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

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  Aram nodded. “Let it be as you say. Enter my tents, and allow your men and mine time for their fevers to break. Then we shall ride for the Sumar together.”

  83

  Tattered shreds that had once been a tunic and kilt clothed Captain Psydon on his endless walk. He saw nothing but windblown sand on his right, and briny water, thick as oily slime to the touch, on his left. The crusted salt on the placid shore of this endless mirror of toxic goo crunched beneath his feet.

  The surviving crew of the Sun Ship Paru’Ainu had crossed the last river almost two weeks ago, and their water skins were now down to a few swallows left per man. Pack-hunting wurms ruled the grassland river tables to the south, which had forced his men down into the basin. It had cost Psydon many of his dwindling crew to learn which danger was more lethal. Now he found the lesson in doubt.

  He had assumed that the continual dark clouds rolling by overhead would drop rain on them, but they faithlessly rarely did so, thus prolonging rather than relieving the agony. They kept the sun off, which lessened their tendency to sweat—but whether this was a mercy or a slow, cruel death now seemed disputable. Swollen throats and thirst-cracked lips ensured that no one disputed it aloud, however.

  A large, white dune extended out into dark sea. Psydon led his men up the hill of wind-rippled powder, certain that it was just another peninsula. The stench hit as he neared the dune’s crest. When he reached the top, he saw its source.

  The mummifying carcass of a long-necked behemoth stretched across the other side of the dune. Beyond it, a wide river emptied into the dead sea. The rest of the behemoth herd lay rotting between Psydon’s men and the river. Only on the far southeastern horizon did any hint of green appear, far enough upstream to be free of the killing salt. Scavenger wurms still tore at the more distant of the behemoth carcasses, while vultures dined on the nearer ones surrounded by the relative safety of the toxic sands.

  It took the rest of the day for Psydon and his men to plod southward through the sand heaps, before attempting to turn east for the green river delta. The only safety in it was that they came at the wurm-infested watering place from out of the setting sun.

  Psydon was not concerned. He knew by now that he did not need to outrun any of the carnivorous dragons, just the men that were closest to him. He was already scoping out which of his dehydrated crew stumbled the most, so that he could make his way into their midst.

  84

  En’Tarah-ana’s caravan had allowed P’Tah-Tahut and his men to pass unmolested, as promised, and had even given the Vizier more tokens of favor to present to Assur and Kullasina.

  The new city of Assur, on the Hiddekhel’s west bank, barely had a couple foundations laid, but the hastily constructed brick kilns burned day and night with a smoke that became visible on the northern horizon, while P’Tah-Tahut was still many days off.

  Given the orderly condition of En’Tarah-ana’s advance guard and caravan, P’Tah found what greeted his arrival surprising, disturbing, and somewhat of a relief all at the same time, for differing reasons. Piles of brick, both fired and waiting to be fired, rose like chaotically placed cubic sentinels all over the dirty tent city. The place reeked of human excrement.

  Kullasina greeted them as they rode into the enormous camp; his long, oily, black hair tied back, face painted white with lime paste, and lips dyed berry-stain red like some enormous parody of one of Kush’s old Khana’Anhu clowns. P’Tah-Tahut only thought of it as a parody of a clown because, compared to Kullasina, Kush’s slave clowns showed a good degree more dignity, and a modicum of self-respect. And that did not say much.

  “Welcome to the sacred realm of the great god, Asshur”—Kullasina pronounced his father’s name like a sneeze—“seer into the fates of men, and ward of the holy Igigi and their Anunnaki counterparts on Earth!”

  Tahut dismounted, unsure how to respond. He settled for, “I bring greetings from the god Ninurta of Bab’Elu, and tokens from the caravan led by mighty En’Tarah-ana, whom your god has so generously sent to aid us.”

  Kullasina wagged his enormous tongue, bowed at his stocky waist, and broke wind with a loud, long rip. “Thanking us be! The puissant god Asshur has seen you coming from afar through his third eye, and waits for us to dine with him on fatlings and curd. You like fatlings and curd, don’t you, Pa’Tah-ha-ha, don’t you?”

