The North is a land of many gods, as well you know, Inanna. But in the South there are as many gods as frogs, as many gods as reeds rising from the riverbanks. In my correspondence with the priests of other cities and my exploration of the temple’s own archives, I learned of gods that I had never heard of before: Muati and Enten and Gunara, Kabta and Kulla the gods of bricklayers, Utta the Spider Woman, goddess of weaving. Not every one of them had a city of their own, but even the least of them had prayers and favored offerings, a shrine in some sheltered corner, a person who owed them their life.

I worked at this new undertaking in collaboration with the scribes of the Tablet House. Sagadu had the blessings of Nisaba, goddess of writing; he was bright and quick and rarely made errors, and after a time I appointed him my personal scribe. The task of writing songs to the gods of the North was my own, for no one knew them as well as I, but Sagadu was a vital help in the work of dedicating songs to all the most holy shrines of the South.

To Old Grandfather Enki of most ancient Eridu, I dedicated a song.

To Great Enlil, Lord Wind, god of Nibru, whose House there had once worn the head of my mother’s first husband, I dedicated a song.

To Ninlil, Lady Wind and Great Mother of the Grain, of Shuruppak the Healing Place, I dedicated a song.

To their daughter Nanshe, the Wind Upon the Waves, goddess of the port city of Sirara, I dedicated a song.

To Ningishzida of Gishbanda, who rose from the dead, and to Ningirsu-Ninurta of Lagash, the mighty warrior with the heads of the Seven Champions adorning his chariot, I dedicated songs.

To the temples of Nisaba of the Stylus at Eresh and of Nin Khursang the Wild Cow at Kesh, I dedicated songs.

To you, Holy Inanna, who has more cities than any other god in the South, to your shrine at Bad-Tibira which you share with Dumuzid your husband, at canal-watered Unug which you share with An your father, at Adab, at Kish, at Zabala and Umma, I dedicated songs.

I was not content to write a song for one god who was not my temple’s own. Once I began the quest I had set for myself, once Nanna opened my ears and allowed me to do so, it was as though I could not stop. Over the course of my long life, I have written 42 hymns to as many gods and cities of North and South. Each writing was a new task taken up, with its own challenges and peculiarities, yet none gave me so much difficulty as the hymns I wrote to you, to Inanna; including the very last I have written, that one which is different from all the rest.

As Sagadu and I scoured the temple library we were dizzied by your titles. I saw you called Lioness and Warlike and Dragon, which put me in mind of my father’s Ishtar-backed victories, but other, more inscrutable sources called you Honey-Tongued, Sweet-Mouthed and Heavenly Mother. How could there exist such contradiction, and how could it exist with the most powerful and widely-worshipped goddess of the South, the one of whom it was said “all the South is Inanna’s country”? I could not risk getting your character wrong or misrepresenting you in my songs. Your worshippers would never open their hearts to the words unless they recognized you in them. I did not know you yet, my lady. Not truly. I did not know that Inanna is within, the goddess of the unquiet heart, and the South is the heart’s country. But I sought you in tablets and the stories of priests, in songs and in the other temples with whom I began an earnest correspondence, that I might learn as much as I could to better praise them.

It was not easy. The responses I received from other High Priests and Priestesses ranged from flattered to amused to incredulous. A letter from the High Priest of Ningishzida at Gishbanda was brutally short: “Ask the En Kheduana, Chief Wife of the Moon at Urim, why?” Many did not write back at all. But the High Priest of Ninurta at Lagash wrote down the Seven Songs of the Seven Champions for me, and the Chief Wife of Enki replied with a detailed description of her divine husband’s temple, and the galas of Unug sent an envoy to treat with me in person.

When I went to the reception chamber with Sagadu at my side, his clay and stylus ready, I had hoped that I might see a familiar face. The temple of Inanna and An at Unug was the home temple of the band who had sat with me in the Gardens of the Moon and blessed me on my wedding day. But I had not expected that my visitor would be a certain tall and slender galaturra whom I recognized at once.

“Garashang,” I said, smiling and rising to my feet.

“Sister,” said the manwoman, and embraced me. I could not help but think of Rimush, the last person who had called me sister, though his voice had carried a different tone. “We hope that you are recovering since the rebellion was put down.”

“Business is returning and the walls are nearly rebuilt,” I said. “But Urim is not as it once was.”

“Nor Unug,” said Garashang. She flicked her wrist dismissively, making the bangles on her brown wrist jingle softly. “A third of our men were marched off to the desert to die and a third were made into eunuchs. You can imagine what this has done for our business! Inanna’s coffers are running at a record low. We eat emmer porridge and share one pot of lipstick between us.”

