2250 BCE

Urim, House of the Great Light, Giparu of the En

Lady, my Lady! Queen of Heaven, Moon’s Daughter, Jeweled, Shining, Keeper of Signs and Shibboleths. Inanna, my sweet. Come to me now, dear goddess. Lend me your honey to moisten my lips. Let the air of your wings fill my lungs, the fire of your eyes quicken my breast. Give me the strength to remember, for I am old.

Oh, but I am old, my Lady! Younger than you, of course, but I feel as though I too was there when Father Enki gave each god his due and you the remainder. My eyes are sore from the dust you kicked up when you rose from the Land of the Dead. My belly aches, and when I run my hands beneath my gown I swear I can feel the scars of the dragoness whose grandson filleted her to make Heaven and Earth.

Does that sound a bit grand to you, O Lady and Lord, O Lioness Without Equal, that I should compare myself to the gods? That I should speak so to one who has hung in the sky since time began, who has brought cupbearers high and mountains low according to her whims? Well, what sense in modesty? I have never been modest, and I will not be modest now, though I am old and feeble, though I can feel your sister’s breath hot and dry on the back of my neck. If my brother’s son is a god on earth, as he says he is, then what does that make me, who came before him, who has seen four kings sit upon the Throne of Thrones?

I am your greatest servant and your greatest poet. The Land Between the Two Rivers has never seen my equal, nor will it again, and my name and my songs shall ring for a thousand thousand years. I am the En Kheduana, High Priestess of the Ancient and Most Holy City of Urim, Chief Wife of the Moon, sister and daughter of kings. My father was of the People of the Mountains, they whose tongue is now spoken from the steppes of Elam to the brink of the Lower Sea, but my mother was a queen of the Black-Headed People of the South, who speak the tongue of the gods. I have seen wars beyond counting and the rise and fall of cities. I have been cast out, spat on and disgraced and returned victorious. I have pressed my face to the chests of conquerors and bounced a living god on my knee.

You have helped me before, goddess. When everything was taken from me, it was you who brought it back. When I was two, you made me one. Yours is the power to ravel and unravel, to weave and to snarl, and all my long life I have been caught in the tangles of your weft. I have pleaded with you and cajoled you and cursed you and praised you, in my heart and my mind and with trembling clay-stained hands. Now, in the dark of my bedchamber, in the quiet of the night and the quiet of my life, I call on you one last time. This time, for once, my wish is a small one, and my dreams small dreams. I ask only that you help me remember. 

I want to see them again one last time before I die, before your sister grips me in her claws and takes me to the House of Dust. I want to see my family: my father, the King of the World, my ghostly mother, my sweet fool brothers. Those I taught and those I learned from. The men I might have married, the god I did marry, the man who tried to destroy me and all the others. I feel them around me, goddess, though the night and the bed I lie in are empty, though my bedchamber is dark. Lady, my Lady! My Inanna. Come to me.

2285 BCE

Akkade, Great Household of the True King

This land has never been whole. 

It was not whole when the four Old Ones fashioned the first men of clay, nor after the Great Flood washed it clean, nor after my father came and forged from it his Empire. Between the Swift River to the East and the Slow River to the West, there have always been cities beyond number, each with its god and each with its king. Kings were cheap in this land before my father made them his governors, and so were gods. Only I, who has dedicated my life to kings and gods both, would dare admit it. (If in the wanderings of my mind I should blaspheme a little, my Lady, I know you will forgive me. You are the source of kingship and the lioness of war, but also the queen of cheats and charlatans and clowns, and if anyone can forgive an old woman the occasional lapse of propriety, it is you.)

In the time before my father, each petty king looked towards his neighbor cities as towards a plump roast of meat or a maiden with a flyaway veil. And whenever one of those kings felt he did not have enough slaves, enough flocks, enough concubines, enough mountains of lumber and bushels of wheat, despite evidence to the contrary, there was war. Since my father and his sons crowned themselves Kings of the World, there has still been war. The only difference is that now we call it rebellion. 

