On the day I first put on the aga, we experienced a rare miracle: it rained.

Ugunu clapped her hands and cried that it was a sign from the gods. Baranamtarra nodded her head in stiff approval. I inhaled the fresh scent of water and wind and felt lighter than I had in a long, long time. The rain only lasted a few minutes, and in only a few minutes more the puddles it made on the tiles and cobblestones had vanished in the sunlight, but that smell lingered, clinging to me like the words of a hymn or the presence of a god.

The priests and priestesses of the temple came before me one by one to show their deference to my Enship, and each new bow I met with a stiff nod of my own. I was grateful to have finally transitioned from zirru to En, to have mastered the tongue-twisting poems of Baranamtarra, to have learned from Dubsang how many shekels a barrel of azaggur-fish was worth and from Ugunu every nicety of writing, yet I was not happy, not altogether. In my flounced robe and heavy earrings and the new weight of my rolled cloth headdress, yet unfamiliar, I felt in that moment as though my life’s story had been written for me. I had begged Nanna to make me his En, and En I would be. I would serve the Temple and the Moon. I would press my name and my approval into clay using the cylinder seal that now hung from a cord around my neck. I would watch young girls grow old and old women die around me, and I would grow old as well. I would bear neither sons nor daughters nor know the touch of any earthly husband. Some say the moon, with his pitted and pockmarked face, is a stone; I too would be stone, a remote monolith in a corner of my father’s empire, a pillar untouched by passion or emotion. I had not cried in many months.

I watched the women of the temple uncertainly. Among the priestesses now under my authority were girls of all sorts; some were highborn, the cousins or nieces of Lugal Kaku, while others were the daughters of herdsmen, potters and fishermen. There were jolly ones who grinned when they greeted me, and nervous ones who flitted around me like birds, smoothing the fringes of their robes. There were stout matrons and skinny old crones and maidens no older than me, and some of the ones still in training were younger still. But these were not the young ladies of my father’s court. These were Black-Headed girls, with blunted nails and ungainly frog-cry names like Gukkalibla and Sangkakbadbad. They moved with a rolling, wide-stepping gait from years of wading in the marshes and spoke of helping their fathers spear crocodiles as if describing a walk through the Gardens of the Moon. As we dined on simple temple fare their mouths would water as they talked of grilled snake and frog’s legs and turtle soup. I had never been one of them, and now that I was no longer a zirru but the En, the one and only En, I never would. Alone I stood and alone I walked out from the temple sanctum to see the crowds that had gathered around the House of the Great Light for the occasion.

Many of the people of Urim who assembled to see me that day, and I knew that some had been waiting hours to see me. They sat hunched together in groups, gossiping around dwindling cookfires and bouncing children on their knees, but when the drums of the priests announced that I was emerging, every person leapt to their feet for a glimpse of me. I waved to them and smiled as graciously as I ever had, and wondered if I still looked small to them. If I always would.

I realized that I was standing in the very place Lugal Kaku had stood when he gave me his welcome a year before, and that the Great Man of Urim was not here. Certainly if he had been he would have made his presence known. To his credit, just days before I had received a messenger from him enquiring after my health. I had smiled and said that I had learned much and looked forward to fully assuming my duties. I did not trust the man, and especially when he wasn’t in the room with me. If my father had sold me South, Lugal Kaku had bought me, and I did not even know my own price.

The crowd moved towards me. I watched them warily, the young, the old, men and women, and remembered my first glimpse of the people of Urim long ago. There were even nobles here beneath canopies held by slaves, women with jeweled leaves and flowers rising from their heads, men in helms sporting ears and hair rendered lovingly in gold.

“A blessing, Enship!” an old man at the head of the crowd wheezed. I met his awestruck gaze and grasped the hand he was reaching out to me. “May all the blessings of Nanna the moon be with you,” I told him.

“Please, bless me, Enship!” said another man, whose eye was covered by a bloody bandage. A woman with a swollen belly and a little boy beside her with a scrap of cloth about his waist were quick to follow, with the woman asking that a prayer be said for her unborn child. Then there was a woman with sores on her face and a man with his arm around his young wife and a rich man whose slaves were pushing others out of the way so that he could stand at the head of the crowd.

