The years drifted by. After Manishtushu’s visit and my return from Unug, my life began to sink back into its natural pattern. I said prayers to Nanna and sacrificed animals. I blessed the people who came to my altar seeking solace. I spent long hours with Sagadu writing hymns to glorify all the many temples and cities across our land, and sometimes caught him looking at me a fraction of a moment too long, or myself at him, but only a fraction of a moment, not even long enough or fanned enough by your fires to be called a moment in full.

Perhaps my blessing had worked as intended, my words moved my silent husband, for Manishtushu’s reign was a prosperous one and his accomplishments numerous. He made the name of “Lord Over Elam” that had originated with Rimush more than a boast, bringing the Elamite states of Anshan and Sherikhum under his control. He constructed an immense fleet that warred against the silver-rich nations of the Southwest and traded in gems, ivory, and lumber at thirty-seven ports. That he made a better king than Rimush could not be argued, and if neither brother knew how to rule except through fear, at least Manishtushu relied more on his works and reputation than on active cruelty, dedicating a massive statue of himself to Enlil at Nibru and restoring shabby Ninua to its former glories. Perhaps no man ever loved Sharru-kin, or Rimush, or Manishtushu (except we unfortunate enough to have been born into their family), but where King Rimush was cursed, King Manishtushu was respected. At night when I gazed upon the moon I comforted myself with this fact: that the Empire was better off having Manishtushu as king than Rimush, no matter how my second brother had gained the throne. Rimush had no compassion for those outside his family, and had he lived longer, I reasoned, he might have undone all our father’s works, sowing a hatred so deep that my hymns, popular and widespread though they were becoming, could never counterbalance it.

Manish was the better king, but Rimush was the firstborn son and rightful heir of Sharru-kin, removed from the throne only through an unnatural act of murder. What did that mean? That the midwife had made a mistake, and Manish was the firstborn twin all along? That I had done the right thing in absolving my brother’s crime, that I was laying smooth the path for the greater glory of my family and the unity of my world? I could not hear of some great accomplishment of Manishtushu’s without wondering if, in some small way, it had come to pass because of me. It did seem that he grew more ambitious and more bold, more confident in his kingship, after that fateful visit to the House of the Great Light, a truth which I tried my hardest to forget.

Manishtushu reigned eighteen years in total, and during that time he wrote to me I know not how many times. But I could not bring myself to answer, not even once, after the day that he visited me at Urim. And after a time I stopped even reading the words he wrote me. They were all the same, in any case. Praise for my latest hymns, wishes for my good health, and, always, his thanks: “words cannot express my gratitude for how you spoke for the gods on my behalf…” He believed himself to be in my debt, and every time I remembered this I felt sick, as though I had betrayed one brother to save the other’s life. I did not know if Manishtushu still slept poorly, wracked with the guilt of what he had done, but I rather doubted it. Now it was I who tossed and turned, burdened with the guilt of having been born a princess and made a priestess. Yet Manishtushu, the brother I had once considered most dear to me, continued to write. His messages arrived so frequently that when I did not receive one for an entire month I knew he must have died.

And when he died, war came to Urim.

In the old songs they say that war is “the storm that came to be.” If that is the case, then all Manishtushu’s reign was a gradually darkening sky, troubled and churning but still dry after the downpour of Rimush’s reign. And when the heavens opened, they washed my life away.

Help me, Inanna, to remember the breaking of the storm, to remember that I am the woman for whom the storm came to be. Help me to remember how the darkness swept over the House of the Great Light, how war came to Urim for the second time in my life and scraped its blade against the door of the giparu and threw me into the dust.

Like all such things, its beginning was a hard one.

I mourned Manishtushu as I had mourned every other death in my life, dutifully and in full. But the ritual blood was scarce washed from my face when I received a messenger who told me that a large chest had been delivered to the temple gates for me, and with it a written letter. “Bring them in here,” I said. I was in the middle of a particularly difficult bit of coordination for the coming Festival of the New Moon, and the representatives of the different facets of the temple were all gathered there with me: Adda, Sagadu and his brother, Baranamtarra and Ugunu, the captain of the temple guard, and several prominent priests and guildsmen. When the messenger returned with a large carved chest, I asked him whose symbol was printed on the lump of clay that sealed the chest’s side.