Though my father took away the crowns from rich men, he could not stop them wanting to get richer. That is the folly of men, to kill each other for what they already have, and no folly is greater than to want to become a king. I have known enough of them to know that. Once, I envied kings. Once, my most precious dream was that I would marry a king, that I would give birth to one. Now, I pity them. I pity all men, in fact. If I woke up a man tomorrow, Great Lady, old as I am, I would cut off my parts and join your menwomen to dance for shekels in the streets. Their life is not an easy one, but their mothers must sleep well knowing they will never be kings.

Kings beyond counting had we, and cities and gods besides, but in this land there are only two races, as there are only two Great Rivers: the Black-Headed People of the South and the Mountain-Men of the North. And there are two languages as well. Emengir hums with all the sounds of the South: the plashing of river mud, the buzzing of marsh flies and chafer beetles when they gorge on fallen fruit.  When I pray in Emengir, the South prays with me; I can hear the mother sheep calling to their little lambs, the rain that breaks the drought and the trilling of nightjars. Then there is the Lishanum Akkaditum, which was mine from the cradle, and that is equal parts susurrus and rockslide. I hear in it shields beating on spears, death-rattles and battle-cries, the thunder that flashed from the eyes of the Mother Sea Dragon in days of old. Yet this was the language of my first words, the language now spoken in commerce and government across the wide world! Perhaps as one who speaks to the gods regularly, I am biased towards their language. But I of all people should not play favorites.

Like my brothers, I am a child of both peoples, both tongues. My eyes are the eyes of a Northerner, green like my grandfather’s garden in Azupiranu, and my hair the rich black of the South--though more silver now than black, if truth be told. But I wear my silver hairs as I wear the crown of the En. Silver is only right for a woman who married the Moon, whose name is Moon, who owes her life and livelihood to you, Inanna, the Moon’s daughter. With the passing of the years I have begun to resemble the name I chose for myself, and I cannot begrudge the gods that.

My father, too, resembled the name he chose for himself. That was Sharru-kin, “True King.” In my memories he seems as broad as he was tall. I remember well his arms, hairy arms thick with scars from his endless campaigns. I remember his blade of beard and his single dark brow, and between them eyes so bright you might almost believe half the tales told of him. Whatever his name was before he conquered the world, he put it to the sword when he was little more than a boy and I never found it out. Though his sons and his daughter had a king for their father, he did not.

“My father was a gardener,” Sharru-kin says in the officially sanctioned song, “And my mother I never knew.” This was a way of politely implying she had died birthing him. More likely her pimp had forced her to give him up so she could turn a profit instead of nursing a babe. Recently, in no small part thanks to my industrious nephew, the story has arisen that my grandmother was not a common whore or adulteress but a hierodule, one of your own priestesses, Inanna, who gives men pleasure for the glory and profit of your temple, though the name such women cry out as they ride their patrons in my father’s rocky homeland is not Inanna but Ishtar. (If my father were really the son of one of your Holy Ones, the Set Apart, my Lady, it would lend a delicious symmetry to the story of his life and mine. This is why I consider it too beautiful to be true.) Suffice to say that my father was a man of low birth, who rose as high as anyone could have dreamed and then far higher, from a gardener’s bastard to a king’s cupbearer to the founder of an empire. He had that quality I loathe in men and which so many men have, that hunger to have everything. But I forgive him for it, only because he began with nothing.

How did he do it? How did the boy who wiped dribble from the chin of feeble Ur-Zababa in Kish become the broad and bearded expanse that occupies my childhood memories? The Song of Sharru-kin says that you and my father were lovers, Great Goddess. That he covered you with kisses and made you pant and squeal until you promised him the world from edge to edge. That you sent a dream to Ur-Zababa to make him promote his delivery boy to cupbearer, and another to the boy himself in which you made your further plans known by drowning Ur-Zababa in a river of blood.

That you loved my father, Goddess, that much is certain, or else how to explain his successes? But I have long questioned whether the more colorful stories of you and Sharru-kin were true. Your Dumuzid, the Good Son, whom you loved and for whom you weep each year when the wells go dry, was young and sweet, a tender youth whose hands were more like to hold a shepherd’s crook than a sword.  He was no warrior, and after he dared call himself king in your absence, he grovelled before you and accepted your punishment. Having shared your bed with a god like that, could you have really done the same with a man like my father?

