Pahpi Nu spoke softly. “I have not accused your intent. Rather, I point out that, regardless of your intentions, the forces you have set in motion can mechanically end in no other way—short of a direct intervention by E’Yahavah. As to it coming in the form of an interruption, I regret that I must invoke the Right of Seerdom, according to the custom of Seti and Q’Enukki, and all the Seven Seers—which gives me that prerogative.”
Kush turned from the Zhui’Sudra’s balcony, and continued to address the circle of Ensi chieftains, as if Pahpi Nu had not even spoken.
El’Issaq of Iavanni stood before Kush and shouted, “The Right of Seerdom has been invoked by the Zhui’Sudra himself! You will desist!”
Napalku saw Magog and Ghimmuraya grab their sword hilts, but before he could shout a warning to El’Issaq, Kush bowed and fell silent.
A’Nu-Ahki spoke. “You speak of the powers of the World-that-Was; a subject I understand well, having lived most of my nine-hundred-and-forty-odd years in that world. I’ve seen those powers create and destroy, and I know the warning signs when I see them. I do not oppose using natural forces like quickfire—we use it here, and hope to make wider use of it soon—perhaps even as you propose. But with power comes responsibility. Character must come before power in the foundation of a world.
“The M’El-Ki and I taught you to follow righteousness; to dress modestly, and bless your Creator, to honor father and mother, wives and husbands, and to love your neighbor. I urged you to guard your hearts from sexual sin, and the uncleanness that stirs up the iniquity we all inherit. For by these things came the Deluge on the olden world: First came the perversion where the Watchers, against their created nature, went after the daughters of men and took—in their minds—‘wives’ of any they chose.
“What followed, the Khaldini call ‘the Final Abomination,’ in their increasingly shortened history lessons. I tell you that the Watchers capitalized only on the beginning of defilement—not its end. They ‘begat’ sons, the Nae-Fillim—or Fallen Ones—which were sometimes unlike each other in form, because the Watchers could only contort the seed of humanity, never truly procreate themselves with our women.
“These engineered offspring devoured one another in rivalries and warfare: Giants slew Naefil and then both slew the Elyo, and the Elyo drank human blood, while men killed one another without remorse. Even organized warfare eventually broke down into random violence with no winnable strategic purpose, other than to incite terror. Everyone sold himself to work perversion and shed blood, until the earth swarmed with evil.
“At the same time, men sinned against beasts, birds, and all creatures that walked on the earth. They sought to re-engineer life at its deepest levels. On bizarre whims, hoping to achieve physical immortality, they contorted animal and human forms; unleashing plagues of deformity that attacked the very fundamental creation codes of life, so that the resulting monstrosities shed even more blood. In the end, however, it was humanity—not the Watchers—that brought E’Yahavah’s wrath to its full.
“Humanity alone was created fully in the image of God. The heavenly orders—both holy and fallen—despite their great power and authority, exist only to serve, not primarily to create. When humanity fell, E’Yahavah made us mortal for our own protection. Sin made us dangerous to ourselves. Influenced by suggestion from fallen Watchers, the human imagination eventually created only vanity and evil continually. Mankind became dupes and monsters in the greatest horror that has ever existed.”
“For this reason, E’Yahavah El-N’Lil scoured everything from the face of the earth. Because of the wickedness of human deeds, and because of the blood they had shed in the earth, he annihilated everything. Only we remained; I, my wife, my sons with their wives, and everything that entered with us into the Boat of a Million Years, from which you all descended.
“Yet now I see your works; that you do not walk with integrity—this is where I begin to expose your intentions, Kush, Nimurta, and all you who conspire with them. You have begun to walk a path of destruction. You have divisions and envy—this is why you are not in harmony, my sons—not because your elders have forsaken good sense, and not because we withhold the secrets of the Ancients. I see demons beginning to seduce you. I fear for you, that after my death, perhaps sooner, you will increasingly shed human blood, as happened in the World-that-Was. You are no more immune to destruction than my generation…”
Nimurta interrupted. “I was led to believe by your teaching, and that of the M’El-Ki, that E’Yahavah would never again destroy the Earth, until the final World-end of Fire. Surely our alleged lapse doesn’t rise to that?”
