My Lady, you are the goddess of the moment. As Inanna of the South you watch over love, and as Ishtar of the North over battle, and for this reason some might think you two beings instead of one. But I, your greatest poet, who brings together gods in order to bring together lands, I have looked closely and found your true nature. I have never fought in a battle, nor have I made love, but I have spoken at length on both subjects with those who have, and I can say with certainty that in both cases there is a moment’s wild ecstasy; a total release from identity and surrender to the seething tide of emotion. That is where you live, Inanna, in the moments of passion that give life its sharpness and clarity. Moments; a laugh that goes on longer than common sense dictates, an acrid flush of fear that tenses the muscles.
My life, my Enship, is so many of these moments, all strung together like beads of lapis on a necklace. When I die they shall lay the rope of my life with its blue moments across my dead breast, some pale and feathery as a summer sky, others dark and turbulent as the Two Rivers. It is a whole brace of moments by now, so long they shall have to loop it around me like twine, like a rope on a ship’s mooring, like the golden vines my mother wore. I shall go down into the earth in a shroud of petrified memories, and if your dark sister asks me to strip I will not take it off, because I have heard that tale, and know her tricks.
Once I became En the moments began in earnest, and those moments stand out all the more because against them, the bulk of my life has been so monotonous. There were the daily sacrifices and the daily prayers, petitioners and offerings to be received, letters to be written, letters to be read, accounts to be balanced. But I remember the burning grasp of Inanna, so achingly alive, when I heard a large chorus lifting their voices together, or when I watched a leper or a cripple praying earnestly in the temple shrine, his eyes welling with tears when my priests and I offered him water and bread. It never troubled me to tend to the poorest and weakest and sickest of Urim, nor to see them and greet them in the temple, and whenever I appeared in public before a crowd, as I did for the festivals, I did not care which hand touched mine. Is that strange, Inanna, that I could look upon a man with rotting teeth or open sores or a limb swollen to twice its normal size, but killing a goat made me weak and dizzy? Perhaps it was a little remnant of my father in me, my lack of squeamishness where human beings are concerned. Or perhaps Nanna had heard me that night in the temple, and it was by the grace of my husband that I was becoming stronger and more suited to my role.
The most curious thing about being En is that the En is like a king and a servant at the same time. She must rule her temple and serve her god, serve her city and rule her priests. A king must serve as well, serve the needs of his people, though many kings do not know this and their people suffer the more for it. But an En-priestess is at once the mistress of the temple and the subordinate of the Lugal, the mistress of the people and the dutiful wife of a god. My power was a thing to be cherished, but it did not extend beyond the walls of the House of the Great Light.
Especially in the earliest days of my Enship, there was so much to do that I had little time to be sad. I was too busy to miss Akkade, to think of my brothers, to realize that I had no true friends among the priests and priestesses. My days were spent at the work of being the En, and what little free time I had was spent in the company of my slave women, Igiru, Elamitu and Zumbu. The three women I brought from Akkade were not the temple’s only slaves--there were several, especially in the workshops of the temple artisans--but by and large the workforce of the temple was made of freedmen servants and the priests and priestesses themselves, who did not balk at any labor. Though I did not tell my women myself, I was sure they had caught wind of how close Baranamtarra had come to dismissing them, and of how I had pleaded for them to be kept on. Whether out of a desire to keep a low profile or because they wanted to show me the same loyalty I had shown them, or for some other reason unknown, my women clung to my side and were rarely found beyond the giparu.
Over time I began to realize that the other workers of the temple were avoiding them, or the other way around. I could tell that the temple’s own servants whispered amongst themselves if I walked by with one or more of my women in tow. They did not think it proper for an En to have her own private slaves. I might have been inclined to agree, but I kept them in my service for several reasons. Firstly because even if there was a part of me that hated my father, I was determined to cherish the last gift he had ever given me. Secondly, because I was very fond of all three, and the sight of them made me more glad than any of the Sumerian clergy who now surrounded me. And lastly, and most importantly, I felt responsible for the women. It was I who had brought them all this way to serve me--should I abandon them in a strange city, as my father had done to me?
One day when Zumbu was approaching the giparu with a basket of laundry on her head, I noticed that something was amiss before she had even reached the threshold. While she had one hand up to steady the load, every few steps she would stop and raise her free hand and wipe her face with it. Concerned, I walked out to meet her. As I drew closer, I quickly realized that she was crying.
“What has happened?” I asked her as she swallowed another sob.
Zumbu placed the basket on the ground beside her. She had to work to force the words out. “They laughed at me, Mistress!” she said finally. “I went to wash the clothes in the river and the other women were there washing already--the two servant girls who mind the priests’ day robes and the fat one who works for Ugunu--they saw me and they said something to me, but I didn’t understand. So I asked them to repeat it, and they walked away and laughed at me!”
