FSF, October 2007

by Spilogale Authors

  "And yourself?” the man with the suit says.

  "No grandchildren,” he says. “No children. Not anymore."

  The man frowns and nods. “We'll find someone for the bike,” he says. “The world is full of children."

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  Urdumheim by Michael Swanwick

  From his home in Philadelphia, Mr. Swanwick reports that he is just about to leave for a trip to Chengdu in Szechuan Province, China. His latest story collection, The Dog Said Bow-Wow, is due out this fall and a new novel, The Dragons of Babel, is due in January. He says that “Urdumheim” is a creation myth told by the inhabitants of that new novel—but don't expect to find it in the book. Its only publication is here, in the copy you hold in your hands or on your PDA.

  Every morning King Nimrod walked to the mountain, climbed its steep sides to the very top, and sang it higher. At noon ravens brought him bread and cheese. At dinner time they brought him manna. At sunset he came down. He had called the granite up from under the ground shortly after Utnapishtim the Navigator landed the boats there. First Inanna had called upon her powers to put the rains to sleep. Then Shaleb the Scribe had picked up a stick and scratched a straight line in the mud, indicating simply: We are here. Thus did history begin.

  But before history existed, before time began, King Nimrod led the People out of Urdumheim. Across the stunned and empty spaces of the world they fled, through the plains and over the silent snowy mountains, not knowing if these places had existed before then or if their need and desire had pulled them into being. The land was as large as the sky in those days, and as unpopulated. But in no place could they linger, for always their enemies were close on their heels, eager to return them to slavery.

  So came they at last to the limitless salt marshes that lay between the land and the distant sea. It was a time of great floods, when the waters poured endlessly from the heavens and the grass-choked streams were become mighty rivers and there was no dry ground anywhere to be seen. They built shallow-drafted reed boats then, well-pitched beneath, and set across the waters, where no demon could follow. Skimming swiftly over the drowned lands, they drove into the white rains, seeking refuge. Until at last they came upon what was then an island barely distinguishable from the waters. Here they settled, and here they prospered.

  They were giants, that first generation, and half the things in the world were made by them first. Utnapishtim invented boats and navigation. Shaleb invented writing and record-keeping. Inanna invented weaving and the arts of lovemaking. Nimrod himself was responsible for bridges, houses, coins, and stoneworking, as well as cultivation and animal husbandry and many other things. But greatest of all his inventions was language. The People could not speak before he taught them how.

  I was a boy when the winged lion came. That morning, Ninsun had set me to work pitting cherries. It was a tedious, fiddling chore, and because Ninsun had gathered four bushels, it lasted for hours, but there was no way out of it. So as I labored, I asked her questions about the way things used to be and why things were as they are now. Of all the First, she was the least closemouthed. Which is not to say she was at all talkative.

  "Why is there work?” I asked.

  "Because we are lucky."

  It didn't seem lucky to me to have to work, and I said so.

  "Work makes sense. You labor, you grow tired. You make something, you're better off than you were before. Imagine the world if it weren't that way."

  "What was the world like before the People came here?"

  "There are no words to describe it."

  "Why not?"

  "Because there was no language. Nimrod invented language as a way for us to escape from Urdumheim."

  "What was Urdumheim like?"

  "King Nimrod gave it that name afterward so we could talk about it. When we lived there, it wasn't called anything."

  "But what was it like?"

  She looked at me without answering. Then abruptly she opened her mouth in a great O. The interior of her mouth was blacker than soot, blacker than midnight, black beyond imagining. That horrible hole in reality opened wider and wider, growing until it was larger than her face, larger than the room, until it threatened to swallow me up and along with me the entire village and King Nimrod's mountain and all the universe beyond. There were flames within the darkness, though they shed no light, and cold mud underfoot. My stomach lurched and I was overcome by a pervasive sense of wrongness. It seemed to me that I had no name and that it was thus impossible to distinguish between myself and everything else, and that therefore I could by definition never, ever escape from this dreadful and malodorous place.