  The Vizier bowed slightly, and said, “We give thanks for your god’s hospitality. A dinner of fatlings and curd is more than we had hoped.”

  The Clown-king shouted, “Well, goodings on that! Let’s go to the god tent and stuff ourselves in a tently sort of way!”

  P’Tah-Tahut almost broke out laughing, imagining Inana dressed in Kullasina’s outrageous garb and paint-job. Perhaps it was his use of her favorite non-word goodings. It seemed unlikely that two entirely different personalities would rot away in exactly that same pattern, using the same word, in the same way, without the possibility of one having imitated the other. Suddenly, it was not so much funny anymore, as deeply disturbing.

  Kullasina pranced toward his father’s big tent, cackling and jabbering, until he reached the flap. Then he slumped into a morose march, leading P’Tah-Tahut inside.

  Any lingering levity vanished once Tahut encountered Asshur.

  The Saar-turned-god had crudely tattooed a great purple eye onto the middle of his forehead. Oily silver-black curls wreathed the eye, cascading down his shoulders as a seething mass of enraged spiders that climbed the spokes of a jerking web to engulf Asshur’s twitching face at its center. His eyes bulged like yellowed cysts, threatening to burst their noxious jelly and dead gray pupils out in pressurized streams if his blackened eyelids squeezed them any more tightly. The diseased stench inside the tent drove the Vizier’s considerable hunger away, with his courage, as a whip to a cowering dog.

  Asshur’s voice was not his own. It rumbled from lungs tunneled through with volcanic fissures of infectious phlegm, which somehow failed to weaken its force. “At last you come, dear Ptah. Latest word from En-ki is that your master will no longer need to march north of Kish. It is time we joined the battle there, and make this world our own, before it gets too big to manage so easily. The Ancient Enemy has returned!”

  Now these are the generations of the sons of Noe, Sem, Cham, Japheth; and sons were born to them after the flood.

  The sons of Japheth: Gamer, and Magog, and Madoi, and Jovan, and Elisa, and Thobel, and Mosoch, and Thiras. And the sons of Gamer, Aschanaz, and Riphath, and Thorgama. And the sons of Jovan: Elisa, and Tharseis, Cetians, Rhodians…

  And the sons of Cham: Cush, and Mesrain, Phud, and Chanaan. And the sons of Cush: Saba, and Evila, and Sabatha, and Rhegma, and Sabathaca. And the sons of Rhegma, Saba, and Dadan. And Cush begot Nimrod… And Mesrain begot the Ludiim, and the Nephthalim, and the Enemetiim, and the Labiim, and the Patrosoniim, and the Chasmoniim (whence came forth Phylistiim) and the Gaphthoriim. And Chanaan begot Sidon his first-born, and the Chettite, and the Jebusite, and the Amorite, and the Girgashite, and the Evite, and the Arukite, and the Asennite, and the Aradian, and the Samarean, and the Amathite; and after this the tribes of the Chananites were dispersed…

  And to Sem himself also were children born, the father of all the sons of Heber, the brother of Japheth the elder. Sons of Sem, Elam, and Assur, and Arphaxad, and Lud, and Aram, and Cainan. And sons of Aram, Uz, and Ul, and Gater, and Mosoch. And Arphaxad begot Cainan, and Cainan begot Sala. And Sala begot Heber. And to Heber were born two sons, the name of the one, Phaleg, because in his days the earth was divided, and the name of his brother Jektan.

  —Genesis 10 “Table of Nations”

  (Septuagint Greek version, abridged)

  18

  Partitions

  85

  Palqui’s long fever had finally broken the week before, but he still lay on his sick mat underneath the crowded portico. A near endless rain poured in the courtyard beyond. The cool Glow hovered overhead inside the awning, but it seemed that only he saw it
now, as only a mad man sees the hallucinatory delusions of his own disease.

  Lomina tended him dutifully, and Yoktani and his mother also visited, but they had somehow changed. Even their faces seemed different in subtle, frightening ways. Lomina’s smile had lost something, and her eyes had a disturbing new flash to them that he had difficulty trusting. The distance was almost unbridgeable. Palqui felt so hopelessly misunderstood that even the partial language they still shared in common might as well have been gibberish. It would have been easier in some ways to start life over again with strangers. Lomina even seemed alien to his touch.

