He looked powerful.
While petting the ewe with one hand, he slit its throat with the other. Blood shone on his gold, and the sheep sagged to the ground. “Why does he read the omens?” Rudi asked Asa, as the youngest, least qualified of the augury priests stepped forward. He crouched beside the animal, then slit it from throat to tail. He reached in and removed the liver.
The priestesses sang.
The priest mopped the blood off the liver and moved to stand by a burning lamp. He stared at the organ, then glanced over to his mentor, who stood in the shadows.
Rudi held her breath; the boy’s face was white.
“One more,” the priest whispered in words that echoed through the courtyard like a shout. “The gods will choose a final sacrifice.”
* * *
Chloe and Cheftu were in the marketplace, bartering for goods the next morning, when the cry rang out: “The en is dead! En Kidu is dead!”
Like everyone else, they exclaimed in shock and horror. The best place to hide, Chloe had suggested, was in full view. They joined the throng that raced to the tenemos walls.
So they stood—Cheftu shaven-faced and bare-scalped, with dyed eyebrows and lashes, and Chloe, painted fair, a cloak drawn over shoulder and bracelets around her bicep, like a Harrapan woman. Carefully, she balanced their belongings on her head—a useful ancient talent. Cheftu’s arm was strong around her waist, though he slumped in order to blend in better.
From within the temple, the cacophony of weeping and wailing washed out to the clients of Ur.
“They must be killing a ewe,” one of the nearby Sumerians said. “They’ll want to read its liver.”
“Who needs to read the liver? The gods weren’t pleased with him, so they took him,” another said.
“I bet Puabi missed him, so she had the gods call him,” a woman said to the men. “What wasn’t there to be pleased about?”
“Indeed,” Chloe whispered beneath her breath. Cheftu squeezed her waist.
“His job was to keep the populace—”
“The en is dead,” a priest announced. “The gods sought another sacrifice and have taken his life, willingly, I’m sure. The en was a vessel for their powers, and in his death he bows to their wills again.”
“You’re going to be a saint,” Chloe whispered.
Cheftu’s look was designed to shut her up. But she didn’t see any need for fear; they’d obviously bought the story, completely.
They were home free.
* * *
“I don’t believe you,” Gilgamesh said. “The en, who was perfectly healthy, and you tell me, already with a female, didn’t awaken this morning?”
The acolyte, who had stumbled on the corpse, nodded.
“When did you last see him?”
“With everyone else, sir. At twilight.”
“Who else attends him?”
“Shama, sir.”
“Puabi’s old chamber keeper?”
The acolyte nodded.
“Why wasn’t he put to death with her?” Gilgamesh asked.
The acolyte shook his head. “I know not, sir. Perhaps he was a gift to the en from the ensi Puabi, upon her death.”
Gilgamesh turned to Rudi. “The en is dead?”
“The gods proclaimed they needed a final sacrifice,” she repeated. “We are their servants, sir.”
The new lugal muttered, “As though I could forget,” beneath his breath, and turned to the en’s chamber door. “Open it,” he told the acolyte.
“Shama… he, he prepares the body,” the acolyte said. “I daren’t disturb him.”
Gilgamesh set his own hand on the door and pushed it open. Rudi felt ill at the smell—a body well on its way to dissolution.
Gilgamesh covered his nose and mouth, and stepped inside.
Flies swarmed.
Shama was hunched on the ground, his back black with flies, rocking to and fro and moaning. The stench grew stronger as they moved toward the en’s rooms.
Gilgamesh gently raised the old man to his feet, and had two soldiers escort him from the room.
They looked into the en’s bedchamber.
The former lover, the toast and envy of Ur, was laid in his robes on a stretcher, ready to be taken to his eternal resting spot. His golden braids were carefully tied into a knot, and the diadem that denoted his authority was seated on his brow. His eyes, once vivid with light, were murky. Rudi didn’t look closely at the swelling and squirming of his once-perfect body.