“It is not one that I know,” the messenger replied. “A striding king, it looks to be, and a giant clutching a lion’s cub to his breast.”

I leaned forward in my chair and peered at the imprinted clay. “It says ‘Lugal Anna son of Melemanna, King of Unug,’” I said. Neither name was known to me. Anna meant metal or steel, and Unug had of course not had a king in many years. “Open it,” I said.

Laying the chest on the ground, the messenger cracked the seal and opened the chest. At once a smell of decay assaulted my nostrils. “What is inside?” I asked. I felt a twinge of dread, which was only magnified when the messenger glanced into the chest and his eyes grew wide at its contents. With some trepidation, he reached inside and lifted from its depths a bloodied head with matted hair.

Some of the priests gasped or cried out. Beside me, Baranamtarra hissed a prayer to Nanna through clenched teeth and Ugunu clapped her hand over her mouth and nose.

Long hair obscured the grisly thing. “Let me see the face,” I said. In silence I began my own prayer to Nanna. Please, let it be no one that I recognize. But when the messenger pushed the hair away from that pale dead face, not quite a man’s but not quite a woman’s, I knew exactly who it was.

Garashang.

“Who dares send me this?” I said, trying as hard as I could to keep the quavering from my voice. “This is the head of the chief galaturra of the Temple of Inanna and An at Unug!” I felt a stab of grief and a rush of fear, for whoever had done this to Garashang might have done the same to the other galaturra, to the entire Eana Temple, but no other emotion compared to the swelling tide of anger that was now rising within me. Perhaps it was because of the manner of her death or the way the head had been sent to me, so cruel and mocking, but mostly, it was because she had been a High Priestess. This was not just a crime but a blasphemy, a crude violation of the sacred and untouchable, and it filled me with fury to the very core of my being that Garashang should have died at another’s hand.

“There is a letter,” the messenger stammered, clearly shaken.

“Give it to me,” I said. The messenger handed the clay tablet to me and I read the words aloud for all to hear. Towards the end I had to work to force them out so that I was nearly shouting.

“Speak, messenger, to the En Kheduana, Chief Wife of the Moon at Urim, and let her know that Lugal Anna son of Melemanna, rightful King of Unug, Urim and Lagash, of the bloodline of Gilgamesh, says this:

‘My gift to you is the head of a false High Priest who served uncomplaining under a usurper and consorted with the kin of conquerors and tyrants. You should find many more such treasures if you search the ruins of the Temple of Inanna and An at Unug. Lugal Meshnannepada of Urim received a similar gift from me, but it was the head of the usurper of Unug himself, that dog that your brother placed on my father’s throne twenty-five years ago.

‘You will leave the Temple of Urim, Akkadian bitch, or I will come and remove you myself. The blood of ancient days shall rule in Shumeru again. Leave here, and do not return.

‘May she know this!”

When I set down the tablet the room erupted into heated discussion as everyone else clamored to be heard. But I called for silence with a clap of my hands and said, “If we spend hours debating, this Lugal Anna will cut us down where we stand. This is a time for swift action.”

I was now 45 years old, and had been En two-thirds of my life. I was no longer young nor particularly beautiful, but I was also no longer a frightened child. Memories of Lugal Kaku’s rebellion came flooding back to me, but I felt a sense of dreadful urgency far stronger than that which governed me then. That rebellion had never truly reached me. This time, I was its target. To Lugal Kaku I had been a nuisance to be shuffled out of the way, a piece in the game of twenty squares to be moved off the board. To this Lugal Anna, I was an enemy. I did not understand the man who could claim rulership over a city and do this to its temple and its High Priestess. I did not want to understand him; only to survive him.

