"La-ul," the man replied curtly. The intensifier suggested disdain for the question.
Nanshe was taken aback. "You weren't an artisan," she guessed after a moment; a blind potter or
weaver could still ply his trade, or at least serve as assistant.
"Sataru," he said simply. The verb meant to have incised, but Nan-she was slow to understand.
"You mean you were a scribe?"
Mudu didn't turn his face toward her, which was a relief, since his gaze was frightening. "Palace,
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not temple. Records."
His calloused hands did not look as though they had once held a reed. Nanshe looked at his powerful arms and back, which she had supposed had been his since youth. Various thoughts contested within her, but her merchant's thrift won out and she protested, "Scribing is a valuable trade."
The man grunted. The sounds of men working the shaduf on the levee had evidently reached him, for he turned without pausing onto the path that led to the well, where he set down the pole and began to tie up the first bucket's handle. The polished crossbar over which the rope was slung squealed as he let the bucket drop, and he stretched his arms while they listened to the splash and then the glug of its sinking.
"Water is heavier than clay," he said suddenly.
Nanshe looked up at him, puzzled. "That's not true," she said. She started to say something more, then realized that speaking betrayed her location. She took a step back, and added, "Clay tablets will sink."
Mudu turned and began drawing up the rope. It occurred to Nanshe that he was probably saying that scribes do not carry loads all day. She was still trying to work out why the Palace hadn't ransomed him to his city, or set him to work keeping its own records, or otherwise turned his tangible value to account.
"How many years ago?" she asked. It occurred to her that he might have had children.
A shout carried faintly across the open air. Nanshe turned and saw an adult waving from the path bordering the adjacent field's far side, her mother's cook. She set off at a run, then whirled round to call "Good-bye!" to the slave. If Mudu had once been a palace scribe, he was something other than she had thought.
"If you like dallying at the well, you could bring home some water,"
Cook observed. She could not discern detail at a distance, or she would have cuffed Nanshe for speaking to the slave. "You didn't send me out with a bucket," Nanshe observed. Then, "How long ago was the war with Umma?" Cook laughed. "You sound like a tablet-house instructor." Nanshe scowled, and Cook pretended to flick water at her. "Which war do you mean?"
Nanshe began to say When they brought back all the slaves, but thought better of it. Sitting in the courtyard with a basket of legumes, she watched Cook cleaning a turtle with a small bronze knife, and wondered whether scribes impressed into battle for their city fought with better weapons than laborers. The household's other knives were flint, while vendors in the market sliced their wares with blades of clay. Was Mudu's weapon also carried back in triumph to Lagash; did it serve Ningirsu in his temple today?
Later Nanshe retrieved her doll from Sud, whose tiny clay soldiers had overrun it. Sitting in the shade of the poplar that arched over the house, she took a reed she had cut and positioned it beside Dolly's arm, as though it were a spear. The figure now looked like Inanna—Nanshe could not imagine an armed woman otherwise—and she reflected that if she took Dolly out to the house they had made for her in the tamarisk brush (Sud had helped, under the impression that he was building fortifications), then the knee-high mud-brick structure, its thatched roof removable to disclose partitioned rooms within, would become perforce Her temple. Nanshe, who knew nothing of any temple's inner chambers, was thrilled at the thought of now gazing upon them.
As she lay that night with Dolly in her arms, the reed spear forgotten under the tree, Nanshe wondered whether she could recruit her mother's assistance in making Dolly a new dress for Festival. Attired like a prosperous merchantwife, Dolly would certainly
This isn't what my readers want. The -plot must conform to a gaming scenario; any novelistic texture must grow in the cracks between.
Your readers? They are the game's readers; you're just brought in to entertain them.
Okay, I'm sorry. But if they're reading something I wrote, can I think of them as mine, even if the copyright isn't? At least for as long as they hold open the pages?
This is only a brief scene. Even a novelization can't be incessant action.
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I'll give it a paragraph. One can introduce new themes in that little space, establish a counterpoint, okay? If I write more the editors will cut it.
Clay soldiers stood atop the house's perimeter, like invaders breaching the city walls. With an annoyed cry Nanshe swept them clear, but the point returned to her as she lay remembering: Sud thought in terms of armies because the lugals did; the cities did—it was the way things were. Perhaps the gods did.
War with Umma precluded trade with Umma, but Umma (Nanshe's father often said this) produced little that Lagash did not, and competed with Lagash for trade elsewhere. If the arrogance of Umma's people regarding water boundaries roused Ningirsu's ire, there was no reason why Lagash's merchants should question the will of the city.
Shock troops thunder across the plain, impossibly loud, each chariot drawn by two onagers. Lugal Eannatum's chariot commands four, and the songs will declare that it moved twice as fast. They far outpace the infantry, which disappears behind boiling clo uds of dust, emerging seconds later, a forest of speartips glinting above their helmets, like figures marching out of a mountainside. The enemy ranks break and scatter, and though the chariots do not run them down as in song, no soldier stands fast to attack as they sweep through the line, causing spearmen to drop shields, spring away like panicked grasshoppers, trample each other. Umma's own chariots, fewer and slower, have not yet reached the advancing Lagashites, who see the rout, roar terrify-ingly, and present spear tips to the spooked Umman onagers. The plain dissolves into a swirling chaos of smoke, noise, and trembling earth, but the contest is already over.