I frowned. “I will see if I can put together an offering for you. There must be something I can give--”

“You will do nothing of the sort,” said Garashang, cutting me off. “Inanna crawled to the netherworld and back. Her temple will survive a minor rebellion, and her priest-priestesses will survive a little hunger. We always have before. Now then. You wanted someone to tell you about Inanna and Her nature? Why do you not simply come yourself to the House of Heaven at Unug? It is not a far journey, and you know we have invited you before.”

My cheeks flushed under Garashang’s unremitting gaze. “I wish that I could,” I said. “But there is so much to be done here...each year brings with it new challenges, new work. I am always needed, year after year. I fear for what the temple might become if I were not here.”

“You don’t know how not to work,” said Garashang. I blinked, surprised and a little unsure of her meaning. “You were brought up to be one thing, and one thing only. Then you were told you had to be a new thing, so you have thrown yourself into that with every fiber of your being. You are a wonderful En, that much cannot be denied. But you are still a princess, and still a young woman, and I know that you still remember how to laugh and how to dance.”

I was stunned. “You speak with great wisdom,” I said.

“Eresh-gunu told you that like calls to like,” said Garashang with a crooked smile. “If my words sound wise, it is only because I know what it is like to be two things. As does Inanna. ‘I am a woman, and I am a noble young man’, she says in an old song, a song I might have sung myself. In the North she is Ishtar, the raging lioness who fans the battlefield with flame. Here in the South she is Inanna, the playful maiden who teases and chases her lover. When she gets her way, she is sweet, so wonderfully sweet, but when her wrath is roused it is terrible to behold. The virgin and the harlot, the mother and the maiden, the bride and the groom and everything in between. If you are going to write a hymn to Inanna, you will have to understand this first and foremost. Now, have you ever heard the story of Inanna and the Divine Powers?”

“I have not,” I said, marvelling that there were still so many Southern stories I did not know. I beckoned Sagadu forward and asked him to take down what Garashang said.

As we listened, enraptured, Garashang spun a wondrous tale of Inanna and old Father Enki, how she got him drunk and swindled him out of the me, the markers of civilized man. At the mention of Enki’s drooping jowls and white head I thought wistfully of old Dubsang who had been my High Steward. The Queen of the Great Below had claimed him at last some two months before my audience with Garashang, and his replacement, a dour fellow named Adda, inspired in me none of the same affection.

“Then there is another tale,” said Garashang at last, “That tells a different story. And what you must understand about Inanna is that there is always a different story. There is always another version of events, and if you are wondering which is true, the answer is: both. Now, in the early days of Creation, when the world was young, old Grandfather Enki gave each god his due. He gave the sun and justice to Utu, the moon and comfort to Nanna, and he passed out the numberless me: inventions and offices, behaviors and ways of being, all the things that make the Black-Headed People civilized, setting us apart from the wild Lullubi clans or the towheaded Guti. But Grandfather Enki was old even then, and senile. He forgot his little granddaughter Inanna! And after all was done she came to him complaining, saying, ‘Give me something to do, give me power!’

‘And Father Enki said to Inanna, ‘The whole world is already made. The only thing I can give you now is the power to unmake. You shall have the power to straighten what is tangled and tangle what is straight, to make a poor man rich and a rich man poor, to turn a man into a woman, and a woman into a man. It only takes a moment for a life to change, so you shall be the goddess of change, the goddess of the moment.’” Garashang paused, smiling at me. “So you see,” she continued, “Both stories are quite true. Inanna holds all the Divine Powers herself, and she also holds nothing but the power to undo what the other gods have already done. Because that is where true power lies: not in titles or property or blood or wealth, but in change. You can measure the power of a god, or a man--or a woman--by what they can change. By what they do that has never been done before.”

I smiled too, understanding. “That would make me very powerful indeed,” I said, laughing. “Though it would seem from the tepid responses I’ve been getting from other cities that not everyone agrees with you.”

Garashang shrugged. “Not everyone understands the cult of Inanna, and even those who worship her do so in their different ways. But we menwomen of Unug know what you are trying to do. And you will always have our support, that much we promise you.”

I have mentioned the time I first felt your presence Inanna, and many other times after. But I think that was the day when I first understood that what I had been feeling all those years was you. That was the day I found Inanna in myself, and after that any poem I tried to write flowed forth like water from a fountain.

