All Our Broken Idols

by Paul M. M. Cooper

  ‘Turn me around!’ he screamed.

  ‘Sharo,’ Aurya hushed him, ‘please don’t.’

  ‘Turn me around!’ he shrieked, lashing out with his feet, and to Aurya’s surprise the men gave in and turned him to face the arena. Aurya saw the sweat standing out on the back of his neck, his quaking body, and she reached out to touch his shoulder. His skin was stony. He didn’t react, just watched without flinching as the chariot made another thunderous pass, sending dust and grit into the crowd so people coughed and covered their faces.

  Arrows flew. The King killed two females quickly with blows to their throat and chest. Then one of his spear-men lunged out and struck a young male, sending it curling on to its side. The bodies of lions were heaped around their cages. Tears ran down Sharo’s cheeks, down his neck and collarbone. The lions fell until only Sharo’s lion and the biggest male of all were left. This other lion was a true beast of the high hills. A scar marred its muzzle, its mane thick and black. It shielded Sharo’s lion with its body as the King made one pass, then another. One arrow lanced into the ground beside them. The great lion let out a roar and dashed at the King’s chariot, edging around it and darting in its path the way Aurya had seen market cats play with rats. The crowd were jumping up and down and screaming, raising their hands to the air.

  ‘Finally a beast with some fight!’ a fat man near Aurya screamed out. Sharo’s lion watched the huge male dicing with the chariot and tried to get away. It edged behind the cages, but the dogs on the soldiers’ leashes strained after it, gnashing their teeth, slobbering and baring their pink gums. The soldiers tensed their shield wall, spears bristling. Sharo’s lion spun on the spot, hopeless and trapped in the arena. Meanwhile, the huge scarred male reared up at the chariot, exposing the full cavern of its mouth, its long yellow teeth. The King’s men looked afraid. The King couldn’t get a good shot, and he shouted an order to the chariot driver, who turned to gain greater distance.

  The huge lion seemed to sense an opening. It had fought other lions in its time, Aurya thought. It knew the weakness in turning your back. As the King’s chariot rounded, the lion dashed with incredible speed and pounced. The crowd breathed in all together, and fell silent. The moment lasted for ever: the lion in mid-air, leaping towards the exposed rear of the chariot, the expressions of the King and his guards frozen in shock, spears held out in flimsy defence. Sharo whispered something, but Aurya didn’t hear.

  The lion fell on the chariot wheel, and both the King’s men desperately drove their spears into its back, their faces masks of terror. In an instant, the lion was dragged over the wheel, and some mistaken instinct made the soldiers hold on to their spears. The animal followed the turning wheel over the chariot and down to the ground below, and the men were thrown like pieces of rag into the air. The lion went under the wheel. The crackle of bones sounded in the arena’s sudden hush. The crowd groaned in unison. The wheel bounced over the mess of the lion’s body, and with an even louder crack, the chariot’s axle gave way. The horses broke their halters, and the whole vehicle bucked upwards and turned over in the air. Screams began to erupt around the arena. The King tumbled overhead, tangled in his driver’s reins, pulling him under. The chariot rolled on top of him and dragged him in the dust.

  Sharo’s lion saw its opening. As the crowd fell silent once again, it darted at the King. Its body was a bow of pure animal speed, dust rising at each beat of its paws. The trapped King saw the beast coming, and raised his hands to fend it off. The lion grabbed him in its jaws, clenched his waist and shook him like a doll. The King let out a shriek of pain and fear, and his hands grasped and pulled at the black mane as it mauled him. Then the uproar of the crowd began like a clap of thunder. All around the arena, the circle broke. Soldiers dashed forwards. There was a great screaming, a clamour of feet and voices.

  ‘The King is fallen,’ people bellowed. In the chaos, the archers holding Sharo loosened their grip. He broke free, himself suddenly a wild thing, and dashed to where everyone else was looking: to the twisted wreckage where King Ashurbanipal was trapped beneath his chariot, and the lion gripped him in its jaws.

