Day of the False King

by Brad Geagley

  They continued searching through the tablets in silence, until Semerket heard Lugal give a victorious grunt. “Ah!” said the trader, staring at a clay tablet he had withdrawn from a basket. “This looks promising!”

  Quickly Semerket went to his side. Lugal read from the tablet aloud. “ ‘Egyptian female, twenty-three years of age. Slim, comely. Answers to the name of Aneku.’ And it says here she came from Egypt in the company of Menef, aboard his own ship.”

  A sweat broke on Semerket’s brow. Very few people knew that Naia’s father had called her Aneku when she lived in his house. In Egyptian it meant, “She belongs to me.” He felt almost nauseous, torn between both exhilaration and fear. “It could be her,” he breathed, “for Aneku was her infant name. Who was she sold to?”

  Lugal eyed the tablet. His expression darkened. “Ah, well, it’s not the best of news—particularly for a husband—but it could be worse, I suppose.”

  Semerket did not like the anxious look on Lugal’s face. “Who bought her?” he asked again.

  Lugal coughed, pretending great interest in the tablet, squinting at the marks inscribed on it. “The guardians of the Temple of Ishtar, I’m afraid.”

  Semerket let out a long breath. “You frightened me,” he laughed. “From your look, I expected worse.”

  “Well, then,” Lugal smiled in return, relieved. “If you’re comfortable with it, so am I. Frankly, I thought that you’d despise me for selling her to the Ishtar eunuchs, and take your revenge somehow.”

  Semerket’s sense of disquiet returned. “Why d’you say that?”

  The grim, anxious look again appeared on Lugal’s face. “Do you not know of the Temple of Ishtar?” he asked. “What it is…?”

  “I assume that Naia—if that’s who she really is—helps to serve the goddess in some way.”

  “Aye,” Lugal said, “but do you know in what way?”

  Semerket shook his head, suddenly unable to speak for fear of what the answer would be.

  “Ishtar is first and foremost a goddess of fertility…”

  “Well?” Semerket asked.

  “Aneku was bought to serve as a temple prostitute.”

  SEMERKET STOOD DAZEDLY outside Lugal’s compound in the red afternoon sun. He wandered past a wagon train of slaves, recently arrived from the northern mountains. The strong scent of unwashed human flesh made him aware of where he was, reviving him better than even spirits of juniper. He pushed his way through the milling slaves, taking himself back to the stables where the chariot waited.

  “I want to return to Babylon now,” he announced to the driver.

  “But, lord, it’s getting dark. By the time we reach the city, the Elamite’s curfew will have fallen.” The man smiled encouragingly, hoping that Semerket might see reason. “Wouldn’t it be better to stay here in Eshnunna tonight, and get a fresh start in the morning? The desert night is full of demons…”

  “Now!” snarled Semerket, seizing a coiled whip from a peg and brandishing it dangerously.

  The moon rose large and yellow over the desert, and the boulders and scrub cast weird, tangled shadows across the golden sands that stretched before them. Despite their eagerness to run as swiftly as before, the charioteer kept his horses to a brisk trot. For the first couple of leagues Semerket remained silent. He focused his troubled eyes forward, always on the red glow in the southwest that was Babylon.

  The charioteer glanced covertly at him. The moon’s rays picked out Semerket’s bitter profile. The charioteer swallowed, musing on what the Egyptian must have discovered back in the slave yards that had turned him so sour. When Semerket spoke again, his words were not the ones the charioteer expected to hear. “What can you tell me of the Temple of Ishtar?” Semerket asked quietly.

  So that was it, the charioteer nodded to himself. The man must be of an amorous nature that evening, and needed to relieve his tension in the time-honored way. The charioteer had noticed that eventually all foreigners wanted to go to the Lady’s temple, to see for themselves if the stories were true. In fact, the charioteer received lavish gratuities from Ishtar’s guardians to talk up the temple’s allurements to the hostel’s boarders.

  The man launched into a full-throated description of the pleasures Semerket might find at the home of Ishtar. “Ah, my lord! It is a wonder of the world—”

  “Is it a brothel?” Semerket curtly interrupted the charioteer’s patter.

  “It’s a paradise come to earth, a city in itself, dedicated to love, with gardens of such exquisite—”

  “What of the women there?”

  “The Ishtaritu, my lord?” The charioteer blinked in confusion, trying to remember the order of his rehearsed speech. After a false start, he was once again able to pick up the thread of his words. “My lord, there are more than two thousand of them. Every new ship brings fresh beauties from around the world to serve there, each chosen to become a living manifestation of the goddess herself. Why, there are women from over sixty different races and countries, some with skin like polished ebony, others with eyes cut obliquely—”

  “Are Egyptians among their company?”

  “I—I suppose so, my lord.” He hurried on to the next part of his speech. “And if you’ve tired of female companionship—as who among us has not?—there is no shortage of male Ishtaritu to whom an offering—”

  “And the cost for all this beauty?”

  “Ah, my lord, the act of love is the only offering the goddess requires.” The charioteer coughed discreetly. “Of course, a present equal to the pleasure you receive is not turned away by the priests, if that should be your wish.”

