In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  “. . . It wasn’t the actual film at all, just the video projected onto a big screen, so we saw the clamshell version with its sides trimmed off.” Trent was talking about a kid’s movie that had been shown as part of an exhibit. It was raining on the ride back, and Leslie was concentrating on the road.

  “So what were these creatures like?” she asked dutifully. She was trying to get onto the Whitestone Bridge, but the lane for the turnoff was stalled as a stream of cars, most bearing American flags, passed on the left to cut in just before the exit.

  “They were mammals, I guess: furry, with serene expressions. You couldn’t tell from the dubbing whether totoro was a made-up word or the Japanese term for a forest spirit.”

  “Like Huwawa?” Trent was always gratified when she remembered an earlier subject of interest to him.

  “Hey, maybe. Huwawa fought back, but then the totoro were never attacked. They did have enormous teeth.”

  Leslie wanted to ponder the nature of wheeled vessels, but consented to discuss Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s journey to the Cedar Forest to slay its guardian. The strange passage held more interest than Ziggurat’s political macaronics, and spoke (in some way) of the distances Sumerians had to travel to get wood for their roof beams and chariots.

  “Huwawa was supposed to be evil,” Trent mused. “An odd quality for a forest guardian.”

  “It was Gilgamesh who called him that,” Leslie pointed out. “It seemed pretty plain that he wanted to kill him for the glory. You will recall that Enkidu, closer to nature, hated the whole idea.”

  “A totoro wouldn’t kill anyone for the glory,” Megan observed from the back seat. “They don’t need glory.”

  Her parents exchanged glances. “Good girl,” said Trent. “More people should think that way.”

  After dinner Trent showed Megan a game board on his computer. “Archeologists called it ‘the Royal Game of Ur,’ because the first boards were found in the Ur royal cemetery. But other versions were found elsewhere, even drawn on paving-stones, so it wasn’t just for kings.”

  Megan studied the irregularly-shaped board, which comprised a rectangle made of twelve squares and another made of six, joined by a bridge two squares long. Each square was brilliantly colored with one of several complex designs. “How do you play?” she asked.

  “Nobody really knows. Some rules were discovered for a much later version, and it seems that each player threw dice to move tokens around the board. The two players each move in opposite directions, and can land on each other’s tokens and bump them off, especially along the narrow stretch here.”

  Megan reached out and traced her finger down on board’s side. “Can we play it online?”

  Trent shook his head. “Sorry, this is just an image of the original board. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a website somewhere to play it, though.

  “Maybe the designers should add that feature to Ziggurat,” he said later to Leslie.

  “They know their audience better than you do,” she replied. “You know what they would say? ‘There’s no place here for a game.’”

  Trent laughed. “True enough. I like the narrow defile, though. It compels the player to move his tokens along the equivalent of a mountain trail.”

  “No mountain trails in Sumer. Were you hoping to give players a pleasant suggestion of the Khyber Pass?”

  That night Leslie opened a file on her laptop and began to organize her notes on Sumer into something that could provide the outline of a novel. War had to be the theme of at least one book, Trent had said, and present in the background for the other two. Leslie decided to think about agriculture and water rights, a likelier cause for conflict than the poems suggest. Even a prosperous landowner would have no reason to read, but Leslie suspected that a middle-class audience would have problems with an illiterate protagonist, so she invented a younger son who was intended to become a scribe. Worldly doings would dominate the action, but it was the kid sister who would prove the novel’s secret protagonist, and not merely for Leslie. Women always constitute more of these books’ audience than the men realize, Trent had told her. You craft the book to please them, like the baby food that is flavored for the mother’s palate.

  She sketched out some paragraphs about a girl who helped her younger brother prepare practice tablets for school, while the older brother learned the family business with their father. Nobody knew how the clay tablets were made, though she could make some obvious guesses. Nobody knew the location of Agade, Sargon’s magnificent capital. Leslie was tempted to set the novel there, though of course she realized she should use sites that readers would find in Ziggurat.

