And the noble, who also saw it, bowed his head and said no more. Most of the Giblut whom Sharur knew would have gone on arguing. Justified or not, Giblut had confidence in their own wits. Confidence in their own wits was a large part of what made them Giblut.
Aratta lay down on the ground and fell asleep, as if he were still no more than a peasant. No. Sharur stared. Aratta floated a couple of digits above the ground, and slept on a cushion of air. When mosquitoes tried to land on him, they could not, but buzzed away unsatisfied. And when Sharur lay down, he discovered he did not touch the ground, either. Enimhursag granted him the same soft rest as he did to the man in whom he had chosen to dwell for the time being. Nor did insects bite him. He passed as luxurious a night as any in all his life.
The rising sun woke him. Beside him, Aratta was already awake and alert. Perhaps the peasant woke quickly every day. Perhaps, too, having the god looking out through his eyes roused him to early alertness.
Through Aratta, Enimhursag said, “Today, we cross into the land the Giblut stole from Imhursag. Today, we cross into the land Engibil stole from me. Today, that land returns to its rightful owner.”
“Have you sent scouts into the land the Giblut rule?” Sharur asked. “Have you sent spies into the land that once belonged to Imhursag?”
Enimhursag shook Aratta’s head. “I have not done this. In the land where I rule, I can at my will see through any man’s eyes, hear through any man’s ears. I can reach beyond my borders where the gods of the lands are not my enemies. But in the land of the raving Engibil, I am as one blind and deaf.”
“Ah.” Sharur nodded, remembering how the family’s Imhursaggi slave woman mourned the absence of Enimhursag from her spirit. He said, “If it please you, great god, I can go into Gibil, scout ahead, and then come back and tell you what I see. If an Imhursaggi tried this, he would give himself away, but I would not betray myself, having been born a Gibli.”
“Yes, you were bom a Gibli,” Enimhursag said, as if reminding himself. Sharur was acutely conscious it was the god studying him through Aratta’s eyes. If Enimhursag did more than study him ... But, after that measuring stare, the god went on, “Yes, go into the land Engibil took from me. Accompanying will be the noble Nasibugashi. He, too, will scout ahead. You were born a Gibli. You will protect him, so he will not betray himself.”
“It shall be as you say.” Sharur bowed his head.
“Of course it shall.” Enimhursag allowed himself no room for doubt.
Nasibugashi proved to be the noble who had wondered whether the Giblut would bring any new weapons to the war. Sharur judged him a shrewd choice on Enimhursag’s part. He seemed more his own man, less drunk on the power of the god, than most Imhursagut. That would make him better able to act on his own in Gibil than others from his city might have been.
“Let us be off,” he said to Sharur. “Let us be moving. The farther ahead of the army we get, the deeper into Gibil we can go, the more we can see, the more word we can bring back to the warriors and the god.”
“These things are true,” Sharur said. Was Enimhursag looking out through Nasibugashi’s eyes, too? Sharur had trouble telling, far more so than he had with Aratta. Perhaps Enimhursag’s presence was lighter in the noble. Or perhaps Nasibugashi had more personality of his own than did the peasant, making Enimhursag’s presence harder to discern.
As Nasibugashi had urged, Sharur and he hurried out ahead of the host of Imhursag. When they walked through the village to which Aratta and the other peasants had brought Sharur after he crossed into Imhursaggi land, Munnabtu came out of her house and waved to him. “The god told me you were coming this way,” she said, smiling. “Did I make you glad?”
“Truly, you made me glad,” Sharur answered, and smiled back.
“You made her glad, too,” Nasibugashi said. Was he only a man, judging by a woman’s smile, or was the god speaking through him with certain knowledge? The latter, Sharur judged: he sounded very certain.
Sharur and Nasibugashi walked through the fields south of the village toward the canal that marked the border between Imhursaggi land and Gibli. The peasants working in those fields waved to Sharur almost as Munnabtu had done. When he entered Imhursaggi territory, their only thought had been to kill him. Now, because their god was well pleased with him, they, too, were well pleased with him.
