The night of my wedding I slept little, yet dreamed much. I dreamed that the moon danced in the street with our bloodstained nuptial sheet like a bridegroom. I dreamed that my mother and father came to lay flowers in my lap and bless me on my wedding day, but when they touched me I shrank by slivers until there was nothing of me left, only a dark place in the sky between the stars. I dreamed that I sprouted a beard of many colors, and Inanna came to pluck it out.
The private chambers of the En in which I slept that night were as richly appointed as my own in Akkade, but they stank of perfume and beneath it, the sick-sweet smell of an old woman (how I pause and smile at the memory of my young nose wrinkling! How much more like an old dragoness’s den does the giparu smell now I have slept here for fifty years?) Just as Rimush followed my brother, so it seemed that Galusakar followed me.
Drifting in and out of sleep, lying in the dark bed of En Galusakar and all those before her, I wept for the gardens of Akkade I would never see again, for the hotness in my breast that could not be quenched and the faces of my brothers. I wept for Baramu whom I had barely known because I knew that now I never would. I wept for my mother for the first and only time, but for my father I had no tears.
I wondered whether it was right to curse one’s father, especially when one’s father is the King of the World. The priests who taught me the name and purpose of each of our many gods had only hinted at the use of curses against one’s enemies. There were spirits who were not the friends of man but who could be used by one man against another, summoned with incantation and manipulated with sacrifice, though when I asked the priests to teach me to call on such beings they would scowl and shake their heads. When I was young my nursemaids always forced me to wear apotropaic amulets, in case some enemy of my father’s named me to Lamashtu the Deformed One or Lilitu the Screech Owl, bloodthirsty slayers of children. And there was a woman brewer called Pazris who sold ale to the palace kitchens that even the young noble ladies of the court would visit. She knew every secret rhyme and rite, not only to make a man love you or to make yourself more beautiful but to make hideous things happen to your enemy, to give her leprosy and bloody stools, to make her hair fall out, to make her be raped by dogs. If some misfortune befell one of the daughters of my father’s Great Household, for a few weeks gossip would swirl through the Gardens of Akkade as to who had put the curse on her, and for what reason.
But I had never been to Pazris seeking triumph over my rival. I was Princess of the World, and had none. So the only curses against my father that escaped my lips that first morning were vague, malformed ones, stunted by my lack of knowledge and my own feeling of guilt over uttering them. “May he suffer as I have suffered,” I whispered, and added, “By Shamash,” because the Sun was justice, and if anyone could recognize that I had been dealt injustice it was him. “May he be alone, as I am alone. May Ishtar--” but I was so young that I trembled even to utter your name, and the rest of that curse died in my throat. I should have mentioned Sin, though I should have called him Nanna in his own city. Any married woman knows well enough how to manipulate her husband, but I had only been married a few hours, and no one had yet taught me such tricks.
I was startled from this reverie by a knock on the door. “Enter,” I said. My stepson had only just begun to rise, and in his first pale rays I beheld Elamitu.
“Another early morning,” I said. “Am I to be married all over again?”
Elamitu giggled. She was near my own age, yet she never seemed more like a child than when she laughed. “Visitors, Mistress,” she said. “Shall we ready you?”
“I suppose there is no escape,” I said as I brushed the hair out of my eyes.
Together, my three women dressed me for my guests. My wedding dress, if I would ever see it again, was nowhere to be found, and the priestess robe I had donned during the ceremony had been sent away to be washed of its perfumed oils. That left a single robe and simple pair of leather sandals which my women had found at the bottom of a chest. They smelled of the same musk as the rest of the room, and neither fit very well. When the time came to style my hair and Elamitu and Zumbu stepped back for Igiru to work on me, I beckoned them close again.
“I will wear the three braids of the North,” I said. “They have an Akkadian En, now. they may as well know it.”
There were two women in priestess’s robes like mine waiting for me outside my bedchamber, standing still as stones with their hands clasped before them. They may have been among the crowd of well-wishers and supplicants at my wedding ceremony, but there had been so many and I had been so numb that I could not place either of their faces. One was tall and mannish, with broad shoulders and a plain, good-natured face. The other was shorter and stockier, with a large bust and a twisted frown. As I approached they put their hands at their mouths, the shorter woman never breaking her scowl.
“Good morning, Zirru Kheduana, and welcome to Urim and your new home,” said the tall woman. “I am Ugunu, the Mistress of the Tablet House, and this is Baranamtarra, the Mistress of Litanies.” I could not help but notice that this Ugunu had addressed me not as Egir, Princess, nor as En, but as Zirru, which meant only “Priestess.” The other woman said nothing, but judging by the look on her face it was not from lack of things to say. It was a calculated and hostile nothing that made me uncomfortable.
“We have brought you breakfast,” Ugunu said merrily. She held out a covered basket to me and lifted its lid, revealing two small, plain rolls inside.
“Thank you,” I said, accepting the basket.
“Come with us, Priestess,” the other woman barked. “It is time for your lessons.”
“Lessons?” I asked.
“You must learn how to serve the god you have married before you can put the rolled cloth aga on your head and become En,” said Ugunu. “You were proclaimed En a bit more...abruptly...than most women in the past. You will live here in the giparu, but for the next year you will attend lessons with the junior priestesses, and observe the priests and priestesses of the temple complex at prayer, before you can take on your official duties.”
