And, as Habbazu walked along the Street of Smiths, he watched with keen interest. His eyes flicked to left and right, studying donkey trains, peering into smithies and shops. “We have smiths in Zuabu,” he said after a while. “I do not think we have so many smiths as do you Giblut. We have merchants. I do not think we have merchants so busy as do you Giblut.”
Sharur’s chest puffed out with pride. “Trade here is slow these days, too,” he said. Habbazu did not look as if he believed him, though that was simple truth.
Ereshguna was pressing a stylus into a tablet of damp clay when Sharur led Habbazu into his home. His father looked unhappy as he wrote, which likely meant he was reckoning up accounts. As trade with other cities and other lands declined, the accounts gave less and less reason for a man to look anything but unhappy.
Thus, when Sharur and the thief came in, Ereshguna set down the tablet with every sign of relief. “I greet you, my son,” he said, bowing. He turned to Habbazu and bowed again. “And I greet your companion as well, though I have not yet had the pleasure and honor of making his acquaintance.”
“Father, I present to you Habbazu, who visits Gibil from the city of Zuabu,” Sharur said. “He practices the Zuabi trade. Habbazu, here is Ereshguna my father, the head of the house of Ereshguna.”
Habbazu bowed. He had polished manners when he chose to use them. “I greet you, Ereshguna of the house of Ereshguna. Your fame is wide, as is the fame of your house. But you should be most famous for the mercy your splendid son showed a thief who intended to steal from his caravan outside Zuabu.”
“Ah.” Ereshguna’s eyebrows rose. “You are not any Zuabi thief. You are that particular Zuabi thief. I did not know your name.”
“Yes, I am that particular thief.” Habbazu bowed once more.
“When I met him outside Zuabu, I did not know his name,” Sharur said.
His grandfather’s ghost shouted in his ear, and, no doubt, in Ereshguna’s: “Are you mad, boy? Has the sun baked the wits from your head? Have the demons of idiocy crept in through your ears and built a home between them? Why do you bring a Zuabi thief into this house? Do you want to wake up in the morning and find half the walls missing?”
“It will be all right, my father,” Ereshguna murmured in the tone people often used when ghosts interrupted their conversations with fellow mortals. Habbazu looked up at the ceiling and said nothing. That tone would have been familiar to him, too. Ereshguna clapped his hands together and, raising his voice, called for bread and onions and beer.
He set out an extra, partly filled cup for the ghost of Sharur’s grandfather, surely in the hope that, having consumed the essence of the beer, the ghost would grow gay or grow sleepy and would in any case shut up. To Sharur’s relief, that hope, or at least the last part of it, was realized.
Having drunk, having eaten, Ereshguna asked Sharur, “Why has Habbazu come to Gibil to practice the trade of the Zuabut?” Why did you bring him here? underlay the words.
In a voice as light and casual as he could make it, Sharur said, “Enzuabu charged Habbazu to steal something from the temple of Engibil: a cup of baked clay that came to the god’s house from the mountains of Alashkurru.”
“Really?” Ereshguna said. Sharur nodded. So did Habbazu. Ereshguna plucked at his beard. “Isn’t that interesting?”
“I thought so, Father,” Sharur said, having been too well brought up to say something as impolite as, What did I tell you
“Why such a fuss over one worthless cup?” Habbazu asked.
Sharur did not directly answer that question. Sharur could not directly answer that question, having sworn in the market square of Imhursag by all the gods of Kudurru that he would not. Instead, he said, “Think, thief. Would Enzuabu have sent you to Gibil to steal one worthless cup?”
“Who know what a god would do?” Habbazu returned. “Who can guess what is in a god’s mind?” But he leaned forward, his sharp-featured face alert. “Speaking as a mere man, though, I say you are likely right. And so I ask a different question: What is the true value of this cup that seems worthless?”
Again, Sharur did not answer. Again, Sharur could not answer. His father had taken no oath to speak of the power contained in the thing from the Alashkurru Mountains only to the folk of his own city. But Ereshguna said only, “We are not certain ourselves.” Sharur thought that wise; the less Habbazu heard, the less Enzuabu would learn.
