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

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  Khumi easily recognized the Warlord’s face with a shudder. It was an icon of his youngest grandson, Nimurta.

  King Narmer is thought to have reigned c. 3150 BCE [assuming contiguous rather than some overlapping reigns, the latter being much more likely—KGP] as first king of the 1st dynasty (and/or last king of the 0 dynasty) of a unified ancient Egypt. The rebus of his name as shown on his palette and on other inscriptions is composed of a chisel, thought to be read mr, above a catfish, thought to be read as n’r. King Narmer, or Catfish as he could also be called, appears thus on seal impressions from the 1st Dynasty tombs of King Den (tomb) and King Ka (Tomb) at Abydos (where we believe he may have himself built a tomb), and also at Tell Ibrahmin Awad. Narmer’s name and that of his possible predecessor Scorpion…

  —King Catfish, also Called Narmer

  Marie Parsons, Tour Egypt

  26

  Scorpion

  147

  The man once known as P’Tah-Tahut was tired. The Scorpion-spirit that had all but consumed Narnmer was strong, and getting more difficult to control.

  The decades had wearied “Thoth,” and he now feared that he had given in to Narnmer’s impulses far too often, much as a father spoils the youngest child after wearing himself out disciplining all the older ones. In this case, however, “the child” was simply incapable of growing up.

  After they had left a few colonists with their Great Ancestral Parents on the island of Tel’Muhn, Ninurta and P’Tah-Tahut, with their two ships, had sailed for the open ocean. On finding it, the other ship had turned east, while Ninurta and his vizier went west, hugging the coastlands. Many weeks later, their ship entered sheltered waters again, zigzagging between lands to the north and south. Eventually, the narrowing sea bent northward, into the heretofore-unknown opening of the expansive Yordaen Estuary—unknown, that was, except to Kush, whose settlement they had found on the western shore, beyond the great elbow of water.

  Finding the language of his father’s folk incomprehensible, Ninurta had taken his people farther north by ship, up the great meandering estuary. After many months, they entered a vast morass infested with dragons, until they found a solid landing, again on the western shore. From there, Ninurta had led his people inland. This he did under P’Tah-Tahut’s spell, for the old Vizier had no desire to settle in such a monster-ridden place, and did not want to risk the possibility that Ninurta might stay by the water to recapture his monster-slaying youth.

  Abandoning the ship, they had hiked over barren mountains, into a series of valleys. There they had lived for several generations—or the brief spans that passed for “generations” in this degenerate new world.

  The colonists had spoken a mixed set of dialects at first, some barely comprehendible, others more so, which P’Tah-Tahut had managed to merge into a single tongue over the decades, using the powers of suggestion he and Suinne had discovered back at Kish. Each new generation grew more resistant to this technique, however, but that did not matter in the end. Tahut had established the bulk of his control during their parent’s lifetime, enough that spell casting hardly seemed needed anymore. He had a rich foundation of mental dominance over them from which to manage their growing tribes.

  Most of those who had accompanied Ninurta and P’Tah-Tahut on the ship from Uruk had aged and died in the last century and a half. Like rats, they spawned their squalid broods, which had grown likewise into randy rodent-folk, aged, and died, to leave yet more rat-lings, now ancient in appearance, but not wisdom. Only Ninurta (whom the rat-folk’s merged dialect now pronounced Narnmer), “Thoth,” and a few others from the ship remained; namely Khuqslu or “Kuk,” Min, and old Ae’Guptor or “Geb,” whom Tahut had first used as a test subject in fostering his powers of suggestion to maintain covert governance.

  With each new generation, Narnmer and the other godlike shipmen, had discarded prematurely aged wives to move on with younger explorers and younger women. They established new lands ever further northwestward. Eventually, they had settled along a big river that Narnmer had named the River of Light. There they began to build larger settlements, leaving the hunter-gatherer lifestyle behind again in favor of agriculture. P’Tah-Tahut briefly began to enjoy a taste of the comfort to which he had grown accustomed back at Kish—that was, until “Narnmer” discovered the Misori-Rayim settlements downstream.

