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

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  Then the falcon landed again on his shoulder, talons and beak spattered in blood. Its cold gaze froze her arm before she could swing.

  Dumuzi yelled, “I am Horakhti! I am for these men of my father! The more we have with us, the better it will be later! Stay out of my way, woman, or the wrinkles by your eyes shall be falcon’s feet, not crow’s!”

  For the first time in his life, Horahkti saw fear in Inana’s eyes.

  Arrows began to hit the railing nearby. Horahkti grabbed the woman’s arm, and shoved her down the nearest hatch into the hold, not particularly caring if her feet took to the ladder or not.

  The sail was halfway up. A quick glance showed that the skiff had reached shore, and that men were clamoring to get in.

  Dumuzi yelled to the rowers, “Leave the wounded! Take only those who can fight!” Then he ducked for cover behind the tiny above-deck cabin.

  Unhurt warriors in the skiff dumped two men with arrows in them overboard as the oarsmen began to pull back for the ship. Two other boats had already come alongside on the opposite beam, shielded from the missiles. Men climbed ropes and netting to reach the main deck, and then either helped yank their fellows up behind them, or scrambled for the two hatches to get below.

  Horahkti carefully made his way aft to the tiller man, who crouched for protection from the rain of arrows behind a water barrel lashed to the aft quarterdeck. “As soon as the sail is set, turn us out from the bank and take us north, for the delta. Once there, enter the westernmost channel!”

  “But the Captain will…”

  Horahkti’s falcon flapped its wings and screeched from his shoulder. “I am in command here! The Captain will do as I say.”

  The last boat came around to the protected side of the ship, just as the anchor stone left the water. Horahkti left the tiller man, and scrambled to the rail to help the last few men up, while a hail of arrows fell over them. The sails filled, and brought them suddenly about.

  “Get out into the river, beyond bowshot!” Horahkti yelled to both the tiller man and the sailors on the boom lines.

  Within minutes, they were out of enemy reach. Horahkti ordered one of the men to count those who had managed to reach the ship, and report the number to him. He gazed back to the east bank and watched the army of Iyapeti complete the slaughter of his father’s forces, and noted that the northerners were not even taking any prisoners. Then his rage against his mother grew. He turned for the nearest hatch and went below.

  As he expected, Inana was already coming on to the soldiers who had just escaped with their lives. Horakhti strode into their midst, grabbed his mother by the arm, and dragged her back up on deck. He shoved her against the rail, face outward, toward the receding east bank.

  “You see what you have done?” He grabbed her hair by the neck and forced her to watch the butchering of Narnmer’s army.

  “Dare you, Dumuzi, to take me…”

  Horahkti twisted her around and slapped her face. “Shut up! I am Horahkti! This is your doing! Utana’Pishti and his wife were decent to you, and you did your sword dance on them against that fig tree to entertain yourself and the men, against the Asiru’s orders! Gilgamesh was right to spurn you, and now you’ve ruined Narnmer’s kingdom too! The White Rock people would be taking prisoners, except for what you did!”

  Inana-Isis spat blood. “You let me have my play!”

  “I warned you against it! They died well, the Great Parents from Dilmun! You would not die as they died!”

  “They turned you against me! I am divine; I cannot die…”

  Horakhti snatched her by the throat and began to choke her as she scratched at his face, and terror filled her eyes. The falcon flapped down on her golden hair from somewhere above, and started pecking at her scalp. Once her arms stopped flailing, but well before all life drained from her body, he tossed her down onto the deck, and allowed her to catch her breath.

  Horakhti said, “You can die as a dog does, not with dignity, as did the wife of Utana’Pishti. From now on, I give the orders!” He looked around at the men that watched. “Take her below, and do what you want to her—just don’t kill her or beat her.”

  The men just stood there, in dumb indecision.

  One of them finally ventured to speak; “But Lord, she is a goddess.”

  Their new leader roared, “I am son of the Asiru, and son of this Isis! I am Horahkti; and I will finish my father’s work to unite this land!”

  The falcon landed on his shoulder again, and shrieked like a harbinger of Under-world.

