice saying.


    ¡°As to a replacement,¡± said Adda, ¡°Baranamtarra has suggested a young lady from the kitchens who may--¡±


    I put up my hand to silence him. ¡°Where is the grave?¡± I asked.


    ¡°The priests laid her in the temple graveyard,¡± said Ugunu. ¡°Near where the other servants and slaves have been buried over the years. She was given the rites befitting a worshipper of Nanna.¡±


    ¡°I should like to see the place,¡± I said, struggling to keep my voice like the proper voice of an En. Oh, Goddess, when they string together the beads of my life, the moments dark and surging, they shall alternate them sorrow and joy, sorrow and joy, for so have they befallen me. Why was I not there? Should I have brought her with me--no, she might not have survived the journey, she might have died in Unug instead of Urim which had been her home once and was her home again. I should have been there, plain and simple.


    ¡°I am sorry, Enship,¡± said Ugunu. ¡°I know that you were very fond of Egiru.¡±


    ¡°Igiru,¡± I said. ¡°Her name was Igiru. Heron, for her gait and stature. She was born a child of Urim and a worshipper of the moon, and it was her greatest joy that she came back here after years of service in Akkade. She helped me see the joy in Urim when I was young and angry and alone. She--I would have--I wanted to, but--¡± the words failed and I realized that I had no real excuse, save my own selfishness. ¡°I wish I had been here,¡± I said at last. The cluster of men and women around me was silent.


    ¡°Perhaps it would please your Enship to leave an offering at the grave,¡± said Adda. ¡°You have a free hour tomorrow between your audience with the merchant Kisishu and the prayer for the motherless children of Urim.¡±


    I nodded grimly. ¡°I will do more than that. I must enter mourning again.¡±


    ¡°She was a slave, Enship!¡± Baranamtarra spluttered. ¡°Perhaps your customs are different in the North, but here in the South, this is unacceptable.¡±


    I threw up my hands in frustration. ¡°I have lived in the South longer than I ever lived in the North,¡± I said. ¡°Singing the songs of Nanna until my tongue went numb. Would you still hold it against me that my father¡¯s fathers were of the mountains and yours of the marsh?¡±


    Another woman might have been shamed into silence by these words, but Baranamtarra was shaking her head. ¡°You cannot, Enship,¡± she said. ¡°Think of the whispers, of what people will say of you if you do this thing. It is...unbecoming in one so powerful as yourself. The younger priests and the people of Urim will call you a weakling, to display such tenderness towards a slave.¡±


    ¡°What do I care if I display tenderness?¡± I said. ¡°I am not leading troops to war. This is an aga on my head, not a crown. And besides, what right have you to speak to me so, Baranamtarra? You are talking to the wife of your god.¡±


    Puffing out her chest, Baranamtarra stood as tall as she could. ¡°I, too, am a bride of Nanna,¡± she said stiffly. ¡°And I will not tolerate--¡±


    Ugunu placed a hand on the small of Baranamtarra¡¯s back. ¡°As the concubine in the palace treads softly before the Queen, so we before the En,¡± she said primly. Baranamtarra glowered, but she did not speak again, and Ugunu said, ¡°You shall do as you see fit, Enship,¡± and with her hand still planted firmly on Baranamtarra¡¯s back she led her away from me. I watched them go and was surprised at how labored and faltering their step. When I first arrived at the temple so many years ago they had seemed ancient and seasoned but now I realized that they might only be ten years my senior, if that. I wondered if they were older than Igiru had been. There was strength yet in both of them, and I was thankful for it. Much as I clashed with Baranamtarra I had had quite enough of death for a while.


    ¡°I shall not accept a replacement,¡± I said aloud. ¡°Ilum Palilis and Elamitu alone shall be my servants henceforth. No other woman of another¡¯s choosing will attend to me.¡±


    ¡°Of course,¡± said Adda, and I noticed that he seemed a bit frightened. He must have known that when I said ¡°another¡± I meant him and Baranamtarra. With muttered obeisance, he and all the others swept away, even Elamitu and Ilum Palilis, who were anxious to return to the giparu. Only Sagadu remained with me.


    ¡°Ugunu speaks the truth,¡± he said quietly. ¡°You shall do as you see fit. No one can tell you otherwise.¡±


    I turned to look at him, my loyal Sagadu, to search his dark face for any kind of answer. ¡°They do not understand,¡± I said. ¡°Igiru deserved better. She did not deserve to die a slave.¡±


    ¡°If you mourn for her and give her offerings,¡± said Sagadu. ¡°Remember the lessons of Inanna. The gods who mourned her properly were rewarded for their piety, and Dumuzid was punished. You may not want to mourn but you will feel better afterwards, and the gods will smile on you.¡±


    ¡°You have seen the play before, have you not?¡± I asked.


    ¡°I have,¡± said Sagadu. ¡°Several times, since I was a boy. It is very popular, but I always find it moving. Inanna is a powerful goddess, and we are all made the better for her presence.¡±


    ¡°She is with us now,¡± I said, and for a moment we stood in silence, letting the heat of you pass over us and through us, pumping in the beating of our hearts, the coursing of our blood, the rushing of our breath. All the South is Inanna¡¯s country. Did that make us all Inanna¡¯s creatures? Did that mean I was half Inanna, or more than half, or only a little, and where was Northern Ishtar¡¯s fire amid the warm and sticky lifeblood of her other self?


    ¡°If there is anything I can do,¡± he said, and to my great surprise he raised his hand and placed it on my shoulder.


    He had never touched me before. So few men had. I felt a burst of feeling, white-hot and stinging, rise in me, part shock and part surprise and part joy and all Inanna. But before I could react he drew back his hand as though my flesh had burned him. Then he flung himself on the ground, pressing his face to the dirt.


    ¡°Forgive me, Enship, I did not mean--¡± he said.


    ¡°Please, Sagadu,¡± I said. ¡°Rise. You embarrass me.¡± He rose to his feet, his eyes two white pits of fear.


    I will leave at once,¡± he said. ¡°Ningtuku, who it seems was right about me all along, may well put a dagger in his breast when he finds out, but it is better I should be gone than he should see me in my shame.¡± He turned to go but I drew him back, catching him by the arm.


    ¡°Please,¡± I said. ¡°I am still your En, am I not, Sagadu? And you sworn to obey my commands?¡±


    ¡°Of course, Enship,¡± he said. He was staring down at my hand encircling his wrist, the lighter shade of my skin stark against his own dark brown. I let go, and felt his eyes move up to my face.


    ¡°Then I command you to stay,¡± I said. ¡°In precisely two weeks¡¯ time, after I finish mourning Igiru, we will begin work on the hymn to the Temple of Inanna at Adab. Until then, I would be obliged if you would go over the missive from the High Priestess of Adab and our notes from this outing to Unug, and take down anything of particular import to the composition.¡±


    Sagadu bowed so hastily he might never have been there in the first place. When he was gone, I went to the giparu and sank down onto my bed, exhausted. I took off the aga and laid it on the chair beside the bed and stared at it as though it were about to speak.


    Yours, Inanna, are manhood and womanhood, the office of En and the office of scribe, writing and dictation, love and grief. These are all me, all numbered among the signs of civilization between which we mortals balance our lives. But it is one more cruel joke you gods have played on me, Inanna, that you have required me to be a woman and Chief Wife of the Moon at Urim at the same time, yet made it nearly impossible for me to do so.

 Chapter 11

    The years drifted by. After Manishtushu¡¯s visit and my return from Unug, my life began to sink back into its natural pattern. I said prayers to Nanna and sacrificed animals. I blessed the people who came to my altar seeking solace. I spent long hours with Sagadu writing hymns to glorify all the many temples and cities across our land, and sometimes caught him looking at me a fraction of a moment too long, or myself at him, but only a fraction of a moment, not even long enough or fanned enough by your fires to be called a moment in full.


    Perhaps my blessing had worked as intended, my words moved my silent husband, for Manishtushu¡¯s reign was a prosperous one and his accomplishments numerous. He made the name of ¡°Lord Over Elam¡± that had originated with Rimush more than a boast, bringing the Elamite states of Anshan and Sherikhum under his control. He constructed an immense fleet that warred against the silver-rich nations of the Southwest and traded in gems, ivory, and lumber at thirty-seven ports. That he made a better king than Rimush could not be argued, and if neither brother knew how to rule except through fear, at least Manishtushu relied more on his works and reputation than on active cruelty, dedicating a massive statue of himself to Enlil at Nibru and restoring shabby Ninua to its former glories. Perhaps no man ever loved Sharru-kin, or Rimush, or Manishtushu (except we unfortunate enough to have been born into their family), but where King Rimush was cursed, King Manishtushu was respected. At night when I gazed upon the moon I comforted myself with this fact: that the Empire was better off having Manishtushu as king than Rimush, no matter how my second brother had gained the throne. Rimush had no compassion for those outside his family, and had he lived longer, I reasoned, he might have undone all our father¡¯s works, sowing a hatred so deep that my hymns, popular and widespread though they were becoming, could never counterbalance it.


    Manish was the better king, but Rimush was the firstborn son and rightful heir of Sharru-kin, removed from the throne only through an unnatural act of murder. What did that mean? That the midwife had made a mistake, and Manish was the firstborn twin all along? That I had done the right thing in absolving my brother¡¯s crime, that I was laying smooth the path for the greater glory of my family and the unity of my world? I could not hear of some great accomplishment of Manishtushu¡¯s without wondering if, in some small way, it had come to pass because of me. It did seem that he grew more ambitious and more bold, more confident in his kingship, after that fateful visit to the House of the Great Light, a truth which I tried my hardest to forget.


    Manishtushu reigned eighteen years in total, and during that time he wrote to me I know not how many times. But I could not bring myself to answer, not even once, after the day that he visited me at Urim. And after a time I stopped even reading the words he wrote me. They were all the same, in any case. Praise for my latest hymns, wishes for my good health, and, always, his thanks: ¡°words cannot express my gratitude for how you spoke for the gods on my behalf¡­¡± He believed himself to be in my debt, and every time I remembered this I felt sick, as though I had betrayed one brother to save the other¡¯s life. I did not know if Manishtushu still slept poorly, wracked with the guilt of what he had done, but I rather doubted it. Now it was I who tossed and turned, burdened with the guilt of having been born a princess and made a priestess. Yet Manishtushu, the brother I had once considered most dear to me, continued to write. His messages arrived so frequently that when I did not receive one for an entire month I knew he must have died.


    And when he died, war came to Urim.


    In the old songs they say that war is ¡°the storm that came to be.¡± If that is the case, then all Manishtushu¡¯s reign was a gradually darkening sky, troubled and churning but still dry after the downpour of Rimush¡¯s reign. And when the heavens opened, they washed my life away.


    Help me, Inanna, to remember the breaking of the storm, to remember that I am the woman for whom the storm came to be. Help me to remember how the darkness swept over the House of the Great Light, how war came to Urim for the second time in my life and scraped its blade against the door of the giparu and threw me into the dust.


    Like all such things, its beginning was a hard one.


    I mourned Manishtushu as I had mourned every other death in my life, dutifully and in full. But the ritual blood was scarce washed from my face when I received a messenger who told me that a large chest had been delivered to the temple gates for me, and with it a written letter. ¡°Bring them in here,¡± I said. I was in the middle of a particularly difficult bit of coordination for the coming Festival of the New Moon, and the representatives of the different facets of the temple were all gathered there with me: Adda, Sagadu and his brother, Baranamtarra and Ugunu, the captain of the temple guard, and several prominent priests and guildsmen. When the messenger returned with a large carved chest, I asked him whose symbol was printed on the lump of clay that sealed the chest¡¯s side.


    ¡°It is not one that I know,¡± the messenger replied. ¡°A striding king, it looks to be, and a giant clutching a lion¡¯s cub to his breast.¡±


    I leaned forward in my chair and peered at the imprinted clay. ¡°It says ¡®Lugal Anna son of Melemanna, King of Unug,¡¯¡± I said. Neither name was known to me. Anna meant metal or steel, and Unug had of course not had a king in many years. ¡°Open it,¡± I said.


    Laying the chest on the ground, the messenger cracked the seal and opened the chest. At once a smell of decay assaulted my nostrils. ¡°What is inside?¡± I asked. I felt a twinge of dread, which was only magnified when the messenger glanced into the chest and his eyes grew wide at its contents. With some trepidation, he reached inside and lifted from its depths a bloodied head with matted hair.


    Some of the priests gasped or cried out. Beside me, Baranamtarra hissed a prayer to Nanna through clenched teeth and Ugunu clapped her hand over her mouth and nose.


    Long hair obscured the grisly thing. ¡°Let me see the face,¡± I said. In silence I began my own prayer to Nanna. Please, let it be no one that I recognize. But when the messenger pushed the hair away from that pale dead face, not quite a man¡¯s but not quite a woman¡¯s, I knew exactly who it was.