On the southern side of the canal, Gibli peasants performed similar labor in similar fields with tools also similar save that rather more of them were bronze and rather fewer stone. Curious as magpies, they looked up from their work to see what the two men on the Imhursaggi bank of the waterway would do.
What Sharur did was slide off his kilt and shake his feet out of his sandals. After a moment, Nasibugashi imitated him. Together, the two men stepped naked into the warm, muddy waterway of the canal.
About halfway across, Nasibugashi let out a soft exclamation of surprise. “The god’s voice fades in my ears,” he murmured. “The god’s presence fades from my mind. I am alone within myself, as I have never been before.” He cocked his head to one side, as if listening internally. “I do not feel Engibil trying to fill the emptiness the loss of Enimhursag has left behind.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Sharur agreed. “Engibil isn’t— there—all the time, the way Enimhursag is.” Remembering the times when Engibil had spoken in his mind, he wished the god made his presence known even less often.
When the two men came up onto the Gibli side of the canal, peasants loped toward them. The peasants who had been working in the fields of Imhursag came down to the bank of the canal and stared across with round, wide eyes to see what sort of reception Sharur and Nasibugashi got.
“What are you two doing here?” one of the Gibli peasants asked. Unlike Imhursagut, he and his comrades seemed more interested in the new arrivals than angry about them. “Don’t often see people coming this way, where their god can’t yell in their ear all the time.” He spoke with good- natured contempt.
“It’s not so bad,” Nasibugashi said. Sharur nodded; Enimhursag had indeed made a good choice in him. A more god-assotted Imhursaggi—a priest, say—would have been as bereft as a canal fish suddenly thrown up on land.
“What about you?” the peasant asked Sharur.
“I don’t think it’s so bad, either,” Sharur said. “Shall we get out of the reach of all the big, staring eyes?” He nodded toward the Imhursaggi peasants, through whose eyes and ears Enimhursag was no doubt seeing and hearing.
One of those Imhursaggi peasants would have failed to understand what he meant, would have made him explain more than he wanted to explain, more than would have been wise to explain. As he had hoped they would be, as he had thought they would be, the Giblut were quicker on the uptake. “All right, we’ll go for a walk,” their leader said.
The Imhursagut kept staring after them. After a bowshot or so, they went up and over a tiny hillock, so that the border canal and the Imhursagut on the other side of it were no longer visible.
Sharur pointed to Nasibugashi and said, in bright, conversational tones, “This man is an Imhursaggi spy. You should seize him.”
With commendable quickness, the Gibli peasants did just that. With equally commendable quickness, they also seized Sharur. Their leader asked, “And why should we listen to you, whoever you are?”
“Because, sometime before nightfall, Imhursag’s army will swarm over the canal,” Sharur answered. “Enimhursag sent us ahead to spy out the land.”
Nasibugashi’s eyes looked as if they would bug out of his head. “You betray the god!” he gasped. A moment later, he found something even more appalling to say: “You deceived the god!”
His horror convinced the Giblut to take Sharur seriously. That horror probably did a better job of convincing them to take Sharur seriously than anything he could have managed on his own. The peasant who had been doing the talking for his comrades asked, “Who are you, anyhow?”
“I am Sharur, the son of Ereshguna the master merchant,
” Sharur answered, which made Nasibugashi’s eyes get even wider. Back in the lands of his own city, Sharur smiled an enormous smile. “I have indeed betrayed the god of Imhursag. I have indeed deceived the god of Imhursag.”
“It is well done!” the peasant cried. He and his friends pounded Sharur on the back for fooling the god of the rival city. Sharur wondered what they would have done had they known he had fooled Enimhursag into launching an attack on Gibil.
“How did you deceive the god?” Nasibugashi asked. He sounded half astonished that Sharur should have imagined such a thing, let alone accomplished it, half curious to learn his exact method.
“Never mind.” Sharur spoke to the Gibli peasants: “Spread the word that the Imhursagut are coming. Women and children should flee, men should get weapons, harry the invaders, and fall back on the main army, which will, I have no doubt, muster between the city and the invaders.”