Yet again, it seemed, a decision had been made for me, but I was actually grateful for this one. At least I would not be expected to know how to be a High Priestess from the very moment of my arrival. “I will do whatever is asked of me,” I said. “You should know that I have been educated in my father’s house at Akkade. In geography, history and mathematics, and I can read and write in the languages of North and South.”
“As befits a girl of your august dynasty,” said Baranamtarra sneeringly.
“What of my ladies?” I asked, ignoring her. “Will they remain with me in the giparu?”
“Your slaves, you mean,” said Baranamtarra. “You must dismiss them. The temple has its own servants, and it is good for the younger priestesses to learn to serve their seniors. No En has ever kept slaves in the giparu.”
I scowled. “Lugal Kaku said that I would keep all the gifts given me by my family,” I stammered. “My father--”
“Is not here,” said Baranamtarra. “Now come. We do not often have to punish the young priestesses, but if you do not come to your lessons when called, we will do what is necessary.”
“Where is my brother, Manishtushu, the son of the True King?” I asked. “I demand to see him. He cannot have left yet. Where is he?”
Baranamtarra and Ugunu exchanged a look. Then Ugunu said gently, “He is being hosted at the palace of Lugal Kaku. You will see him when he is to leave. Now come, child. We will not ask you again.”
“When he comes, I will make him ensure that my slaves stay here, in the giparu,” I said.
Ugunu stepped forward and took my arm. “No harm will come to them,” she said. “I know that they are dear to you. We must learn to make changes here and there to our usual order of things. You are an En unlike any we have had before.”
“Indeed,” said Baranamtarra, and she turned and walked towards the door.
Someday, Ugunu explained to me as we walked, a few steps behind Baranamtarra, I would be chief overseer of the temple’s faculties, but until I assumed my duties there were many I had to follow and learn from. The House of the Great Light was not just one building but many. There was the temple proper, with its shrines to Nanna and to lesser gods, and the giparu where the En resided, but there was a host of workshops and scribal rooms ranging out towards the city of Urim. Everyone in Urim visited the temple at some point or another, whether it was to place an offering-statue on an altar, to request a prayer for a sick child, to train as a scribe at the Tablet Houses. “It is the most important place in Urim,” said Ugunu. “We have a saying here, in the South: ‘The strength of my god completes my strength.’ Without a temple, no city can ever be great. No king can lay claim to great deeds, nor any man, nor any woman either.”
“I know another old saying,” said Baranamtarra ahead of us, without turning around. “‘This above all do the gods hate: one who is wealthy and demands more.’” I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came forth. Ugunu began to babble about some particular facet of the temple’s organization, and I tried my hardest to listen.
In the days to come I would spend many mornings with Ugunu, practicing my cuneiform on tiny squares of clay until my stylus was blunted and my hand and eyes ached. I would perfect the rolling of a tiny cylinder seal with which to sign my approval. I would meet and speak at length with Lulakhtanak, the hawkish head of the Boys’ Tablet House, and handsome Ningtuku who led the libation priests, as well as the priests who oversaw the Houses of Coppersmiths and Potters, of Jewelers, Bricklayers and Crofters, of all the other workshops whose artisans made goods for the temple and the city. And I would meet lesser priests and priestesses, messengers and servants of the temple household, so many names I was sure I would never remember them all. The House of the Great Light reminded me of my father’s Great Household, and I wondered what the court of Lugal Kaku was like if this was only his city’s temple. The idea that all these people and all their labors, a complex hierarchy of business and prayer and the business of prayer, was organized around me was a desperately strange one. I kept expecting to see a king step out of the shadows, tall and bearded like my father and brothers, and tell me he was the ruler of the temple. Or else I expected to hear the booming voice of Nanna my husband giving me his orders, revealing me as another servant, following out the tasks handed down to me from a higher authority. But the only revelation I received was that I had much to learn. O, Inanna, how many times did I learn that painful lesson in my first few weeks as En!
I spent much of my time with Dubsang, the High Steward, who was to be my chief functionary when I became fully the En of the temple. In the interim between Galusakar’s death and my ascension he was performing most of the En’s duties, and the strain seemed to be taking its toll on him, for I never knew a man who walked slower nor wheezed as often. He was as stooped and wrinkled as I imagined old Father Enki, and seemed to be forever sponging sweat from his bald head.
Men, even priests, were not permitted inside the giparu, so my first lesson with Dubsang happened outside on the lawn. I waited for him in the shade of an acacia tree. When I saw how even the walking stick he used wobbled and swayed, I decided at once that I would go to his own chamber myself for our future meetings. I got up to take his hand and guide him to the cushions I had laid beneath the tree, and had Zumbu fetch us a pot of beer. It felt like it took ages for him to lower himself down to the seat, receive the pot from Zumbu, slurp noisily through the long straw, clear his throat and finally ask me, “Tell me, Princess, have you had training in the running of a household?”
“I have,” I said. He asked me to repeat myself, which I did, more loudly.