    Garashang.


    ¡°Who dares send me this?¡± I said, trying as hard as I could to keep the quavering from my voice. ¡°This is the head of the chief galaturra of the Temple of Inanna and An at Unug!¡± I felt a stab of grief and a rush of fear, for whoever had done this to Garashang might have done the same to the other galaturra, to the entire Eana Temple, but no other emotion compared to the swelling tide of anger that was now rising within me. Perhaps it was because of the manner of her death or the way the head had been sent to me, so cruel and mocking, but mostly, it was because she had been a High Priestess. This was not just a crime but a blasphemy, a crude violation of the sacred and untouchable, and it filled me with fury to the very core of my being that Garashang should have died at another¡¯s hand.


    ¡°There is a letter,¡± the messenger stammered, clearly shaken.


    ¡°Give it to me,¡± I said. The messenger handed the clay tablet to me and I read the words aloud for all to hear. Towards the end I had to work to force them out so that I was nearly shouting.


    ¡°Speak, messenger, to the En Kheduana, Chief Wife of the Moon at Urim, and let her know that Lugal Anna son of Melemanna, rightful King of Unug, Urim and Lagash, of the bloodline of Gilgamesh, says this:


    ¡®My gift to you is the head of a false High Priest who served uncomplaining under a usurper and consorted with the kin of conquerors and tyrants. You should find many more such treasures if you search the ruins of the Temple of Inanna and An at Unug. Lugal Meshnannepada of Urim received a similar gift from me, but it was the head of the usurper of Unug himself, that dog that your brother placed on my father¡¯s throne twenty-five years ago.


    ¡®You will leave the Temple of Urim, Akkadian bitch, or I will come and remove you myself. The blood of ancient days shall rule in Shumeru again. Leave here, and do not return.


    ¡®May she know this!¡±


    When I set down the tablet the room erupted into heated discussion as everyone else clamored to be heard. But I called for silence with a clap of my hands and said, ¡°If we spend hours debating, this Lugal Anna will cut us down where we stand. This is a time for swift action.¡±


    I was now 45 years old, and had been En two-thirds of my life. I was no longer young nor particularly beautiful, but I was also no longer a frightened child. Memories of Lugal Kaku¡¯s rebellion came flooding back to me, but I felt a sense of dreadful urgency far stronger than that which governed me then. That rebellion had never truly reached me. This time, I was its target. To Lugal Kaku I had been a nuisance to be shuffled out of the way, a piece in the game of twenty squares to be moved off the board. To this Lugal Anna, I was an enemy. I did not understand the man who could claim rulership over a city and do this to its temple and its High Priestess. I did not want to understand him; only to survive him.


    I beckoned the captain of the temple guards. ¡°See to it that your men are posted double at the temple gates and triple outside the giparu. I want every man trained in arms to be on his watch.¡± Next I turned to Sagadu. ¡°Draft a message to Akkade straightaway,¡± I said. ¡°Send word to the king that we are in terrible danger, and that rebellion brews again in the cities of the South. And send messages to the Lugal Meshnannepada of Urim and Ensi Tuge of Lagash, telling them of the threat we have received and asking for their collaboration in defending our cities. Have the fastest messengers in the temple deliver these words.¡± I asked the messenger who had brought in the chest to place the head back inside and to carry it to the priests who interr the dead. ¡°Have them bury it in the temple graveyards exactly as they would bury the body of a priestess. And as to the rest of you--¡± I said, regarding the crowd. Priests and priestesses. The House of the Great Light, shining, waiting for my command. ¡°Go to your underlings and servants and apprentices, all the people of the temple complex, and tell them what has transpired here. Tell them that their En says this:


    ¡®I cannot command you to stay. Long ago when Lugal Kaku raised a rebellion, I had the women shelter in the giparu and the men in the inner sanctum of the temple. But any man who can do this to the High Priestess of Inanna will not be held back by sacred ground. Today, we have seen who this Lugal Anna is. If you fear him, you have my permission to leave the temple. If you wish to go then go, to your families, or to the marshes, or to the barracks of Meshnannepada¡¯s palace to defend Urim. But if you wish to stay, then stay as I will, for this temple is my only place in the world, and I swore an oath long ago that no man would ever make me leave it. I will face this Lugal Anna. But I will not blame you if you cannot. The blessings of Nanna be with us all.¡±


    I saw fear in their eyes as they hurried off to warn the rest of the temple, and I wondered how many people would be gone by nightfall. Yet what I had said was true--I did not blame them. I could not blame them for being afraid, not when I was so afraid myself. As Sagadu made his way towards the door, I called his name. He turned towards me, expectant. ¡°Enship?¡± he asked.


    ¡°After you have sent the messages to Akkade, Urim and Lagash, you will leave here,¡± I said.


    ¡°Enship, I could not leave you,¡± he said.


    My brow furrowed and I rose from my chair. ¡°I command you, Sagadu, leave, as I once commanded you to stay.¡±


    Sagadu met my gaze defiantly. ¡°I am a man,¡± he said. ¡°I can protect myself if necessary, I will not leave your side, nor--¡±


    ¡°Damn you, Sagadu, leave!¡± I said, turning away from him. ¡°While there is still time. You alone have I commanded to do this.¡±


    ¡°As it please you,¡± I heard him say. And then I heard him turn and walk away, and I knew that he would do as I had commanded. I did not turn myself until I was certain he was gone. And then with a heavy heart I hurried to the temple sanctum, to do the only thing I could think to do.


    As I walked down the long, dark hall of the sanctum, I remembered how I had sang and prayed with the priests the night we heard the horns of the city guard, all those years ago. Nanna had not failed me then. But today, I was alone. It was not even late enough that Nanna could be seen, though I knew he was there. Later, I promised myself, when the moon was high and those who had chosen to stay were accounted for, I would return to the temple with a host of priests and priestesses, and we would sing a proper prayer to the gods. But for now, before anything else happened, I wanted a few words alone with the god I had married.


    Drawing nearer to the altar, I tried to remember the old songs of Nanna, but the words of other songs chimed together in my head--the songs of war. Our poor broken world has seen so much of war that the singers have been writing about it since time began. The bloody sorrows of men long-dead, laments for the husks of cities, piteous curses against the ravages of the Foreigner, the Northerner, the Southerner, the conqueror, the king. My mind was a library of ancient turmoil.


    ¡°Hailstones and flames.¡±


    ¡°The bright time wiped out by a shadow.¡±


    ¡°War came down and smote the city like an axe.¡±


    ¡°The storm was like a hammer coming from above, the city was struck as the field is struck by the hoe.¡±


    In many of the songs these ancient poets spoke of gods who abandoned their cities. ¡°The lady of the city flees like a flying bird¡±, ¡°He has abandoned the cowpen and let the breezes haunt the sheepfold.¡± Would Nanna do the same, I wondered? Would his compassionate light shine down or would we look up into a moonless sky as Lugal Anna butchered us?


    ¡°Nanna, Nanna,¡± I whispered before his altar. ¡°My husband, my life, my god. I have never needed you as I need you now. Protect us. Let us weather this storm. If you value my life and the lives of your priests, if you value the sanctity of this temple, then please, keep us safe.¡± I began to sing my own song to Nanna, closing my eyes and touching the fingers of one hand to my brow, letting the power flow through me. I imagined my words as a ray of light, emanating far beyond my body and the temple and Urim, piercing the sky, higher and higher until they reached his ears. And when that song was done I sang another, and another, praising the god I was devoted to in every way that I knew. He had never deserted me before. Surely now he would listen. Surely he would protect us.


    Somehow in all my years of star-gazing, I had not learned the greatest lesson of the skies, and of the gods: that the moon, though his presence can be felt so often, waxes and wanes. He is not always there when you need him.


    If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    You can spend your every waking hour reading about war, listening to the songs of war, singing them yourself until you are breathless, but you will never really know it until you experience it yourself. Not until you hear the roar of men who have become beasts and smell the smoke of your own world burning around you. Not until you lie awake all night knowing that there is someone coming for you, someone who wants you dead because you are guilty of being who you are.


    By evening, when the time came for the prayer and sacrifice, there were more priests and priestesses than I had expected, though many of the younger ones especially were gone. Baranamtarra and Ugunu and all the other senior priests had stayed, and I gave them my grave thanks for it before we began the evening prayer and sacrifice. That night I tried to sleep but could not. I rose from the giparu and watched for fires along the walls of Urim, as I had done so many years before, but there were none. From the great city below the temple there was only darkness and silence.


    In the morning we went to the temple, all of us who had remained, and prayed again at first light, but our songs were interrupted by the sound I had been dreading--the horns of the guardsmen. But it was not the city guard of Urim--it was closer, sharper, the horns of the temple guards I myself had posted. War had not just come to Urim again, it had come to our very front gates.


    Abruptly the music of our prayer-song came to an end. ¡°So early?¡± said a priest in shock, clutching his drum and rattle. Everyone was frozen still, trying to hear what was going on outside.


    The priests flocked around the altar of Nanna. ¡°Enship!¡± Ugunu cried. ¡°You must go to the giparu! He will not harm you there!¡±


    ¡°He will,¡± I said. ¡°He killed the High Priestess of Inanna, what makes you think he will hesitate to enter the giparu?¡±


    ¡°Go,¡± said Baranamtarra grimly. ¡°If you leave now you can make it to the giparu before you are spotted. When he comes in here we will tell him you fled when you received his letter, and perhaps he will believe us. The riches in the temple sanctum may attract his attention, but not the giparu. Go!¡±


    I wondered if the hopelessness and futility and terror I now felt was anything like what Sagadu had felt when I had asked him to go. Lifting my robes above my ankles, I ran from the temple and across the courtyard towards the giparu, desperately hoping I would make it before anyone noticed me. I wondered if Elamitu was still there. I had begged her to leave, but in her typical easy fashion she had refused, unlike Ilum Palilis, who had been gone the instant word of war had reached her. As I ran I heard sounds that made my heart pound and my stomach lurch: the shouting of men, the shrieking of women, metal clanging against metal. My vision was a blur and my eyes and nostrils stung with smoke. Something was burning.


    ¡°Where are you going, En?¡± A man¡¯s voice called out as I ran, and a fresh wave of terror crashed over me. ¡°Where are you going?¡± He kept repeating. I was too frightened to look back at him. ¡°Where are you going?¡±


    Throwing myself over the threshold, I slammed the door of the giparu behind me, my breath coming in painful gulps. Frantically I searched for something to drag in front of the door. My bed was the nearest object of any size, but I did not know how quickly I could move it by myself.


    ¡°Elamitu!¡± I called. But there was no answer. I threw myself into the task at hand, and with the burst of strength the gods give to the desperate, I managed to get the bed across the room. When I had jammed it firmly against the door I sank to my knees. It was a long time before I could breathe comfortably again.


    I prayed. Nanna, Nanna, please, don¡¯t let him, don¡¯t let him--what he might do was so terrible I could not even think it, so I focused on simply keeping him from entering. Don¡¯t let him come in. Over and over again, I prayed the words, letting it become a silent litany in time with the pounding in my breast and in my head.


    Then I heard something scraping at the door, and knew it for a blade.


    My breathing became harsh and labored again, and I clapped my hands over my mouth as if to keep my fear from spilling out. ¡°Enship, I know you are there. I saw you,¡± said a voice, a man¡¯s voice, and the scraping of his blade grew more frenzied as the door jostled against the wooden bed-frame.


    I was as silent as the dead Ens beneath me. Nanna, Nanna!


    ¡°Now, now,¡± said a man¡¯s voice. ¡°I had heard you Northerners were frigid, but is this the way you receive a guest? I am so very anxious to meet you. We have much to discuss.¡±


    A few moments later my bed overturned and the door came flying open. To this day I do not know how he did it, unless some dark and nameless god gave strength to his sword-arm, some corpse-hound battle spirit with bloody tongue and rolling eyes. My god¡¯s strength completes my strength. My god was absent, and so was my strength.


    He entered then, and I knew who he was without him saying it. I knew that this was not some common soldier, nor even a general, but Lugal Anna himself, the one who called himself ruler of Unug and Urim and Lagash and scion of Gilgamesh, who had taken Garashang¡¯s head, who had sworn to remove me forcibly from the temple if I would not flee before him. Here he was, stepping over my threshold, violating the sanctity of the giparu without a second thought exactly as I had feared he would. With a red-stained sword in his hand and his face twisted into a smile, as if the entire thing was a joke too funny to be believed.