“May all the blessings of Nanna be with you,” I said, again, and again, and again.

They held out their hands towards me, a forest of outstretched brown arms, a wall of desperate flesh, clutching, groping. I clasped them, one after another, and muttered “The blessings of the moon.” I gave them every blessing they asked for, though in truth I did not know whose blessings I was giving, my own or Nanna’s. I felt no more holy than I had the day before. All I felt was tired and thirsty and hungry, but I kept on grasping hands until I felt a hand myself, a gentle one on my shoulder. It was Ugunu.

“Come inside and eat with us, Enship,” she said. “You look exhausted. It would not do for you to tire yourself so on your very first day as En.”

“But there are so many more,” I said. “I am not done.”

“You will never be done,” said Ugunu gravely. She beckoned me to follow her back inside the temple, and it was only with reluctance that I tore myself away from the cries of “Bless me! Bless me!”

It was a special occasion, and so we ate more richly than usual: trays of hot bread and roasted meat and boiled duck’s eggs, pots of beer, wine, iab-butter and olive oil, firm round cheeses flavored with leeks and mustard seeds. The Buranuna had been kind to the temple’s fishermen, and there were besides endless varieties of fish, from the striped ab to the long, slippery gubi, not roasted on a spit over the flame as my father’s people did in the North, but propped on sticks around the fire’s edge. I reflected that even in something so simple as the proper way to cook a fish the people of North and South differed in how they made use of the rivers’ bounty. But our hunger was of course the same, and I even found myself sampling a bit of watersnake.

After I dined with the priests of the temple I got up to leave, and was not surprised when no one followed me. I knew I must get used to walking alone, so it was alone that I left the feast and went to the Gardens of the Moon. I do not know exactly what I hoped to find there. Perhaps it was a memory of the gardens of my youth, the gardens of Akkade, that led my feet in that direction, even though the temple’s gardens were modest in comparison with those of my father’s palace, even though the air carried nothing for me, neither the rich spices and perfumes of the Great Household of Sharru-kin nor the drifting tones of a young boy calling “Khedu, Khedu…” If only the scent of rain had stayed just a little longer. That, too, was gone by now, replaced by the swollen smell of vegetation in the sun.

I walked along a tiled pathway, in the shade of acacias and fruit trees. There were no fountains here as in the gardens of my youth, but this place did have its own unique charms: stone memorial stelae erected by the Ens of the past, and statues besides. I stopped to regard a bronze statue of a broad-shouldered man with a fiercely pointed beard. He held a sword stiffly in one hand and his inlaid eyes were eerily lifelike, beneath a brow that was a carven slash in the metal of his face. It was a face I knew. I realized with a start that it was meant to be my brother.

I could have almost laughed. This was the statue Lugal Kaku must have seen when he mistook Manishtushu for Rimush upon his arrival! I looked at the statue and thought of Rimush; wondered how he was faring, whether I would receive a message from him soon, whether I would ever see him again. Then I pretended it was Manishtushu instead, and thought of him, my sweet, angry brother, shepherding me to my heavenly bridegroom. I sat down next to the statue and leaned against its solid, sun-warmed leg and felt alone, exquisitely and extraordinarily alone.

Once again, I heard them before I saw them. They were not playing music this time, but they were talking as they strode through the gardens, their words as sharp and quick as ever, punctuated by peals of laughter. When I saw them at last in their bright motley, fanning themselves with palm leaves and resting their hands on each other’s shoulders, I hailed the galaturra in their own dialect, which now at last I understood.

They shrilled their admiration. “How much you have learned since you came down from the bridal palanquin!” cried a tall one, and I recognized her as the same one who had spoken so boldly on the day of my wedding. “Every blessing and good fortune to Your Holiness, Mighty En.”

“Thank you,” I said. I remembered the last time they had blessed me, and how strange it seemed that it was now I who was giving blessings to the clamoring people of Urim. “Will you sit beside me?” I gestured to an empty place on the other side of the statue. The tall manwoman smoothed her skirts and settled next to me gingerly. Several of her sisters flopped down beside her with considerably less propriety.

“And who is this gentleman?” one of them asked, gesturing at the statue.

“My brother, the Crown Prince,” I said.

