by Brian Godawa
The purpose of the projectile missile was not to do damage. That was a ludicrous proposition. Its purpose was on the other end of the cord, the end tied to Marduk’s waist. As the beast dove deep into the lake waters, Marduk was jerked from the shore like bait on the other end of a fishing line.
He plunged into the cold waters and grabbed the line, pulling himself toward the sea monster until he was able to grab onto its spiny back and ride it like a bucking bronco in a water pen.
In a normal scenario, Marduk would not have much of a chance of riding this fury out. Tiamat was simply too mighty to withstand. But this was not a normal scenario. For Marduk had inscribed the enchantment spells he received from Ishtar into the surrounding seabed. And those spells served to lull Tiamat into a confused trancelike state. Its own chaos was turned against it, and the dragon swam without purpose or plan. It was trying to get away, but from what it just could not comprehend. It was being hemmed in by magic.
Marduk’s animal skins had the effect of making him virtually invisible to the dragon. At a moment when it should begin to fear, it did not. So confusion blinded it, compounded by the spells all around the lakebed. It dove deep, but could not find the opening of the Abyss because of its disorientation.
So it went the only other direction it could imagine to break free of the swirling confusion in its skull: Upward with a furious speed.
It broke the surface and its entire body came out of the water like it was flying straight up into the heavens. On the way down, Marduk heard the command yelled and the catapult released. The battle net was flung at the sea dragon and enveloped it just before it hit the water with a huge tsunami like wave that drenched the entire shoreline, dragging some slaves to drown in the depths.
The great serpent wriggled and writhed, trying to free itself, but it only wore itself out as the net entangled it like an underwater spider web of entrapment. Though the water weakened Marduk, he was not incapacitated. He used most of his strength to ride it out until he could find his moment of maximum impact.
But then the great dragon found the lakebed and rolled around, trying to shake loose the netting. Its gigantic body smashed Marduk against the silt bottom.
He lost his grip and twisted about in the murky turbulence, flailing for something, anything to grab hold of. He prayed it would not be the mouth of the great beast.
Fortunately, the battle net kept him from being washed away into the tumultuous current. He found himself snagged back to the sea dragon’s upper back as the net tightened its tangled grip.
He held on for his immortal life. He could not be killed, but he could be trapped in a crevice of rock or a landslide of boulders from which he could not extricate himself. And if that happened, he could be trapped there for millennia, losing his kingdom and awaiting the Judgment. And this enormous reptile had just the weight and force to accomplish that should Marduk let go of his saddle again.
When they cleared the murky turbulence, he saw they were headed straight for the opening of the Abyss. The roof of the opening would crush him as the dragon scraped its way out. There was nothing he could do. He held on, and awaited his demise. He thought he had at least done better than what any other god would have achieved. He had come so close.
But without warning, Tiamat just altered its course ninety degrees and swam straight up. The combination of the enchantment spells and the net had so thoroughly worn down the mighty gargantuan with confusion, blindness, and exhaustion that it did not see the portal to the Abyss.
It was instead reaching for land. It burst out of the water and landed on the shoreline. It was making a last attempt to beach itself and wriggle out of the net using the ground as a surface to drag it off.
But Marduk was out of the water. His full strength returned. He pulled himself through the rings of the net, his body naked because the loincloth had been ripped off in the midst of the battle. He pulled his huge battle-axe wrapped to his back, and swung with all his force into the soft exposed flesh from some scales he had ripped free. The axe went deep.
Tiamat bellowed. It was a hideous sound that pierced the souls of everyone still alive along the shoreline.
Marduk wrenched it free and swung again. An artery of blood broke open like a geyser, drenching Marduk in thick red.
Tiamat was almost to the water again.
The net was coming off.
Marduk swung one more time and the axe was lost in the sliced fat and muscle of the serpentine colossus.
Tiamat roared again. It shook the shoreline.
Marduk was out of the water and in his strength, but so was Tiamat. It was out of the water and therefore away from the spells that restrained it. It had regained its wits. And it was aware of Marduk because the magic skins were gone from his body.
But it was too late for such awareness.
Just as it hit the water, to regain its bearings, Marduk had opened the area of flesh he had cut, and burrowed his way into the body of the beast.
He had withdrawn his dagger and was cutting his way through the innards of the dragon.
The dragon desperately swam in circles. It could feel the parasite digging its way through its organs and the serpent could do nothing about it.
Marduk reached the heart of Tiamat. It was huge, the size of ten men. Marduk used his dagger to slice its arteries off and then plunged it into the beating muscle, ripping downward with all his might.
Tiamat jerked and spasmed as its heart became a useless severed organ.
The enormous serpent died in a sea of its own blood, floating slowly to the bottom of the lake.
Then its belly sliced open with Marduk’s blade and he came out of the great beast and swam upward.
When Marduk broke the surface, he crawled onto shore exhausted. But he had an image to reinforce. So he stood to his full eight-foot naked frame with a proud bravado and lifted his chin toward the entourage of gods and king, and said simply, “Tiamat is dead. Long live Marduk, king of the gods.”