He nodded and went on, “A king’s court may be his Great Household, but a temple of the gods is a greater household still. The House of the Great Light is the heart of Urim. The farmers work the land, but for many leagues the land itself belongs to the temple: every field of barley and emmer, every head of cattle and brace of goats, every shaduf well and irrigation ditch. Each spring at harvest-time, the farmers tithe a portion of what they produce to the temple. This the temple trades for raw materials from other lands: incense and perfume, copper and bronze, wood, gold, lapis. With these goods, the temple artisans of the House of Goldsmiths and the House of Weavers and all the rest fashion yokes for the farmers’ oxen, statuary to glorify the city, strings of beads for beautiful ladies like yourself. And who do you suppose is the one who ensures that each man in this system works according to his pay and is paid according to his work? That each order is recorded without error, and each shipment received untampered, marked by an unbroken clay seal?”
“The En,” I said. I was thankful that I had been allowed to witness some of the mercantile goings-on of my father’s palace. As a girl I had once sat on Rimush’s knee and listened raptly while he negotiated the delivery of a shipment of cedarwood from far Gubla, and Manishtushu often spoke to me of his dealings with wine merchants, a business which, perhaps fittingly, my father had placed him in charge of. But these were in Akkade the affairs of the king, not the High Priest or Priestess. The House of Ever, as Ishtar’s place in Akkade was called, was so much less complicated than a Sumerian temple. I had visited it for the Akitu and your other great festivals, and it was no more than a shrine and a small scribal school, two or three fat priests who wore too much kohl and a handful of scurrying temple maidens who laughed behind their hands. That place had no workshops, no layman tradesmen overseen by abacus-clutching priests. No High Priestess walking among them making marks on a bit of clay. As I listened to Dubsang’s droning voice, I began to wonder why the city of Urim even needed Lugal Kaku. To offer the Enship to the daughter of his king, I thought wryly. I had not seen the city’s governor since my wedding day.
There were many days in which I did nothing but follow the lesser priests around and watch them as closely as I could, mouthing words along with them, placing my feet in the places they had stepped. In this way I learned all the many rituals of Nanna and the lesser gods of Urim. I learned to feed and clothe the statues of the temple, especially the statue of Ningal, the Great Queen, who was Nanna’s wife in Heaven as I was his wife on Earth. When the words had been spoken to open her mouth and eyes and milk had been poured over Her blank, dark face, the porous stone absorbed it as though she were really drinking the offering. The very first time I did this I had to stifle a laugh behind my hand because the mad image had come into my head of the goddess slurping her milk greedily, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand and belching in pleasure. The priests looked at me and I turned my face and pretended to be coughing on dust. I had not yet learned that a little laughter at the gods of Sumer is the only way to worship them. The fear of making a mistake was still too sharp, and there was no one who gave me that fear more than Baranamtarra.
As Mistress of Litanies, Baranamtarra knew all the hymns and sacred songs of Nanna; the urshemmas and balbales, the adabs and ululumamas. It fell to her to teach me what she knew, that I might someday lead the priests and priestesses in song.
On our first lesson together in the giparu, Baranamtarra asked me to sing a song of the gods. I stood dutifully and said, “I confess I do not know any such songs in Sumerian, but I can sing you one to Sin, the Northern Moon god.” I opened my mouth to begin, but Baranamtarra cut me off.
“You will not sing that here,” she snapped. “Nor any other Northern song. Here you will learn to praise the Moon our god in our own language, in Emengir and Emesal.”
“Emesal?” I asked. The word was strange to me. Eme meant language, but sal could mean “fine” or “high-pitched”.
Baranamtarra shut her eyes and began to sing a hymn to Nanna. Her voice was rich and sonorous, much more lovely than I had expected. I found that I could not follow the exact meanings of her words and was reminded at once of Inanna’s menwomen and their queer dialect.
“Only women may use Emesal,” Baranamtarra explained. “It is the language of the sacred priestesses of Sumer. You shall learn it from me.”
“Don’t the menwomen of Inanna, the ones who call themselves galaturra, speak Emesal amongst themselves as well?” I asked. “I heard them on my first day in Urim, when they gave me their blessing.”
Baranamtarra scowled. “That lot. A motley pack of scoundrels if ever there was one. Yes, the gala use it as well. But this is not Unug or Bad-tibira; it is not one of Inanna’s cities. They have no place here.”
“They said that all the South was Inanna’s country,” I said.
Baranamtarra’s eyes narrowed. “You are not one of them. You are En, and what they believe should not concern you. You must praise Nanna above all. You are his chief representative, the first among his earthly wives. Now, we will begin with the balbale, a simple form used in praise ceremonies and typically accompanied by flute and drum. Repeat after me...”
Baranamtarra would snap and correct me instantly at the slightest error. Sometimes her hands clenched and I was sure she wanted to hit me but dared not. I always felt a heavy knot of dread in my stomach each time I was to see her, and left her presence relieved.
There was a song that gave me a damnable amount of trouble that she made me repeat over and over again for weeks, until I was ready to retch from the sound of the first words. It described in detail the herds of cattle held in the grazelands of the Moon. “Again,” she would shrill. “Again!”
I closed my eyes tightly and pressed my fingers into my temples to quell my head’s throbbing. “His great cattle pens are four in number. The cows are driven together in herds for him. His various types of cow number…”
“How many?” asked Baranamtarra sharply. “You must remember. How many?”
“Thirty…” I panicked, wracking my brain for the precise number. “Thirty-nine thousand and six hundred,” I said at last with a burst of relief. “His fattened calves are one hundred and eight thousand. His young bulls number one hundred and twenty-six thousand. His sparkling-eyed heifers number fifty-thousand five hundred. His white cattle are--”
“Fifty-thousand four hundred,” said Baranamtarra. “His sparkling-eyed heifers number fifty-thousand four hundred. Start again, at the beginning.”
