Ciarelli read us a book about them."
Both parents stared at their daughter.
"That's an excellent point, dear. The Sumerians even had chariots, which they used in their battles just like the Greeks. Did I show you the images of them on the computer?" "Not yet. Do they look like the ones the Greeks rode around the city walls?" "We don't actually know what Greek chariots looked like," said Leslie. "But Daddy is right,
there are actual pictures of Sumerian ones." "Even though they're older?" Megan thought for a moment. "I guess if you invented the wheel, you'd want to make sure everyone knew it."
Trent showed Megan images of Sumerian carts and chariots while Leslie washed up, then took her to the library to get a video. Leslie spent the hour reading about early Mesopotamia, the laptop beside her for taking notes. The glow of domestic contentment—the parents' eyes meeting after Megan said something wonderful could spark the most luminous serenity—still suffused the otherwise empty house, and this, plus perhaps the fact that she generally curled up in this armchair with a novel (the glass of wine also helped), shifted something within her, and the customs and practices of kalam, "The Land," began to suggest the most familiar and comfortable of stories: a Mystery (turning upon a former scribe's ability to enter a darkened chamber and read the clay tablets with his fingertips), a Melodrama (legal records told of wicked uncles challenging the legitimacy of their dead brothers' sons), a Gothic (involving the Sumerian custom of burying the family dead within one's house), and even a Romance (a marriage contract could bring the future bride, sometimes still a girl, into her husband's household without specifying who the husband will be, so that she grows up wondering which brother she shall marry). How easily the third millennium B.C. could be shaped to the varieties of the twentieth-century (or nineteenth-century, if Leslie is honest) novel, the template of bourgeois sensibility.
Trent came down the stairs, hardcover in hand, with the careful tread of one leaving a child just asleep. Leslie smiled and waved. "Still on Book III?" "For every category of ships I omit, I have to add an explanation for something else. She has already suggested that the story may last as long as the war." Leslie laughed. "Switch to the Odyssey, fast! I'm surprised you've kept her interested so long in a story where no one travels."
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"I suspect she's waiting for the captive princess to be rescued and flee toward home." Trent dropped into the couch opposite Leslie. "Raymond Queneau once said that all novels are either iliads or odysseys. He wrote one, Odile, that was intended to encompass both modes."
"As its title suggests?"
A look of astonishment spread across Trent's face. "I never thought of that."
Leslie shook her head fondly. "But does this rule apply to pre-Homeric literature?"
"Good question. The Gilgamesh poem would be an odyssey, wouldn't it?"
"Maybe the later versions, not the Sumerian one. No descriptive journeys but lots of dialogue and social clashes."
"Huh." Trent pondered this. "So what do you call a Gilgamesh-Iliad? A Giliad?"
"Go to bed, Trenchant. I'll have something for you later." It was only after he had left, a grin on his
face, that she realized what he was thinking.
He was asleep when she finally came to bed, the reading lamp on and a splayed book beside him on her pillow. Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time. It was one of Trent's endearing qualities, that he fell in love with the assignments that were tossed to him: gave them his heart, which got bruised when they were kicked into some chute and later mashed flat in a change of plans. Entering the realm of novel tie-ins, land of the flat fees, he was already resolved to do more than asked. She shifted the book to the bedside table and slid in beside him, feeling an affection that flared brightest at the sight of her daughter's features visible in her sleeping husband.
As she pulled the sheet over her and darkness expanded beyond the bedroom walls, Leslie found herself thinking of the Iliad, seemingly more modern than the Odyssey, beginning with the war it treats already in progress and ending before its conclusion. Megan must already know the story of the Trojan Horse; will she be upset to hear of the burning towers, the slaughtered populace, and what awaits the victors who set out on triumphant returns? Gilgamesh was an iliad in that respect, too.
It is the last night of the end of history, and Leslie—who had been reading of the three tiers of cultivation in Mesopotamian farming— dreams of Nanshe climbing a tamarisk: emerging above the lower canopy of citrus and pomegranate to look across the grove, the date palms standing like aloof grownups surrounded by crowding children. Nanshe's playmates, feet planted among the cucumbers and lettuce, stood looking up as she scrambled higher, the breeze unimpeded in her hair. The sound of men raising the sluice gate carried clearly from the canal, and Nanshe imagined the water, trickling through the channels and branchings into the orchard, reaching at last to wet their toes. Their startled shrieks would rise like birds, and Nanshe would laugh and hurl down twigs.