The whole temple was soon abuzz with word of my peculiar literary efforts. Every priest and priestess had their opinion, and though I was aware of the whispers and rumors, none of them dared to confront me directly. None except Baranamtarra.

“Enship, why do you not expend as much energy on the Litany of Nanna as you do the Litanies of these other gods?” she asked me one day after the evening’s prayer, when I had said I was hurrying back to the giparu to finish a particularly striking stanza. “Why waste your time and your talents on writing about the gods of every other city?”

I shrugged. “Because the South is one land, and I wish the Black-Headed People to see it as such. Many of the people of Urim have never been beyond their city walls. With these songs I hope to cast their gaze upwards and outwards, over the walls and across the Land Between Two Rivers.”

Baranamtarra scowled. “Yet you are writing songs for the Northern gods as well.”

“North and South must learn to see themselves in one another,” I said. “The people of Urim are every bit as worthy as the people of Akkade. Just so, when night falls Nanna lights up his beloved Urim no more or less brightly than Sin lights up his city of Kharranu.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Beside her, Ugunu beamed and said, “It is truly a thing no man has done before!”

“Hardly surprising, when one considers her family,” said Baranamtarra pointedly as I turned back towards the giparu.

As my work began to consume me, I began to spend less time in the giparu unless I was sleeping or waking, during the day preferring to write at the Tablet House where Sagadu could attend me. I became inured to the comings and goings of my own slaves, so engrossed and engulfed was I by the monumental task I had set before myself.

Until the night Zumbu woke me with tears in her eyes.

“Mistress,” she said gently, shaking my shoulder. I blinked and rubbed the sleep from my own eyes, confused. Zumbu had never done so bold a thing as to wake me in the middle of the night. “What is it?” I asked her. She was holding an oil lamp under her chin, and in the ghostly light I saw her eyes shining and red.

“Oh, Mistress,” she said, and fell into a fresh wave of weeping. It was so unlike her to weep freely that I was immediately alarmed.

I rose from the bed and placed my arm around her shoulders. “What is wrong?” I asked. “What has happened?”

“It is many-colored,” she said. For a moment, still half-asleep, I could not figure out what she was talking about. Then she said, “He waits for me now, outside the giparu.” And I realized that the Sumerian word she had used for “many-colored”--shuba--was a man’s name. The name of her young lover.

There are moments when I know, truly, why the Black-Headed People like to laugh at the gods: because they like to laugh at us.

I was awake then. “You will leave with him,” I said, not sure if I was asking her a question.

She nodded. “He wants to marry me but he cannot afford to buy me from you. So he told me we would leave tonight. He told me not to tell anyone. But I did not want to leave without saying farewell.”

“Where will you go?” I asked.

“He worked his father’s farm before he was apprenticed to the Metalworkers,” she said. “Rimush sent his father and brothers to the camps, so now it is only his old widowed mother there, and she can barely manage by herself. On his last visit she begged him to return. He would have gone anyway for the sake of his mother, but he has asked me to go with him.”

“You love him,” I said.

She nodded. “I do,” she said, with some hesitancy. Then, “And--there is more.” She glanced down at her belly and I knew what she meant.

“He will have to marry you, and soon,” I said.

“We cannot be married unless I am free,” said Zumbu, a bit of her old defiance creeping into her voice. “In the country, no one will know. We will tell everyone we are man and wife, and the child will inherit his grandfather’s land.”

“You have served me well for years now,” I said, rising to my feet. “Would you do one more thing for me?”

“Anything, Mistress,” she said. And I asked her to fetch me my robe and my aga.

Outside the giparu, Shuba was waiting beneath the stars, just as she had said he would be. When he saw me he threw himself on the ground, but I bid him rise at once.

“I understand that you wish to marry this woman,” I said.

Not lifting his eyes from the ground, he stammered, “Yes, Enship. But forgive me, if I--”

I held up a hand to silence him. Then I turned to Zumbu. “I should have offered your freedom to you long ago,” I said. “I was foolish not to, and I hope that you will forgive me. Have you any of the money saved that I gave you?”

“I have,” she said. She produced a single silver shekel from a pocket in her dress.

Taking the coin from her, I said, “Then you have bought your freedom from me, for I have decided to sell you at a fraction of what you are worth. Once you were given to me as a wedding gift. Now, here is my wedding gift to you.” And I handed it back to her. Speechless, she turned to Shuba, who had forgotten to be awestruck and was grinning at me in the moonlight.

“Come, quickly,” I said. “Before the priests and guards awaken. They will think there is another rebellion on or somesuch nonsense. Follow me to the Temple of Nanna.”