Being no fool, Habbazu noticed he was getting something less than straightforward answers. “You know more than you are saying,” he remarked, although without any great rancor. .
“Yes, we know more than we are saying,” Sharur agreed. “You have come into our city to steal from our god. Should we be delighted at that? Should we drink ourselves foolish and dance in the street because of it? You have not come here to help Gibil. You have not come here to help the Giblut.”
“This is so,” Habbazu said frankly. His eyes flicked from Sharur to Ereshguna and back again, as they had flicked from donkey train to smithy as he walked along the Street of Smiths. In easy, relaxed tones, he went on, “If, though, you hated me as you might hate me, you would bind my hands and feet and deliver me to the temple of Engibil trussed like a hog for the slaughter, that the god of this city might punish me for my crime.”
“Nothing prevents our doing that now,” Ereshguna said.
“That is so, my master,” Habbazu said with a polite bow. “But it is not the first thought in your minds, as it would be had I fallen into the hands of, say, the Aggasherut. They would have given me over to Eniaggasher at once, to let the goddess do her worst to me.”
“We are not Aggasherut, for which I am glad,” Sharur replied. He scratched his cheek, at the line where his beard stopped. “Shall we bargain, thief from Zuabu?”
Habbazu smiled at him. “What else have we been doing?”
Sharur inclined his head. “You speak the truth; there can be no doubt of it. The question is, how much loyalty do you owe to a god who has twice sent you to steal from Giblut and twice left you at the mercy of Giblut?”
“That is half the question,” Habbazu said. “The other half is, how much loyalty do I owe to the Giblut who twice showed me mercy?”
“Even so,” Ereshguna agreed. “Also to be remembered is the question of how much mercy the said Giblut will continue to show you.”
“Believe me, my master, this question is never far from my mind,” the thief said. “You still have not said what you would have me do. Until I learn this, how can I judge whether I am more loyal to Enzuabu or more grateful to you for your mercy?”
“That is a fair question,” Ereshguna said slowly. Sharur nodded. It was, in fact, the question of the moment. Sharur felt fairly certain that he wanted Habbazu to steal the Alash- kurri cup from Engibil’s temple if he could. Of what should happen after that, of what would happen after that, he was less sure.
He did not want Habbazu to take the cup back to Enzuabu. The god of Zuabu might keep it for himself or might return it to the great gods of the Alashkurrut. In neither case would Gibil or the Giblut gain any credit with those great gods.
If Habbazu stole the cup and promised to deliver it into the hands of Sharur and Ereshguna, could he be trusted? Or would he say he would help the Giblut who had been merciful to him and then try to escape from Gibil with the cup and take it to the god who had ordered him to steal it?
If he did deliver it into the hands of Sharur and Ereshguna, what should they do with it? Sharur knew returning it to the great gods of the Alashkurrut would be the sure course, the safe course. He did not know whether he cared about the sure course, the safe course. The notion of smashing the cup, letting the power of the gods spill out of it, held an appalling sweetness. Sharur had suffered. Why should not the gods of the Alashkurrut suffer in turn?
He glanced over to his father and saw the same questions in Ereshguna’s eyes. Habbazu saw the intently thoughtful expressions on both their faces, too. “Perhaps, my masters,” he said wit
h surprising delicacy, “this is a matter you wish to discuss further between yourselves before telling me what you decide.”
“Perhaps,” Sharur said. “But perhaps, while we discuss this matter between ourselves, you will slide out the door and never again be seen by a Gibli who knows you for what you are.”
Habbazu bowed. “Perhaps,” he said with a broad smile.
Sharur’s grandfather’s ghost broke into the conversation: “Best thing you can do is knock the cursed Zuabi thief over the head and fling his body into a canal. No one will miss him, not in the least.”
“No, ghost of my grandfather. It would not do,” Sharur said. He said no more than that, not with Habbazu in earshot. But not only did the thief, know too much, Enzuabu also knew too much. If Habbazu vanished, the god of Zuabu was only too likely to send forth another thief, one Sharur would not be able to recognize.
