And so my life as a temple slave began. I could have shrivelled like a sea-plum in the hot sun, but instead I thrived. We in my spirit clan are hard to kill, when we insist upon living.
The strange and crowded place I found myself in had a name: Eridu.
Many people lived in this city, so many people that I would never know all their names. I had to learn to walk past each new person, when all my instincts told me to stop and ask who they were.
The high walls all around the city protected these people from storms and invaders, and the people grew their food, and hunted, on the river plains outside the walls. This was a camp that they lived in all year round, although it took me a while to understand that.
Indeed, for three full moons I walked everywhere with my mouth hanging open. I was a fool, but I could not be ashamed of it. Chariots, wheeled carts, potteries, kilns, metal making, great factories churning out clay bricks, rivers carved out by human hands: it was a city of wonders. I wanted to know how everything worked, and how everything was done. It is always best to know how to do things.
My new home in this city was a holy place called the Temple of the Waves. Although at first it struck me as a grand and awe-inspiring place, it was in fact an old and simple temple, built a very long time before from clay bricks and roof tiles.
There was one room for the congregation, and behind that a small room for the most secret ceremonies. That secret back room led out into a small yard, with high walls all around. At one end there was an ancient vine, thick and green and trained over a wooden frame, providing shelter for a cooking fire and a few cushioned seats. Along one side of the yard there were four sleeping cells, one of which was given to me.
Yes, it was a simple place, by the standards of Sumer, and yet it had its jewels, which might bear comparison anywhere.
First the paintings, in the main room of the temple. The gods, in these very ancient paintings, looked so real that you felt they might reach out and touch you. Beneath these paintings were the strange patterns, pressed into the wall plaster, that the people of Sumer used to record their most holy secrets.
And then there was the statue. I do not think there was ever a finer statue in all of Sumer. The body was carved from wood, the face from clay, and she had been painted with such vivid realism that she might have been a living woman.
It was a likeness of the goddess who once lived here: the goddess Nammu, queen of the Anunnaki, which is the name the people of Sumer give to the highest gods of their land.
The statue had hair of a kind I had never seen before: golden curls, heaped up high onto her head. The skin was painted a golden brown, the colour of a cheetah, and the eyes, inset with huge gems, were the blue of a midday summer sky. Could Nammu have really looked like that?
It was said that the goddess once slept in one of the cells out in the courtyard at the back of the temple, and in those days, there were many priestesses. But no one expected the goddess to return, and now there was only one priestess here: the woman in black, who had bought me for one shekel. Her name was Dulma.
Dulma was a good woman, but she was infuriated, in the early days, by what she saw as my stupidity. Why did I not know how to use a bath house? Why did I insist on sleeping outside? Why could I not be trusted to make a simple pot of tea? And why, above all things, was I so slow to learn Sumerian?
I did struggle with the language. In my own country, I was known to be a superb linguist. I spoke fourteen languages, some of them known to only a handful of people. All the same, the Sumerian came quite slowly to me at first. The names of some plants and animals, and some foods, were familiar. Everything else made no sense to me until I had forced myself to learn it. It was an ugly language.
“When you hear the gods speak it,” Dulma said, “you will not think it ugly.”
Dulma told me that the gods of Sumer walked about on the streets, just as men did, even in the heat of the day. They did not hide in dark caves, as the gods did in my own country. Here they were more like tribal leaders than gods. They spoke to people, face to face. Therefore, I must speak their language: that first over everything.
Dulma had bought me from the market to be the temple orphan, which meant cleaning, cooking and fetching water. But when I had been there a handful of moons, a man came in off the front steps of the temple with a look of ready violence in him. I thought, Better do it quick. So I shoved him, kicked his legs out from him, and put him down hard on the ground.
After that Dulma gave me an eight-pointed star, the sign of Nammu, carved out of hippo ivory. She tied it to my neck with a thin piece of leather.
“Now you are the protector of the temple.”
I was still a slave, but a better sort of slave.
“I will need knives also, if I am to protect this place,” I said. “I will make my own if I can find the right stone. I am a master flintknapper.”
“No doubt you are,” said Dulma.
