Turtledove, Harry - Novel 12

by Between the Rivers (v2. 1)

  Agum’s voice was a bare thread of whisper: “If we’d been in there, he might have grabbed us like that.”

  He might have grabbed me like that, Sharur thought. For whatever reason, Enzuabu had taken him for an enemy, although, as he’d said, Enzuabu and Engibil were at peace, no less than their cities were. Sharur scratched his head in bewilderment. He’d come through Zuabu and its hinterland several times, going to and from the Alashkurru Mountains. Never once had the god of Zuabu taken the least notice of him.

  A thought much like that must have crossed Agum’s mind, for the guard asked, “Did you somehow anger Enzuabu, master merchant’s son?”

  “Not in any way I know,” Sharur answered. “Come the morning, though, I will make a forgiveness-offering even

  “It is good,” Agum said. “I do not want a god angry at us.”

  “No, nor I.” Sharur watched Enzuabu until the god shrank down to accommodate himself to his temple once more. Only then did the merchant think it safe to lie down and go back to sleep.

  He greeted the rise of Shumukin, the lord of the sun, with a prayer set to the same music as that for Nusku the night before. Shumukin was, without a doubt, the most reliable god the folk of Kudurru knew. His one failing was that he sometimes did not know his own strength.

  After telling Harharu and Mushezib what Agum and he had seen in the night, Sharur said, “I will buy two birds for the forgiveness-offering,” and started back toward the village closest to Zuabu.

  “Why not go into the city?” Mushezib asked. “It’s right here before us.”

  Sharur shook his head. “I do not wish to enter the stronghold of Enzuabu on earth before offering to the god, not when I do not know how badly I may have offended him.” Mushezib ran a hand through his thick, elaborately curled beard before finally nodding.

  Having traded jewelry for a pair of trussed doves, Sharur carried them to the caravan. He laid them in a fine bowl, one for which he had intended to gain a high price from the men of Alashkurru. No help for it: an offering of his worst would have inflamed Enzuabu against him had the god not been angry before.

  He held the bowl with the two doves out toward the walls of Zuabu and humbled himself before the city god: “Lord Enzuabu, if I have enraged thee—forgive, I beg! Lord Enzuabu, if I have affronted thee—forgive, I beg! Lord Enzuabu, if I have insulted thee—forgive, I beg! Lord Enzuabu, if I have offended thee—forgive, I beg! Lord Enzuabu, if I have slighted thee—forgive, I beg!”

  After running through a long litany of the ways in which he might have incurred Enzuabu’s displeasure, he twisted off the doves’ heads and let their blood fill the bowl. Then, using only the first two fingers of his right hand, he sprinkled the blood on his chest and his kilt. He beckoned first Harharu and then Mushezib forward, and did the same with them. Last of all, he sprinkled the lead donkey with the doves’ blood. The donkey snorted and twitched its big ears. It did not like the smell of blood.

  “Lord Enzuabu—forgive, I beg!’’ Sharur cried. “May thy wrath be shattered like this bowl I give to thee!” With all his might, he dashed the thin, lovely bowl against the hard ground. It smashed into a hundred pieces. The doves blood made a red star on the dirt.

  “It is accomplished,” Harharu intoned, almost as if he had expected it would not be. “Now let us continue.”

  “Now let us continue,” Sharur echoed. Harharu pulled on the rope to get the lead donkey moving. But, as the caravan passed Zuabu by, he got no sense that Enzuabu had in fact forgiven him. True, the god did not rise up in fury, as he might have done, but he yielded nothing, either. He simply bided his time.

  West and north of the lands Zuabu ruled was a barren, unirrigated stretch of land no city or god claimed. Little dust demons swirled around the caravan, now nervously running away from the men and donkeys, now skittering up close to see if they might cause some mischief. When one of them got under his feet and tried to trip him, Sharur took from his belt the eyed amulet of Engibil. “Begone!” he cried, and, with little frightened gasps, the dust demons fled from the power of the god.

  Wild donkeys fled from the caravan, too; the power of man sufficed to put them in fear. Their hooves kicked up more dust than all the dust demons in the world could have raised. Sharur sent Agum and one of the assistant donkey handlers, a wide-shouldered man named Rukagina, after them with bows. The hunters returned later in the day with a gutted carcass slung from a pole.