"Your faces are tablets," she once cried, exulting at her friends' alarm, "I see what you really feel!" Father had been explaining to Enannatum how a man's expression and posture can disclose his true feelings, vital skill for any merchant. Invisible in a corner, Nanshe listened. Now every visage contained characters effaced and rewritten, yet legible to her questing eye. The canopy is a face, where stirring leaves bespeak Ekur's stealthy efforts to climb. The horizon is a register, the line where dust storms, the winter rains, attacking armies will first inscribe themselves. The world is a tablet, a stele, the frameless burst of meaning that Nanshe, alone between the fruit trees and the unforthcoming sky, resolves to see hear feel for her own.
The rentals were returned unwatched; Trent's redaction of Helen and Paris's rapprochement was left dangling. Cubicle workers stared transfixed before streaming video; officials disappeared into shelters; the skies fell silent. In the shocked still evening, the intolerable images replayed.
Connecticut, untouched by war for nearly two hundred years, got an upwind look. Leslie and Trent lived closer to Stamford than to Bridgeport, but it was toward the older city that Leslie traveled each day, to a thirty-floor gleaming wafer whose daily occupants flowed in and out on the nearby commuter trains. That afternoon, in response to a whispered comment by an ashen coworker, she rode up to the roof and looked out west. It was there: a low smudge on the horizon, widening as it spread on its own terrible winds into Brooklyn and New Jersey.
No work was done the next day, and the weeks that followed were traversed in a cloud of dazed
grief. Megan, who had gotten (they later realized) a good dose of live coverage while her parents
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stood white-faced before the TV, had scary dreams about jets. Trent took a long time completing
his assignments, then found new ones hard to get. It was somehow still that Tuesday, so violently
nailed to history one could not pull free and move on.
"They now say less than ten thousand." No real numbers known at all, just vast uttered estimates, to be slowly refined by counting absences. From the hole in Pennsylvania, perhaps a salvageable black box. Amid horror, Leslie found herself yearning for story: a cockpit transcript, defiant last letter, jubilant claim of victory. Which of you have done this? The loathsome Taliban of Afghanistan denounced the attack, Saddam Hussein hailed it.
Work resumed, though badly. Leslie had to tell her tech staff not to go to CNN.com so often. She came home to a consistently clean house, sign enough of how Trent wasn't spending his days. Megan's school held its postponed Open House, and they stood before her cubby and examined her activities book, album of drawings, and her daily journal. Leslie turned to the journal entry for September 11, and they read:
Today somthing is going on but I don't know what. Marry came in and said somthing is getting
wors. Somthing aubt a plane. But what that's the onley quchin I have. I'm -probley going to ask
her to tell me the
ansor becas quechins are ejacashnal.
Trent shook his head. "You couldn't make up something like that," he said. Leslie looked at him with annoyed bemusement. Who said anything about making things up?
Their first trip to the City was a rainy Sunday excursion to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where an exhibit on Japanese anime was about to close. They were quiet as they crossed the bridge to Queens, which afforded them a good look at the south Manhattan skyline. Trent perked up as they entered the lobby, however, and led Megan off to the fifth floor while Leslie checked the map for the Assyrian collection.
Most of the Mesopotamian exhibits were Babylonian, but Leslie found one extremely strange artifact from the era of Ziggurat: a teapot-sized terra-cotta jug bearing a chicken's head and four clay wheels. She stared at the thing, which looked more Dada than Sumer-ian, then read how such vessel carts could be dated to the mid-third millennium, but that scholars were divided as to whether they had been built as toys or for temple rituals. Leslie thought that the saucer-sized wheels were too crude for religious purposes, and noticed something that the description hadn't mentioned, a half-ring emerging from the front of the vessel, from which a rope could be tied to pull the device. Of course it was a toy, though she could not imagine why wheels had been put on a pouring jug (it had two openings, one for filling from the top and a spout in front) rather than a chariot.