A rousing cheer blistered the shoreline as hundreds of slaves and workers were relieved that their lives would be spared the terrors of the sea serpent. Marduk had suppressed chaos and established his kingdom.
Nimrod filled with a new determination for he now knew they would be unstoppable. No god had ever come close to such a mighty feat of power. A fleeting thought of Ishtar’s demise even accompanied his thrill of victory. His guardian was now king of the gods.
Anu walked up to Marduk with the Tablet of Destinies.
But before he could hand them to him, Enlil stepped out of the crowd and complained, “I want to see the body.”
Marduk looked over at Enlil, and replied, “Oh, I am not finished yet. You will see the body.”
Marduk turned to Nimrod and said, “Command your slaves to dredge up the corpse for me with the battle net.”
Nimrod obeyed and Marduk turned back to Enlil. “You are welcome to watch if you still require satisfaction.”
Enlil wondered just what exactly Marduk was planning. Marduk smirked, and then added, “On second thought, I command you and the other gods, as obeisance to my new superiority, to stay and watch me filet this great fish.”
The gods begrudgingly watched and waited as the company of slaves hauled the body of the great sea dragon onto land with the battle net and a few hundred strong arms.
Marduk then retrieved his large battle-axe and proceeded to cut the body of Tiamat in half, from jaws to tail. He chopped and hacked for hours, covered in gargantuan fish blood and guts, until he had two perfect halves of the great monster.
Enlil was disgusted with the brutishness with which Marduk operated. He thought it would be a new era of barbarism under this monster. But of course he dare not speak what everyone else was also thinking.
After Marduk was done cutting the serpent’s corpse in half, he looked to the heavens, saturated in blood and stench and proclaimed, “I am Marduk, king of the gods. And I have split Tiamat like a shellfish. Thus I have created the heavens and
the earth out of the body of the great sea dragon. I have established the stars and their paths, the moon and the sun, and the constellations in their course. The Anunnaki gods all bow before me.”
The four high gods bowed. “Annunaki” was another Sumerian word for the gods of the pantheon. It meant “Princely Seed.”
Marduk had made sure that the ceremonial ritual of crowning him king of the gods was performed immediately upon the completion of his corpse splitting. He wanted his enthronement to be as close to his victory as possible for maximum symbolic impact.
His throne had yet to be built in his new temple, but a symbolic one worked just as well, made out of wood, gilded with gold and laden with jewels. The royal house of Nimrod and the four high gods representing the pantheon all participated in the ritual of transferring the crown and the Tablet of Destinies from Enlil to Marduk.
It was all very humiliating for Enlil, but there was really no challenging the mighty strength of Marduk, who now took on a litany of fifty names of greatness read before the observing crowd of Nimrod’s people by Sinleqi, the king’s scholar and scribe.
Sinleqi droned on in his monotonous voice reading from the freshly engraved tablets, “Marduk, as Anu, his father called him from his birth, who with the flood-storm his weapon, vanquished the enemy; Murukka, creator of all, who rejoices the hearts of the Anunnaki; Marutukku, the refuge of his land, city, and people; Barashakushu, of wide heart and warm sympathy; Lugaldimmerankia, the lord of all the gods of heaven and the underworld…”
Enlil started to get drowsy. Sinleqi’s prattling was dreadfully long and redundant. It went on for what seemed an eternity with names, epithets, and etymologies that served to say the same thing over and over again. How great Marduk is, how glorious he is, what a wondrous and gracious god he is, blah, blah, blah. It reminded Enlil of the pretentious self-aggrandizing Ishtar. These two were complimentary whores of power.
Not like him. He began to plan in his mind how he might manipulate them to face each other in a contest of megalomaniacal egos. Maybe they would destroy each other and the assembly would be better off when they did.
But what if by some strange twist of fate, they partnered up together? Then the very pantheon itself would be in jeopardy. Enlil tried to put the horror out of his mind as he concluded his participation in the vainglorious enthronement ceremony.
When they had concluded the official transfer of the Tablet of Destinies and the crown to Marduk, Anu led the assembly of gods and men in a vow of devotion.
“We pledge our fealty and worship to the gracious Marduk, king of the gods!”
Everyone human and divine repeated the words that would usher in a new era ruled by a new chief deity.
When all was performed and done, Marduk concluded the ceremony with a simple pronouncement. “And now we shall build Babylon, the gateway of the gods.”
Chapter 9
The process of creating bricks for the building of Babylon began even before the lake was fully drained. It would take some weeks to seal the entrance to the Abyss and then finish the canals and dredging and finally filling in of the lakebed with rock and soil.
In the meantime, Nimrod conscripted the entire workforce and slave force of tens of thousands for the laborious task of making bricks. They would work on the city, the wall, and the temples simultaneously. There were two kinds of bricks; sun-dried bricks for most of the homes, shrines, and inner walled areas, and kiln-fired bricks for the outer walls and most importantly for the temple-tower, Etemenanki and Marduk’s complimentary Esagila.
