T’Qinna looked up from the cooking fire in the modest center courtyard. Misori’Ra and Khumi patrolled the common zone dividing the palace from the tent community that made up the rest of Surupag. In addition to the decrease of plague victims, she gave thanks for her brother-in-law’s return, with his able-bodied, able-minded men. Growing emotional warmth helped fuel her gratitude.
Something suddenly got the attention of the two watchmen.
T’Qinna hoisted the vat from the coals, and went to see what the men were looking at. A dust cloud approached from the trees on the western side of the tent town. Out of it emerged an exodus of fleeing people, many in families, some pulling pack animals.
T’Qinna stopped next to Khumi. “I wonder what they want.”
Khumi said, “I don’t know, but maybe you should go inside.”
Misori’Ra had a bow and quiver, as well as a pear-mace.
She motioned to the arms and said, “I’m an excellent archer. If Ra needs to swing his mace, he won’t be able to use the bow.”
Khumi took a moment to think. “She’s right, Ra.”
Misori’Ra—a dark, wiry man with fiery eyes and black hair going gray at the sides—unslung his quiver, and handed her his bow. T’Qinna put on the arrow satchel and held the bow behind her back so as not to seem threatening to the approaching mob.
The newcomers entered town at its opposite end, forming a column down the main throughway, between the tents. It took the leading walkers about five minutes to reach them.
Khumi raised his arms and hailed them. “Can you understand me?”
A woman at the column’s head answered. “Iun derstan dyou.”
The crowd slowed to a halt as the woman and a couple men came forward to meet Khumi, T’Qinna, and Ra.
Khumi said, “Where do you come from, and what do you seek?”
Terror nearly squeezed the woman’s eyes from her face. “Weflee da monstour Huwawah, who drownsvith flood and burnsvith fire!”
T’Qinna had seen many cases of hallucination in the last few weeks. “Khumi, can I speak to her. I’ve heard of this Huwawah before. Most of the patients are terrified of it.”
“Sure.”
“I am Mother T’Qinna…”
The woman tilted her head. “Muthortahkhqhindla?”
T’Qinna had found that most of the stricken had trouble pronouncing her name. “I’m also called Pyra. This is the House of Pahpi Nu, the Father of us All. Did you see this monster yourself, or hear of it from others?”
“Isee Huwawah’s flame! Howlsandroars und shrieksandroars!”
“What does Huwawah look like? Is it a dragon?”
The woman turned to one of the men by her, and asked him something in a whisper. He shrugged. Then she looked back at T’Qinna and said, “Thrahgone we knownot. Huwawah has fierymelam, Muwa Pyrrha.”
“Are we in any danger here?”
The woman’s eyes blinked rapidly, rolling up into her head briefly as they did so. Then she said, “Huwawah roarsbyvoice in his-melam. Flameburns-all. Flooddrowns-all. Deadly fearings!”
“Where are you going?”
Her eyes twitched again. “Intosunrise. Ever intosunrise.”
T’Qinna nodded. “We have boats to help you across the river, if you wish. You may rest here tonight if you want.”
The woman grew agitated. “Never any restings! I’m not afraid of travel, not afraid of hardness! Huwawah comes! Mustnot find!”
Khumi said, “Ra, you show them to the boats. Put two of our men in each to ferry them across. Warn them of the cannibals.”
Ra nodded, and motioned for the crowd to follow him.
T’Qinna ran a tired hand through her multi-colored hair. “Do you think it’s an asag, or even a gryndel?”
“I don’t know,” Khumi said. “If it is, they sure have a magnified fear of it. It’s as if they’ve eaten those mushrooms from back at Grove Hollow. I remember seeing some bad stuff there.”
“I see a similarity too. Except that here it’s caused by fever.”
Khumi’s face darkened. “There’s one other likeness.”
“What’s that?”
“Back at the Hollow, we usually had different hallucinations. But as time went on, the others started having hallucinations that began to be group-visible. Tiva even experienced this. The Watchers became clearer with our every use of the mushrooms, I suppose. These people all saw ‘Huwawah’ at the same time. What if the fever does what the mushroom did, only to a whole world?”