I knew the words to perform a wedding before Nanna well enough, having witnessed many in the very same spot, beginning with my own. The chrism I poured on their heads at the end was not the bridal perfume but a pot of libation oil, since I did not have time to fetch anything better, but they did not seem to mind.

“Give my farewells to Elamitu and Igiru,” she said. “They knew that this day was coming, but it pains me not to see them before I go.”

“I will,” I said. With tightness in my voice, I said, “Take care of each other. I wish you both the joy that I was named for.” But they did not know what I meant.

She turned back to look at me once as they passed under the temple gate. That was the last time I ever saw her, she who had been mine once, who had been my wedding present. Zumbu, the Mosquito, and the Many-Colored. A fine, strange pair they made, and I meant what I had said that I wished them only joy, though I felt a pain in my chest as I watched them go, though I lay down in my bed that night and thought of my own life and where it had led, and dreamed of many colors streaming and a baby at my breast. And though it brought me pain then and brings me pain now, I hope that I remember the look on Zumbu’s face on the night of her wedding for the rest of my life.

After the departure of Zumbu I did not write for a time. Igiru, who was becoming more stooped than any heron should as time wore on, told me that I was to be commended for my compassion. I had every right to do with a slave who had confessed intent to run away as I wished. I could have had her thrown in the river to be judged by Buranuna’s waters, or beaten with sticks and dragged through the temple, or any number of other options that, I reflected, would probably have been the first recourse of Rimush. Hearing this I offered Igiru and Elamitu their freedom on the spot, but both of them smiled and politely declined, which made me feel even worse.

Baranamtarra, her delight at my having one less personal servant transparent, appointed a new one to me from the temple’s own stock in collaboration with Adda my High Steward. Ilum Palilis was her name, the daughter of a temple servant woman trained in arrayment. Hair was her mother’s specialty and supposedly hers, though she seemed untried and skittish and the first time she took hold of my hair she handled it as though it were a nest of asps. I would not let her touch my head at all until she learned from Elamitu the braided style of Akkade, for I still would wear my hair no other way.

It was Sagadu who jolted me out of this despondency and returned me to my writing, and all he did was step outside to receive a letter that had just been brought to the library as we were going over the harvest records from the previous year. I rubbed my temples and asked if he might read it to me, for my eyes were tired from poring over the tiny markings, and Sagadu obliged.

“Speak, messenger, to my sister the En Kheduana, Chief Wife of the Moon at Urim. Tell her that her brother Rimush, the King of the World, says this:

‘I had the pleasure of attending a festival at which your song for Ishtar of Akkade and the House of Ever was premiered. You write with great passion and our father would be pleased to hear the lengths to which you are going to unite the people of his Empire towards a common cause. Your ingenuity is to be commended. Yet I notice you insist on stamping your own name at the end of these songs, along with the words ‘my King, a thing has been done which has never been done before’. Though ostensibly a supplication to me, I cannot help but be reminded of the inscriptions that kings place on the great statues and stelae they commission. Do you feel that this is appropriate, little sister, for the singers to call out your name as they come to the end of their melody? I cannot agree that the name of an En, however unique her writings, deserves to be memorialized so. High though your station may be, humility is more becoming of a woman, lest our enemies begin to think that it is your legacy, and not Sharru-kin’s, that you seek to perpetuate.

‘May my Lady know this!”

I sighed. “Always he speaks of my father,” I said aloud, more to myself than to Sagadu. I rubbed my temples even harder.

“My own brother is the same way,” said Sagadu wryly. Then his eyes grew wide as he realized how familiar he had become. “Enship!” He stammered and placed his hand at the level of his nose. “Forgive me, I did not mean--I do not wish to--”

I smiled. “It is alright, Sagadu,” I said. “You need not be so formal around me. You sat with me while Garashang spun her yarns about Inanna, you searched the temple’s archives for old songs and helped me write the hymns to Nanshe and Ninurta. We have shared stories of the gods aplenty; why not share our own stories?” And I told him a little of my brother; how stiff and unyielding he was, how he had always watched over me and sought to emulate our father in everything. It felt wonderfully strange to speak of such things aloud--and not just aloud, but to a man. I had not had anything resembling a friend since the foolish, giggling girls of Akkade.

In return, Sagadu told me of his own father, who had been a scribe. “Every man in my family has been either a scribe or a priest--and as you know, all priests must begin as scribes--as far back as the days of Gilgamesh. My father died when I was very small, but all my life my brothers have been impressing on me his legacy, making sure I did nothing to besmirch his name. Since I completed my training and became a scribe at the Tablet House, it has been even worse, for one of my elder brothers now serves the temple of Urim as head of the libation-priests.”