In the afternoon ceremonies, beneath Nammu’s exquisite statue, Dulma would kill a cat, or a pigeon, on the little clay-brick altar, and say the prayers that were sacred to the goddess. Then she would daub the animal blood on the foreheads of the small band of worshippers who still came to the temple. Most were old fishermen and their wives, praying for sons who were out on the water.
“You know if we had a real god to cut, then many more would come,” Dulma said.
“Would a god let you cut them?” I said, very surprised.
“Yes, it is a common rite. They heal quickly, because of the melam they have in them.”
“I should like some melam,” I said. “I would like to heal quicker.”
Dulma laughed. “Not only you, Ninshubar.”
* * *
So I had been told of the gods. But they were not real to me, until one day I came out with my broom to sweep around the altar and there was a man there, kneeling down in front of Nammu’s statue.
A man, but not a man.
He had rich brown hair, very straight, a beard close cut, and dark brown skin, with a strange green sheen to it, which lay thin and tight over his muscles.
The man looked up at me with the eyes of a leopard, and I felt the power ripple off him, wave after wave.
On the wall directly behind him was the painting of a man who looked just like him.
Enki.
Nammu’s son.
His bare arms were strung with many heavy bracelets, made of some ancient metal. His clothes were a thing of quite extraordinary beauty. He was dressed in a cloth that had been dyed blood red, and then beautifully, intricately stitched into panels and layered skirts that moved over each other so seamlessly and elegantly as he stood to look at me. How many people had it taken, and how long, to make these clothes?
“You’re new,” Enki said. It was the first time I had heard an Anunnaki speak, the strange accent they had. “And you are tall. Quite something.”
He was tall, too, and I could see that he was dangerous.
My hands moved, involuntarily, to my knives.
“Handsome, too,” he said, “if one doesn’t mind a scar or two.”
I heard Dulma behind me.
“No one is going to call you new,” Enki said to the priestess.
“No, my lord,” Dulma said.
“No sign of my mother, then?” he said.
“No, my lord,” Dulma said.
“I’m joking,” he said, laughing. “I imagine that you might have told someone if the mother of the Anunnaki suddenly appeared!”
“Yes, my lord,” Dulma said, doing an awkward bow, but with her eyes still on him.
Enki looked up at the statue of Nammu, her sapphire eyes very bright in the dark gold of her face, and around at the small clean room with its stamped-earth floor. Then his eyes settled at last upon me.
“You’ve looked after this place well,” he said.
“Thank you, my lord,” Dulma said.
“I did not intend to be away so long,” he said, looking up again at the statue of his mother.
“No, my lord,” she said.
“I will be in temple tomorrow,” Enki said. “For the full rites. I will send a priest for you both, and you will have seats at the front.”
“We are honoured, my lord,” Dulma said.
When Enki had gone, Dulma said to me: “Perhaps we will see the moon goddess that they call Inanna.”
“Who is Inanna?”
“She is the new Anunnaki. Born in Ur, now brought here to marry Enki’s son.”
“And why do we want to see her?”
“They say she is destined for greatness,” Dulma said. “I would like to put my eyes on her, that is all. There might be luck in it.”
* * *
When I saw the inside of the Temple of the Aquifer, with its army of priests, in blood-red robes, and its great arching ceilings, then I saw that I had not yet understood the scale of the city that I lived in. As we pressed forwards through the crowds, the smoke and the incense, I walked with my head tipped back, trying to take in all the paintings on the walls and columns.
At the front of the temple, before the altar, someone had set up what looked like a bed. It was covered in rich, red cloth, and with many shining pillows.
A priest pointed us to a wooden bench right there in the front, and Dulma and I found ourselves sitting only an arm’s length from the bed.
“What is going to happen?” I whispered to her.
“You will see,” she said, with a knowing arch of one eyebrow.
* * *
Well, I did see. The god Enki appeared from behind the altar, and a heartbeat later, a woman appeared beside him. A thin, dark woman, with jewels tied into her long, straight hair.
Heartbeats later, priests appeared around each, and then the two gods stood there naked.
When I saw what they were going to do next, I nearly laughed out loud.
Then I only stared.
I had never seen anyone have sex before, only heard people doing it in the dark.
