All Our Broken Idols

by Paul M. M. Cooper

  Aurya

  The years had changed Sharo more than Aurya could have imagined. She stood in the entrance to the mason’s workshop and watched him, lit by reed torches. He turned and saw her, and she felt a fish bone in her throat. His skin was covered in white dust, and his eyes were red as a waterbird’s. They were the sore eyes of a stone worker, the skin around them puffy and dark. A kind of sadness had worked its way into his face, which was now thin and stubbled with wispy hair.

  ‘Sharo?’ His face remained fixed, but he pulled his shawl up over his dusty hair and put down his chisel and hammer on the piece of stone.

  ‘Hello, Aurya,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Sharo …’ She stepped into the workshop’s shadows. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  A breeze picked up the reed matting overhead, and a curtain of dust peeled off into the air, carrying the acid smell of stone.

  ‘It was two thousand days on nineteenth of Tishrin.’ He used a thick hand to brush the dust from the stone he was working on. Aurya recognised his hands: the hands of her father, strong and sanded smooth. Sharo had been carving the King in his chariot on to the stone, the emerging form of a lion jumping up to bite the wheel. It was still lumpen and ill-defined, but it was unmistakable.

  ‘Oh Sharo.’ She came over to him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, pressed her cheek into his neck. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for everything.’

  His skin felt cool and hard, but slowly his hands reached up to wrap around her. Tears made tidemarks in the white dust coating his skin.

  ‘I’ve missed you, Aurya.’

  ‘I missed you too, Sharo.’

  She ran her hands through the tight curls of his hair, and little puffs of dust rose from him.

  ‘But I know why you’re here.’

  She looked into his eyes, the dark irises couched in those river beds of red. Sharo gestured back to the entrance, where Bel-Ibni was standing with one hand clasped in the other.

  ‘Yes. They sent me.’

  Sharo nodded and turned back to the stone.

  ‘They want me to carve something that didn’t happen.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s no use, Aurya. I can only carve the things I’ve seen. Nothing else makes sense.’

  She sat down on a bench beside the piece of stone Sharo was working on, and he drew the shawl further around his face, and went on working. She listened to the click of his hammer and chisel, and then reached out and touched his hand, brushed the dust from the little hairs on its back. She ran her fingers over his, and felt the dry, hard skin, knew his fingerprints would now be worn away completely. He paused and looked up at her.

  ‘Sharo, you’re risking your life. The King … he could kill you if you don’t do as he says. He’ll do terrible things to you.’ She dropped her voice. ‘He’s going mad.’

  Sharo shrugged, but his face was a mask of misery.

  ‘Sharo, why are you doing this? For that lion? After all these years?’

  He put down his tools again and fixed her with a look for a long time. Then he stood up.

  ‘Let me show you what I’m working on.’

  He led her around the corner to the wide courtyard behind the workshop, and she gave a little intake of breath. In a semicircle, a dozen flat slabs of stone were gathered, each etched with intricate carvings. The work was spectacular. Every detail was perfect. Here was the king in his chariot; here were the lines of soldiers, with their dogs baying on their leashes; here was the wooded hill with its monument on top, a carving within a carving; here were the people beckoning to each other as they gathered to watch; here were the lions in their cages, with the children on top releasing them; here were the arrows darting through the air to their targets; here were the lions dying; here were the priests pouring oil on the slain beasts. Everything was there, exactly as it had happened.

  ‘They keep telling me to make the lions more fearsome,’ Sharo said. ‘They say they should look like fierce beasts, so the King can look brave as he kills them. But that’s not how it happened. Not at all. They told me this lion’s tail was too long, even though that was exactly its length. The King even wants me to carve him wrestling a lion, pinning it by its throat with one hand.’

  Aurya thought of the King peering out from under his blanket and laughed despite herself. In the flickering light, the lions seemed to come alive: their sad faces scrunched in pain, the blood gushing from their mouths, their straining limbs still clinging on to life.

  ‘And that part over there …’ He waved towards the workshop building. ‘They say that part shouldn’t exist at all.’

