Gate of the Gods: Book 5 of The Windows of Heaven

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  The man who had been El’Issaq nodded.

  T’Qinna said, “That doesn’t look like any dragon to me.”

  In the thinning dust cloud cast across the village common, the figure of a man emerged from the poplar trees at the opposite end of the tent town from the palace. Above his head, a blue ball of flame crackled with what appeared to be lightning. As he entered Surupag, however, the light began to fade, and the sky somehow seemed to fade along with it.

  T’Qinna and Pahpi Nu slowly walked forward to meet this strange visitor, T’Qinna quite certain that it was the Wordspeaker of E’Yahavah, who had ordered them both aboard the Boat of a Million Years nearly three hundred and fifty years ago. By the time the stranger was halfway through the village, the flame over his head had faded to cool phosphorescence, barely noticeable against the backdrop of poplars.

  As they drew near the approaching figure, something familiar about his gait began to change T’Qinna’s assessment. Unlike E’Yahavah’s Messenger, this man wore tattered clothing full of holes. His face was a much darker brown, with wooly hair and a thin, curly beard caked in dust. An emaciated body showed battered and bruised arms and hands. Then he spoke.

  “Coming I, to speak words of Huwawah! In my days diwides he the Earth! Mouda Tchkweyenneh?”

  T’Qinna began to shake all over as the sky grew darker than the panic gripping her heart. Her voice cracked. “Napalku?”

  The man under the strange glow began to weep convulsively. “I Palqui! Immydayz is world diwided!”

  Pahpi Nu’s face fell. Then he grabbed his mantle at the neckline and ripped it down to his chest. “Why, Great E’Yahavah? Why give the plague to your mouthpiece for this generation? Have you left us entirely?”

  A light blasted out of the north as a cluster of gigantic fireballs streaked across the dimming sky, southward, leaving a trail of black smoke. The shockwave of their passage slammed into the ground moments later, with a hot blast of wind, and the howl of the meteor’s air-ripping speed. Blackness spread from its sky trail as the leftover rubble of the mountain-sized Nemesis stone vanished over the southern horizon.

  T’Qinna and the others stood silent a long time, watching the south. After several minutes, a bone-jarring jerk raced through the ground, nearly knocking everyone over. The impact must have hit far out into the vast Southern Ocean, beyond the Abyssu mires, south of the Sumar.

  Pahpi Nu said, “We need to gather the villagers and find higher ground. We likely have only a few hours before the wave hits!”

  The problem was that Surupag had no high ground over ten cubits above the river; nor did anywhere else inside a week’s journey.

  62

  Inana’s sacred boat glided over the west delta channel, “crushing millions of watery sun sprites so their dancing fire-blood would lubricate her passage,” at least according to Ninurta’s love and war goddess.

  Suinne had kept his knowledge of today’s solar eclipse to himself, even from P’Tah-Tahut, intending to shape it into his developing narrative for Ninurta as needed. It would not be a total eclipse as far north as Kish anyway. The clear blue sky already nibbled a tiny bite into the sun’s disk as the boat entered the lagoon, west of “the world’s oldest city.”

  On an embankment above the small boat yard, stood the “Eridu Stone,” now raised upright before a small square shrine of baked brick. The Astronomer had expected to find insanity at Eridu, not that Utu would have had the acuity to be aware of the eclipse, despite his Khaldi training. What he saw atop the shrine, once Ninurta’s party climbed the low bank, far exceeded Suinne’s expectations. It also greatly disturbed him to discover how easily technical skill and madness could comfortably coexist.

  The worshippers around the shrine chanted, “Eli baltuti ima’ ‘idu. Eli baltuti ima’ ‘idu… The dead will outnumber the living. The dead will outnumber the living…”

  Atop the modest temple, stood a horseshoe-shaped, woven reed arch soaked in bitumen pitch. Under it, Utu sat with his arms raised to heaven, leading the chant. Before him, a brazier of hot coals crackled in the fading sunlight. His entire body was drenched in lamp oil.

  Suinne watched from further back, with a dumbstruck Kush and Saeba, as Ninurta and Inana approached the circle of worshippers around the shrine, and then passed into their midst.