I beckoned the captain of the temple guards. “See to it that your men are posted double at the temple gates and triple outside the giparu. I want every man trained in arms to be on his watch.” Next I turned to Sagadu. “Draft a message to Akkade straightaway,” I said. “Send word to the king that we are in terrible danger, and that rebellion brews again in the cities of the South. And send messages to the Lugal Meshnannepada of Urim and Ensi Tuge of Lagash, telling them of the threat we have received and asking for their collaboration in defending our cities. Have the fastest messengers in the temple deliver these words.” I asked the messenger who had brought in the chest to place the head back inside and to carry it to the priests who interr the dead. “Have them bury it in the temple graveyards exactly as they would bury the body of a priestess. And as to the rest of you--” I said, regarding the crowd. Priests and priestesses. The House of the Great Light, shining, waiting for my command. “Go to your underlings and servants and apprentices, all the people of the temple complex, and tell them what has transpired here. Tell them that their En says this:

‘I cannot command you to stay. Long ago when Lugal Kaku raised a rebellion, I had the women shelter in the giparu and the men in the inner sanctum of the temple. But any man who can do this to the High Priestess of Inanna will not be held back by sacred ground. Today, we have seen who this Lugal Anna is. If you fear him, you have my permission to leave the temple. If you wish to go then go, to your families, or to the marshes, or to the barracks of Meshnannepada’s palace to defend Urim. But if you wish to stay, then stay as I will, for this temple is my only place in the world, and I swore an oath long ago that no man would ever make me leave it. I will face this Lugal Anna. But I will not blame you if you cannot. The blessings of Nanna be with us all.”

I saw fear in their eyes as they hurried off to warn the rest of the temple, and I wondered how many people would be gone by nightfall. Yet what I had said was true--I did not blame them. I could not blame them for being afraid, not when I was so afraid myself. As Sagadu made his way towards the door, I called his name. He turned towards me, expectant. “Enship?” he asked.

“After you have sent the messages to Akkade, Urim and Lagash, you will leave here,” I said.

“Enship, I could not leave you,” he said.

My brow furrowed and I rose from my chair. “I command you, Sagadu, leave, as I once commanded you to stay.”

Sagadu met my gaze defiantly. “I am a man,” he said. “I can protect myself if necessary, I will not leave your side, nor--”

“Damn you, Sagadu, leave!” I said, turning away from him. “While there is still time. You alone have I commanded to do this.”

“As it please you,” I heard him say. And then I heard him turn and walk away, and I knew that he would do as I had commanded. I did not turn myself until I was certain he was gone. And then with a heavy heart I hurried to the temple sanctum, to do the only thing I could think to do.

As I walked down the long, dark hall of the sanctum, I remembered how I had sang and prayed with the priests the night we heard the horns of the city guard, all those years ago. Nanna had not failed me then. But today, I was alone. It was not even late enough that Nanna could be seen, though I knew he was there. Later, I promised myself, when the moon was high and those who had chosen to stay were accounted for, I would return to the temple with a host of priests and priestesses, and we would sing a proper prayer to the gods. But for now, before anything else happened, I wanted a few words alone with the god I had married.

Drawing nearer to the altar, I tried to remember the old songs of Nanna, but the words of other songs chimed together in my head--the songs of war. Our poor broken world has seen so much of war that the singers have been writing about it since time began. The bloody sorrows of men long-dead, laments for the husks of cities, piteous curses against the ravages of the Foreigner, the Northerner, the Southerner, the conqueror, the king. My mind was a library of ancient turmoil.

“Hailstones and flames.”

“The bright time wiped out by a shadow.”

“War came down and smote the city like an axe.”

“The storm was like a hammer coming from above, the city was struck as the field is struck by the hoe.”

In many of the songs these ancient poets spoke of gods who abandoned their cities. “The lady of the city flees like a flying bird”, “He has abandoned the cowpen and let the breezes haunt the sheepfold.” Would Nanna do the same, I wondered? Would his compassionate light shine down or would we look up into a moonless sky as Lugal Anna butchered us?