T’Qinna had been asking herself that same kind of question for over three months now.
57
The opened throne portico funneled a gentle breeze off the river that relaxed Ninurta. Noises of boat preparations for tomorrow’s journey to Eridu echoed up from the wharf with the reassuring sounds of industry—they were finally doing something to move forward again. The voice of Ptah-Thoth, god of wisdom, also comforted him, despite the disturbing nature of his news.
“Divinity has always had its price, my Lord. I have made study of this matter since my return, and some, before I departed. Your gift has come with a challenge for you to conquer even the work of En-ki, so that you may truly rule as En-ki wishes. You are the Sacred Bridge to men. Thus, you who unite men under your awesome melam-glow must also taste some of what they have tasted. But En-ki is wise. He only gave you enough to make you stronger, as when a man who survives a serpent’s bite becomes more resistant to the venom. It is to make you more powerful!”
Ninurta pondered Thoth’s words. “I see goodings to that. Who now is this?” He motioned to the round, dull-eyed man that stood next to Thoth.
The Vizier pulled the man forward, and held him gently by the shoulders. “This is Ae’Guptor, who had been a Lugal from the tribes of the Misori-Rayim before stricken by the plague. The fever is gone from him now, but its effects are likely permanent. He cannot speak as a man, nor can he understand, except as a small child. My magic can put ideas into his mind without his needing to understand—ideas that can work for you!”
Ninurta stared into the frozen eyes of the man. “Do your magic on this Geb person. I would see it. Sure you that understand me, he can’t?”
“Quite sure.”
“Yet your magic, by smalling bits, will learn him to obey?”
Thoth nodded. “Yes, ‘by smalling bits,’ but not as before. Many of them are like this, others are worse. A few are like you, only mildly affected—but only you are the chosen of En-ki. Fewer still are like me—unaffected—if you will pardon my saying it, my Lord.”
Ninurta waved his hand. “Pardonness is. Can he still work?”
“Not as before. But he can still be useful.”
Ninurta stared harder into “Geb’s” blank eyes. “How?”
Thoth smirked as he took on a lecturing tone that Ninurta usually found irritating. “Allow me to demonstrate. First, I used a repetitive phrase—it doesn’t matter what it is, because the disease leaves them highly open to suggestion, almost as if they had taken a potion. I chanted En-Ki’s name in a repetitive string of syllables. ‘En-Ki be me, En-Ki be me, En-Ki be me…’ and so on. Now that he is completely under, watch this…”
Thoth tightened his grip on Geb’s shoulders and gazed into his unblinking eyes. “Be in terror of me! I am Thoth, the god of wisdom and writing! My scrawl is of deep magic! See my face becomes the Dragon!”
The entranced man shrieked like a terrified woman. “A-Pepi! A-Pepi!” he screamed, burying his face in his quivering hands.
Ninurta’s eyes came alive. “He understood you!”
“Yes and no,” Ptah-Thoth answered, still clutching the terror-frozen former Misori’Rayim Lugal. “I seem to be able to plant images and ideas in his mind—it works fully only with the ones still able to partly understand our speech. I must study it more.”
Ninurta’s face darkened. “Do this, can you, to me?”
Thoth pushed the quivering Geb away so that the unfortunate wretch crumbled, broken and gibbering
, to the floor. The Vizier then bowed to the throne. “I have not tried, my Lord. I would rather not…”
“Try now! Knowing this I must!”
“Lord, I don’t feel right doing this with you…”
“Do it! The Beast I must conquer here too, if Bridge I am to be!”
“I obey the will of Ninurta, whose word makes it all real!”
58
Suinne and P’Tah-Tahut met one last time before the “moon god” departed with Ninurta and Inana for Eridu. The sun had not yet risen; but the eastern skies over the river glowed like an enflamed canker sore.
The Astronomer said, “I’m glad not to be cutting you down from a gibbet this morning. You are wise indeed! Your risk has paid off.”