    I could not believe how young he was, my tormentor, my enemy. He was no grizzled warrior or hardened ruler but a strong and handsome young man, young enough to be my own son. Beneath a layer of grime he wore the armor of a prince, leather chased with gilt and carnelian, and his jutting beard was more North than South. All of a sudden I remembered the rumors told to me in Unug by the galaturra years before--that the son of the Lugal of Unug deposed by Rimush was still alive--and it all became clear to me. His claim to an ancient bloodline, his labelling the Lugal of Unug a usurper and Garashang a treacherous collaborator. This was he, Melemanna¡¯s lost heir, come of age at last. Come to the Temple of the Moon at Urim with an army, with soot on his fine armor and blood on his sword and a smirk on his face.


    Lugal Anna stepped into the middle of my bedroom. ¡°There were fewer people here than we anticipated,¡± he said. I could still hear the roiling of flames and the clanging of metal from outside, but his voice had the measured poise of a young nobleman in some Great Household. ¡°I take this to mean that you received my little gift. Yet seeing what happened to your sister, the High Priestess of Inanna, and knowing the danger you were in, you chose to stay. Why is that?¡±


    ¡°I am the En,¡± I said, and looked into his dark eyes. The litany of Nanna bubbled to the surface of my crazed brain and I tried my best to focus on the song, any song, even the counting-song of the cattle of the moon, rather than my fear.


    ¡°Indeed,¡± he said. ¡°I did not really believe you would flee. You have been En a very long time.¡±


    ¡°Longer than you have been alive,¡± I said. ¡°And I will be En after you are dead.¡±


    He snorted. ¡°Truly, this is Sharru-kin¡¯s daughter before me,¡± he said. ¡°Not that I expected any less. Do you know whose son I am?¡±


    ¡°The Lugal of Unug¡¯s,¡± I said. ¡°The former one, before he was replaced by a man of my brother Rimush¡¯s choosing.¡±


    ¡°The true one,¡± he said. ¡°The one whose family ruled in the South for generations. I am only taking back what is mine by right. I have been waiting for this moment my entire life, but your brother¡¯s death presented the perfect opportunity for me to rally my forces and strike.¡±


    ¡°But why do you claim Urim and Lagash?¡± I asked. ¡°Why not be king in Unug alone, as your father was?¡± This, truly, was a dangerous man, I thought, and I must be careful what I say. Dangerous because he spoke so calmly that it was easy to forget he had not put away his sword, and that it was stained with red.


    ¡°The ancient royal lines of Urim and Lagash were extinguished with Kaku and Kikuid,¡± he said dismissively. ¡°The close bond between our three cities would never continue if I became ruler of Unug alone. The governors put in place by Rimush are too eager to cling to their own power and too loyal to your brother to ever acknowledge the truth. I am the only true king left among them.¡±


    I gritted my teeth. I had known a True King once myself. ¡°You have sinned gravely against the gods,¡± I said. ¡°Disgracing and invading their temples, slaughtering their priests--you will never rule one city, let alone three, if you disrespect the gods. Gilgamesh himself, whom you call your ancestor, was two-thirds divine, with the goddess Ninsun for a mother. He knew how to give the gods what was due to them.¡±


    ¡°You would speak to me of Gilgamesh?¡± said Lugal Anna. His voice raised in volume and he took a step forward.  ¡°I am no priest-king like the Ensis of old; I did not come here to debate religious matters.¡±


    I rose to my feet, suddenly aware that if I was about to die I did not want to die sitting on the floor. ¡°Why did you come here at all?¡± I said desperately. ¡°We are not warriors. Women and priests. That is what you will find here, and at the Eana of Inanna and An. Even Lugal Kaku kept his war against my brother from our gates. Why have you come like a conqueror to the temples of the gods?¡±


    Lugal Anna studied the point of his sword. ¡°Do you know why Lugal Kaku¡¯s Rebellion was such a spectacular failure, all those years ago?¡± he asked. ¡°It was not for any lack of strength or loyalty from the men of Lagash, Unug and Urim. It was not even truly because of Kaku¡¯s character, and you know as well as I he was a fat craven and as oily as a Buranuna gubi. The gods cannot abide an oathbreaker, and eating until you are as round as the moon is no sure way to make Nanna love you, so perhaps Kaku was doomed from the start? But his gravest misstep, his most egregious error, was this: how greatly he underestimated your family. He had no idea the lengths you Northerners will go to for power. That much is certain from the way he treated you. When Rimush ascended the throne, did Kaku really ask you to go back to Akkade? Did he really think he could get any member of your family to take a crown off their head just by asking nicely?¡±


    At first I did not realize he was expecting an answer. But he was staring at me, so I said at last, ¡°He did not ask. He ordered me to go, just as you did. And I would not do it then, just as I will not do it now.¡±


    Lugal Anna laughed delightedly. He had a high-pitched laugh, the complete opposite of my father or brothers¡¯ deep rumble. It was so much at odds with his appearance that it unnerved me. ¡°The man had the brains of a muskmelon!¡± He crowed. ¡°I asked you to go, but I never really believed you would. I know who I am dealing with, and Kaku did not. With tact like that I believe he almost deserved what your brother did to him. Almost.¡± He drew closer, and I tensed. ¡°Do you know what happened to Lugal Kaku?¡±


    ¡°He was sent to one of my brother¡¯s labor camps,¡± I said. The memory of the last time I ever saw Rimush rose sluggishly to the surface of my mind like a bubble of marsh gas.


    ¡°Yes, though he did not make it there,¡± said Lugal Anna. ¡°The trek through the desert was too much for him, and I was told by those who saw that the vultures feasted on him for more days than he lasted alive. All that flesh was put to good use at last.¡±


    I winced.


    The Lugal flashed me an incongruous smile. ¡°Kaku did not know the cruelty of Rimush until it was too late, and thereafter he knew its full force,¡± he went on. ¡°Now I, on the other hand, believe I have a very realistic understanding of precisely what you Northern rock-hoppers are capable of. My father did as well. He warned Kaku and Kikuid to be careful, to bide their time and seek further alliances, that Urim, Unug and Lagash united could never throw off the Akkadian yoke, that the wrath of a prince of Akkade was like the wrath of Ninurta of the mighty mace. But they did not listen, and your brother tore down the walls of Urim and sent them all to his camps to work for his Empire until they died, of thirst, of hunger, of burnt and blistered skin, of cruelty. Do you know how my father Melemanna died?¡±


    ¡°How could I know that?¡± I managed to say.


    ¡°A fair question. But you should know. After all, it was your own brother who sent him trekking through the desert, to quarry stone in the sun three hundred miles away from his home, his city, his family and his god. When he was there, he saw a pile of bricks fall and pin a man beneath them. And he broke from the line to free that man, began scrabbling with his bloody hands to help him. He managed to free the man¡¯s body, but one of his arms remained trapped beneath the pile. So my father seized the nearest libation jar and poured oil on the man¡¯s arm, hoping that he might be able to pull it free that way. He might have succeeded, except that other men of my father¡¯s work-team, seeking the overseer¡¯s favor, ran to him and told him that my father had broken the rules.¡± Lugal Anna paused. His face was as distant and blank and unknowable as a stone relief.


    ¡°The guards took hold of my father, and the overseer approached my father calmly. ¡®You have wasted good oil,¡¯ he told him, gesturing to the man whose arm was still trapped beneath the bricks. ¡®There is a much easier solution to the problem.¡¯ And he swung his sword and cut the trapped man¡¯s arm off at the shoulder.¡¯ He ordered one of the guards to bring the man to a doctor, to have his wound sewn up and stanched and thereafter have him returned to work. Then he said to my father, ¡®A man with one hand may still be of some use to his master. But a criminal¡¯s hands are attainted, and no good honest work may come of them. That was not your oil to take, nor had you received an order to leave the line.¡¯ And with his sword he took both my father¡¯s hands.¡± Lugal Anna was staring at his own hands now. When he looked up at me, his face was shining, his eyes were shining, his gaze was a terrible hot javelin of light that I felt on my face and breast and hands. ¡°After that, of course, he could do no more work for the camp, so they did as they did with all those who break rules. They skinned him alive.¡±


    I tried to find something to say, and could not. I stood and felt the hot and hateful burn of Lugal Anna¡¯s eyes, those eyes which I will never forget though I live to be as old as Enki.


    Again he laughed, and again his laugh made me shudder. ¡°I was only a boy when this happened. I would have died there with him, or else I would have perished in the long desert march like so many others, but my mother hid me when the soldiers came looking for me and told them I had died the night the walls came down. There were so many bodies to be counted, and so many of them children¡¯s bodies, that no one asked her further. So how did I come to hear this story? Not every man who labored under your brother¡¯s corvee died there, though every man wished to. There were a few who made it back to Unug or Adab or one of the other rebellious cities, just a few, but enough to let their stories spread to royal ears. Rimush saw to that. What would be the good of crushing us into the dust if we did not know what he did to our people? How else was he to make us obedient to the rule of the North, to the True King, the King of the World?¡± He spat on the ground, a sudden, sharp gesture that made me flinch. ¡°Rimush knew only that one way to rule, through fear and hate, and Manishtushu after him. But there are other forces that govern men¡¯s lives, and the wise king knows to get them under his control early and completely. Even Sharru-kin was aware of that, or else he never would have sent you here to be En.¡±


    ¡°And so you have attacked the temples,¡± I said and the words seemed heavy as iron.


    ¡°You say I do not give the gods their due, but never say I do not know their importance,¡± said Lugal Anna. ¡°A man¡¯s heart is in his god, and a man¡¯s god completes his strength. True blood of the ancient Lugals of Unug though I am, it would not be enough for me to break the power of the king. I must also break the power of the gods. I know what the temples give to their people. I know the sway they hold over this land. I will destroy the temples of Unug and Urim and Lagash, but when I have my throne I will rebuild them. I will fill them with people I can trust, men and women loyal to my line and not your father¡¯s. The next En of Urim will be a daughter or a sister-in-law of mine. The next songs that fill my people¡¯s hearts will be hers. Don¡¯t think of what I have done to the temples as a crime against the gods. Think of it as an act of praise for Them. I do not want them to be serviced any longer by the kin of conquerors and their sycophants.¡± Then he said the words that had chilled my heart years before when I thought them myself, that I had prayed to Nanna in thanks that Kaku had been too much a fool to realize. ¡°If we are ever to be free of the Empire, we must be free of you.¡±


    He grabbed me.


    I cried out in shock but he clapped a hand over my mouth, rough and filthy with the ashes of my temple. His muscles were like rods of iron, and I knew I had no chance of resistance. My body went limp as I felt him half-drag, half-carry me outside the giparu. ¡°I have another gift for you,¡± I heard him say as my heart pounded in my ears. The aga tumbled from my head and I did not see where it fell.


    When we crossed the threshold he pushed me to the ground and I crumpled, scrunching my eyes shut in horrified anticipation of what he might do next. I flinched a moment later when I felt something hit me in the side. I opened my eyes hesitantly and saw with surprise that he had thrown a dagger on top of me.


    ¡°Here, Enship,¡± he said. ¡°Take this ornament. It becomes you.¡± Then he kicked me, hard, in the stomach.


    He did not even turn around to speak his final words to me, but I heard them drifting towards me like vultures in the fetid air, loud against the crunching of his boots on the rubble of the temple as he walked away. ¡°I would use that dagger if I were you, En. My men will do much worse than that blade if they catch you. Save yourself the trouble and get out of here. This is not your city anymore.¡±

 Chapter 12

    Lying in my fine bed on this sleepless night, Inanna, smelling the soft perfumes of the giparu, knowing that Elamitu sleeps nearby and that tomorrow will bring a breakfast of porridge after the morning prayer and another audience with my great-niece, it is not easy to remember that moment when I lay in the dust, clutching my stomach in the place where Lugal Anna had kicked me. For in this moment I am En, but in that moment, I was not, could not be, because I had no god.


    I had prayed to Nanna as I had never prayed to him, begged and pleaded for his intercedence, and though I was alive yet, it was not in any way that I recognized. My power had been stripped from me. I had no place to turn, my temple ruined, my people scattered, my god torn from me as easily as a garment under rough hands. I was no En, no princess, nothing. I can only liken the feeling to a person who has lost their vision or their hearing. I, too, had lost one of my senses, had been deprived of one of the ways in which I understood the world. What was left was a raw, throbbing place of emptiness, a painful new landscape to navigate, and I did not know if I had the strength for it alone. I did not want to know this new Urim, this Urim that had no Nanna in it. I did not want to walk forth into a night without the moon. No tears came from my eyes, but my body shuddered with sobs so heavy I felt them in my face and breast and belly. A thin wheezing escaped my lips. I who had prided myself on my powers of poetry and song was rendered speechless, a keening and insensible thing, like Lilitu when she fled the smashing mace of Gilgamesh.


    For a time I lay where he had left me, but the sun was scorching and I knew that even if Lugal Anna¡¯s men did not harm me, Utu would. I crawled into the shade of the giparu¡¯s walls, but no sooner had I found a spot that seemed safe than I heard the voices of men, far too close. Then, flinging the last of my strength into my quaking legs, I ran from the giparu. I ran until I was at the very gates of the temple complex, and only then did I turn back.


