So when the midday heat had eased a little, we put on kilts of fine white linen, and he drew a narrow red stripe across my shoulders and sliced a lock of my hair, and we went together to the temple of Inanna. We passed through the rear courtyard and crossed a maze of lesser rooms-workshops and toolbins and the library where the holy tablets were stacked-and at last we came to the cloister where the temple priestesses wait to serve worshippers. "Now you will give yourself to the goddess," my uncle told me.
For one horrified moment I wondered if he had arranged for me to yield my supposed virginity to Inanna herself. Perhaps the son of a king might in fact warrant such a lofty initiator. By now I had become something of a swaggerer, at least in the inwardness of my thoughts, and I imagine I could have found the valor to couple with a goddess: but to embrace the high priestess was another thing entirely. Her hawk-featured face frightened me; that and the thought of her thickening flesh. She was older than my mother, after all. No doubt she had been the most superb of women once, but now she was aging and said to be unwell, and I had seen when she appeared at the last harvest festival, oiled and bejeweled and practically naked, that her magnificence was going from her. But my fears were absurd. Inanna, whether she be young or old, is reserved only for the king. The priestess whom my uncle had provided for me was a juicy girl of about sixteen, with golden paint on her cheeks and a glittering red jewel mounted in her left nostril.
"I am Abisimti," she said, touching her hand to breasts and thighs in the holy sign of Inanna. Then she led me into her little chamber, while my uncle went off to make his observances with a priestess of his own.
Abisimti's room contained a couch, a basin, an image of the goddess. She lit the candles and performed the libations and took me to the long narrow couch. We knelt by it and said the prayers together, her very solemnly, and in a copper brazier she burned the lock of my hair that my uncle had cut off. Then she drew my garment from me and bathed me with a cool cloth. At the sight of my nakedness she frowned.
"How old are you?" she asked.
"In a month, twelve."
"Twelve? Only twelve?" She laughed prettily and clapped her hands. "Then the gods have favored you greatly!"
I said nothing, merely stared intently through her light linen robe to the high round breasts half visible beneath.
"How eager you are!" she cried. "Your first taste of the great mystery and you can hardly bear to wait a moment longer!"
I dared not lie to a priestess, but I did not want to tell the truth. So I looked away, feigning embarrassment.
Abisimti let her robe drop. But before I could possess her she had to tell me at length of the esoteric meaning of the rite we were about to perform, which I had already comprehended on my own, and then to instruct me in the method and art of coupling. That was also superfluous but I endured it patiently enough. Then we went to it. I pretended to a clumsiness I had long ago outgrown. Even so, Abisimti's eyes were shining when we were done. Was that right, I wondered, for her to take such pleasure in it, she being a priestess? But later I came to see that it is not only right but blessed for the priestesses of Inanna to enjoy the devotions of the temple cloister. A common whore may hate her work and detest her customers, perhaps, but a priestess is engaged in the most sacred act of all, which is to bridge the great gulf between mortal and god. That is true of a common whore as well, but the whore does not understand such matters.
In such ways I glided toward manhood. I thought I saw the shape of my life.unrolling before me. I would eat well and drink well and enjoy many women, and I would be a warrior and a priest and a prince; and one day Dumuzi would die and I would be called to the kingship of Uruk. I did not question any of that. Plainly it was my destiny. Though I was already well aware that the gods are capricious, I did not think them stupid: and who better to rule over the city, once he was of age, than the son of Lugalbanda? It struck me as inevitable that the assembly of the city would choose me when Dumuzi's time was done.
But meanwhile Dumuzi was king. And Dumuzi, though hardly young-he was at least four-and-twenty then-was far from old. He might easily live another twenty years, if he was lucky on the battlefield. That was a long time for me to wait for the throne. A great restlessness surged in me. I struggled to contain it.
ONE DAY in this time a slave wearing the badge of Inanna came to me while I was practicing the throwing of the javelin and said,
"You will come now to the temple of the goddess."
He led me through winding passageways I had never seen before, in the depths of my grandfather's temple, or perhaps even beneath it, in tunnels that descended into the White Platform. By the flickering light of our oil-lamps I saw that the halls here were highvaulted and richly ornamented with mosaic decorations in red and yellow, which was strange in this place of perpetual night. There was the smell of incense in the air, and a dampness, as if the walls themselves were sweating. This plainly was some holy sanctum, perhaps that of Inanna herself. I was made uneasy by that, as I always was by anything pertaining too closely to Inanna.
I heard the scrambling of small creatures in the darkness, and the sound of harsh congested breathing. Now and then a passage intersected ours, and I saw lamps glowing far away. Twice we came upon wizards or exorcists at work in the hallway by candleglow, crouching against the tiled floors and scattering barley-flour and pungent-smelling tamarisk branches about as they cast their spells. They paid no attention to us. A little while afterward, as I looked down a crosspassage, I had a quick glimpse of three squat brown two-legged creatures with heavy shaggy chests and the hooves of goats, trudging away from us. I am sure I saw them. I have no doubt they were demons. I knew I was in a place of perils, where one world borders close on another, and things that are meant to be invisible cross boundaries that should not be crossed.
We remained on our path, sloping ever downward. At last I arrived at a great door plated with bronze which pivoted on a large round black stone sunk beneath the pavement. "Go in," the slave said.
I entered a long narrow room, deep and dark. Its rough brick walls were ornamented with black shale and red limestone set in bitumen, and lamps mounted in four high sconces provided a glimmering light. On the floor two overlapping triangles of white metal were inlaid to form the outline of a six-pointed star.
At the center of that star stood a woman, perfectly motionless.
I was expecting to find myself before Inanna herself, but this was some lesser priestess, taller, younger, and more slender. I felt certain I had seen her before, in the goddess-ceremonies, close at the right hand of Inanna, robing and disrobing her as the rite required: a handmaiden of the goddess, of the inner circle of the temple. For a long silent moment I stared at her, and she at me. Her beauty was extraordinary. It grasped me like a great hand which I could not elude. I felt the power of it seizing and shaking my soul like the hot winds of summer. She was elaborately bedecked: her cheeks were colored with a face-bloom of yellow ochre, her upper eyelids were darkened with kohl, her lower ones were made green with malachite, and her thick lustrous hair had been reddened with henna. She wore rich robes, with the reed-bundle emblem of Inanna embroidered across her breast. A ball of myrrh was burning in a censer that rested on a silver tripod. Her eyes, dark and piercing, traveled across me from shoulder to shoulder, from head to toe: she seemed to be taking my measure.
At length she greeted me by my name, my birth-name. I had no name for her and so I could make no answer. I merely stood there gaping foolishly at her.