  The “Great Hunter” had decided that only one thing would impress his newest, bloodthirsty little minx of a wife, Neith. That was for Narnmer to conquer the entire River of Light Valley under a united empire. The only reason Tahut did not poison his master was that the population in the lower delta lands of the north far exceeded that of the upper river tribes. He had carefully cultivated those tribes to serve him, and did not want to risk throwing away his chance of a civilized retirement. The Vizier might eventually engineer a situation to his liking with the delta folk without “Narnmer,” but Ninurta’s way, if done properly, had one advantage; it was quicker.

  Thus, “divine Thoth” grew tired, and the “war god” ravaged a new land, exactly as he had the old. Despite the comparative slowness with which both men aged, relative to almost all others, P’Tah-Tahut and Nimurta were still getting too old for this stuff. The problem, as Tahut saw it, was that only he had enough brains left to know that. Hence, the new mythology for the people living along the Upper River of Light, which turned out to be a much longer river than “Thoth” had hoped. So long, in fact, that Tahut felt the need to reinvent not only himself, but also the entire world.

  “Ptah” was about to become “the creator,” just as soon as he could pull off his re-education program. This posed little problem, since each small nomadic clan loosely held to its own cult—so loosely in fact, that when clans came together to form permanent settlements, their cults merged naturally, no matter how mutually exclusive their beliefs were. It helped that “Ptah” was also “Thoth,” who had created most of the stories about Nu, Kuk, Geb, Tefnut, A’Nubys, and whoever else, over generations. It also helped that “Thoth” resisted the temptation to formalize things—he left space for chieftains to add their own touches according to clan needs.

  To facilitate this flexibility, Tahut had carefully reinforced the idea that divine personalities (including his own) often merged with those of other deities. The little savages tended to associate their divinities with natural forces anyway, which often worked alone or in combination with other natural forces. It need not make sense in a world of children devoid of logic; all that the Vizier required was a loose belief system, which he could adapt as need arose to minimize inter-tribal conflict.

  In the meantime, Narnmer and Neith could conquer to their bloody hearts’ content in the northlands. Tahut took advantage of his manifold deifications to urge the burgeoning population of the river town of Gebtos to finish building his new boat, thus servicing his “divine needs” for his own northward move. He wanted to be close enough to the action to affect its outcome, if need be, but not so near as to risk harm to so many gods resident in his person. Ninurta’s growing “Scorpion-spirit” needed a bridle.

  The high-sterned punting boat already sat in the river, along Gebtos’ short quayside. Only its above-deck tenting and provisioning remained.

  Chubby Ai’Guptos, who for over a century had answered only to the diminutive, “Geb,” sat with Tahut inside the linen awning that overlooked the crude dockyard, to watch their minions work. “Divine Thoth, is this uniting of the land so good that such blood is worth the shedding? I have nightmares of watching divine Narnmer chop heads off so many people.”

  Tahut adopted the form of speech he had designed for those whose lives grew long enough for the others to consider them divinity. “I fear so, divine Geb, and for you especially, as god of earth. My sight hearkens back to the dark times, before mind controlled matter, when older gods than we walked abroad. These children in the north are also sons of Misori’Ra, as are we. In the beginning, the gods were eight, and Atum-Ra made nine on the Boat of A Million Yea
rs. But time and distance have caused us to lose track of one another in the age since that Cosmic Egg opened upon the mound that first rose above the Waters of Primal Chaos. It is well to unite the land.”

  Geb shook his head. “Terrible dreams still chase me. The hideous face of A’Pepi, master of the Serpents of Chaos, opens his mouth to spit his venom and swallow us whole…”

  Tahut had to re-cast his spell over Geb from time to time, to keep the overgrown child from seeing that Tahut’s own face rested beneath that of the serpent. Geb still suffered from the image Tahut had rashly imprinted onto his mind too soon after the fever of Bab’Elu first softened Ai’Guptos’ brain. Five times in the last century, Geb had seen A’Pepi on P’Tah-Tahut’s face. Each time, the Vizier had slipped the old chunker a potion to trance him, so that “Thoth” could counteract the suggestion. Yet no matter what Tahut did, it never completely erased the “Chaos Serpent’s” face from Geb’s memory.

