Inanna, page 16
“I will take my manservant,” I said. “But I will leave the rest.”
He looked over at me, thinking. “And take Harga,” he said. “Harga is always useful.”
“Yes.”
“And one more thing.”
“Yes, my lord?”
“Keep your hands off her.”
“The girl?”
“Yes, the girl. This little goddess of love. Keep your hands off her.”
“It is not such a hard thing to promise,” I said.
He raised his palms to the night sky. “You are dissolute, Gilgamesh. You would try to sleep with me if you were drunk enough. With a donkey. With Harga. With every girl in this city. I know what you are, Gilgamesh.”
“Certainly, you seem to think you do.”
He shook his head. “You did well here in Marad. You stayed sober; you kept your head. You played it well. I’m pleased. Now do this thing for me, do it well, and then you should come back to Nippur, and we will see if it can be made to work with Della.”
CHAPTER TEN
INANNA
In the morning, Enki came into my rooms and sat down on my bed, one of his knees touching my leg. “Do you know what is happening, Inanna?”
“No,” I said. “No one will say a word to me.”
His smell was so familiar to me: of olive soap, and so clean and warm. He pushed back my hair from my forehead with one strong hand, and put his leopard eyes very close to mine.
“Your mother has stolen from me,” he said. “What do you know about that?”
“Nothing. But I do not think it can be true, that she would do anything to cross you.”
“All the same, she has,” he said. “In fact, she has killed me, although I am not yet dead. She has murdered me. So what you do now is very important, Inanna. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, Grandfather.”
Servants went in and out when he was gone. They tidied up my things, and brought me water. No one spoke to me when I asked about my mother and father.
I shut my eyes and tried to focus on them. I could sense my father clearly. He seemed to be moving away from me. Towards Ur. Could he have left without coming to see me? Or was he being taken away against his will?
My mother I could barely get a feel of, and what I felt made no sense. It seemed as if she was below me. Far below me. But how could that be? There was only the big state room beneath my set of rooms, and below that nothing. I knew the palace well enough to know that. And why was she so faint?
In the evening, women came to dress me for dinner, as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. I was led onto the terrace and I was seated next to Dumuzi, my new husband, although he kept his cheek turned from me. There was no sign of my mother or father.
I sat and ate, barley soup and soft cheese, some plums. No one spoke to me, but the talk of court flowed all around, as if this was any other supper in the palace. Enki, sitting opposite me, seemed cheerful enough.
“You look very holy in that saffron,” he said. “I know it is your brother’s colour, but it suits you well.”
I pulled out my mouth into something like a smile. “You are too kind to me, my lord.”
Far below me, the thing that might be my mother seemed to be growing fainter.
* * *
My husband and I travelled north to Uruk on a fleet of barges, the men rowing hard against the river. We pushed our way into a head wind, and the sails upon the masts stayed furled.
The sails had been dyed purple: that would be our colour now.
All our possessions were heaped up on the decks of the first barge. We newly-weds travelled behind on Enki’s Barge of Heaven, which I had first stepped onto on the day he took me from Ur. “He’s not letting us keep it,” Dumuzi said. “But it makes a nice show, does it not?”
Behind us came eight military barges loaded with soldiers and their mounts. It was the morning after my fourteenth birthday, although the day had gone unmarked.
The sky above us beat thick with swifts and swallows as we sailed.
Dumuzi and I sat on wooden chairs upon the foredeck, a purple shade fluttering over us in the spring breeze. Dumuzi had a rack of new mees on each arm.
My husband seemed newly energised. He was the most cheerful I had ever seen him. “You know An and Lugalbanda have run Uruk for three hundred years,” said Dumuzi.
I said nothing. Those were the days when I said nothing.
“But now it ends,” said Dumuzi. He cast a glance at me, fanning himself. “Ugh,” he said. “This sulking. Your mother is safe. She’s a hostage. As you were a hostage. What is the value in a dead hostage?”
He said nothing about my father.
The fields went by, and the peasants kneeled as the barges passed, and the day grew unseasonably hot. I sat with my eyes on Dumuzi’s arms, looking at his new mees. Was one of them my mother’s mee of peace?
The thought grew in me as the leagues went by, and the sweat ran down my back, that my mother might in truth be dead, and although I kept my head held high, tears slipped down my cheeks.
“Look,” said Dumuzi. “You didn’t ask for this. My sister didn’t ask for this. And I didn’t ask for this. Do you think I asked for this?”
I said nothing.
“This is our job now. To hold Uruk for my father. To keep the sky gods from coming south. That’s our job now. And if you want to keep your mother safe, you need to take that seriously. You need to think about the sky gods.”
I didn’t say anything, but I dried my eyes on my dress. It did cheer me a little, in truth, to think about the sky gods, just as my husband had suggested. To think about the king of the sky gods, my grandfather Enlil, who had gone to war once against his brother Enki, and might do so again.