  Ninsun closed her mouth. “It was like that.” The clay pot where we dumped the discarded pits was full, so she tossed them out the window. “This is almost done. When we're finished here, you can run along and play."

  * * * *

  I don't think that Ninsun was my mother, but who can tell? We had not invented parentage at that time. No one had ever died, and thus no one had foreseen the need to record the passing of generations. Children were simply raised in common, their needs seen to by whoever was closest.

  Nor was I the child Ninsun thought me. True, when she released me at last, I did indeed react exactly as a child would in the same circumstances. Which is to say, I was out the door in an instant and hurtling across the fields so fast that a shout to come back would never have reached my ears. My reasons, however, were not those of a boy but of a man, albeit a young one still.

  I plunged into the woods and cool green shadows flowed over my body. Only when I could no longer hear the homely village noises of Whitemarsh, the clang of metal in the smithy and the snore of wood at the sawyer's, did I slow to a walk.

  Whitemarsh was one of seven villages on an archipelago of low hills that rose gently from the reeds. On Great Island were Landfall, Providence, and First Haven. Farther out on islands of their own were Whitemarsh, Fishweir, Oak Hill, and Market. Other, smaller communities there were, some consisting of as few as three or two houses, in such profusion that no man knew them all. But the chief and more populous islands were connected by marsh-roads of poured sand paved with squared-off logs.

  By secret ways known only to children (though I was no longer a child, I had been one not long before), I passed through the marshes to a certain hidden place I knew. It was a small meadow clearing just above the banks of one of the numberless crystal-clear creeks that wandered mazily through the reeds. In midday the meadow lay half in sun and half in shade, so that it was a place of comfort whatever the temperature might be. There I threw myself down on the grass to await Silili.

  Time passed with agonizing slowness. I worried that Silili had come early and, not finding me there, thought me faithless and left. I worried that she had been sent to Fishweir to make baskets for a season. A thousand horrid possibilities haunted my imagination. But then at last, she stepped into the clearing.

  I rose at the sight of her, and she knelt down beside me. We clasped hands fervently. Her eyes shone. When I looked into those eyes, I felt the way the People must have when the first dawn filled the sky with colors and Aruru sent her voice upward to meet them and so sang the first song. The joy I felt then was almost unbearable; it filled me to bursting.

  We lay together, as we had every day for almost a month, kissing and fondling each other. Silili's skin was the color of aged ivory and her nipples were pale apricot. Her pubic hair was light and downy, a golden mist over her mons. It offered no more resistance than a cloud when I ran my fingers through it. She stroked my thighs, my chest, the side of my face. Then, blushing and yet not once taking her eyes from mine, she said, “Gil ... I'm ready now."

  "Are you sure?” It is a measure of how deeply I loved Silili that I asked at all instead of simply taking her at her word. And a measure of how much I wanted her that when I asked I did not stop stroking her gently with one finger, over and over, along the cleft between her legs, fearful that if I removed my hand
her desire for me would go with it. “I can wait, if you want."

  "No,” she said, “now."

  We did then as lovers always do.

  * * * *

  Afterward, we lay together talking quietly, sometimes laughing. Inevitably, our conversation turned to what we would be wearing when next we saw each other.

  Children, of course, go everywhere naked. But after this, Silili and I would need to wear clothing in public. Tonight she would go to Inanna and beg enough cloth to make a dress, and thus claim for herself the modesty of a grown woman. Like any male my age, I had already made a shirt and trousers and hidden them away against this very day.

  Silili brushed her hands down the front of her body, imagining the dress. “What color should it be?” she asked.

  "Green, like the forest. Reddish-orange, like the flames of the sun."

  "Which I am to be, then—forest or sun? You are as inconstant as the sky, Gil."

