The big one, toothless and muzzled, had to be led on a rope when the whip and goad-pole had no effect.
It all left Okmar in a fouler temper than usual. His head pained him, he said, and his hand throbbed hot with fevered pustules. Rilah tried to appease him with song, to no avail. When Andu offered to look at the wound, Okmar cursed at him. Even Mabot, normally the most genial of men, had harsh words for the cook’s boy, accusing him of serving them dung and spoiled food.
Soon, though, they reached the city itself, with its temples and houses, its gardens and gates, its palace. Above the rest rose the tower, the mighty ziggurat, only partially finished, surrounded by wooden scaffolds, ladders, planks, and ropes. Yet, already, it dominated. It challenged the sky.
And the marketplace …
Oh, the marketplace!
Here were stalls selling sheep skins and leather, flax and linen … chickens and eggs … olive oil, fragrant spices … greens and fruits and figs … cedarwood … dried fish and fresh fish … pottery and baskets … copper bangles and beads of blue lapis …
Here were soothsayers, breathing smoke or reading livers. Here were priests of En-Lil and Enki, as well as An and Inanna. Here were married women in veils, and sacred prostitutes with their lips stained berry-red.
Here were musicians, and beggars, and a man walking on his hands, and another juggling torches, and a woman who danced while wearing live snakes.
The caravan passed by on the marketplace’s bustling outskirts, to the slave quarters. The pens held hundreds more, raided from the hill-tribes. Overseers, merchants, craftsmen, and house-masters walked among them, inspecting and haggling. Further on were the pens of cattle, sheep, goats, asses, and camels, where the same activity took place.
Once they had set up and settled in, Okmar surprised them by leaving Maruk in charge and retiring to his lodgings, instead of avidly pursuing his profits. The guards, cooks, and drovers were given a portion of their wages and immediately dispersed to spend it.
“Come drink with me,” said Andu, jingling coins. “We’ll find other girls you can gaze at yearningly from afar, girls who won’t risk you getting your eyes popped out.”
Jehal laughed. They went off together into the city and found the Nine Lamps, a loud, lively establishment presided over by a brewstress and her daughters. The wine was good, the beer better. A goat carcass turned, grease sizzling, on a spit above a bed of coals. Layers of opium haze floated in the air, stirred by the trill of reed flutes.
Time passed pleasantly.
Until a man burst in through the curtain of strung sections of dried river reed stalks, making them clatter. Blood ran from many wounds. His arms clutched his sundered midsection, hands filled with a slippery mass of entrails.
Those nearest him recoiled, some with cries of their own. The man blundered a few steps further. His eyes rolled like those of an ox at slaughter. “They’re coming!” he cried, then vomited up a glut of bile.
Women screamed and men shouted. The wounded man swayed in place, gurgled, and pitched headlong to the straw-covered dirt floor. A stain spread beneath him.
More screams and shouts came from outside of the Nine Lamps. Inside, after a moment of shock, dozens of alarmed voices arose at once – was the city under attack? Enemies of Sumer? Soldiers of a rival king? People sprang to their feet. Beer spilled. Opium pipes tipped, spilling smoldering embers into the straw.
Andu, kneeling by the man sprawled in his own guts, looked up at Jehal. “He’s dead --”
The man groaned. He pushed himself up with his arms. Intestines swung, dangling and dripping, out of his opened belly.
“Andu!” Jehal jumped over an upended bench, grabbed his startled friend by the shoulder, and yanked him backward just as the man lunged.
The dead man. For so he was, and so he had to be. No one could be so eviscerated and still live.
Jehal and Andu crashed into a table, knocking it over, spilling more bowls of beer. The dead man seized another victim, instead, a wizened old man frowning at the disturbances from a bewildered opium stupor. His teeth ripped into the old man’s bald scalp, peeling away a leathery flap.
“What’s going on?” Andu asked. “Jehal, what’s happening here?”
“I …” Jehal shook his head, which still swam with drunkenness.