  165

  Psydon surveyed the wreckage of White Rock from the uppermost level of the city’s ziggurat with his two new allies. The storms and earthquakes had settled down since his army had marched in, and he had struck an accord with Ur’Nungal of Uruk. It had somehow not surprised him to find this other, larger, army approaching from the east, or that its commander dealt so well with him. Psydon’s dreams seemed to smooth things out before him somehow, as if everything magically fell into its right place in their wake. Now, old Asshur also arrived, whose disturbing, half-shut eyes simmered like quiescent volcanoes, to survey the victory.

  No matter—Psydon now had more power than his two new allies—and an identity different from being the son of the world’s first slave! Now that he knew who he was, Psydon no longer feared—not even the great black World-serpent, and its realm of crushing water and searing liquid stone. Isis had set him straight, before continuing on her quest southward. Isis, and her powerful spirit guide, had awakened within him his own spirit guide—for whom his wretch of a father had ignorantly named him.

  High Psydonu transmitted more of its memories to a willing vessel, mingling them with Psydon’s own. Far below the Earth—or far beyond it—a primeval giant, who was really nothing more than a deceived, self-focused little man, groaned in the pressurized heat of his eternal torment.

  Something had just shifted.

  166

  Unquiet night always retold Palqui that his Glow had vanished. Every twisting shadow from every campfire danced in mockery of it. Each frenzied cricket screeched a rebuke. He was not sure exactly when it had happened, but first noticed its absence soon after the escape from White Rock. Palqui could not quite out-limp the sense that the Glow had departed after Qe’Nani had tried to eat his heel in the barn. He found much about the weeks of marching and limping that followed difficult to recall.

  Their long flight south, living off the land, had brought the tiny band of refugees at last into the highland forests. It seemed nobody had pursued them. Perhaps Raqu and Syruq had kept a semblance of faith in their silence, at least—Raqu and Syruq would both now betray their wives to satiate young lust with the cult of Ishtar, learn dumb-idol-ritual-fables from that of Nanna-Suenne, and who might even worship Ninurta without going all the way back to Uruk. And if not them, then Syruq’s infant son Naqor would.

  The lack of pursuit made horrible sense, after a fashion. The new gods did not think that so tiny, demoralized a remnant of those who still remembered the Divine Name really mattered anymore. Only one of them could actually pronounce the Name, anyway; and life these days had reduced her to just gazing out at the world in traumatized silence.

  Maybe they really didn’t matter anymore. Maybe nobody did.

  Palqui sat outside the mouth of a cave, in the cedar forests that covered the foothills of the great mountain, near the springs feeding the Yordaen River. He tended the campfire, and kept watch over the cavorting flicker of shadows, while the others slept inside.

  The Glow had not always been pleasant—often just the opposite, when it brightened—but it had been a steady reminder that he was not alone; that he had a purpose. It reminded him that he had once spoken to the Divine Wordspeaker face-to-face and lived. It had told him his life meant something, despite all the confusion and madness. What scared him even more, in a dull, thudding sort of way, was the relief he often felt that it was gone. What had happened to him? What had happened to them all?

&
nbsp; “I told you that you would not find my work in you simple to understand. I wouldn’t lie about such a thing, Palqui. I wouldn’t lie at all.”

  Palqui turned to see another, seated at the fire with him. He had heard no one approach. Then, he would not have expected to, once he saw who spoke. The Stranger he had seen in the Treasure Cave, long ago, whom Melchi Shemi had later told him was the Divine Wordspeaker, gave a somber shrug with deep, wounded eyes that reflected Palqui’s depression.

  Palqui put his palms over his face. “I couldn’t keep it all straight. The Madness fell on me, too, and then I failed as this ‘bridge’ thing that Melchi Shemi hoped I was. Is that why you took the Glow from me?”

  The Wordspeaker’s voice, so kindly, so unfathomably sad, said, “I didn’t take the Glow from you, Palqui, or your purpose.”

  “Then I must have forsaken it or forgot it, like I forget my cloak sometimes or maybe I just be all wants-driven and disobeying—started out by thinking, I must be that! Always in me failings somewhere can be found.”