Meekly I tried to protest, but she gave me a sharp look and said, “Again.”
I took a deep breath and dug my nails into my palms. “Why must I remember the precise number of cattle in the fields in a song written hundreds of years ago,” I said, despairing, “When I must also learn from Dubsang and his scribes how many head of cattle there are this year in the actual fields owned by the temple?”
“This song is older than the room in which we sit,” said Baranamtarra sharply. “You must learn it because it is part of the Litany of Nanna. Again.”
“Aren’t there any newer songs?” I grumbled.
At this, Baramatarra surprised me by smiling, though it was a smile without warmth or affection, as thin and bitter as a melon rind. It was the smile one gives to a child who has proved themselves touchingly naive. She answered my question with one of her own. “Who writes the songs of Nanna?”
“People from a long time ago, or else the gods themselves,” I said bitterly. “You’ve said as much.”
Baranamtarra stood up straight. “The Ens,” she said. “The former Ens. Every word we study in this room was written by an En such as you will be. If you want there to be new songs praising Nanna in new words, if you want to extend and embroider the great Litany of the temple, by all means! But first you must learn all the songs that came before. Otherwise your own songs will have neither power nor music.” I stared at her for a moment, processing this new information. I imagined an old Sumerian woman in a flounced robe counting cows, and it was not until Baranamtarra startled me by slapping fiercely against the wall with her hand and shouting “Again!” that I started over once more.
The words of the prayer-songs of my predecessors flowed on, endless and babbling like the waters of the Slow River, which I now called the Buranuna. In Nanna’s temple there were special prayers for each phase of the moon; for Nanna when the moon became a crescent, for Ningal when it was full, for both when it was new. And every evening there was a moonrise prayer accompanied by sacrifice. As En, I must lead both. Baranamtarra gave me exactly one week to learn these ceremonies through watching the junior priests.
Oh, how well I remember that terrible eighth night! I think I shall never forget how my heart pounded and how I glanced back and forth from the stone altar-slab stained with animal’s blood to the naked libation-priest, from the priestesses in their flounced robes to Baranamtarra like a rough-hewn chunk of diorite, her face blunted into more cruel of a shape than usual in the dim half-light of the temple’s inner sanctum. How the little goat they had brought was so white he shone like a piece of Nanna himself fallen down to earth, how his eyes were the color of his blood I would spill, how he bleated in fear when he smelled the air, rank with the sacrifices come before him.
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I had watched a week’s worth of pigs and goats die under Baranamtarra’s and Ugunu’s practiced hands. I had watched the underpriests skin and butcher these animals, donated by the farmers of Urim. I had seen their guts taken to the Reader of Signs for extispicy, I had seen their bodies turn on a spit and smelled and eaten their roasted flesh. Yet in spite of all I had seen, I stumbled over the words of the prayer that night. When I did, Ugunu supplied the words for me in a whisper that the dark chamber of the temple amplified into a rush of wind. My hand shook as I gripped the long knife, slippery in my sweaty palms. I felt more sweat trickling down from under my arms and breasts as the priests lifted the goat onto the slab and held it down by the legs, as the priestesses took up a chorus and shook the rattles they carried.
I had never killed anything before. In Akkade, the only meat I saw was spiced, braised and plated. Yet I knew I had to do this, and what was more, as the rattles grew more frenzied, I knew that I must look at it. Oh, Inanna, I tell you, after all the horrors I have seen in this world I never wanted to close my eyes more than that very night, that night I killed a goat for the first time! It seems so foolish to think of it now, when I have slaughtered goats beyond counting in the name of the gods, and pigs, sheep and cattle besides, when I have wiped the grease of the evening’s sacrifice from my lips more times than I can count. But I was terrified that night. Terrified not of the god I served and married, but of his servants. I did not want them to see their En for a weeping girl. I am the daughter of a conqueror and the sister of princes, I thought as I placed one hand under the bleating goat’s chin and lifted it, as I lay the bare blade across its tender throat. My father did this to men, to kings. Surely I can do it to a white goat? And when I gritted my teeth and slashed with the blade I thought, how many men has my father killed? My brothers are joining him in his campaigns to the West--have they killed men?
The goat did not die a clean death that night. I did not cut it deep enough, so that instead of falling flat against the slab and dying it screamed hideously and its hot blood splashed over my gown. I lost hold of it, stumbling backwards and nearly falling, ashamed and horrified all at once. One of the priests who was holding the animal down came to my aid and the goat’s alike, bending back its neck with one swift crack. Its legs kicked out at me a final time before it went limp, dousing both me and the priests in a fresh rain of blood, and I stepped so far back I bumped into the naked libation priest. In my dazed state I wondered why he was not the one who performed the sacrifice, when surely it would make more sense to have someone who did not wear robes? My own were bloody, heavy with stench and wetness, and the blood was black in the dim light of the priests’ lanterns and of Nanna streaming down through the skylight in the temple ceiling. Was he proud of his little wife, of her little miseries? I stood there drenched like Ningal’s milk-sopping statue, unable to move, unaware of whether the priests were looking at me. I stared numbly at my soiled robes and my nostrils curled as I remembered the night in Akkade, two or a thousand years before, when I awoke warm and sticky and covered in blood, black night-blood just like the goat’s. Then I had thought that I was dying, that in spite of my amulets a curse had been laid on me and Lamashtu had pulled out my guts with her teeth and I was dying. I summoned my nurses with screams and wailing, and when they had lit their lamps and come running they scolded me for making a mess, and helped me bathe and showed me how to use a rag to stop myself up each month when the blood came. But now I would be doused in blood each night, I would slink back to the giparu with my cheeks burning not only from shame but from the light of the Moon and the stares of his priests and priestesses. Their ministrations had made me so conscious of them, of the endless opportunities for mistakes, that I had begun to forget why I was really there, and whose servant I actually was.