  “Narnmer shall be Asiru, the Uniter. It shall be to good,” Tahut said, as if comforting a small boy with nightmares.

  Geb, as with the other “gods,” except for Tahut and Ninurta, could only claim “divinity” by the accident that his plague variant had not been the sort that shortened lifespan quite so drastically. Regrettably, his cognitive deficiencies and proneness to hallucination proved moderate to severe. Tahut could not help laughing to himself whenever he overheard one of the younger folk reverently associating madness with divinity. At times, he laughed so hard he wanted to throw himself off one of the many rocky cliffs that bracketed the Upper River of Light.

  Geb smiled, and chanted, “Asiru! Asiru! Uniter for we!”

  “That’s right. Now you see the vision.”

  “Not seeing, but hearing the ibis and the crocodiles singings.”

  Tahut nodded. “Hearing is as good as seeing, divine Geb.”

  P’Tah-Tahut wished he could leave Geb behind, with Geb’s vapid, equally lingering wife, once the boat was ready. Unfortunately, the couple could damage the growing river town. Thoth could not let them exercise their “divine authority” over cognitively normal, but shorter-lived, descendants, unsupervised. No safe freedom existed for the gangs of younger folk to refute divinity, no matter what flexibility “Thoth” built into their cultic beliefs. This was true no matter how insane, arcane, and inane the dictates of the “divine ones” became.

  P’Tah-Tahut knew that his life might one day depend on this.

  148

  Psydon’s timber ships were larger and sturdier than those Inana remembered from the Sumar, but not nearly as maneuverable. The god of the deeps had not accompanied her and Dumuzi, but entrusted them to his best shipmen, and to the company of warriors he had sent along as protection.

  “Isis” smiled at the outcome of all that had befallen her. It had been exactly as En-Ki had promised, back at Uruk. Even Dumuzi, or Horahkti—the name he now preferred—had discovered a new sense of manhood that she found attractive, even if he refused to expend any of it on her. The falcon, its wing now long healed, remained on his shoulder, hunting smaller sea birds from the ship, which it snatched from the air like taloned lightning.

  The storm out of the north had sped them along over deepening waves, until they reached the flooding Styx Delta, where they continued upstream inside a basin that had widened from the main waterway. On the second day in the channel, as the clouds thinned and the rain stopped, they sighted a half-submerged village with a knot of people clinging to the roof of a crude brick building. Inana commanded her mariners to ignore them when the captain of the ship began to steer his vessel toward the sinking structure to rescue them. She would permit no delay in her quest.

  Psydon had given her a bronze sword, and she wanted to reach her long-lost husband to plunge it into their mutual enemies. It had taken her mere moments, with En-Ki’s prodding, to surmise, upon hearing from the ocean god of the advancing Scorpion in the south, that it must be her Ninurta. Only he could be so bold as to try to unite a new civilization again from scratch under his own aegis. Even if it turned out not to be so, “Isis” would have this man anyway, and put forward all her divine wiles to make him her creature, just on principal. Only now, she knew when to be more mother than whore, if only for the moment.

  Two days after the half-submerged village, the basin narrowed into an actual river channel. Three more days after that, she reached the battlefield she had dreamt of all her life.

  The battle was still in progress.

  149

  Iyapeti and Haviri were just mounting to lead their force west from White Rock, when the rider arrived.

  The man trotted his onager up to Haviri’s, and bowed before speaking, “Two companies of Arameans march to our aid, which are less than a week from arrival.”

  Haviri looked up to Iyapeti, who sat considerably higher on his dark horse. “The M’El-Ki gave us the option of waiting another week, then taking the direct route through the Cedar Valleys, and cutting to the Sink-lands through the passage south of the Yordaen Lake. What is your command?”

  Iyapeti thought for a long moment. “I want to be marching, but it is best not to divide our force. We’ll wait for the Arameans.”