  Inana chattered, “Ah, little brother Utu the sun god joins with his element. Is it not gladdings he so increases his melam-glow?”

  Ninurta clapped. “Gladdings is! For En-Ki summons us to be Anunnaki, but Utu is to be chief of the Igigi of heaven, for sun is to sky, not to Earth, but ever shall he speak to us in our jipars of his sky journey! Ever we hear the voice of Utu-Shamash in our ears!”

  Utu shrieked, “I am Shamash the sun, Utu is Shamash! En-Lil sends his monster to devour the sun, but I am the sun, and so I go to vanquish the monster from the void!”

  “And En-Ki joins us in Utu’s good fight!” Ninurta added loudly, as if cheering on one of his fellow hunters in the chase.

  Suinne did not feel the least bit diminished by the others ignoring him for this “joining of the gods”—not until he made sure that Utu’s designs applied only to Utu. So far, it had occurred to no one that “the moon is to sky, not to Earth” also, and he wanted to keep it that way. Inspiration came as he saw a chance to turn what was about to happen to his own advantage.

  Suinne shouted, “Look at the sun! It is as my son, Utu-Shamash, has said. The monster of En-Lil has taken a bite out of the Sun! But my son Utu’s journey shall save us all, for the sun shall burst anew from the monster’s tail! Hurry, Utu, hurry!”

  As the sky darkened, Utu took a flaming coal from the brazier with his bare hand. He seemed to watch merrily as the flame caught onto the oil and raced up his arm. Then he tossed the coal onto the pitch-soaked arch and set it ablaze.

  The sky darkened.

  63

  Utu the boy-man had been burning alive deep inside, where the Thing that controlled his body had imprisoned him.

  A voice of roaring flame said, “Samyaza releases you from your service. Be happy that your name lives on for thousands of years!”

  Utu shifted from inner flame to outer flame as he resumed control of his own body only to find every part of it on fire, with his mouth still shrieking, “Eli baltuti ima’ ‘idu… The dead will outnumber the living!”

  The last thing he saw, before his eyes shriveled into cooked raisins, was a terrible light out of the north, as a cluster of mountain-sized stones seared across the sky overhead. Then Utu collapsed with his final shriek into a burning pile.

  Only his shrieking did not stop, because the fire just got hotter and hotter, as the gloom grew thicker and darker in the midst of a horrible falling sensation.

  Utu’s wailing was the opening stanza of a never-ending chorus.

  64

  Afew minutes after the meteor stole Suinne’s attention from Utu’s death shrieks, the ground shook briefly. Having studied the ancient texts on sacred astronomy, along with the detailed observations taken by the Zhui’Sudra and the M’El-Ki during the Deluge, the Astronomer had a good estimate of what would happen next, and how long they had before it did. Doubtless, the meteor cluster impacted far off, in the Southern Ocean, which gave them maybe an hour or two before the giant wave came churning toward them through the “Absu” mires.

  Suinne looked west, across the channel, at the gentle grassland hills. They hardly seemed high enough, but they were certainly higher than the tiny shrine mound of Eridu.

  He screamed over the chanters, “En-Ki speaks to the lowly moon god, who is much closer to Earth than he is to heaven!”

  All the noise stopped. Ninurta and Inana turned to him like a couple of children interrupted at play.

  Ninurta said, “What speaks En-ki to our faithful moon god?”

  Suinne spoke quickly, “The chariot of fire has lifted my son Utu to his place in the sun. Still, En-Lil and En-Ki fight as brothers battling for the favor of their father, Anu. En-lil’
s battle-lion, unable to conquer the sun, spews a flood our way! En-Ki warns us that we must cross the western channel in boats, and climb the grassy hills. The flood from En-Lil even now roars our way to arrive in mere hours! En-Ki, who favors us, warns my eyes that watch from the moon, which is in the sky, but much closer to Earth than the sun is! Hurry! Soon you will see that faithful is Suinne, the moon god!”

  Ninurta nodded. “And so the war in heaven begins on Earth! To the boats! I must enter the shrine briefly!” He grabbed a couple of Utu’s priests, and entered the small brick building.