The sickle-sword in Eannatum's hand would be portrayed in stelae and (now lost) wall paintings, the implicit metaphor—of his enemy falling like wheat before him—apparent to the most unsophisticated viewer. Sumer's plains, where nothing stands waving in ranked thousands but the wind-tossed stalks, themselves compel the image. Shall Ninlil, goddess of grain, bow down like grain before warlike Inanna?
As her city did before Inanna's. That is the story—Gilgamesh of Uruk's—he wants most to write, the wordstring that will reach from inscribed clay to etched polycarbonate. Beginning with young Gil-gamesh's defeat of Agga's army and ending with the elder king building a shrine in subjugated Nippur, it will bracket the period (a few years, presumably, of his early maturity) when Gilgamesh gained and lost Enkidu, and so must deal with it, though in terms a gamer will not balk at. If Gilgamesh's triumphs over Kish and Ur are dramatized with suitable elan—Trent accepts that there must be several battle scenes— then the reader will sit still for the journeys to the Cedar Forest and the netherworld: perhaps even in the less familiar Sumerian versions. The harmonics of mythopoesis, echoing even from this profoundly alien culture, can inform any story, however strong its appeal to gamers.
He is trying to decide whether The Epic of Gilgamesh and the earlier poems can be considered
either iliads or odysseys. Declaring the Epic an odyssey is banal but probably unavoidable, just as
"Gilgamesh and Agga," the only Sumerian Gilgamesh poem not to have been incorporated into the
Epic, is an iliad in every respect. Role-playing games are all iliads, since they deal with battles,
depict societies primarily in terms of their ability to sustain a war effort, and see individual
psychology only through the lens of fitness for combat.
Longingly he thinks again of Enmerkar, the figure not in the carpet, whose presence in the Wake he yearns to discover. He
suspects that Enmerkar and his friend Lugalbanda were the models for Gilgamesh and Enkidu, but the fragmentary nature of the few surviving tablets leaves this unclear. For these oldest of texts Queneau's schematic dissolves, and we are confronted with the stuff of myth, which Trent wants to rub between his fingers, raise to his nose. O show me the substrate of meaning, psyche's bedrock.
What did Lugalbanda cry when he awoke and found that his companions had left him for dead? The steppes of Mount Hurum, dry and desolate, must have seemed the Sumerian underworld; did he realize at first that he still lived? The tablet here crumbles into powder, the rest of the story is lost.
Enmerkar and the army commanded by his seven heroes succeed in subjugating Aratta (the poem could hardly have gone otherwise), and they return to Erech along their original route, intending to reclaim Lugalbanda's body and bear it home. Upon reaching Mount Hurum,
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1. They find Lugalbanda, who has been roaming the steppes in despair. He la. is overjoyed to see them, or perhaps reproachful, but accepts in the end his retrieval by his peers and his return to the land of the living. lb. rages and does not forgive; the story becomes one of irreparable breach.
2. They do not find Lugalbanda, who 2a. has wandered deeper into the wilderness. 2b. has been taken away by the gods. Trent imagines more pathways, a thorough exploration of the branching possibilities that, like books opened in dreams, can appear but not actually be read. Some he knows can't work: it's the Greek gods who take up petitioners in extremis and turn them into constellations. Nor can Lugalbanda break with Enmerkar; Sumerian myths don't deal with character conflict in that way. So Enmerkar and Lugalbanda are reunited; the ordeal of Lugalbanda abandoned is a wound that heals up by poem's end.
Such wounds make us feel what we can't understand: that's what myth is. Niobe, still weeping for her children though turned to stone, or the centaurs' anguished thrall to wine and lust, retain their power to claw at the reader. The Wake doesn't claw, though the great man, a lesser writer in every other way, knew enough to.
Untitled, obscure in meaning, often fragmentary, the two or three dozen narrative poems that exist in Sumerian versions seem too blunt and odd to move us as the Greek myths can. Except for the line about mankind being created from "the clay that is over the abyss," the only tale that Trent found deeply affecting was Lugalbanda's abandonment on Hurum and his undescribed reaction.
Mount Hurum is not on Ziggurat's map—no one knows where it is—and Trent recognizes that his novels must reside within the game's geography. He hovers above the plain, watching the words IRAQ and BAGHDAD fade away and the coastline press inward until it is resting against the city that now labels itself Ur. Trent begins to fall, slowly at first, then faster as the land below grows larger and more detailed until it tilts abruptly away, like the view from a plane pulling out of a dive, and he is skimming above a landscape that has lost its lettering and cartographic flourishes and assumed almost the realistic detail of a desert seen in the opening shot of a nature documentary.
A ripple breaks the horizon's flatline, and at once the ground flashing below is not sand but cultivated fields, divided by roads and levees. The structures ahead swell and gain definition, a great wall bristling with towers, its ramparts topped only by the central ragged pyramid. The viewpoint circles the city center, temple and palace readily identifiable (Trent remembers close-ups of them) and the ziggurat's corrugated slopes rendered in vivid detail, then swoops down to alight in the central square.