I was so numb from shock that I could not end the prayer, so Ugunu said the final words, lifting her hands to the sky, and the male priests began the task of butchering the dead goat. I backed away, never taking my eyes off the altar and the scene before me. My hands crept across the wall behind me and found the corridor that led outside the temple. I turned and ran. Yes, Inanna, like the foolish girl I was I bolted from the temple of my husband, from all of them. And I heard someone running after me.
I had hoped that perhaps I could make it back to the giparu and change my clothes with some semblance of dignity before anyone saw me again. But I had only made it just outside the temple when a sharp voice called “Priestess!” and I froze in terror. I knew that voice well from days of hearing it drone the litanies of the Moon. It was Baranamtarra.
I turned and saw her striding towards me purposefully, the flounces of her robe shaking with every step. Her face was hard to see in the dark, but her intent was clear. She walked right up to me, so close I could feel her breath, sickly-sweet from chewing fennel seeds. Her every word quivered with loathing as she said, “You will do better tomorrow night. Nanna will not suffer such an insult a second time. Get back to the giparu and change. And another thing. You will never run in the House of the Great Light again. Never.” Then she slapped me, hard, across the mouth.
I raised my hand to my stinging cheek, too shocked to speak. I slunk away from Baranamtarra, and could not even meet her eyes. In that one instant, stained with blood and embarrassment, I felt smaller than I had ever felt, smaller even than when the people of Urim remarked that I was no giantess, no goddess. I realized then the truth of my situation. It came to me in waves of pain that broke against me in time to the throbbing of my cheek.
I was nothing. I was a spoiled and privileged girl who had never done anything for herself, who had been treated like the rarest of treasures, simply because of who her father claimed to be and what he might do to anyone who said otherwise. I could eat goat prepared by servants off golden platters but could not kill one without making a disgraceful mess. I was not in Akkade anymore. This was Shumeru, the land of the South, the oldest of all the realms of men, where Ninlil, An, Enki and Nin Khursang breathed life into their little clay mannikins and set them down to raise the first cities from the muck and reeds. Even Lugal Kaku, fat and foolish though he was, had claim to a lineage that stretched back to before the Great Flood, to gargantuan god-kings whose reigns lasted tens of thousands of years. My father’s father was a gardener. The paint was still wet on the eaves of Sharru-kin’s palace, the clay barely dry on the tablets that proclaimed him True King, Only King, King of the World. I thought of the fox in the old story that my brother and I had sung aboard the ship to Urim, the foolish and arrogant fox who claims to cause the tides with his little stream of urine. Could it be that the grand, united Empire into which I was born was no more than a drop of piss in a roaring river, and my father was the fox, a braggart claiming to rule a land that was too old and too broken to ever be whole?
I am a princess, and I have always felt like a princess. I have never known how not to feel like a princess, not truly, not even when I had lost it all, not even now, when I feel older than the mud bricks of Eridu and twice as weather-beaten. And that night, I still felt like a princess--but I did begin to wonder, for the first time in my life, how much my title was really worth. So I scurried away from Baranamtarra like a scullery-maid, like a slave-girl, and I went back to the giparu and ran my hands over my blood-sticky face as if to remind myself it was still there.
Igiru was waiting for me in the dark of my bedchamber laying out my clothes for the next morning. “Mistress, what has happened to you?” she asked in alarm. I mumbled something about the sacrifice, that it was the goat’s blood and not my own, and she furrowed her brow in concern and laid her hand tenderly on my cheek and began to help me out of my soiled clothes. She called to Elamitu and Zumbu in the next room and asked them to draw a bath for the little princess. I had liked it when she called me that on the boat to Urim, but I did not like it now.
When my bath was done I put on the clean robe Igiru had been laying out for the next morning. Then I thanked the three women and said I would lie down for a time, and they left the room, Igiru without losing the worried expression on her face. When they were gone I placed my hands over my eyes and lay there for I know not how long.
Eventually I realized how hungry I was, and that the goat must have been prepared for dinner by now, along with all the other offerings for the gods of the lesser shrines--not just other animals but plates of vegetables and cheese, the nightly feast of the temple priests, skimmed off the top of the farmers’ tithe. I was so embarrassed to see Baranamtarra or Ugunu or anyone that I could barely imagine returning for dinner, but the gnawing in my stomach soon won over my pride.
As I crept down the hill from the giparu with only a small oil lamp to guide me, picking my way slowly through the dark, I heard voices. One of them, I realized with a jolt of terror, was Baranamtarra. I dove behind a cluster of bushes and covered the tiny flame of my lamp with my hand, hoping she would pass by, but the two speakers did not seem to be moving anywhere.