“My son is right, ghost of my father,” Ereshguna said. His thoughts and Sharur’s might have been twin streams of molten bronze poured into the same mold. After a moment, he spoke directly to Sharur in a low voice: “I think we have no choice but to let the thief pay a call on the temple. He and only he knows which cup among the many in Engibil’s treasure contains the power of the Alashkurri gods. Once he has it, once we learn which it is, we go on from there.”
“Father, I think you are wise. I too think we have no other choice,” Sharur said, nodding. He turned to Habbazu. “You will pay a call on the temple. You will bring forth this Alashkurri cup. If we aid you, will you deliver it into our hands, not into the hands of Enzuabu?”
Habbazu hesitated. Had he agreed at once, with fulsome promises, Sharur would have been sure he was lying. As things were, he could not say with certainty whether the thief lied or told the truth—which, no doubt, was exactly what Habbazu wanted. He scowled, angry at himself and Habbazu both.
At last, the thief said, “I will deliver the cup into your hands, not into the hands of Enzuabu. Were it not for your forbearance, Enzuabu could not have sent me here. Were it not for your mercy, Enzuabu could not have ordered me to Gibil. I remember my debts. I repay them.”
“It is good,” Sharur said, hoping the thief remembered debts to men more than whatever he owed to the god of his city.
“Speak to me of the priests of Engibil,” Habbazu said. “Speak to me of their comings and goings. Speak to me of their prayers and offerings. Speak to me of their duties and rituals, that I may avoid them while they perform those duties and rituals.”
Now Sharur and Ereshguna hesitated in turn. In revealing, would they also be betraying? And then, before either of them could reply, Engibil spoke, his voice resounding inside Sharur’s mind as he said, You shall come at once to my temple. You shall come alone to my temple. You shall obey me.
7
“I will come at once to your temple. I will come alone to your temple. I will obey you,” Sharur said, and he left his father’s house, the house in which he had dwelt all his days, and he walked up the Street of Smiths toward Engi- bil’s temple. When the god spoke in that way, a man could not disobey.
Engibil must have spoken to Ereshguna at the same time as he ordered Sharur to come before him, for Ereshguna neither exclaimed in alarm nor shouted out questions. Hab- bazu did both, but Sharur took no notice of Habbazu, not then. All he noticed was the god’s resistless command.
As he walked up the Street of Smiths, his own thoughts slowly began to return. His will, however, remained enslaved to the god’s greater, stronger will. He could not stop his feet from moving closer to the temple, one step after another. But he could be bitterly amused at his folly—and also at Habbazu’s. So the thief had believed, as Sharur had believed, Engibil to be a drowsy god, a sleepy god? Would they had been right! Now Engibil, not so drowsy, not so sleepy, had caught them plotting against him. What would he do? Whatever he wants, Sharur thought. Fear made him tremble—all but his legs, which kept walking, walking, walking.
The temple loomed before him. The priest Burshagga stood waiting in front of the entrance as he approached. Sharur’s mouth shaped words: “I am come at the command of the great god. I am come at the order of the mighty god.”
“This I know,” Burshagga answered. “I was commanded to wait here. I was ordered to bring you before the god the moment you arrived.” His voice was steady, but fear had a home in his eyes. He was used to obeying the orders of Kimash the lugal, not those of Engibil.
Without another word, he turned and walked into the temple. Without another word, Sharur followed him into the temple, as he might have followed—as he often had followed—Kimash’s steward Inadapa into the palace of the lugal. But he had never been so afraid, following Inadapa.
Through the forecourts of the temple they went, Sharur behind Burshagga. Other priests looked up from their tasks as the two men went by, as Kimash the lugal’s servants and slaves might have looked up when Inadapa led someone past them. Sharur tried to read their faces. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, but that failed to reassure him. He reckoned the priests simply took his condemnation for granted. No man could successfully oppose a god’s direct will. Kimash ruled by distracting Engibil’s will, not by opposing it.