  Sharur led the cheers for them. “Tonight we feast!” he cried. Wild donkey might not be so flavorsome as mutton or beef, but everyone would be able to gorge himself on meat.

  The caravan crew were not the only hunters on the plain. Not long after Agum and Rukagina came back with the donkey, a lion roared nearby. That fierce, thunderous cough made Sharur’s hand fly to the hilt of his knife before he realized it had done so. It also made the donkeys of the caravan, which had been restive at the sight and smell of one of their kind slain, suddenly become docile as lambs.

  Harharu chuckled. “They depend on us to protect them from the wild beasts, and they know it,” he said to Sharur.

  Off in the distance, the wild donkeys threw up a great cloud of dust. The roar sounded again, and several more after it in quick succession. Vultures spiraled down out of the sky, as they had done when Agum and Rukagina killed. Then the birds could feast on the offal the men had left behind. Now they would have to wait until the lions were done before taking their share.

  Sharur set his hand on the neck of the lead donkey. “We will give them what they expect, then,” he said. The donkey snapped at him. He jerked his hand away in a hurry. Harharu laughed out loud.

  That evening, the guards and donkey handlers gathered brush and dry donkey dung for a couple of cookfires by a tiny stream. They and Sharur held gobbets of donkey meat over the flames on sticks, roasting them till they were charred black on the outside but still red and juicy within. Sharur burned his fingers, burned his lips, burned his tongue. He did not care. His belly would be full.

  Rukagina’s eyes glowed in the firelight. For a moment, Sharur, seeing that, simply accepted it. Then he knew something was amiss. The eyes of dogs and foxes, wild cats and lions, gave back the fire that way: he had watched the beasts prowling round the edges of many camps. Men’s eyes did not normally reflect the light in the same way.

  Demons’ eyes did, though. “Rukagina!” Sharur said sharply.

  Rukagina stared at him. The donkey handler’s eyes glowed brighter still, as if the fire were behind them, not in front. “Rukagina, yes,” he said, as if he did not recognize his own name. Then he laughed, a hideous cry that made all his companions exclaim in alarm. “Rukagina is eaten, eaten!” he roared.

  “A pestilence!” Harharu said. “A demon of this desert has seized him.”

  “Yes,” Sharur said, and brandished Engibil’s eyed amulet, as he had at the little dust demons on the road.

  This one was made of sterner stuff. Its laugh came again through Rukagina’s mouth. “I am the spirit of this desolation,” it declared. “Your god is far from home, and lazy even in his own city. He has no power over me here. The desert is my city. Here I am a god. Maybe with this man I shall cause a true city to rise here. Then I shall be a true god, a great god, greater than your god.”

  Maybe the demon could do that. Maybe Engibil had been just such a wandering desert spirit once. But Sharur did not intend to let the demon aggrandize itself at the expense of one of his men. “Seize him!” he shouted, and the caravan guards piled onto Rukagina.

  With the demon in him, the donkey handler fought back with more than human strength. But he was not stronger than all the guards together. They held him down, two men on each arm, three on each leg. He howled like a fox. He hissed like a serpent. He snarled like a lion, and tried to bite like one. And ever and always, he kept seeking to throw the guards off him. .

  Mushezib drew his bronze knife from its sheath. ‘ ‘Maybe I should yank up his beard and cut his throat like a sheep’s,” the g
uard captain said. “That would make the demon flee.”

  “Yes, but whom would it seize next?” Sharur asked. “You, perhaps?”

  “Avert the omen!” Mushezib exclaimed, and spat to his left side.

  Sharur walked over to the packs the men had taken from the donkeys’ backs when they stopped for the night. Had he paid less attention to the way the beasts were loaded, he might have searched till sunrise without finding what he sought. As things were, he ran it to earth like a cheetah bringing down a gazelle gone lame: a small, plain pot, its stopper sealed with pitch.

  “What have you got there?” Mushezib asked.

  “Essence of the marigold,” Sharur answered. “The Alashkurrut esteem it highly, and every caravan sells many jars to them. It’s sovereign against scorpion stings—of which they have many—snakebite, jaundice, toothache, stomach trouble, difficult breathing, diseases of the privates ... and possession by a demon.”

