Help me, Inanna, Lady of the Largest Heart, to remember the voyage from the city of my father to the city of your father, from Akkade that was my home to Ur--Urim--that would be.
I spent ten days aboard the ship, just as the king my father had promised. It was my first time on a boat aside from little pleasure barges that paddled up and down the Idiqlat for an afternoon, and my first journey out of the city of Akkade. For the first four days I was sick with longing and anger and the motion of the floor beneath my feet. I barely left my bed, though I slept little, and everything I ate came back up within the hour. The three women my father had given me attended me tirelessly in this time, and I reflected that if my father could be cruel, at least he was true to his word. My head lolled on the pillow. I looked at them through fever-dulled eyes and thought, my wedding present.
The two younger ones were close to my own age, meek and retiring creatures. One was a hook-nosed Northern girl with the unfortunate slave-name of Zumbu, Mosquito, and the other a beauty whose smooth dark hair and skin might have belonged to one of the Black-Headed but whose name of Elamitu, Elamite Woman, marked her as being from the East and not the South. The eldest of the three was a Sumerian woman called Igiru, Heron, for her gangly limbs. It was she who spent the most time at my bedside during those first four days on the water. Igiru would murmur softly to me for hours as I tossed and turned. She would wipe my brow with a damp cloth and tell me stories of the South in her own Southern tongue, of Urim which had been her home before she was sold to a slaver band to pay her father’s debts. Her eyes would well with tears as she told me of the glorious gates of the House of the Great Light, of the Gardens of the Moon even finer and more expansive than my father’s gardens in Akkade, of the nighttime chorus of crickets and frogs among the reeds, lit by the lanterns of the pole-boats and the soft glow of marsh gas. She had prayed to Nanna the Moon that she should return to his patron city before she died, and now her prayers had been answered, and she knew that I would love it as she did. When I closed my eyes and Zumbu or Elamitu came with fresh beer or a plate of food, Igiru would shush them and tell them that the egir-turra, the little princess, was sleeping.
With their help, I grew stronger. I was sick until I was not sick, until my bleeding heart had bled itself dry. I started to eat more and began to leave my bed for a few minutes at a time, then a few hours. I walked along the deck in the bright sun and watched the world go by from the side of the boat, as the galley-master chanted and the oars heaved and splashed in endless rhythm. The waters of the river were sometimes green, sometimes brown, sometimes blue, but always deep with possibilities. Leaning against the wooden railing I watched the water for glimpses of fish or turtles or gods. I thought of leaping over the edge and slipping under the waves like a fish-tailed kuliltu, like the seven Apkallu who taught mankind. But there would be no such easy escape for me. I was no swimmer, and this river was not called the Swift for no reason. If I tried to escape that way, I would end up on the riverbed with Lahmu and Lahamu of the lovely curls, and the world and my family would be short a princess.
In those first few days Manishtushu, my escort, divided his time between roaring at the ship captain, gambling with the sailors and guards and drinking whatever wine there was aboard. He commanded the two younger of my slaves to his bed, I am sure, and perhaps even Igiru as well, though he had the courtesy not to let me see him do it. He came to my bedchamber once or twice, though I do not remember if he spoke to me. If in my haze of grief and weariness I saw a tall broad-shouldered shadow standing over me, I thought of my father the King of the World and was sick anew. To his credit Manish seemed to understand this, and kept his distance from me until I could speak again.
When I was ready, Manish helped me to forget where I was going and what I would never see again. We had not brought with us a set for the game of twenty squares, but he scratched a simple grid into the ship’s deck with his knife so that we could play with date-pits as markers. There were no instruments aboard, but we sang our favorite stories in time with the clapping of our hands and the endless slap of the oars against the waves. It helped to laugh at the boasts of the vainglorious fox who claims his pissing in the river is the reason for the tides, at the mighty warrior god Ninurta being bested in battle by a turtle. We had a laugh or two at your expense as well, Inanna, though we called you Ishtar when we sang of how you broke the roller-bird’s wing because his tiny cock could not satisfy you, so that he cries to this day “Kappi! Kappi!”, ”My wing! My wing!”
Though they looked so much alike, I had always felt that my twin brothers regarded me differently. Rimush with his watchful gaze and furrowed brow made me feel like a child. Manishtushu, though he was my brother and a prince, was almost a friend to me, and never more than in those ten days on the water.