  Suinne was certain now where Nimurta and Inana had hidden the “stolen” Tablets of Destiny. He did not wait for his master, but gathered a jabbering Kush and the dully-silent Saeba with him, and rushed for the nearest boat in Eridu’s western lagoon.

  65

  Young Gilgamesh stood on the Kulaba hill, still watching the southern horizon where the falling star had vanished. Two hours after the jolt of its distant impact, the sky still hung under its spreading gray trail. An engulfing swarm of black clouds, carrying a storm of hot rain, sped northward out of the Southern Ocean to swallow the sky in a matter of minutes. Many in Uruk, who had climbed the Kulaba for a better look at the fireball, and had since returned to their business, now rejoined Gilgamesh in his vigil outside in the bathwater-hot rains.

  The earthquake hit at the same time as the roar from out of the Absu. A corner of the E’Anna—Inana’s “House of Heaven”—collapsed just a few paces from where Gilgamesh stood. Worse than the quake, the approaching rumble became the hungry stomach growls of some monster out of the deep, reaching forth its watery hand to devour cities.

  The small crowd began to murmur, then to scream.

  “Huwawah comes!”

  “Floodings of Huwawah drowns the world again!”

  The humps of water swayed up the main river channel like the undulating muscles of a colossal gray serpent that bulged above the trees, across the southeast horizon, before consuming them.

  After an instant of shock hesitation, while others ran downhill in panic, Gilgamesh yelled, “To me! To Gilgamesh! Up Kulaba!”

  Unfortunately, half of those who had returned to the river haven with Lugalbanda a few weeks ago could only speak gibberish, and those that did better, often heard things wrong. Gilgamesh screamed wildly for his people to gather by him, but few heard him over the approaching roar.

  The giant wave whipped its way up the main channel like an enraged snake, winding through the contours of land to engulf some parts of the delta, while leaving others almost untouched. The swell reached its peak across the main channel southwest of the Kulaba hill, biting into the low grassland mounds on the other side. The lower sections of Uruk Haven were not so fortunate, as the wave engulfed two thirds of the small city, leaving untouched only what the earthquake spared of the Kulaba shrines around Gilgamesh. The giant watery snake veered eastward again, north of where Gilgamesh stood, before whipping out of sight.

  For hours afterward, the boy ruler watched, leaning over the wall of the temple court, horrified, while the watery back-draw returned downstream, carrying hundreds of dead bodies of men, women, children, and beasts, with other flotsam from a wrecked civilization.

  He yelled up at the scalding rains, “Is Under-world not filled with the dead that this Huwawah is loosed on us too? Is divine Lugalbanda also lost?”

  Gilgamesh still could not quite think of the spirit being as his father, even though it lived so comfortably in his father’s body.

  PART 3

  M’El-Ki

  About 900 miles southeast from the Madagascar chevrons, in deep ocean, is Burckle crater, which Dr. Abbott discovered last year. Although its sediments have not been directly sampled, cores from the area contain high levels of nickel and magnetic components associated with impact ejecta.

  Burckle crater has not been dated, but Dr. Abbott estimates that it is 4,500 to 5,000 years old.

  It would be a great help to the cause if the National Science Foundation sent a ship equipped with modern acoustic equipment to take a closer look at Burckle, Dr. Ryan said. “If it had clear impact features, the nonbelievers would believe,” he said.

  But they might have more trouble believing one of the scientists, Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He thinks he can say precisely when the comet fell: on the morning of May 10, 2807 B.C.

  Dr. Masse analyzed 175 flood myths from around the world, and tried to relate them to known and accurately dated natural events like solar eclipses and volcanic eruptions. Among other evidence, he said, 14 flood myths specifically mention a full solar eclipse, which could have been the one that occurred in May 2807 B.C.

  Half the myths talk of a torrential downpour, Dr. Masse said. A third talk of a tsunami. Worldwide they describe hurricane force winds and darkness during the storm. All of these could come from a mega-tsunami.

  Ancient Crash, Epic Wave

  Sandra Blakeslee, New York Times

  November 14, 2006

  Second Interlude

  Ifound the first bug underneath the lamp, in my sleeping quarters.