Confusion and terror inflamed the patrons of the Nine Lamps. Even as they tried to rush outside, other figures tried to shove their way in … lurching, mauled figures, with limbs missing, with faces half torn off.
“We have to get out of here!” Jehal pulled Andu up from the floor.
“They’re … they’re corpses … look at them, Jehal, they’re corpses but they move, they walk …”
With the entrance blocked by the murderous dead and their prey, Jehal cast his gaze wildly about. He saw the brewstress waving people toward a short flight of mudbrick steps. He and Andu rushed that way and emerged onto a flat rooftop courtyard with a rail fence, where woven grass shades held aloft on poles provided some relief from the heat of the day.
It also provided a view of the violent carnage in the streets. The city gates thronged with frantic crowds trying to escape. The marketplace had become a killing ground.
Again and again, they saw it … someone would fall, savaged and dying … then rise up, heedless of his or her wounds … consumed by a ravenous hunger for the flesh of the living …
Other survivors had likewise taken refuge on rooftops, defending the narrow stairs, or climbing up ladders and walls. They called back and forth, one group to another, hoping for answers or plans or advice.
Evil spirits, most agreed. A curse, a spell, angry gods.
A disease, claimed a few. A plague, a sickness and contagion.
No one was safe. The dead turned on their own friends, their own family. Pleading was useless. Their own names brought no recognition, falling as if on deaf ears or dull wits or dead minds. They cared for nothing but their hunger.
Those who fought back found that even spears and sickle-swords seemed to do little good. The risen felt no pain. Cut their legs out from under them and they’d crawl, or drag themselves along. They were slow-moving and clumsy, but they kept on, relentless.
It started in the slave-market, some said. Started there and spread, and those who weren’t killed outright, those who came away bitten or scratched, those still succumbed to it, as if stricken by poison.
At that, Jehal and Andu exchanged a suddenly-sobered glance.
“The big one,” said Andu. “You were right. He was dead. All the ones that he injured … he bit Mabot, and Okmar, too --”
“Rilah!” Jehal ran to the edge of the roof and swung a leg over the fence.
Andu ran after him. “What are you doing? You can’t think to go find her!”
“I’m going.”
“She’s a slave --”
“I don’t care.”
“Jehal, she must already be --”
“I have to know!”
“You’ll only get yourself killed. Don’t do it. Don’t be a fool.”
“I’ll come back.”
Jehal jumped into the street. Sun-baked blood dried on mudbrick, like potter’s glaze on clay. The nearest group of the shambling dead turned toward him. He hesitated, knees weak and bowels watery. They were much closer from down here than they’d been from the roof.
Andu yelled at him from above. Jehal snapped to his senses and began running.
Here was a wailing woman cradling the body of her child, which then stirred in her arms. Her wails turned to joyful weeping … she leaned to kiss the little face … then shrieked as the child’s teeth sank into her lip.
Here was a soothsayer, who must not have foreseen these omens; the sheep’s liver she’d been reading was cast aside as she buried her head into a man’s belly in search of something more tasty.
And here was a wealthy man’s corpse, still gleaming with jewelry his killers had ignored. A beggar crept from hiding to strip him of his gold, only to h
ave the corpse sit up and chew through his throat.
If the marketplace had become a killing ground, the slave quarters were worse. Clouds of flies, buzzing green-black, roiled over body parts, offal, and unrecognizable lumps of meat. Some of the dead had not been able to escape their pens and milled there, groaning.
Jehal almost laughed when he saw the big one among them. The big one, toothless and muzzled, who’d brought this horror down on their heads … when had it been too late? If they hadn’t found him, if Okmar hadn’t put him in with the slaves …
Not that it mattered, not now.
He almost laughed, yes, but it would have been a mad, mirthless laugh, bitter as the dregs of old, cold tea.
A guard’s spear, the bronze point bloodied, sticky handprints along the haft, had been discarded or dropped between the pens. Jehal picked it up. It failed to make him feel much safer. He did not want to speculate on whose it might have been, or what must have become of its owner.
