The First Heroes

by Harry Turtledove

  That made some of them bristle and others close their ears and minds against her. Lugalbanda, who had earned his place here by winning a battle or three but who was not the best or most eloquent of speakers, found himself unable to restrain his tongue. “I—I have heard,” he said, battling the stammer that always beset him when he had to speak in front of people, “I have heard a story, a rumor really, but it has a ring of truth—that there is a new god in Aratta, a god of war.”

  “That’s old news,” said the councilor who had spoken first. “The god, if he is one at all, has been there for years.”

  “Indeed,” said the king’s sister. She turned her beautiful and terrible eyes on Lugalbanda. “Tell us what you have heard.”

  His knees were weak and his wits scattered, but those eyes compelled him. They drew words out of him, words that even made sense—and that was a miracle worthy of her divinity. “I—I have heard that the god came from the east, and he brought with him an art and a weapon. He forges bronze, they say, that is stronger and brighter and keener than any in the world. His swords are sharper, his spearheads more deadly. But even more than those, he has a craft, a thing of power and terror. It rolls like thunder over the earth. Great beasts draw it, swifter than the wind. Wherever it goes, armies fall like mown grain.”

  “Travelers’ tales,” said the king.

  “Travelers who have been to Aratta,” his sister said. “Is there more?”

  Lugalbanda had an itch between his shoulderblades. It would have killed his dignity to scratch it, yet it was a miserable niggling thing.

  It could not drive him any madder than the sight of her face. “There—there is a little, divine lady. They say the god rides in his great weapon, and rules it with the terror of his will. And—and they say that he is not alone. That he has made more of them, and taught the men of the city to master them, and they are unconquerable in battle.”

  “It is true,” said the eldest of the council, who was deaf and nearly blind, but his wits were still as sharp as ever. “Even I hear a thing or two, and I have heard that no enemy has threatened Aratta since shortly after the god came to it. It’s more than the terror of his presence; he has weapons that deter even the hordes of savages.”

  Enmerkar smote his thigh with his fist. “If Aratta has such weapons—if this is not dream and delusion—we need them. We need copper and stone, wood and bronze. We need strength to drive back the Martu and to keep them from coming back again and again.”

  Inanna clapped her hands together. “All hail to the king of Uruk! Yes, we need what Aratta has—and it would be best if our messenger went soon, before winter closes the mountain passes. As it is, he’ll not come back until spring, but maybe he’ll come to us with a hoard of god-forged weapons.”

  “And maybe he’ll come back empty-handed, or never at all.” But Enmerkar was less despondent than he had been in all this Martuembattled year. “It’s a risk I’m willing to take. But, lady, to send a caravan—”

  “We can’t send promises,” she said. “We’re too desperate. It must be sacks of wheat and barley, and jars of dates and baskets of apples and all the riches of the earth that we can possibly spare.”

  “And wine,” the eldest councilor said. “Send the king a great gift of date wine, and see he drinks a good part of it while he haggles. That will bring him round if nothing else will.”

  He grinned a toothless grin. Some of them were outraged, but laughter ran round the rest of the circle, easing the mood remarkably. He had won them over more truly with laughter than she had with her fierce impatience.

  She was in no way contrite, though she had the grace to acknowledge his wisdom. “We should leave as soon as may be,” she said, “with as large a caravan as we can muster, under a strong guard. You”—she thrust her chin toward Lugalbanda—”will command the guard. See that you choose men brave enough, and hardy enough, for mountains.”

  Lugalbanda could find no words to say. He was the youngest and the least of this council. He was a fighting man, to be sure, and had led a company of stalwarts from the city with some credit and a number of victories the past few seasons. But to leave Uruk, to venture the mountains that walled the north of the world, to walk where all the gods were strange—

  “I am not—” he began.

  No one heeded him. The king had heard what Inanna had tried to hide behind the shield of Lugalbanda. “You are going? Lady, you cannot—”

  “I am going,” she said with divine certainty. “My temple will do well enough in my absence. The rest of the gods will look after the city. No one and nothing in Uruk will suffer because I have gone from it.”