I reached up to help her steady the basket and placed my other hand on the back of her shoulder. “They are cruel to laugh,” I said. “You have only been here a few months, and before this you never served in the South. They cannot expect you to understand every word they say.”
“I will not have them laugh at me any longer!” said Zumbu, and I was taken aback at her forcefulness. “You speak the language of the South. Please, Mistress, teach it to me!” she begged. “If I am to work here, I must know it.”
So it was that Zumbu’s lessons in Emengir began. Every morning I would give her a simple phrase to practice, and every night I would test her on it. Igiru did her part, and promised to speak to Zumbu only in Sumerian when they worked together during the day. Sometimes when Zumbu was arraying my hair or drawing my bathwater I would point to objects, one after another, and ask her to supply the Sumerian name. She applied herself to the task with a ferocity that made me both proud and surprised, for when I first met her I had thought her the most timid and placid creature alive. It seemed that just as Nanna had awakened something peculiar or unknown in me, so he had awakened Zumbu.
Elamitu poked her head in on these lessons every now and again, but their content never seemed to hold her. Like my brother Rimush, she had not the gift for languages. Even her Akkadian bore the lilting accents of Elam and was broken sometimes, though never more so than when I asked her about her homeland. “Liyan is ship-city, Urim, too, ship-city,” she would say, and “Kiririsha is Lady of Liyan.” I thought this Kiririsha of the challenging name was a queen or priestess, perhaps some Elamite En, for the longest time, until I remembered that Elamitu had blessed me in her name once. Kiririsha was no En but a goddess, the city of Liyan’s patron deity. Yet when I asked Elamitu if she disliked finding herself in a foreign temple, if she ever longed for the shrines of her own goddess, she would only shrug and say “All gods are same.”
Elamitu was complacent, in those days. She still is, in fact, though age has bent her back and made lines in her lovely brown face. For all her wrinkles and aches, she is happy doing what she has always done, and now as then she does not wish to buy her freedom, though I have offered to grant it a thousand times. She is the only slave I have ever known who refused to take payment under any circumstance. When I offered Igiru and Zumbu a shekel for a job well done, they would pocket it with many thanks, but Elamitu would only hold up her hands and say “No, no,” in a way that embarrassed me. In childhood I was taught that slaves were misfortunate, and that the gods did not decree any man should be a slave forever. In my old age, I know that even a High Priestess may fall on hard times, and even a princess can be bought and sold.
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The nomads of the desert have a saying that “once a man has seen Death, he will gladly accept a fever,” and the reverse is true as well. To one who has never known true suffering, lesser hardships seem greater and greater ones are simply unimaginable. In my youth I pitied Elamitu that she wanted to stay the comfortable slave of a kindly mistress because, poor young fool that I was, I could not fathom what was yet to come. I had not yet smelled the black smoke nor heard the scrape of Lugal Anna’s blade against the door.
So I, too, became complacent. I became En. I praised Nanna and fed Ningal and slaughtered goats and put my seal on shipments of clay pots and dried fish. I left offerings to Galusakar and the other dead Ens who slumbered forever beneath my bed, lavished gifts and compliments on the priests so they would trust me, prayed for the people of Urim and clasped their hands so they would love me.
My girlish dreams of motherhood, of queenship, began to fade farther and farther, though I was still troubled from time to time by the thought of a life I might have lived but was not living. The sudden whipping of wind against my robes might set my flesh prickling and burning, and if I heard some petitioner’s child wail or saw some man with his arm around his wife, it could make me sullen for an afternoon or even days. Sometimes I caught myself staring a little too long at the smooth, dark bodies of the libation priests, and I would duck my head and throw myself into the litanies of Nanna until I was almost shouting. There, too, were moments, and though moments can cut like a blade at first, what makes them moments is that they pass. I would always come back to being En, to the temple, to my life and what had become of it.
As whole years began to melt away, I realized that I no longer stumbled over the names of the junior priestesses, nor quavered when I slaughtered goats in sacrifice. I developed a genuine taste for water-snake and turtle. And though I wore my Northern braids, always, I rarely used my native language anymore, even with Zumbu, who had to ask the other servants to repeat themselves less and less frequently. Yet when she asked me for a particularly difficult word in Akkadian and I had to pause a moment before saying, “Secretive, to act secretively?...ah, puzra epesu,” it was then that I truly knew I was becoming Sumerian, that Slow Buranuna’s silty water was leeching into my bones. I was becoming like my mother, not only a woman of the Black-Headed People but an enigma, as silent and penitent as the votive statues in the temple sanctum amongst whom I walked with ever-more purposeful strides. My youthful petulance cooled, and I was not who I had been.
