After telling Harharu and Mushezib what Agum and he had seen in the night, Sharur said, “I will buy two birds for the forgiveness-offering,” and started back toward the village closest to Zuabu.
“Why not go into the city?” Mushezib asked. “It’s right here before us.”
Sharur shook his head. “I do not wish to enter the stronghold of Enzuabu on earth before offering to the god, not when I do not know how badly I may have offended him.” Mushezib ran a hand through his thick, elaborately curled beard before finally nodding.
Having traded jewelry for a pair of trussed doves, Sharur carried them to the caravan. He laid them in a fine bowl, one for which he had intended to gain a high price from the men of Alashkurru. No help for it: an offering of his worst would have inflamed Enzuabu against him had the god not been angry before.
He held the bowl with the two doves out toward the walls of Zuabu and humbled himself before the city god: “Lord Enzuabu, if I have enraged thee—forgive, I beg! Lord Enzuabu, if I have affronted thee—forgive, I beg! Lord Enzuabu, if I have insulted thee—forgive, I beg! Lord Enzuabu, if I have offended thee—forgive, I beg! Lord Enzuabu, if I have slighted thee—forgive, I beg!”
After running through a long litany of the ways in which he might have incurred Enzuabu’s displeasure, he twisted off the doves’ heads and let their blood fill the bowl. Then, using only the first two fingers of his right hand, he sprinkled the blood on his chest and his kilt. He beckoned first Harharu and then Mushezib forward, and did the same with them. Last of all, he sprinkled the lead donkey with the doves’ blood. The donkey snorted and twitched its big ears. It did not like the smell of blood.
“Lord Enzuabu—forgive, I beg!” Sharur cried. “May thy wrath be shattered like this bowl I give to thee!” With all his might, he dashed the thin, lovely bowl against the hard ground. It smashed into a hundred pieces. The doves blood made a red star on the dirt.
“It is accomplished,” Harharu intoned, almost as if he had expected it would not be. “Now let us continue.”
“Now let us continue,” Sharur echoed. Harharu pulled on the rope to get the lead donkey moving. But, as the caravan passed Zuabu by, he got no sense that Enzuabu had in fact forgiven him. True, the god did not rise up in fury, as he might have done, but he yielded nothing, either. He simply bided his time.
West and north of the lands Zuabu ruled was a barren, unirrigated stretch of land no city or god claimed. Little dust demons swirled around the caravan, now nervously running away from the men and donkeys, now skittering up close to see if they might cause some mischief. When one of them got under his feet and tried to trip him, Sharur took from his belt the eyed amulet of Engibil. “Begone!” he cried, and, with little frightened gasps, the dust demons fled from the power of the god.
Wild donkeys fled from the caravan, too; the power of man sufficed to put them in fear. Their hooves kicked up more dust than all the dust demons in the world could have raised. Sharur sent Agum and one of the assistant donkey handlers, a wide-shouldered man named Rukagina, after them with bows. The hunters returned later in the day with a gutted carcass slung from a pole.
Sharur led the cheers for them. “Tonight we feast!” he cried. Wild donkey might not be so flavorsome as mutton or beef, but everyone would be able to gorge himself on meat.
The caravan crew were not the only hunters on the plain. Not long after Agum and Rukagina came back with the donkey, a lion roared nearby. That fierce, thunderous cough made Sharur’s hand fly to the hilt of his knife before he realized it had done so. It also made the donkeys of the caravan, which had been restive at the sight and smell of one of their kind slain, suddenly become docile as lambs.
Harharu chuckled. “They depend on us to protect them from the wild beasts, and they know it,” he said to Sharur.
Off in the distance, the wild donkeys threw up a great cloud of dust. The roar sounded again, and several more after it in quick succession. Vultures spiraled down out of the sky, as they had done when Agum and Rukagina killed. Then the birds could feast on the offal the men had left behind. Now they would have to wait until the lions were done before taking their share.
Sharur set his hand on the neck of the lead donkey. “We will give them what they expect, then,” he said. The donkey snapped at him. He jerked his hand away in a hurry. Harharu laughed out loud.
That evening, the guards and donkey handlers gathered brush and dry donkey dung for a couple of cookfires by a tiny stream. They and Sharur held gobbets of donkey meat over the flames on sticks, roasting them till they were charred black on the outside but still red and juicy within. Sharur burned his fingers, burned his lips, burned his tongue. He did not care. His belly would be full.
Rukagina’s eyes glowed in the firelight. For a moment, Sharur, seeing that, simply accepted it. Then he knew something was amiss. The eyes of dogs and foxes, wild cats and lions, gave back the fire that way: he had watched the beasts prowling round the edges of many camps. Men’s eyes did not normally reflect the light in the same way.
Demons’ eyes did, though. “Rukagina!” Sharur said sharply.
Rukagina stared at him. The donkey handler’s eyes glowed brighter still, as if the fire were behind them, not in front. “Rukagina, yes,” he said, as if he did not recognize his own name. Then he laughed, a hideous cry that made all his companions exclaim in alarm. “Rukagina is eaten, eaten!” he roared.
“A pestilence!” Harharu said. “A demon of this desert has seized him.”
“Yes,” Sharur said, and brandished Engibil’s eyed amulet, as he had at the little dust demons on the road.
This one was made of sterner stuff. Its laugh came again through Rukagina’s mouth. “I am the spirit of this desolation,” it declared. “Your god is far from home, and lazy even in his own city. He has no power over me here. The desert is my city. Here I am a god. Maybe with this man I shall cause a true city to rise here. Then I shall be a true god, a great god, greater than your god.”
Maybe the demon could do that. Maybe Engibil had been just such a wandering desert spirit once. But Sharur did not intend to let the demon aggrandize itself at the expense of one of his men. “Seize him!” he shouted, and the caravan guards piled onto Rukagina.
With the demon in him, the donkey handler fought back with more than human strength. But he was not stronger than all the guards together. They held him down, two men on each arm, three on each leg. He howled like a fox. He hissed like a serpent. He snarled like a lion, and tried to bite like one. And ever and always, he kept seeking to throw the guards off him. .
Mushezib drew his bronze knife from its sheath. “Maybe I should yank up his beard and cut his throat like a sheep’s,” the guard captain said. “That would make the demon flee.”
“Yes, but whom would it seize next?” Sharur asked. “You, perhaps?”
“Avert the omen!” Mushezib exclaimed, and spat to his left side.
Sharur walked over to the packs the men had taken from the donkeys’ backs when they stopped for the night. Had he paid less attention to the way the beasts were loaded, he might have searched till sunrise without finding what he sought. As things were, he ran it to earth like a cheetah bringing down a gazelle gone lame: a small, plain pot, its stopper sealed with pitch.
“What have you got there?” Mushezib asked.
“Essence of the marigold,” Sharur answered. “The Alashkurrut esteem it highly, and every caravan sells many jars to them. It’s sovereign against scorpion stings—of which they have many—snakebite, jaundice, toothache, stomach trouble, difficult breathing, diseases of the privates ... and possession by a demon.”