“Nanna, Nanna,” I whispered before his altar. “My husband, my life, my god. I have never needed you as I need you now. Protect us. Let us weather this storm. If you value my life and the lives of your priests, if you value the sanctity of this temple, then please, keep us safe.” I began to sing my own song to Nanna, closing my eyes and touching the fingers of one hand to my brow, letting the power flow through me. I imagined my words as a ray of light, emanating far beyond my body and the temple and Urim, piercing the sky, higher and higher until they reached his ears. And when that song was done I sang another, and another, praising the god I was devoted to in every way that I knew. He had never deserted me before. Surely now he would listen. Surely he would protect us.

Somehow in all my years of star-gazing, I had not learned the greatest lesson of the skies, and of the gods: that the moon, though his presence can be felt so often, waxes and wanes. He is not always there when you need him.

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You can spend your every waking hour reading about war, listening to the songs of war, singing them yourself until you are breathless, but you will never really know it until you experience it yourself. Not until you hear the roar of men who have become beasts and smell the smoke of your own world burning around you. Not until you lie awake all night knowing that there is someone coming for you, someone who wants you dead because you are guilty of being who you are.

By evening, when the time came for the prayer and sacrifice, there were more priests and priestesses than I had expected, though many of the younger ones especially were gone. Baranamtarra and Ugunu and all the other senior priests had stayed, and I gave them my grave thanks for it before we began the evening prayer and sacrifice. That night I tried to sleep but could not. I rose from the giparu and watched for fires along the walls of Urim, as I had done so many years before, but there were none. From the great city below the temple there was only darkness and silence.

In the morning we went to the temple, all of us who had remained, and prayed again at first light, but our songs were interrupted by the sound I had been dreading--the horns of the guardsmen. But it was not the city guard of Urim--it was closer, sharper, the horns of the temple guards I myself had posted. War had not just come to Urim again, it had come to our very front gates.

Abruptly the music of our prayer-song came to an end. “So early?” said a priest in shock, clutching his drum and rattle. Everyone was frozen still, trying to hear what was going on outside.

The priests flocked around the altar of Nanna. “Enship!” Ugunu cried. “You must go to the giparu! He will not harm you there!”

“He will,” I said. “He killed the High Priestess of Inanna, what makes you think he will hesitate to enter the giparu?”

“Go,” said Baranamtarra grimly. “If you leave now you can make it to the giparu before you are spotted. When he comes in here we will tell him you fled when you received his letter, and perhaps he will believe us. The riches in the temple sanctum may attract his attention, but not the giparu. Go!”

I wondered if the hopelessness and futility and terror I now felt was anything like what Sagadu had felt when I had asked him to go. Lifting my robes above my ankles, I ran from the temple and across the courtyard towards the giparu, desperately hoping I would make it before anyone noticed me. I wondered if Elamitu was still there. I had begged her to leave, but in her typical easy fashion she had refused, unlike Ilum Palilis, who had been gone the instant word of war had reached her. As I ran I heard sounds that made my heart pound and my stomach lurch: the shouting of men, the shrieking of women, metal clanging against metal. My vision was a blur and my eyes and nostrils stung with smoke. Something was burning.

“Where are you going, En?” A man’s voice called out as I ran, and a fresh wave of terror crashed over me. “Where are you going?” He kept repeating. I was too frightened to look back at him. “Where are you going?”

Throwing myself over the threshold, I slammed the door of the giparu behind me, my breath coming in painful gulps. Frantically I searched for something to drag in front of the door. My bed was the nearest object of any size, but I did not know how quickly I could move it by myself.

“Elamitu!” I called. But there was no answer. I threw myself into the task at hand, and with the burst of strength the gods give to the desperate, I managed to get the bed across the room. When I had jammed it firmly against the door I sank to my knees. It was a long time before I could breathe comfortably again.

I prayed. Nanna, Nanna, please, don’t let him, don’t let him--what he might do was so terrible I could not even think it, so I focused on simply keeping him from entering. Don’t let him come in. Over and over again, I prayed the words, letting it become a silent litany in time with the pounding in my breast and in my head.

Then I heard something scraping at the door, and knew it for a blade.