  Over in the shadowy corner, in the direction Sharo was pointing, were the final pieces: two panels, carved in the same immaculate detail as all the others: King Ashurbanipal trapped under his chariot, a lion gripping him in its jaws, with Sharo standing there. The next scene showed Sharo kneeling beside his lion’s limp body and weeping. Aurya covered her mouth.

  ‘Oh, Sharo …’ A void opened inside her, and she held her brother, realising only then how much she had needed him.

  ‘Sharo. What you said, that day. The day of the hunt. About our mother. Was it true?’

  Sharo turned to look at her with haunted eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry, Aurya.’ She held him tighter. ‘I should have told you earlier. Father always told me we had to lie to you, about our mother. About the lion dragging her away. And after he died … I didn’t know what to do. You kept talking about the house of dust, and I didn’t know how to tell you. You’ve always been better at those things than me.’

  ‘I’m sorry too, Sharo. For everything.’

  He nodded. Aurya noticed something in the corner of the crumbling old wall.

  ‘You planted an olive tree,’ she said. ‘You always loved olives.’

  ‘Yes. Olive trees can grow for a hundred years, sometimes many hundreds. No one really knows how long. And the man down the road said he’d pickle them for me. You should hear it when the wind picks up, Aurya. It blows right through the branches. It almost sounds like it’s saying our mother’s name.’

  ‘What was her name?’ Aurya said. And wasn’t it strange that she’d never known?

  ‘Ashana. Ashana Nur-ili, daughter of Adad-Kudurri-Usur.’

  Aurya bit her lip.

  ‘Sharo, will you tell me the rest of her story sometime?’

  Sharo nodded.

  ‘I can tell it now if you’d like. Our mother always cried at these parts.’

  Aurya sat down beside him as he carved, the tapping of his chisel punctuating the story as he spoke in the same soft, even tone she remembered from so long ago.

  King Gilgamesh clambered on his hands and knees through the dark tunnel. Darkness lay all around.

  He could not see the hand in front of his face.

  He could not see the path ahead.

  He could not see the ground beneath.

  After days of travelling through this dark place, he reached the end of the tunnel, and the river of the dead. Gilgamesh found the ferryman Urshanabi and told him of his quest to find the secret of life.

  ‘I will take you across the river,’ he told the King. ‘But you must cut down one hundred and twenty trees to use as bargepoles, for each tree will wither and die the moment it touches those waters.’

  Gilgamesh did as the ferryman commanded, though it took many days. Then they made their offerings and set out across the river of death to meet with the immortals.

  ‘But be warned,’ Urshanabi told the King, ‘you will never find what you seek.’

  Sharo paused there and stopped his tapping on the stone.

  ‘I’m not going to tell you the rest,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘So you have to come back.’ She felt a bubble of tears. She put her arm around his shoulder.

  ‘I’ll come back, Sharo. But your carvings … they’re going to kill you if you don’t stop this. The King is going mad.’

  ‘Then that’s what they�
�ll do.’ He turned back to his work. ‘I can’t forget any of it, Aurya. And what I remember goes into the stone.’

  He brushed away the dust from his work. Aurya felt a great sinking in her heart, a weariness in her limbs. The night air was cold, and she knew Abil would be worried about her. Aurya breathed out and turned to leave. Sharo picked up his chisel again and made a couple of gentle strikes.

  ‘Aurya,’ he said, and she turned back to him. He sniffed. ‘You should leave this place. This city. It poisons everything it touches.’

  ‘I know. I’m trying.’

  Sharo smiled.

  ‘You grew your hair. You look just like her, you know.’

  Aurya nodded and felt a smile break through her tears.

  ‘Thanks, Sharo. It’s good to see you again.’

  She walked from the workshop, leaving Sharo behind with his stone. Bel-Ibni was waiting in the shadow of the gate, and looked questioningly as she approached.

  ‘Well? Will he stop this nonsense and carve what the King wants?’

  ‘I think so,’ Aurya lied.

  Aurya saw the muscles in the servant’s jaw clench and unclench. And then, for the first time, she saw a fluttering of real fear in his eyes.