  "Blue,” I said, “like the sky. White, like the moon and the clouds. Red and yellow and blue like the stars. Orange and purple like the sunset or the mountains at dawn.” For she was all things to me and, since in my present frame of mind all things were good, all things in turn put me in mind of her.

  She made an exasperated noise, but I could tell she was pleased.

  It was at that instant that I heard a soft, heavy thump on the ground behind me. Lazily, I turned my head to see what it was.

  I froze.

  An enormous winged lion stood on the bank of the stream opposite us. Its fur and feathers were red as blood. Its eyes were black from rim to rim.

  Silili, who in all her life had never feared anything, sat up beside me and smiled at the thing. “Hello,” she said. “What are you?"

  "Hello,” the great beast replied. “What are you? Hello. Hellohellohello.” Lifting its front paws in the air, it began to prance about on its hind legs in the drollest manner imaginable. “What are you are what. You are what you are what you are. Hello? Hellello. Lo-lo-lo-lo-lo! Hell you are lo you are. What what what!"

  Silili threw back her head and laughed peals of silvery laughter. I laughed as well, but uneasily. The creature's teeth were enormous, and it did not seem to me that the cast of its face was at all kindly. “A lion?” Silili asked. “A bird?"

  "A bird a bird a bird! A lion a lion a bird!” the beast sang. “You are a lion you are hello what are a bird hello you are a what a what hello. Bird-lion bird-lion lion lion bird!” Then he bounded up into the air, snapped out his mighty wings, and, flapping heavily, flew up and off into the sky, leaving nothing behind him but a foul stench, like rotting garbage.

  We both laughed and applauded. How could we not?

  But when later I returned to Whitemarsh, and my sister came running out from the village to meet me, I raised my hand in greeting and I could not remember what word I normally used in such circumstances. I wracked my brain for it time and again, to no avail. It was completely gone. And when I tried to describe the beast I had seen, I could remember the words for neither “bird” nor “lion."

  * * * *

  Still, that strange incident did not stay long in our minds, for that was the summer when Delondra invented dancing. This was an enormous event among our generation not only for its own sake but because this was the first major creation by anyone who was not of the First. As adults we had to spend our days in labor of various sorts, of course, but we met every evening on the greensward to dance until weariness or romance led us away.

  Music had been invented by Enlil years before and we had three instruments then: the box lute, the tabor, and the reed pipe. When the evening darkened, we lit pine-tar torches and set them in a circle about the periphery of the dancing ground and so continued until the stars were high in the sky. Then by ones and twos we drifted homeward, some to make love, others to their lonely beds, and still others to weep and rage, for our hearts were young and active and no way had yet been invented to keep them from being broken.

  Which is what we at first thought had happened when Mylitta, who had hours before wandered off into the woods with Irra, returned in tears. (This was late in the summer, when we had been dancing for months.) Mylitta and Irra were lovers, a station or distinction we of the second generation had created on our own. None of the First had lovers, but rather coupled with whoever caught their fancy; but we, being younger and, we thought, wiser, preferred our own arrangements. Even though they did not always bring us joy.

  As, we thought, now. Everybody assumed the worst of Irra, of course. But when Mylitta's friends gathered around to comfort her, it turned out that she had been frightened by some creature she had seen.

  "What was it like?” Silili asked.

  "White,” Mylitta said, “like the moon. It came up from the ground like ... something long and slithery that moves its head like this.” She moved her hand from side to side in a sinuous, undulating motion.

  "A snake?” somebody said.

  Mylitta looked puzzled, as if the word meant nothing to her. She shook her head, as if dismissing nonsense and, still upset, said, “Its mouth was horrible, with teeth set in circles. And it ... and it ... talked!"

  Now the forgotten lion came to my mind again and, apprehensively, I asked, “Did it say anything? Tell us what it said."

  But to this Mylitta could only shake her head.

  "Where is Irra?” Silili asked.

  "He stayed behind to talk some more."