Tahut nodded. “I kept him under nearly an hour, and used the time wisely to suggest many things that will come to him in the weeks ahead as ‘revelations of En-ki.’ I also fed him the ‘either-or’ prompt for potential events you gave me, especially those that involve us personally. I implanted the agreed-upon emergency trance-initiation words as well. I suppose it is crude compared to what the priestesses of Aztlan were capable of in the World-that-Was, but the logic pattern of the suggestions should hold. I brought him out with the suggestion that he had victoriously resisted all my suggestions. He accepted it easily because it was what he wanted to believe, going in.”
For a moment, a wave of suspicion washed over Suinne that maybe his “divine partner” suggested something to Ninurta that could set in motion a chain of events that would leave P’Tah-Tahut as sole advisor-god, but then he shook the idea off. Tahut was even needier of the company of an intellectual equal than Suinne was. Still, best to make sure; “You did not alter the logic formula I gave you in the least?”
P’Tah-Tahut met Suinne’s eyes, and did not blink. “Not in the least. At the deepest point of his trance, I told him that Inana’s word is mildly suspect, but only because she is a woman. Her word gains credibility if either you or I agree with it; and much credibility if we both do.”
“What about our arrangement?” Suinne wished he could have risked hiding nearby to listen, but if caught, that might have suggested to Ninurta that he and Tahut were acting together. Even them talking together risked that.
Tahut’s eyes remained steady. “If you and I should disagree, then Ninurta is conditioned to defer making any decision on that matter. If this happens at a time of great stress, when he must be decisive or die, then he is to proceed as he would without the advice of either of us, or Inana—it is the only way this can work.”
Suinne was as satisfied as he could be with the word of any other person besides himself. “Then I shall have a good journey.”
Tahut gave his sepulchral grin. “While you are gone, I shall ride north to see if any of Assur’s clan is still coherent.”
“Are you sure it’s wise to leave the safety of Kish? You have here at least a few servants who can wield a mace.”
“I shall bring a couple with me. If it is ‘En-Ki’s will’ for Ninurta to strike northward, I would rather he find friends than enemies, if possible. Besides, the maddened ones seem terrified of the cities. Even Qe’Nani has slipped off into the wild. Good riddance to the gibbering old fool!”
Suinne nodded. “Aye. I’ll take Kush and Saeba south with me. Ninurta wants to leave them at Eridu, in Utu’s care.”
“That’s assuming Utu isn’t a lunatic, too.”
Suinne sighed. “In that case, they all should make good company for one another.”
59
The Monster was not what its Maker had created it to be. In fact, its Maker had not created it to be a monster at all, but a servant. It still served. It just served as a monster for someone who had become more monstrous still.
No matter, it liked its work.
It walked with human feet, and saw through human eyes, for the moment. And it had a son now to shape in its own image. Not a son it had genuinely begotten in a biological sense—that had always been impossible; its kind knew that now by bitter, fruitless experience—but a son nonetheless, who would grow up believing that the Monster had begotten him, and that he was semi-divine because of it.
Perception was everything.
Suggestion, to those carefully conditioned to be open to it, fashioned people, who then would behave as though that perception were reality. In the end, it was as good as real, and that was all that mattered to the Monster.
And to its master.
The eyes it looked out through and the ears it now heard with, had once belonged to a man named Kengu, who had been the son of a Lugal or “Great Man,” or was it “Legal?” It didn’t matter either way; the so-called “Great Men” always hashed out what was “legal” for everyone else. Such things were trifles to the Monster. Kengu had been a “Lugal-Banda” or “Junior Legal” to his father, once. Now, the title became confused with the name, and the Monster had to answer to Lugalbanda as if it were its name.
No matter, the name fit. The Monster had answered to many names, and doubtless would answer to many more, in ages to come. It knew that its real work was only just beginning.
Lugalbanda’s eyes surveyed the empty village of Isin, while the Monster inside chafed at needing to leave Uruk so soon, with such a small war party. The situation was untenable.
Tiny bands of refugees had filtered south to Uruk, replacing those who had fled the city to parts unknown, months before. Most of the newcomers were unable to speak so much as a coherent word. Those that could speak raved about this other monster they called Huwawah. Since it was altogether necessary to secure a stable settlement at Uruk, it became equally necessary to address what the barely-sane people of that city saw as the chief threat to their safety, thus their stability, and thus to the execution of the Monster’s objectives.