  “No one but you,” her brother said bluntly. “Lady, the journey is long and the road is hard. As great and powerful as you are, and as divinely blessed, still you walk in flesh, and flesh can be destroyed. We can’t risk the loss of you.”

  “You can’t risk a lesser messenger,” she said. “You could send every wise man in this council, and that would be a noble embassy, but my heart declares that they would fail. I may not succeed, either, but the refusal may be less swift. Men will hesitate to refuse a goddess.”

  “I can’t let you go,” Enmerkar said.

  She raised her chin. When she drew herself up, she was nearly as tall as the king. She met him eye to eye and will to will. “I am not yours to permit or deny,” she said with dangerous softness. “I belong to Uruk, and Uruk has great need of me.”

  He was not struck dumb—far from it. But before he could burst out in speech, the eldest councilor said, “Certainly no man may oppose the will of a goddess. But, lady, Uruk will be a sad place without you.”

  “Uruk will be sadder when the Martu break down the gates,” she said. “A god may address a god, even when kings are minded to be difficult. I will speak as an equal to the god in Aratta, and see what I may win for Uruk.”

  Even the king could hardly fail to see the sense in that. He scowled and snarled, but he no longer tried to forbid her. She rose from her chair of honor and shook out the flounces of her skirt. “We leave before the moon comes to the full,” she said.

  Whatever protest any of them might have uttered, she did not hear it. She had swept out, grand as a goddess could be, in every expectation that when she deigned to look again, all would be done exactly as she had ordered.

  Mountains went up and up, but never quite touched the sky. Lugalbanda’s men had known no height of land but what men made with their own hands: towers, and walls of cities. This lifting and tilting and tumbling of the earth robbed them of breath and sense, numbed them with cold and pelted them with stinging whiteness.

  Snow, their mountain-born guides called that. They were casually contemptuous of the flatlanders, as they called the men of Uruk—but they were in awe of the goddess who traveled with them. Lugalbanda had deep doubts of their trustworthiness, but their fear of the goddess had proved thus far to be greater than either greed or malice.

  He had been trudging upward since the world began, and wheezing for breath the more, the higher he went. Some of the men had had to turn back: they were dizzy, their heads were splitting, and when they tried to rise or walk they collapsed in a fit of vomiting. Lugalbanda was not much happier than they, but he had so little desire to eat that there was nothing to cast up.

  There had been a raid or two, days ago; they had lost a pair of oxen and a drover. But since they had come to the top of the world, they were all alone but for the occasional eagle. Lugalbanda was sure by then that their journey would have no end, that they would climb forever and never find Aratta.

  Inanna, being divine, knew no such doubts or weakness. She walked ahead of her people, beside or just behind the guides, wrapped in wool and felt and fleece, and nothing showing from the midst of it but her great dark eyes. She refused to ride on one of the oxen; she would not let one of the men carry her. Her legs were sturdy and her strides long; she breathed as easily on the summits as in the river valley in which she had been born.

&nb
sp; Lugalbanda followed her blindly. The snow was so white, the light so piercing, that his eyes stabbed with pain. He wrapped them in folds of linen and followed the shadow of her, and knew little of where he went. He had no mind left; it was all burned out of him, there beneath the roof of heaven.

  Even as dazed he was, he became aware, one bitterly bright day, that the ascent had stopped. They were going down, slowly sometimes, and at other times precipitously. Little by little the air warmed. The snow thinned. The sun’s light lost its fierce edge. Lugalbanda’s eyes could open again without pain, and his mind began to clear.

  There came a morning when, having camped in a green and pleasant valley, they descended by a steep narrow track. It surmounted a ridge and, at midmorning, bent sharply round the knee of the mountain. There before them was not yet another wilderness of peaks but a wide green country rolling toward a distant dazzle and shimmer.