“The very same who led you through our city streets the day we gave you your blessing?” asked another of the menwomen.

“No,” I said, surprised they had even remembered. “They are twins, my elder brothers, alike in every way.”

The tall galaturra opened her mouth to say something, but another, who appeared to be the eldest of them, held up her hand to silence her. “Have mercy, have mercy, he is her brother. She does not want to hear about it!”

They laughed then, and to my surprise, I laughed with them. Then I asked their names.

“My name is Kankala, Perfume,” said one in yellow, “Because I am twice as sweet and three times as costly.”

“Inanna-shudug, the Touch of Inanna,” said another. “Because that’s what I deliver.”

“Eresh-gunu,” said the eldest one. “Because I am Painted Like a Queen.”

“And I am called Garashang, Leek,” said the tall one beside me, “Because I’m as tall and slender as a young leek stalk.”

“I thought we called you that because you grew up in the muck,” said the one called Kankala.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The others chuckled. Garashang gave Kankala a patronizing smile. “Forgive me, sister,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I forgot for a moment that you sucked milk from Nin Khursang’s own teat in the House of the Lofty Peak.” Garashang turned to me. “They mock me because I grew up deep in the marshes, but I am not ashamed to say that I was born in a woven reed hut. That my cradle was a coracle, and the waters of the Buranuna rocked me. I did not feel dry land beneath my feet until I came to Urim to be among my sisters.” She smiled, remembering. “I must have been your own age, Little En, perhaps even younger.”

“How did you come to join the galaturra?” I asked. “I must confess I know little of your ways.”

“Don’t you have our kind in the North?” asked Kankala.

“If you mean in the temples of Ishtar, then yes,” I said. “In fact, they figure prominently in one of her legends.”

This seemed to fascinate them. “Which one?” asked Garashang.

“The story of Her Descent to the Netherworld,” I said. They looked at one another as if sharing some secret between them that I was not privileged to know. Inanna-shudug reached forward and patted me on the wrist with a hand heavy with jewelry. “Very well. I am interested to hear how your Northern Ishtar differs from our Inanna. Do you know the story well?”

“Akkade where I was born is one of Ishtar’s cities,” I said. “I was raised on her stories. That one is very serious.” And they threw back their painted heads, Inanna, and they laughed at me! Of course now as I remember it I want to laugh along with them, as I had before. But, young and foolish as I was that day in the Gardens of the Moon, I could only gape and feel embarrassed.

“Inanna is made to be a fool in that tale,” said Eresh-gunu. “She goes down seeking to steal power from her sister, the Queen of the Underworld. But her sister tricks her into removing all her clothes, knowing they are the source of her power, by telling her it is a requirement that all those who enter the Palace of Dust do so nude. And then she hangs her from a hook like a slab of meat.”

“But when Ishtar died and went to the Netherworld, no life could flourish on earth,” I said. “Asushunamir, who was the first manwoman, a creature neither male nor female, was sent to bring the Water of Life to revive her. When he did, Ishtar’s sister, the Queen of the Underworld, She Whose Name May Not Be Spoken, put a curse on Asushunamir and all his kind. ‘The food of the gutter shall be thy food, and the sewers of the city shall be thy drink. The threshold shall be thy habitation, and the besotted and the thirsty shall smite thy cheek.’”

“I don’t know any Asu-so-and-so,” said Kankala dismissively. “And all that sounds a bit too grim. Besides, it was two beings neither male nor female sent to give Inanna the Water of Life. A galaturra, like us, and a kurngarra, those are more like tumblers, dancers. They swallow fire and swords, and I mean real swords, dear, not the other kind. You will find both of us in Inanna’s temples. Father Enki made us from the dirt beneath his fingernails, and we went down to the Palace of Dust and listened to the woes of the Queen of the Dead, and soothed them. And we weren’t punished for it. We were blessed. We are the most sacred and wonderful creatures in all the worlds, because Inanna owes us her life, and we owe ours to her. Life can’t survive without Inanna, and no matter what trouble the old bitch gets herself into, we’re always there to pull her back to safety.”

“I still do not think it is a very funny story,” I said stubbornly. “Especially when she makes Tammuz--Dumuzid--die in her place.”

