All Our Broken Idols

by Paul M. M. Cooper

  ‘What are they doing?’ Katya asked. She turned to Salim and saw that he had turned pale. Lola’s face was set. The men with guns pulled from the cage three prisoners with black hoods over their heads, their hands tied. When they moved from the tree cover, Katya noticed with a shock that one of the escorts was Abu Ammar. He had a stiff grimace on his face, the coloured lights dancing on his spectacles. In his free hand, his black knife was drawn. The man on the megaphone announced something as the prisoners got closer, his voice lilting and theatrical. Abu Ammar pulled the hoods off the captives, one by one, and all the faces beneath were as grey as candle wax, as if coated in dust. Their eyes were closed, and they were murmuring. Beside Katya, Salim took a breath.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Don’t watch this.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘They’re going to kill them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Whatever reason they can think of,’ he gasped, and threw up his hands. ‘For fighting back. For trying to leave the city. For having a jar of fucking pickles!’

  He turned away and made for the stairs. Katya looked down at the scene. The audience had fallen completely silent, and a deathly hush hung over the park. Surely Abu Ammar, the man she’d stood next to in the storehouse dark, who’d brought her a kebab, a man three years younger than her, couldn’t do what he seemed about to do.

  ‘Katya,’ Salim called back, with desperation in his voice. ‘You won’t forget it, if you see it. I mean it. You won’t forget it for the rest of your life. That’s what they want.’

  Katya shuddered and took one last look at Abu Ammar, who raised his black knife to the air. The blade’s heat came back to her, when it had brushed against her wrist the other day. Down in the park, the men with guns kicked the bound captives in the back of the knees so they were forced to kneel. Katya turned away and followed Salim, her stomach churning, and breathed steadily through her nose to avoid throwing up. Lola followed her, and just as they closed the fire exit door, she heard jeers from the fighters down in the street.

  It was cool and dark in the museum. There was no power. The three of them sat in silence and shadow before the carving of King Ashurbanipal in his garden. Katya ignored the scars on the King’s face, where the men who destroyed his palace and burned his city had tried to erase his image from the walls. She imagined she was there in that garden, beneath the leaf shade, the birds and vines overhead, the King raising his cup in a toast. When she noticed the severed head hanging from the tree on the left, carved faithfully and skilfully, she jumped up and ran away through the halls. No one followed her. She ran through the museum, not knowing where she was going, just wanting to run as far as she could. Finally she reached the room with the lion carvings.

  She stared at the sorrowful lions scattered in the King’s wake, at the lion jumping up and biting that wheel. She looked at the King, at his eyes cold and hard and slightly smiling as he drove his spear into the lion’s back, at its eyes staring out at her through the millennia. Then she spoke aloud the passage from Gilgamesh that had been running over and over in her mind, the one that made her skin feel cold whenever she read it to Lola. She heard her own voice, high and scared, in the gloom.

  ‘“I dreamt of the house whose people sit in darkness,”’ she wavered. ‘“Dust is their food and clay is their meat. They are clothed like birds, with wings for covering. I entered the house of dust and I saw all the kings of the earth, their crowns put away for ever …”’

  Aurya

  The hunt was all people were talking about in the city. Sharo seemed not to understand, or if he did, he didn’t believe what he heard. He visited his lion more frequently now, going every other day. He always came back with more stories about it: how it had become friends with a female lion that it would playfight with, how he was worried it wasn’t happy in its enclosure, how he could tell by its voice that it yearned to wander the hills the way it used to.

  When the day came, it was hot and clear. Aurya tried to talk Sharo out of going.

  ‘You should stay here,’ she said, as they sat on the workshop wall and watched the city morning. ‘This isn’t something you should see.’

  ‘I’m coming.’ There was a stony determination in his eyes. ‘They told me Enkidu is going out into the fields with the King and the other lions.’

  ‘Sharo …’

  Aurya looked her brother in the eye, and thought that she could make him stay, if she had to. But that sharp sliver of stone stuck in her chest. Over the past few weeks, as all her attempts to find the house of dust had failed, as she began to lose hope that she would ever find her mother, the sliver had started to whisper to her. Sharo wasn’t a child any more, the voice of that sliver said. He had forgotten their mother and left her to search this vast city alone. He refused to tell her what he knew. He had abandoned her. It would do him good to see the hunt, the sliver whispered. It would make him grow up. It was only as Aurya walked down the gravelly path from the workshop, and Sharo skipped along and spoke excitedly about the lion, that she realised that the voice whispering from that cold sliver was her father’s.