    The air was so choked with smoke I could barely see, and I did not know any longer if my eyes stung from the fire or my own tears. The shouts of men and women were more faded and distant than they had been, but I did not know if that was good or bad. All I knew was that I had to leave. Even if Lugal Anna had forced me to this point, at least, I thought, I was choosing to leave for myself. I tried not to think of what had become of the temple¡¯s people, especially the ones who had chosen to stay. I promised I would return as soon as I was able, that I was a daughter of Sharru-kin and I would not be afraid. Then, with my back to the House of the Great Light, I began to walk downhill, away from the temple, clutching in my right hand the dagger my enemy had given me in hope I would use it.


    I realized that I held not just any dagger but a temple¡¯s ritual dagger, the same sort used for sacrifices and mourning mortification. I did not want to know where the Lugal had gotten it from. Why had he given it to me? Why had he not taken my head as he had taken Garashang¡¯s? Was it cruelty, or compassion? Or was it fear--did Lugal Anna still have some fear yet of what my brother might do to him if I was harmed by his hand? No, I thought. My brother is dead. Naram-Sin is king now, my brother¡¯s eldest son. But when I closed my eyes to imagine him coming to my rescue I saw only the bawling baby in Manishtushu¡¯s arms.


    As I walked through the streets of Urim, quiet and empty in a way that disturbed me, I considered my options. The first was that which Lugal Anna had offered me, and that I would not take. If I stayed in Urim I was certain he would find me sooner or later, and in any case I did not know where in Urim I could be safe. Unug was no place for me either, and with no supplies and little to protect me from the sun I would not survive overland travel to Borsippa or one of the other nearby cities outside Lugal Anna¡¯s control. If I could reach Urim¡¯s docks I might be able to board a ship, use my gold earrings as payment for my passage, but where would I go? There were not likely to be any ships sailing North when Lugal Anna had declared open rebellion against Akkade. Might I seek asylum in a foreign land, in Gubla or some Elamite city? I spoke only the two languages of our own land, and besides I did not think any Elamite would be welcoming to the sister of the two kings who had warred against his countrymen for decades. Perhaps, I thought grimly, I should never have left the temple at all. Perhaps I should have gone down to the grave of En Galusakar and all the others and laid myself across the earth and admitted defeat. But I could not do that. Desperate though my situation was, I would not allow Lugal Anna, who had disrespected gods and kings alike, to be the cause of my death.


    ¡°I know you,¡± someone said from behind me. I felt a momentary burst of fear, but when I turned it was no soldier but a scrawny young boy, no more than ten. He held a heavy-looking stick made of bundled reeds in one hand. A dead lizard dangled from the other.


    ¡°You are the En,¡± the boy said. He did not bow or place his hand at the level of his nose, just stood there with his lizard and killing-stick, regarding me as curiously as if I were a creature in a menagerie. I realized I must look very little like an En, without my aga and with my hair and robes in disarray. Yet still, he had recognized me.


    ¡°How do you know my face?¡± I asked the boy.


    ¡°I saw you at the temple about a week ago,¡± he said. ¡°My mother and I had come to lay an offering on Greatmother Ningal¡¯s altar for my brother Urun. He was in bed with fever after a mashkim stung his heel when he was swimming. You stopped to talk to us. You said you would name him in your prayers to Nanna.¡±


    I nodded, though there were so many names in my prayers night after night that I did not remember this one. ¡°What became of Urun your brother?¡± I asked gently.


    ¡°He is recovered,¡± said the boy. ¡°We were planning to go back to the temple soon to thank you and the gods, but now--¡± His voice trailed off. ¡°Has the temple been destroyed like the one in Unug? Is that why you¡¯ve left?¡±


    I hesitated. ¡°War has come to the temple, yes,¡± I said. ¡°Just as it came to all of Urim. And many of the priests have left there, not just me. But I know that the temple will be rebuilt soon.¡± What I did not say was that it might be Lugal Anna who did the rebuilding, just as he had promised.


    ¡°Then where are you going?¡± he asked.


    I could not lie to a child. ¡°I don¡¯t know,¡± I said.


    The boy nodded. ¡°Would you come home with me, then?¡± he asked. ¡°My brother has been wanting to meet you. We have bread and beer, and once I bring home this monitor there will be meat, too.¡± He added the last with no small amount of pride, lifting the dead lizard to show me more clearly.


    Perhaps it was the plainness of the boy¡¯s speech, or the hunger in my belly or the pain in my breast or the heat beating down on my bare head. But with one more backwards glance to the smoking peak of the temple complex, I told him I should be delighted to join him, and I followed him down one of the narrow streets of Urim. I was not sure of where I would end up but sure at least that I had a place to go, that I should not have to use the dagger of Lugal Anna nor face the shameful shadows in the afterlife, pinch-faced and feathered, asking me why I left, why I gave up, why I did not stay to die with the old Ens in the ruins of the temple. To this day I cannot say why I fled the way I did, except that I was the daughter of a king and the sister of kings and I would take any chance I could to survive. To be kicked and spat on, to flee, to follow a little stranger into his family¡¯s house, all this and more I could do, but to die in the sun unmourned was beneath me.


    When we came to the door of a modest home, the young boy said simply, ¡°Mother, this is the En.¡±


    I thought the woman poking at a fire in the center of the dark and smoky room was going to faint, so wide did her eyes bulge and so frantically did she get to her knees and place her hand at the level of her nose.


    ¡°Please,¡± I said. ¡°There is no need.¡± I beckoned the woman to stand, which she did hesitantly and without taking her eyes from me.


    ¡°But Enship!¡± the woman stammered. ¡°I did not--I should have--forgive the simplicity of our home, forgive the dirt, I should have cleaned, I would have, if I had--¡± her single eyebrow furrowed and she turned from me to her son, fixing him with a look of rage. ¡°Shulgi, you dumukir! You bring the Chief Wife of the Moon into my house without warning your poor mother? If your father were here he would beat you bloody.¡±


    She took the lizard from the boy¡¯s hands and shuffled to the back of the room where another, older boy was sitting on the edge of a bed-frame grinding grain in a clay vessel. At the sight of me he leapt to his feet and gave me a deep bow.


    ¡°A week ago I shook with fever and could not leave my bed, but now I am healed,¡± said Urun, beaming. ¡°I still have a scar from the fish¡¯s sting, but it will remind me to be careful where I place my feet in murky water. Thank you, Enship.¡±


    I smiled. ¡°It was not me,¡± I said. ¡°It was by the mercy of Nanna and Ningal that your health has been restored. Trust in the gods and they will never abandon you.¡± Like water overflowing an irrigation-ditch, I could not stop the words that flowed unbidden from my lips. I had kissed so many brows and daubed at so many tears with those words that I did not even need to think of a response. But even as I said them, I wondered if they were true. The mercy of Nanna and Ningal. What mercy had they shown their own shrine? Myself? Garashang? Yet the boy was nodding at me seriously. He trusted me, he believed me, and I realized with a sudden jolt that my simple, thoughtless words had shaped the outcome of his life. If he grew to manhood, he would be as dutiful a worshipper of Nanna as any man of Urim. Behind me his mother clasped her hands and sighed a joyful prayer.


    At midday we took long straws to share a pot of beer, with a hunk of barley bread and a thin soup of lizard meat for each of us. I had to use all my strength to keep from devouring the food like a beggar. To keep my mind from the gnawing in my stomach I listened to the woman¡¯s story. Her name was Ninninnata, Harrier-hawk, and the family¡¯s trade was in making pottery for local sale. Beaming with pride, she showed me some of their work stacked neatly against the walls of the little house, pointing out which pots were her own and which were Urun¡¯s. Lugal Anna¡¯s rebellion meant they had few customers at the moment, which is why she was sending the boys out more and more to catch little animals for food. Urun was the head of the household now, since her husband had died of an illness of the stomach. Her initial discomfort melted away the more she talked, and soon she was going on as though we were two old friends, while the boys lost interest in the conversation and scurried off to play. It amazed me that a person could be so full of joy, given what was going on in the city.


    ¡°You are an example to all women,¡± I told her. ¡°To raise such fine children and run your business and to keep sorrow from settling on your household, even when there is war in the streets of Urim. I have served the gods for many years, and it can be said I have run a business, but I have never raised children. Nor have I kept sorrow from my house, it seems.¡±


    We were quiet for a time. Then she fixed me with a curious look and asked me, ¡°Do you know the proverb of the elephant and the wren?¡±


    ¡°I do,¡± I said. ¡°The proud elephant boasts, ¡®I am the greatest and mightiest, behold, I am a creation of the gods!¡¯ but the little wren whispers in his ear, ¡®I may be small, but I, too, am a creation of the gods.¡¯¡±


    Ninninnata smiled. ¡°The moral is the same, but I know it a different way. The proud elephant boats, ¡®I am the greatest and mightiest, behold, I have taken a shit!¡¯ but the little wren whispers, ¡®It may be small, but I, too, can take a shit.¡¯¡± She threw back her head and laughed and I laughed with her, laughed away the tension in my joints, the throbbing in my brow and the ache in my heart. I thought of my long-ago days with the galaturra. Perhaps this was yet another story with its Northern and its Southern version. Old as I was and long as I had lived in Shumeru, I was still an outsider, even in small and subtle ways, and this was a sobering thought that cut off my laughter in time for me to hear the words Ninninnata was saying.


    ¡°Everyone can do something,¡± she said. ¡°Everyone can change their world and everyone has their part to play, no matter how small or weak they seem. No man is truly greater than another. Ensis and Lugals play the game of twenty squares, with men for pegs and cities the holes they move them to, but when the dust settles and the smoke clears it is only that, a game. We are all the creations of the gods, and if we place our trust in them, and only them, we shall never be lost. These are the words I think to myself when the horns of war sound, when there is a drought, when a loved one is taken ill. The gods grant us many trials, yes, but also many blessings. If we weather the storm of their wrath, we are rewarded with the balm of their favor. So it has been for a thousand, thousand years in the Land Between the Two Rivers and beyond the Two Rivers to the ends of the earth.¡± She smiled again, and it was a smile that made her look older. Older, but happy. ¡°So you see, Enship, that is how I do all the things I do. This Lugal Anna is nothing more than a proud, trampling elephant who has just dropped a great heap of dung and thinks it makes him better than the wren or the turtle or the cow. An elephant trumpeting into empty air, just like his father, just like Lugal Kaku. Just as they all are.¡±


    ¡°After the defeat and capture of Lugal Kaku,¡± I said hesitantly. ¡°When my brother meted his punishment upon the people of Urim. Did you--¡±


    She understood what I was asking her at once. ¡°My father,¡± she said. ¡°And two of my uncles, with their wives. We never saw them again.¡±


    ¡°I am sorry,¡± I said.


    She shrugged and said, ¡°It was many years ago, Enship. And it was not your fault.¡± And in all my long life no words have ever sounded sweeter to my ear.


    When the meal was done Ninninnata sent her sons to the market with a cart loaded with pots, warning them to be back well before sunset. ¡°I never watch them go without a little fear these days,¡± she said. ¡°But there is no other way. You look tired, Enship. Would you like to rest?¡± She gestured to the family¡¯s bed, its simple stretched-leather frame a far cry from the ornate wooden bed of the giparu. But I thanked her repeatedly and sank into that simple cot as readily as if it were the bed of a queen or a goddess. As weary as I had ever been, my eyes closed and I was asleep in moments.


    And you, my Lady Inanna, as you had done for my father long ago, sent me a dream.


    I saw you standing before me in all your glory, as you must have looked to Dumuzid on your wedding night, as you must have looked before you descended to the Underworld. Wings and vines and swords sprang out from your shoulders, the triple cow¡¯s horns of divinity from your brow, and a trickle of life-giving water from beneath your feet. You clutched in one hand tablets on which were inscribed the me, and in the other hand your shining rod and ring. Your one-sleeved gown was made of sunlight, so bright it hurt to look at. Your ears drooped with heavy rings and there were ropes of lapis and carnelian, malachite and jet, around your neck and wrists and ankles, and a studded ring in your nostril. The part in your hair was brightened with the saffron of Akkad, your lashes were black with the rich dark kohl of Sumer, and your lips were bloody. Your brows met in the middle, a curving dark line like a river furrowing mud, and below them you had the eyes of a lioness, amber and brown. You smelled of perfume and ripe fruit, of rain and fresh-dug earth, of crusted sweat and spilled beer and the stinking guts of the dead.The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.


    And all at once it became clear to me.


