Which goes to show that every permutation Of bodies and of beds both can and will Be tried—through all the times and nations A marriage party usually is filled Per balance of the sexes. It's hard, still,
Because of claims from old religious quarrels, To keep in mind conditions make our morals.
But such is life, distractible and local— Like fights that have become their own excuse.
The king retreated into bland but vocal Pigheadedness, pretending to be obtuse On issues they debated—from the use Of palace funds, to plans for his domain: Not dredge the
channel—repair the harbor chain.
"Without good trade, there'll be no revenue," She argued, "and defenses cost too much." What can a wife (and former steward) do When her good sense has been ignored? She clutched Her righteousness, and upped demands a notch.
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He thought he'd reached the depths of his dismay— Then Cretan Minos rowed into the bay.
This ruler soi-disant of all the seas Had wrested Crete from regent brothers, all So he and his could do just as they please— Wife's tastes were bestial, son's beastial, Which worked, for his were architectural.
He'd heard of small Aegina's plague and flight And thought he'd conquer it without a fight.
Alarms! Excursions! Mobilize our forces! War ships in harbor! Enemies have come! King /Eacus was filled with all remorses— He'd let the stubborn fight distract him from Those critical defenses. He felt numb,
Especially when the ultimatum came:
Immediate submission or the flame.
Lampito realized, as her husband claimed, Expensive walls and weapons were really needed; The thought she'd weakened the nest left her shamed. As men's and myrmidons' demands exceeded Her rationed swords and shields, her hopes receded, But with her co-wife gone—off hunting things— ' Twas left to her alone to aide the king.
Each side's commander soon received reports: Aegina's rocky shores were all secure, With no place for a landing but the port— But there, alas, defensive works were poor.
The myrmidons were news, unknown before, But Minos didn't do a double-take. "More women? Ha! They're nothing." Big mistake.
Formalities: Aegina spurned surrender. Thus answered, Cretans landed on the quay To find that they were fighting either gender: The men were trained, but women meaner—they Threw all their strength and numbers in the fray, All weapons raised against invading
males: Swords, brickbats, pointy sticks, teeth, fingernails.
At first they held their ground. Their viciousness Unnerved the Cretans—myrmidons fought hard, Ignoring danger, to protect their nest, And men, to save their wives. Thus caught off-guard, They were confined and couldn't gain a yard, But with good armor and their better
training, The Cretans forced a breech, and soon were gaining.
They battled house to house, result too clear, Till Cyrene at last came from the hills
With all her huntresses, each armed with spears— All former soldier ants fresh
from the kill. Resistance stiffened under her—but still, The Cretan front kept rising up, not falling:
The death rate of defenders was appalling.
The myrmidonic tactics were the cause: Their sense of strategy was mass attack In crowded interference, without a pause
To make sure that reserves were at their back.
Retreat on purpose? The thought took them aback. King yEacus soon realized that while he
Was not obeyed, they'd follow Cyrene.
But she was in the deepest thick of things
And wouldn't back out either. It was hot,
But shielded by Lampito, our brave king
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Worked through the battle din to where she fought—
Which made the ants who saw him quite distraught— And once he caught her and her sole attention, He then explained his tactical intention:
That first, Aeginetans in front fall back To draw the Cretans out, then sides sweep in Behind their rear, now open to attack. The plan was good, but Cyrene didn't grin— She saw a flaw, much to the king's chagrin: "What keeps our enemy, while we retreat, From pressing on to finish our defeat?"
Lampito, with her managerial skills, Knew what: unused material for planned New houses could make barricades to fill The streets, behind which fighters could safely stand. The work was quickly done at her command, And Cyrene then plunged where bat tle pressed To give the word: fall back, sweep round, invest.
They fell back in good order; with fighters freed, As quick as knives her counter then attacked The Cretans. Minos missed what happened—he'd Blinked—suddenly, instead of helpless city sacked, He'd lost his landing party. His wrist smacked, He soothed his ego with an easy crime And went to bully Athens one more time.