  They met Abil near the fish market. Watery blood formed miniature waterfalls down the sides of the drain there, the evil spirits of its stench lurking heavy in the air. Skinny desert cats mewled on the rooftops. That day, the crowds were heading in only one direction: to the Shamash Gate and the fields to the east. Men carried baskets stacked on the backs of donkeys, with pots and jars hanging from sticks slung over their shoulders.

  ‘Come on,’ Abil said. ‘I know the best place to watch from.’

  They passed beneath the shadow of the gate, and walked down the road away from the city. Soldiers supervised the excited crowds, flying pennants from their spears.

  ‘Will he be all right?’ Abil whispered to Aurya, motioning to Sharo. She nodded, the sliver sharp in her heart.

  ‘It’ll be for the best. He can’t keep this up for ever.’

  As they walked out into the country to the east, Aurya cast an eye over the city defences, thicker on the side facing the mountains than the river side: the moats and low banks, the towers and small forts bristling with men, staring off in the direction of the grey hills from which all danger approached. On the road, a line of carts moved. On each cart was a cage built of thick planks, and inside each cage one of the King’s lions paced. Their grunts and roars and whines sounded above the noise of the crowd, and the onagers pulling the carts looked desperate with fear. The people lining the verges jeered at the caged beasts.

  ‘Look, Aurya – it’s Enkidu!’ Sharo said, pointing to one cart. All the lions looked the same to her.

  ‘That’s not its name, Sharo. Animals don’t have names. Come on.’ She tugged at his wool. ‘Don’t get lost in the crowds.’

  The three of them pushed through the clamour and climbed the mesquite scrub until they reached a low tree-clustered hill overlooking the plain. A stone monument of some kind stood at its top, around which people gathered for the best view. People beckoned as they clambered up the root-riddled soil, calling in all the city’s languages. Children roamed in groups, running and fighting each other, and rough gangs of city people vied for the shaded spots under the trees. At the top, Aurya, Sharo and Abil lifted themselves up on to the stone monument, and sat in one of its alcoves containing a shrine. Aurya put her back against the carved stone and listened to her heart thud in her chest.

  From up there, she could see out over the ploughlands and scrub, right to the blue desert hills in the distance, their talus dappled by the shadows of clouds. In the open space outside the city, a huge mass of people had gathered, thousands of them. It looked like half of Nineveh. They formed an enormous circle on the plain, its inner edge a line of soldiers, two and three men deep, their tall red shields forming a wall, their spears bristling inwards. Some held thick-necked black mastiffs on strained leashes. In this wide rounded arena, a chariot kicked up clouds that eddied in the wind, and Aurya recognised its rider: King Ashurbanip
al, wearing his pointed crown, two spear-men riding with him.

  ‘Aurya, what are they doing?’ Sharo asked her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sharo,’ she said. ‘Please don’t hate me.’

  ‘Aurya, I don’t understand.’

  She looked at his face, at the fear and uncertainty washing over him, and felt her heart break.

  ‘Sharo, I’m so sorry.’

  He turned around and looked at the carving they were leaning against. He gave out a stifled shriek, and people all around them turned their heads. Aurya saw what was carved on the stone behind them. It was a lion hunt. It must have been 200 years old, cruder than the carvings made at the mason’s workshop, but it was clear what it meant: the lion leaping up at the ancient King’s chariot, the King’s bow arched and tense, ready to deal death to the jumping animal. Sharo’s face had gone completely white.

  ‘Aurya, what is that?’

  ‘Sharo …’

  ‘Aurya, what are they going to do to Enkidu?’

  ‘It’s for the best, Sharo. You can’t be friends with a lion for ever. It’s a wild beast, a beast of the hills.’

  ‘No, Aurya!’ he screeched. She’d never heard him like this. ‘No, you can’t let them do it!’

  ‘Sharo, you can’t stop it. You can’t change it.’