  There was then such a hubbub of talk and argument as only the young can have. In quick order we put together a party to go after our friend and bring him back to us safe. Snatching up knives and staves—knives had been invented long ago, and even then staves had been employed as weapons—we started toward the woods.

  Then Irra himself came sauntering out of the darkness, hands behind his back, grinning widely. Mylitta ran to his side and kissed him, but he pushed her playfully away. Then he made a gesture that took in all of us, with our knives and staves and grim expressions, and raised one eyebrow.

  "We were going to look for you."

  "Mylitta said there was a...” With Irra's eyes boring into mine, I could not think of the word for snake. “One of those long, slithery things. Only large. And white."

  "Why won't you talk?” Mylitta cried. “Why don't you say anything?"

  Irra grinned wider and wider. And now a peculiar thing happened. His face began to glow brighter and brighter, until it shone like the moon.

  He held out his hand, fingers spread. Then he squeezed it into a fist. When he opened it again, the fingers had merged into one another, forming a smooth brown flipper. “The ... whatever ... showed me how to do this."

  Nobody knew what to make of his stunt. But then Mylitta started crying again, and by the time we had her soothed down, Irra was gone and it was too late for dancing anyway. So we all went home.

  * * * *

  After that evening, strange creatures appeared in more and more profusion at the edges of our settlements. They were never the same twice. There was a thing like an elephant but with impossibly long legs, like a spider's. There was a swarm of scorpions with human faces that were somehow all a single organism. There was a ball of serpents. There was a bird of flame. They arrived suddenly, spoke enigmatically, and then they left.

  Every time somebody talked to one of these monsters, words vanished from his or her vocabulary.

  Why didn't we go to our elders? The First had powers that dwarfed anything we could do on our own. But we didn't realize initially that this was anything to do with them. It seemed of a piece with the messy emotional stuff of our young lives. Particularly since, for the longest time, Irra was at the center of it.

  We did not have a name for it then, but Irra had become a wizard. He had a wizard's power and a wizard's weirdness. He would pop up without warning—striding out of a thicket, jumping down from a rooftop—to perform some never-before-seen action, and then leave. Once he walked right past Mylitta and into her house and before her astonished eyes
urinated on the pallet where she slept! Another time, he rode across the fields on a horse of snow, only half-visible in the white mist that steamed off its back, and when the children came running madly out to see, shouting, “Irra! Irra!” and “Give us a ride!” he pelted them with snowballs made from the living substance of his steed, and galloped off, jeering.

  These were troubling occurrences, but they did not seem serious enough to warrant bothering the First over. Not until I lost Silili.

  I was working in the marshes that day, cutting salt hay for winter fodder. It was hot work, and I was sweating so hard that I took off my tunic and labored in my trousers alone. But Silili had promised to bring a lunch to me and I wanted her to see how hard I could work. I bent, I cut, I straightened, and as I turned to drop an armful of hay I saw her standing at the edge of the trees, staring at me. Just the sight of her took my breath away.

  I must have looked pleasing to her as well for, without saying a word, she took my hand and led me to that same meadow where we first made love. Wordlessly, then, we repeated our original vows.

  Afterward, we lay neither speaking nor touching each other. Just savoring our closeness. I remember that I was lying on my stomach, staring at a big, goggle-eyed bullfrog that sat pompously in the shallows of the stream, his great grin out of the water, his pulsing throat within, when suddenly the ground shook under us and a grinding noise filled the air.

  We danced to our feet as something like an enormous metal beetle with a kind of grinder or drill in place of a head erupted from the ground, spattering dirt in all directions. The gleaming round body was armored with polished iron plates. A crude mouth opened at the end of an upheld leg and said, “Who.” Then, “Are.” And finally, “You?"

  "Go away,” I said sulkily.

  "Goooooooo,” it moaned. “Waaaaaaaaaay. Aaaaaaaaa."

  "No!” I pelted the thing with clods of dirt, but it did not go away. I snatched up a stick and broke it across the beetle's back, to no visible effect. “Nobody wants you here."