In the third year since my assumption of the Enship and the fourth since I left Akkade, I decided to try something I had heard was the right and duty of the Ens but which I had never done before. I decided to write.
Do you believe I never would have been a poetess, Inanna, were it not for those children? I was walking past the low garden wall on my way to the midday meal when I heard the peals of their laughter, saw their brown faces smiling in the sun. I had watched children playing in the Gardens before, of course, and many times after. Were it any other day I might not have stopped or even looked at them. I might have walked on, letting their silvery laughter follow me and haunt me for a day or two, but never looking, letting the moment crash and break like a wave. But I did look, that day, and I noticed two things: firstly, that there were five of them, four boys and a girl, and secondly that they were playing at a game I used to play with my brothers. The two larger boys each had another boy sitting on his shoulders and prodding him like a donkey-driver, and they were running back and forth after a goat’s-bladder ball, cheering and whooping and making quite a mess of the flowerbeds in the process.
The girl chased along with them after the ball, laughing, but she was soon quite out of breath, and when she sat down in the grass to rest she looked up at me and the look of wonder in her face split my heart in two. She pointed at my head, at my aga, and shouted at her friends to stop their roughhousing, never taking her eyes off me. The boys stopped playing abruptly, and the two who were riding the others jumped off to the ground and stared at me just as the girl was staring. They made the Southern sign of respectful greeting, of the hand at the level of the nose, and backed away until they were hidden behind a copse of berry bushes. The awed respect in the eyes of the boys I could almost tolerate--but that girl! How could she be so fearful of me, how could she look at me as though I was the Wife of a God, and nothing more? Didn’t she know that she was me?
When Ugunu saw me later that day, she could tell that I was shaken. “Is something troubling you, Enship?” she asked gently. She was nearly as tall as Igiru and always took long strides, but she slowed her pace so that she could walk with me the rest of the way to the feasting hall.
“No,” I said. “It is nothing.” I did not speak much of my true feelings, not to anyone, though I felt them churning inside me like another life.
“The next festival of the Crescent Moon is approaching, Enship,” said Ugunu. “Baranamtarra and I have conferred and we would like to ask your Enship if you will compose a song to celebrate the occasion.”
“A song,” I repeated dully. It had never occurred to me to compose a song before, even though learning to sing them had become so large a part of my life.
“Many of the past Ens were poets as well as singers,” said Ugunu. “And the Litany of Nanna can never be too long when the glories of Nanna are endless. Think on it and see if any inspiration strikes you.”
I told Ugunu that I would consider it, and so I did. At night when I at last had time to myself, I would go to the temple sanctum as I had that night so long ago, when I asked my husband the moon to make me his greatest living servant. And I would gaze up at him, a thin sliver that cast but little light of yet, and think on his endless glories.
It was true that the city of the moon god was prospering. There had not been a poor harvest since my Enship began, and the four corners of my father’s Empire grew closer, it seemed, every day. In reviewing the temple’s finances I had seen us gain access to copper and tin from the North, wine and costly cedar and boxwood from the West, stone mined in the East, fine goldwork from the other cities of the South. I was aware of both men and women of Lugal Kaku’s Great Household who had taken a Northern spouse, and merchants of the Northern mountains who had set up shop here to capitalize on Urim’s wealth. Some of the tribute carts brought to the temple of late were pulled by creatures like asses but larger and stronger, and I was told they were a cross between the ass and an animal from the far East that ran like the wind itself. Certainly I could talk about these things in a song to celebrate the god. Certainly I had much to thank Nanna for. Was I not adjusting well to my role as En--did not the people of Urim clamor for my touch, and did not Baranamtarra look on me with a tolerance that, if it was not approaching love, was not approaching hatred either?
But my mind kept turning back to the wide eyes of the girl in the gardens and the pain in my belly, the knotted lump of loneliness and sorrow. There were words I had been unable to say for so long that I felt I might have to scream to be delivered of them. I carried my sorrow with me out of the temple and to bed. The next day when the sun was high, I did not let the words escape my lips as they had before, as when I cursed my father or pleaded with the open sky. I took a stylus in my right hand and a piece of clay in my left, as Ugunu had taught me, and I let my hand do the speaking and the screaming for me.
I matched the rhythm of my words to one of the songs I knew, slapping my hand against my thighs to keep time, singing it softly aloud to myself. It took several days and many pieces of clay, but when the Festival of the Crescent Moon came, Nanna looked proudly down on his young wife as she raised her voice in a song that was, for the first time, her own.
I have never been quite as other women were. Some women marry potters or fishermen, carpenters or princes. Some, like you, Inanna, marry shepherds. My husband was a stream of light and a pale eye in the heavens. And when he finally gave me a child, it was no earthly baby, but a song.