  The young-faced leopard woman, whom Palqui knew was really older than the world, he had once known personally as “Mother someone.” She spoke now as a powerful queen out of fable might, so far beyond his understanding that it hurt his heart even to converse with her. While she had always been older and wiser than he was, they used to share comparable reasoning skills, and had once spoken of deep things together. If only he could remember, maybe he could be useful again.

  He tried to say her name several times, when she walked by, but found he could not. In the end, she had placed a sympathetic hand on his forehead and told him that he could call her Pyrrha. It felt like a horrible demotion of some sort, as though he had disappointed her somehow. She told him that he had gotten ill. Yet Palqui knew this was not true, or at least not the whole truth. Mother Pyrrha would never lie to him, though. He recalled that much. However, she might withhold from him the entire truth if she thought of him as weak in some way.

  Thus he lay on his pallet, wondering what had gone wrong, and what he had done wrong. A million real and possible infractions flooded his heart, but none were beyond the normal conscience struggles of a man who had tried, however imperfectly, to do the right thing; none really made the devastation he had endured feel justified, even as Divine correction—at least not for his own personal sins. Correction ultimately enabled, it did not debilitate. Only punishment did that—or so he had always assumed.

  Terrible things had happened: Nightmare images haunted him of dark, muscular Ninurta on a great ziggurat, tormented by falling lights and strange voices, one of them, Palqui’s own. He recalled capturing murderers with that voice, and holding them with it, frozen in their terror, while he crushed their skulls with a mace—things he could not possibly have done. He remembered roving through a country full of idiots, who spoke nonsense words, only to find in the end that he had become one of them.

  Now he couldn’t even think straight. He heard voices almost all the time, whispering meaningless, sometimes cruel things, as if from another room. The voices did not come from those who shared the sick mats on the crowded portico with him, but from inside his head—he had checked. This caused him to wonder if maybe he was not the real murderer, smashing heads in fits of madness, while his delusion created the Glow, and manufactured false memories of the crimes his victims had supposedly committed, just for pretext. The more he wondered, the more reasonable the idea of his own guilt and madness became to him.

  That had to be it! Every few days, odd things would happen to him, where people’s faces sometimes changed while Palqui spoke to them—not their expressions, but their actual faces shifted into those of someone else—so that, on a bad day, he had little certainty of who it was he even talked with! One time, everyone’s faces even looked the same to him, except that he could still tell men from women. Madness!

  How had this happened to him? What Divine aim did it serve?

  He remembered that the Divine Messenger had rescued him from Arrata, and had given him a mighty calling, warning Palqui that his words to this generation would be few, and not well understood by those who heard him. He knew also that the Divine Messenger had renamed him Palqui at that time, which meant division. What he had not expected was that the same curse would strike him down, too!

  Had he misrepresented the Divine Name somehow? Assuming for a moment that he was not mad, would it have been possible for him to enter all those villages as the kindly teacher he had always tried to be, instead of what the Glow had forced on him, if maybe, he had just tried harder, or been more sensitive to what El-lil was saying to him?

  Palqui lay on his mat, going over it and over it in his mind. He also overheard the other sick speak of the monster that sent floods and bashed skulls—he could often tell some difference between the inside-his-head voices and the ones outside his head. He had also seen men and women claw at Pyrrha, and the other Great Ones, just to crawl away from him, screaming in revulsion, rather than lay next to the terrible mouthpiece of “Huwawah.”

  A shadow fell over him. A standing figure blocked out the feeble glow of the cresset lamp on the doorpost. Palqui looked up, and saw the last person he had ever expected to see again. His father looked down at him with tender eyes—the same ones as when Palqui was a small boy.

  Then his father’s face shifted into that of someone else—a dark man dressed as a fish-dragon, with hard, distant eyes, though they gazed down on him with what seemed a reserved sort of fondness. Palqui had seen the man before, in a dream, but also in waking life. The name Melchi came to mind, and Palqui recalled that the dark figure in the fish-shaped raincoat had born that title. What words of rebuke would come from him?