  Aurya ran after Sharo, to where a clearing formed around the King and the lion. The King was pale as ash, and bleeding from several wounds. The skin of one arm was grazed bloody where he’d skidded. He was moving though, and letting out groans and whimpers as Sharo’s lion shook him in its jaws. Both his hands pawed at the animal’s face, tried to gain some purchase on it, clutching at its mane. The lion didn’t move. Its eyes swivelled between the people and dogs gathering around it, and its back legs tapped in fear against the ground. But it didn’t let go of the King.

  ‘Get back!’ Ashurbanipal screeched, panic in his voice. ‘Get back and shoot it!’ The bowstrings all around creaked. But no one loosed an arrow. ‘Shoot it!’ the King shrieked again.

  ‘Your highness?’ an archer begged him. ‘What if we miss?’

  ‘It will tear you in its rage!’

  No one moved. And then Sharo stepped out from the crowd.

  ‘Enkidu,’ he moaned, reaching out his hand. Soldiers turned their arrows to face him. Their bowstrings creaked, and they shouted at him to stand back. Sharo was going to die: Aurya knew it in that moment.

  ‘You?’ the King whined. ‘The river boy?’

  He let out a hiss as the lion’s teeth clenched again around his waist. It tore at his tunic, with the sound of rending cloth, and ran its claws down his face, marring one of his eyes. The King’s hands twisted like roots. Sharo kept walking, alone now in the circle of people. Aurya tried to cry out to him, but her voice was hoarse, and came out dry as whispering leaves. This was the end of it all, of all the years she’d looked after him. The lion saw Sharo. Its yellow eyes rolled up to meet him, and it let out a little yelp, muffled by the King’s body. Its grip lessened a little, and then a low moan escaped its jaws. Sharo stepped closer and reached out to put his hand in the lion’s mane.

  ‘Shh,’ he said. ‘Let go of him. Let go, Enkidu. They’ll let you live if you let go.’

  Bowstrings ached all around. And slowly, with its eyes fixed on Sharo, the lion opened its jaws. The King let out a gasp of pain as its long teeth withdrew, stained with blood. His gilded tunic was soaked black, his skin and hair were covered with dust and ragged strips of flesh hung off him. Aurya held her breath as the lion let him go, and then raised its head to Sharo. It opened its mouth, its pink tongue curled and wet and red, the ribbed maw of its throat. And then the arrows flew, without a thought for the boy. The first one hit the lion between its ribs with a thump, and it let out a whine. Sharo screamed.

  ‘No!’

  Two, three more arrows struck the lion in the neck, the legs, and then the men with spears ran and drove their weapons into its side, stabbing again and again as Sharo screamed its name. It didn’t try to fight back. It shuddered with each blow.

  ‘Enkidu!’ Sharo was screaming. ‘Enkidu, I’m sorry.’

  Men rushed from all sides and heaved the chariot from the King. He couldn’t stand. His legs were limp and broken, and they had to bring a wooden bier to carry him. He was gasping in little breaths, wincing, and Bel-Ibni suddenly rushed to him, distraught and pale.

  ‘My lord. I’m so sorry. I only just –’

  ‘Bel-Ibni,’ croaked the King. ‘It’s that dream. The dream with the lion.’

  ‘My lord, what do you …?’

  ‘I knew it meant something,’ the King whimpered. Blood ran in rivers from his face and torn body, pooling in the wrinkles of his scrunched face, pattering in drops on the ground. ‘I knew all along.’

  Servants carried the King away, and the whole crowd stood stunned and silent as the boy, who had saved the King, dropped to his knees and wept. He dug his face into the dead lion’s mane, his hands covered in its blood. People were afraid of him. They backed away and hurried away one by one, muttering darkly, performing the signs that warded off evil omens. As the crowd thinned, Aurya still stood with Abil and watched S
haro’s back heaving with sobs. Around the arena edges, priests in their colourful clothes were chanting and using pine cones to pour oil over the dead lions, their blood brown in the dust.

  ‘Sharo,’ Aurya said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You knew,’ he said. ‘You knew this was going to happen.’