On the last night of our voyage he came to my chamber after the evening meal with a wineskin and two goblets. “My wedding present, sister,” he said. “As red as the land of Musur where it was made. I would have waited for the wedding feast, but a vintage this fine should be savored by the bride herself, not divided up between the whole host of guests.” I did not say what I was thinking, that he wanted it for himself and had probably drank his own supply already. But I thanked him all the same.
We went up to the decks to drink in the cool night air. Before long my face was warm and my smiles easy, and my brother’s eyes were glassy and his hair tousled. It was then that we had our first glimpse of Ur in the distance. I saw the silhouette of the great temple looming against the stars, and the glimmering of the city’s torches, themselves an array of stars fallen to earth. High above us, my husband-to-be strutted and puffed in his silver glory, and cast a road of light across the water to show us the way to his Great Household. It was so beautiful that I almost began to look forward to it. I thought of waking Igiru but decided to let her sleep. She would have plenty of time to see the city of her girlhood, for I was determined to keep the three women my father had given me in my service when I took my place as En.
Manishtushu stroked his pointed beard. “Do you know why I am here, Khedu?” he asked.
“To be my escort,” I said.
“Yes,” said Manishtushu seriously. “When Father told us he was planning to make you En, Rimush and I both offered to see you safely down the river. We did not want you out of our sight. But Father did not want his heir to leave his side, not even for twenty days. He has his eye on the nomads of Martu to the west of the Slow River, and he wants his heir to bear witness to how he makes war. He may call himself King of the World, but the world is big and the Empire is small. Smaller than his ambitions, at least.”
“But you were free to go,” I said, understanding.
My brother sighed and ran his broad fingers through his reddish Northern curls. “We are exactly alike, Rimush and I. Sometimes even Father cannot tell us apart. I am as strong as him, as tall as him. I can shoot as far and run as fast--farther, sometimes, and faster. I have studied the gods and cities of the Empire and the foreign lands beyond it. Yet my brother will be a king, and I will not. He is The One Who Goes in Front, and I am He Who Is With Him. Even by our names, he is first and I am second.”
“If Rimush should die without a son, you will be king after him,” I said. I could not quite understand how my brother was feeling. I had known Manish and Rimush all my life, so I knew the slight difference in the width of their noses, the freckle that one brother did not have, but there were times when even I saw them together that the two princes seemed to be one, Foremost become Secondmost and Secondmost Foremost. I did not know what that was like, to have a reflection. I had always been the only one like me.
“And what is the likelihood of that?” asked Manishtushu bitterly. “The governors of every city from Ninua to Eridu will bring him their daughters and sisters and nieces, they will lay their own wives naked at his feet if it means the good graces of the King of the World. Already he has proposals of marriage. The Lugal of Nibru sent a bard to sing to us about his daughter’s every mole and hair and dimple. By the time he finished the song I felt like I had fucked her myself. In a month’s time the palace will be hosting an Elamite prince whose sister has just reached marrying age, and Rimush--you know how dreadful he is at languages--he says he is keen to meet the girl, but he cannot even pronounce her name! He just grins like an oaf and calls her Elamitu, like your slave-girl, when he asks me if I think her ass will be as round as the Elamite ambassador’s wife’s.” I had rarely heard my brother speak so coarsely, but he had always been the kind of man who laughs at his own jokes, and he was laughing now.
“I hope no secrets are kept from Rimush about his own marriage,” I said. My brother stopped laughing and drained the rest of his wine. For some time we were both silent, and the sounds of the ship rose to fill in the gaps in our conversation; the rhythmic slap of oars against the water’s surface, the creaking of the mast, the distant chant of the galley-master beneath us keeping time.
“You are lucky,” he said finally, and now it was me who laughed.
“Lucky?” I asked. “In what way am I lucky?”
“You will be married against your will, as many girls are, but not to a man,” said Manish. “No drunk will beat you, no palsied grandfather will force himself on you. No conqueror will Take You As Plunder and give you a name to match.”
“No man will love me, either,” I said softly.
“The gods will love you,” said Manish. “You will sing their praises and tend their altars. You will bring joy to the hearts of their worshippers, and they will love you as well. I envy you. Do you realize that? Rimush pities you, I think, and Father doesn’t much care how you feel, but I envy you.”
I shook my head and turned away from him, not certain whether I wanted to laugh or cry but certain I did not want him to see my face. “If you envy me so, you could become a priest,” I said.