More compelling was a copper statuette on the opposite wall, of a man wearing a helmet with long curving horns and strange boots that curled up extravagantly at the toes. His pointed beard and wide staring eyes reminded Leslie of a medieval devil, a conceit that would give pleasure to a fantasy writer or a fundamentalist. The text noted that the horns resembled those of a species of ram found in the mountain regions, whose present-day inhabitants wore pointed slippers. So perhaps the figure had been made there: no one knew.
". . . It wasn't the actual film at all, just the video projected onto a big screen, so we saw the clamshell version with its sides trimmed off." Trent was talking about a kid's movie that had been shown as part of an exhibit. It was raining on the ride back, and Leslie was concentrating on the road.
"So what were these creatures like?" she asked dutifully. She was trying to get onto the Whitestone Bridge, but the lane for the turnoff was stalled as a stream of cars, most bearing American flags, passed on the left to cut in just before the exit.
"They were mammals, I guess: furry, with serene expressions. You couldn't tell from the dubbing whether totoro was a made-up word or the Japanese term for a forest spirit." "Like Huwawa?" Trent was always gratified when she remembered an earlier subject of interest
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to him. "Hey, maybe. Huwawa fought back, but then the totoro were never attacked. They did have enormous teeth."
Leslie wanted to ponder the nature of wheeled vessels, but consented to discuss Gilgamesh and Enkidu's journey to the Cedar Forest to slay its guardian. The strange passage held more interest than Zig-gurat's political macaronics, and spoke (in some way) of the distances Sumerians had to travel to get wood for their roof beams and chariots.
"Huwawa was supposed to be evil," Trent mused. "An odd quality for a forest guardian."
"It was Gilgamesh who called him that," Leslie pointed out. "It seemed pretty plain that he
wanted to kill him for the glory. You will recall that Enkidu, closer to nature, hated the whole idea."
"A totoro wouldn't kill anyone for the glory," Megan observed from the backseat. "They don't
need glory."
Her parents exchanged glances. "Good girl," said Trent. "More people should think that way."
After dinner Trent showed Megan a game board on his computer. "Archeologists called it 'the
Royal Game of Ur,' because the first boards were found in the Ur royal cemetery. But other
versions were found elsewhere, even drawn on paving-stones, so it wasn't just for kings."
Megan studied the irregularly shaped board, which comprised a rectangle made of twelve squares and another made of six, joined by a bridge two squares long. Each square was brilliantly colored with one of several complex designs. "How do you play?" she asked.
"Nobody really knows. Some rules were discovered for a much later version, and it seems that each player threw dice to move tokens around the board. The two players each move in opposite directions, and can land on each other's tokens and bump them off, especially along the narrow stretch here."
Megan reached out and traced her finger down the board's side. "Can we play it online?"
Trent shook his head. "Sorry, this is just an image of the original board. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a website somewhere to play it, though."
"Maybe the designers should add that feature to Ziggurat," he said later to Leslie.
"They know their audience better than you do," she replied. "You know what they would say? 'There's no place here for a game.'" Trent laughed. "True enough. I like the narrow defile, though. It compels the player to move his tokens along the equivalent of a mountain trail." "No mountain trails in Sumer. Were you hoping to give players a pleasant suggestion of the Khyber Pass?"
That night Leslie opened a file on her laptop and began to organize her notes on Sumer into something that could provide the outline of a novel. War had to be the theme of at least one book, Trent had said, and present in the background for the other two. Leslie decided to think about agriculture and water rights, a likelier cause for conflict than the poems suggest. Even a prosperous landowner would have no reason to read, but Leslie suspected that a middle-class audience would have problems with an illiterate protagonist, so she invented a younger son who was intended to become a scribe. Worldly doings would dominate the action, but it was the kid sister who would prove the novel's secret protagonist, and not merely for Leslie. Women always constitute more of these books' audience than the men realize, Trent had told her. You craft the book to please them, like the baby food that is flavored for the mother's palate.