Gilgamesh stared. “It’s not possible,” he said. “Kidu cannot also be dead.”
“The gods took their final sacrifice,” Rudi said.
Gilgamesh dragged her closer. “Death is a horror to see,” he said. “I should avoid it at all costs.”
Rudi tried to look everywhere except the en’s body. Gilgamesh shook his head as he looked at the wild man. “His corpse is rotting quickly,” Gilgamesh said. “Was he this corrupt?”
A worm crawled out of the en’s nose.
Rudi ran from the room.
She heard the doors close behind her, and Gilgamesh’s words: “Prepare his tomb immediately. We’ll bury him in a double hour.”
* * *
Ningal listened to Gilgamesh’s tale, while the few remaining members of the council shook their heads. Now it would be safe for family members to return, for commerce to begin again, for Ur to rebuild.
Ningal wondered if Chloe and Kidu fled the city already. If they were embracing as they walked along the river’s edge, dizzy with relief to be together, to be free? For not a moment had the justice believed the word of the en’s death. Of course, Kidu had to create that illusion so that he could leave with Chloe. It was the only way for the two of them to be together. Though what the en would do for a livelihood, Ningal couldn’t guess.
Had she thought of him at all? Why should she? He was an old man who had loved her as best he could. He had to believe, though he hadn’t seen, that she had survived the nepenthe, escaped from the death pit, and abandoned Ur.
The real Puabi would return soon. She would select another en. The world would continue its forward motion, but Ningal wondered if he would ever feel real excitement and joy again.
“Justice,” a woman said, and touched his elbow. “How fares the boy this day?”
He turned to the beautiful, tired face of Shem’s widow. Ningal smiled at the light in her eyes. “Ezzi asked for you,” he said. “To thank you.”
Part Five
The Journey
I can’t believe we have to walk when there is a perfectly good river, right there,” Chloe said. “I was a lady too long. My feet are killing me.” She looked up at her flock. “Hey you, back over here!”
Cheftu didn’t even glance at her. “That river goes one direction. South. Do you know where we’re headed?”
“North,” she said crossly, glaring at the recalcitrant Dadi sheep. He always led the flock astray. And they’d only been walking for two days. “I’m getting in the mood for mutton,” she said to him. He ignored her words, but rejoined the group.
“The current is too strong to try and fight,” Cheftu said.
Chloe paused and watched a guf filled with onagers and parcels, piloted by two men, go sailing by. “It looks like a Six Flags ride,” she said. They swirled and bobbed on the racing current.
“Do you want to rest?” Cheftu said, halting a few steps away.
She looked behind them at the twisting and haphazard column that followed. “No, we can walk on.” The sheep moseyed along, and Chloe herded them. Another skill she had picked up along the way.
The sun was blistering hot, at least 110 degrees in the shade of the palms, but Chloe knew Cheftu wanted to get as much distance between them and the temple as he could before nightfall. It was a precaution, should Gilgamesh or the newly instated Puabi decide to act on any suspicions they might have about the en’s sudden, mysterious death. Chloe swatted away flies, mosquitoes, and gnats. Trees and water made the heat that muc
h more unendurable—by adding 80 percent humidity.
Even the sheep looked bedraggled.
They trudged on. Cropped fields, interlaced with canals, ditches, and channels carpeted both sides of the river. Palm trees and orchards filled in the narrow islands, the only spaces where emmer, cucumbers, onions, lentils, peas, and barley weren’t planted. Even then, on the outskirts of the fields, the soil looked like it was frosted.
Salt.
In modern-day Iraq the Persian Gulf was at least a hundred miles farther south, and she could see the reason why.
Silt. The mouths of the rivers silted up over the centuries, the millennia, putting more and more land on the edge of the gulf. The salinity of the water was cumulative, driving the people farther and farther north in order to find decent soil. “Do we know where we’re going?” she asked Cheftu.