“Then you have not seen how we perform it here in the South,” said Garashang. “Oh, if only you had been in Unug this past New Year’s, for the Akitu Festival! Our sisters came from miles and miles around, all of us wearing our finest robes and clapping and singing and shouting. People wore masks and painted their faces wild colors, men dressed as women, children dressed as kings, women dressed as beasts. We drank and danced and fucked until the sun went down and came up again. Here in the South we believe that it is good to laugh, and especially at the gods.”

“I didn’t say I never laughed,” I said, a bit frustrated. “And we have funny stories about the gods as well, in the North. Do you know the story of Ishtar and the roller-bird?” With the utmost satisfaction, I discovered that they did not. So I told it to them. And although I had to explain the part about the bird’s call sounding like “My wing!” because that only makes sense in Akkadian, they whooped and clapped when I was done and told me they loved it, that they would share it with their sisters when they got home. Then they told me, with much talking over one another and interruption, a truly filthy song that started out like a solemn hymn but turned out to be about Dumuzid trying to seduce his sister Ngeshtinana in the pasture by pointing out the rutting of sheep to her. As it came to an end Kankala started bleating like a lamb and Garashang leapt on top of her, thrusting and snorting, and I laughed as I had not laughed since Akkade, with simple pleasure.

I wiped tears from my eyes and said at last, “But you never answered my question. How did you come to join the galaturra? All of you? Garashang, you say you were not even born in Urim. So how did you end up here?”

“Like calls to like,” said the one called Eresh-gunu. “How did you end up here?”

I was startled, once again, into silence. I have rarely been spoken to as your menwomen speak to me. They have a remarkable mixture of disdain and respect for authority that is unlike any other group of people in this world. But then, they are themselves regarded with a mixture of disdain and respect. People mock the galaturra for their freakish appearance and lewd behavior, but they also respect their awesome power over luck and fertility, their connection with the world of gods. They are both one and the other, in-between in all things, and contrariness is as much a part of their nature as it is a part of the nature of their Mistress.

Inanna-shudug smiled. “We are none of us ashamed,” she said. “It’s just that there is little to tell. One knows these things from an early age. I joined the temple of Inanna as a young man, because when I saw Inanna’s girls strutting through the streets one day, they were the loveliest things I had ever known, and all I wanted was to be like them. I was engaged to be married at the time, but I broke off the engagement that very day. Her father was furious, but when I explained my reasoning, he calmed, knowing I could never be the son-in-law he wanted. And so I went to the temple and changed my name, and I have never looked back.”

“Since I was a child, everyone told me I was a galaturra,” said Kankala dismissively. “I swayed so much when I walked and lisped so much when I talked that everyone was calling me one even before I was. When I left home to join the temple of Inanna, my parents were overjoyed. I was the youngest of twelve, you see, and they were worried they would have to sell me to the slavers to pay for all those weddings.”

“And from birth, I was formed differently on the outside as well as within,” said Eresh-gunu. “Partly male and partly female. Many of our girls have an operation, you know, to take away that which is neither their own nor Inanna’s. But I never even needed that much.” She gestured to her broad, hairless face and the small breasts beneath her gown.

“And for me?” asked Garashang. “When I was twelve or thirteen years old, I used to wrestle with another boy in the shelter where our families docked our poleboats. At least, at first we wrestled.”

“She always was a randy little thing,” Inanna-shudug cackled.

Garashang silenced her with a look, and continued, “After my father caught us together, well, he knew what I was, and so did I. There was no other thing to do but seek out my sisters.”

I nodded. I wondered what that must be like, to choose to leave one’s home, to know there was a place you were born to fill. “You were sure of yourselves. Your path was clear ahead of you,” I told them, and shrugged. “I am a foreigner, placed here by a father who did not think to tell me when he was sending me away. A priestess, a High Priestess, among gods I know less than I think I do, and people whose every custom is strange to me. But I am glad we have had this time together, to get to know one another. I want to know Sumer. I want to know Urim, not just the House of the Great Light but its people as well, and its gods. I want to become part of this city. I have been a stranger here too long.”

“Like calls to like,” said Eresh-gunu again. “Are we so different? We found each other, but you have found us as well, sister.”