They held a sacrifice in celebration— This after clean-up—during which they mourned And newly dead were given their libation. That done, while some remarriage plans were formed, They partied hard—though yEacus was scorned By Kallimorphos. Thrown into a funk, He was consoled by getting rather drunk.
The skills of both his wives were sorely tested, Cajoling him through the dregs of his expense— Hung over, he was crabby and congested. At least each thought well of the others' sense (Their organizing, his experience)
And mutual respect—domestic grease—
Is the sole basis for a lasting peace.
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History, at least thirty-nine of its countless elements, began with Sumer, or so Samuel Noah Kramer would
have us believe. The origins of history are being continuously reglossed, even as we are 'perpetually revising
our view of our relationship with the past and our own place in the present—and what, in fact, history
actually is. Despite the uncertainties in our knowledge of the past (and the present), and the subjectivity of
our interpretations of either, there are constants, however much their particulars and primacy might be
argued. There have always been, will always be, work and play. Suffering and healing. Firsts and lasts.
Gregory Feeley here offers a meditation on "the end of history," both as fearfully anticipated and as complacently announced.
Giliad
Gregory Feeley
Trent's pleasure in being asked to beta-test Ziggurat deeply annoyed Leslie, who watched without comment as he slid in the CD but left when summer-movie music began to vibrate from the speakers as cuneiform characters appeared on the screen and slowly turned into the company's name. She was in the kitchen when he called her to come see something, and had nearly finished preparing lunch when he appeared at the door. "No, I'm not interested," she answered, ignoring his crestfallen expression. "Go role-play as Sargon, but don't tell me it's history. And that anachronistic Greek letter is pretty dumb."
"They're just showing off their HTML," he protested, hurt. "You say you hate not being able to underline in e-mail." He took a sandwich, an act he made seem like a peace offering. "Was there really a king named Sargon?"
Leslie sighed. "Yes and he's certain to appear in the game, since his name sounds like someone out of Star Trek." Trent laughed. "You know what else they'll put in?"
"Gilgamesh?" he guessed after a second. Trent hated being made to feel he was being tested.
"Beer," she answered, handing him a bottle. "The Sumerians invented it."
"Really?" His pleasure at some bauble of fact was unmediated, like a child's. "And there were seven cities vying for supremacy?"
"In Sargon's time? I don't know." Leslie thought. "Uruk, then Kish . . ."
"Nippur, Eridu, Ur, Lagash, and Uraraa." Leslie looked skeptical, and he added, "I know, it depends on when." "These are independent city-states? Then this would be before Sargon, or sometime after." She sighed. "I'll look it up, okay? But I don't want to deal with your game."
When she entered the office, however, a color map of the Tigris-Euphrates valley was glowing on the monitor. Trent was nowhere to be seen. Leslie pulled down her Cambridge Ancien
t History, and as she turned back toward the desk a half dozen cities appeared within the lopsided gourd formed by the two rivers. She stepped closer and saw that the symbols marking the sites were ragged-sloped triangles, ziggu-rats. Kish was nearest the stem, with the rest farther south; but after a second a constellation of features began to appear: the word AKKAD materialized just beneath the bottleneck, while stylized inverted Vs, ominous as the peaks of Mordor in Tolkien's map of Middle Earth, rose to the east and became The Zagros Mountains, ELAMITES, AMORITES, and GUTIANS threatened from the periphery. Leslie glanced at the speakers and noticed that the volume had been turned down.
Not wanting to sit with her back to the monitor as it cycled through these changes, she took her book into the bedroom. She could hear tapping from the living room, where the laptop was plugged in by the couch. She sat in the armchair—the squeak of sprawling across the bed would doubtless bring Trent—and browsed through the pages on Mesopotamia.