The city is full but empty, for Trent knows (with the logic of dreams) that moving crowds would strain the resources of role-playing games: yet this is the Uruk of his book, anchored to the CD-ROM yet ranging freely, ungameably peopled by people. Trent moves through the throng in this confidence, secure in his characters' imaginative reality even as their bodies pass through him, or perhaps his through them. Cinched tight by the city walls, the crowded buildings radiated heat—unrelieved by winds—and a terrible stench, electronically imperceptible but evoked, made real in the mind's nostrils, by the twining long molecules of words, complex chains that twist to do anything, like wisps of smoke weaving themselves into firewood.
Stinks and gritty skin, heaped refuse and open water glimpsed from ramparts: immaterial perceptions, electrons are too crude to trace. Why are words finer than particles, which are older than anything? The meaning of Sumerian myths elude us, but not because their tablets are fragmentary or our grip on their language infirm. Every word sprouts wings, turns metaphor, and flits off at an angle we hadn't seen. These angles are not ours, they disregard our geometry. This unbeget-ting language, spoken by no one, is hardware that only ran thoughts now incomprehensible, their myths a food our minds cannot digest.
No single stuff of myth, then, no wellspring feeding every people. To work in the digital realm is to accept this: the sentences you construct do not pretend to be transcriptions of spoken words, nor do
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your images seek validity as representations of nature, judged by their fealty to something. Music—always disconcertingly itself, especially when not giving tune to words—still plays while you play, but no longer serves only as dramatic accompaniment. Word, image, and tone alike emerge from the difference between 0 and 1, the contrast between fields of force that needs, can have, no touchstone.
Game-players don't know this; they blithely enter these regions (paying for admission), thinking them flat, directional. Assume our forest is merely your path; cheer yourselves after walking its length. Contention is stranger than you know, gamers, who strain at the lines we draw round you, roar at the points we dole out, and imagine yourselves at play in the fields of the board.
Trent frequently checked the online news outlets, a practice he justified on the grounds that it kept him at his desk instead of sending him into the living room to turn on the radio. Some days he merely glanced for new headlines; others he read to the bottom of what stories were available, searching for hints of the attack that was surely coming. He knew that Leslie was doing the same from work, and sometimes imagined them sharing a second in the pages of msnbc.com/news or www.bush-watch.net, invisibly present to each other.
When it came, the websites gave it headlines, although there was nothing more than reports of rocket bombardments. "It has begun," he said aloud. What someone had told him a dozen years ago, coming out of a late movie to students gathered on the sidewalks and word that Baghdad was under attack.
They ate dinner before the TV news: few facts, much commentary.
"Word from halfway round the world," Leslie murmured, her thoughts on a different track than
Trent's. "How long have most people waited for news of distant battles?"
"We're not getting much," he replied. Anchormen, bleating helplessly, were being replaced one by one with roundtable discussions. Trent cycled through the channels once more, then left it on public television.
"True; I was thinking of information reaching the strategic command, not the sorry populace. Do you think reporters will make it in before they flatten everything?" "Afghanistan isn't Kuwait," Trent replied. "It's a big country, mountainous; far from the sea. You can't pulverize it from aircraft carriers."
"I don't know," said Leslie. She was sick with hatred for the Taliban, whose recent demolition of two immense Buddhas seemed their only assault upon something not living. But George W Bush had declined to distinguish between them and al Qaeda, as though playing to a constituency that would regard such nicety as treason. His demands had been provocative and insulting, impossible to meet although the Taliban seemed to have tried. Yet had the Western nations invaded Afghanistan in the spring, she would have cheered.
"Is the President our foe?" Megan asked while Leslie was loading the dishwasher.
"In what sense?" she said, startled.
"I just heard Daddy on the telephone, and he was talking about our 'foe president.'"
On his desk Leslie noticed a photocopied page, with several sentences highlighted an
d scribbled dates and numbers in the margin. She squinted at the text, calling upon her grad school French. II y eut une attaque. Les villages insoumis . . . There was an attack. The unsubdued villages illuminated themselves in turn, marking the progress of conquest, like the little flags in commercial cafes.
A shadow from the other side darkened the sheet, which she turned over to find a sentence in Trent's handwriting. The resisting villages burst alight one after another, illuminating the path of Ivhctory, like the ?snaj?ping banners of a streetside cafe. The photocopy had been made with their scanner, his usual practice when he wanted to mark a passage from a library book.
"I hear you likened our President to Dario Fo," she said as they were getting ready for bed.
"I did?" He thought about it, then laughed. "He could be played by Dario Fo."
Reaching to turn off the light, she saw a book on the floor and turned it over to see the title. Her lips quirked: there was nothing to smile about, but confirmation of her husband's nature prompted an odd comfort. The photocopy had pleased her more than the notation of his daily
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Turtledove, Harry - Anthology 07 - New Tales Of The Bronze Age - The First Heroes (with Doyle, Noreen) Page 31