“Mighty lugal, you may trust in me!” Sharur exclaimed.
“I do,” Kimash said simply. “Go now. Go for me. Go for Gibil.”
“I shall go now,” Sharur said. “I shall go for you, mighty lugal. I shall go for the Giblut.” I shall go for myself, and for the sake of Ningal. He did not say that aloud. Only later did he realize it was likely the chiefest reason for which Kimash sent him forth.
5
Sharur tugged at the donkey’s lead rope. “Demons eat you!” he shouted in the best Zuabi accent he could assume. “Devils flay the hide off your bones! There lies the city, just ahead. If you want to rest, you can rest inside it.”
The donkey brayed and looked stubborn and set its feet and would not go forward. A man with a couple of pots full of grain strapped to his back strode around Sharur as he went back to the animal and got it moving with a direct brutality of which Harharu would have disapproved. The others on the road to Imhursag—the road the donkey was doing its best to block—did not complain; on the contrary.
“You stupid thing,” Sharur said, as the donkey resentfully started going once more. “You stupid, ugly thing. Under the shadow of the walls, you want to stop. I tell you, it shall not be.” The donkey brayed, but kept walking.
In Sharur’s view, the walls of Imhursag were not nearly so fine as those of his own city. They were not so high as Gibil’s walls, nor did they compass round so broad an area. Much of the brickwork was old, and in imperfect repair. But that only made the temple of Enimhursag, thrusting step by narrowing step into the sky above the top of the wall, seem more massive and imposing by comparison. This was the god’s city first, with men and their needs an afterthought.
Guards at the gate looked Sharur and the donkey over without much interest. “Where from?” one of them asked.
“Zuabu,” he answered, and pointed southwest.
“What’s the beast carrying?” the guard inquired.
Was Enimhursag looking out through the bored man’s eyes? Was the god of Imhursag speaking through the bored man’s lips? Sharur did not think so, but knowing was hard. Still, having succeeded with the lie—no, the half-truth, for the guard had not asked his home city—about his origin, he had not intended to speak anything but the truth here: “Bronze and bracelets and beads and pickled palm hearts.”
“Where’d you come by all that stuff?” the Imhursaggi asked. He and his companions chuckled at that. The Imhursagut were men like any others... when Enimhursag let them be so.
As if his dignity had been affronted, Sharur drew himself up straight. “I traded for it—of course.”
The guards laughed out loud. “Of course, Zuabi,” their leader said. They didn’t believe him. None of Zuabu’s neighbors believed Zuabut when they proclaimed their honesty. The guard went on, “Just remember, friend, your lightfingered god won’t protect you if you step out of line here. Enimhursag, the great lord, the mighty lord, loves thieves not.”
His voice grew deeper, more rolling, more imposing when he mentioned his god—or was it the god delivering a warning through him? “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sharur said in tones too arch to be taken seriously. Laughing once more, the guards waved him into Imhursag.
As he passed through the gateway into the city rival to his own, Sharur felt, or thought he felt, a tingle run through him. The hair on his arms and chest stood out from his body for a moment, as if lightning had struck not too far away. Then the feeling faded, and he might have been in any city of Kudurru.
Most of the Imhursagut, to look at them, were not much different from other folk of the land between the rivers. Peasants gaped at the number and size of the buildings Imhursag held. Potters shouted their wares. Customers shouted derision at them. A drunken woman slept in the shade of a mud-brick wall. Her tunic had hiked up to show her secret place. A small boy pointed and giggled. A dog lapped up what was left of the beer in the pot beside her, then lifted its leg against the wall. The small boy giggled louder.
Here and there, though, Enimhursag’s priests—the god’s eyes, the god’s spies—strode through the streets. They shaved their heads. They shaved their beards. Sharur wondered if they ever blinked. He didn’t think so. Whenever he saw one of them, he kept his own eyes cast down to the dirt of the street so as to draw no notice. He did his best not to imagine what would happen if Enimhursag realized a Gibli had sneaked into his city.
A gang of slaves was knocking down a mud-brick building. Only a single overseer watched them, and was paying more attention to a harlot sauntering along the street than to the workmen. Nonetheless, they labored steadily and diligently. In Gibil, a gang supervised with such laxness would have accomplished nothing.
One of the slaves, seeing the overseer’s eyes following the rolling buttocks of the harlot, did lean on his copper-shod digging stick for a breather. After a moment, though, the slave stiffened and began breaking up mud brick once more. “I pray your pardon, mighty lord,” he muttered as he worked. ‘‘I am but a lazy dung fly, unworthy of your notice. I am but a lowly worm, not deserving of your attention.” How the chunks flew from the brick!
Sharur shivered. No wonder the overseer could turn his gaze toward a whore’s backside rather than keeping it firmly fixed on the work gang. Enimhursag watched the slaves, and held them to their tasks more thoroughly than the man might have done with lash and shouted curses. Sharur wondered if Enimhursag was keeping special watch on this gang because the building that would replace the one they were demolishing was to serve his cult, or whether the god simply surveyed all the slaves in his city.
The less Sharur spoke, the less chance he had of betraying himself to the people or to their vigilant god. He had hoped to be able to find the market square without talking to any of the Imhursagut. But the streets of Imhursag were like those of Gibil. They were like those of any other city in the land between the rivers. They bent and twisted back on themselves in ways no one who had not lived in Imhursag since birth—or no one whom Enimhursag did not guide— could hope to understand.
After passing the gang of sweating slaves and their inattentive human overseer for the second time, Sharer realized he might wander till nightfall without stumbling upon what he sought. No help for it, then, but to ask an Imhursaggi. He put the question to a graybeard carrying a large bundle of palm fronds.
“Not from here, eh?” the old man said. “No, I can tell you ain't, I can. You talk funny, you do. Well, from here you go...” His voice trailed away. Was he reviewing the plan of the city he carried in his mind? Or was he asking Enimhursag for the answer—and receiving it? Sharur did not inquire. Sharur would sooner not have known. The old man resumed: “Second left, third right, first left, and you're there.”
“Second left, third right, first left,” Sharur repeated. “I thank you. May your god bless you for your kindness.”
“Oh, he does, lad, he does.” The old Imhursaggi’s smile was broad and happy. He liked living in a city where the god ruled directly; Sharur did not understand, but he did not argue, either. Thanking the man again, he led the donkey down the street.
The directions, whatever their source, were good. Imhursag's market square proved neither so large nor so noisy as that of Gibil. No, after a moment Sharur revised that first impression: Imhursag's market square might be small, but at the moment it was a great deal noisier than that of Gibil. Merchants from all over Kudurru and the surrounding lands thronged here, where the Giblut traded among themselves and large stretches of the square of Gibil wore nothing but bare dirt and blowing dust. Seeing Imhursagut profit while his own people had to do without infuriated Sharer.