My breathing became harsh and labored again, and I clapped my hands over my mouth as if to keep my fear from spilling out. “Enship, I know you are there. I saw you,” said a voice, a man’s voice, and the scraping of his blade grew more frenzied as the door jostled against the wooden bed-frame.

I was as silent as the dead Ens beneath me. Nanna, Nanna!

“Now, now,” said a man’s voice. “I had heard you Northerners were frigid, but is this the way you receive a guest? I am so very anxious to meet you. We have much to discuss.”

A few moments later my bed overturned and the door came flying open. To this day I do not know how he did it, unless some dark and nameless god gave strength to his sword-arm, some corpse-hound battle spirit with bloody tongue and rolling eyes. My god’s strength completes my strength. My god was absent, and so was my strength.

He entered then, and I knew who he was without him saying it. I knew that this was not some common soldier, nor even a general, but Lugal Anna himself, the one who called himself ruler of Unug and Urim and Lagash and scion of Gilgamesh, who had taken Garashang’s head, who had sworn to remove me forcibly from the temple if I would not flee before him. Here he was, stepping over my threshold, violating the sanctity of the giparu without a second thought exactly as I had feared he would. With a red-stained sword in his hand and his face twisted into a smile, as if the entire thing was a joke too funny to be believed.

I could not believe how young he was, my tormentor, my enemy. He was no grizzled warrior or hardened ruler but a strong and handsome young man, young enough to be my own son. Beneath a layer of grime he wore the armor of a prince, leather chased with gilt and carnelian, and his jutting beard was more North than South. All of a sudden I remembered the rumors told to me in Unug by the galaturra years before--that the son of the Lugal of Unug deposed by Rimush was still alive--and it all became clear to me. His claim to an ancient bloodline, his labelling the Lugal of Unug a usurper and Garashang a treacherous collaborator. This was he, Melemanna’s lost heir, come of age at last. Come to the Temple of the Moon at Urim with an army, with soot on his fine armor and blood on his sword and a smirk on his face.

Lugal Anna stepped into the middle of my bedroom. “There were fewer people here than we anticipated,” he said. I could still hear the roiling of flames and the clanging of metal from outside, but his voice had the measured poise of a young nobleman in some Great Household. “I take this to mean that you received my little gift. Yet seeing what happened to your sister, the High Priestess of Inanna, and knowing the danger you were in, you chose to stay. Why is that?”

“I am the En,” I said, and looked into his dark eyes. The litany of Nanna bubbled to the surface of my crazed brain and I tried my best to focus on the song, any song, even the counting-song of the cattle of the moon, rather than my fear.

“Indeed,” he said. “I did not really believe you would flee. You have been En a very long time.”

“Longer than you have been alive,” I said. “And I will be En after you are dead.”

He snorted. “Truly, this is Sharru-kin’s daughter before me,” he said. “Not that I expected any less. Do you know whose son I am?”

“The Lugal of Unug’s,” I said. “The former one, before he was replaced by a man of my brother Rimush’s choosing.”

“The true one,” he said. “The one whose family ruled in the South for generations. I am only taking back what is mine by right. I have been waiting for this moment my entire life, but your brother’s death presented the perfect opportunity for me to rally my forces and strike.”

“But why do you claim Urim and Lagash?” I asked. “Why not be king in Unug alone, as your father was?” This, truly, was a dangerous man, I thought, and I must be careful what I say. Dangerous because he spoke so calmly that it was easy to forget he had not put away his sword, and that it was stained with red.

“The ancient royal lines of Urim and Lagash were extinguished with Kaku and Kikuid,” he said dismissively. “The close bond between our three cities would never continue if I became ruler of Unug alone. The governors put in place by Rimush are too eager to cling to their own power and too loyal to your brother to ever acknowledge the truth. I am the only true king left among them.”

I gritted my teeth. I had known a True King once myself. “You have sinned gravely against the gods,” I said. “Disgracing and invading their temples, slaughtering their priests--you will never rule one city, let alone three, if you disrespect the gods. Gilgamesh himself, whom you call your ancestor, was two-thirds divine, with the goddess Ninsun for a mother. He knew how to give the gods what was due to them.”