He shook his head, and Chloe saw the streaks of sweat running down his back. Fuzz glinted golden on his head already, and Chloe wondered how long it would take for those long braids to grow back. Years probably, if Cheftu’s hair grew like hers did—like hers used to.
She’d blamed his hair, his body, for the way she felt: drugged with desire. An exotic and new covering on the soul she loved so much and knew so well, was her excuse. There had to be some reason she couldn’t keep her hands off him.
He seemed to feel the same way about her.
It will be a miracle if we make it to wherever Nimrod leads, Chloe thought. Neither Chloe or Cheftu had had even a double hour of sleep since they’d found each other. Cravings ran just too high actually to sleep beside each other. Is this how a junkie feels? she asked herself as she swatted a sheep on the rump, encouraging it back into the group. It was insane, but when she touched Cheftu—she had to have him inside her. Usually the sooner the better.
And it got better, every time.
I have to stop thinking this way or we won’t make it any farther today.
Another guf zipped by, the wind blowing the cloth around the sailors’ heads. They looked cool, exhilarated. Chloe put one foot in front of the other and felt the sweat drip off the end of her nose.
Ahead, Nimrod walked with his family; his two wives, his brother Roo, who’d been Chloe’s classmate, and a mass of sheep, goats, and cattle. Chloe was down to three sheep now. When she’d been listed as being among the “chosen,” someone had taken four of her sheep. Mimi, the goat, she couldn’t give away. As though he knew she was thinking of him, he turned wicked yellow eyes her way, his jaw moving furiously.
She was still dressed; Cheftu was, too. Who knew what the goat was eating.
“Hya! Hya!” she called, and hustled her livestock forward.
Ahead of her, Cheftu walked in a very short skirt and bare chest.
Oh yeah, it was hot….
Larsa
“From the north to the south, from east to west. Everywhere, there is the taxman.” By dusk, they’d reached the outskirts of a town and a broken dike.
“I’ve never seen a place so flat,” Cheftu said. Because of the flatness, any depth of water made the entire world look flooded, with the exception of the walled commonwealth of Larsa, which rose on the northeastern horizon, built up on generations of clay remains.
Chloe wondered if when she’d woken up in the plain of Shinar, this had been the depth of the water around her—four inches. Except she’d known there were houses and people and animals beneath the water, so it had to have been deeper. Still, this image was chillingly familiar. Flood. “I don’t see any animals going two by two,” she joked.
Nimrod walked back to them. “It’s not that deep. Step carefully. The walls of Larsa protected that commonwealth from the waters, and we can be in the city tonight.”
They slogged through the water, which was only calf deep. The sagging heads of barley poked through the surface occasionally, and palm trees, appearing stunted, grew from the blue water. Mosquitoes formed a mist on its face, and Chloe wrapped her head in her top to keep her nostrils and ears from becoming plugged with the incessant buzzing.
The walls of Larsa were wearing away; the brick had only been sun-baked, so sitting in water was starting to dissolve the clay. At the gate, a series of men, dressed in skirts similar to those in Ur, and black-haired or shaved bald, awaited them.
“Greetings,” they said to Nimrod. “Where do you journey from?”
“The great commonwealth of Ur,” he answered.
“How many are in your party?”
“Male humans?”
“No, everyone.”
It took some counting, but with the addition of children and women, they arrived at 63 humans and 109 animals.
One scribe started figuring that, while the first man told them of the sleeping arrangements available. “As you saw, our fields are in dire shape. Most of the freedmen and slaves who live out there had to take refuge within the city walls.”
“Is there room for us?” Nimrod asked.
“After a fashion,” the man said, then accepted the numbers from the other scribe. “Each of you will owe a 45 percent night-stay tax—”
“That’s—!”
“And an additional fee, paid to each of the homes in which you stay, plus payment for food for you and your families, overnight rental space for your animals, the temple tax so the god Ningirsu allows you to stay, and, of course, payment to me and my accountant here for our services.”