  “Strong stuff!” the guard captain said admiringly.

  “Engibil grant it be strong enough.” Sharur used the point of his own knife to scrape away the pitch and pry up the lid to the pot. He was used to being glad Engibil took less part in human affairs than a god like Enzuabu or, worse, Enimhursag. But when a desert demon mocked his deity, he wondered if he should have second thoughts. .

  A sweet, spicy odor rose from the pot when he opened it. Beckoning for Mushezib to come with him, he walked over to demon-possessed Rukagina and squatted beside him. Seeing—and perhaps smelling—what he bore, the spirit made the donkey handler clench his jaws tight, like a two- year-old who refused to eat his mashed parsnips.

  Mushezib seized Rukagina’s beard and pulled with all his formidable strength. Altogether against the demon’s will, the donkey handler’s mouth came open. Sharur poured half a potful of essence of marigold down him. Rukagina was trying to cry out at that moment, which meant the medicine all but drowned him. Instead of being able to spit it out, he coughed and choked . . . and swallowed.

  He let out a cry that frightened into silence the small crawling and creeping, piping and cheeping creatures around the caravan’s campfires. His entire body convulsed, so violently that the men holding him were flung from his limbs. Something dark came forth from his mouth and nose, from his eyes and ears, and was gone before Sharur could be sure he had seen it.

  Rukagina sat up and looked around. A hand went to his chin. “Who’s been pulling my beard?’’ he demanded. Had Mushezib yanked on Sharur’s whiskers like that, his chin would have been sore, too.

  “Look at the fire,’’ he told the donkey handler. When Rukagina did, Sharur studied his eyes. They did not flash as they had before. “The gods be praised: we have driven the demon from you.’’

  “Demon?” Rukagina said. “What demon? I was sitting by the fire, eating a slice of the donkey’s liver, and, and ...” His voice trailed away. “I do not remember what happened after that.”

  “As well that you do not,” Sharur said, to which the rest of the caravan crew nodded in unison, as if a single will controlled them.

  “Tell me!” Rukagina said. His companions were happy enough to oblige him.

  Thoughtfully, Sharur replaced the stopper in the pot of marigold essence. Among the supplies the caravan carried was a small pot of pitch: no telling when someone might need to stick something to something else. As he used a twig to daub it on and reseal the stopper so what was left of the medicine would not spill, Mushezib came up to him and said, “That is a strong medicine.”

  “Yes, it is,” Sharur agreed. “Now that I can tell the Alashkurrut I saw with my own eyes how it routed a strong demon, I can charge more for it.”

  “True enough,” the guard captain said. Eyeing the pot, he went on in musing tones: “If it works as well for diseases of the privates as for driving out demons, it is a very strong medicine indeed.”

  “Ah,” Sharur looked down at the pot he held in his hands. He hefted it. “Do you know,” he said, “I very much doubt the Alashkurrut would want a pot that has already had half the medicine drunk from it. Why don’t you take it, Mushezib? You can dispose of it as you like.”

  “The master merchant’s son is kind.” Mushezib made sure he did not seem too eager. “I shall do just that.”

  2

  Past the haunted desert, three cities lay between Gibil and the Yarmuk River. In neither of the first two, both ruled by ensis, did the caravan encounter any difficulty with men or gods. Sharur still wondered why Enzuabu had seemed so hostile. Even the demon of the desolation had mocked Engibil. The omen struck Sharur as worrisome. “I wonder if the demon troubled the caravan out of Imhursag,” he said to Harharu.

  “I doubt it,” the donkeymaster answered. ‘‘The Imhur- sagut have their heads so full of their god, there’s no room in them for anything else.”

  “In that case, I am glad to be empty-headed,” Sharur said, and Harharu laughed. So did Sharur, though a moment later he wondered what was funny. If Enimhursag protected his people and Engibil did not protect his, which was the stronger god?

  But a city’s strength, as Sharur well knew, depended on more than the strength of its god. It w^s the strengths of god and men together. Engibil might be weaker than some, but Gibil, as the metal merchant knew, was by no means to be despised. Where gods were weak, the strength of men could grow, as could their ability to act for themselves. He cherished what freedom he had: cherished it and wanted more.