* * *
Eight days on the Euphrates and then the river Warka, and then early on the ninth day, around a sweeping bend, a vast shape on the left-hand bank. I thought, Oh, it is a cloudbank resting on the Earth. But then the mist cleared, and the sun picked out the ramparts in gold.
Here it was: Uruk. A golden block upon the green.
The city at the heart of the world.
* * *
I stood for the approach, my hands pressed together against my chest, my bare feet apart on the cedar deck.
Closer and closer, the shudder of the oars shivering out across the river, and the walls before us resolving from the work of great giants into only countless tiny clay bricks, each fashioned by mortal hands.
We slid past reeds and lush pastures, past a small boy holding a donkey, and watching us open mouthed. Only at the last moment did I understand that there was a gap in the city walls, and that we were going to sail straight into Uruk.
“Oh!” I said, despite myself.
“Glorious, isn’t it,” my husband said, coming to stand beside me, with a real smile on his face.
* * *
Huge crowds had gathered for the coming of Inanna, daughter of the moon gods, and the shepherd king Dumuzi, son of Enki, by some mortal no one had heard of. God-born but not very sacred.
I was lifted down onto the White Quay, and a servant rearranged my dress as I stood there, my arms held out limp while she worked. I looked around reflexively for my lions, but of course they were not there.
“Inanna, look,” Dumuzi said, looking very young for a moment. “It’s Lugalbanda’s boy. The soldier. You know, the one Akka took hostage.”
I looked up towards the city and there he was. Standing above the kneeling crowds, on the wall at the end of the quay, with a leather-covered helmet under his arm. There he was. Sweaty and dusty, his hair damp in the sun, looking straight at me.
Just the sight of him.
Oh, my insides.
Oh, my outsides.
Oh, my heart.
There he was.
The son of Lugalbanda.
Hero of the north.
There you were.
Gilgamesh.
CHAPTER ONE
NINSHUBAR
When I first woke up in the blackness, I was lying on my front, my right cheek and temple on cold, wet dirt. My whole body was cold and damp beneath me. A bad smell: something was rotting.
I thought for the briefest moment that I might be dreaming, but then I tried to move and could not for the pain. I shut my eyes and I had a flash of Enki’s boot coming down hard on my head; did he also kick me in the ribs?
Was I still at the palace?
When it is as dark as it can be, as black as it is in the deep caves of my country, you can lose a sense of what is real and what is dream. But I began to believe that I was awake, and that the place I was in was real. There was water dripping. Somewhere close to me, someone was whimpering.
I thought it sounded like a girl, and it may have been my eyes, but I thought I could see her glowing, just a little: a brighter space in the absolute darkness, in the shape of someone’s body.
“Who is there?” I said, very quiet.
The whimpering stopped. I saw the shape turn in the darkness; something that looked like a head rose up.
“Who are you?” the shape said. It was a woman’s voice, not a girl’s.
“My name is Ninshubar.”
“Are you a prisoner here?”
Prison. I had heard the word. I had had it explained to me. Things all made more sense now. “Yes, I suppose I am a prisoner. I suppose that Enki brought me here. Do you know where we are?”
“We’re in the Palace of the Aquifer,” she said. “Or rather, we are beneath it.”
“Are you also a prisoner?”
“Yes, I suppose I am,” she said.
I lay quietly then, trying to work out how to sit up without crying out.
* * *
Her name was Ningal. She said she was a goddess and a daughter of Enki. She claimed to be the mother of the young goddess Inanna, whose wedding I had just been to.
“If you are really you, then I saw you in your temple clothes,” I said. “With your wings on. On your way to temple. But I did not know your name.”
“You have not heard my name before?”
“There are so many goddesses,” I said. “All your names sound the same. But I do know Inanna’s name, and Enki’s too. And I have seen both of them.”
Ningal was silent.
“Where is your daughter now?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I fear I have put her in terrible danger.”
* * *
There was nothing dry in our clay-floored cell, no blankets or straw – nothing to keep us warm or comfortable. I was in the linen tunic I had been wearing at the feast, although it was now damp and muddy. Ningal was naked. She did have a soft shine to her, but it was a useless light; all it allowed, very dimly, was me to have a guess at where she was.
“What is this light in you?”
“It’s something called melam. It keeps us young and helps us heal.”
“I’ve heard about melam.”
She put out one warm hand on to my arm. “Ninshubar, are you here to spy on me?”
I considered this. I would never spy on anyone. Unless it was part of a plan that I had. Unless there was great honour in it. But what could I say to convince Ningal of that, when she had no idea who I was?
“Ningal, it will be hard for you to judge the weight of this, but the only answer I can give you is that I do not think I have ever done anything wrong.”
She laughed, a lovely sound.
“Why is that funny?” I said.
“Because I think my father Enki would say the same thing. But I tell you, Ninshubar, he is not a good man.”
“I can see there is no point trying to persuade you of this. All the same, I have always done what was right.”
“I am glad life has been so simple for you,” she said, a little sharp.
I said nothing to that.
There was a moment’s more silence, and then she said: “I’m sorry, Ninshubar. That was rude.”