  The second, I discovered attached under an unused pocket flap on my laptop bag. The salt and pepper shakers in the makeshift cafeteria likewise had them in false bottoms. Had they been cockroaches, the Department of Health would have shut the place down. Oh, that’s right; there is no Department of Health out in the wastelands where Turkey borders on Iran and Armenia. I suspected that my discoveries would prove bad for my health if I pretended there was someone to report these things to—someone like Stavenger. It might even prove worse if I destroyed them.

  I felt like I’d been a sucker all my life. It galled me that, even now, all I could think of was my own professional humiliation that the strange common dreams Norby and I shared of the Woman’s message on the ancient recording were common knowledge with another party. I imagined Hobbes arching a tufted brow my way.

  Before leaving the cafeteria trailer, I grabbed a sticky-note pad from my bag and a pen. On the first page, I wrote, using large letters, “Don’t talk. Just read.” On the second page, I added, “Every room is bugged. Don’t respond by talking until we know if they have long-range directional mics outside!” Then I stuffed the pad in my coat pocket, and left the trailer. Only then did the fear really hit.

  The air was bitter cold outside, but the pre-dawn morning stillness promised no wind. I saw Vris heading for the cafeteria, and intercepted her. Pulling the pad from my pocket, I opened it in front of her, as if I were just comparing notes on some aspect of the “Device,” as we had officially dubbed the strange artifact sometime during our four months of studying it.

  When I flipped to the second page, Vris smiled up at me with a maddening playfulness, and said, “Yes, I noticed them, too, a week ago…” her eyes danced as she watched the blood drain from my face in the pre-dawn half-light. Then she added, “I’m surprised such little flowers open in this cold weather.” She winked.

  I laughed, and wanted to growl at her at the same time. “Yes, the little flowers. So lovely, and so funny—one of nature’s little double-entendres—they come from India, don’t they?”

  Her smile grew wider. “I believe they do. I’m not in the mood for coffee this morning. Let’s go for a walk out on the lava field.”

  Our first meeting was not for over an hour, so I nodded.

  Vris and I had become a little bit of an item in the close community of researchers, technicians, and Defense Department people clustered around the project dubbed “Hollywood” by the CIA. If this was The X-Files, she had become the Scully to my Mulder—or so it amused me to think. I guess that made poor Norby into all three “Lone Gunmen” rolled into one lonely guy.

  Once out beyond reach of any possible long-range directional microphone, I said, “You like making me squirm, don’t you?”

  Vris laughed. “You make too tempting a target.”

  I smiled. “Are you calli
ng me a drama queen?”

  Her face fell. “They will make the Device disappear, you know.”

  That brought me back to the cold, hard, lava-encrusted earth. “Why? It’s the most fantastic discovery in archaeological history!”

  “You’ve never lived in ‘the largest democracy on Earth.’”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I’m not a Hindu, Buddhist, or a Muslim.”

  Now she had me completely confused. “What’s that got to do with finding the bugs?”

  She stopped walking, and pulled me to a halt by tugging my arm. “I’m the daughter of indigenous Christian missionaries. Things have been changing in your country for a long time, and not for the better. Its leadership is becoming more that like that of my country. I’ve had a faith crisis since a Hindu mob beat my father to death in front of my eyes, when I was eight years old. I know from experience that the majority are not always right, and are not always wise or good. I know many fine Hindu people—so I’m not saying this against Hindus as such—it’s just that those particular men were not good, and they had the ear of the local authorities in ways that our tiny church did not.”

  “I’m sorry, Vris, I didn’t know. But I still don’t understand.”

  “The things you and Norby told me that the Woman said in your dreams”—We had all taken to calling the woman on the ancient recording simply the Woman—“I’ve been having dreams too; since before you both even mentioned them, since before you even arrived, Ben. I know I should have told you, and I’m sorry, but it scares me! This Woman who may be the mother of us all, speaking from before the dawn of history, says things so like what my own mother used to tell me, after they murdered my father! The madness that followed, the influence the men who killed him had over the local authorities! I ran from my parent’s faith—I broke my mother’s heart—and now it’s all coming back!”