  “Of course.”

  Stillness fell between them. The charioteer again looked sideways. The Egyptian certainly did not seem eager to sample the glories of Ishtar’s temple. In fact, he seemed more morose than ever.

  Just as they came to the outskirts of Babylon, however, Semerket cleared his throat to ask a final question of the charioteer. “Where is it? What part of the city?”

  “The Ishtar Temple, my lord? Why, near the Ishtar Gate—where else?”

  The moon had lost its skin of gold by the time they reached the city walls, and was now almost directly overhead, a flat pale disc of white. Contrary to the charioteer’s predictions, the Elamite guards allowed them to enter Babylon, for Semerket demanded—and received—a pass permitting them to be on the streets after curfew.

  The charioteer deposited him at the front door of Bel-Marduk’s hostel. Semerket waited at the door in the light of the hostel’s torches, watching as the charioteer drove the horses around to the stable. When he knew he was alone and unobserved, he slipped again into the street.

  Since he had a pass allowing him to be abroad after curfew, he was certainly not going to be stupid enough to let it go to waste. He walked quickly down Processional Way, in the direction of the Ishtar Gate. It would be ironic if he found Naia no more than a furlong from where he had been staying all along…

  Firmly, he forbade himself to sob.

  DESPITE THE ELAMITES’ CURFEW, Ishtar’s temple was raucous with activity. Most of those who gathered in the street around its tall gates were Elamite soldiers on leave, drunk and loud, or foreigners with nighttime passes, also drunk and loud. As he came nearer the gate, he took out a silver piece to pay the temple guardians. Despite the chariot driver’s reassurances, Semerket did not believe that Ishtar’s priests demanded only an offering of love at her temple; if so, that in itself would have been reason enough to call the temple a wonder of the world.

  A silver piece was coincidentally the exact price of admission required of him. Passing through a tunnel, he at last entered the gardens. A thousand torches gleamed, making the gardens blaze as brightly as if it had been noon. The temple grounds comprised a series of low-slung terraces planted in flowers and groves, rising to form an artificial hill. At their crest stood the temple itself, looking very much as the charioteer had described it to him, a paradise on earth. The scent of jasmine and honey
suckle wafted to him, borne in the arms of the night breezes.

  A long line of men snaked through the gardens, climbing slowly through the terraces. Semerket crossed the courtyard to join it, for the line appeared to be the only way into the temple. There, he supposed, was where the sacred prostitutes were to be found.

  When he had gone a few steps, however, he realized that the women concealed themselves in niches within the terraces. Watching the other men closely, he learned that one chose a woman by throwing yet another silver piece into her lap. The Ishtaritu then led her suitor into the temple, where Semerket presumed the cribs were located.

  Semerket had no choice but to ogle every woman’s face as he passed, seeking Naia’s. There were literally hundreds to choose from, each clad in the bizarre garb of her homeland. The charioteer had spoken true when he said that the women came from at least sixty nations from all around the world.

  There were dark-skinned girls from the lands of the Ganges, who cultivated wispy mustaches on their upper lips; Africans with their crisp hair cut at an angle, their full breasts covered in heavy chains of bronze; yellow-skinned beauties from Cathay, with hair blacker than any Egyptian’s. On and on he went, past yellow-and red-haired women with skins whiter than the sands of Libya; but Semerket saw no Egyptian woman.

  He was close to the entrance of the temple now, and the only places left to explore outside were those parts of the gardens where the hot-eyed male Ishtaritu waited. Judging from what he saw, their ranks were as varied as the women’s. Some were muscular, easily at home on any dockside, aggressively male, while others were indistinguishable from their sister Ishtaritu, dressed in women’s robes, with faces painted as expertly as any courtesan’s—only more so.

  Semerket, who had not lain with a woman since Naia had divorced him, began to feel queasy. His pulse pounded in his limbs and his forehead became tight—a distant warning signal that his headaches would soon begin again.

  It was not his simple unthinking prudery that disturbed him; it was that he had caught the unmistakable whiff of sex in the air and felt suddenly capable of rape. The women who had so brazenly displayed themselves to him in the gardens had aroused his long-dormant lust. Another few minutes at the temple and he would be lost. He stood at its doorway, breathing deeply, gathering up his courage to go inside.

  At last, he stepped into the temple’s dim and smoky interior. Hesitating in the entry hall, he thought that the eunuch priests might stop him, for no Ishtaritu accompanied him. But the eunuchs were indifferent to what he did or where he went. They conversed rapidly with one another in their alcoves, sibilants hissing like angry adders, and did not even condescend to look at him. His breath caught painfully in his chest, for the place was thick with incense. Semerket brought his mantle over his face and took another few steps into the dark.

  The temple was a warren of reed partitions, erected so that hundreds of doorless cells existed in long rows. Within them, couples flagrantly copulated in every position that Semerket had ever imagined, and some he had not. Several single men, alone like him, strolled the hallways. They stopped occasionally to stare at or even cheer the more athletic or beautiful or imaginative pairs performing within the cubicles. Some even shamelessly stroked themselves as they watched, entranced by the carnal spectacle before them.