  In fact . . . Leslie padded into the office, where the flexing trapezoids of Trent’s screensaver moved silently across their bit of darkness. Trent used her own machine’s better speakers to play music, so had left the Ziggurat CD in his drive, its icon present (she saw after tapping the side of the mouse) on the task bar at the bottom of his screen. She twirled the volume knob, then brought the cursor gliding down to click on the tiny pyramid. As the game instantly resumed, she brought the volume up to the lowest audible level, and the clashing sounds of battle faintly reached her.

  Leslie clicked rapidly backward, undoing whatever war Trent had gotten himself involved in, then paused in the silence to examine the lists of artifact images. Might as well use implements actually pictured in the game, if you’re going to write a tie-in. But the sub-directories showed few agricultural or domestic tools (the designers favoring scenes of splendor or warfare), and she found herself studying the gorgeous works of art, museum photographs—had the producer cleared the rights for these?—of enormous-eyed statuettes; gold jewelry of exquisite workmanship; goddesses carved of alabaster and serpentine, the later ones of Attic accomplishment, the earlier ones deeply strange.

  What kind of culture could carve these stone figures, hands clasped reverently and eyes like saucers, and place them in their temples, presumably as stand-ins for individual worshippers? Their gaze was neither submissively lowered nor raised towards heaven; they were looking at their gods, with an alertness Leslie knew she could not understand. Did the temple’s divine statues—made certainly of gold, meaning leaf covering perishable wood, which was why none had ever been found—gaze back, or were they intent upon other matters? The gods were sometimes taken from their temples and transported to other cities; vase paintings and cylinder seals showed them being poled along the river.

  These were “idols,” Leslie supposed, but it was foolish to conclude that they were literally worshiped, any more than those statues of the Blessed Virgin that Connecticut Italians still carried to festivals. Carved images of supplicants stood before gilt representations of divinities in an enactment doubly signified, creating a field of force no instruments can measure.

  Trent couldn’t use this, though he might be interested in the “sacred marriage” hymns, which made clear that the new year’s ritual ended in sexual consummation between the city’s ruler (who assumed the role of the god Dumuzi) and a priestess who represented divine Inanna. More metonymy, although perhaps the gods were recognized as physically present in their surrogates.

  Same with the food, she wrote in a file she was compiling for Trent’s use. Everyone knew that the food set out for the gods was actually consumed by the temple staff. Nothing is stone literal, it all hovers between levels of mediation, and we can’t tell where to draw the line.

  This was evasion, and Leslie knew that Trent would brush it impatiently aside. The “Stele of the Vultures” was so named because one panel showed vultures flying off with the heads of slain soldiers, and there was no reason to believe that Sumerian armies showed mercy to their captives in any of their endless campaigns. Prisoners who could not be ransomed were killed or mutilated, and what else could you expect? the ancient world did not have POW camps. Trent’s novelizations could not gratify the gamers’ zeal for battles without acknowledging this truth.

  The textbooks gave few women’s nam
es, but Leslie remembered a goddess known for mercy named Nanshe, and decided in the absence of evidence to the contrary that Sumerians sometimes named their children after minor gods. She added some more lines about the girl and her family, spent a few minutes reading news updates (a habit now faintly obsessive, but she couldn’t help it), then took herself to bed. Drifting past shoals toward sleep, she thought of Nanshe, who spoke sometimes with the water-carrier, a great-shouldered man baked like a brick by the sun, who had been captured and blinded during a war years ago. He stood all day drawing water from the levée and carrying it along the road to the village square, the thick pole with buckets swaying at either end bowing across his back like an ox yoke. Mudu, the kids called him, as he had apparently said it once when asked his name.

  “Were you a farmer?” Nanshe asked him as he walked back toward the well, buckets and pole slung easily over one shoulder. She felt pleased to have inferred this after watching his practiced motions with the shaduf—when temple servants were sent for water, they slopped and wasted effort.

  “La-ul,” the man replied curtly. The intensifier suggested disdain for the question.