Perhaps my father was gentle like Dumuzid once. That I cannot say. When I try to picture him as he was then, with a new beard dusting his chin and another man’s gold in his ears, pouring his king’s wine, with eyes the same color as mine but twice as bright, I wonder if I have been listening to too many songs myself. The truth is that I don’t know the truth. When one’s father sits on a throne, one does not ask him what it was like to run errands for the last man to sit there.

In the song of my father the King of the World, the feckless Ur-Zababa sets trap after trap for his servant Sharru-kin, which he easily thwarts with the guidance of his beloved Ishtar. He sends Sharru-kin southeast to visit another king, mighty Lugal Zagesi, with secret instructions that Lugal Zagesi murder his guest. Again, a woman steps in on my father’s behalf, foiling the plot and saving my father. Not a goddess, but the sweet wife of the Lugal, who nurses feelings for the handsome stranger, who knows her True King when she sees him.

In the Song of Sharru-kin, the True King is the only king. The others are cowards, though not so cowardly that they do not seem like fitting enemies for the hero. Impervious to harm and irresistible to women and goddesses alike, my father takes the throne of Kish in the South with little fuss and rallies his Northern kinsmen to his cause. Lugal Zagesi, my father’s greatest rival, who conquered four cities of the Black-Headed People, whose ambition and greed are unparalleled except by Sharru-kin himself, puts up a terrific fight. But my father crushes him in the end as he crushed all resistance, as he would try to crush the numberless cities and kings and gods of this land into one whole.

I am old now, and know that songs are written by whoever still has hands to hold a stylus when the dust settles. I know also that songs are prettier than life. The song says that Lugal Zagesi’s wife betrayed her husband to help my father out of love. It is certainly true that after the greatest king of the Southerners was dead, after my father paraded him under a yoke through the city of Nibru and hung his head from the doorframe of the House of Enlil, he married the dead man’s widow. But it is also true that he gave her a new name when he married her, an Akkadian name to match her Akkadian husband and his new Akkadian Empire: Tashlultum, which means “I Took Her As Plunder.”

I never knew the name my mother’s first husband called her by. No doubt my father could barely pronounce it. I never knew the name she had from birth, no more than I knew my father’s birth name. He killed both names and hid them from the prying eyes of his children and his people. Neither of my parents was the person they were born as. My mother never spoke to us of her old life as a queen in the southern marshlands. I learned of her past in history lessons, when my tutors extolled the virtues of Sharru-kin and the obstinate pride of his predecessors, who dared to stand against their rightful overlord. I heard of Lugal Zagesi when singers composed the song of my father, for the glory of his Empire and the weight of his gold in their pockets. The first time a harpist sang that leid for us, we were all assembled in the Great Household, our family of six with its slaves and retainers and all the other noble families sworn to my father. I looked from my father to my mother and back again, over and over, my father in his golden crown and crimson robes, my mother splendid in the jeweled flowers and leaves of the South, but in neither one of their faces did I see a single mote of truth. When the song turned to their secret bond of love my father nodded and grunted his approval, and I Took Her As Plunder with her wan cheeks laid her ring-laden hand on the head of my little brother Ibarum and said nothing, nothing!

It is a strange thing, to have characters in a song for one’s parents. Of course, it is a strange thing to have a king and a queen for one’s parents as well. But I have never known any other sort of mother or father than a silent queen in her heavy jewels and a man who called himself the King of the World. When we were small, my brothers and I used to play at being other things than princes and a princess. In the hot, damp air of Akkade, by the fountains and gardens of our father’s new capital, we became frogs and fish, gods and infidels, potters, perfumers and the captains of ships. As a grown woman I have often seen the common-born children of Urim play in the Gardens of the Moon, and their games are much the same as ours were then, though I notice that the boys often wish to wear spiky crowns of palm-fronds and carry sticks for swords, and the girls twine flowers in their hair and pretend they are of gold. That was the one game my brothers and I never played. We would be ugly Humbaba with his mane of coiled guts or hairy bull-strong Enkidu before we ever played at being Sharru-kin and Tashlultum. There are things too close to the heart.