Hence, the Monster must root out this other monster, and set it straight—if it was a monster of its own kind—or take it down. Either way, the Thing that inhabited Lugalbanda’s body needed to set the matter at rest.
Fortunately, the Chief Mason kept Gilgamesh safe at the House of Heaven on Kulaba Hill, so “Lugalbanda” could be free to work.
Something moved in one of the tents of the empty village.
The Monster used Lugalbanda’s arm to signal his four-man war party to follow. It hefted its spear, and moved quietly for the tent.
Heaven and Earth exploded.
The flash and concussion stunned the Monster in a way that its men were incapable of experiencing. The air blazed with curling waves of firefly lights, and a horrific howling. The Monster’s host body fell, pressed beneath the descending paw of a gigantic battle-lion. Its men, aware only of a nameless, shapeless terror, broke and ran for their boat.
Wings of living flame unfurled from somewhere atop the towering creature above the house-sized paw that held Lugalbanda’s body pinned.
The face looked down—a projection almost human, but with a beard of bronze, and eyes like twin super-novae—wreathed in wild hair of living lightning.
The Monster knew it had fallen into the grip of nothing less than a kherub; a being not unlike what it had once been, only far more powerful. Even a lowest-tier kherub carried enough energy reserves to maintain quasi-materiality almost indefinitely; a feat the Monster might manage poorly for only a few minutes, at extreme cost to its person.
The Kherub spoke, “Go back to Uruk, for it is given over to you.”
The Monster found what little courage it ever had. “Are you the one called ‘Huwawah?’”
The house-sized paw had talons of something that burned like red-hot steel when they slowly unsheathed and penetrated Lugalbanda’s skin.
“Don’t be any more of a moron than you already are,” said the Kherub, who then vanished into the spaces between space.
“Lugalbanda” scrambled for his boat, screaming for his men.
They were already paddling out into the river.
60
Shatru thought he had heard something outside. He rose up fr
om an afternoon nap with his beautifully fat wife, and poked his head out of their tent, to see if any of the foolish ones of Isin had returned. He hoped not. He didn’t want to have to kill any of them like the E’Ya Man said.
His wife called from inside, “Are there any foolish girls stripped nakedly out there for me to clothe? Me has already made two cover-shawls.”
Shatru answered, “No silly nakeds, just some men in boat fast paddling away. Not from Isin, they.”
“Come back inside then. Me have things for you.”
The sky flared and grew dark before he could pull his head in.
61
Two weeks after Misori-Ra Misori’Ra put the mob that fled “Huwawah” across the river by boat, another ruckus in Surupag’s tent town interrupted T’Qinna, Khumi, and Tiva’s’s afternoon meal with Pahpi Nu and Aeolis. They raced from the tiny library, to find the Khaldini tent village across the common running amok. Lomina, her mother-in-law, and Yoqtani approached across the small field.
T’Qinna called out to them, “What’s happening back there?”
Lomina did not wait to catch her breath. “Shurrupak people saying Huwawah has come!”
T’Qinna looked up to see past the tent village. The cloudless sky seemed darker than it should have been. A strange light flickered amid the trees beyond the dust stirred up by the panicking villagers. A loud voice from that direction roared words that she could not make out.
Pahpi Nu said, “Khumi, array your men in the bushes, flanking the common field approaches to the palace, with their bows fitted. I’m going out to meet this thing.”
Khumi raced off to deploy Ra’s men.
T’Qinna stood in front of Pahpi Nu. “If you go, I go.”
The old man looked to argue with her, but then shrugged as if it would be useless. Aeolis also followed, but stayed silent.
Tiva cried, “What about me?”
Pahpi Nu said, “Keep Lomina and Yoqtani inside, and bar the library doors. If it’s some form of dragon, it will soon pass. Aeolis, stay with them and help.”
Gate of the Gods: Book 5 of The Windows of Heaven Page 21