  “The sea,” Inanna said. He had not heard or sensed her coming, but she was beside him. The mountainside dropped away almost beneath her feet, but she stood as calmly as if on level ground. “Look, do you see? There is Aratta.”

  He had seen it, but at that distance and out of the last of his mountain-born befuddlement he had taken it for an outcropping of rock. It was built on such, he saw as he peered under his hand, but its walls were deep and high, and within them he saw the rise of towers.

  It was a greater city than he had expected. It was not as great or as noble as Uruk, but its splendors were manifold. Its walls were of stone, its gates of massive timbers bound with bronze. Its houses and palaces and the towers of its temples were built of wood and stone. The wealth of that, the extravagance, were unimaginable in a world of mud brick, but here they were commonplace.

  They were three days on the road between the mountains and the city. Lugalbanda had sent men ahead, swift runners with strong voices, to proclaim the goddess’s coming. They performed the task well: when the caravan came to Aratta, they found its walls hung with greenery and its processional way strewn with flowers.

  Inanna allowed herself to be carried in like a sacred image, borne on the shoulders of the tallest and strongest of her guards. She had put on a gown of fine linen and ornaments of gold and lapis, and set a diadem of gold over her plaited hair, with golden ribbons streaming down her back and shoulders. She was as bright as a flame in the cool sunlight of this country, where everything was green, and the earth’s bones were hidden beneath a mantle of grass and forest.

  The king of Aratta received her at the door of his high stone house. He was a younger man than Lugalbanda had expected, tall and broad and strong, with the look of a fighting man and the scars to go with it. He watched Inanna’s coming with an expression almost of shock, as if he had never seen a goddess before.

  It was a remarkable expression, like none that Lugalbanda had seen before. After a while he set a name to it. It was hunger: not the hunger of the starving man who sees welcome sustenance, but of the rich man who thought that he had seized all the wealth that was to be had, but now he sees a treasure that is not his—and he must have it, whatever the cost.

  As quickly as it had appeared, it receded into his eyes. He smiled the practiced smile of kings and greeted the goddess and her following in a fair rendering of the dialect of Uruk. She replied with dignity.

  Lugalbanda did not listen to the words. He watched the faces. The god was not here: there was only one divinity in this place, and she had drawn every eye to her. No god would have borne such a distraction.

  At length the king bowed and turned and led the goddess into his house. Lugalbanda followed at a wary distance. The caravan dissipated within the king’s house; only Lugalbanda’s own men followed the goddess to the depths of it, and there guarded her.

  Embassies, even urgent ones, were leisurely proceedings. It would be days before anyone came to the point. Today they feasted and exchanged compliments. No word was spoken of the caravan of gifts and grain, or of the message that had come with it.

  Nor did they speak of the god—not the king, and not the high ones seated near him, and certainly not Inanna. But in the farther reaches of the hall, among the young men, the talk was of little else. They were all wild to master the new weapon, which they called a chariot. “It is wonderful,” they said. “Remarkable. Divine. To ride in it, it’s like riding the wind.”

  “I should like to see this thing,” Lugalbanda said. “Is it winged? Do the winds carry it?”

  “Oh, no,” they said. “You should see, yes. Come after all this feasting is over. We’ll take you to see the chariots.”

  Lugalbanda made no secret of his pleasure in the invitation. They had no wariness in them, and no fear of betraying their city. They seemed as innocent as children. They were full of stories of the god: how he had come from a far country; how he had offended a goddess there and been broken for it, and still walked lame; how that curse had pursued him even to Aratta, and taken his consort and his daughter, and left him alone in a world of mortal strangers.

  Lugalbanda must remember that these were strangers to him just as they were to the god, that even close allies could turn to enemies. Trust no one, the elders of Uruk’s council had admonished him, and offer service to none but the goddess herself.

  He was the elders’ servant before all else. He exerted himself to be pleasant company and drank maybe a little more than was wise, but it was difficult to refuse his hosts’ persuasion—and the beer was surprisingly good for an outland brew.