The ziggurat Etemenanki was the largest of its size in all of Sumer and Akkad. It would take a year of round the sundial labor to build it. Since the structure functioned as a cosmic mountain upon which the gods would descend from heaven, it was a solid structure with the shrine of deity on top and a stairway down its front. The inner base was made of sun-dried bricks, but the outer layer was made of kiln-fired brick. Firing bricks took more time and effort, but created a more durable hardened ceramic block that could withstand outside forces such as wind, rain, storm, battle, and floodwaters.
This was deliberate on Nimrod’s part, because he carried in his memory the legendary Deluge that swept away the antediluvian world with all its achievements of gods and men. He had rebuilt some of the cities and temples over the ruins of the old. He had seen the devastation first hand. And he had visited his distant kin, Noah, and was told of the Creator Elohim, and his vindictive judgment on mankind that was the origin of the Great Flood. He rejected this despotic deity and his capricious controlling obsession from on high. How dare he make mankind and the angels, and then demand sniveling toe-licking slavery.
Contrary to this monolithic tyranny was the pantheon of gods who watched over mankind from Mount Hermon. This divine assembly of Watchers was willing to share power, to elevate man above his mud brick existence. If it was one thing the Watcher gods gave him hope for, it was the glorious human potential of mankind to become as gods, to commingle heaven and earth in a unity of being.
He knew that what he and Marduk were planning would more than likely provoke another vengeful response from Elohim. So his purpose was to create a temple of durable structure that would resist another Deluge, and would be high enough to rise above any new floodwaters.
The four high gods that had visited Nimrod for the commencement of the construction had approved it and returned to their holy Mount Hermon in the distant west. One day in the near future that distance would be eliminated and the two seats of power would become one in Babylon, the gateway of the gods.
Nimrod was ready for the next step in his plan. He was ready to reveal his queen.
Chapter 10
Shamhat was going stir crazy. She had been sequestered in a secluded encampment out near the edge of the massive desert to the west of Babylon for over a year. She was guarded by a well-armed contingent of about a hundred warriors, who were under strictest orders of secrecy and protection to kill anyone who ventured near their posted site. They did not even know her name or who she was, only that she was the holy property of Nimrod, their lord and king. She was not allowed to travel anywhere or have any visitors except for Nimrod who would occasionally arrive unannounced for conjugal satisfaction.
But this confinement was not punishment. It was part of the plan, and she had agreed to it. She was to be Nimrod’s queen, but in order to create an aura of power and mystery to their reign; she would have to be completely dissociated from her past. She would have to be forgotten and then unveiled much later with a new name and a new identity.
In distant days, she had originally been a harlot of Uruk. She had seduced the Wild-Born Enkidu who was the only man she had ever met that showed her true love was possible. Enkidu married her and became the Right Hand of Gilgamesh, the King of Uruk, Nimrod’s previous identity. But Enkidu had died from a mysterious disease, and with him, Shamhat’s belief in love and grace and anything true in this life. She had determined to never again be the tool of men and to climb her way up the stairway of power to achieve as much as she could.
Of course it would always be a man’s world, and so she would have to play the system in order to accomplish her ambition. She would have to use her feminine wiles to her advantage. And her feminine wiles were a highly tuned and cultivated set of skills in manipulating the simple nature of men. This was about more than their piggish bondage to lust; it also involved their ridiculously transparent slavery to their egos. Women, on the other hand needed men like a fish needed a chariot.
Nimrod had taken Shamhat to be his queen, partly because of her connection to Enkidu, and partly because he saw in her the experience and ambition required to negotiate the political machinations of a kingdom. She knew men better than they knew themselves and this would be an advantage for his rule.
He knew her soul was damaged beyond repair. His Naphil insight could tell she was capable of great treachery. But that also gave her the qualifications to be his queen. Because of his connection to En
kidu, he too had lost his faith in friendship, trust, and goodness. So no matter how cynical and destroyed their past, no matter how small and shriveled that small piece of humanity was, it was still a piece of them both that he would eventually be able to use to his benefit should the time come.
But that time was not now. Now was the time for queenship and marriage. And Nimrod had found the perfect opportunity for the birth of that queen.
The very evening after Marduk slaughtered Tiamat the sea dragon of chaos, Nimrod had secretly transported Shamhat to the lake and had her prepare for a theatrical entrance. Nimrod had concocted the perfect way to create a new divine identity for Shamhat with a new narrative that would forever erase her past.
Late the next morning, Nimrod took a cabal of priests, sorcerers, and magi down to the lake to consecrate the waters of Marduk’s triumph. The assembly of two hundred celebrants performed their rituals and ceremony on the shoreline to sanctify the access to the Abyss over which the ziggurat temple was to be built. This was to be holy ground.
Unbeknownst to the religious participants, Shamhat had been hiding in the lake waters with an artificial breathing apparatus that consisted of a large pitch covered reed balloon full of air, submerged and tied to the bottom. Shamhat then sucked the air through a small pipe attached to the balloon that allowed her to stay below for several hours.
At one point in the ceremony of blessing, the priests threw several lambs and goats into the water as sacrifice. They were tied to large stones that sank the animals to the bottom and their deaths.
That was Shamhat’s signal to come up out of the water and walk up to the shore as if born from the waters of sacrifice.
As she stepped up onto the sand, water glimmering down her voluptuous naked curves, the entire religious procession stood in wonder.