Some of the peasants—those who had been standing around and those who had been holding Sharur—dashed off to do as he had asked. Nasibugashi stared again. “Does not the god of Gibil tell his people what needs doing?” he said, astonished again.
Sharur and the peasants who still held the Imhursaggi noble looked at one another and started to laugh. “Sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn’t,” Sharur answered. “Sometimes the people figure out what needs doing before the god does.”
“How can this be?” Nasibugashi cried in honest bewilderment.
“Not hard at all,” one of the peasants answered with another chuckle. “Engibil is that kind of god—and we are that kind of people.”
“Be gentle with this one, as gentle as you can,” Sharur told them. “For an Imhursaggi, he is very much his own man. Had he been born in Gibil, he would be his own man. Had he been born in Gibil, he might well be a great man.”
“As you say it, master merchant’s son, it shall be,” the peasant said. “What shall we do with him now?”
“A good question.” Sharur had not thought past laying hold of Nasibugashi. He spoke in thoughtful tones: “He is my captive. Perhaps I shall make him my slave and have him serve me.”
The Gibli peasants burst into laughter. The Imhursaggi noble burst into curses as vile as any Sharur had ever heard from caravan guards or donkey handlers. The curses made the Gibli peasants laugh louder.
Sharur said, “Or, perhaps, I shall see whether his kin or his god care to ransom him. He is a clever man; he would make a clever slave, and might escape. He is a bold man; he would make a bold slave, and might seek to slay me. For now, let us take him back to Gibil. We can decide his fate there.”
“It shall be as you say,” the peasants said as one. And then, almost as one, they went on, “Master merchant’s son, you will reward us for helping you take him to the city?”
“I shall reward you for helping me take him to the city,” Sharur promised. “The house of Ereshguna does not stint.”
“No,” Nasibugashi said bitterly. “The house of Ereshguna cheats.”
“It is not so,” Sharur said. “I am a Gibli. I serve my own needs. I serve the needs of Gibil. I serve the needs of Engibil.”
“You are a Gibli,” Nasibugashi agreed. “You put the needs of your god last. Were you a proper man, you would put those needs first.”
“I am a proper man. I am a proper Gibli,” Sharur said. “Now your god is out of your mind, Nasibugashi. Perhaps you, too, will learn to be a man first, a creature of the gods only afterwards.” .
Nasibugashi did not answer. Sharur studied him. Of all the Imhursagut he had met, this noble was the first who indeed might learn to be a man before he was a creature of the gods. Sharur wondered if his wisest course might not be to keep Nasibugashi in Gibil for a time, to let him learn what living in a city full of men who were their own men was like, and then to let him return to Imhursag, to see if he might sow the seeds of such a city under Enimhursag’s nose.
“Let us go on to Gibil,” Sharur said. One of the peasants gave Nasibugashi a push. Outrage still mingling with astonishment on his face, the Imhursaggi noble stumbled south toward Sharur’s city.
Engibil might not have warned the folk of Gibil that the Imhursagut were invading, as Enimhursag had assembled the folk of Imhursag for the invasion. But news of trouble with Imhursag had far outsped Sharur’s coming to the city. Already, peasants with spears and bows and clubs and shields were forming into companies to oppose the Imhursagut. Already, nobles in donkey-drawn chariots rode north toward the canal that marked Gibil’s boundary with its hostile neighbor.
“Where are your warrior-priests?” Nasibugashi asked as yet another chariot rumbled past, ungreased axles squealing.
“We have only a handful,” Sharur answered. “Most of our priesthood serves the god in his temple. That is his home. That is where he needs servants. Men take care of the business of the city.”
“Madness,” the Imhursaggi noble said. “Madness.”
“It could be so,” Sharur said. “But I, a mad Gibli, deceived Enimhursag, and had no great trouble in doing so.” He exaggerated there. He knew he exaggerated there. But Nasibugashi did not know' and would not know he exaggerated there. He went on, “And, when we mad Giblut go to war with Imhursag, who these days comes off victorious?”
“It will be different this time,” Nasibugashi said.
Sharur showed hi,s teeth in what was not quite a smile. “I doubt it,” he said. “Come—now we go into Gibil.”