Reading history will send you repeatedly to the bookcase to consult other sources on the subject,
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unless the author has managed to catch you in the spell of his narrative (which means you are not reading history). This volume was so introductory that Leslie would have found herself standing up with every page, save that she did not own the books to consult. Finally she went to the back hallway and searched the double-shelved rows to locate an old paperback, History Begins at Sumer. Anecdotal and lacking an index, it led readers by the hand through successive "firsts"—first library catalogue; first farmer's almanac—with little discussion or analysis. She wondered whether the game designers had quarried it for local color.
Returning the books to the office, Leslie saw that the screen now showed a stylized face with dark holes for eyes and the corrugated beard of an Assyrian sculpture. She recognized it as a bronze head thought to be of Sargon, with its damaged eye-hole digitally restored. The image stared out at the viewer, its probable accompaniment muted.
"That's somebody," said Trent, who had appeared at the doorway. "True enough," Leslie replied. "Ancient statues don't bear plaques, but they always turn out to be of specific gods or individuals—never some generic woman or warrior."
"How about epic heroes?"
"You mean like Gilgamesh and Enmerkar? They were probably historical figures."
"Enmerkar?" Trent said, startled.
"Sounds like Earwicker?" asked Leslie, smiling. He was already going to his shelf, pulling down the Third Census and the Concordance. After a minute he reported, "No . . . no references to Enmerkar or Gilgamesh. Rather surprising, when you think of it. Isn't the poem about the search for immortality and bringing back the dead?"
"No, not really. Is that what fantasy writers think?"
Trent flushed at this, then sat down to consult one of his reference works. Leslie picked up the book on Sumer and tracked down the chapter on Gilgamesh ("First Case of Literary Borrowing"). Kramer's precis did make the poem sound more about seeking immortality than Leslie remembered. As Trent was doubtless about to find corroboration of this, she decided to withdraw the remark.
"Hey," she said suddenly, "pause that." She was pointing to the monitor, where the image of a desert landscape dominated by an enormous crumbling mound was undergoing digital transformation. By the time Trent had turned and clicked to freeze the image, the mound had risen into angular prominence, like an ice sculpture melting in reverse, and the surrounding wastes had sprouted small buildings. With a keystroke Trent restored the original photograph, and they gazed at the massive ruin, so decayed that the eye first saw it as a natural formation.
"I've seen that picture," said Leslie. "There's a modern structure on top, built by archeologists. It looks like a Crusader's castle."
"Really?" Trent drawled. "They must have edited it out."
Leslie explained that while the later Babylonians incorporated the various Gilgamesh poems into a single sequence that did include a quest for immortality, the Sumerian originals—composed during the period in which Trent's game seemed to be set, around 2500 B.C.—told a different story, in which Enkidu is physically detained in the netherworld and Gilgamesh merely seeks to get him back.
"But it's the Babylonian version that everyone knows, right?"
"Well, yes." Leslie thought irritably that Trent was crowing, but he looked back to his reference book—an encyclopedia of fantasy, she saw—and she got it. "That's right, the great man wrote about immortality, didn't he?" It came out sharper than she had intended, but Trent didn't take offense. "He always insisted it
wasn't immortality, simply an extremely prolonged life span," he said mildly. "He was far too obsessed with the end of things to preclude its certainty."
And you had to be similarly obsessed to write his life, thought Leslie. Most of Trent's
enthusiasms—Finnegans Wake, the works of James Branch Cabell, Wagner's Ring—were those of
the great man, whom he was seeking, through a kind of literary archeology, to understand. That this
required the intentness of the scholar rather than the enthusiasm of the dilettante was for Leslie its
primary value.
"He would have hated computer games," Leslie pointed out.
"Certainly these games. He would have hated postmodernism's embrace of pop culture and mass
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media; he still believed in great modernist masterpieces rising above a sea of trash. Yet look at his best work: commercial SF novels, his 'serious' efforts unpublished. And his narratives are fragmented and decentered, mixing prose with verse and embedding texts within texts like—" Trent looked at the monitor, where overlapping windows had opened atop one another, and laughed at the too to-hand analogy.