  ‘Sharo, I didn’t – I just wanted to …’

  ‘Why didn’t you stop them, Aurya? Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Why do you care so much about that lion, Sharo?’ Her voice was harder than she meant. ‘You visited that thing whenever you could, but you never helped me try to find our mother. You never told me what you know. And you never helped me look for the house of dust.’

  Sharo shook his head.

  ‘There’s no such place, Aurya. There’s no house of dust.’

  ‘Father said there was,’ Aurya growled. ‘He said our mother was there, in the house of dust.’

  ‘He was lying to you. It’s just a place in the old stories. A place mother told us about, that the ancients believed in. Father used to sit outside the house and listen while she told her stories. The house of dust is where people used to go when they die.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Aurya shouted. Then Sharo spoke through clenched teeth, his arms covered in the blood of his lion.

  The wild man Enkidu knew that he had been chosen to die. He lay in his bed and felt death come closer.

  ‘If only I had never come to this city,’ the wild man moaned. ‘If only I had stayed in the wilds, by the river.’

  ‘But, my friend,’ cried Gilgamesh, ‘we have fought the bull of heaven together, and the demon Humbaba. Together we have lived a thousand lives.’

  But the wild man dreamed of the place that beckoned him.

  ‘It is a place where all the kings of men have gone,’ he said, ‘their crowns piled in a heap. They wear clothes made from black feathers. Their food is mud, and their water is dust. Their languages are forgotten, and they sit and wait in silence. This is the house of dust, the place I now go.’

  And the wild man held the King’s hand, and by morning he was dead.

  Aurya reeled.

  ‘But … Father said there was no lion. She was never dragged away.’

  ‘He was telling the truth about that, Aurya. There was no lion.’

  Her fingers tingled, and she balled her fists.

  ‘What? What are you talking about, Sharo?’

  He stood up and turned to her. People were flocking away in droves now, leaving the field strewn with the animals’ bodies, the abandoned cages empty, the dogs and soldiers retreating back to the city. Corpse birds were circling high.

  ‘There was no lion, Aurya,’ Sharo said in a voice she’d never heard before. ‘I could never tell you before. But I remember it all. The night mother died.’

  ‘Sharo, what do you mean?’

  He had a black look in his eyes.

  ‘It was one of the fifty days of summer. The locusts had been and eaten everything away. And in our house, our mother was screaming, and you were being born.’

  ‘Sharo,’ Aurya tried to cry out, but she found she could only whisper, ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘And then you came. You were screaming and balling your hands. And there was blood everywhere. And the blood didn’t stop. And our mother went pale.’

  ‘Sharo, you’re lying.’

  ‘She died that night, Aurya.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘You were the lion, Aurya. You dragged our mother away.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. Then she screamed, ‘I don’t believe you!’

  Sharo just looked back at her, a look in his eyes as cold and flat as the eyes of an animal. Before Aurya knew it, she was running. She heard Abil follow and call out her name, but she couldn’t stop. She ran across the field, skidding in the dust, ankle turning in a hole, back to the wooded hill. She stumbled up through the roots and discarded things, the broken pots and old reeds, tears blurring her vision, gulping for breath between her sobs. At the top, she curled up between the roots of a tree and hid her face, sobbing into her arms. Abil caught up with her.

  ‘Please don’t cry,’ he said.

  ‘He was lying,’ Aurya said. ‘Everything he said was a lie.’

  The boy looked down at her.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I hate him!’ she cried. Aurya gripped Abil by the wrist, feeling the warmth of his skin, looking up into his kind dark eyes.

  ‘Abil,’ she said, ‘I want to go to the tablet house. I want to leave the masons and learn how to read. I never want to see Sharo again.’

  Out on the plain, the dust rose in great clouds, twisting and swirling, obeying only the wind.

  BOOK III

  The River

  Aurya

  Aurya sat on the wall of her house and looked out over the courtyard, at the birds flitting in the pomegranate tree. The city’s morning sounds rose all around them: market callers selling medicinal herbs and magic stones, knife sharpeners going from place to place, traffic in the nearby street. Aurya had a tablet on her lap, angled in what light fell through the leaves. It had taken most of the morning to read. Even after five years she was still slow and halting, and other things were on her mind. She watched the baker’s children play out there in the courtyard, a boy and a girl. The tablet was the story of a city in the north that had disrespected its gods and been wiped out by a horde of dog-headed men from the hills.