“If you saw me in the light, you would not have said it.”
“What would I see in the light?”
“Scars,” I said. “Many scars. If you always do the right thing, that is what you win for yourself. Scars, more scars, and then when your scars have scars on them, death.”
“I am not as brave as you,” she said.
“No one is braver than me. You should not feel bad.”
Again, her lovely laugh. I put my hand out to her this time, and patted her arm.
* * *
The damp floor and walls of our cell, its exact size and all its smells, became very familiar to me. And Ningal, too, became my familiar. I learned to trust the feel of her arm, to trust that there was goodness in her, stranger that she was.
She said to me: “Ninshubar, how can you be sure that it’s always right you’re doing?”
“I’m only sure that I think it’s the right thing, and that I have pondered what the right thing is, and then I have done what I think is the right thing. I try to take everything into account, and I make my calculations. It is not easy, and as I have told you, often all you win is suffering.”
“I wish I had known you before, Ninshubar, and that you could have known my daughter. You would have been a good friend to us.”
“There is still time,” I said.
* * *
We sat together, our arms touching, against the dripping clay wall in the blackness. I was still in a great deal of pain, although of course I did not tell the goddess.
I said: “I know what I have done to be here. I have refused to submit to him. But what is it that you did to get in here, a great goddess of Ur?”
“I took something from him that he felt to be his alone.” She put her hand out and held my hand in the darkness. “I took something from my husband, too.”
“So they are both angry with you. What is it that you stole?”
I thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then she said: “I could never have babies with humans, like the other Anunnaki can. And you know we Anunnaki, we cannot seem to breed with each other here on Earth. When my husband and I came down here to this realm, we had our two children with us, Utu and Ereshkigal, and it should have been enough. But I began to dream of another child. And I got pregnant with Inanna.”
“Why can’t you breed?”
“I think it’s the air,” she said. “We are not used to it. Anyway, I wanted the baby. But I feared that she would die inside me. At first, I felt her kicking strongly, but as the weeks went by, her kicks grew weaker, and my belly did not grow as it should have.”
“Go on,” I said.
“Enki was away. So, I went to where he hides the things.” She paused. “Have you ever been to the Temple of the Waves, at the edge of city here?”
“I am the protector of that temple!”
“You amaze me!”
“Only with the truth.”
“Well, you will know then that there is a statue there of Nammu, the mother of the gods. Enki hides things beneath her, although he thinks no one knows. So I went in at night, and I moved the statue. It took me hours and hours to move her, but I did it. And underneath there was his melam, in an old bronze box. There was not much, and I knew it was everything Enki had. That he had spent years collecting it. That he had lied to everyone about it, when the sky gods came begging for it, saying he had none left. Anyway, I could have taken just a little. But I didn’t. I ate all of it.”
“Ah.”
“I went back to Ur as if nothing had happened. But then that wasn’t enough for me. So I went up into the mountains, to the place where my husband hid things in the first days. I did not think he had any melam left; he had sworn to me it was finished. But there was some there, and I ate that too. I ate all of it.”
“And then Inanna thrived?”
“She at once began to grow.”
“The miracle Anunnaki.”
“Yes, but I have always known I would be found out. And now they have both found out, and they have worked out together that it was me who took all of it. So now I will be punished. Enki will torture me, to make sure all the melam is gone, and then he is going to kill me, Ninshubar, because really, that is what I have done to him.”
“And your husband will not help you?”
“I do not think he will. And you should know too, whatever you have done, Enki is going to kill you. This is a place that people don’t come back from.”
I laughed at this, and then clutched at my ribs, trying to breathe through the pain.
“Ningal, this is not the first time I have been about to die. We need to work out where we are, and how to get out. Everything after that, we will work out as we go.”
“Oh!” she said, almost cheerful. Her wounds had healed much faster than mine. “I do know where we are. I came down here once with Isimud once. We are in the dungeons, underneath the palace, right down deep in the Earth.”
“I need to know the detail of it.”
“It is a long time ago. But we came down through the guard block, along a long underground corridor, and then down some flights of stairs. With no doors leading off the stairs, as far as I can remember. Then at the bottom of the stairs, we went down another corridor, and there were cells on both sides, and at the far end there was an entrance out onto water, a passage out for small boats. And in that corridor, in the floor, there were trap doors, with prisoners under each.”
I looked up at the ceiling, and for a moment I imagined I could see the smallest crack of light.
But very, very high up above us.
“Ah,” I said.
She said: “Do not think I am proud of what I did here, in the first days.”
But I was thinking about the trap door.
* * *
We had each taken a corner to do our private business in. It turned out the private business of goddesses smelled just as bad as mine. We had nothing to wipe ourselves on. In one of the “good corners”, there was a bucket of brackish water, but that was for drinking only, not washing. There was no food at all.
It was vital to keep our bearings, and not go too close to the business corners.
“I wonder why you are in here with me,” she said.
“Is it a game?” I said. “Is he playing with us?”