    I had been sworn to Nanna as a child, but I had never really chosen him. I was the daughter of Ishtar¡¯s chosen king, born into an Ishtar-city, and I had lived my adult life in the South, the South which is all Inanna¡¯s country, which has Inanna flowing through it as the Buranuna and the Idigina, the Slow River and the Swift, flow through its earth. Though I had written hymns to all the gods of North and South, no god had ever moved me so much as one, and no god had ever moved within me so much as one. Desperate in my dark hour of need I had called on Nanna, but he had not listened and I had fled. Just as in life, I had deferred to the power of the father when I should have been looking within, to the power of the daughter. Sharru-kin¡¯s daughter I was, but he could not save me. Nanna¡¯s bride I was, but he could not save me. Only a woman could save me now.


    I looked into your flaming eyes, bright with laughter and fury, lust and rage. You did not speak to me, yet I knew what you wanted me to do.


    When I awoke it was evening, and Ninninnata was taking linen-wrapped clay blocks from the place beneath the bed to mold them into pots. I asked her if I might spare some of the clay. ¡°I will not take much, I swear to you.¡±


    ¡°You may take anything you wish, Enship,¡± said Ninninnata graciously, offering me a handful. I shaped it into a tablet, staining both my fingers and the sleeves of my robe but not caring about the mess. There was of course no stylus in the house, for no member of the family could read or write, but I had something better. He had told me to take it, to use it. ¡°It becomes you.¡± So use it I would.


    With the point of Lugal Anna¡¯s dagger, I pressed cuneiform markings into the clay.


    Nin me sharra, ud dalla eda, I wrote. Lady of All the Divine Powers, Bright-Shining One.


    Munus zid melem, gurru ki ang An Urasha. Righteous woman clothed in radiance, most beloved granddaughter of An and Urash, Heaven and Earth.


    Nugig anna sukhkeshe galgala. Mistress of Heaven, clad in glorious jewels.


    Aga zidde ki ang, namenna tumma. She who loves the aga and the office of Enship.


    When Shukaletuda found you and ravished you where you slept in the shade of a tree, your revenge was terrible. You filled the wells with blood and rained hail and thunder down upon the earth, so hard that nothing could grow. When Dumuzid was arrogant and did not mourn you, even with tears of love in your eyes you commended him into the hands of the demons of dust. In a hundred stories I had seen the splendor of your love and the devastation of your rage, both terrible, both wonderful. Banished, disgraced, humiliated, blasphemed against, I would turn now to the only one who could save me. I would write, write until I ran out of clay and had to keep on writing in my mind, write until supper was ready and I gently refused because my stomach was a seething cauldron, write until Ninninnata and her sons who had saved me had gone to bed with worried glances and I was sitting in the light of an oil lamp, rocking back and forth on the dirt floor of the house, whispering your name that pulsed red and hot like a wound in me, Inanna, Inanna, Inanna.


    I stayed in the house of Ninninnata and her sons for more than a week. I helped Ninninnata cook and clean and kept her company during the long, quiet days when her sons would wheel their cart through the streets, selling as much as they could to those people who had not fled or retreated to the depths of their homes. When the boys were home I told them stories of the gods and practiced with them the songs of Nanna that their mother had taught them while she looked on, beaming with pride. I even learned to help shape the pots, though I could not place my hands in clay without thinking of the hymn I was composing piece by piece, the greatest and most powerful Inanna-song I had ever written for my greatest and most powerful need.


    If my presence put a strain on their small food supply or attracted unwanted attention, they spoke no word of it. Ninninnata was something of a gossip, and whispers of the new guest she was hosting crept swiftly through the neighborhood. It was not long before her neighbors were coming to call, making up one excuse or another when really I knew they were hoping to catch a glimpse of me. I could not hold that against them. They were brave to risk the danger of the streets for a blessing, and I obliged them as well I could. Many of them, with smiling faces, would tell me how I had prayed on behalf of them or a relative, laid my hands on their child, accepted their small offering. I listened to these stories with a mild but vacant expression, as though they were speaking of En Galusakar or some other ghost of the past and not of myself. So many, so many! I am ashamed to say how few of them I remembered, how few faces and names and stories were familiar to me. But that is the price of a life spent helping other people.


    Each day I greeted graciously the humble people of Urim who knew me and whom I did not know. And each night I sang my song of Inanna, and I waited.


    One morning a neighbor hammered on the door calling for Ninninnata. When she opened the door carefully he all but burst with excitement to tell her that ¡°The king himself marches through the streets of Urim! The war is over!¡±


    I rose from the place where I had been sitting. ¡°Which king?¡± I asked hesitantly.


    Bowing deeply before me, he said, ¡°Enship. It is Naram-Sin, come from Akkade. As soon as he arrived the rebel¡¯s armies began to scatter. They did battle for but a single day before the one who called himself Lugal Anna was subdued.¡± His words struck me like a thunderbolt.


    ¡°You must go to him, Enship,¡± said Ninninnata. ¡°It is safe now, thank the gods!¡±


    ¡°Where would I find Naram-Sin?¡± I asked the man at the door.


    ¡°He has taken up residence in the palace of the Lugal of Urim,¡± said the man. ¡°I would be honored to show you the way.¡±


    I turned back to Ninninnata, whose hands now clasped protectively the hands of her two sons. I kissed them each in turn. ¡°I will not forget your kindness,¡± I said. ¡°You shall be remembered to the king, and to the gods as well.¡± And I blessed her and her children in the name of Nanna and Ningal, and of Inanna too. Then I removed my golden bracelets and earrings. ¡°For you,¡± I said. ¡°Sell them and buy whatever you need.¡±


    The roads of Urim are winding and narrow, and the way to the palace of the Lugal was long. But at last we reached the palace gates, damaged by fire but still glorious for all the marks of war. Beside them stood Akkadian guardsmen in their pointed caps and leather tunics.


    I thought of what a strange sight I must make. My robe, which Ninninnata had helped me wash, marked me out to be a zirru, and my hair as ever was braided in Akkadian style, but I no longer wore the aga nor the jewels of a High Priestess. And how was Naram-Sin to recognize his aunt, in any case? He had never even seen me, save one time when he was an infant. Yet as I confidently strode towards the guards outside the palace walls, I had no doubt I would gain an audience with my nephew. Inanna had heard me. From the dark of night you had struck out with your mighty sword, and my exile was at an end.


    ¡°Good day,¡± I said. ¡°Would you go inside and tell my nephew, Naram-Sin, the King of the World, that his aunt the En Kheduana, Chief Wife of the Moon at Ur, requests to speak with him?¡±


    The guards looked at one another curiously. I had spoken to them in Akkadian, and this had plainly confused them. Could I be who I was claiming to be, unadorned and arriving by myself, accompanied by no one save a commoner who had scurried off into shadows at the sight of the palace gates?


    ¡°The streets of Ur are dangerous these days,¡± said one of the soldiers. ¡°How are we to know you are who you say?¡±


    ¡°By my seal,¡± I said. I reached under the neckline of my robe for the cord from which dangled my cylinder. I held it before the faces of the guards and watched their eyes grow wide. In moments I was being marched through the shabby halls of the Great Household of Urim. It had been stripped of most of its finery, its windows broken and its floors strewn with debris. The Lugal¡¯s reception room seemed in better condition, with bright-burning oil lamps and freshly-swept floors, but it was filled with men like those who had accompanied me inside--soldiers in pointed helms and leather armor, with loud voices and rough hands that drifted from the handles of their swords to the points of their beards. Anyone could see that this was no comfortable seat of power but a war-camp, the makeshift residence of a king who had come to put down a rebellion.


    The raucous soldiers grew quiet as I entered the room. I felt their curious eyes upon me as I strode confidently towards the throne, from which another pair of eyes was watching.


    Broad-shouldered and long-bearded. This was not the weak and broken Manishtushu I had last seen, but Manishtushu the young man I remembered from before I was En, quick to laugh and slow to pass judgment, nursing his private anger. Then again it was not Manishtushu at all, I reminded myself. I was not a young girl any longer, and the man on the throne was not my brother but his son.


    ¡°Naram-Sin,¡± a functionary at his side announced him, following it with the familiar litany of titles. But I noticed there was a new one among them. He was not only ¡°King of the Four Corners,¡± but ¡°God of Akkade.¡± A god? I thought. I was married to a god, yet even I did not claim that title. After a lifetime of service to the gods, I did not know what to think of a man who called himself one. This was a thing so far beyond my knowledge that I pushed it aside for the time being. There were other, more pressing subjects to attend to.


    My mind turned to the thought of my last meeting with his father; of his shame and our sorrow and of all those unanswered letters. I prayed that this meeting would go more smoothly. Yet I felt no fear, no apprehension. I was coasting upon the thermal heat of my last and greatest song to Inanna, and I knew that with all your power behind me my victory was assured. With no one to announce me, I did it myself. ¡°I am the En Kheduana,¡± I said. ¡°Chief Wife of the Moon and servant of the gods, daughter of Sharru-kin, the King of the World, and sister to your own father.¡±


    Naram-Sin rose to his feet. ¡°I am happy to see that you are unharmed, Aunt,¡± he said. ¡°Happy, though surprised. And not just because you have a reputation for tenacity, as do all members of our family. There were whispers in the streets that the En was sheltering in a commoner¡¯s house somewhere in Urim, and that she was even accepting visitors, offering them blessings and prayers. But none of my soldiers could ever find out where you were hiding. No one would share your location with another unless they could be certain you would come to no harm.¡± He smiled wryly at me. ¡°Your people love you, Enship. I hope that mine will display as much loyalty to me.¡±


    ¡°My people are your people as well,¡± I said. ¡°By showing respect for the things they value, you have already begun to earn their love.¡±


    ¡°Do you speak of the city, the god, or of yourself?¡± he said.


    Now it was my turn to smile. ¡°They have been most generous,¡± I said. ¡°I can tell you where to find the family who gave me shelter. If you will reward them, I would appreciate it greatly.¡±


    ¡°Of course,¡± said Naram-Sin. ¡°Though there is much to be done here. I suspect you have come here not just to make your presence known, but to confirm that the rebellion has been put down and the streets of Urim are safe again, because you wish to return to the temple?¡±


    ¡°As soon as possible,¡± I said.


    ¡°I can assure you, Lugal Anna will trouble us no more. But as to your request, let me at least have a chance to offer you my hospitality,¡± said Naram-Sin. ¡°Stay here for the night. Bathe and rest yourself, and dine with me and my generals as our honored guest.¡±


    I nodded stiffly. ¡°For the night only. And only if you agree to return me to the temple tomorrow, and I am allowed to enter alone before you yourself make your entrance.¡±


    ¡°As you wish, Aunt,¡± he said, amused. He clapped his hands and the man at his side who had announced him stiffened. ¡°Take my father¡¯s sister to the bedroom of the Lugal¡¯s queen. Give her fresh robes and a bath and servant women to wait on her, all the comforts we have available. She will dine with us tonight seated at my right hand. And let us all thank the gods for having delivered her to us; chief among them my namesake, Nanna-Sin, the moon that overhangs both North and South.¡±


    The two women given me by my nephew were clumsy and ill-trained, with none of the nuance I had come to expect from Elamitu. Even Ilum Palilis was more skilled than they. From the ample bodies and pretty faces of these girls I could imagine where their talents lay, and why my nephew had brought them all this way with his army. I smiled at the realization that Naram-Sin, though he called himself a god, was prone to the same vices as his father.


    I sank into a bronze tub of hot water with a sigh of relief that seemed to come from my very bones. Looking around at the shabby chamber that had once been home to the Lugal¡¯s wife, I wondered what had happened to her, and to the Lugal of Urim himself. I hoped they were safe somewhere, far away from the devastation of their city. I knew they probably were not, and thanked my own good fortune.


    There were no women¡¯s jewels to be had, nor any cosmetics. But my servants draped me in a one-shouldered Sumerian garment, as blue as the sea itself, and I tried not to wonder where it had come from. I pulled out my cylinder seal and hung it proudly over the front of my dress. It was my only physical claim to being En; I would not hide it.


    Dinner was emmer porridge, a simple roast of mutton and great quantities of wine and beer, the food of an army on the move. I spent most of the meal silent, still too drained from the events of the past days to have much interest in conversation. Naram-Sin was in a merry mood, and raised many toasts throughout to Akkade and Sin and Ishtar, to me, to his generals, to himself. As the plates were being cleared he dismissed his generals, saying that he wished to speak with me alone.