I heard my brother laugh again, a shadow of my father’s roar. “Never,” he said. “Could you imagine me in a fleecy itqu, with my head and chin shaved clean? I should have to keep away from bronze and water, lest I laugh at my reflection. I could never give up women and hunting and wine. I could never give up wanting to be king.”
“Is it so wonderful to be a king?” I asked. I had only ever known one, and I did not like him much.
Manishtushu was quiet. Then he said, “I don’t know, in truth. But it is all I have ever wanted.”
I turned to look at him then, my brother, He Who Is With a Him who was not there yet who was with us both, always, the shadow of a prince and beside him the shadow of a king. Manishtushu rose and stretched and picked up the empty wine cup.
“I bid you goodnight, sister,” he said. “Send one of your women to me, would you? The Elamite, perhaps. We can pretend we are Crown Prince Rimush and his foreign princess of the unpronounceable name. I’ve been told I bear a certain resemblance to him, in a certain light. She will never know the difference.” He laughed bitterly, and I pretended not to have heard both the joke and the request.
The priests say that the waters of the Two Rivers are so sacred that if a man is accused of a crime, he will sink beneath the water if he is guilty and float if he is innocent. I think it is a wonder anyone floats at all. We are all guilty of some crime, of some cruelty. Some may sink faster than others, but we all have enough sins and heavy hate in our hearts to carry us down to the bottom. I could not know then what my brother was capable of. I could not know then what he would do. But that night I saw him laid bare, and, wrapped in self-pity as I was during that voyage, for the first time I felt sorry for my brothers. It was bad enough they were men, but to be the sons of a king suddenly seemed almost as cruel a fate as my own.
In the morning I awoke to the sound of voices and the scent of Ur.
Every city has a smell all its own, and the air of Ur is not like the air of the Akkade. I knew this at once, from the moment my eyes first opened on the morning of my wedding. Akkade smelled like cardamom and rosewater, fresh paint and spilled wine. It was ever a city of hollow beauty, a city of empty threats. But Ur is a city by the sea, and like all cities by the sea it smells chiefly of her. Even beneath the smells of asses’ dung and limestone dust and the lingering scent of war that is so hard to wash away. Even here and now, in the heart of the temple complex, when the wind sighs I can still feel it in the air, so much salty water like the tears I shed for the girl named Joy. And I felt it that morning, the insistent sea pressing so close around me, worrying, prodding, pushing me up onto the shore.
I rubbed my sleepy eyes as Zumbu and Elamitu led me to a basin of fresh river water, and Igiru readied her pots of cosmetics and perfumes. “Shall I have not a single day to rest, nor to see the city that shall be my new home?” I said.
“We were instructed to ready you for the ceremony as soon as we arrived in Ur, Lady,” said Zumbu dutifully. I sighed. My father had thought of everything, it seemed.
The shock of the water’s chill woke me swiftly enough. After my bath I sat numbly on my bedroll as my ladies painted my lips and eyelids. They draped me in a golden robe in the Sumerian style, which leaves the right arm free. Elamitu and Zumbu, as they were not Sumerian and had never served a Sumerian lady, stood back and let Igiru work on my hair. She combed out my long plaits and rolled my Sumer-black hair with its Akkadian curls into the simpler style of the South. She gave me no cloth to drape over my head. I touched the nape of my neck, its nakedness unfamiliar, and wondered whether the women of the South eschewed the veil out of pride or lack thereof.
When Igiru was finished with my hair, she went to a chest beneath my bed. “From your mother,” she said, and my breath caught in my throat when I saw the glittering things she was drawing out. A mantle for my shoulders, long strings of carnelian and lapis polished so that they gleamed. Bold earrings in the shape of crescent moons. A wreath of golden leaves for my brow and a matching set of bangles for my wrists, and, most exquisite of all, a flowered hair-comb, the kind that makes a cluster of flowers on long stems seem to spring from the top of a woman’s head. These were not just any wedding finery but my mother’s finest jewels, saved from the sack of Umma. No one had worn them since she had, and I was shocked they had not been buried with her, as many of her possessions had been. “From your mother,” Igiru had said. Perhaps Tashlultum had known her only daughter might one day find herself in a city of the South. Igiru began to dress me in the jewelry, clucking and cooing that I would be the most exquisite bride that Urim had ever seen.