“You would speak to me of Gilgamesh?” said Lugal Anna. His voice raised in volume and he took a step forward. “I am no priest-king like the Ensis of old; I did not come here to debate religious matters.”

I rose to my feet, suddenly aware that if I was about to die I did not want to die sitting on the floor. “Why did you come here at all?” I said desperately. “We are not warriors. Women and priests. That is what you will find here, and at the Eana of Inanna and An. Even Lugal Kaku kept his war against my brother from our gates. Why have you come like a conqueror to the temples of the gods?”

Lugal Anna studied the point of his sword. “Do you know why Lugal Kaku’s Rebellion was such a spectacular failure, all those years ago?” he asked. “It was not for any lack of strength or loyalty from the men of Lagash, Unug and Urim. It was not even truly because of Kaku’s character, and you know as well as I he was a fat craven and as oily as a Buranuna gubi. The gods cannot abide an oathbreaker, and eating until you are as round as the moon is no sure way to make Nanna love you, so perhaps Kaku was doomed from the start? But his gravest misstep, his most egregious error, was this: how greatly he underestimated your family. He had no idea the lengths you Northerners will go to for power. That much is certain from the way he treated you. When Rimush ascended the throne, did Kaku really ask you to go back to Akkade? Did he really think he could get any member of your family to take a crown off their head just by asking nicely?”

At first I did not realize he was expecting an answer. But he was staring at me, so I said at last, “He did not ask. He ordered me to go, just as you did. And I would not do it then, just as I will not do it now.”

Lugal Anna laughed delightedly. He had a high-pitched laugh, the complete opposite of my father or brothers’ deep rumble. It was so much at odds with his appearance that it unnerved me. “The man had the brains of a muskmelon!” He crowed. “I asked you to go, but I never really believed you would. I know who I am dealing with, and Kaku did not. With tact like that I believe he almost deserved what your brother did to him. Almost.” He drew closer, and I tensed. “Do you know what happened to Lugal Kaku?”

“He was sent to one of my brother’s labor camps,” I said. The memory of the last time I ever saw Rimush rose sluggishly to the surface of my mind like a bubble of marsh gas.

“Yes, though he did not make it there,” said Lugal Anna. “The trek through the desert was too much for him, and I was told by those who saw that the vultures feasted on him for more days than he lasted alive. All that flesh was put to good use at last.”

I winced.

The Lugal flashed me an incongruous smile. “Kaku did not know the cruelty of Rimush until it was too late, and thereafter he knew its full force,” he went on. “Now I, on the other hand, believe I have a very realistic understanding of precisely what you Northern rock-hoppers are capable of. My father did as well. He warned Kaku and Kikuid to be careful, to bide their time and seek further alliances, that Urim, Unug and Lagash united could never throw off the Akkadian yoke, that the wrath of a prince of Akkade was like the wrath of Ninurta of the mighty mace. But they did not listen, and your brother tore down the walls of Urim and sent them all to his camps to work for his Empire until they died, of thirst, of hunger, of burnt and blistered skin, of cruelty. Do you know how my father Melemanna died?”

“How could I know that?” I managed to say.

“A fair question. But you should know. After all, it was your own brother who sent him trekking through the desert, to quarry stone in the sun three hundred miles away from his home, his city, his family and his god. When he was there, he saw a pile of bricks fall and pin a man beneath them. And he broke from the line to free that man, began scrabbling with his bloody hands to help him. He managed to free the man’s body, but one of his arms remained trapped beneath the pile. So my father seized the nearest libation jar and poured oil on the man’s arm, hoping that he might be able to pull it free that way. He might have succeeded, except that other men of my father’s work-team, seeking the overseer’s favor, ran to him and told him that my father had broken the rules.” Lugal Anna paused. His face was as distant and blank and unknowable as a stone relief.