    ¡°I know you have had a difficult ordeal, Aunt,¡± he said, draining the last of his wine. ¡°And I will not begrudge you your silence. But I would have you know that I wish us to be friends. I admire you for your long and successful Enship, and for the powerful influence you have exerted over both North and South through your writings. Perhaps, isolated here in Urim as you are, you do not even realize the extent of this influence. Your songs are being sung across the Land Between the Two Rivers. In the North we speak not only of Sin but of Nanna, not only of Ishtar but of Inanna. No man can call himself educated if he does not speak Emengir.¡±


    ¡°It pleases me to hear these things,¡± I said. ¡°Truly, it does. But you are right: my heart is heavy with the violence and turmoil that has touched my city and my temple. I can only think of the work that must be done.¡±


    ¡°I would like to have you as my ally in the completion of that work,¡± he said. ¡°You gave my uncle your counsel the last time there was war here--though he did not take it--and you counseled my father as well.¡±


    I wondered how much of the truth Naram-Sin knew, and whether Manishtushu had told his son how he had gained the throne. I decided I would not speak ill of the dead, neither would I raise secrets long-buried. Instead, I said to my nephew, ¡°You are correct on both counts--that I counseled the two kings who came before you, and that one of them didn¡¯t listen to me. And I would have us be allies as well, nephew. So tell me, King of the World: now that the rebellion has been put down and peace reigns once again, what is it that you plan to do?¡±


    His tone grew serious at once. ¡°I will rebuild Urim and Unug,¡± he said. We were speaking Akkadian for the convenience of his men, but I noticed he used the Sumerian names of the cities. ¡°And I will see that you are reinstated, and the temples properly staffed. Criers will send out the word that it is safe to return for any members of your temple who may still be alive in hiding. So that all men may know whose effort has done this, the bricks with which I rebuild what Lugal Anna destroyed shall carry the seal of Naram-Sin.¡± He held up his own tiny cylinder seal, bound like mine on a cord around his neck. I leaned closer. Peering at it, I was surprised to see that it was not quite the same as the family seal used by my brothers and my father. On the head of the king kneeling before Ishtar, above his crown, rose something that had never been there before: the bull¡¯s horns of a deity.


    ¡°You have noticed my addition to the family seal,¡± said Naram-Sin. ¡°I do not just rule by the will of Ishtar, Aunt. I have been touched by the gods themselves, as much as you have. I shall rule this land as king and god both, just as you have been both king¡¯s daughter and god¡¯s wife.¡±


    I stared at him incredulously. ¡°I have heard tell of god-kings in distant lands,¡± I said. ¡°The red men of Musur have such. But here, in the Land Between the Two Rivers? This is a thing that has never been done before.¡±


    ¡°That is high praise from you, Aunt,¡± he said with a smirk. ¡°For was it not you who invented that phrase?¡±


    I laughed, for I had not even realized the connection. In truth it had been Rimush who had first spoken those words, but Naram-Sin was right that they were forever connected with me. ¡°Naram-Sin, my nephew,¡± I said. ¡°We have a saying here, in the South: ¡®my god¡¯s strength completes my strength¡¯. A man¡¯s heart belongs to his god and then to his king, but it seems that you understand that. Lugal Anna, your recent enemy, he understood that as well, but he used the knowledge to take vengeance and sow chaos. You must be careful. Be careful with your crown and with your people. Young as you are, there may be hope for the Empire of your grandfather yet.¡±

 Chapter 13

    Naram-Sin was a man, or god, of his word. He had his men bring me by litter to the very gates of the House of the Great Light at the first light of morning, freshly bathed and well-fed, and he himself stayed behind that I might walk into my temple on my own. When I first stepped from the litter and approached the temple¡¯s ruined gates, more ragged and smoke-stained than the gates of the Lugal¡¯s palace had been, I felt flooded with emotion. Fear at what I might find within was the chiefest among them, but also happiness. I was home. Alone I had left, alone I returned. I whispered a final small blessing to Inanna and started down the path towards the temple sanctum. In the distance I heard the soft chanting of the morning prayer, though there seemed fewer voices than usual.


    ¡°Enship!¡± cried the priests who were the first to see me. They threw themselves to the ground and told me how relieved they were to see me.


    ¡°Where is my High Steward?¡± I asked. ¡°Has Adda survived and returned to the temple?¡±


    ¡°He has,¡± said one of the priests. ¡°We will fetch him for you at once.¡±


    The moment I saw Adda stalking towards me across the temple compound I ran to embrace him. I could tell the gesture made him extremely uncomfortable. When I exclaimed my joy that he was still alive, he sputtered that he had a brother who captained a ship and had weathered the storm in the city of Umma, a few days travel up the Idigina. ¡°It is most joyous to see you, Enship,¡± he said with his typical reserve of feeling. ¡°I have been keeping a record of the temple personnel who have returned, as well as the extent of damages to the temple buildings. When you are ready, I can give you the full report.¡±


    ¡°I wish to know as soon as possible,¡± I said. ¡°Even before the repairs can be scheduled, vacant positions must be filled so that the temple may be reopened for the petitioners.¡± How comfortably the Enship returned to me even before the aga had been placed back on my head.


    My reception chamber was missing its fine chairs, so I stood while Adda recited to me a list of disappearance, death and destruction. The giparu and the inner sanctum of the temple had been ransacked, as had several of the workshops. Everything of value had been stripped excepting for a few hidden emergency stores which Lugal Anna¡¯s men had not been thorough enough to find. The outer gates and some of the outlying buildings had had fires set, but there was less structural damage than I had feared. The captain of the guards had died on the day Lugal Anna came to the temple, along with most of the temple guardsmen, whose bodies had been cleared away by Lugal Anna¡¯s men. Most of the priests and priestesses had returned by now, but many of the craftsmen were missing, especially the men of the House of Metalworkers, who, I had no doubt, had used their own weaponry against the invaders. Among the highest-level priests and priestesses, Baranamtarra had only just reappeared, alive but shaken, and Ugunu and Ningtuku were missing.


    I swallowed. ¡°What of Sagadu, my scribe?¡± I asked.


    ¡°He is at work in the library,¡± said Adda. ¡°It seems that before he fled the temple he was able to save a good number of the records and songs preserved there by throwing them into a satchel, including your own originals. As soon as it was safe to return he began reorganizing the tablets.¡± It was all I could do to keep from clapping my hands with joy. I made the necessary commands to Adda, asking that emergency supplies be distributed and new leaders be appointed for the Tablet House and the libation-priests. They would be declared interim in case Ugunu or Ningtuku should reappear, though I was sorry to say that I rather doubted it. And then I dismissed Adda, took a deep breath, and went to the temple library.


    Yes, Inanna, when I saw him again, I embraced him too. And no, Inanna, he did not break away. ¡°Sagadu,¡± I said. ¡°I owe you a great debt, for protecting all this from Lugal Anna and his army.¡± I gestured to the tablets laid out across the table beside us.


    ¡°And I owe you a debt, Enship,¡± he said. ¡°For insisting that I leave. If I had not, I might not have been able to save anything. We have records going back twenty years and all the great songs of Nanna, as well as those of Inanna. I know that goddess, though your vow of priesthood is to her father, is an especial favorite of yours.¡±


    I smiled. ¡°I have another task for us, Sagadu. This is a powerful song, one that must echo from midday to midnight. A song of Inanna that I must spread out of gratitude, for it is she I credit with my return to the temple and the calming of the storm.¡±


    ¡°Nothing would give me more joy than to help you bring your words to life,¡± he said. And I embraced him again, just to make certain that he was real.


    I could have stayed there in the library with Sagadu for a thousand years, but I knew there were other things I needed to attend to. I was, after all, the En, and my life had been nothing if not a string of moments that did not last as long as I wanted them to.


    The giparu was not yet fit for habitation, and in any case it had been desanctified by Lugal Anna¡¯s intrusion. It would require many repairs and the blessings of a team of priestesses before I could sleep there again. So it was to the quarters of the zirru-priestesses that I now went in search of Baranamtarra. To my surprise the first people I saw there, crouched outside the door beating laundry on a stone, were none other than Elamitu and Ilum-Palilis. Now it was they who ran to embrace me.


    ¡°Did they harm you?¡± I asked them. Ilum shook her head no. Elamitu said ¡°Yes,¡± and when I looked into her eyes I knew how.


    I felt the fires of Inanna welling in my breast. ¡°We shall find the man, or men,¡± I said gravely. ¡°I shall have my nephew bring every rebel soldier who stood with Lugal Anna before you, one by one, so that you may identify the culprit. Then you shall decide the manner of his death, whether he is to be stoned or flayed or bound and flung into the river.¡±


    ¡°It does not matter,¡± Elamitu said.


    ¡°What do you mean?¡± I asked furiously. ¡°Of course it matters! You must not suffer such an insult.¡±


    ¡°I was not a maiden before this and I am not a maiden now, so what have I lost?¡± she said. ¡°If my father is not dead by now, I would not know his face from that of Gilgamesh. Whose virtue have I soiled? And besides: I don¡¯t want anyone else to die. I am alive. And so are you.¡±


    I sighed. I have never really understood Elamitu. Even now when she brings me my bread and beer, though her step is slower than it was, she is the same complacent creature, inscrutable. She is wise in her way, but I do not know whether she is the product of a life of servitude, or the cleverest of us all, who says one tenth of what she knows and who will go down to the Palace of Dust with a smile on her lips. So I let the matter lie, and asked if they could take me to Baranamtarra.Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.


    ¡°She is not well, Mistress,¡± said Ilum-Palilis. ¡°I have never seen her so. She lies in her bed mostly, staring at the wall, and when someone tries to speak to her she either screams at them in rage or begins to weep. She frightens me.¡±


    I gritted my teeth. ¡°Take me to her,¡± I said. And they led me inside and down the narrow hallway, to a little room with a modest cot on which a stout and familiar figure was sitting with her back to the door.


    ¡°Baranamtarra,¡± I said. Ilum and Elamitu scurried away. Alone, always alone, I walked towards her.


    She turned without getting up and I saw that her face was puffy and her eyes red from crying. Once that face had reminded me of a stone. It was as unreadable now as ever, but not, it seemed, from any concerted effort. She was empty, and I knew that in some way her power had been broken.


    Baranamtarra gave me a blank, dull stare. ¡°Is this how it is meant to be?¡± she asked me.


    ¡°How what is meant to be?¡± I replied.


    ¡°That every time a king dies, the earth shudders and tries to shake off its yoke?¡± she said.


    ¡°I did not think you had much love for my family and our line of kings,¡± I said. ¡°Nor for me, for that matter.¡±


    ¡°No,¡± she said. ¡°But I loved this temple. I loved my life here. But now...¡± her voice trailed off and she began to weep, gulping, ugly sobs that contorted her face, the crying of someone who is not accustomed to crying.


    ¡°Baranamtarra,¡± I said gently. ¡°We will rebuild. I have spoken to my nephew, and he has great respect for the gods and their houses. He will give us all the money and resources we need. All will be as it was before, you will see.¡±


    She looked up at me with her swollen eyes and quivering lip and said, ¡°I did this.¡± Her voice was like a death rattle.


    ¡°No,¡± I said. ¡°This was Lugal Anna¡¯s doing. We are not to blame for his blasphemy.¡± I did not understand. How could Baranamtarra, implacable, incorruptible, lover of ritual and tradition, be to blame for what had happened? She had never really approved of my being En, I knew, but I could not believe her capable of conspiring to remove me from power. Not when it would mean so much chaos and upheaval to the temple itself.


    ¡°I have never spoken these words aloud,¡± said Baranamtarra. ¡°But whether I do or do not I am damned all the same.¡± She breathed sharply in and out for a time. Then she said, ¡°I questioned the power of the gods.¡±


    I gaped, uncomprehending.


    There were tears rolling down her cheeks. ¡°I served Nanna for such a long, long time,¡± she said tremulously. ¡°I gave him my dowry, my youth, my life. I served his temple and I saw such wonders, such joy, but also...I have seen maidens bound in marriage to tyrants older than their fathers. I have wiped the brows of children who died screaming in the night with skin like fire. I have poured broth into the mouths of beggars without teeth, without eyes, of lepers and limbless men, the misbegotten of Urim. And I have known sorrow. I loved our old En as though she were my mother, when my own mother had sold me to the temple too young for me to remember. And I saw the En sicken and die and be replaced by--by you, Enship. And there came a day--I do not know precisely when, but there came a day when it was all too much. When I spoke the litanies of Nanna but could no longer feel his light. When I buried another innocent, saw another life spoiled and ruined, and could fathom it no more. And I began to disbelieve. I thought, ¡®Nanna has no power over men and women. We say his words and watch him rise in the sky, but that is his only trick. Either he cares but lacks the power to help, or he does not care at all.¡¯


    She paused, and I saw that she was shaking. ¡°Those who have never served a temple will tell you that everything that happens is the justice of the gods. That when we face misfortune we are being punished for our sins, or else the sins of our ancestors. But I have seen famine and war turn men into beasts and children into spiders, all swollen belly and stick-thin limbs, and I can no longer believe that we are at fault for the ill that we do. So I ask you, En Kheduana, Chief Wife of that Moon which is not always in the sky; how can you still have faith? How can you still believe that what we say and do has any effect on them?¡±


    I swallowed. I was suddenly weak. Her words had squeezed the air from my lungs like a vise. ¡°Everything you say is true,¡± I said. I stepped closer to her. ¡°And yet, it is not true. That is the power of the gods, to be both one thing and another, everything and nothing. They are not there when ill befalls us, yet they are there to give us the strength to endure it. They are harsh and cruel and uncaring, yet they are the source of every joyous moment and every good thing. They are change. And you must not lose your faith, because without the gods there is no change, no moments drifting from one to another, the dark becoming light becoming dark becoming light again. Trust in your gods, Baranamtarra, and their light will return to you.¡±


    She did not speak, only fixed me again with that blank and empty look. Having nothing else to say, I left her.