  “No, you didn’t forsake it, and your wants and lapses are much as any other faithful seer’s would be, given your gifts, experiences, and the tests I’ve put you through. It’s not about you.”

  Palqui pushed his tears away with an upward swipe of his palms. “Then I don’t understand.”

  The Divine Wordspeaker smiled from the corner of his mouth. “My work in you isn’t simple to understand—like I said. It’s not really so much about understanding right now, anyway. You have not charged me foolishly with having evil intent, and have tried to remain true to the task I gave you. For now, that is enough. The intense suffering thing; it never gets easy, but it will pass, and find its reward. I know, because of what I am about to do.”

  “Master, what are you about to do?”

  “Suffer—not just from of the horror of what has happened to all that I love—but horror of what I must do to complete that love.”

  “Not sure I follow…”

  The Visitor’s smile enlarged to show his white, even teeth. “You follow just fine. Your son is not the end, Palqui. One of Raqu’s offspring will be the beginning of the thread I use to bind up and complete everything. I will introduce myself anew to human history through them, and respond to every evil that has happened, at my strategically chosen times, in ways of my own devising. Though it will begin with this single thread only after your days are done, it will begin. Watch after Mother Pyra with me; she hurts.”

  “How can I watch over her when she will surely outlive me?”

  “I know. I mean, watch after her just for right now.”

  Palqui nodded. “That I do.”

  The Wordspeaker said, “Oh, and my Glow is still upon you; you just can’t see it with earthly eyes. It’s not because you have lost your spiritual sight, that you can’t see it, Palqui, it’s because your brain is healing, just as Mother Pyra once said. It’s not good for men to see my Glow too much—not until the time when I renew all things. Then it will be a joyful Glow.”

  “Thankings be for your kindnesses.”

  The Divine Wordspeaker rose, his clothing suddenly an otherworldly white. “Rest here few more days, and then go on to Yerikho Freehold to wait. News of the war will come to you there before the winter solstice.”

  “Will it go well for Melchi Shemi, and Elders Kham, and Yapheth?”

  “If I tell you, you must say nothing of it to the others. Some of it will be hard for you to bear.”

  Palqui nodded. “I will say nothing to them.”

  The Wordspeaker told him.

  167

  U’Sumi saw the smoke of the burning bodies from the river, almost a day before he arrived at the battlefield where Iyapeti and Haviri had defeated Nimurta’s last army. “Narnmer” still hung suspended from the mast, when the boatmen dropped the anchor stone.

  A somber Iyapeti and exhausted Haviri met the M’El-Ki as he stepped ashore. U’Sumi’s first words were, “Khumi and Tiva?”

  Iyapeti glared up at the prisoner that sailors lowered to the deck to transport ashore. “Murdered, but not by him. I think, had he been here, they would have been used as hostages, and might still be alive.”

  U’Sumi’s legs almost went out from under him as he stepped onto the riverbank. “So he said.”

  “Inana murdered them before my forces were in position to attack, while the Scorpion’s army was in full retreat. She did it as if out of sport!”

  “Where is she?”

  Iyapeti hung his head. “She and Dumuzi escaped in Psydon’s other ship, northward into the delta, with about a company of Psydon’s fighters, and what they could rescue of the Scorpion’s. I had mounted scouts follow them along the bank as far as they could, but the ship went into the westward channels once it reached the delta fan. By the time we recovered an abandoned skiff, they were lost in the maze of islands. Who knows what changes the inflowing seas have brought to the delta channels?”

  “What of Psydon?”

  Haviri answered, “He was not with them; at least none of my men sighted him during all the time we shadowed the enemy, or when we struck. Nor was he among the dead. I fear he’s about some other mischief—or…” he paused, as if uncertain.

  U’Sumi said, “Or what?”

  “My Father, we’ve known Psydon a long time. He’s been a faithful friend, and ever grateful to you in my hearing. Isn’t it possible that Inana spun him a lie—something plausible enough that he would allow her to join him on the ships, and that she and Dumuzi then murdered him at sea?”