She sketched out some paragraphs about a girl who helped her younger brother prepare practice
tablets for school, while the older brother learned the family business with their father. Nobody
knew how the clay tablets were made, though she could make some obvious guesses. Nobody knew
the location of Agade, Sargon's magnificent capital. Leslie was tempted to set the novel there, though
of course she realized she should use sites that readers would find in Ziggurat.
In fact. . . Leslie padded into the office, where the flexing trape-zoids of Trent's screensaver moved silently across their bit of darkness. Trent used her own machine's better speakers to play music, so had left the Ziggurat CD in his drive, its icon present (she saw after tapping the side of the mouse) on the task bar at the bottom of his screen. She twirled the volume knob, then brought the cursor gliding down to click on the tiny pyramid. As the game instantly resumed, she brought the volume up to the lowest audible level, and the clashing sounds of battle faintly reached her.
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Leslie clicked rapidly backward, undoing whatever war Trent had gotten himself involved in, then paused in the silence to examine the lists of artifact images. Might as well use implements actually pictured in the game, if you're going to write a tie-in. But the subdirectories showed few agricultural or domestic tools (the designers favoring scenes of splendor or warfare), and she found herself studying the gorgeous works of art, museum photographs—had the producer cleared the rights for these?—of enormous-eyed statuettes; gold jewelry of exquisite workmanship; goddesses carved of alabaster and serpentine, the later ones of Attic accomplishment, the earlier ones deeply strange.
What kind of culture could carve these stone figures, hands clasped reverently and eyes like saucers, and place them in their temples, presumably as stand-ins for individual worshipers? Their gaze was neither submissively lowered nor raised toward heaven; they were looking at their gods, with an alertness Leslie knew she could not underst
and. Did the temple's divine statues—made certainly of gold, meaning leaf covering perishable wood, which was why none had ever been found— gaze back, or were they intent upon other matters? The gods were sometimes taken from their temples and transported to other cities; vase paintings and cylinder seals showed them being poled along the river. These were "idols," Leslie supposed, but it was foolish to conclude that they were literally worshiped, any more than those statues of the Blessed Virgin that Connecticut Italians still carried to festivals. Carved images of supplicants stood before gilt representations of divinities in an enactment doubly signified, creating a field of force no instruments can measure. Trent couldn't use this, though he might be interested in the "sacred marriage" hymns, which made clea that the new year's ritual ended in sexual consummation between the city's ruler (who assumed the role of the god Dumuzi) and a priestess who represented divine Inanna. More metonymy, although perhaps the gods were recognized as physically present in their surrogates. Same with the food, she wrote in a file she was compiling for Trent's use. Everyone knew that the food set out for the gods was actually consumed by the temple staff. Nothing is stone literal; it all hovers between levels of mediation, and we can't tell where to draw the line.
This was evasion, and Leslie knew that Trent would brush it impatiently aside. The "Stele of the Vultures" was so named because one panel showed vultures flying off with the heads of slain soldiers, and there was no reason to believe that Sumerian armies showed mercy to their captives in any of their endless campaigns. Prisoners who could not be ransomed were killed or mutilated, and what else could you expect? The ancient world did not have POW camps. Trent's novelizations could not gratify the gamers' zeal for battles without acknowledging this truth.
The textbooks gave few women's names, but Leslie remembered a goddess known for mercy named Nanshe, and decided in the absence of evidence to the contrary that Sumerians sometimes named their children after minor gods. She added some more lines about the girl and her family, spent a few minutes reading news updates (a habit now faintly obsessive, but she couldn't help it), then took herself to bed. Drifting past shoals toward sleep, she thought of Nanshe, who spoke sometimes with the water-carrier, a great-shouldered man baked like a brick by the sun, who had been captured and blinded during a war years ago. He stood all day drawing water from the levee and carrying it along the road to the village square, the thick pole with buckets swaying at either end bowing across his back like an ox yoke. Mudu, the kids called him, as he had apparently said it once when asked his name. "Were you a farmer?" Nanshe asked him as he walked back toward the well, buckets and pole slung easily over one shoulder. She felt pleased to have inferred this after watching his practiced motions with the shaduf—when temple servants were sent for water, they slopped and wasted effort.
Turtledove, Harry - Anthology 07 - New Tales Of The Bronze Age - The First Heroes (with Doyle, Noreen) Page 30