“Not--your brother is Ningtuku?” I asked incredulously.

“The very same,” said Sagadu. “And every chance he gets he berates me to be careful. He is...concerned about my being appointed your Chief Scribe.”

“Why should he be concerned?” I asked.

“Because he doubts my abilities,” said Sagadu, a little bitterly. “He is passionately worried that I will make some error that will grievously upset you, and believes this will somehow bring down an unending curse of shame for ten generations on our family.” He laughed.

“You have been an excellent scribe to me thus far,” I said. “And I am pleased that you told me these things.”

Sagadu suddenly could not meet my eyes. “Thank you, Enship,” he said.

I was silent for a time. Then I asked him, “Sagadu...what do you think of my songs? My writing them to the gods of other cities, I mean?”

“What do you mean, Enship?” he asked.

“I mean, do you think it is a wasted effort? That it will not bring about any change in the Empire, nor get the people of the Land Between Two Rivers to see themselves in one another?”

“Not at all,” said Sagadu. “It has already brought about a change. You have managed to rouse the ire of a King, and that is no small feat.”

I smiled and picked up the harvest records to begin again.

Only then did my spirit quell enough for me to return to my writing. And it was well that I did, if my aim was to help preserve and unite the Empire. Rimush’s reign was marked by trouble from the start. No sooner had the rebellion of Urim and Lagash been quashed than my brother faced additional rebellions. There were other Southern cities that saw the death of Sharru-kin as an opportunity to throw off the Northern yoke. Even some of the Northern cities sought their independence from the Empire, such as troublesome Kazallu, already destroyed and rebuilt once in my father’s reign.

In putting down these rebellions, Rimush, the Foremost, would have made our father proud. He suffered no insult and showed no mercy. If a city announced that they would give no more tribute to Akkade nor swear fealty to an Akkadian overlord, they would find an Akkadian army at their walls within a fortnight. Rebel leaders were paraded in stocks; their lands were divided amongst loyal retainers of the Great Household at Akkade, their heirs made eunuchs and their womenfolk given to the soldiers. Men were taken from their own cities and gods and families and marched across the desert to cut stone until they died. Sharru-kin ruled the world through fear, and Rimush was quick to show it that the son was made in the image of the father.

My brother was a King of the World in every sense. His resolve was like a lion’s, his will of diorite, and his wrath as terrible as Ishtar’s. But for all that, his reign was not long. He sallied forth on campaign after campaign to crush those cities that rebelled against him, yet all along the Queen of the Great Below was waiting for him with claws outstretched. But Rimush’s death was not to be found on the battlefield or behind the barricades of Umma or Adab or Zabalam. She was at home in Akkade, closer than he could have dreamed, and when she found him she did what no traitorous Lugal or Ensi had ever succeeded in doing: she took him by surprise.

I was not there. I had no knowledge that would have helped my brother. I only broke the seal on the letter that delivered the news, and I must tell you truthfully, Inanna, how I wept when I read it, how my voice cracked so that I could no longer read the words aloud. I had said that I was done with tears, and while it is true I never again cried for myself, I could not help but cry for him, though I was not certain whether I cried for Rimush my brother or Rimush my king. If I were not so weary today and my eyes so dry I might weep for other kings as well, for the whole lot of them, wretched as they are. How pitiful their greed, how hideous their cruelty, how transient their glory.

Later it was written in the official account of his reign that “seals and sealed letters” killed my brother Rimush. Beginning with my father, our dynasty has developed a custom of creating polite circumlocutions for ugly truths (I might also mention how the historians detail extensively Rimush’s victories over rebel cities, yet leave out mention of those cities he was unable to bring back into the Empire, and those cities where resentment still festered like a sore no matter how many of their sons he castrated or flayed or sent to the camps to die a desert death). The song of Sharru-kin my father talks of secret love-pacts and clever hoodwinks when it means betrayal, usurpation and rape. Likewise, that “seals and sealed letters” killed Rimush means secret alliances struck among courtiers of the Great Household of Akkade, hushed meetings and plans laid. It means the shocked and strangled cry of a king, and a dagger in the dark.

Eight years did Rimush sit on the throne of Akkade, the throne of our father, the throne of the King of the World. And when he died, leaving no son, the One Who Goes In Front was succeeded by the One Who Goes With Him, who had been with him all these many years. Waiting.

And I with ashes on my hands and blood drying on my face became the sister of a second king.