“The guards took hold of my father, and the overseer approached my father calmly. ‘You have wasted good oil,’ he told him, gesturing to the man whose arm was still trapped beneath the bricks. ‘There is a much easier solution to the problem.’ And he swung his sword and cut the trapped man’s arm off at the shoulder.’ He ordered one of the guards to bring the man to a doctor, to have his wound sewn up and stanched and thereafter have him returned to work. Then he said to my father, ‘A man with one hand may still be of some use to his master. But a criminal’s hands are attainted, and no good honest work may come of them. That was not your oil to take, nor had you received an order to leave the line.’ And with his sword he took both my father’s hands.” Lugal Anna was staring at his own hands now. When he looked up at me, his face was shining, his eyes were shining, his gaze was a terrible hot javelin of light that I felt on my face and breast and hands. “After that, of course, he could do no more work for the camp, so they did as they did with all those who break rules. They skinned him alive.”

I tried to find something to say, and could not. I stood and felt the hot and hateful burn of Lugal Anna’s eyes, those eyes which I will never forget though I live to be as old as Enki.

Again he laughed, and again his laugh made me shudder. “I was only a boy when this happened. I would have died there with him, or else I would have perished in the long desert march like so many others, but my mother hid me when the soldiers came looking for me and told them I had died the night the walls came down. There were so many bodies to be counted, and so many of them children’s bodies, that no one asked her further. So how did I come to hear this story? Not every man who labored under your brother’s corvee died there, though every man wished to. There were a few who made it back to Unug or Adab or one of the other rebellious cities, just a few, but enough to let their stories spread to royal ears. Rimush saw to that. What would be the good of crushing us into the dust if we did not know what he did to our people? How else was he to make us obedient to the rule of the North, to the True King, the King of the World?” He spat on the ground, a sudden, sharp gesture that made me flinch. “Rimush knew only that one way to rule, through fear and hate, and Manishtushu after him. But there are other forces that govern men’s lives, and the wise king knows to get them under his control early and completely. Even Sharru-kin was aware of that, or else he never would have sent you here to be En.”

“And so you have attacked the temples,” I said and the words seemed heavy as iron.

“You say I do not give the gods their due, but never say I do not know their importance,” said Lugal Anna. “A man’s heart is in his god, and a man’s god completes his strength. True blood of the ancient Lugals of Unug though I am, it would not be enough for me to break the power of the king. I must also break the power of the gods. I know what the temples give to their people. I know the sway they hold over this land. I will destroy the temples of Unug and Urim and Lagash, but when I have my throne I will rebuild them. I will fill them with people I can trust, men and women loyal to my line and not your father’s. The next En of Urim will be a daughter or a sister-in-law of mine. The next songs that fill my people’s hearts will be hers. Don’t think of what I have done to the temples as a crime against the gods. Think of it as an act of praise for Them. I do not want them to be serviced any longer by the kin of conquerors and their sycophants.” Then he said the words that had chilled my heart years before when I thought them myself, that I had prayed to Nanna in thanks that Kaku had been too much a fool to realize. “If we are ever to be free of the Empire, we must be free of you.”

He grabbed me.

I cried out in shock but he clapped a hand over my mouth, rough and filthy with the ashes of my temple. His muscles were like rods of iron, and I knew I had no chance of resistance. My body went limp as I felt him half-drag, half-carry me outside the giparu. “I have another gift for you,” I heard him say as my heart pounded in my ears. The aga tumbled from my head and I did not see where it fell.

When we crossed the threshold he pushed me to the ground and I crumpled, scrunching my eyes shut in horrified anticipation of what he might do next. I flinched a moment later when I felt something hit me in the side. I opened my eyes hesitantly and saw with surprise that he had thrown a dagger on top of me.

“Here, Enship,” he said. “Take this ornament. It becomes you.” Then he kicked me, hard, in the stomach.

He did not even turn around to speak his final words to me, but I heard them drifting towards me like vultures in the fetid air, loud against the crunching of his boots on the rubble of the temple as he walked away. “I would use that dagger if I were you, En. My men will do much worse than that blade if they catch you. Save yourself the trouble and get out of here. This is not your city anymore.”