Up the many steps to Engibil’s audience chamber strode Burshagga. Up the many steps to Engibil’s audience chamber strode Sharur after him. Down the steps from Engibil’s audience chamber strode no beautiful courtesan, not today. Sharur regretted that. He would have liked his last memories before the god condemned him to be of something beautiful.
His heart pounded as he reached the top of the stairway. He told himself that was because he had climbed one step for each day in a year. But he knew his heart would have pounded no less had Engibil chosen to meet him in the forecourt of the temple, down at the level of the ground.
Burshagga did not precede him into the audience chamber. He gestured to the doorway and said, “The god awaits you within.”
Sharur already knew as much; Engibil’s radiance, brighter than the sunshine, streamed out through the entranceway. Having no choice but to go forward, he went forward with the best show of spirit he could muster.
Inside Engibil’s house on earth, the god sat on his gold- wrapped throne. Sharur cast himself down before Engibil. He felt no shame in doing so; he should have done likewise before the lugal on his throne.
Rise. The word resounded soundlessly inside Sharur’s head. He could not have disobeyed even had he wanted to. Willing his limbs not to tremble, willing his face to show none of the fear he felt, he got to his feet.
“Great god, mighty god, god who founded this city, god who made this town, I greet you,” Sharur said. “Tell me how I may serve you, and all shall be as you desire. You are my master. I am your slave.”
“This I know,” Engibil said complacently. It pleased him now to speak like a man, to move his lips and let sound come forth. “I have been reflecting on your case, Sharur. I have been contemplating your circumstances, son of Ereshguna.” He folded his arms across his massive chest, awaiting Sharur’s reply.
That would have been easier to give, had Sharur had any idea how to answer. “Is it so, great god?” he said, temporizing as he might have done when a rival merchant said something unexpected and confusing during a dicker.
“Son of Ereshguna, it is so,” Engibil replied. “Hear now the judgment I have reached concerning you.”
Sharur bowed his head. “Great god, I will hear your words. Mighty god, I will obey your words.” What choice have I? he wondered bitterly.
“My judgment, then, is this,” Engibil said. “I have decided I held your oath in my hand too tightly. I have decided I held your oath in my heart too straitly. Thus I ease it; thus I loosen it. You have my leave to borrow from your father bride-price wherewith to pay Dimgalabzu the smith.”
“Great god, may I—?” Sharur had intended to try to talk Engibil into reducing whatever punishments he ordained. That was probably hopeless, but, being a merchant and a scion of merchants, he had intended to tr
y. Now what would have been his protest gurgled into silence after a bare handful of words.
He stared into the god’s face. Engibil was, as always, divinely perfect, divinely awe-inspiring. Engibil also looked divinely pleased with himself, as if he had settled a problem to his own satisfaction. So, evidently, he had.
But it was not the problem because of which Sharur thought he had been summoned to the temple. He had to conclude, then, that Engibil had not been listening when he and Habbazu and Ereshguna discussed robbing the god’s temple.
As Sharur stared at Engibil, so Engibil stared at Sharur. “Are you not pleased, son of Ereshguna?” the god demanded. “Is not your heart gladdened? In my generosity, I give you leave to wed the woman you desire.”
He was indeed a lazy god. He could have searched through Sharur’s mind to learn why the man before him did not respond as he had expected. Sharur imagined coming before Enimhursag if the god of Gibil’s rival city needed to discover something. Enimhursag, if he saw anything out of the ordinary or suspicious, would have tom it from a man by force. But Engibil was content to ask.
And Sharur answered, ‘‘Oh, yes, great god, I am pleased. My heart is gladdened, mighty god. Truly you are generous, to give me leave to wed the woman I desire.” He spoke the truth there, nothing but the truth. He spoke it as quickly as he could, too, to give Engibil no chance to change his mind yet again.
The god smiled on him; beneficence flowed out from Engibil in waves. “It is good,” the god of Gibil said. “It is very good. Go now; son of Ereshguna. Go now, and give this news to your family. Go now, and give this news to the family of the woman you desire. May the two of you prove joyful together. May the two of you prove fruitful together. Go now. You have my blessing.”
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