At last, she stepped back and beamed at me as though I were her own child. “You are beautiful,” she said. “Like Inanna when she makes herself beautiful for Dumuzid.” She fetched me a piece of bronze and I saw that I was beautiful--or, rather, the effect of all the things I wore was beautiful. Like my mother, I had become a thing of borrowed glory, a trellis choked in golden foliage. My brown flesh, though it glowed in the morning light against the gold of my gown, was cold and clammy to the touch. And in my own eyes, becomingly darkened as they were with your secret formula that we call “let-him-come,” I could read nothing, recognized nothing.
Zumbu smiled and mumbled some words of blessing at the ground. Elamitu blessed me in her own language, in the name of a goddess called Kiririsha. I know more of the gods and their ways now, of course, but even then I wondered if this foreign goddess was one I knew by a different name, and whether she or any of the gods was watching me today.
Aboveboard Manishtushu and all the guards and slaves were lined up along the sides of the ship, and I realized for the first time that the distant chiming of the rowers and their master, so familiar I had all but ceased to hear it, was gone. The men bowed when they saw me, and my brother gasped. He opened his mouth to say something, but I looked at him with the slightest trace of a furrow in my brow and he was silent. He bowed his head and took me by the arm and led me down the ramp that had been unrolled for my convenience, with my three women trailing behind with their heads down and their hands clasped in front of them, all except Igiru, who was weeping, digging fiercely at her eyes with the heels of her hands like a woman slicing onions, though whether she wept for me or at the sight of her longed-for home city I did not know.
We had come out the mouth of one river and sailed east to the mouth of the other, where lies the walled city of Ur--Ur, which I must remember not to call Ur but Urim. The city gaped before me, stony and splendid, an undulating mountainscape of clay, bright-eaved merchant’s palaces and slapdash hovels and between them palms and beds of salt-grass, irrigation rivulets spanned bridges thin as needles. Off in the distance loomed the mighty House of the Great Light, clearer now than it had been by night, that was to be my home. I inhaled that sharp scent of a city so utterly unlike Akkade, a city that was older than I could imagine, that was so old it lived for the glory of its own self and not its king. I realized then, as I descended to the stones of Urim, that I must not be the first princess to arrive here by boat. I was one in a long line of king’s daughters, a long line of outsiders, of visitors flaunting their own power, as I was to be only one in a long line of Ens. I wondered if the old En before me had thought of me as she drew her last rattling breath, or of all those who came before her, stretching out their dusty hands from the Great Below to welcome her.
There was a crowd of curious onlookers waiting to see us at the docks, men and women and scrawny children. They withdrew from our guards, pure Akkadian in their leather jerkins and pointed helmets, and murmured and bowed when they saw my brother in his royal finery, with his sword buckled at his side. Scanning the crowd I saw the same attributes repeated again and again; dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes. Women in one-sleeved dresses with a black knob of hair and a black line connecting their brows, men bare to the waist in long skirts, bald or short-haired, many without beards. In the great festival processions and slave markets of Akkade, I had been accustomed to seeing different kinds of people. Aside from the Northerners and Southerners of the Land Between Two Rivers, there were many others from the foreign kingdoms of mountain and plain: the slender brown Elamu of the East and the hawk-nosed Amurru of the West, lisping Suteans, beardless Hurrians and fair-haired Guti, Lullubi tribesmen with their long queues. But in this crowd I saw few who were not Sumerian, scarcely a head that was not Black.
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I looked upon them, who were my kinsmen by blood if not by else, into whose city I had intruded, the daughter of a man from another land who called himself their True King, who had raised me to their highest office without my knowledge or consent. I looked on them, but when they looked at me I blushed and could not meet their eyes and longed for the comfort of my veil. Yes, Inanna, I, proud and unrepentant En Kheduana, who has spit in the face of conquerors and felt the shuddering sobs of kings, I tell you that I could not meet their eyes! It was not that I was modest, though many probably took me for such. It was that I did not yet know what they wanted from me. It was too much all at once; the surprise of the marriage pact and the voyage, the new city, my bridal vestments that already were beginning to stifle and itch in the sweltering heat. I needed time before I could face them, time before I could look into their eyes and know if they saw me as a friend or foe, as a priestess or an infidel, a princess or a weak young girl from a powerful family. It was with relief that my slaves helped me into a curtained palanquin, which was lifted up by the men who had come with us on the ship, with my brother and his guards marching at the head of our little procession and more slaves bringing up the rear with gifts of goodwill for Lugal Kaku and the Temple of the Moon. With a long sigh that rattled my shoulders, I drew the curtain and settled onto the cushioned divan within beside my slaves, pretending not to understand the murmurings in Emengir that drifted through the air around me.