Now these two gods had sex before me on a bed that I could have leaned out and touched. They were so close I could smell the heavy oils they had been daubed in, and, later, the smell of their sex.
At first a sexual thrill went through me, but after a while, I only felt awkward, and bored. Then came the shock again.
Once a month, when he was in the city, the great god Enki lay with his wife in the Temple of the Aquifer, with all the gods of the city, and all the priests, and as many others as could cram into the temple, all watching. He did this so that the sun and the moon would continue to rise over the Earth; so that the crops would come; so that the river would flood: this was the law in this country.
Sometimes it was his wife, sometimes one of her priestesses; sometimes instead he would pull out a woman from the congregation, and she would be honoured. Sometimes young brides would be brought to him, before they went to their new husbands. But today it was the turn of his wife and she lay before me receiving his attentions with no expression at all upon her face.
It did remind me of the secret places, of the ceremonies that only the elders are meant to ever see, and I saw that it was holy work to these people. For his part Enki appeared to do it with relish, and endless patience, and all the while I could have reached out one hand and touched the cloth of the great bed they were lying on. At one point, I found myself looking straight into Enki’s eyes. Again, I had to stifle shocked laughter.
Enki warmed to his task. Drums began; the priests began chanting. The crowd shouted encouragement, even breaking into applause.
At one point a group of women came forwards to sing a hymn.
“Our lord is the honey man,” they sang, their hands held aloft. “He is the one her womb loves best. He who ploughs her, ploughs her well!”
Enki entwined himself around the goddess. I looked up amidst the huge columns; all over the temple walls, there were paintings of him doing exactly this.
Dulma whispered to me, and pointed: there was Inanna, the little moon goddess that everyone was so eager to see. Inanna sat unsmiling on the benches to our right, with two young lions sitting neatly in front of her. She was very small compared to the soldiers who sat either side of her. As I looked, she turned her eyes to me.
Her eyes were the black of a night sky that had been robbed of all its stars.
They gave out no light at all.
A great shudder went through me, of fear, but also of a high emotion I could not yet name. I looked away quickly.
Afterwards I said to Dulma: “These gods are not like the gods in my country.”
Dulma stifled a yawn. “I can tell you they are not.”
“Do you think his wife enjoyed it?” I said. “She seemed so limp, like a dead rabbit.”
“This is their duty,” the priestess said.
As we walked back to the Temple of the Waves, through the crowded, dusty streets, she said: “Ninshubar, he may call you to temple. You should be prepared for that.”
“Why?”
“He likes strangeness. He likes to mix up new blood in his stock. If he picks you, Ninshubar, you must go with him.”
I heard what she said, but I already knew: I would never submit to that.
* * *
In the afternoon, I went down to the slave market.
Dulma sent me out at this time every day to buy food for our dinner. Normally she would send me for vegetables and some lentils, but after the Temple of the Aquifer, she seemed to be in the mood for a celebration, and she said: “Tonight we will eat fish. Get some small ones and make sure they are fresh. And some mountain greens, fill up a basket, and get two lemons and some salt.”
So I went out into the streets with a round basket over one arm, and a pot tucked inside that for the fish, and my temple chits in my pocket to pay for it all.
Dulma often said to me: “Why don’t you run away from me, if you are such a good runner? What is holding you here when you can run like the wind? When you are the greatest runner the world has ever seen?”
I would say nothing. Now I went down to the slave market, on my way to the food market, just as I did every day. I crouched on a wall, and began my process. I would look at the face of every merchant, as carefully as I could, looking for a face that I recognised. And then when I had finished looking at the slavers, when I was sure I had seen every one of them, I would look at the face of every slave. I must not miss a face. Most of the slaves were captured soldiers and villagers from the north: spoils of the war against King Akka. But some, you could see, were not from the north. They had been snatched from further away. These were slaves I looked at most closely.
Because what if the men came through again, and I was not there to ask them: what became of my Potta? Did you kill him, or is he still in the world?
Or what if the Potta was brought through this market, and I was not there to find him and save him?
That day, as every day, the men from the boat were not there. My Potta was not there. So, I walked on with the basket, to buy some fish, and greens, and some salt and two lemons.