“We drive them!” Tupsharru yelled, his voice breaking in his excitement. “We drive them as a swineherd drives swine to the market.” He had a cut on his left cheek, from which blood ran down into his beard. Sharur did not think he knew he had been hurt.
But Enimhursag was not altogether powerless: far from it. Having come far out from under the shadow of their own god, having often defeated the Imhursagut and driven north the border between Gibil and Imhursag, the Giblut could hardly be blamed for reckoning the god of their rivals reduced to impotence.
Then Enimhursag stooped over the battlefield, seized a Gibli in his left hand—the hand not holding that immense sword—lifted him on high, and cast him down. The god bent again, grabbed another Gibli, and smashed him to the ground as well.
Seeing the god’s great hand descending to close on yet another man of his city, Sharur thought of his dream when he had gone up to Imhursag in the guise of a Zuabi merchant. There, too, something vast and terrible had reached down to pluck up tiny men and send them to their doom. Then Enimhursag had killed a true Zuabi merchant, not the false one he had, Sharur remained convinced, been seeking. Now—
Now, suddenly, Enimhursag let out a bellow of pain and rage; he rose without a Gibli clenched in his fist. Now his ichor dripped down onto the battlefield from a wounded forefinger. Another bellow rang out on the field, this one from Dimgalabzu the smith: “If your women haven’t taught you to keep your hands to yourself, you great overgrown gowk, let a man do the job!”
Enimhursag reached down again, and succeeded in killing another Gibli. The success gave him confidence. It gave him, perhaps, too much confidence, for his next try resulted in another wound, this one worse than that which Dimgalabzu had given him. A Gibli scribe’s voice rose in a triumphant cry.
The Imhursagut cried out, too, in dismay. “Our god is wounded,” moaned a man in front of Sharur. “Our god bleeds!”
“You will be wounded,” Sharur shouted at him. “You will bleed.” He flourished his sword and screwed his face up into a fierce and terrible grimace. When he took a step toward the Imhursaggi, the fellow spun on his heel and fled back through his own lines, throwing away his club to run the faster.
Sharur threw back his head and laughed. He was a young man at the forefront of a victorious army. When he had sneaked into Imhursag disguised as a Zuabi, he had been afraid. When he had gone openly into Imhursag to deceive the god, he had been afraid. He had been alone each time then. He was not alone now. He and his comrades, he and the men of his own city, were driving the enemy before them. No wonder, then, he laughed.
Also driving the enemy was one man not of his city. Grinning widely, Habbazu displayed a fine, heavy gold necklace. “So long as you took that from an Imhursaggi and did not steal it from a man of Gibil, enjoy it and profit from it,” Sharur said,
“A man who would steal from his friends is no gentleman,” the thief replied. “In this fight, the Giblut are my friends, for they help keep the Imhursagut from doing my body harm. I have this of an Imhursaggi, not from a Gibli.”
“It is good,” Sharur said. Along with the. nobles and smiths and scribes of Gibil, he pressed deeper into the wavering host of Imhursag, forcing the foe back in the direction of the canal that marked the border between Imhursaggi land and that of Gibil.
Then a shadow fell on his part of the battlefield. Involuntarily, Sharur looked up. The day, like most days in Kudurru from the beginning of spring to the end of autumn, had been bright and clear. For a cloud to pass in front of the sun was rare.
But no cloud had passed in front of the sun. Obscuring its light was the massive form of Enimhursag. Sharur stared up into the god’s enormous face. That proved a mistake.
Enimhursag’s eyes widened as he recognized the mortal who had led him and his city into this war.
“You liar!” Enimhursag shouted, his voice ringing in Sharur’s ears. “You cheat! You trickster! You Gibli!” To his mind, that seemed the crowning insult.
He intended more than insult. With his left hand, the hand unencumbered by the sword, he reached down for Sharur. No green and growing stalks of barley hid Sharur from the god’s search and anger now. If Enimhursag squeezed him in that man-sized fist, his blood would pour down onto the struggling Giblut and Imhursagut, as the luckless Zuabi merchant’s blood had poured out of him after Enimhursag seized him by mistake.
Unlike the luckless Zuabi, Sharur was not taken asleep and helpless on his mat. He had a sword in his hand and he had the determination to use it. He swung it at the enormous thumb that curled down to grasp him.
The blade bit deep. Sharur yanked it free and slashed again. Enimhursag would have been wiser to try to smash him flat than to seek to lay hold of him. But the god had proved imperfectly wise in other ways as well. Wounded a second time, he bellowed like a bullock at the instant in which it is made into a steer: a cry of commingled pain and astonishment that without words said, How could such a dreadful thing happen to me?
More great drops of ichor splashed the ground by Sharur. Enimhursag’s vital fluid did not have the harsh, metallic stink of human blood; it smelled more like the air just after lightning has struck close by—a smell that made the nose tingle on account of its power. If, after the battle was over, wizards could find the spots where the god had bled and dig up the ground into which his ichor had soaked, they might do great things with it.
That would be for later, though. For now, Sharur brandished his sword and shouted up to Enimhursag: “Go back to your own land. This land does not want you. Go back!”
All the Giblut took up the cry: “Go back! This land does not want you. Go back!”
Enimhursag howled in rage. He had expected the men of Gibil to welcome him as a liberator, to thank him for rescuing them from mad Engibil. But the Giblut not only did not welcome him, they not only did not thank him, they were handily defeating him and his people, and were defeating him by themselves, without even seeking the aid of their god.
Where that must have humiliated Enimhursag, it made Sharur proud. And yet, at the same time, it worried him. He had not wanted the Imhursagut to beat the men of his city. But he had wanted to draw Engibil’s notice to the northern border of the land Gibil ruled. If the god of Gibil needed to pay no attention to the invasion, he would not be distracted from affairs in and around his temple, and Habbazu would have a harder time stealing the Alashkurri cup.
Sharur fought on. So did his fellow Giblut. Step by step, they forced back the Imhursagut. Enimhursag managed to slay a few more men of Gibil, but was also wounded again and again. Whenever the god tried to attack a smith or a scribe or some other man intimately connected with the new in Gibil, he found good reason to regret it.
Sharur briefly wondered if smiths and scribes would also be able to resist the power of Engibil. Before that thought had the chance to do anything more than cross his mind, he forgot it, for Engibil appeared on the battlefield.
He did not manifest himself as taller than a building, in the fashion of Enimhursag. He was, in fact, hardly more than twice as tall as a man. But his voice, like Enimhursag’s, rang above and through the merely human din of the fighting. “Go home,” he called to his fellow god, as the Giblut had done. “You have no business here.”
“You are not a god, to give me orders,” Enimhursag shouted back. “You are not even a god to give your own people orders. If men will not heed you, why do you think I will heed you?”
“The men of Gibil are doing as they should,” Engibil said. “They are driving greedy invaders from their land. They are doing as I desire. If they can do it without unduly troubling me, so much the better.”