“That’s her that will be En,” I heard them say. And “Sharru-kin’s daughter,” and over and over, “She looks small. She looks so small.” I almost laughed at this. I was a young girl; did they expect me to be eleven cubits tall like Gilgamesh? But then, my father is almost that tall in my memories, and my mother has shrunk nearly to the size of a votive idol, or one of those tiny bronze mannikins that are buried by builders to bless the foundations of a new house. I suppose this is how it is, with characters in songs, with kings and their womenfolk, with monsters and heroes and gods too. No one is more beautiful or more imposing or more frightening than they are before you see them. In truth we are none of us very large, not the king, not the gods, not anyone, but a story can make us seem so.
Our little procession began to move through the streets. My heart pounded as I began to wonder when we would approach the House of the Great Light where I would meet my bridegroom. Igiru’s face was shining, and she smiled as she whispered to me how much I would love the city of Urim, how excited she was to finally be here. Her words were cut off by a commotion from outside; a clamor of voices so different from the other sounds I had heard in the city that it startled me.
“What is that?” Elamitu asked.
Igiru nodded gravely and said, “They always find the brides,” more to herself than to any of us.
Yes, Inanna, we heard them before we saw them. My long life has taught me that this is always so with your creatures, but I did not know it then. At the time all I knew was the shrill piping of flutes, the stamping of feet, the beating of the small hand-drum called the tigi. And I heard jubilant voices raised in song, but this was a Southern-tongue of a different kind than I had ever known. It was not the accent of Urim, which I knew from one of my tutors, nor the accent of Nibru or Kish. It was almost a separate language all its own. It seemed to flow at a different rate, as though this tongue and the Sumerian I had heard before were two rivers with two different levels of silt. It was so unfamiliar that I could barely determine the meaning, except that I heard your name, Inanna, not only once but many times. They were praising you, I did not doubt, though who they were remained to be seen. “Who are they?” I asked my Sumerian slave-woman, and she said, “The wonder of Inanna. Look, Princess. My words will do them no justice.”
I lifted the edge of the curtain as high as I dared.
What can I say of my first glimpse of the menwomen of Inanna? Growing up as I did in one of your cities, my Lady, I had heard whispers of your strangest children. In Akkadian we called them assinnu, buggerers, and though the young men of the Great Household might mock the lisping speech and swaying walk of the menwomen, they knew better than to doubt their power. It was the first assinnu, Asushunamir, who saved you from your sister’s clutches in ancient days, and they were ever in your favor after that. I had heard it said that any man who sought the assinnu at Ishtar’s temples and lay with one would be blessed with good luck and health. When I was a young girl this seemed frightening and mysterious. Now that I am an old woman and know something of their ways, I am certain that it was the assinnu themselves who started this rumor.
I had never seen their ilk before, but it was clear to me at once what they were and what they were not. I beheld that the source of the music was a ragged band moving towards us on foot. They wore the one-sleeved dresses of the South in a chaotic mix of colors, fabrics and styles, bright as birds and with all their noisy self-importance. Their eyes and nails were painted as well as any lady of my father’s court, but their plucked chins were hard, their hips narrow, and most had no breasts. Some of them were going bald at the front of their heads but they all wore the low bun style of the South, and a few even wore flower-shaped jewels like my own, though as they came closer I saw that these were not gold and lapis but chipped and painted pottery. They clapped their hands and bared gap-toothed smiles that made our guards scowl and grow tense. They were blocking our path, and my heart pounded as I wondered what it was they meant to do.
Their song came to a frenzied close. Then they whooped and clapped and said as one, in Emengir that I had no trouble understanding, “A blessing! A blessing for the bride!”
Leaping and laughing and calling out their intent to bless me, I found them oddly beautiful. Perhaps it was simple relief at knowing what they wanted. Perhaps it was because their beauty was so unlike any other beautiful thing in my life. I had been called beautiful that very day by Igiru, but it was only because I was a bride and wore ancient and beautiful things, not any lightness in my heart or joy in my face. My father’s capital city was called beautiful, but only because it was new, and my mother was called beautiful only because she was Queen. These haggard, motley creatures were not beautiful to me because it seemed right that they should be, but because they looked as though they had been trying at it, as hard as they possibly could.
Manishtushu scowled. “Begone!” he cried. He waved a fly-switch at them like a stunted whip. “Do you fools not know in whose way you stand? This is not any bride but your city’s new High Priestess, the future wife of the Moon himself, and the daughter of your True King besides. Let us pass!”