En, High Priestess, is my title, and Kheduana is Southern-talk and means Jewel of Heaven, also a title of the moon my husband. But I did not always have this name, no more than my mother and father had theirs. I did not become En Kheduana until I was fifteen years old and married the moon. When I was born to the widow of my father’s rival in the seventh year of his reign, the name he gave me was Khedutum, which in Northern-talk means “Joy.”

Two sons of the King of the World were born before me and two after me. Having a Sumerian woman for his queen, all my father needed was a Sumerian son to cement his rule over the North and the South, and my mother I Took Her As Plunder was so obliging that within a year of their marriage she gave him two. They came forth from her belly on the same day, two boys with one face between them, like the two brothers who guard the left and right doors of the House of Dust. The firstborn twin was called Rimush, a fitting name, for it means “Foremost”, or “Goes at the Front”. The second was called Manishtushu, “Who Is With Him”, since he came into the world behind another. I was next, and two more boys would follow me: Ibarum, Friend, and Ilaba’ish-takal, Trusting in the God Ilaba. 

The birthing of Ilaba’ish-takal when I was ten years old was my mother’s final act in the world. It was a nursemaid who took me in her arms and told me gently that a new brother lived but my mother had died. Being a child I was excused from entering full mourning. I was not made to dress in rags and ashes and sit apart from the other members of the Great Household, nor to cut my face and body with the ritual knife. But on the day of her burial I stood beside the grave and listened to the droning of the lamentation priests and poured libation oil on the earth at the proper moment, and when my brothers wept I did my best to join them.

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In the years since that day, I have often wondered whether my mother went to the Palace of Dust willingly, knowing that her duty to the True King was fulfilled, his line secured and his family established. I wonder as well to which gods my mother prayed and with what words, that she was able to give the conqueror who killed her husband four sons. Was it to Nin Khursang the Wild Cow, Lady of the Sacred Mountain, or to Enlil the Creator? Was it to you, Inanna, who loved my father and his cities, the one he was born in and the one he built? Which god gave Tashlultum their favor? Who bestowed on her such a blessing as the man who took her as plunder, and drove a knife into the heart of her name? And which god was it that let her die with her children still children?

My mother is a glittering shadow of my earliest childhood, a phantom like the gidim of old stories, with mouths so dry they cannot speak. Joy, my father named me, though I fear I brought not much to Tashlultum. I can remember the fine linen of her robes and the shape of her jewels, beautiful, worthy of any young girl’s envy, but I do not remember her holding me. I remember a fleeting hand on my shoulder, like the light touch of an insect, and smiles when I did as I should, when I remembered to bow before an important guest or did not stumble over a prayer. She is said to have been beautiful. My memories are hazy, but when I think of her I feel that her beauty was never really hers. It was the kind she wore or put on, not the kind she had. It was her title as Queen of Sumer and Akkad, South and North. It was her makeup and the priceless jewels of her ancestors which she had been allowed to keep after the conquest. Her golden foliage did not bloom from her so much as swallow her, like a tangle of costly weeds shadowing an abandoned house from view.

Once when I was very young, I came up behind her as she was walking from the shrine of Enlil and Ninlil and hugged her legs, tightly, and she froze very still and lay her hand on my head and said, “You startled me, Khedu.” I looked up at her with expectant eyes but she spoke no more, only fixed me with a gaze that made my cheeks flush pink and my arms drop to my side, that made me turn and run with stinging eyes. When I was young, this was painful to me. Now that I am old, I forgive her. The gods dealt Tashlultum a Northern family and a Northern king, but she was of the South; there was marsh-water in her veins. Though my hair was as black as hers, and her sons beneath their coppery curls had her brown eyes and not our father’s green ones, we had Akkadian names, and the language in which we politely greeted our father was again, Akkadian. How she felt for Lugal Zagesi I never knew, but he gave her no children and his murderer gave her five.

My mother is a shadow in my memory, and my father the great looming shape that casts it. Of my brothers, what remains? I remember Rimush and Manishtushu sitting on stone steps in the palace courtyard with their arms around each other’s shoulders, one whispering in his twin’s ear words that made the other boy giggle and blush. I remember the first time I held little Ibarum, how small and light he was, how I kissed the tufted top of his head. I remember clutching a toy that belonged to Ilaba and him laughing as he chased me through a field calling, “Khedu! Khedu!” No one has called me that, it seems, in ten thousand years. I remember all these things, yes, but only as I remember how the demons chased Dumuzid to the house of the crone Billulu, how Enlil and Enki and their wives fashioned the first men. My family have become no more than characters in a song, words in a story, crumbling clay that folds around a lacuna in the shape of a girl named Joy.