  Nanshe was taken aback. “You weren’t an artisan,” she guessed after a moment; a blind potter or weaver could still ply his trade, or at least serve as assistant.

  “Sataru,” he said simply. The verb meant to have incised, but Nanshe was slow to understand.

  “You mean you were a scribe?”

  Mudu didn’t turn his face toward her, which was a relief, since his gaze was frightening. “Palace, not temple. Records.”

  His calloused hands did not look as though they had once held a reed. Nanshe looked at his powerful arms and back, which she had supposed been his since youth. Various thoughts contested within her, but her merchant’s thrift won out and she protested, “Scribing is a valuable trade.”

  The man grunted. The sounds of men working the shaduf on the levée had evidently reached him, for he turned without pausing onto the path that led to the well, where he set down the pole and began to tie up the first bucket’s handle. The polished crossbar over which the rope was slung squealed as he let the bucket drop, and he stretched his arms while they listened to the splash and then the glug of its sinking.

  “Water is heavier than clay,” he said suddenly.

  Nanshe looked up at him, puzzled. “That’s not true,” she said. She started to say something more, then realized that speaking betrayed her location. She took a step back, and added, “Clay tablets will sink.”

  Mudu turned and began drawing up the rope. It occurred to Nanshe that he was probably saying that scribes do not carry loads all day. She was still trying to work out why the Palace hadn’t ransomed him to his city, or set him to work keeping its own records, or otherwise turned his tangible value to account.

  “How many years ago?” she asked. It occurred to her that he might have had children.

  A shout carried faintly across the open air. Nanshe turned and saw an adult waving from the path bordering the adjacent field’s far side, her mother’s cook. She set off at a run, then whirled round to call “Goodbye!” to the slave. If Mudu had once been a palace scribe, he was something other than she had thought.

  “If you like dallying at the well, you could bring home some water,” Cook observed. She could not discern detail at a distance, or she would have cuffed Nanshe for speaking to the slave.

  “You didn’t send me out with a bucket,” Nanshe observed. Then, “How long ago was the war with Umma?”

  Cook laughed. “You sound like a tablet-house instructor.” Nanshe scowled, and Cook pretended to flick water at her. “Which war do you mean?”

  Nanshe began to say When they brought back all the slaves, but thought better of it. Sitting in the courtyard with a basket of legumes, she watched Cook cleaning a turtle with a small bronze knife, and wondered whether scribes impressed into battle for their city fought with better weapons than laborers. The household’s other knives were flint, while vendors in the market sliced their wares with blades of clay. Was Mudu’s weapon also carried back in triumph to Lagash; did it serve Ningirsu in his temple today?

  Later Nanshe retrieved her doll from Sud, whose tiny clay soldiers had overrun it. Sitting in the shade of the poplar that arched over the house, she took a reed she had cut and positioned it beside Dolly’s arm, as though it were a spear. The figure now looked like Inanna—Nanshe could not imagine an armed woman otherwise—and she reflected that if she took Dolly out to the house they had made for her in the tamarisk brush (Sud had helped, under the impression that he was building fortifications), then the knee-high mud brick structure, its thatched roof removable to disclose partitioned rooms within, would become perforce Her temple. Nanshe, who knew nothing of any temple’s inner chambers, was thrilled at the thought of now gazing upon them.

  As she lay that night with Dolly in her arms, the reed spear forgotten under the tree, Nanshe wondered whether she could recruit her mother’s assistance in making Dolly a new dress for Festival. Attired like a prosperous merchantwife, Dolly would certainly

  This isn’t what my readers want. The plot must conform to a gaming scenario; any novelistic texture must grow in the cracks between.

  Your readers? They are the game’s readers; you’re just brought in to entertain them.

  Okay, I’m sorry. But if they’re reading something I wrote, can I think of them as mine, even if the copyright isn’t? At least for as long as they hold open the pages?

  This is only a brief scene. Even a novelization can’t be incessant action.

  I’ll give it a paragraph. One can introduce new themes in that little space, establish a counterpoint, okay? If I write more the editors will cut it.

