Between the Rivers

Between the Rivers Harry Turtledove

TOR® fantasy

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEW YORK

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

BETWEEN THE RIVERS Copyright © 1998 by Harry Turtledove Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

Tor Books on the World Wide Web: http://www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

ISBN: 0-812-54520-6

Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 97-29844

First edition: March 1998                                                -

First mass market edition: April 1999

Printed in the United States of America 0987654321

1

Sharur was walking back toward his family’s shop and home on the Street of Smiths when a fever demon that had been basking on a broken mud brick soaking up heat sprang at him, its batlike wings glistening in the sun. He leaped back so it could not breathe sickness into his mouth and pulled out an amulet marked with the eyes of Engibil, patron god of the city of Gibil.

“Begone, foul thing!” he exclaimed, and made the left-hand gesture every child in the land of Kudurru learned by the age of three—every child, at any rate, that lived to the age of three. He thrust out the amulet as if it were a spear. “Greater powers than you protect me.”

Screeching in dismay, the nasty little demon fled. Sharur strode on, his back straight now with pride. He returned the amulet to its proper loop on his belt. The belt, which also bore a couple of other amulets, a bronze dagger, and a stylus, held up a knee-length linen kilt that was all he wore between stout leather sandals and a straw hat shaped like a short, broad cone. Slaves—and some freemen of a class poorer than Sharur’s—dispensed with shoes and sometimes with kilt as well. No one went without a hat, not in the land between the Yarmuk and the Diyala.

The streets of Gibil were narrow and winding. Sharur’s sandals scuffed up dust and squelched in muck. A farmer coming at him leading a donkey with baskets of beans tied to its back made him squeeze up against the front wall of one of the two-story mud-brick homes lining both sides of the street: a prosperous home, because that front wall was whitewashed. The shiny white coating did not make the sunbaked mud any less rough on the bare skin of his back. Farmer and donkey plodded on, equally oblivious to having annoyed him.

His grandfather’s ghost spoke in his ear: “You should follow that fellow and break a board on his head for the bother he caused you.”

“It’s all right, father to my father. He’s on the way to the market square; he had to get by me,” Sharur answered resignedly. His grandfather had been quarrelsome while he was alive, and was even more bad-tempered now that no one could break a board over his head.

“If only that fellow had known me in the flesh, I’d have hit him myself,” the ghost grumbled. “He deserved it.”

“It’s all right, father to my father,” Sharur repeated, and kept walking.

His grandfather’s ghost sniffed. “All right, he says. It’s not all right, not even close. Young people these days are soft—soft, I tell you.”

“Yes, father to my father,” Sharur said. The ghost, he knew, would keep on haranguing him and trying to meddle in his affairs as long as he lived. He consoled himself by remembering that it would have no power over his children, whenever they might be born, for they would not have known his grandfather alive. A when I’m a ghost myself, he thought, I hope I don’t plague the people who recall me.

He turned a last comer and stepped onto the Street of Smiths. It was probably the noisiest street in all Gibil, but he found the racket familiar, even restfuk haying lived with it all his life. Smiths banged and tapped and hammered and rasped and filed. Fires crackled. Molten metal hissed as it was poured into molds of wet sand.

Behind the racket, power hovered. Smithery was a new thing in the land of Kudurru, and thus in the whole world, however big the world might be. In the days of Sharur’s grandfather’s grandfather, no one had known how to free copper and tin from their ores, much less how to mix them to make a metal stronger than either. These days, smiths stood on an equal footing with carpenters and bakers and potters and those who followed the other old, established trades.

But smiths were different. The other trades all had their old, established tutelary gods, from Shruppinak, who helped carpenters pound pegs straight, to Lisin, who got spots out of laundry. Smithery, though, smithery was too new for its great power to have coalesced into deities or even demons. Maybe it would, in time. Maybe, too, the smiths would keep the power in their own merely human hands.

Whenever that thought crossed Sharer’s mind, it frightened him. If Engibil saw it there, or, worse, if one of the greater deities—sun god, storm or river goddesses; the ugly, sexless demon that squatted underground and caused earthquakes with its quiverings; many more—did so, what would they do with the smiths, to the smiths, for seeking to gain power thus? Sharer neither knew nor wanted to find out.

At the same time, though, knowing himself to be a worm in the eyes of the gods, he longed to be a strong worm. His eyes traveled down the Street of Smiths to the lugal’s palace at the end of it, the only building in the city that came close to Engibil’s temple in size and grandeur. Kimash the lugal gave Engibil rich presents, of course, but he ruled Gibil in his own right, as had his father and grandfather before him.

One or two other cities in the land of Kudurre had lords who were but men. The rest were about evenly divided between towns where ensis—high priests—transmitted the local god’s will to the people and those where the gods ruled directly. Sharer was glad he did not live in one of those towns. Everyone who did struck him as a step slow.

Thinking of power, he almost walked right past Ningal without seeing her. “Well,” she called as he went by. “Don’t say hello.”

“Hello,” he said, and felt very foolish.

Ningal set down the basket of eggs she was carrying back to her father’s smithy: had she kept holding it, she couldn’t have set both hands on her hips to look properly annoyed. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think you live too much of your life inside your head instead of in the world out here.” “Not when I look at you,” Sharur said. Ningal’s smile said he’d gone partway toward redeeming himself. Like other well-to-do women of Gibil, she wore a linen tunic that covered her from the neck almost to the knee, but it clung to her in the heat and did little to hide her shapely figure. Her eyes sparkled; all her teeth were white; her hair fell to her shoulders in midnight curls. Sharur went on, “With the profit I make from my next trip to the mountains, I’ll have enough to pay bride-price to your father.”

“How do you know I’ll want you to, when you don’t even notice I’m here?” she asked with a toss of her head that sent those curls flying.

Sharur felt his cheeks heat, though he doubted Ningal could see him blush. Like her, like everyone in the land between the rivers, he was swarthy, with dark hair and eyes. In Laravanglal, the distant southeastern land whence tin came, the people were the color of dark bread, and men grew beards scanty rather than luxuriant. A few of the mountaineers of Alashkurru had eyes of green or even gray, and hair that might be brown or even, rarely, the color of copper instead of black. More, though, looked like Sharur and his countrymen.