    I do not know if Baranamtarra followed my advice and put her trust in the gods again. She died only days later, without ever having left that room. And when she died, I mourned for her, not just because I had known her many years and it was the proper thing to do, but because the words she had spoken had shaken me. Still they haunt me sometimes, when I am slaughtering an animal for sacrifice or carrying a basket of ritual ointments or pressing my stylus into clay. How can I know, even I, the High Priestess of Nanna, that what I do has power? And when these thoughts like ghastly gidim chase at my skirts I remember the faces of the people of Urim, of Ninninnata and her neighbors coming to pay their respects, and I know that there, at least, is evidence enough.


    Looking back at my good fortune, I do not know whom I should thank for it if not the gods. Looking back at the bad that has struck me, I do not know whose ire I incited if not theirs. Each moment of darkness led me to a great light; each light was in its time extinguished. Life is a series of moments witnessed by the gods, and whether our little flailings capture their attention, we cannot truly know. But if that belief puts a smile on the face of a sleeping child, or gives comfort to a woman cast out from the only home she has known for thirty years, then tell me, my Lady Inanna, does it really matter?


    In his response to the rebellion of Lugal Anna, Naram-Sin more resembled his father than his uncle. He granted Anna a quick and private death, and rather than punish the people of Unug and Urim and Lagash, Naram-Sin sent them provisions and builders, and they gave him their support in turn. Ships from Urim began to sail North again, and there was no more talk of secession from the Empire. He lavished gifts upon the temple and placed within it a new shrine, small but unmistakable: the shrine of Naram-Sin, of the God and King, Beloved of the Moon and beloved of the people of Urim. Beloved of himself, if truth be told.


    I thought of Ninninnata and her unshakeable faith in the gods, the way the vainglory of kings failed to frighten or impress her. How did a king who was also a god fit into this view of the world? Was his divinity a mark of ultimate arrogance or ultimate piety? Or yet again, was it nothing more than the shrewdness of a king who has seen other kings fall, and wishes to keep from retreading their steps?


    I surveyed the reconstruction efforts of the temple with a wry smirk playing about my lips. I had another god in the family. Only time would tell which one he would grow to resemble: wise Enki or lofty Enlil? Cautious An or cocky Dumuzid? Utu with his righteous wrath or Nanna with his rays of cooling, empty light?


    I, for my part, would be Nanna¡¯s bride again, the bridge between the mortal and immortal worlds, the mistress of his temple. But a woman¡¯s body given in marriage does not always include the offering of her heart, and if my body belonged to Nanna, my heart, I knew now, was another¡¯s. It should not have taken me so long to see it; to realize that each time I defied another¡¯s wishes, each time I yearned and burned for things I was not permitted, each time I did a thing that had never been done before, it was you, speaking through me, breathing through me. My life has been a letter of love to you, Inanna. With the fire of my song and the triumph of my return and the heaviness of my memories, I praise you, hail you, exalt you.

 Epilogue

    2250 BCE


    Urim, House of the Great Light, Giparu of the En


    Two nights ago I saw again my nephew, the king and the god. He is making a state visit to Urim to discuss business with the new Lugal, but also on behalf of his daughter, whom he would groom as my successor.


    I sat with the daughter of Naram-Sin until late, talking of my Enship and my life¡¯s work. Her mother is of the Black-Headed People, and the girl, though she is a bit skinny, has the true black hair of a Southern lady. Her Emengir is very fine: her tutors in Akkade have even contrived to teach her a bit of Emesal. She does not remind me of any of the men in our family, but her reserve puts me in mind of my mother Tashlultum. Then again, I was always good at playing the proper princess in public when my mind was thinking otherwise, so perhaps the girl is not so mild as she seems. Perhaps she has a little of our family¡¯s fire, tempered, I hope, with a little of our compassion as well. She did not speak much last night, but she listened, and for that I am forever grateful. I talked until I did not realize I was still talking, and as I talked it brought back to me the ones I have lost: both the people I once knew and the people I once was. Child, maiden, woman, crone, priestess, princess, outcast, triumphant. I wondered how many of these things she would become in time.


    Her name is Tanittu-kullatu, Praising Everything, but that is Northern-talk and the priests will wash it away in a flood of perfume down the nape of her neck when she takes the holy orders. Dutiful girl that she is, she has already chosen a sacerdotal name: after I die she will become the En Menanna, High Priestess Silence of the Moon. It is a name that suits both her and him, for I have rarely encountered a better listener than either my husband the god, or my grandniece his future bride. She has a markedly long neck and the round cow¡¯s-eyes that any maiden would be envious of. There are young men in Akkade whose hearts are already breaking for her, I am sure of it. But it will be easier for her than it was for me. Her father is no founder or conqueror but the fourth of a dynasty, its kingdom and its ways established. King and god both, Naram-Sin is well-loved and well-feared. The people of Urim shall not begrudge another Northern En, and the future En Menanna was raised in Akkade knowing she would die in Urim. I have even heard that her sisters are to become High Priestesses in other cities. It seems the precedents set by my family and myself are already being followed. If Naram-Sin¡¯s throne has been comfortably warmed by father, uncle and grandfather, perhaps my little grandniece¡¯s throne, if such it can be called, has been warmed for her by me, her way made easier by my own. Perhaps that has been the whole purpose of my Enship, and when I thought I was doing a thing for myself, really it was for her. Let it never be said I did not care about my family. Let it never be said I am not Sharru-kin¡¯s daughter.If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.


    Tanittu, my successor. The closest to a child I will ever have, in truth. She has been granted a gift that I never was, for I would have liked to know En Galusakar, and heard about her duties, her trials, her life. I would have liked to know what it was to be En before I was En, but that is the power of Inanna, who changes us from one thing to another before we even realize the change has been made.


    I lie down in the giparu among the bodies of dead Ens, not so different from my own body except that mine breathes yet, and theirs do not. I lie down attended by the dry-wind gidim of my past, and think of my own death. I do not fear it. I have faced it a thousand times, I have seen the deaths of others, I have heard Lugal Anna scraping the door of my bedchamber. I shall never know fear of death again.


    When I die, I will see them all who went before me. Dubsang, Baranamtarra, Ugunu. My sweet Igiru, who was like a mother to me. Manishtushu, proud, aching, and Rimush with a dagger in his chest and pain in his eyes. My mother, overgrown with weeds. My father will be seated at the right hand of Gilgamesh himself, I do not doubt, or else as a judge among the Anunnaki, the Elder Gods enthroned in the Underworld. But I shall look on them with your fire and make them scatter like scudding bats, and I shall have no fear of them.


    I will embrace the women I meet. En Galusakar whose face I never knew will thank me for my offerings and introduce me to the numberless Ens who slept beneath my bed, and I will kiss them in turn and call them sister. I shall take mighty Kug-Bau by the hand and ask if she was really an alewife before she was a queen. I shall walk with Puabi and speak to her as an equal, and I shall ask her fifty ladies if they drank poison and lay down in her sepulchre, or if a lamentation-priest crushed their skulls. I can scarcely imagine there are galaturra in the House of Dust, for their joy and their strength seems immortal, but I know that they grow old and die like men and women do. And when I see Eresh-gunu and Inanna-shudug and my Garashang, I shall dance and clap my hands as they taught me. I shall take the hands of all of them and we shall dance as if we were young, dance until the Great Above crushes the Great Below and Ereshkigal is Inanna and the dead are the living.


    When I die, Great Lady, only my poems and you will remain. Let them be sung forever. Let them still be sung when the sea draws back from Urim and the House of the Great Light is darkness and dust, so that everyone will remember who I was. Let it be remembered that I was she, En Kheduana, a thousand things, and two, and one, and that I loved a thousand gods in my time, and two, and one, only one. Let it be remembered that I was a woman. You understand that better than most gods. For I am old, my Lady Inanna, and weary with the weight of hymns and miracles, prayers and sacrifice, wars and dying. I hear Your sister¡¯s wings beating on the wind for me. But the stylus fits easily in my hand nowadays, and my bed feels soft and warm, and I am not afraid.

 Historical Notes and Glossary of Terms & Characters

    Spelling and Pronunciation


    Outside of this novel, readers may encounter many variant spellings of the Sumerian and Akkadian names and words used here (for example, the name of the goddess Nin Khursang is also spelled Ninhursag, Ninkhursang, Ninhursanga, and Nin?ursa?). Our heroine¡¯s name is typically spelled Enheduanna in English, but I have chosen to write it as En Kheduana to emphasize her title (En) and the KH sound present in the word. I do use the spelling Enheduanna when referring to her as a historical figure, such as in the title and the Author¡¯s Note. Pronunciation of Akkadian and Sumerian words is fairly consistent, though there are some features unique to one language or the other.


    <ul>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">Vowels A, E, I, O, U are pronounced ah eh ee oh ooh, as in Spanish or Italian.</li>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">R is rolled as in Spanish or Italian.</li>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">SH, pronounced as in wish, is frequently written elsewhere as ?.</li>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">KH is like the ch in Scottish ¡°loch¡± or Hebrew ¡°Chanukah.¡± It is often written as ? or ?.</li>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">NG is only found in Sumerian words and is pronounced like the ng in ¡°sing.¡± It is often written as ?.</li>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">Q is only found in Akkadian words and is pronounced as an aspirated K, or K with a small puff of air after it.</li>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">Some Akkadian vowels are marked with a macron (¨¡), which means the sound is extended longer than the unmarked vowel (a).</li>


    </ul>


    Geography


    The ruins of Ur or Urim, which have been extensively excavated by archaeologists, are located at modern Tel Muqayr, Iraq, near the city of Nasiriyah. Ur was a port at the mouth of the Euphrates River around the time of our story, but due to receding sea levels it is currently more than 150 miles from the waters of the nearest ocean (the Persian Gulf). Much of the marshland that formerly covered southern Iraq has been drained by man or disappeared naturally in the four thousand years since the Akkadian Empire. Like most Sumerian cities, Ur was destroyed and rebuilt many times over its long history. It was continuously inhabited for some three millennia, being finally abandoned in the 500s BCE. The Great Ziggurat of Ur at the temple of Nanna, one of the most famous and impressive achievements of Mesopotamian civilization, was not built until several centuries after the time of our story.


    The precise location of Akkade, the Akkadian capital founded by Sharru-kin, has been lost. For my own narrative purposes I have followed the popular theory that places it near modern-day Baghdad, along the Tigris some 200 miles north of Urim.


    Glossary of Terms, Cities and Gods


    Aga


    Sumerian. The rolled cloth headdress of a High Priestess.


    Akkade


    Akkadian. A city founded by Sharru-kin as the capital of his Empire. Birthplace and childhood home of En Kheduana and seat of power for the kings of her family¡¯s dynasty. Its patron deity is the goddess Ishtar.


    Akitu


    The festival of the New Year, especially associated with Inanna/Ishtar and her consort Dumuzid/Tammuz.


    Amagal


    Sumerian for ¡°grandmother.¡±


    An


    Sumerian, ¡°Heaven¡± or ¡°Sky.¡± A powerful elder god, husband of Urash and grandfather of Inanna.


    Anunnaki


    The primordial gods who dwell in the Underworld.


    Billulu


    A legendary crone who sheltered the fleeing Dumuzid from the demons who pursued him.


    Buranuna


    Sumerian name for the Euphrates River.


    Dumukir


    A Sumerian insult. Literally ¡°son of a hyena¡±.


    Dumuzid


    Sumerian, ¡°Good Son.¡± The young shepherd god who dies and is born again, consort of Inanna.


    Eana


    ¡°House of Heaven.¡± The temple of Inanna and An in the city of Unug.


    Elam


    A foreign land to the East. Like Sumer and Akkad, it is made up of numerous city-states. Its people are called Elamites.


    Emengir


    The Sumerian name for the Sumerian language (literally ¡°native tongue¡±).


    Emesal


    ¡°Fine tongue¡± or ¡°high-pitched tongue.¡± A special dialect of Sumerian used only in certain religious songs and by religious orders of women.


    En


    Sumerian, meaning simply ¡°Lord¡± or ¡°Master.¡± A High Priest or Priestess. Also Entu, if female.