I smiled, and sat for a moment in silence. Though this place was called the Gardens of the Moon, they did not lack for sun, and the heat felt good against my skin. I reflected that my time in Urim was making me darker. My skin, which had always been the light brown of dried brick, was now closer to the color of the wet river mud before it is packed and shaped. Closer to the color of the Sumerian menwomen that sat beside me and shared my laughter. Realizing no one was around to look at me, I took the aga off my head and let my braids tumble down over my shoulder, spilling a fresh wave of heat across my skin.

Garashang placed her hand on my shoulder. “We have spent all this time swapping stories of the gods, but would you like to hear a story of men--of women, in fact?”

I nodded, and Garashang began, “You are not the first Northern woman to come to Urim, nor the first to rule here. You may be the first En of Northern blood, but once we had kings of our own, and in those days we had a queen as well. She died hundreds of years ago. Her name was Puabi.”

“Puabi,” I repeated the Akkadian word, smiling. “That means ‘Word of My Father.’”

“I don’t know who her father might have been,” said Garashang, “But she was a Northerner, just as you are, and she kept that Northern name. Her husband was our Lugal, and when he died without an heir she ruled in his place. She was both priestess and queen, and Urim prospered under her rule. No other city could match ours, in those days. The House of the Great Light groaned with the weight of tribute, and Nin Puabi bathed herself in spiced perfumes from further than red Musur. She was famous for her beauty, her wealth, and her wisdom, and though her hair was curly and her eyes green, the people of this city loved her. In fact, the legend says that Puabi’s ladies loved her so much that when she died, fifty of them agreed to die with her. They all drank poison and were laid in the tomb beside her, in the jeweled flowers of the South.”

I blinked, incredulous. “All fifty of them drank poison rather than live without their mistress?” I did not think Elamitu and Igiru and Zumbu would drink poison at my behest, nor would I want them to follow me.

“That’s what one story says, yes,” said Garashang. “Of course, there is another tale that says that it was Puabi who loved her ladies too much to leave them behind in this world. This is a very different story, a story which involves fifty wailing women and two priests...one with strong arms and one with a cudgel.”

I shuddered, and Garashang laughed. “A joke, Enship! A joke, to lighten the mood.”

“That isn’t a joke,” said Kankala languidly. “I mean, they really do say such things. The truth is nobody knows how the fifty ladies died, or whether there were fifty of them, or two, or none. Puabi is in the ground six hundred years or more. But her legend lives on.” She adjusted one of her beaded bracelets. Then she looked at me and added, “There was a time when a woman of the North made the South flower. Perhaps that time has come again?”

I smiled. I wanted to ask if they knew anything about the great Sumerian queen Kug-Bau, whose line had ruled Kish until my father and Ishtar drowned her grandson in a river of blood. I wanted to search my half-remembered history lessons for queens of the rocky North to match Puabi’s greatness. I wanted to sit there, laughing and trading stories and songs, for the rest of my life.

My reverie was interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps. I looked up and beheld one of the priests, his shaven head gleaming in the evening sun. “Begging your pardon, Enship,” he said. “It is almost time for the moonrise prayer. Also there is a messenger here to see you from the oil merchant Lubalasanga. He finds himself unable to meet your order in the time agreed upon previously and requests that you give him more time. Another messenger from our own Temple workshops requires your seal before he can be dispatched to Lugal Kaku’s personal treasury.”

The galaturra rose to their feet. “We will see you again, sister,” said Inanna-shudug. “Come to to Unug up the river, to the Eana, the Great House of Inanna and Her Heavenly Grandfather An, whenever you find the need. You are always welcome.” They embraced me, one by one, and swept off across the gardens. I could still hear their raucous laughter long after I could no longer see them.

How much I wanted to follow them! How badly I longed to linger telling stories in the sun, to dance and laugh and kiss men with them, to call them sister, a name which still sounded strange to me. I had been a sister, but never had one. But regardless of whose sister I was or was not, I was En, and there were other matters that required my attention. I rose to my feet and followed the young priest back to the temple, back to my Enship, back to the path my life had taken. Like calls to like. The words of Eresh-gunu echoed in my head long afterwards, even when I had slipped exhausted into my bed, listening to the silence of dead Ens slumbering beneath me. Was there anyone truly like me?