I scarcely remember her, Khedu, that girl I was, that princess of a new kingdom. No priestess’s aga had yet wearied my head. My earlobes that now sag from long years of earrings were taut in those days. My skin was smooth and brown, my hair pure Sumer-black, but instead of my mother’s plain Southern bun I wore the three-plait style of Akkad, one braid down my back and one on each side in front. Like all Northern girls I wore the veil from the time of my first bleeding, draped over my head and down my back, but I often failed to raise it to my face in the presence of men, with a willfulness that I masqueraded as mere carelessness.

I was proud, in those days, proud of my father and proud of myself. From an early age I had more education than most women can claim to. I had tutors to teach me letters and mathematics, geography, history and song, proper courtesy and the language of the South. While my brother Rimush learned to be a king and the other three learned to be princes I was taught to weave, to play the harp and the double-flute and the game of twenty squares, and to praise the gods. It was then that I first learned hymns to you, my Lady, and to all the other gods besides. I learned their words and stories and feast-days, whose amulet would cure a stomach ailment and whose would soothe a fever, who accepted bullocks in sacrifice and who preferred kids. 

Every one of our gods had a city, and each city and god had two names, one in the language of the South, one in the language of the North. In the Northern language of my childhood, the Sun was named Shamash, his sister the Eastern Star was Ishtar, and their father the Moon was Sin. But in the soft babbling words of the South, sun and moon were Utu and Nanna, and the goddess of the Eight-Pointed Star was Inanna. Akkade was your city, Ishtar’s city, and I was taught to praise you from my earliest girlhood. But no one told me that the mystery of the gods is to have two selves, not only two names. I did not learn then the Sumerian songs of Inanna of the wetlands; only those of warlike Ishtar. If I ever thought of Inanna, I just assumed she was the same as Ishtar under another name, and all her stories the same as well. Only later, in your country, did I learn that to sing of the two as interchangeable was to see a reflection in clouded bronze, the truth distorted.

However incomplete my learning, I impressed my tutors, the wise masters of Umma and Lagash, Nippur and Mari, whom my father hired for his children. I displayed an especial talent for learning language, and was conversant in Emengir well before my brothers. I often teased Rimush that he ought to change his name from Foremost to Hindmost given his struggles with Emengir, and once made him so angry that he chased me into the boughs of an apricot tree.

I was proud, in those days. I am proud still, but it was easier then. Pride always comes easy to those who have accomplished little but been given everything. All the other young noble ladies of the Great Household of Akkade wanted to walk with me in the gardens, to weave with me, to sit beside me at banquets. And I felt the gaze of young men everywhere, hot and persistent like desert flies. As we grew, the young ladies around me began to speak of marriage, of their fathers sending messages they were not allowed to hear, or hosting guests beyond the limits of their own apartments. They giggled and tossed their braids as they wondered whether their husband would be handsome or stingy, wealthy or cruel--and whether he would be of the North or South, for my father was not the only one to have chosen a spouse from the other end of his new world. There was a girl, Urballu by name, who was serene in all this and took no part, only because she had been betrothed to the firstborn son of the Governor of Nippur since the day of her birth and had never had to wonder who she might marry. And I, too, was removed from these dawdlings, but for a different reason. Though I was young and beautiful, no man offered himself or his son to me. My father’s Empire was still new, and I its only princess. The world waited with breath held to see what my father would do, and me, foolish, stupid child, I only played and sang and ate dates in the gardens, and thought my father would never marry me to anyone because there was no one who dared suggest it.