The menwomen did not move, but some of them exchanged knowing glances. “Future wife of the moon,” said a tall, thin one in a purple dress, sucking in her teeth. “Shall we have another in the sky beside him soon? Two moons would be bad for the galaturra’s business. If the men of Urim could see our faces clearly by night, we should never make so much as a penny.”
The other menwomen cackled, and a look of rage passed over my brother. “Marsh-slime,” he said, and added some words in Akkadian that I had rarely heard before but which made the menwomen whoop all the louder.
“I said begone, or my men will cut the male parts from the female parts of you,” said my brother menacingly, and the guards placed their hands on their swords.
“Too late for that,” said a willowy youth in green, and another roar of laughter rose from the crowd. The one in purple proudly tossed back her head with its crown of cracked clay flowers.
“We pilipili, cross-dressers, are the servants of your beloved Ishtar, Northman,” he said. “We may not be as sweet and mild as her hierodules, nor our titties as big neither, and we may call her by a different name, but we are hers, and command your respect. Down here where the marshwater rises, Ishtar reigns supreme. This is Moonfather Nanna’s city, but all the South is his daughter Inanna’s. No other god has more Southern cities to their name than she.”
The guards exchanged an uneasy look and I lifted the curtain higher still.
“What do you want?” asked my brother uncertainly.
“We are the galaturra, the little ladies of Inanna. It is custom here that we bless every bride in this city on her wedding day,” continued the purple-robed manwoman. “Inanna-Ishtar has granted us the use of her powers. She makes a poor man rich and a rich man poor, She makes the weak strong and the strong weak, She is a noble lady and a noble young man, just as we are. If we are not permitted to bless a bride—and most especially, if we are not compensated for that blessing—we reserve the right to bring the goddess’s wrath down on whoever has denied us our due.”
“Inanna’s sweetness lends her cruelty strength, and her cruelty lends her sweetness strength,” said a manwoman in a gown of blue and yellow stripes. “I am sure your little princess would agree. Ask her when she is done watching from the palanquin.” He raised an arm in my direction and I recoiled from the curtain, letting it fall. I was not sure if it was exactly forbidden for me to see them, but I was embarrassed to have been seen spying. Perhaps I was also afraid to see by what my brother might do to them if they continued to give him trouble.
My upcoming wedding must have put my brother in a charitable mood, for I heard him call one of the slaves to fetch a measure of gold shekels for the galaturra. “Make it quick,” he spat, and I heard the pipes and drums begin anew.
“Princess!” the menwomen called. “Light of the Moon, and bride! Show us your face, that we may bless you!”
Shaking and with flushed cheeks, I lifted the curtain all the way and received my blessing.
It was a song first, in that same twisting dialect that I could barely interpret, punctuated with their shouts and whoops. Now and again they switched back to the Emengir I knew to call me “Beauty of Beauties!” and “Blossom of the Desert!” and “Daughter of the King of the World!” and I heard over and over again Inanna, Inanna. Perhaps this entire spectacle was a wedding-gift from you? After all it was on that day that you became my new kinswoman. But at the time I could only sit with burning cheeks, while beside me Igiru clapped her hands and Elamitu and Zumbu stared in wonder.
When the song was ended, the beautiful ones bowed their heads and placed their hands at their mouths. The one in purple said, “May your life be long and may you find joy in the House of the Great Light.”
“And try not to be disappointed on the wedding-night if your bridegroom cannot perform the duties he owes you,” said another with a stifled giggle.
“And as for you, O prince of the broad shoulders and the fine thick beard,” said a third, pointing to my brother. “If you desire a wedding night of your own during your stay in our city, we are skilled actors to a girl. The bloody sheet of course will cost you extra, but if your cock is as large as your reputation--”
Manishtushu waved his sword at them. Screaming with laughter, they scurried off in a dozen directions, clapping hands on each other’s backs and talking animatedly in their strange dialect. And I knew not what to make of them.
I was still thinking of your menwomen when the palanquin came to a stop. During the rest of our journey, Igiru tried to satisfy my curiosity. She told me they had spoken the truth: these beings were your servants, concentrated in a house of their own at the Eana, your temple in the neighboring city of Unug, called Uruk in the North. They wandered the streets of Unug and Urim, blessing brides by day and conducting other business by night. As they were between the male and the female, Igiru explained, so they were between the realm of gods and the realm of men. If they felt they had been treated fairly by the bride and her family, they could make her bear strong, healthy sons; if not, they could curse her womb with barrenness, make her children die in the cradle.