  ‘That boy is going to get us all killed.’

  When she got home, Aurya lay on her mat with Abil and listened to the movements of the city night outside, the yowls of cats and drunks, the huff of oxen and the slushing footsteps of patrolling soldiers in the muddy streets. She felt the muscles in her stomach, the strange creature growing just beneath the surface.

  ‘Abil, I want to talk to you.’

  ‘You don’t still want to leave, do you, Aurya? I told you: our lives are here, in the city. And these dreams you’ve been having, these feelings … they’re just your imagination. Everything is just as it’s always been.’

  She held on to him, unable to let him go, while the night moved around them. She wanted to tell him, but telling him would make it real. And what was it inside her? Was it a child, or a lion? She lay in the darkness, feeling the warmth of her husband’s body, and the city’s invisible spirits moving in their enormous numbers in the sky overhead.

  ‘Abil?’ He didn’t answer. She listened to his breathing and knew that he was asleep. ‘I’m going to have a child.’ The words went unheard, disappearing into the night as if never said. ‘I’m so scared.’

  The new trove of tablets that the King had promised arrived in the following days. There were hundreds of them, arriving in carts and barges, stacked in wicker baskets and flax bags stuffed with straw. The caravan driver Sin-Zababa came with them, but he seemed in a strange mood to Aurya. He had got even thinner, and pale as ash. He didn’t want to talk about the tablets at all.

  ‘Long journey,’ he kept saying. ‘Too long, a very hard road.’

  He waited out by the library gate as the tablets came in, and set up an awning under which he would spend the night, chewing some kind of mountain grass he kept in a pouch.

  Aurya had to stay late to catalogue the new finds as they came in. She marked each tablet with the King’s inscription before stacking them on the waiting shelves: stories and poems, histories and king lists, manuals and lists of laws, word lists for the dead languages, hymns to the gods, psalms and songs. All this time, her thoughts wandered over Sharo and his story, over Abil and the dark shroud she felt creeping over the city.

  Sometime after sunset, Aurya made some excuse and headed to the room of records. The place was huge. It sprawled across many shelves, stuffed with tablets stacked in piles and tied with string. It took her a long time to find what she was looking for: the manifests of vessels. She counted back the years. The tablet she found was scratched and old, but the writing was clear enough. She ran her finger down the list of names. And then she found it.

  ‘Ashana Nur-ili, daughter of Adad-Kudurri-Usur.’ There she was. Her mother’s name, stamped in the clay. ‘Departed by boat headed north with Tappum the mason, son of Iarbi-ilu.’

  That was all it said. Aurya sat down on a seat nearby and stared at this one line in the clay as goosebumps broke all over her arms. She felt the grooves in her necklace as she read it over and over, imagined the day it must have been written, the young woman setting out by boat with her new husband. Then, when the shaking in her body had passed, Aurya put the tablet back on its shelf, and went back to work.

  Once everyone else had gone home, Aurya brought a pitcher of beer to Sin-Zababa, who took it with a far-off look in his eyes.

  ‘Thank you, Miss. It’s been a long journey.’

  ‘They only get longer,’ she said, and the driver nodded.

  ‘Back on the road tomorrow. Back on the road tomorrow.’

  With the library empty, Aurya could take as much time as she liked to read each text as they passed through her hands. She stopped to read one strange tablet that imagined an argument between a palm tree and a willow, over which was the superior tree. Then she read about the goddess Ishtar’s descent into the underworld, how she passed through every gate into that dark place, and at each one removed an item of clothing until she stood naked before the land of the dead. When Aurya reached the story’s end, she saw something that made her stop: a dark spot on the baked clay, like a blot of ink. She scratched at it, and her fingernail came away with a rust-coloured rind of red. She examined it, drew it close to her face and breathed in. There it was: under the tablet’s earthy clay smell, and the slight hint of smoke from the tablet’s firing and the dust, there was the copper tang of blood. Aurya picked up another slab of clay and peered at that too. There was another one: a dark spot, larger this time, and a deeper red. She searched through the piles of new tablets, peering closely at each one. After checking a few more, she found another spot, and then another, until finally she picked up an ancient king list, and found a long dark thread of dried blood staining the clay, pooled in the letters’ deep cuts. Aurya said a prayer under her breath:

  Give me unto Marduk the merciful.