The Old Man glared down at the disruptor. “The Invocation of Seerdom is not a call to debate, Nimurta. There are things far worse even than sudden destruction in this life, let alone the next. The Divine M’Ae declares that whoever sheds man’s blood is doomed to lawful destruction by the hand of man. Into Under-world shall they go, to await condemnation, into the Abyssu’s darkness by violent death, as written on the Tablets of Destiny.
“I am commanded to testify to you all, to your children, and all flesh, in the hope that your living blood might not be required of you at the hand of lawful execution for treason. The land becomes unclean from human blood shed upon it, unless we hold the blood of those that shed it accountable. Only by this is the land purified from the curse of the Divine M’Ae.
“My children, I urge you all to use sound judgment. I want you all planted securely over the face of the Earth—that your deeds be as praises lifted to my God, who saved me from the Tides of Nemesis. Then you shall go and build cities of industry, with quickfire, and all kinds of fruitful tree.
“I command you these things, as did Q’Enukki, the father of your fathers, command Muhet’Usalaq his son, and Muhet’Usalaq, his son Lumekki, and Lumekki commanded me. I give you not just a request, or a plea, but a commandment, as Q’Enukki, the Seventh Sage, commanded his sons.
“Without authority based on truth, mercy, goodness, and justice, there can be no order. The powers that build civilization then become the fires that destroy it. This prophecy ends.”
Lightning flickered madly in the skylight with a crack of thunder, illuminating the ancient seer’s face, as if punctuating his warning.
A piercing scream lanced the rough-hewn hall from outside.
Imdugud: (Mesopotamian) – A name of Ninurta as rain-god. In some versions, Imdugud and Ninurta were originally the same deity who developed into two widely different beings. Imdugud (or Zu) once stole the Tablets of Destiny from Enlil but they were recovered by Ninurta. He is depicted as a storm-bird with the head of a lion. Called Imdugud, Imgug, Imgig, Zu, Ninurta…
—Mythology Dictionary, www.mythologydictionary.com/imdugud
7
Imdugud
21
Napalku was first through the doors to see what the noise was. In the display chamber outside the inner treasuries, the young woman he had first seen in the tower window on his arrival pointed to the body of an acolyte lying face up on the stone floor. His glassy eyes stared, frozen open in death.
The girl shrieked, “They’ve stolen the Divine M’Ae! Imdugud marauders have stolen the Tablets of Destiny!”
The others swarmed out of the rotunda, nudging Napalku aside to get to the body and the girl. The display niche for the hammered gold tablets that held the written device of Divine governance was empty. Napu managed to push his way back into the mob to reach the girl.
“She’s lying. Don’t believe her—ever!”
The Voice came from nowhere and everywhere, loud enough that those nearest the empty display niche should have heard it. But nobody responded. Even Pahpi Nu, who descended from his balcony by a wooden staircase, went to the girl and held her in his arms as if he had heard nothing.
“Tell us what you saw, child,” said the Zhui’Sudra.
The girl dabbed her tears with her wrap, and said, “They had the black cloak with the red Imdugud dragon-bird of the Amurru marau
ders on it—escaped Khana’Anhu slaves!”
Napalku stepped forward. “Which way did they come from?”
The girl hesitated. “There is but one way into the Treasure Cave.”
“Yes, they would have had to go through a seven-level township filled with people, in broad daylight, wearing Imdugud cloaks or carrying them with. Then they would have had to escape by the same route, carrying several heavy golden plates. Which way did they come from, and where did they go?”
Mother T’Qinna’s hand rested on Napalku’s shoulder. “Napu, there’s a storm outside. Besides, how can she know those things?” She turned and set her warm green eyes on the girl. “Inana, try to remember exactly what you saw.”
Inana clasped her golden braids in her hands. “Oh, Mother T’Qinna, it all happened so fast. The acolyte was already fallen when I came out of the library. The Imdugud men—there were three, I think—they saw me and rushed past, out the main entrance.”