“I cannot do it!” Baranamtarra was saying, and there was no mistaking her strident tones. “The girl will drive me to the Palace of Dust!”
“Quiet, fool,” said another voice. I was sure it was Ugunu. “The hour is late and you are loud enough to wake the dead.”
“Would that I could,” said Baranamtarra. Her voice sank lower. “To lose our Lady Great Crescent was sorrow enough, but to have her replaced with this...this upstart, that is too much to bear. This woman has not been chosen by the gods but by our fat and too-friendly Lugal, for his own glorification. When En Galusakar, may the gods grant her rest, was taken sick, no prayers were offered to Nanna to aid us in the selection process, no goat was slaughtered for the omens spelled out in its guts. The priests, as bald as the vultures they are, sent word straightaway to Lugal Kaku, which he passed along to his beloved True King. For the most holy office in the most southerly of cities, the True King has sent us a Northerner. A curly-haired mountain girl born of a lowborn butcher and his whore! We may as well have given the Enship to a jenny-ass.”
I could hear Ugunu’s sharp intake of breath. “You should speak more carefully of our king. You never know who might be listening. Sharru-kin would have you flayed along the banks of the Buranuna if he heard you speaking so.”
Baranamtarra was livid. “I don’t care what Sharru-kin would do if he heard me. He is not here, nor even his drunk of a son, only his wretched daughter. The wrath of Nanna will come down on the city of Urim for this, mark my words. Nanna will not suffer so unfit a wife, just as I will not suffer to kiss the robe of a foreign En. It is an insult to the god we serve.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” Ugunu’s voice rose, and it shook me. I had never heard her speak so forcefully. “Do you think I want this girl to lead us? What I want doesn’t matter, and neither does what you want. Think what En Galusakar would do if she were here, sister. She was a compassionate woman, with an open heart. She would not blame this girl for her father’s blasphemy. She would have found it in her to love her.”
There was a pause, and I could imagine Baranamtarra shaking her head in sorrow, her shoulders quaking with rage. Then I heard her voice again, saying, “She loved the gods too.”
“So do we all,” said Ugunu gently.
Baranamtarra’s words were a hiss, a puff of dry air. “Then why must we serve the whims of kings?” After that, there was silence.
A week before, perhaps even a night before, I would have wept yet again. But I had done so much weeping since I left Akkade I was desperately sick of it. There comes a time when you try to cry and realize you don’t have any more tears. There comes a time when the cruellest blow strikes, when the coldest blade is drawn against you, and you simply say “I must change something.”
But I did not know what to do. To whom could I turn in my distress? Manishtushu was gone back to Akkade to lurk in Rimush’s shadow. My slaves would listen, but what advice could they give me? And the priests and priestesses of the House of the Great Light, I was quick to realize, were not my friends. So who, then, remained to me? Who would be my friend in my hour of need? Of course you know the answer, my Lady. You better than anyone.
I waited until I was sure the two senior priestesses were gone. Then I rose and uncovered my little lamp-flame, ignoring the pain in my stomach for a moment, and walked back to the temple of Nanna I had so recently fled, my footfalls sounding against the tiles of the pathway. It felt peculiar to walk alone. Even as a girl in Akkade there was someone with me almost always: a nursemaid, a gaggle of ladies, a servant, at least one brother. Should I have found some night guard to escort me? Then I remembered that I was En. If they saw me walking with an escort in the dead of night, what would that say to Baranamtarra and Ugunu? What would they think of an En who was afraid to walk freely in her own temple? They would think her a scared foreign girl and not the wife of a god, if they did not think that already, if the priests and priestesses were not already finishing their dinner and laughing about how I had embarrassed myself and run. I realized this, and I walked alone through the great doors and down the corridor, past the basin of holy water, past the shrines of lesser gods and the statue of Ningal that I fed with milk, back to the inner sanctum of the moon.
The air inside was still heady with incense and the blood of the goat I had killed at moonrise. I had never been here alone before. And yet, I was not alone, not really ever--the place before the altarpiece was crowded with little clay offering figures with their round, staring eyes, proxies pouring out endless prayers for the men and women who had placed them there during the day. I stepped past them gently, lifting the hem of my robe so as not to disturb them and feeling like a giant among lesser men, as tall as Gilgamesh and Enkidu. I approached the high altar, the dark stone stained darker in places, and placed my lamp on it. I looked up into the great skylight and bathed my face in Nanna’s streaming light. And I began to speak.
It was not a curse this time, but a prayer. I wondered if there was much difference between a prayer and a curse after all. (It was not the last time in my long life that I would wonder this, my Lady, as you who have heard all my songs can attest.)
“God of the Moon,” I said, “My only wish is--” What? To serve you well? To be a good En? “To be happy here,” I said at last. “Help me to be En. Help me to make the people of Urim love me. Help me to love them. Help me to survive here, far from home.” High above, my husband shone in the sky. He seemed not to have heard me.