  May my mother Ishtar forgive me.

  ‘In the name of Ashur and Nabu, Ashurbanipal the King of Legions enters his library!’ came the King’s booming voice, making Aurya jump. The usual clamour accompanied him: the clang of bells and banging of drums, the grunts of the slaves beneath the bier, the fluttering of pennants and ostrich feathers. Servants and slaves hurried along ahead of him, flicking fly whips, and his soldiers lowered their spears so as not to knock the hanging lamps in the ceiling.

  The King and his entourage passed her doorway in a bustle and clamour of instruments and voices, and she straightened up. Abil was there too, walking behind the royal bier, carrying something in a red cloth. He caught Aurya’s eye for a moment, his face pale. She took the bloodstained tablet with her and went to the corridor as the commotion made its way through the library. The greenish flames of sea wood were already flickering, and the King stopped in the reading room. Aurya wandered out through the chaos of servants and soldiers trailing through the halls, back to the library gate where Sin-Zababa was crouched beneath his canopy. The beer had combined with the grass the driver chewed to make his eyes sleepy and dull, but he raised his head to see Aurya standing there.

  ‘Sin-Zababa, where do these tablets come from?’ she said. He looked up at her with sad eyes.

  ‘From a place just like this,’ he said. ‘An old stone library, in the palaces of Elam.’

  ‘From Elam?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I heard the King had Elam destroyed.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what happened to the people like me? The people who kept the books?’

  Sin-Zababa took a long draught of his beer, and spat out the grains.

  ‘When I arrived they were already dead. Some of them still holding the books they loved in their arms. Their throats cut, ear to ear. And the soldiers laughing.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘Shamash will judge me for what I saw.’

  Aurya looked down at the thread of blood on the tablet, and fe
lt her fingers pressing white into the clay. A pure anger filled her from within, blistering as the sun. Murderers, all of them. Murderers the King and murderers his soldiers – and they had made a murderer of her too. They made her file away their murderous loot with the blood on it barely dried. The image flashed through her head of a body tumbling into the darkness, a pair of eyes looking up at her, pricked with points of moonlight. The voice in her dream came back to her as blood rushed to her face, and the world seemed to rock around her. A murderer in a city of murderers.

  Just at that point, the King’s procession exploded out of the library in all its riotous noise. Abil was with them, still carrying his wrapped package. Aurya pulled herself together and hurried after the clamorous crowd, trying to draw close to him. Soldiers and servants bumped her, cymbals crashed in her ears and the ostrich and peacock feathers brushed her face, but she managed to reach him through the chaos.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she hissed. Abil didn’t dare look straight at her, only let his eyes flicker in her direction. She could tell he was afraid.

  ‘It’s this tablet. The one I’ve been translating.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s a ritual. The King is going to the top of the ziggurat to perform it.’

  ‘What kind of ritual?’

  ‘Ancient. Full of power.’

  Aurya could hear a tremor in his voice. She looked up at the King, whose arms were raised, his head tilted back, his lips murmuring. When they stepped out into the night, Aurya saw that the ziggurat’s highest chamber was lit with a flickering flame, and the night wind moved around her restless and full of shadows.

  Katya

  The pickup trucks carrying the lion hunt stones parked outside the museum. As they drew to a stop, one engine burst from the weight of the stone, and smoke began belching from its bonnet. The black acrid fumes made Katya cough as Abu Ammar walked her and Salim back to the museum. Inside, she caught a glimpse of Lola up on the mezzanine. The girl ducked down at the sight of the gunmen pouring into the museum. Timid workmen moved the two lion hunt pieces on forklifts and wooden shipping pallets, laying them out on the entrance hall floor. Katya walked around the huge stone slabs with Salim; both were awestruck, talking excitedly despite themselves.