  The fish-clothed man squatted, smiled, and spoke softly; “Being steward over the ultimate backstop for enforcing law is a harsh business, my young friend. I’m told you bore up under it well.”

  Palqui only followed the “…ultimate… law …harsh business” part, but he sensed that “Melchi” had just vindicated, rather than condemned him.

  “Is your name Melchi?” Palqui asked him.

  The fish-man chuckled. “That’s just my title. My name is U’Sumi. I am your ancestor.”

  “Shemi? Ancestor? Is this the land of the dead?”

  “No, Napalku, you’re still alive and getting better.”

  “My name is Palqui! For in my days the Earth is diwided!”

  Shemi said, “I know. You are a true seer of E’Yahavah, and he changed your name. My mistake.”

  “But N’Palgu was name of me from birth. Mother says so.”

  “I know; I was there when you were born. I mentored your father.”

  “Father?”

  A tear ran from Shemi’s eye. “Yes. He’s not far away. I’ve sent for him to be reunited with you, your brother, and your mother.”

  “Nothing will be ever the same again, will it?”

  “I think you’re right about that.”

  “Help me, Father Shemi. I can’t stop hearing evil voices.”

  “I’ve been praying for you, Palqui. You rest, Son. Your day as a seer is not done, though I think the mace work can fall to others from now on.”

  Palqui relaxed. “Hope it so. Thank you, Melchi Shemi.”

  “Are you up to telling me what happened to Nimurta?”

  Palqui propped himself up. “What need you to know?”

  Melchi Shemi’s face darkened. “Tell me all you can, Son.”

  86

  The sun burned through the months-long overcast for the first time since the meteors, just as Suinne and Lugalbanda reached Uruk with Kush, Saeba, and the stragglers they had picked up during their journey since parting from Ninurta. The woman of Kush’s dreams had attached herself to the demented old Saar like a hanging ornament—one shaped like a giant deer tick, to the Astronomer’s mind. She can have the old goat!

  What they found at the city seemed to surprise even Lugalbanda, which in turn surprised Suinne even more. It vaguely comforted him to see that whatever Kengu had become could still be surprised. The newcomers approached Uruk from the northwest; having forded the western delta channels further upstream, with the help of a reed boat that had doubtless been left high and dry by the Wave.

  The incomplete northern rampart of the Kulaba Hill was untouched by the Wave’s fury, unlike the haven section of town, where the East and West Channels met, and most of the lower tent city had been. The sun bro
ke through the cloud cover fully as they climbed the hill toward Inana’s “House of Heaven.” Only then did Lugalbanda hold up his hand quietly to halt them.

  Suinne saw the men dressed in uannu-skin mariner rain gear, directing repairs to the temple.

  Lugalbanda’s eyes widened with—was it terror? He turned, and said to Suinne, “Be silent until I tell you to speak, Old Monster. Keep the others together, and under control.”

  The Astronomer tried hard not to smile. “As you say, my Lord.”

  Lugalbanda approached the fish-coated men, and said something to them just beyond Suinne’s earshot. The Uannu-coats seemed to greet Ninurta’s son cordially enough, and one of them hurried inside the E’Anna.

  A moment later, young Gilgamesh burst from the building, and ran to his father. However, Suinne could not help notice that the boy slowed his pace while still a good thirty cubits away from Lugalbanda. The boy’s sudden loss of momentum spoke volumes to the Astronomer, who had made as much of a science out of studying his prey as he had studying the stars and planets. Gilgamesh clearly had mixed feelings about his father’s return.

  The spotty sunshine had begun to burn Suinne’s sensitive, almost transparent skin. He put up his hood when he saw that workers and “fish-men” alike had begun to notice him, point, and stare. He slowly drifted closer to where Lugalbanda, Gilgamesh, and the two chief uannu-clad mariners talked. The Astronomer suddenly remembered that only crewmembers from one or more of the Sun Ships wore such gear. Implications began to unfold for him, none of them good.

  Suinne hung back, far enough away to seem plausibly innocent, but near enough to hear most of the conversation. Gilgamesh explained that Uruk had been starving when the “Uannu-men” appeared out of the water, and that they came during the day, but went back into the water at night because they lived in the Absu. He then described their first encounter.