Okmar’s tent, over where the caravan masters took their lodgings, was silent. Whether it was the silence of abandonment, of the undisturbed, or of the dead, Jehal didn’t know. He approached quietly, cautiously, tense with apprehension.
He used the spear to lift aside the tent flap and peered in.
The tent’s furnishings were strewn about in disarray, as if a struggle had taken place. Jehal’s heart sank. A curve of splintered wood and a tangle of strings – part of a broken lyre – lay near a man’s fat-ankled and grimy foot.
There was Okmar, face down, with his limbs splayed, not moving. A few flies circled above him. His skin looked mottled, both greyish and dark, like the rind of a bad fruit. On the side of his head was a split gash, clotted with hair and blood. Another curve of splintered wood – the other part of a broken lyre – jutted from his eye socket.
“Rilah …” Jehal said.
He heard a gasp and a rustle, swiftly muffled.
“Rilah?” he said again, louder, hardly daring to hope.
A sheepskin by the bed moved, drawing back to reveal Rilah’s frightened, tearful face.
“You --” His breath caught. “You’re alive.”
She slowly stood up, letting the sheepskin drop. Her shoulders slumped in despair. Stains spotted the front of her simple robe.
“I wish it wasn’t you,” she said, voice quavering. “Please, be quick.”
“What?”
“I killed him,” she said. “I’m to be put to death, I killed him, I’m only a slave and --”
“Are you hurt? Did he … did he attack you?”
“He tried to … how did you know?”
“Did he bite you?” Jehal repeated. “Scratch you?”
“No … just …” She showed him her arms, bruised with fingermarks, but not scratched.
“Tell me what happened.”
Okmar, Rilah said, hadn’t felt any better after retiring to his tent. His hand pained him, and his head. He felt sick, feverish and nauseous, unable to rest. He didn’t want food, water, music, or anything. Finally, he’d fallen asleep.
“It … it was a strange sleep,” she went on. “He didn’t snore. He’s always snored. Then I wondered if it was sleep, if I should do something, fetch someone. But he’d forbidden me to, so I obeyed. I fell asleep, myself. I woke to hear him getting up. And the … the way he looked … the way he seized and pulled me … the way he opened his mouth …”
In her terror, without thinking, Rilah had struck Okmar with the lyre. It broke against the side of his head. When he went for her again, she’d jabbed it at him. Only meaning to ward him off, she said, but the end had plunged into his eye.
“He fell.” She glanced at Okmar, and glanced away, shuddering. “Dead. I’d killed him.”
“And he stayed that way?” Jehal asked. He prodded Okmar’s leg with the spear, but the caravan master did not move. Even when he punctured the skin, wincing as he did so, Okmar did not move. Nor did he bleed, except for an oozing dribble.
Rilah stared at Jehal. “Stayed that way?” she echoed.
“Don’t you know what’s going on out there?”
“I … I hid,” she said. “I didn’t know what else to do. There was such noise … yelling and … horrible noises. I thought they’d found out. I thought someone would come for me. They will. They’ll put me to death --”
“No,” Jehal said. He drew her close, resting his chin atop her head. “No, I won’t let them, I won’t let anyone harm you.”
She clung to him, shaking and sobbing. Although he’d imagined her in his arms many times, it had never quite been like this.
A low, hungry groaning made them whirl. It was not Okmar; Okmar remained motionless, cooling and flyblown. The groaning came from outside, followed by shadows falling across the tent.
“Come on.”
“What is that?”
“The dead.”
“What?”
Holding her hand, he led her behind him, with the spear preceding them both. They rushed out of the tent. Rilah stifled a scream when she saw the corpses stumbling toward them.
“Maruk,” Jehal said. “Mabot. Ah, no.”
It made sense, of course … Mabot had been bitten, and Maruk would have taken faithful care of his brother once the fever set in … but when Mabot died and rose again, he would not have been bound by similar brotherly loyalty.