Napalku added, “Rushed, carrying heavy gold tablets?”
Inana glared at him for the tiniest fraction of a second before her hands went over her eyes and the tears burst. “Yes! I don’t know! I guess!”
Napalku felt the angry presence a second before he heard the voice.
Arrafu Lord of the High Khaldini said, “Young Khaldi, do you accuse my daughter of something here?”
Napalku suddenly realized his danger.
Then it got worse.
“Ay! Old man! You leave my Napu alone! He’s a good boy!”
Old Qe’Nani—whom Napalku had been steadfastly avoiding since his arrival at Arrata—pushed his way through the crowd. The tracker looked silly, his fists balled as if ready for a brawl, while foppishly dressed in the linen robes of a High Khaldini lord.
Arrafu raised his hand to strike his eldest son, but wiry Qe’Nani was faster. He twisted under his father’s swing, came up behind, and rapidly punched Arrafu in the kidneys twice. The Lord of the Khaldini crumpled.
“That’s enough!” The Zhui’Sudra shouted, interposing himself between Qe’Nani and Arrafu, who had fallen to his knees.
Nimurta, Assur, and Kush came up behind Pahpi Nu, while Inana ran sobbing to her father, and helped him back to his feet.
Napalku watched the scene in the cavern antechamber slow to an unnatural crawl, as even Pahpi Nu’s dropped staff leaned into a fall that took hundreds of times longer than it should have to reach the stone floor, where it bounced with a drawn-out, watery wobble. Kush and Nimurta crept up on either side of the Zhui’Sudra and ushered him away, while Assur came alongside Mother T’Qinna like a slow boat in a river fog.
Napu tried to go after them, but found he could not move fast enough in that direction. The air itself resisted him like some form of heavy fluid. Then he saw the Man in White, standing inside the display niche that had until moments ago held the Tablets of Destiny. Unlike everyone else, this stranger moved at a normal rate of speed, his hands gesturing for Napu to approach him. Napalku stepped toward him to obey, and found that he too could walk free of the cold honey-like air that had entrapped the others as bugs in tree sap destined to become amber.
The Stranger stepped from the display niche, clasping Napu’s wrist to pull him aside into library, where he shut the draperies behind them. He resembled Napalku’s father—light brown complexion and black beard, except his eyes were the most luminous shade of blue.
“Don’t ever trust that girl,” the Stranger said. “She will be a knife at your back all the days of your life. That bynt actually wants to be the new Isha’Tahar, if you can imagine it.”
Napalku recognized the name from the Eridu Stone—that of a woman who supposedly became a goddess after she consorted with the Watcher Shamash or Shamyazha, as Mother T’Qinna had called him.
The white-clad Stranger pulled him further into the library. “Your name is no longer Napalku, but Palqui—for in your days the Earth is divided. I have chosen you to speak for me in this generation; although I have little to say that will be terribly well understood by anyone, until much later. Nor will you find my work simple to understand, I’m afraid. Do not fear for your wife, Mother T’Qinna, and Pahpi Nu. You must leave this place quickly, now. Do not take provision or a mount, for I will see to your needs through the protector I have sent out for you.”
“Who, Lord?”
The Stranger smiled. “He will find you when the time is right. Now go! Leave this place. By the time the others notice you are missing, you shall be many days journey from here.”
“How is that possible, since you have forbidden me a beast to ride? And where shall I go? There is a storm outside.”
“The rain and wind have stopped, only clouds remain. Strike west along the mountain paths, north of the River T’Qinna.”
The Stranger pulled Palqui out the archway at the far end of the library, which overlooked the town of S’Eduku-tal-ebab on the east slope of Arrata’s mound. The eastern hills around Mount Lubar, with Pahpi Nu’s vineyard town tucked away amid its lower slopes, loomed like a hazy shadow on the horizon. The rain and wind had indeed stopped, and the air was dead calm, as if weighed down by an immense sorrow.