“Jewel of Heaven,” I called to him. “Bringer of Justice. Illuminator.” I translated these names from Akkadian to Sumerian. I had heard them in prayers to Sin, and Nanna was not Sin. Was He not, though? Both shone equally bright. I was a new princess in a new land; would he listen more closely if I gave him new titles? I closed my eyes tightly and let the words flow from me. “Lord of the Rushes and the Stars,” I called him. “Cold and Shining Lantern, Puller of the Tides, Watcher Over North and South, Pride of Urim, Pride of Akkade, listen to me, protect me, help me! If I must be En, then let me be En. Let me be a better En than any before me or after me. Do this for me and I will sacrifice to you. I will glorify you with my words and my deeds, with every step I walk and breath I take. Take me in your hands, shape me into your true servant. Your greatest servant that has ever lived.” I let my words pour into the night sky like bats. I did not know where they were coming from, yet still I prayed. I prayed with hands lifted to the skies, until my words had all flown into the dark and I was chanting Nanna, Nanna, Nanna. If he could not help me, his newest and youngest bride, what power did he have? My god’s strength completes my strength.
I fell to my knees at last, exhausted. The temple seemed to have swallowed all my prayers, though whether they were swallowed by the god’s ears or by his unfathomable gullet I could not say. My lamp guttered and then went out, and it was truly dark then, except for the wan half-light of the moon, that light that can be seen but never felt. The sun’s light is all passion, both life and death. It brings fields of grain and blossoms and fruit, but it makes the earth dry and cracked, it kills men who become lost in the desert or labor too long without water, burns and shrivels their flesh. The moon’s light brings neither life nor death. It only guides, gentle as a mother’s hand, allows us to see our way safely in the night. Utu, the Sun, is the one who judges, but his father the moon passes no judgment. He only looks down on us and watches.
As he watched me, I remembered the harsh words of Baranamtarra. How would I deal with her, this woman who held power over me, who tormented me, who called me an unfit wife for the god? Who called my father a lowborn butcher and my mother a whore?
What would my father do, in this situation? My father, who took his rival’s widow to wife and named her His Plunder. My father, who put down a rebellion in the city of Kazallu so violently that it was said that after Sharru-kin’s army passed through there, no bird could find a place above the ground to perch. Ugunu had spoken of flaying along the Slow River, and after all, I was the En. As I could move alone, so I could act alone. For a moment my heart pounded as I realized just what I was capable of. There were at least a handful of guards here whose loyalty I could count on. Some were so devout they bowed almost to the floor when I scurried past them. They might vanquish my enemy for me in the name of the moon, and I would never need to force a mangled curse past my lips again.
What would my mother do? She would bow and bend and make herself lovely, that I did not doubt, but she would say nothing. She would not protest against bad treatment, she would not protest against hard work, and she would live out her Enship as silent and cold as Nanna. But I did not want to become like my mother. There was a heat in my breast that I did not want cooled by the moon’s silver beams.
And my brothers--well, my brothers would be Sharru-kin all over again. They did not suffer being mocked. It was only a year or two ago that a young man of the Great Household had spread an ugly rumor. Naqu had it from one of my father’s concubines that the young Crown Prince had summoned her to his bedchamber, only to send her away in disgrace after spending himself the moment she placed a hand on him. Whether this was true or not scarcely matters. When Rimush managed to trace the story to its source, he beat Naqu so savagely that the young man walked with a limp ever after, and the concubine in question I never saw again. Rimush was of course a prince, and the eldest prince besides, almost as far beyond reproach as one could get, but I was sure even if he were in my present position he would find some way of getting even with Baranamtarra, with Ugunu, with the whole lot of them.
As the moonlight worked its own way through the ceiling of the temple shrine, I thought to myself that there must be another way. If the way of silence and the way of violence were not mine, then what was? How would I, Kheduana, answer cruelty? Perhaps it was mere weakness or fatigue, but I knew that I had had enough of cruelty, and I would not answer it with more. Neither, however, would I bow. That has never seemed to me fitting for a princess, or a queen, for anyone. I looked up at the moon and gritted my teeth, knowing what I would do. And I tell you, Inanna, though I had not yet found your truth, though I had not yet found even my own, though I wore no aga and was little more than a foreign usurper in the eyes of they who would be my servants, I tell you that my Enship began the day I followed the light of the moon and decided which way I would go.
The next night I killed the goat more quickly, though I still splashed some blood on myself and still my stomach heaved when I smelled it. But I did not run. I said the final words of the prayer, and when all was done I walked, as slowly as possible, and held my head high and smiled at Ugunu, who smiled back, and Baranamtarra, who did not.
At dinner I did not eat, much as it pained me not to. I put the food I was given into my little basket and took it back to the giparu instead. I did not even eat it the next morning, when, ravenous, I devoured my first little roll in two bites. I had a lesson in litanies with Baranamtarra, and I threw myself into it, rattling off the praise of the moon god as passionately as I ever had. And when we stopped for lunch, I called Baranamtarra’s name.
“Yes,” she said. Only the one word, yet I could tell even that pained her.
“Begging your pardon, I was wondering if you might do something for me.”
“Speak,” she said.
I gestured to the basket I carried. “I have some bread, a pot of clarified butter, and a dish of olives that I have saved from my dinner last night. It is not much, but I wish to lay it as an offering at the grave of En Galusakar. Would you show me the place where she is buried?”
The look on her face was almost worth the pain in my stomach. She could not have been more shocked if I had asked her to show me the grave of Dumuzid himself. “I...I know the place well,” she said. “She is interred beneath the giparu, like all of the former Ens.”