Trent had been gesturing unconsciously toward the top shelf, too close to the ceiling to hold any but small-format paperbacks, and L eslie glanced up at their titles. "If you want to write about porno sci-fi, why not the guy who wrote The Simulacra?"
"He's not as interesting," Trent said in a conspiratorial whisper, as though broaching heresy. "My guy isn't trendy; he's still out in the margins."
Images were appearing one after the other on the screen: an ancient map of Nippur, an artist's rendition of the walls of Uruk, a detailed relief of charioteers riding into battle. Scenes of war, which the city-states waged incessantly upon each other until they were conquered from without. Was this how players would busy themselves? An image of naked prisoners in a neck-stock was followed by a stele fragment of soldiers dumping earth over a mound of enemy dead.
"How do you win?" she asked. "Conquer everyone else, or just stay on top of your own small heap until you die of old age?"
"I'll let you know," he said. The screen was once more displaying the entire region, and Trent leaned forward to study it. "Why do they call it a river valley? The land between the rivers is wide and flat, with mountains on one side only."
"It's an alluvial plain." Except for the levees that gradually build up along the banks of the river and any canals, the land appears perfectly flat. But the basins defined by these ridges, too wide and shallow for the eye to discern, would determine the flow of water as it floods, an issue of gravest consequence.
"Annalivia, Annaluvia," Trent mused. "Yes, dear." Outside, Megan's shout echoed off the tier of condo balconies across the grass, and she looked out the window. "Beta-testers play with the product, right? They don't work at it."
"Not exactly, but I take your point." Leslie was already heading for the door, where Ursuline was blocking the threshold, evidently to alert her to anyone coming or going. She stepped over the sleeping Labrador and padded quietly down the hall, leaving her book on the table outside their bedroom. Through the back screen she could hear the children's shouts, none pitched to the pain or alarm she was always listening for.
Four kids were visible or audible through the dining room window, circling each other on the trimmed lawn. Their game seemed improvised yet intuitively understood, and even the fluid shifting
of rules that Leslie observed provoked neither confusion nor protest. What games did children play in the ancient world, without structures designed for their edification? Would the diversions of ancient Greece be more familiar to us than those of early Sumer, a culture twice as old and incomparably stranger?
Leslie took chilled coffee from the refrigerator, added ice, and stood watching out the kitchen window, a few degrees' different perspective. Without a ball or demarcated spaces, their game seemed the frolic of will in a field of limitless play, the impulse to sportiveness before it has touched a limit.
At one point the four children were all facing one direction, paused before a prospect invisible to Leslie. Something in their hesitancy immediately reminded her of the scene, shown earlier in this Kubrick's year on living room DVD, of the killer apes crouched warily before the slim featureless monolith. "It looks like the World Trade Center!" cried Megan, still weeks shy of her eighth birthday. "Where's the other one?" Trent had laughed, anticipating the coming scenes depicting life in 2001. "You'll see," he said.
The sun retained the brightness of midafternoon, though it was after five and Leslie, had she not taken a half-day from work, would be on the train home by now. The resumption of school still left what seemed an entire play day for Megan, who would go back outside for more than an hour after dinner. This plenitude, possible only in the first weeks of the school year, possessed the transient glamour of enchantment: one layer of time folded over another. Partake while the feast is before
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you, she wanted to tell her daughter, who consumed her good fortune with youth's grassfire prodigality. She brought a glass in for Trent, who had called up another map of Mesopotamia, this one showing the network of canals running between rivers and cities. "It's all connect-the-dots on a flat surface," he said in mild surprise. "I bet news traveled by boat and canal path, along these lines. Like a computer chip," he added after a moment.
Turtledove, Harry - Anthology 07 - New Tales Of The Bronze Age - The First Heroes (with Doyle, Noreen) Page 28