  ‘May depression descend upon your palace, built for joy!’ she read. ‘May the evils of the desert, the silent place, howl continuously!’

  She thought her father used to sing about something similar, back on the riverbank, but she couldn’t really remember if it was the same story. She ran her fingers over her mother’s cylinder necklace and thought of all the days she’d spent in the heat of the classroom, the only girl among all the boys from rich scribal families, receiving the strikes with the reed wand whenever she misplaced a wedge in a letter. She rubbed the back of her hand at the memory. What had kept her going?

  Behind her, Abil came and touched her on the shoulder. He kissed her on the back of the neck. His short beard tickled her skin and brushed against her hair, which she’d grown as long as she could. She now tied it with a cord, the way sellers tied bunches of coriander in the market, so it fought its way free whenever she left the house in her headscarf. She still wasn’t used to the scarf: Aurya and Abil had been married for less than a year; a tiny orphan’s wedding, paid for by the palace.

  ‘How’s your reading?’ he said.

  ‘It’s sad. Everyone dies in the end.’

  ‘It was so long ago,’ he said, still kissing her nape as he spoke. ‘All those people would be dead by now anyway.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter when you’re reading it. Every time you read it, they come back to life all over again.’

  She watched the baker’s two children running in the courtyard, through the morning’s sun and shade. Abil put his arms around her, so his hands rested on her stomach, and she froze. She pressed his hand gently, willing him to feel the unusual firmness there that had grown through the months of Tibbakh and Ilool. He didn’t, never one for noticing what he wasn’t shown. Aurya breathed a sigh as he left her and went back to his table to work on the half-finished clay tablet he was copying for the library. As summer came to an end, smells and tastes had changed in her mouth. She’d begun to hate the smell of cumin and the tang of turnip paste. She’d once loved the yeasty smells rising from the bakery in the courtyard, the charcoal and wet dough, but now they made her feel ill. She said her favourite prayer:

  May the seven winds carry away my groans,

  May the waters of the river flow cleanse me.

  When the time came, they bathed quickly, rubbed themselves with olive oil and cheap perfumes, and both said some prayers to their house shrine. Then Aurya covered her hair and they left together for the library.

  Barges unloaded at the docks at that ti
me of day. The spice markets and charm sellers bustled, and already hooting laughter drifted from the drinking houses. Flocks of refugees held bowls by the Halzi Gate, their families close, their skins too small for their skeletons.

  ‘There are so many these days,’ Aurya said. ‘There never used to be this many.’

  ‘The gods are cruel some years,’ Abil said, shaking his head.

  ‘It’s not the gods. It’s the King,’ Aurya said, keeping her voice quiet. ‘It’s these wars.’

  ‘There’ve always been wars,’ Abil said. ‘You can’t stop them, any more than you can stop the seasons or the stars. Poor wretches, though.’

  They passed a large family crouched in the shade of an alleyway. Abil gave them a piece of bread, and they fell on it hungrily, splitting it between the smallest children.

  ‘This feels different,’ Aurya said.

  ‘You shouldn’t listen to everything you hear in the markets,’ Abil said, and Aurya felt a rush of annoyance.

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s just part of living in the city that rules the world. Of course everyone wants to come here. You might as well complain about the clay in the bricks or the stones in the walls.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘I mean the old kings built all of this with their wars.’

  ‘They built the ukuku drinking house?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  As they went by the Shamash Gate, Aurya watched the refugees being herded together, and saw where a rough shanty town was beginning to form in the shadows of the walls. They passed the rest of their walk in silence, and Abil left her at the great library’s gate. He didn’t seem to realise that they had argued. It was at times like this that Aurya felt how much of her life was still unknown to her husband: she’d never told Abil about their father, about how he’d really died. Sometimes she thought he had married a different person from the one she was, and it made her afraid to think about what would happen if he ever found out. She still had those dreams sometimes.