  His eyes were wide and wild, rolling around in his head. He clutched out at her and Abil as they tried to hold him still.

  ‘Sharo,’ she shouted, ‘calm down!’

  ‘I won’t let them do it!’ he screamed, and he pushed her aside. And then he was off. He crashed down the hill, knocking people over, crying out and swinging his arms.

  ‘Shamash,’ she hissed.

  ‘Quick,’ Abil said. ‘They’ll kill him if he interrupts the hunt.’

  They ran after Sharo as he broke through the people gathered on the slope. He knocked over picnics of olives and turnip paste, and angry hands grasped out or swung at them as they followed. Abil’s wool coat got torn off and he left it in the hands of a shouting bearded man. The two managed to reach the bottom of the hill, but on the flat ground, Sharo ran even faster, stumbling and crying, towards the backs of the arena crowd gathered in its great circle. The lions in their cages were already being led through the crowd. People’s hands reached up to mock them and touch the cages. The beasts lashed out at the bars, smelling the stench of the baying dogs, hearing the thunder of the chariot wheels on the earth.

  When Sharo hit the crowd, he bowled people over, knocking them aside. Aurya and Abil had to follow in his wake, edging around the angry people. She felt their wool cloaks and the sweat on their skins, the smell of bodies, crushing her like an olive in a press. She gasped for breath and felt Abil’s hand grab hers from behind.

  ‘We can’t lose him,’ she shouted back to him, and felt him squeeze her hand through the crowd. ‘I can’t let them kill him!’

  They burst out to the front and found Sharo kicking and wailing, gripped by two strong archers, who lifted him almost off the ground. One gave him a slap as if he were a sleepwalker, and the other threw a knee into his stomach. Sharo kicked and struggled but they held him tight.

  ‘Sharo,’ Aurya called out to him, and rushed to him. ‘Sharo, please calm down.’

  ‘Is he with you?’ one of the archers asked.

  ‘I’m sorry. Please! He’s my brother.’

  ‘Does he have a devil in him?’

  ‘Sharo,’ Aurya hissed and took his chin in her hands, tried to fix his roving eyes in her gaze. ‘Sharo, look at me. This has to happen. Lions and humans can’t live together.’

  ‘Aurya, they can’t … I can’t …’

  He struggled again, and one archer grabbed him by the hair.

  ‘Please,’ Aurya said, ‘he doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

  ‘The law is the law,’ the archer said, and drew an oiled knife from his belt. ‘Interrupting the hunt means death.’

  Bodies crushed behind her, pressing her into Sharo, and Abil bumped against her too.

  ‘Please,’ Abil yelled at the archer. ‘Wait a moment! I work for Bel-Ibni, the king’s servant.’

  The royal chariot thundered past, and though his back was to it, Sharo’s whole body shuddered and he let out a moan.

  ‘Wait until after the hunt,’ the other archer said to his friend. He looked a bit younger, had fewer scars on his face. ‘The blood will aggravate the dogs.’

  Aurya looked at the two men and her brother still struggling between them.

  ‘Sharo, please stop. Look at me. These men will kill you if you don’t stop.’

  In his chariot, the King had a cold look of victory. Knots of muscles wound through his forearm as he tested his bowstring, and he leaned into every turn with skill. The chariot driver lashed the horses. The hooves made the earth jump beneath Aurya’s feet, and Sharo let out a scream of despair.

  ‘Sharo,’ Aurya said. ‘Sharo, you have to listen to me. Your lion is already dead. It’s the King’s will. There’s nothing we can do.’

  Sharo was sobbing now, and Aurya kept talking to him as the archers held him. On the plain, the lions’ cages had been laid out in a line, and Aurya saw that on top of each one, there was a smaller cage with a child hidden in it. A beat on a drum began like a fast heartbeat, and the blare of a horn sounded. In the arena, she recognised the servant Bel-Ibni as he stepped out from between the red shields.