“But they have blessed me. Does that mean I shall bear sons for the moon?” I asked. Igiru gave me a small, weak smile and said no more. In the perfumed haze of the palanquin, which swayed back and forth with the movement of the men who carried it, my eyes fluttered and my mind drifted. Only half waking, I imagined myself impaled on the point of the crescent moon. I saw myself lying on my back and giving birth to moon after moon that floated forth from between my thighs, silvery-wet, each one filling the room with more light. I was dreaming of holding a round, cold moonlet to my breast when the palanquin came to a stop and a burst of fanfare from the trumpeters announced that we had reached our destination.
My brother drew aside the curtain and helped me out of the palanquin. I stood, grateful for the fresh air, my dress sweaty, my head dizzy, my makeup beginning to melt and run in the heat. It was by now nearly nightfall, and we stood at the outer temple gates with all the city of Urim spread out behind us across the flat plain of the marshland. The city crawled with torches like a nest of fireflies, and Utu, the sun, whom until recently I had been accustomed to calling Shamash, was a clot of swollen red light on the horizon.
We stood before two doors taller than any I had ever seen, taller even than the doors of my father’s palace in Akkade. Standing across from us, before tiled walls inscribed with the names of the moon and all his kinsmen, was a group of men: slaves and bald-headed priests, some in the flounced robes of their office and some, I was shocked to discover, naked and bearing libations, their bodies shaved as bald as their heads. They surrounded another man with a round belly that hung over a skirt that touched the floor.
“Crown Prince,” said the fat man with great reverence. “We are honored by your presence.” He stepped towards my brother, making the Southern gesture of obeisance as he did so, with his hand at the level of his nose. “I am Lugal Kaku, ruler of this city and friend of your father.”
Manishtushu’s face darkened, and I felt a sharp twinge of my brother’s pain. Then he said, “I am not the Crown Prince, friend Lugal. That title belongs to my brother Rimush. I am Manishtushu, Sharru-kin’s second son. No doubt it is the resemblance between us that has confused you.”
A slave mopped Lugal Kaku’s sweaty brow. “Of course,” he spluttered. “Forgive me, Highness, I saw a bronze image of your brother when it was sent to adorn the Gardens of the Moon, and I thought--I did not mean to--”
Manishtushu made a gesture as though brushing flies out of the air. “No matter,” he said. “It is not me you are here to see.”
“Princess,” said the Lugal, stepping forward. “I hope that your journey has not been too taxing. We have been awaiting your arrival with the greatest excitement.” I lifted my chin and looked him in the eye. It was easier to look at one Great Man than the crowds that thronged in the streets of Ur.
“The journey was tolerable,” I said. He was as fat as I had guessed he might be, though even in my dazed state I could not mistake him for a water buffalo. Neither could I mistake him for a king, though he had been one once. He spoke some fine words to me that I barely heard, about beauty and the blood of kings. My blood was king’s blood. What did that make his? “When shall I be married?” I asked him.
Lugal Kaku smiled. His teeth were black from the rot of sweets. “You are anxious to assume your Enship, I see.”
I nodded, for it was true that I was anxious. Like many brides before and after me, I could not wait to lay myself down in my bridal bed. Unlike most brides, it was not so that I could enjoy the embraces of my new husband, but so that I could sleep.
“The moon is already high,” said the Lugal. “And the lords and ladies of my court have assembled within to bear witness. We shall conduct the ceremony at once. Truly the city of Urim is blessed today to have such an En. Ningal, the Great Queen, the goddess of the reeds and wife of the moon who is your counterpart in Heaven, could not herself be more lovely on this day. You are as radiant as Inanna of the dark and curving lashes, as beautiful as Nin Khursang, the Wild Cow, when she...” His voice trailed off into nonsense as he compared me to one god after another. Pulled by hidden teams of slaves or, like the tides, by the will of the Moon, the great doors began to open. I felt a rush of air, not the sea-tang air of Urim but temple air, moon’s air, the air that I would breathe with the rattling gulps of a spinster for the rest of my life. The air I breathe even now, Inanna, as I lie awake in a bed I have never shared. I looked to my brother, to my slave women, to the guards, and followed the retinue of Lugal Kaku into the yawning doors of the House of the Great Light, surprisingly dark for all its grandiose name, as the priests took up a wedding chant.
So it was that I was married.