  “That doesn’t explain why his crews continued to follow her.”

  Iyapeti motioned them all toward a campfire, where food and drink were prepared. “Remember what happened when the earthquake hit White Rock, the night Inana both arrived and escaped? Palqui warned that her cult existed right under our noses. She and Dumuzi clearly had help from some of the farmers. Maybe the same situation exists among Psydon’s mariners.”

  U’Sumi glanced back at the ship. His men continued to lower the bound Nimurta into a landing boat. This news, with his interrogations of P’Tah-Tahut, plus his own experience of an army near mutiny, reinforced a growing realization that whatever hold he had left on the people as “M’El-Ki” was, at best, a tenuous and weakening one.

  “I want an immediate military tribunal. If we don’t act swiftly,” U’Sumi said, nodding sideways at the skiff that now rowed his prisoners ashore, “we may soon discover that there’s nothing more dangerous than a well-beloved tyrant.”

  Haviri said, “Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?

  U’Sumi took a bowl of wine from one of the campfire workers. “Not in a land where P’Tah-Tahut has shaped the very language.”

  The men at the fire looked back at the river, where the Vizier stepped out of the skiff, unbound, ahead of his former lord. P’Tah-Tahut smiled wanly their direction with sullen, sphinxlike eyes.

  In Egyptian mythology, Ptah (also spelled Peteh) was the Egyptian god of artisans and craftspeople, and was always most revered for his own creative efforts. In some mythic accounts, he is described as the god who generated the cosmos by manifesting his imagined realities into words: …the worship of Ptah often became conflated with other cults. The venerations of these “cumulative” cults were directed to such composite deities as Ptah-Seker-Osiris (a god of death and rebirth), Ptah-Nun / Ptah-Nanut (a creator god), and Ptah-Tatanen (a god representing the creative power of the primordial mound). This final association was often seen as most fundamental to the god’s character, as his creative abilities were often thought to represent a “power in the earth.”

  In Memphis, Ptah was worshiped in his own right, and was seen as Atum’s father, or more specifically, the father of Nefertum, the younger form of Atum. The importance Ptah was given in history can readily be understood by noting the fact that Egypt derives its name from the Classical Greek word Aigyptos, which in turn emerged from the native name of a temple at Memphis (Noph)…

  —New World
Encyclopedia, on Ptah

  28

  Great House

  168

  Pahn waited inside the gate-sentinel that he had concealed within a storm cloud. Both drifted southward over the new coastline of the sea filling up the old Sink-lands. The loss of Narnmer’s army was an unexpected blow, but not one from which the Plan could not recover—not with what also moved southward just underneath the cloud, below the gate-sentinel.

  The Monster wanted to see if the transmission of High Psydonu’s personal life codes into the man, Psydon, completed successfully. One other imprisoned Watcher had abortively tried such a thing, but not without profit.

  Just after the Bab’Elu Plague, Samyaza had attempted to broadcast his life codes into Utu. He had almost succeeded, failing only at his final signal transcription relocation sequence. Then he had collapsed helplessly back into the Abyssu’s pressurized super-gravity, where not even light escaped. Samyaza was unable to hold his trans-dimensional signal strength long enough. He had attained remote control of the host, however, and creatively used the silly boy up in a flamboyant display that had selflessly served the Plan. The leader of the Second Insurrection always knew how to make a lasting impression. High Psydonu’s signal power, on the other hand, already showed signs of degrading.

  Old “Hi-Psy” had been lazy, failing to condition Psydon for tenancy as thoroughly as Samyaza and the others had Utu. Such stunning stupidity displayed itself in that Psydon was one of only a few men untouched by the Plague, which made conditioning him more difficult. One cannot cut corners with such things! Pahn was no longer as optimistic as “En-Ki” about the odds of helping any of the imprisoned Watchers escape the Abyssu.

  No matter.

  Even if High Psydonu failed, enough of his codes had imprinted that the man, Psydon, actually believed he was the Watcher, reborn. Watcher or man who imagined he was—as far as Pahn was concerned, a difference that made no difference was no difference.