He went up and down the length of the caravan to see if the trip through the ford had damaged anything. A couple of bolts of red-dyed linen were soaked, but everything else seemed all right. He sighed. “Well, we’re not going to get much for those, not with the color running and stained with mud,” he said.
“For a fording, we did well,” Harharu said.
“I know that,” Sharur answered. “And we saved ourselves trouble from Eniaggasher, unless I miss my guess. But even so—” He scowled. He did not like anything to go wrong, and was still young enough to be easily aggrieved when perfection eluded him. He also begrudged the time spent going down small paths back to the main road.
West of the river, as far as canals took its waters and those of a couple of small tributaries, the land might as well have been part of Kudurru. The people were of the same stock. They spoke the same language, although with a rather singsong intonation. They worshiped the same great gods and lived in the same sort of reed-hut farming villages.
But they had no cities, and no city gods. None of the demons dwelling in this part of the world had been strong enough to consolidate any great number of people under his control. Like the spirit that haunted the waste west of Zuabu, the demons west of the Yarmuk might have had ambitions, but as yet lacked the power to make those ambitions real.
West of the Yarmuk, too, more and more stretches of ground were bare, dry wasteland: country that might have been fertile if water reached it, but that was too far from any stream or rose too high to be irrigated. The mountains of Alashkurru rose higher above the horizon here. Back in Gibil, they were visible only on the clearest days: a deep, mysterious smudge denting the edge of the sky. Not here. West of the Yarmuk, Sharur felt them looking down on him.
Two days after the caravan forded the river, irrigated land became the exception, dry, scrubby country the rule. There was enough forage for the donkeys; Sharur bartered some of the water-damaged linen for a couple of sheep from a herder driving his flock not far from the road. That night, he and the donkey handlers and guards ate roast mutton with wild garlic. -
The next morning, they caught up with the caravan from Imhursag.
Sharur had known they were gaining on the Imhursagut. Had he not taken the detour, they would.have caught them sooner... so long as everything went well at the main river crossing by Aggasher. He doubted that would have happened.
When the donkeys of the other caravan went from being hoofprints on the road to shapes in front of him, Sharur ordered the guards to don their helmets and carry weapons and shields. “You just can’t tell what the Imhursagut will do,” he told Mushezib. “If Enimhursag wants them to attack us, they will, even if we should outnumber them. A god does what he thinks best for himself first, and worries about his people only afterwards.”
“I’ve seen that myself, in the wars we’ve fought against Imhursag,” the guard captain said. “The Imhursagut would throw themselves away for no purpose anybody with even a bare keshlu of sense could see. But they think we’re crazy, because each one of us acts for himself instead of as a piece of our god’s plan. Goes to show, you ask me.”
Goes to show what? Sharur wondered. Instead of asking, he ran a finger along the edge of his bronze spearhead, then tapped the point He nodded to himself. It was as sharp as he could make it.
Up ahead, the Imhursagut were also arming themselves. Sharur saw shields, spears, swords, bows. The other caravan looked about the same size as his own. If the two crews came to blows, they were liable to wreck each other.
“It will be as I said in the land ruled by Zuabu,” Sharur declared. “We shall not begin the fight here. But if the Imhursagut begin it, let our cry be, ‘Engibil and no quarter!’ ” The guards nodded. Some of them looked eager to fight. Some did not. All of them looked ready.
Closer and closer the caravan drew to that from Imhursag. Soon they were within easy bowshot of the rearmost donkeys from the rival city. Almost all the Imhursagut had dropped back to the rear to defend the beasts against the men of Gibil.
Sharur strode out ahead of his lead donkey. “Gibil and Imhursag are not at war now!” he shouted. That was true. It was also the most that could be said for relations between the two cities.
One of the Imhursagut walked back toward him and held up a hand, not in peace but in warning' “Come no farther, Gibli!” he cried. “Halt your donkeys. Do not approach us until you have made known your desires to Enihihursag, the mighty god.”
“You also halt your donkeys, then,” Sharur said. “We will parley, you and I.” He suppressed a sigh. They would parley: Sharur and the man of Imhursag and Enimhursag himself. It was liable to take a while, for the god would have only a tiny part of his attention directed toward the caravan.
Sure enough, the Imhursaggi stood as if waiting for orders for several breaths before nodding jerkily and saying, “It shall be as you propose.” He turned back to the rest of the Imhursagut and ordered them to halt. Sharur waved for his followers to come no closer. Then the man from Imhursag demanded, “Why are you pursuing us? The god told us some time ago that you were following in our wake.”
“We are not pursuing you,” Sharur answered. “We are going our own way, down the same road as you are using, and we happen to be moving rather faster. Let us go by without fighting. You will breathe our dust for a little while, but then it shall be as if we never were.”
“It could be so,” the man of Imhursag said. But then, while he seemed on the point of adding something more, he suddenly shook his head. “No. Enimhursag does not believe you. You seek to get ahead of us to disrupt our trade with the Alashkurrut.”
Only the certain knowledge that laughing in a god’s face was dangerous made Sharur hold his mouth closed. The city gods of Kudurru were a provincial lot, Enimhursag more than most. Though his power touched his followers far beyond the land he ruled, he had no true conception of the size of the world and its constituent parts. “Alashkurru is a wide land,” Sharur said soberly. “We can trade in one part of it and you in another. Even if we get there first, it will not matter.”
“It could be so,” the Imhursaggi said again.
“If you are a merchant, you will have made the journey to the mountains of Alashkurru yourself,” Sharur said, speaking to the fellow as one man to another: always an uncertain proposition when dealing with folk from a god-ruled city. “You will know for yourself how wide the mountain country is—more like Kudurru as a whole than any one city within the land between the rivers. Your caravan and mine can both trade there.”
“It could be so,” the man of Imhursag repeated. Sharur started to be angry at him for his stupid obstinacy, but checked himself. He realized the Imhursaggi did not dare— or perhaps simply could not—come straight out and disagree with his god. That did not rouse anger in Sharur, but pity and fear.
“Let us past you without fighting,” he said gently. “In Engibil’s name, I swear my men will start no quarrel with yours as we go by.”
“How can you swear in your god’s name?” the Imhursaggi—or was it Enimhursag himself?—asked. “Engibil does not speak through the Giblut. We have seen this, to our cost. The words of the men of your city have only their own wind behind them, not the truth of the gods.”
For the first time, Sharur realized deep in his belly that he and the rest of the folk of Gibil were as strange and frightening to the Imhursagut as they were to him. “I speak only for myself,” he admitted, “but Engibil is still my god. If I lie in his name, he will punish me.”