She sighed. “You are a country innocent, and I would like nothing better than to take you away to safety. But I would be in rather hot oil myself, since my own seal is on the record. Nevertheless I am going to help you. The chance of success is narrow, but—”
“Who are you?” Enkidu demanded, suddenly suspicious. “Why should you interest yourself in helping me, especially if my prospects are as poor as you say? What brought you to that court in the first place?”
“Let us just say I have a foolish sentiment for fools. It is fortunate that King Nabonaid has thrown these palace gardens open to, uh, us, during Marduk’s festival; it gives me a place to try to talk some sense into you. Now we’ll have to do this immediately. Much longer and they’ll be suspicious.”
“Do what?”
“Get married, of course. Fortunately I know a priest of Marduk who will—”
Enkidu was too astonished to say a word. Could this woman actually want to marry him, after calling him a five-fold fool and proving it? She would be marrying a slave, and one with bad prospects. It did not make any sense at all.
She mistook his expression of doubt. “I am a free woman, and unmarried, I assure you. Now we must hurry.”
Enkidu tagged after her, finding his tongue at last. “But there has been no betrothal,” he said stupidly. “Your father—”
“I have no father, no brother,” she replied sharply. “Ishtar will give me away—the goddess of love.”
“And of battle,” Enkidu murmured.
They came to a break in the beauty of the terraced gardens. Leather pails, heavy with water, dripped as they were hauled up along a system of pulleys. Slaves guarded their journey, sweating as they transferred the pails to a new pulley and hauled on the ropes. This was the origin of the irrigation streamlets trickling down the conduits: ropes and muscles. All the laborers were eunuchs.
Tamar found what she was searching for: a sheltered alcove cut into the wall beside the bucket system. Inside was the overseer, a priest of Marduk, with his clerk. Tamar explained her business tersely.
The priest seemed to be a friend of hers. He nodded. He then barked orders to his clerk, who set to work imprinting a tablet. Tamar took Enkidu by the hand and led him before the tiny altar set into the stone.
“But—?” Enkidu began.
“We don’t have time,” Tamar whispered. “Save your questions for later.”
He marveled even as it was happening that he accepted her initiative so readily. How could he understand her motives and his own? Perhaps he was merely responding to her certainty, since he had been raised as a slave. He took the loose veil of Tamar in his hand and put it up to cover her face in the symbolic gesture of marriage. “She is my wife,” he said. That made it so.
They stamped their seals in the tablet together with those of the priest and the scribe. The seals were stamped again in the soft clay envelope. The priest gave them the blessing of Marduk, greatest of gods, and the ceremony was over. Enkidu had a wife.
Tamar took the tablet in her hands and hid it under her tunic. “Now we must return,” she said.
“You worship Ishtar,” he said as she urged him along, remembering the bracelet. The lion was Ishtar’s symbol.
She glanced at him, amused. “If it has breasts, it worships Ishtar.” Then she became serious. “You’ll find that Ishtar can do more for you—and in more ways—than Marduk, king of the gods though he thinks he is. Ishtar is the true ruler of Babylon. Remember that, when you need help. Ishtar is always present.” She halted, struck by a new thought. She removed her bracelet and handed it to him. “My dowry. Keep it with you always, Tammuz.”
CHAPTER 6.
The cell was dark and dank and silent. Its gray gloom was broken only by the scuffle of rats’ feet.
For a long time Enkidu lay where he had fallen when the eunuch had shoved him into the black hole and departed with his stone-oil lamp. His bruises weighed heavily on him now. He clutched his seal, the most positive token remaining of his identity.
Why had he fought the court proceedings, antagonizing the fat magistrate? Why did he always fight? Why was he unable to accept his lot, just or unjust, as other people did, and make things easier on himself? He had been raised as a slave; why did he persist in thinking of himself as a man?
In the darkness he saw the shape of his answer: the great beneficent outline that was all he could now picture of Aten. A lesser god, a tortured god, a suppressed god—but still a god, a genuine one, whose radiance would rise again.
“Aten,” he said. But there was no answer.
He tried to see Aten more clearly in his mind. This was not easy, for he had no brazen idol to recall. He could command only sensation, an urge to reach that sunlike presence. But it seemed to him that he felt Aten—faintly, distantly, an impulse in the air, the walls, even within himself.
“I will always worship you, Aten,” he said. “I will always search for your radiance. As a foolish child I believed in a shedu, but now I am grown. I will find you and swell your power again with the fatness of many worshippers.”
A nameless unease pervaded the recesses of his mind at the thought, but dissipated before he could examine it. There was much he did not understand about his god.
It was time to explore his prison. His hands slid about on the floor as he tried to lift himself. His fingers flinched from the cold slime. What dung was he touching?
He gained his feet and stepped carefully back to the door by which he had entered. He found it: clammy immovable metal. His fingers explored the wall on either side, feeling the ridges outlining the small bricks. Baked bricks, too hard for him to attack with his bare hands. No use trying to wash these away with water.
He was hungry; he had not eaten this day. Was he to die here of starvation? “Aten,” he said; but the god was imprisoned too.
Disheartened, he felt his way around the cell. It was lower at the far end, and here his toes squished in slime. This disgusted him, for he had some idea of its nature and there were cuts on his feet that might offer entrance into his body to the evil genii that lurked in such refuse, but he made himself go on. There was stench as of the Kebar Canal.
He knew that breathing became difficult in a confined space, though why this was so was a mystery. The stink here was bad, but he had not felt that peculiar discomfort of the sealed or overcrowded room. Some breath might come from the door—but was there some other opening? Some escape?
He continued the search. There was no exit below; otherwise the rank offal should have drained and become firm. But there did seem to be a slight breeze, just enough for his wet fingers to detect. If only he could see!
How had he come here? The priests of Marduk he had known at Calah would never have treated a man this way! Even the one who had taken him into slavery as a child had acted wholly within the law, canceling the legitimate debt of his father. And the local priest who had blessed his marriage to Tamar in the gardens—he had not sneered at a seeming slave! Why, then, had the priest who arrived at the court been so callous? That one had not been at all concerned with the truth. He had been eager to sell Enkidu for a fee that surely exceeded that recorded on the tablet. Corruption reached even into Marduk’s temple, where the god was certain to know!
How could Marduk smile on both just and unjust?
One priest or the other should have been struck dead!
Enkidu could not doubt either Marduk’s existence or his strength. Marduk had overcome savage Asshur in battle. He had granted his people of Babylon power to destroy Nineveh. He had sent Nebuchadnezzar to conquer the city-states of the west. He had razed the walls of Jerusalem and forced its people into bondage, while their ally Egypt feared to intervene.