  Instead of going through the territory of Aggasher, the city that controlled the usual crossing point for the Yarmuk, Sharur swung the caravan north through the debatable land just to the east of it. Eniaggasher, the city’s goddess, ruled it in her own right. He found dealing with men who were hardly more than mouthpieces for their city’s deity tedious at any time. Now he also feared they would try to delay him or, worse, to help the cause of the caravan from Im- hursag, whose men remained similarly in the hands of their god.

  “I know what you’re doing,” Harharu said when Sharur ordered the turn. ‘‘This wouldn’t work in springtime, you know.”

  ‘‘We’re not in springtime,” Sharur said with a smile. “The sun is high, and the river is low.”

  A couple of herdsmen and a couple of peasants stared as the caravan came down to the Yarmuk. They were folk of Aggasher. One day, Eniaggasher would chance to look through their eyes when a caravan from Gibil used this ford to avoid crossing by the city. Then there might be trouble. But it had not happened yet. Eniaggasher paid little attention to these outliers under her control, in the same way that a man, under most circumstances, paid little attention to his toenails.

  A goddess dwelt in the Yarmuk, too, of course. Before venturing into the river, Sharur walked up to the bank, a gleaming bronze bracelet inset with polished jet in his hands. “For thee, Eniyarmuk, to adorn thyself and make thyself more beautiful,” he said, and dropped the bracelet into the muddy water.

  The sacrifice made, he took off his sandals, pulled down his kilt, and stepped naked into the Yarmuk to test the ford. The sand and mud of the river bottom squelched up between his toes. Little fish nibbled at his legs. The cool water seemed to caress his body as he advanced. He took that for a sign the river goddess had accepted his offering.

  Up to his knees he went, up to his thighs, up to his waist and beyond. If the water got much deeper, the donkeys would have trouble crossing. “Let us be able to ford in safety, Eniyarmuk, and I will give thee another bracelet, like unto the first, when we reach thy farther bank,” he said, and pressed on across the river.

  Before long, his navel, and then his privates, too, came out of the water. He kept on until, wet and dripping, he emerged on the western bank of the Yarmuk. From there, he waved back at the rest of the caravan. Guards and donkey handlers got out of their clothes. Rukagina thoughtfully picked up Sharur’s kilt and sandals and carried them above his head along with his own gear. The men led the donkeys into the river. .

  As Sharur had prayed they would, they made the crossing without i
ncident: almost without incident, at any rate, for a couple of men and a couple of donkeys came out of the water with leeches clinging to their legs. They had to start a fire there by the riverbank, and use burning twigs to make the worms’ heads let go. The guards cried out in disgust. One of the donkey handlers cried out, too, when a donkey kicked him. Despite the leeches, Sharur gave Eniyarmuk the second bracelet.

  He went up and down the length of the caravan to see if the trip through the ford had damaged anything. A couple of bolts of red-dyed linen were soaked, but everything else seemed all right. He sighed. “Well, we’re not going to get much for those, not with the color running and stained with mud,” he said.

  “For a fording, we did well,” Harharu said.

  “I know that,” Sharur answered. “And we saved ourselves trouble from Eniaggasher, unless I miss my guess. But even so—” He scowled. He did not like anything to go wrong, and was still young enough tq be easily aggrieved when perfection eluded him. He also begrudged the time spent going down small paths back to the main road.

  West of the river, as far as canals took its waters and those of a couple of small tributaries, the land might as well have been part of Kudurru. The people were of the same stock. They spoke the same language, although with a rather singsong intonation. They worshiped the same great gods and lived in the same sort of reed-hut farming villages.

  But they had no cities, and no city gods. None of the demons dwelling in this part of the world had been strong enough to consolidate any great number of people under his control. Like the spirit that haunted the waste west of Zuabu, the demons west of the Yarmuk might have had ambitions, but as yet lacked the power to make those ambitions real.

  West of the Yarmuk, too, more and more stretches of ground were bare, dry wasteland: country that might have been fertile if water reached it, but that was too far from any stream or rose too high to be irrigated. The mountains of Alashkurru rose higher above the horizon here. Back in Gibil, they were visible only on the clearest days: a deep, mysterious smudge denting the edge of the sky. Not here. West of the Yarmuk, Sharur felt them looking down on him.