All except that one. Goddess! Help me to see him. Help me to remember him in his glory, to remember how dark his beard and brow, how hard the line of his jaw. He had bright, flashing teeth and his father had given him a bright, flashing name to match them; he was called Baramu, which means Many-Colored. A young man and a member of our court, our Great Household, he was Northern to the bone and his father a staunch supporter of mine. They had ties to Azupiranu, the city of my grandfather’s birth, and when my father rose up in the South the people of the Saffron City were not the last to join him. Baramu’s father enjoyed a position on my father’s cabinet and Baramu enjoyed the company of my brothers and all that the bright new city of Akkade had to offer: its hawks and hounds, its crimson-walled gardens and its gates of gold and lapis, its wild parks and marshes thick with crocodile and elephant, buffalo, ostrich and gazelle, its fountains in the shape of Ishtar, pouring out water onto the driest of lands forever and ever.

I remember the first time he looked at me. It may not have been the first time, for all that, but I remember as though it were. I was at the Feast of Gerra, when the air is thick with meat smoke for the Lord of Fire. My father, though he turned our world upside its head, was wise enough to keep the old festivals as they were, and so in the new hall of the palace of Akkade we feasted just as any king and his court would have been in an older city. I had been seated with the other ladies of the Great Household, across the room from the men. Ilaba’ish-takal and Ibarum sat beside me, with their nursemaid close beside, but the twins were old enough now to sit with the men. Across the room I saw them in their royal crimson, with their golden armbands and oiled beards, laughing. My father, too, was laughing, and when Sharru-kin laughed the entire table of men would roar to match him.

I did all the little things one does without thinking of them. I smiled at something another woman had said to me, I took a fishbone out of my mouth and placed it delicately on my golden dish, I reached for the long straw to my beer. Then my eye lifted again to my boisterous brothers and the other young men, but this time, one of them looked up at me. He saw the girl Khedutum, the girl Joy, the Princess of the World. And I saw the whiteness of his teeth and the sharpness of his eye and Many-Colored, Baramu, inclined his head at me and smiled and it was then that I felt something I had never felt before moving within my breast. I did not know what it was at the time, but now I recognize that it was you, Goddess. I had worshipped at your shrine a thousand times since I was old enough to walk, I had clapped my hands as the tigi-drums pounded and the dancers whirled for you and pressed my lips to the feet of your cold stone idol in my kingly father’s name, but I never felt you in your own city. Never, until that moment. After that, you were with me always, even as you are with me now. I suppose I have Baramu to thank for that.

But he could not speak to me, only smile, not with my brothers beside him, not with my father and all the rest in the room. Baramu was dwarfed by the twins, who were clearly on their way to reaching our father’s stature. So he did not say anything that night at the Feast of Fire. He bided his time.

It was several days before he was able to approach me alone. I was rarely alone at the palace; I had my tutors, my servants, my friends among the other young ladies, my brothers. But he found me in the gardens one day, when the sun was high. I had just come from a harp lesson and I was still carrying the instrument beneath my arm when I heard someone call me by name. When I turned, my heart leapt again to see the man from the banquet in a deep bow before me. I asked him to rise and tried to keep my features still. I did not reach for the hem of my veil to draw it across my mouth and nose (as I so rarely did, contumacious thing that I was!) and was aware it could be perceived as an insult; that I was regarding him as beneath my station, the same way I would not cover my face for a male slave. But there was a smirk playing about the corners of his mouth; he was not insulted or cowed, it seemed, only amused by my boldness, as I was, in truth, amused by his own.

“Please remind me of your name,” I said, as haughtily as I could manage, and he told me who he was and I pretended not to already know, not to have asked the ladies at my table who he was the moment our eyes met at the Feast of Gerra.

“Come with me, Great Lady,” he said. “I would speak with you in private.”

“My father and my brothers would not be pleased,” I said, which was true.

His smile broadened and he said, “If they find out that I was speaking with you alone, you can tell them anything you like. Tell them I forced you to come with me, and they will cut off the hand that led your wrist. Tell them that I am a madman who talks to himself and you happened upon me and decided to listen. Only speak with me, Lady, please.”

I could tell that this was a man as marvellously enamored with himself as with me: a dangerous combination. He beckoned, and with heart pounding and the nameless feeling throbbing inside my chest I would later call Inanna, I followed. Thinking back on it now, I cannot help but be reminded of those stories in which your Dumuzid calls to you from outside your mother’s house and bids you sneak down to meet him in the fields. But at the time I thought only of Baramu.