  Clay soldiers stood atop the house’s perimeter, like invaders breaching the city walls. With an annoyed cry Nanshe swept them clear, but the point returned to her as she lay remembering: Sud thought in terms of armies because the lugals did; the cities did—it was the way things were. Perhaps the gods did.

  War with Umma precluded trade with Umma, but Umma (Nanshe’s father often said this) produced little that Lagash did not, and competed with Lagash for trade elsewhere. If the arrogance of Umma’s people regarding water boundaries roused Ningirsu’s ire, there was no reason why Lagash’s merchants should question the will of the city.

  Shock troops thunder across the plain, impossibly loud, each chariot drawn by two onagers. Lugal Eannatum’s chariot commands four, and the songs will declare that it moved twice as fast. They far outpace the infantry, which disappears behind boiling clouds of dust, emerging seconds later, a forest of speartips glinting above their helmets, like figures marching out of a mountainside. The enemy ranks break and scatter, and though the chariots do not run them down as in song, no soldier stands fast to attack as they sweep through the line, causing spearmen to drop shields, spring away like panicked grasshoppers, trample each other. Umma’s own chariots, fewer and slower, have not yet reached the advancing Lagashites, who see the rout, roar terrifyingly, and present speartips to the spooked Umman onagers. The plain dissolves into a swirling chaos of smoke, noise, and trembling earth, but the contest is already over.

  The sickle-sword in Eannatum’s hand would be portrayed in stelae and (now lost) wall paintings, the implicit metaphor—of his enemy falling like wheat before him—apparent to the most unsophisticated viewer. Sumer’s plains, where nothing stands waving in ranked thousands but the wind-tossed stalks, themselves compel the image. Shall Ninlil, goddess of grain, bow down like grain before warlike Inanna?

  As her city did before Inanna’s. That is the story—Gilgamesh of Uruk’s—he wants most to write, the wordstring that will reach from inscribed clay to etched polycarbonate. Beginning with young Gilgamesh’s defeat of Agga’s army and ending with the elder king building a shrine in subjugated Nippur, it will bracket the period (a few years, presumably, of his early maturity) when Gilgamesh gained and lost Enkidu, and so must deal with it, though in terms a gamer
will not balk at. If Gilgamesh’s triumphs over Kish and Ur are dramatized with suitable élan—Trent accepts that there must be several battle scenes—then the reader will sit still for the journeys to the Cedar Forest and the netherworld: perhaps even in the less familiar Sumerian versions. The harmonics of mythopoesis, echoing even from this profoundly alien culture, can inform any story, however strong its appeal to gamers.

  He is trying to decide whether either The Epic of Gilgamesh or the earlier poems can be considered either iliads or odysseys. Declaring the Epic an odyssey is banal but probably unavoidable, just as “Gilgamesh and Agga,” the only Sumerian Gilgamesh poem not to have been incorporated into the Epic, is an iliad in every respect. Role-playing games are all iliads, since they deal with battles, depict societies primarily in terms of their ability to sustain a war effort, and see individual psychology only through the lens of fitness for combat.

  Longingly he thinks again of Enmerkar, the figure not in the carpet, whose presence in the Wake he yearns to discover. He suspects that Enmerkar and his friend Lugalbanda were the models for Gilgamesh and Enkidu, but the fragmentary nature of the few surviving tablets leaves this unclear. For these oldest of texts Queneau’s schematic dissolves, and we are confronted with the stuff of myth, which Trent wants to rub between his fingers, raise to his nose. O show me the substrate of meaning, psyche’s bedrock.

  What did Lugalbanda cry when he awoke and found that his companions had left him for dead? The steppes of Mount Hurum, dry and desolate, must have seemed the Sumerian underworld, did he realize at first that he still lived? The tablet here crumbles into powder, the rest of the story is lost.

  Enmerkar and the army commanded by his seven heroes succeed in subjugating Aratta (the poem could hardly have gone otherwise) and they return to Erech along their original route, intending to reclaim Lugalbanda’s body and bear it home. Upon reaching Mount Hurum,