Of the ceremony itself I do not remember how long it lasted, what words were said by the priests, who led me behind a partition to change into the priestly flounced sulukhu. Nor do I remember with perfect clarity the moment when the cold perfume was poured on my head and I became Nanna’s chief wife on earth, the mortal counterpart to his heavenly wife Ningal. But I remember sitting on my bridal pillow in a haze afterwards, scarcely moving or speaking, as the noble lords and ladies of Ur kissed my cheeks or my hands and murmured their blessings and gave me their gifts. I received heaps of jewelry and perfumes and gold, pots of beer, bushels of wheat and bundles of leeks, cases of dates and duck’s eggs, spotted leopard pelts from Amur, falcons tied to their perches, young slave men and women who wore no clothes that I might see their value for myself. Everything they gave would be donated to the Temple, of course, minus what Lugal Kaku skimmed off the top for himself. I was permitted to keep only the blessings, and I kept as well the gifts given to me by my family: the three slaves from my father, my mother’s jewels, a pot of costly ointment from Rimush. Manishtushu’s gift I had already received: not just the costly wine from Musur, but his comfort to me during the voyage.
My brother got drunk at my wedding. Ferociously drunk, angrily drunk, drunk enough that he dribbled into his beard, that he roared at Lugal Kaku’s men near as loud as Sharru-kin and grabbed the flesh of passing slave-women without caring if I saw. I tried to speak with him, to comfort him, but his face was a mask of pain and I knew it was the words of Lugal Kaku that has cut him to the bone. His name was He Who Goes With Him, and in some way Rimush had gone along to Urim with us, the shadow of a prince at another prince’s heel.
I, for my part, was barely someone I recognized. I moved like a fish in drought-mud, trapped and sluggish, for my name was not even my own anymore. The one part of the wedding ceremony that stands out clear in my mind is the moment when I received my new name.
“Khedutum, daughter of Sharru-kin,” said the priest, pausing from his litany. “What name have you chosen to be known by?”
And I replied quietly, “Kheduana.” I had chosen it during the voyage to Urim. “Jewel of Heaven”, a poetic name of the Moon. And the priest nodded and went on with the ceremony. It was an entirely typical name for an En. I knew that my predecessor, Lugal Kaku’s great-aunt, had taken the name Galusakar, the Great Crescent, and I have learned since many others before her who had been White Light or Glory of the Night or other such lunar nonsense. My new name was unlikely to raise an eyebrow, but I did not choose it to glorify the god I was marrying. I chose it because, though it was a Sumerian word, the first part of it was the same as Khedutum, which was my Akkadian name, my birth name. I thought I could keep my father from killing it as he had killed the names of so many others, even his own. I thought that if I saved Khedu I would save my old life, and I would never leave the warm palm groves of Akkade, not altogether. I thought that I could keep myself from changing into something I did not recognize.
Of course I was wrong then, as I have been wrong about many things. I could not save my old life, nor stand against my father’s singular power to erase the names of those around him. I am not Khedu any longer. I am not a proud, smooth-skinned girl. I have white showing in my plaits and wrinkles on my cheeks, and my nephew is already grooming his young daughter as my successor for the inevitable day when the Lady of the Great Below comes to collect me. I am not the only princess in the world any longer, you see. I am a relic of the past, a virgin bride who lives like a widow and feels like a statue. The moon’s hag, the moon’s spinster, as wrinkled and light-fearing as the bats that roost in the rafters of the temple. Perhaps I shall ask Elamitu to hang my body upside-down when I die. Perhaps when the time is right I shall flap down to Ereshkigal’s house on my own leathery wings.
Yes, my lady, I dare to think your sister’s dread name. Eresh-ki-gal, Lady of the Great Below. “Sweet is her praise”, as the old saying runs to keep her at bay. I remember her name, though I must not say it aloud, just as I remember the name of the girl Khedutum, though I must not say it, I must not bring back that phantom nor remember the gardens of Akkade all those years ago, before I wore the aga, before I wrote my first song, before Lugal Anna smote me across the cheek, before, before, before…
The last remnant of my old self died that night, was engulfed and extinguished in the House of the Great Light. I became En Kheduana, a priestess of Nanna and a resident of Urim. I became the woman that I am. Everything that has happened to me since, both the bad and the good, has been because of that day, the evening of my wedding, when the cold perfume of the priests splashed over the sleek part in my hair, trickled down my brow and neck and stained my gown and washed away my name.