“My brother’s idea makes as much sense as any I have heard,” Sharur said. “It makes more sense than most I have heard.”
“This does not prove it is true.” Ereshguna and Habbazu spoke together. Master merchant and master thief looked at each other in some surprise, then started to laugh.
Ereshguna said, “Here we are, two older men, trying to restrain the enthusiasm of younger men. When we were younger men, the older men would try to restrain us.”
“Even so,” Habbazu said. “And when your two fine sons are older men, they, too, will try to restrain the enthusiasms of the young.”
He and Ereshguna laughed again. Sharur and Tupsharru exchanged indignant glances. Sharur did not think that, when he grew older, he would try to hold back those younger than himself. He wondered if his father, when a young man, had also doubted he would do any such thing. Looking over at Ereshguna, Sharur thought he probably had had those doubts. Despite them, Ereshguna had changed. Maybe that meant Sharur would change, too. He hoped not, but maybe it did.
Brazen trumpets roused the Giblut the next morning. Ram’s-horn trumpets roused the Imhursagut—a different sort of braying. Along with those harsh blasts from the Imhursaggi camp came the cries of Enimhursag himself, easily audible across the space between the two encampments: “Rouse, men of Imhursag! Today I lead you to victory over the liars and cheats of Gibil!”
Sharur smiled to hear the outrage in the god of Imhursag’s voice. Much of that outrage, he knew, was aimed straight at him. He had lied to Enimhursag, saying Engibil had run mad and the Giblut wanted a new divine overlord. He had cheated Enimhursag, getting him to invade the land of Gibil on those false pretenses.
Engibil’s voice was nowhere to be heard. Kimash’s bronze-lunged heralds cried out the lugal’s orders: “Smiths and scribes and merchants to the front! As we fought before, so shall we fight again.”
On went the armor of bronze scales over leather. On went the helmet, of similar design. Wearing both, Sharur felt as if he had been thrown into one of Etimgalabzu’s furnaces. Sweat poured off him, a river of sweat, a river that seemed to flow as powerfully as the Yarmuk.
“Forward the Giblut!” Kimash shouted. The army he led echoed his war cry: “Forward the Giblut!”
“Enimhursag!” the warriors of Imhursag shouted back. “Enimhursag!” As he had done on the first day of the fighting, the god of the Imhursagut towered over his men, huge, menacing—and, Sharur thought, less dangerous than he appeared. Along with the rest of the Giblut, he jeered at Enimhursag and reviled him.
Axles squealing, the donkey-drawn chariots of the Giblut began to maneuver against those of Imhursag. Kimash had more chariots with him than did the Imhursagut. Before long, Sharur was sure, the elite archers of his home city would overpower their foes and pour shafts into the opposing army from the flank. If it had happened so in the earlier battle, it was likely to happen again in this one.
But, he soon discovered, even Enimhursag, the champion of the old in all ways, did not always precisely repeat himself. The god of Imhursag could not advance beyond the frontmost line of his warriors. But that did not mean, as it had meant in the earlier battle, that he could exert no power beyond the frontmost line of his warriors.
Enimhursag stooped alongside a tiny canal only a couple of cubits wide. When he rose, his enormous hands were full of mud. As a small boy might have done, he shaped the mud into a ball—but this ball was more than half as big around as a man was tall. The god flung it at a Gibli chariot.
It hit the donkeys and knocked them kicking. The chariot itself flipped over, spilling the archers out into the dirt. Enimhursag stooped, rose, and shaped another ball of mud. He aimed and let fly.
This time, the mudball squarely struck a chariot. The car shattered. The donkeys ran wild, braying their terror. One of the men who had been in the chariot somehow staggered to his feet. The others did not move.
The Imhursagut cheered themselves hoarse. Enimhursag methodically began to form still another ball of mud. Advancing beside Sharur, Ereshguna said, “The god of the Imhursagut has found something dangerous to do. But he has not found out how to do it in the most dangerous way.”
As if thinking along with Ereshguna, Kimash cried, “Close with them! Let us meet the Imhursagut sword to sword, mace to mace, body to body! Close with them! Forward the Giblut!”
Forward the Giblut went, at a trot. Enimhursag threw at another chariot and missed. His curses were enormous. He threw again, and smashed a car to kindling. No Giblut staggered from that wreck.
Enimhursag needed longer to realize he was making a mistake than had either Ereshguna or Kimash the lugal. The Gibli army had almost closed with the Imhursaggi force before the god threw the first mudball into that crowded mass of men. It bowled over a dozen, maybe more, not far from Sharur. Some of them could still scream. Some would be forever silent. The men who were not hurt ran on, toward the Imhursagut.
Enimhursag let fly with yet another missile. smashed down another double handful of men. By then, though, the front ranks of the Giblut, Sharur among them, crashed into the armored nobles and priests and traders at the head of the Imhursaggi force. All the Giblut hurled themselves forward with desperate energy—the sooner they mingled with the Imhursagut, the sooner the god of Imhursag would have to leave off throwing balls of mud at them for fear of hitting his own men.
An Imhursaggi priest, crying out his god’s name, swung his ax at Sharur as if he intended chopping down a date palm. Sharur had to skip back; he had no hope of beating that stroke aside. “Enimhursag is my protector!” the priest shouted, drawing back the ax to strike again.
Before he could swing it a second time, Sharur slashed at him. The priest’s armor turned the first swordstroke. The next, which was aimed at his neck, he had to block with the handle of his ax.
Then a wounded Imhursaggi stumbled into him from the side, throwing him off balance. Sharur’s blade bit deep. Blood filled the priest’s beard. He toppled with a groan, the ax falling from nerveless fingers. “Enimhursag does not protect you well enough,” Sharur said. “Enimhursag does not protect Imhursag or the Imhursagut well enough.”
If Engibil was on the battlefield, if Engibil was even watching the battlefield, he gave no sign of it. If anyone was going to protect the men of Gibil, they themselves had to do it. And so they did, crying out Kimash’s name—and also Engibil’s—as they smashed into and through the Imhursagut.
Many men from Sharur’s city—smiths and scribes and merchants—instead of fleeing from Enimhursag, made straight for him. They stabbed and slashed at his feet and hacked away at his ankles with axes. Ichor poured from the wounds they made.
The god of Imhursag bellowed in rage and pain. He stomped several Giblut into the dirt. In so doing, though, he also stomped into the dirt several of his own priests. His most devoted followers did their best to place their own bodies between the god they loved and the ferocious Giblut. Destroying the priests in that way seemed to wound Enimhursag as sorely as anything the men of Gibil could do to him.
Sharur, too, fought his way toward Enimhursag. He knew the stroke he wanted to deliver against the god who ruled the city rival to his own. “The back of the heel,” he muttered. If he could cut through the tendon there, Enimhursag would fall, no matter how large he was. He would fall the harder, indeed, for being so large.
An Imhursaggi stood close by Enimhursag’s ankle. He blocked the way against Sharur—or he did until Dimgalabzu’s ax slammed through his armor and his ribs and crumpled him to the ground. “I thank you, father of my intended,” Sharur shouted, and hewed at the tendon that went up the back of Enimhursag’s enormous leg.