Beneath the giparu? I tried not to show my astonishment. “Thank you,” I said. “Would you be so good as to take me there now?”
Baranamtarra adjusted her robes and said stiffly, “I will. But not now. Wait until nightfall. It is forbidden for daylight to enter the place of the Wives of the Moon.”
The rest of the day continued as normally, in lessons, work, and ritual. But I did not eat dinner that night either, adding my share to the basket. When I returned to the giparu after the sunset prayer, I stood outside to wait for her, holding tightly to my basket of food, determined not to give in to the gnawing pain in my stomach.
She came to me, a shuffling dark presence bearing a tiny light before her, just as she had said she would. She said nothing, but took me by the hand and led me inside the giparu. To my great surprise, we walked into my own bedchamber. Baranamtarra set down her lantern and said “Help me with this.” I realized she was gesturing to the bed.
Together, we pushed the bed to the far side of the room. I almost cried out in surprise to see, in the dim light of the oil-lamp, a dark passageway yawning unknowably down into the floor. Baranamtarra took up her lamp and stepped confidently into the pit, and I realized that there were steps cut into the earth. She walked down a few more steps, then turned and bid me follow her, which I did with some trepidation. I wondered how impossibly old this stair was, how vast the chamber beneath would be--and, of course, how long I might have gone without knowing it was underneath my bed. Would the good priests of the Temple of the Moon have waited until I was dying myself before telling me where the graveyard of the Ens was?
As we walked down the steps and into the earth, the dark grew deeper and thicker in spite of the bobbing lantern, the air stale and cool. Before long there was no sign of the bedchamber behind us, so I gripped my basket and kept my eye on Baranamtarra and her lantern, lighting the way before me. “Would you tell me of her, En Galusakar who came before me?” I asked. “What was she like?”
Baranamtarra did not speak for a moment. Then she said, “She was kind, and very wise. She was old enough to be my mother, yet we often ate together in the Gardens of the Moon, and some nights we would sit awake for hours talking. Her wits were sharp almost until the end of her days. The people loved her, as well. On the feast-days of the moon she would ride through the streets of Urim in a litter, smiling at everyone she passed, and the people would call her name and throw garlands of flowers into her lap. This is the place.” She stopped so abrubtly that I almost bumped into her. I could tell that the ceiling above us was higher than in the passageway, but other than that I could discern nothing about the room. The lantern illuminated only Baranamtarra’s hands and face. Beyond that was emptiness, a perfect and palpable darkness that seemed to stretch on in every direction, so thick I could feel it on me like a cloying sheet of fabric. We might as easily have been at the bottom of the sea, or between two stars, so perfect and utter was the black that surrounded us. Where is Nanna? I thought desperately. The light of the Moon had led me to this place, but it was not here. I gripped the basket tighter and steeled myself. I was the daughter of the King of the World and wife of a god besides. I would not shirk from the darkness underneath my own bed.
Baranamtarra knelt and placed the lantern on the ground. In the tiny ring of guttering light it produced, I could see a few little grave markers nearby, stones inscribed in tiny bird’s-foot markings.
“This one is En Galusakar,” said Baranamtarra, gesturing to the nearest. I wondered how she could tell, and how she seemed so confident in this place. I looked on the marker she had indicated with wonder. Here she was, my predecessor, somehow carrying more weight than all the others because, alone of the uncounted Ens before her, I knew her name. I guessed that she had been buried while I was floating downriver towards my new home. And it was my last home, as it had been hers. Someday I would be in the dark of this chamber beside her, and Urim would claim my bones as it had claimed my life.
“It seems strange to be so far from the light of the moon,” I said, approaching En Galusakar’s grave.
“Since before there was writing to mark their graves, the Ens have always been buried here,” said Baranamtarra. “One day we will run out of room, and then, perhaps, the Ens shall be laid to rest in another place, but there is still space for many graves here. You will join them, in time.”
How many are here? I wondered. Grateful that she could not see my face, I knelt before the grave of En Galusakar. I placed the contents of my basket beside the marker, pouring out the little clay pot of melted iab onto the earth, and whispered a prayer of rest, of thirst quenched and hunger satisfied. I noticed with some surprise that Baranamtarra got to her knees and joined me, though her prayer was so soft I could not hear the words.
“May the gods grant that I can someday be as good of an En as she,” I said, rising to my feet.
Baranamtarra picked up her lantern and stood up. “You were not chosen by the gods,” she said sharply. Her words rang in the cold stillness of the chamber.
“No,” I said. “But I will be the En. That is something neither of us can change.”
Baranamtarra nodded slowly, then took my hand and turned away towards the foot of the stairs. She began to ascend them, more slowly this time, and did not let go my hand as she walked. In spite of the darkness that obscured us both, I felt as though she was seeing me for the first time.
I did not eat dinner the next night either. I made sure Baranamtarra saw me place the food into my basket, and that night I pushed aside the bed with help from Zumbu and Igiru and walked down the steps alone, holding my own lantern, though it took me several passes of my light before I found the right grave marker, and I knew it only because the last offering I had left was still there. The next night, I noticed at dinner that a much larger helping of food was given me than before, enough that I could go to bed full and still have some left over to bring to my predecessor in what became a nightly ritual. And after a time I started to be brought three rolls in the morning instead of one. Baranamtarra never had many words for me, but she never struck me again after that day.