  They were all much warmer than the sun warranted when the feast meandered to its end. Lugalbanda had a new band of dearest friends, each one dearer than the last, and all determined to show him their wonderful new god.

  The god was in his temple, forging bronze. The roar of the forge and the ring of the hammer resounded in the courtyard, silencing even the most boisterous of the young men. Wide-eyed and mute with awe, they crept through the gate into the inner shrine.

  In Uruk it would have been a place of beauty and mystery, glimmering with lapis and gold, and made holy with the image of the god. Here were walls of stone unadorned but for the tools of the smith’s trade. The stone was dark with old smoke, but the tools were bright, with the look of frequent use. On the far wall, where would have hung a tapestry woven in honor of the god, was a wonder of work in gold and bronze and silver, brooches and ornaments and oddities that might be trappings for chariot teams.

  Later Lugalbanda would marvel at the artistry of the work, but his eye was caught by the figure that bent over the forge. There were others in the hall, laboring as he labored, but they were mortal. This truly was a god.

  He had come, they said, from the land of the sunrise. Its light was in him, shining out of him. His skin was the color of milk, his hair new copper shot with gold. His eyes when he lifted them were the color of reeds in the first light of morning, clear green shot through with shadow.

  There was a great sadness in them, a darkness of grief, overlaid with pain. He lived, said that flat stare, because he had no choice. Life was a curse, and death was not granted him. The light was gone from the world.

  “His consort,” said one of Lugalbanda’s new friends: “the greater gods took her to themselves—oh, a while ago.”

  “Five winters past,” one of the others said. “A fever took her, and the daughter she had borne him. It was the fire of the gods, the priests said, taking back their own. There was nothing left of them but ash.”

  “They burned away to nothing?” Lugalbanda asked, barely above a whisper, although the others did not trouble to lower their voices.

  “Not their bodies,” his new friend said with a touch of impatience. “Their hearts and souls, their lives: all were gone in a day and a night. They were the breath of life to him, but they weren’t permitted to linger here below. The gods wanted them back.”

  “But they didn’t want him?” said Lugalbanda.

  “My work is not done,” the god said. His voice was soft and deep. He shaped the words strangely, but
they were clear enough to understand.

  Lugalbanda swallowed hard. He had thought, somehow, that the god was like his greater kin: oblivious to human nattering unless it was shaped in the form of prayer. But he wore flesh and walked visible in the world; of course he could hear what people said in his presence.

  The god’s expression was terrible in its mildness. “You would be from Uruk,” he said. “Have you come to steal my chariots?”

  Lugalbanda’s shoulders hunched. But he had a little pride, and a little courage, too. “We are not thieves,” he said. Then he added, for what little good it might do: “Great lord.”

  The green eyes flickered. Was that amusement? “You are whatever your city needs you to be,” the god said.

  “My city needs me to show you respect, great lord,” Lugalbanda said.

  The god shrugged. His interest had waned. He turned back to his forge.

  He was making a sword, a long leaf-shape of bronze. Lugalbanda did not know what—whether god or ill spirit—made him say, “Don’t temper it with your own heart’s blood, great lord. That would cause grief to more cities than this one.”

  “I care nothing for yours,” the god said. But he said no word of Aratta. Lugalbanda chose to find that encouraging.

  Inanna’s head had been aching since morning. It was worse now, between noon and sunset of this endless day. The sky beyond Aratta’s walls was low, the air raw and cold. It would snow by evening, the elders had opined, somewhere amid their council.

  She was wrapped in every felt and fleece she had, and seated in the place of honor beside the fire, but she did not think that she would ever be warm again. She clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering, though it only made her headache worse.

  She had presented her embassy to the king and his council, offering her caravan of grain and wine and lesser treasures in return for wood and stone and bronze. The king’s eyes had gleamed as her men laid gifts before him: fine weavings of wool and linen; ornaments of gold, copper, lapis, amber; a pair of young onagers, perfectly matched; and with them a pair of maidens from the south, so like to one another that only they themselves could tell for certain which was which.