    Enlil


    Sumerian, ¡°Lord Wind.¡± One of the four ancient gods who created humanity from mud.


    Enki


    Old god of water and wisdom. One of the four ancient gods who created humanity from mud.


    Enkidu


    A legendary hirsute wildman, companion of the hero Gilgamesh.


    Ensi


    Sumerian. A priest-king or (under Sharru-kin¡¯s Empire) priest-governor. The hereditary rulers of some cities, such as Lagash, are styled Ensi rather than the more common Lugal.


    Ereshkigal


    Sumerian, ¡°Lady of the Great Below.¡± The fearsome goddess of death, Queen of the Underworld and sister of Inanna and Utu. It is bad luck to speak her name aloud.


    Ershemma


    Sumerian. A type of funerary song.


    Gala, Galaturra


    Sumerian. Galaturra is the diminutive/familiar form, ¡°little gala¡±. Also ¡°menwomen.¡± Cultic servants of Inanna. Male-bodied but presenting as feminine, they occupy a third gender category.


    Gallu


    Underworld demons of the desert who pursue Dumuzid in the story of Inanna¡¯s descent to the Underworld.


    Gidim


    Sumerian. Ghosts.


    Gilgamesh


    A legendary hero and demigod who ruled Unug (Uruk) in ancient times.


    Giparu


    Sumerian. The private dwelling of a temple¡¯s High Priestess, set apart from other buildings of the temple complex. It is forbidden for men to enter a giparu.


    Gubla


    Sumerian name of the city of Byblos in modern Lebanon. A distant country to the West, famous for its lumber, a rare and costly commodity in Sumer.


    Guti


    An Eastern mountain tribe, distinguished by their fair hair.


    House of Dust


    One of the poetic names of the Underworld.


    House of the Great Light


    The Temple of Nanna the Moon God at Urim.


    Humbaba


    Mythical monster defeated by Gilgamesh.


    Iab


    Sumerian. Clarified butter, commonly used as an offering.


    Idigina


    Sumerian name for the Tigris River.


    Idiqlat


    Akkadian name for the Tigris River.


    Inanna


    Sumerian, ¡°Queen of Heaven.¡± The most important goddess of the South. Daughter of Nanna the Moon, sister of Utu the Sun and Ereshkigal the Queen of the Dead. Associated with the planet Venus (the Evening Star) and identified with Akkadian Ishtar.


    Ishtar


    Akkadian. A war goddess, identified with Venus (the Evening Star) and parallel to Sumerian Inanna. Patron goddess of Sharru-kin and his family and the city of Akkade.


    Kabta and Kulla This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.


    Minor Sumerian deities, the gods of bricklaying.


    Khulub-tree


    Sumerian. A legendary tree inhabited by monsters.


    Kish


    A Sumerian city where the young Sharru-kin grew up and served as cupbearer to the king. Later, Sharru-kin¡¯s first conquest. Its name is the same in Akkadian and Sumerian.


    Kuliltu


    Akkadian. A mermaid. Feminine of kulullu.


    Lagash


    A Sumerian city near Urim and Unug, dedicated to Ningirsu-Ninurta the war god. Unlike many cities, its name is the same in Sumerian and Akkadian.


    Lamashtu


    Akkadian. A female demon who preys on children and mothers.


    Land Between Two Rivers


    Refers to the region in present-day Iraq where our story takes place, west of the Tigris River and east of the Euphrates River. The literal translation (in Greek) is Mesopotamia.


    Lillitu


    Akkadian, ¡°Screech-owl.¡± Commonly called Lilith in English. A female demon who preys on children.


    Lishanum Akkaditum


    The Akkadian name for the Akkadian language.


    Liyan


    A port city in Elam. Its patron goddess is Kiririsha.


    Lugal


    Sumerian, ¡°Great Man.¡± The Sumerian term for the hereditary ruler of a city or cities. Under Sharru-kin¡¯s Empire, Lugals who swore fealty to Sharru-kin became governors of their cities rather than kings.


    Lullubi


    An Eastern mountain tribe. Their men wear long queues.


    Mashkim


    Sumerian. A stinging fish, envisioned as a malevolent water-demon.


    Me


    Sumerian, ¡°divine powers¡± (I¡¯ve also translated it as ¡°shibboleths¡±). The signs of civilization and culture granted to man by the gods, including all human inventions, offices and behaviors.


    Musur


    Also ¡°red Musur.¡± Egypt.


    Nanna


    Sumerian name for the god of the moon. With his heavenly wife Ningal, Nanna is the father of Inanna (Venus) and Utu (the sun).


    Nibru


    Sumerian name for the city of Nippur, dedicated to the god Enlil.


    Ningishzida


    Sumerian, ¡°Lord of the Good Tree.¡± A god associated with life and death.


    Ningal


    The divine wife of Nanna, the Sumerian moon god, and mother of the god Utu and goddess Inanna. Her name means simply ¡°Great Lady¡± or ¡°Great Queen.¡±


    Nin Khursang


    Sumerian, ¡°Lady of the Sacred Peak.¡± A mother goddess associated with fertility and mountains.


    Nippur


    Akkadian name for the city of Nibru, dedicated to the god Enlil.


    Pazuzu


    Akkadian. A capricious demon who can protect against other demons.


    Purattu


    Akkadian name for the Euphrates River.


    Re¡¯em


    Akkadian. A mythical giant bull.


    Sin


    Akkadian name for the god of the moon.


    Slow River


    A poetic name of the Euphrates River.


    Swift River


    A poetic name of the Tigris River.


    Tammuz


    Akkadian name for the god the Sumerians call Dumuzid, consort to Ishtar (Sumerian, Inanna).


    Tigi


    Sumerian. A type of drum.


    Unug


    A small but ancient Sumerian city near Urim dedicated to the goddess Inanna, former home of the legendary Gilgamesh.


    Ur


    Akkadian name of the city of Urim.


    Urim


    A prominent Sumerian port city in the far South. Home of En Kheduana for most of her life. Its patron deity is Nanna, the god of the moon.


    Uruk


    Akkadian name of the city of Unug.


    Utta


    Minor Sumerian deity, the goddess of weaving.


    Utukku


    Akkadian. A race of demons.


    Zirru


    Sumerian. A priestess.


    Index of Persons


    Names in bold are real historical figures. Names not in bold are characters of my own invention. Characters known by a religious or royal title (En, Ensi, Lugal) are listed alphabetically by their name with their title in parentheses. Thus En Kheduana is listed under K as (En) Kheduana.


    Adda


    Enheduanna¡¯s High Steward after the death of Dubsang.


    (Lugal) Anna


    Sumerian, ¡°Tin¡± or ¡°Lead.¡± Son of Melemanna. Self-proclaimed ruler of Unug and leader of a rebellion after the death of Manishtushu.


    Baramu


    Akkadian, ¡°Many-Colored.¡± Suitor to the Princess Khedutum, the young En Kheduana, in Akkade.


    Baranamtarra


    A priestess of Nanna. Mistress of Litanies in Nanna¡¯s Temple at Urim.


    Dubsang


    High Steward to Enheduanna in the early years of her Enship.


    Elamitu


    Akkadian and Sumerian, ¡°Elamite Woman¡±. A slave woman of Elamite origin, given to Enheduanna by her father as a wedding gift.


    (En) Galusakar


    Sumerian, ¡°Great Crescent.¡± High Priestess of Nanna at Urim before Enheduanna. Great-aunt of Lugal Kaku.


    Garashang


    Sumerian, ¡°Leek.¡± A galaturra or manwoman of Inanna, later High Priestess of the Temple of Inanna and An at Unug.


    Ibarum


    Akkadian, ¡°Friend.¡± Third son of Sharru-kin and Tashlultum. Younger brother of Rimush, Manishtushu and Enheduanna, elder brother of Ilaba¡¯ish-takal. Later known by his sacerdotal name of Shu-Enlil.


    Ilaba¡¯ish-takal


    Akkadian, ¡°Trusting in [the god] Ilaba.¡± Also called Ilaba. Fourth son of Sharru-kin and Tashlultum. Youngest brother of Rimush, Manishtushu and Enheduanna.


    Igiru


    Akkadian and Sumerian, ¡°Heron.¡± A slave woman originally of Urim, given to Enheduanna by her father as a wedding gift.


    Ilum Palilis


    Enheduanna¡¯s chief hairdresser after the departure of Zumbu.


    Inanna-shudug


    Sumerian, ¡°The Touch of Inanna.¡± A galaturra or manwoman of Inanna.


    (Lugal) Kaku


    Ruler of Urim and vassal of Sharru-kin. Great-nephew of En Galusakar.


    Kankala


    Sumerian, ¡°Perfume.¡± A galaturra or manwoman of Inanna.


    (En) Kheduana


    Sumerian, ¡°High Priestess Jewel of Heaven.¡± High Priestess of Nanna at Urim. Born Khedutum, only daughter of Sharru-kin and princess of his Empire. Sister of Rimush, Manishtushu, Ibarum and Ilaba¡¯ish-takal, aunt of Naram-Sin, great-aunt of Enmenanna.


    Khedutum


    Akkadian, ¡°Joy.¡± Also Khedu. Birth-name of Enheduanna.


    (Ensi) Kikuid


    Ruler of Lagash and vassal of Sharru-kin. Close ally of Lugal Kaku.


    Kug-Bau


    A semi-legendary historical figure, the only woman in the Sumerian King List document. An alewife or brothel-keeper who rose to become queen regnant of Kish. Grandmother of Ur-Zababa.


    Lulakhtanakh


    A priest of Nanna in the temple of Urim, head of the Men¡¯s Tablet House.


    Manishtushu


    Akkadian, ¡°He Who Is With Him.¡± Also Manish. Second-born son of Sharru-kin. Twin of Rimush, elder brother of Khedutum, Ibarum and Ilaba-ish-takal.


    (Lugal) Melemanna


    The Lugal of Unug and father of Lugal Anna. Died in the labor camps established by King Rimush in retribution for the uprising of Unug, Urim and Lagash.


    (En) Menanna


    Sumerian, ¡°High Priestess Silence of the Moon.¡± Enheduanna¡¯s successor as High Priestess of the Moon at Urim. Born Tanittu-Kullatu, daughter of Naram-Sin, grandniece of Enheduanna and her brothers, great-granddaughter of Sharru-kin.


    Naram-Sin


    Akkadian, ¡°Beloved of the Moon.¡± Son and heir of Manishtushu, grandson of Sharru-kin, nephew of Enheduanna.


    Ningtuku


    A priest of Nanna in the temple at Urim, head of En Kheduana¡¯s libation priests. Elder brother of Sagadu.


    Ninninnata


    Sumerian, ¡°Harrier Hawk.¡± A widow and potter of Urim who shelters En Kheduana. Mother of Shulgi and Urun.


    Puabi


    Akkadian, ¡°Word of My Father.¡± A priestess and/or queen of Urim (despite her Northern origins) hundreds of years before the events of our story. Her tomb in the Royal Cemetery of Ur is known for its riches and for the great number of ladies-in-waiting who died with her.


    Rimush


    The eldest son and heir of Sharru-kin. Twin of Manishtushu, elder brother of Khedutum, Ibarum and Ilaba¡¯ish-takal.


    Sagadu


    Chief Scribe to Enheduanna. Younger brother of Ningtuku.


    Sharru-kin


    Akkadian, ¡°True King.¡± Commonly known in English as Sargon. Conqueror of all Mesopotamia and founder of an Empire. Husband of Tashlultum, father of Rimush, Manishtushu, Kheduana, Ibarum, and Ilaba¡¯ish-takal. Styled King of the World.


    Shuba


    Sumerian, ¡°Many-Colored.¡± An apprentice to the Metalworkers of the House of the Great Light in Urim, lover of Zumbu.


    Shulgi


    A young boy of Urim, son of Ninninnata and younger brother of Urun.


    Tashlultum


    Akkadian, ¡°I Took Her As Plunder.¡± Sumerian-born widow of Lugal Zagesi, queen of Sharru-kin. By Sharru-kin, mother of Rimush, Manishtushu, Enheduanna, Ibarum, and Ilaba¡¯ish-takal.


    (Ensi) Tuge


    Ensi of Lagash during the time of Lugal Anna¡¯s rebellion.


    Ugunu


    A priestess of Nanna in the temple of Urim, head of the Women¡¯s Tablet House.


    (Lugal) Ur-Zababa


    Aged king of the Sumerian city of Kish, overthrown by his former cupbearer, the youth Sharru-kin.


    Urun


    A young boy of Urim, son of Ninninnata and elder brother of Shulgi.


    (Lugal) Zagesi


    Ruler of several Sumerian cities. Last great rival of Sharru-kin, first husband of Tashlultum.


    Zumbu


    Akkadian, ¡°Mosquito.¡±  A slave woman of Akkadian origin, given to Enheduanna by her father as a wedding gift.