While Palqui descended the stepped hill, the people of the city all stood as statues in the midst of their daily activities. On the settlement’s lowest tier, a woman still wet from the rain carried water over her shoulders in a double yoke of wooden pails from one of the fresh-fall cisterns. She had tripped on a stone. Her spilling burden hung in shimmering arcs outside the buckets’ mouths like twin masses of floating frozen glass. Palqui noted the sudden alarm frozen into her eyes as he walked silently past her.
Only when he left the city, did he notice that the Messenger of E’Yahavah was no longer with him.
22
The tomb-silent river slid under the reed boat like oil from the plentiful slime pits that dotted the surrounding Agadae lands. Stunted trees loomed, armies of deformed ghosts on either side, with claw-like branches, sparse of foliage—except for sporadic stands of palm, which stood in the odd gray light; dead kings with spiked crowns. In the boat, the three women and the Old Man sat in silence on woven bench rows just behind the oarsmen.
It surprised even T’Qinna in the end how quickly the collapse of Arrata had happened. The hand-wringing saars and their waffling Khaldini advisors, so afraid of appearing as “backward nomad clan chieftains,” had capitulated to Kush and Nimurta’s demands, once it appeared that a common enemy had been able to penetrate the Treasure Cave and make off with its most valuable artifact. She knew nothing of the sort had happened, but even if she could have proved it, few beside the captives with her in the boat would have cared, except Iyapeti, El’Issaq, En’Tarah-ana, and of course Napalku—if he still lived. There was no way to get word to any of them, however.
Mystery shrouds it all! Where is Napalku? He saw right through Inana! Great E’Yahavah, please let him be safe! How could so many layers of betrayal by so many of my own children been hidden from me, when it went on under my nose for so long?
Worse than the wafflers, a number of Khaldini—her own firstborn son chief among them—had imagined they could preserve for themselves an “enclave of purity” by cooperating. They had agreed not to oppose Kush and Nimurta in exchange for possession of the city named for T’Qinna. Inside the “safety” of S’Eduku-tal-ebab, Lord Arrafu and Usalaq proclaimed what amounted to a kind of spiritual fantasy, using all the theologically correct teachings, to those few that remained in Arrata.
It seemed that Arrafu had built up the walls of his own ghetto around himself, from the inside, for many decades. T’Qinna had just underestimated how high those walls went. A’Nu-Ahki had somehow known more, or at least suspected.
She remembered the bitter confrontation between her son and Pahpi Nu, just before Kush and Nimurta had taken them away south “for their own protection.” (Nobody had ever made clear whom they needed protection from.)
Arrafu had appealed to the Zhui’Sudra in an insipid sort of way: “Gr
andfather, surely you can see this is the only way to preserve the truth.”
A’Nu-Ahki had arched a weathered brow. “Truth? Have you not asked yourself why so many of our best students uncritically believe the testimony of this ‘Eridu Stone’ that Qe’Nani so recently discovered?”
T’Qinna had watched her son fidget with his hands.
Arrafu tried to ignore the question. “I shall preserve the Academy at S’Eduku-tal-ebab so that future generations may have the essentials of theological truth if they want them…”
“Which parts of truth are ‘essential,’ and which parts, nonessential?”
“Grandfather, you are quibbling about words.”
“No I’m not! I’m talking about equipping new generations with the tools to reason, which is why your father founded the Academy! This cuts back to why so many of the history lectures vanished from the curriculum after your father left, and to why so many important words have disappeared, not only from common use, but from that of those supposed to be teachers!”
“Grandfather, this is an old and pointless argument. We live in a simpler world without need of the complex jargon that confused the generations of your day so that evil could prosper before the Deluge.”
Pahpi Nu cocked his head at this. “Confused? Do you lecture me on what went wrong before the Deluge? I was there!”
Arrafu sputtered, “I’m sorry, that came out wrong…”
“Did it? Thoughtful people must draw their own conclusions in a civil discussion of the issues, not simply be told what to think! That’s why we call post-lecture sessions a dialogue! It’s always less risky in the short term to shut down potentially controversial discussion than it is to build from Divine revelation to explore and apply truth in a multi-leveled world! But, long term, we need the skills developed by that more difficult path.”
Gate of the Gods: Book 5 of The Windows of Heaven Page 10