We stopped in a cool and shadowed place behind a wall whose bricks showed leaping re’em bulls. The air was thick with the smell of flowers, mute testament to the reach of my father’s conquests: roses brought from the East, poppies from the West, water-lilies from the South, spindly Northern orchids. “I wanted to come to you,” Baramu said, “And not to your father, because I want you to know what I intend.”

“And what is that?” I asked, though a part of me already knew.

“When I saw you at the banquet I wondered at once why no man has asked for your hand.”

“You know why that is,” I said. “No man wants the King of the Four Corners of the World as their father-in-law.”

“Nor I,” said Baramu, laughing. “I will admit that much. Your father is a formidable man. I have seen the way other men hang on his every word, laughing only when he laughs and scowling when he scowls. But when I see such things I think, perhaps your father tires of this kind of treatment? Perhaps he is only waiting for a man to be brave enough to look him in the eye? For a king is no more than a man, after all. No matter how heavy and grand the crown or the name he wears.”

“You speak freely of the True King,” I said, and could not help myself from smiling.

If he is the True King, as he says he is, my words will do nothing to change that. Many men dream of being king, and sons who are kings, and king’s daughters, but I dream only of you.”

“Me,” I said.

“My father is not as wealthy as yours, true,” said Baramu. “But I would treat you well. I would give you anything you asked. I would love you until the end of your days and give you strong sons to cherish you. You are a king’s daughter, but if you were my wife, you would be a goddess.”

I did not know what to say. “I am not a goddess,” I said. “And I cannot choose my own husband. You should be talking to the True King, not to me.”

“Talk to him on my behalf,” he said. “Tell him you want to marry me.”

“I have not said yes,” I said.

“You have not said no,” he said. Then he took my hand in his and laid it on his chest.

And what did I do, daughter of the King of the World, young beauty that I was? I drew my hand away. I blushed and pulled my veil up to cover my face, as though of a sudden I cared, as though I did not want to be seen with him. I thanked him and bade him goodbye and I left him, goddess, I left him, I left him.

Foolish youth! I should not have been as I was. I should not have pretended to a modesty I have never seen the point of. My father was the only king in our broken land, and I the only princess, a girl without equal--so why, then, did I not behave as such, when my skin was still the smooth brown of untouched river mud, when my breasts were still as firm and high as new spring tubers, when I had beauty enough to be bold? Of all the gods you should know, my Lady, you whose affairs and appetites are the stuff of legend, that I should have kissed him on the mouth. I should have kissed him then in the garden of my father, in the garden of his new city of the land we called one land, and felt the scratch of his thick black beard against my lips, and I should have reached to the nape of his neck and unbound his hair and run my fingers through his dark curls as they streamed across his shoulders. I should have let him take off my dress and let him lay me down among the flowers my father conquered, and I should have let him conquer me in turn, take from me that thing, that priceless thing I protected and guarded all these long years, diligent as any Chief Wife of the Moon should be, until it dried and withered like a fig unplucked, no use to anyone at all! I think these things, Goddess, as I have thought them for years, as I have dreamed them, and I can feel my body's meager juices start to rise, but it is too late. My desire is like the waters of the Slow River in a drought year, that will not reach the mark nor bring the boats afloat. 

There is no use in these thoughts, sweet though they may be, for I am not the girl I was. Baramu is old somewhere, just as I am, if he is not dead. And whether he is or not, I do not doubt he married some governor's daughter or foreign princess who gave herself to him whenever he asked, who bore him strong sons and lovely daughters, while I lit the lamps and fed the statues of the gods, while I filled my nostrils with incense for a thousand thousand years, while I with soured womb laid blessings on the bellies of pregnant women, while I felt no embrace but the cold silver light of the night.

When the artisans paint my likeness or carve it in stone I am brown and black, healthy, a maiden, so I know I must have been one once. But I am old and turning silver and I do not recognize myself in those images, though I pay for them from my own coffers and commission them with my own hand. If I remember a mother's hand on a shoulder, a man’s hand clasping a maid’s, it is not my shoulder, or my hand, it is Khedu’s, Khedutum’s, a girl long dead. Dead as the king my father, dead as your Dumuzid is, my Lady, for six months of the year, and dead as his good sister Ngesh-ti-nana for the other six. A character in a song.