More closed in – other guards, drovers, slaves, cooks. The ones still trapped in the pens strained against the fences, clawing at the air, gnashing their teeth.
Dead or not, Maruk and Mabot had been his friends. Jehal didn’t want to fight them. The brothers, however, had no such sentiments. They came at him with arms outstretched and jaws gaping.
“Jehal!” Rilah cried.
He stuck the bronze spearhead into Mabot’s chest. The metal grated on rib, and punched through muscle and gristle to pierce the heart. But Mabot kept coming. Jehal yanked the spear back. Sludge, like runny mashed figs spilled out.
“How did you kill Okmar?”
“I told you! I hit him with my lyre, then --”
Jehal thrust the spear at Mabot’s eye, but the dead man stumbled over a gnawed-looking severed leg. His head twisted. The bronze point sank into his temple, instead. Mabot twitched, then dropped, his impaled head tugging the spear, and Jehal’s arm, down with him.
He lost his grip. Maruk’s hands, not warm but not cold, clumsy but still large and strong, caught at him and grappled. They fell, Jehal on the bottom, Maruk’s heavy but hideously writhing deadweight atop him. The impact coughed tepid carrion breath from his lungs into Jehal’s face. Jehal gagged.
Somehow, he wedged his forearm under Maruk’s chin as the teeth clashed, barely missing the tip of his nose. They struggled in the mud.
Rilah shrieked. The spear shaft cracked down on Maruk’s skull and snapped in half. The butt end clattered off Jehal’s forehead. He groped for it, got it, and rammed it upward with all his strength. The jagged length of wood skewered through the roof of Maruk’s mouth.
A thick, reeking slime gushed down the spear-shaft. Jehal let go, rolling and twisting out from under Maruk.
Both brothers were unmoving corpses now. But the rest kept coming, groaning their hunger.
Jehal seized Rilah’s hand again.
They ran.
The dead were everywhere.
In the slave quarters and the marketplace. Crowded at the gates. Filling the streets.
They made it to the Nine Lamps and found it overrun.
The rooftops were awash in blood.
“Jehal!”
He looked up. And up.
Until he saw Andu waving from high above.
Andu, and others who’d scaled the unfinished ziggurat’s scaffolding and rickety ladders, which the dead could not climb.
Jehal and Rilah joined them.
From there, they watched.
The dead swarmed like locusts.
The living scattered in all directions, never looking back. With them went all hope
of a single empire under one king and one rule and one language.
The dead held the great city then, in the lands between the rivers, lands rich with silt and clay. They held it, all but the unfinished zigguraut, far from five thousand cubits high.
All but the jewel of Babylonia, a tower to the sky.
GOOD BOY
Defeat. Submission. Surrender.
No anger. No fight, no defiance.
She does not growl. She does not raise her hackles or bare her teeth.
Resignation. Acceptance.
She gives throat. She gives underbelly. She cowers.
All without moving. All in her posture. All in her expression, demeanor, and manner. All in her scent, in the shaking sigh of her breath.
Least of the pack. Lowest of status.
Sit. Stay.
She sits. She stays.
Can’t hunt. Can’t fight. Can’t run.
The Mate …
Coward. Slinking yellow-smell coward, shifting eyes, guilt.
And the Bitch. Strong. Dominant. Smug.
They will leave her. Abandon her. A burden. Without use, without value.
“You know we have to. We can’t take her with us. It’s impossible. She’ll only slow us down, get us all killed.”
“But we can’t just --”
“She can’t walk!”
“She can …”
“Barely. For how long? How far? Are you going to carry her?”
“Damn it, Angie! Listen to yourself! She’s my girlfriend!”
“So you’ll stay here and die with her?”
“Maybe it isn’t as bad out there as --”
“Don’t be an ass, Ron! You saw the news. We all did.”
“Someone will come. The National Guard, someone.”
“Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. For now, all I know is that we’re on our own. You know that, too. If we want to live through this, we’ve got to move.”
“Live through it, yeah, but what about living with ourselves?”
Dawn of the Living-Impaired Page 12