  Semerket tasted bile in his throat. What if he found Naia in such a cubicle? How could he leave without killing the men who dared touched her—or even those who looked on? His breath came in shallow gulps, and his throat burned from inhaling the low-hanging incense.

  He turned away in desperation—why did the eunuchs insist on burning so much of it? The answer occurred to him quickly: if there were no incense, then the scents of sex and bodily exudations would overwhelm everything within the temple. He looked down at the tiles on the floor, and was suddenly grateful that he wore his hard, hempen sandals; if he were barefoot, he would slide…

  In desperation, he approached one of the priests. Seeing Semerket gasping before him like a hooked fish, he signaled a servant hurriedly. “Some wine over here, quickly!”

  “No!” rasped Semerket. “No wine!”

  But the eunuch was pouring a goblet full of mulled red, which the priests kept on hand for such occasions. Many men actually died from their exertions within the temple—one of Ishtar’s more mordant jokes. The eunuchs privately believed that the goddess actually detested men—no doubt the reason why she required her priests to submit themselves to the knife.

  “Water,” insisted Semerket, “water is fine.”

  The eunuch looked at him doubtfully, but dipped a ladle into a nearby font. Semerket drank gratefully.

  “Thank you.” Semerket leaned against the wall, closing his eyes for a moment, and realized that his tunic had become sodden with sweat. The eunuch turned to leave, but Semerket called out, “Please. I need your help.”

  The eunuch began to wring his hands, grimacing. Eunuchs had a horror of physical distress, and Semerket did not look at all well. “It seems to me, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so, that you’ve enjoyed altogether too much sport here tonight; you really need to go home.”

  “I want to find someone in the temple—one of the Ishtaritu. It’s important.”

  “The goddess forbids you to see the same Ishtaritu more than once, sir. Come back another night—tomorrow, perhaps—and choose from the others.”

  “This is different—”

  The eunuch rolled his eyes, and sighed. “It always is.”

  “She’s my wife!”

  Semerket said the words so loudly that several men turned to gaze at him.

  “Your wife—?” the eunuch croaked.

  Hastily, Semerket told the eunuch-priest that he had come to search for an Egyptian woman named Aneku. Her real name was Naia, he said. She was his wife, and she had been mistakenly sold to the temple. He had special papers from the pharaoh of Egypt, he insisted, guaranteeing her freedom. Semerket began pulling pieces of gold from his belt, not even bothering to count them, and shoved them into the eunuch’s fat hands.

  “Take them all, please! Just show me to Naia—to Aneku—take me to her. I beg you!”

  Though it was against every stricture, the eunuch was a native Babylonian and knew the value of Egyptian gold. He was no fool, either, and foresaw a scandal of international proportions brewing. The fiction under which the temple existed was that all Ishtaritu were there by choice, each impersonating the goddess in his or her own way. How would it look if an Egyptian envoy’s wife were found among the initiates, unfairly sold into prostitution?

  “This way,” the eunuch muttered, pulling Semerket by his now-sopping tunic over to the alcoves where his fellow eunuchs waited. On the wall behind them were squares outlined in chalk, and the eunuchs had affixed pegs to each square. From some of the pegs, clay markers hung on strings, each bearing the name of an Ishtaritu. This ingenious system allowed the eunuchs to know which cubicle was in use, and which Ishtaritu utilized it.

  Quickly the eunuch-priest examined the markers, holding them in the light of a nearby torch. “Aneku, Aneku, Aneku,” he muttered. Then he grunted, nodding. “Bin ninety-six.” He seized Semerket by his sleeve and pulled him down a dark hall of reed cubicles. Semerket kept his eyes forward, refusing to look inside any of those he passed. Try as he would, however, he could not stop his ears against the groans and coughs and choking noises that assaulted him from all sides. His legs began to swim beneath him, as if his feet no longer touched the earth.

  The eunuch stopped at the far end of the temple and peeked inside one of the reed enclosures. He held his hand up to prevent Semerket from advancing further. Even from a distance, Semerket heard the sounds of emphatic lovemaking that emanated from the cubicle. He grimaced, holding his hands over his ears.

  Semerket waited in the dark for how long a time he did not know. At last, he saw a man emerge from the room, adjusting his garments. He was a tall, pale creature, with light eyes and long, dark hair. Semerket’s glare b
urned into him as he passed. Momentarily discomfited, the man regarded Semerket with apprehension. He made a holy sign in the air to avert the evil eye and hurried away. As he sped down the corridor, he cast quick glances over his shoulder to see if Semerket followed him.

  The eunuch beckoned Semerket to come forward. Semerket went into the cubicle with his head lowered, so that he saw only her long, shapely legs. He had forgotten the olive sheen of her complexion, and tried not to notice that she was wiping herself down with a cloth. Even these intimate gestures were imbued with her distinctive grace. He raised his eyes carefully and spied the beaded leather thong she wore around her loins; he glimpsed her small breasts with their hard brown nipples.