It was dark now. The moon and stars reflected on the waters that formed a moat around Larsa.
“Forty-five percent of what?” Cheftu asked the man; Nimrod looked like he could strangle him.
“All your estimated wealth. Travelers from Ur, you must be quite well-to-do,” he said with a wink and smile.
Cheftu drew himself up. “Then let me be the first to inform you that all the citizens of Ur beggared themselves in order to barter with Sin, who interceded with the sun god, not to destroy us. None of us have anything of value anymore.”
“Well,” the man said, “that is unfortunate. Either you pay the tax, or you keep walking.”
“Where?” Nimrod asked.
“Out of our territory, which is another half day’s journey, most of it through water right now. I’ll send escorts with you.”
“Who will no doubt, need to be paid?”
“Welcome to Larsa,” the man said. “Choose quickly, we close the gate in a few minutes.”
Nimrod and Cheftu looked at each other. “Would they take sheep in payment?” Chloe asked. “A goat?”
“I wonder if the people inside the walls are taxed like this,” Nimrod said. “They should rise up and kill these men!”
“What is our decision?” Cheftu asked.
Water. Possible malaria. Confusion, exhaustion… “What if the next commonwealth does the same thing?” Chloe said. “Then what will we do?”
“If they take 45 percent here and now,” Nimrod said, “then the next time, 45 percent is considerably less.”
“I have an idea,” Chloe said. “Barter for us to pay when we leave, and let us stay here a few days. And make sure I get to stay in a place with a big kitchen.”
Nimrod nodded as a light dawned in his eyes. “Is Nirg going to want to help you?”
“Oh yeah, I think so.”
* * *
Chloe got to sleep at dawn, and woke a double hour later, feeling refreshed. Cheftu was gone, and she stretched in the not terribly big or comfortable bed. At least they weren’t walking today. She’d just opened her eyes when something fell on the bed.
Chloe squealed and sat up.
The snake writhed in the sheets. She screeched and jumped off the bed. The snake, equally alarmed and rudely awakened, slithered off to a corner of the room.
Cheftu threw the door open. “Chloe?”
She stood stark naked in the center of the chamber and stared at the ceiling suspiciously.
“Good day,” he said, blocking her from outside view.
“I wonder. A snake just fell on my head.”
“Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. “But I’m awake, that’s for sure.”
“You wanted to know when market day was? Today, it just began.”
She scrambled into her dried-out dress and paused to kiss him before she ran out to the makeshift souq stalls. Their whole plan depended on two things: her good cooking and the residents of Larsa’s imagination.
Either that, or the Urians would be short a few animals and lose a few months to slavery.
Nirg, Nimrod’s silent Aryan wife, walked beside her. “We need sage,” Chloe said, “coriander, marjoram, bay leaf, and pepper.” Ur’s marketplace had had everything—she only hoped Larsa’s did.
Compared to the metropolis on the gulf, Larsa was quiet. The market was almost empty of sellers, and the buyers didn’t seem to be buying. After she found the perfect cuts of meat, she learned why.
Chloe was wrapping the parcel of venison to tuck next to her pork slab, when a man approached her. He coughed delicately. “Yes?” she said.
“That would be another two minae,” he said.
She looked at the butcher.
He raised his hands. “Taxman,” he said.
“The whole cut was only four,” she said to the taxman. “A 50 percent tax on the meat?”
“Venison and pork? Yes.”
“If I got mutton?”
“Fifty percent also.”
“Pigeon?”
“Fifty percent.”
“A fig?”
“Fifty percent.”
“What if I don’t have the percentage—I just spent all I had on the meat?”
“Then, I fear, I will have to intercede with the butcher to return half the meat so you can pay your taxes.”
Chloe weighed out another two minae and got rid of the taxman. “Would you like a receipt?” he asked, gesturing to his scribe who scribbled furiously on a lump of clay.
Twilight in Babylon Page 31