  ‘The king of the world, the light that shines on the dust, King Ashurbanipal,’ he announced, throwing his hands to the air. In his chariot, the King raised his bow over his head. The crowd burst into cheers and stamped their feet so the earth trembled. ‘Behind our walls, we rule the world,’ Bel-Ibni went on, his nasal voice resounding over the dusty earth. ‘Here we have conquered the demons of the wild and of the hills. We have conquered our enemies in the deserts and the mountains. And we have conquered the enemies inside ourselves too! Each of these beasts represents one of our victories. Praise Ashur! Praise Marduk!’

  People whistled and chanted as Bel-Ibni edged behind the shields. The horns blared, and the child hidden in the compartment above one cage reached out a pair of wiry limbs and pulled up the lion’s cage door. Moments passed, and then the lion stepped out. It was a huge male, its neck and shoulders thick with muscle, mouth hanging open, long tongue panting. It left the cage with slow steps, flinched at the rumbling of the wheels and the thunder of hooves on the earth. It raised its head and gave a roar that made people in the crowd step back. Aurya shuddered. It was the noise of her nightmares, an ancient fear, dredged up from the days before the flood.

  Two, three more cages were opened, and the lions stepped out, two smaller males and a female. They flicked their tails, swung around in circles and shielded each other. The mastiffs behind the cages snapped at them, and the wild beasts jumped away into the arena centre, growling and circling each other’s backs for protection. They were terrified but still fierce, and let out deep roars.

  ‘Don’t worry, Sharo,’ Aurya said. ‘It’s not Enkidu.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, the lump in his throat bobbing furiously as the archers held him. The lions now darted out into the arena, and the King’s chariot rounded on them, penning them in. The King raised his bow and drew an arrow. There was a moment of held breath, and then it flew, a whistle like steam escaping the lid of a cooking pot. The arrow missed, flew and hit a cage behind the lions: a bang like a hammer on the wood. The crowd let out a long sigh. The animals leapt back, circling and growling in fear, pawing the earth. Aurya’s necklace was slick with the sweat from her palm.

  The King frowned and barked an order to his driver, who adjusted something in the chariot. Sharo’s lip was wobbling, his eyes scrunched closed. The King drew another arrow, and his chariot took a pass close to the group of lions. The soldiers on board jabbed out with spears. Another arrow zipped from the King’s bow, wobbling in the air like a living thing, a darting sparrow. This time it struck one male lion in the flank: a thump like a dull drum. Aurya felt that s
trike. Her fists balled and her heart said: kill these monsters. That’s for all the people you’ve dragged away. The animal let out the yowl of a scalded cat, and then a bellowing roar. An answering roar went up from the crowd. Another arrow flew, and another. Each one hit with that same sickening thump, yelps of pain from the lions, who limped with arrows stuck in their haunches and limbs. One lion coughed and gurgled, and blood spilled down its jaw. It pawed as if trying to burrow a hole like a rabbit, and the crowd hissed. Aurya couldn’t look away.

  Only one lion staggered on. It was the female, arrows jutting from its limbs and back. The King drew near it and motioned for the soldiers to give him his spear. He raised the weapon high overhead, with a flash of its iron tip. The crowd cheered all together, flecks of spittle in the air. The King jumped down before the injured lion, which tried to lift itself on its front legs. Its limp back legs pawed at the earth.

  ‘Ashur,’ the crowd was screaming. ‘Ashur, Ashur, Ashurbanipal. He fights with lions. The lion of men!’

  The King thrust the spear into the flesh above the animal’s shoulder. The she-lion let out a long whine. The King dug his feet into the dust and pushed the shaft in deep. He was now only a foot away from the lion’s snapping jaws, and then twisted the spear so it let out a yelp and dropped still. The dogs around the arena smelled blood; they bayed and strained on their leashes. The King tried to pull the spear from the lion, but it wouldn’t budge. He gave up after a few tugs, and then got back into his chariot, rode around with his arms raised to cheers. Aurya let out a breath. Her heart thudded, and each beat said: kill these monsters, kill these monsters.

  The remaining cages opened, and more lions came out to their deaths. There were six this time, and Aurya spotted what she thought was Sharo’s lion, the last to emerge from its cage, smaller than all the others. She could see the bald spot of the scar on its back leg. It looked terrified, its eyes wide; the bodies of the other lions lying limp and arrow-stuck all around, blood browning the sand. It gave a mournful call. Held in the archers’ grip, Sharo began again to kick and writhe.