“Well, well,” Ereshguna said when Sharur and the Gibli peasants led Nasibugashi into his presence. “Well, well. My son, you not only thrust your hand into the jaw of the lion again, you come home with a prize as well. He looks as if he will make a fine slave.”
“Actually, I, was thinking of ransoming him, if we can get a good enough price,” Sharur said. “He is a noble in Imhursag; I am not sure how well he would take to slavery.”
“A taste of the lash would probably convince him to obey—it does with most slaves,” Ereshguna said, his voice dry. “Still, he is your captive, and so your property. You may do with him as you wish.” He examined Nasibugashi more closely. “Mm—perhaps you are right. He does look to have a wild horse’s spirit doesn’t he?”
Nasibugashi threw back his head and gave forth with the bugling cry of the donkey’s untamed relative. Sharur and Ereshguna stared at him, then burst into laughter. Sharur said, “These men need to be rewarded for helping me bring this horse from the border with Imhursag to the city. I promised them we would repay them for their aid.”
‘‘We shall do it,” Ereshguna said at once. ‘‘We should have done it even had you not promised.” He gave all the peasants small broken bits of gold.
They were loud in the praises of the house of Ereshguna. One of them told Sharur, “Truly, master merchant’s son, you knew whereof you spoke when you told us your family did not stint.” .
“How can you have so much gold, to give of it to peasants?” Nasibugashi asked as those peasants, rejoicing, headed back toward their village. “The gods hate Gibil. Folk from the surrounding cities, folk from the surrounding lands, hate Gibil. They will not trade with Gibil. And yet you have gold, to throw away to peasants. How can this be?”
“I have honor,” Ereshguna said. “I have pride. Were it the last gold I possess—and it is far from the last gold I possess, Imhursaggi—I would give it to these peasants for the sake of my honor, for the sake of my pride. I am a man. These are the things a man does. Do you understand that?”
“In Imhursag, these are the things the god would have a man do,” Nasibugashi said.
“I do not need the god to tell me what to do,” Ereshguna said. “By myself, I know what to do. This is what being a man means.”
“You Giblut are strange,” the captive Imhursaggi noble said. “Word by word, what you say makes sense. Idea by idea, oftentimes what you say is madness.”
Horns blared outside. A bronze-lunged herald shouted the name of Kimash the lugal. Down the Street of Smiths came Kimash, not in his
usual litter but in a chariot with gilded sides drawn by donkeys with gilded reins and harnesses. His helmet, all of bronze, was also gilded, as was his armor, and as was the bronze head of the spear he brandished.
People on the Street of Smiths cheered themselves hoarse when Kimash and his retinue went past. The lugal’s guards were less splendid only than Kimash himself. Their gilded shields and helmets sparkled in the sunlight. They looked hard and tough and at least a match for any of the warriors Sharur had seen in the Imhursaggi force.
“Great is the lugal!” cried the people. “Mighty is the lugal! Strong in Gibil’s defense is the lugal! The lugal and his bold men will drive back the wicked invaders! The lugal and his men will bring home slaves and booty! Engibil loves the mighty lugal!”
“So this is what it means to have a lugal,” Nasibugashi said. “You have made him into a god, and mention the true god of your city only as an afterthought.” His lip curled to show what he thought of that.
“No city can be without a ruler,” Sharur said reasonably. “We have a ruler who is one of us, not one who treats the men and women of Gibil as if they were cattle and sheep in the fields.”
“We are the cattle of our god,” the Imhursaggi noble said. “We are proud to be the cattle of our god. Enimhursag is our master. Enimhursag is our lord. We are his, to do with as he would.”
“We are ours, to do with as we would,” Sharur answered.
Ereshguna pointed to Nasibugashi. “What shall we do with this divine cow here?” he.asked. “We, too, shall have to go to war against the Imhursagut, you know, and we can hardly take him with us.”
“I know, Father,” Sharur said with a sigh. He had succeeded better than he expected, and started a larger war between Imhursag and Gibil than he had thought he would. As his father had said, Gibil would need every man who could afford good bronze weapons and armor of leather and bronze. He sighed again. “This is liable to interfere with our other business.”
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