  150

  Khumi took his scouts away from the river to distance them from the refugees. The morning after the Misori’Rayim chieftain he called “Marmoset Man” showed him King Scorpion’s mass-produced ceramic warning to the delta tribes, Khumi decided to make his force less visible. He also made any contacts with the locals more discreet.

  In the following weeks, Ursunabi and the scouts separated to cover as many villages as possible. Some even crossed the wide river on a hastily built, none-to-seaworthy raft of poplar and straw. Khumi and Tiva retreated downstream about a day’s journey, and camped near some palms, where they had told the scouts to meet them, three weeks hence. When the reconnaissance teams found them again, they all had the same report. Each permanent village, and even many nomadic clans, had received the same pictographic warning. Most wanted nothing to do with Khumi’s messengers.

  Only two chieftains had chosen to heed the call of their “Great Ancestor,” and returned with meager war bands. These added only eight men to the force Khumi had arrived with nearly a month ago. None of them looked terribly battle-ready.

  Khumi and Tiva held council with them that night under the stars, without campfire. He no longer dared risk giving away their position to an enemy that had apparently advanced north far more quickly, and with better preparation, than anyone at White Rock had imagined.

  Ursunabi said, “I spoke to three villages, each of whose chieftains showed me their plaque. Whoever sends these things has a mastery of ceramics at least equal to what we had back at Tel’Muhn, or in Uruk. I’m not sure many people in those places would have thought of mass-imprinting a message, except for that Suinne person Gilgamesh had warned us about.”

  Tiva spoke, even though it seemed to bother a couple of the warriors and village elders. “That tells us that P’Tah-Tahut likely still lives. I doubt that Ninurta, in the condition we last saw him, would be so creative either.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Khumi said. “Ninurta still slipped into Surupag unnoticed, and took T’Qinna. I doubt his native cunning is so impaired.

  “Perhaps not, but mass production is not something we’ve seen used by any, except ourselves, even at Tel’Muhn.”

  Ursunabi twirled his ample mustache. “We need to find defensible ground to await Elder Iyapeti, or retreat to meet him.”

  Khumi suspected his son was right, but was not ready to give up just yet. “We’ve barely met with a third of the—what’s that local word?—nome chieftains. I’m not ready to abandon the sons of Misori’Ra this soon. Ra stayed by us faithfully during his shortened life, and I intend to give his sons a chance. We still have the bulk of summer to wait for U’Sumi to get into position, and Iyapeti’s main force is only two weeks behind us.”

  Ursunabi nodded. “Perhaps it might be best to divide our company, th
en, even melt into the landscape. We could add ourselves to the two nomes who’ve joined us, and keep a smaller, third maneuver force between us. What say you nome chieftains?”

  Both men shook their heads vehemently. The one who spoke best, explained, “Not all my nome-folk to be trusted. Some p’rhaps go already to Scorpion with warnings.”

  It all became a moot point the next morning, when the sentry woke Khumi before dawn. He pointed fearfully at the ribbon of gold forming across the east. On the low hills that overlooked the river from the southeast, stretching over the eastern grasslands, a row of standing figures, some on onagers, made the predawn light into the carnivorous smile of a vast predatory monster. Khumi called his men to arms. Even as he did so, he knew the enveloping force would have them surrounded, backs to the deep river, before his scouts could escape through the last opening, northward.

  A distant cry sounded, and the enemy charged.

  “Tiva, you stay behind me, no matter what happens!” he said to his wife, pulling her as gently as he could from her troubled sleep directly to her feet. He pointed east, and added, “Take this!”

  Khumi slapped a long steel knife into her hand that he had carried on his belt since they were children in the olden world. He remembered using it to cut safety netting during the construction of the first house he had ever built for her—the best one, in terms of craftsmanship—a multilevel mansion that had girded a single tree larger than any that grew in the current world.

  The roar of battle cries filled the air as dawn danced off her large, achingly beautiful, eyes. When he turned to face the battle, he decided to stay right between her and the enemies, as the only shield he could give her.