CHAPTER 6

HARGA

In the marshes north of Eridu

I climbed, stiff-legged, onto the wooden jetty at the Refuge. As I reached down for a rope, I realised I had torn the muscle in my right shoulder again. Perhaps in that day's fighting, perhaps before that without noticing. It was an old injury, from when I carried Gilgamesh out of Ur, and it didn't need much to make it flare up again.

I thought to myself, I am too old for this. The same thing I always thought, these days, when I got out of a canoe.

I was old and I was dirty, befouled with marsh mud and other people's blood. The boys were no cleaner and the three dogs were worse.

Tallboy took the rope from me when he saw me grimacing and the three boys made sure of the boat, tying it up close to the jetty. "We'll get you a bucket of water, sir," said Tallboy.

"Bring it to my hut," I said.

As the two Uruk boys trailed off along the shoreline, giggling over something, the priestess Lilith appeared. She put her hands on her hips and placed herself as a firm block on the path that led to the heart of the Refuge. Her long soft waves of hair were gone, shorn off after the death of her lover, the goddess Ninsun, but she was still a beautiful and imperious woman even in a ragged apron and wooden clogs.

"Did you find the alleged spies?" she said.

"Who knows what we found." I shrugged and winced again at the pain in my right shoulder. "But anyway they are all dead."

I made to walk past the priestess, but she put a flat palm up to me.

"You should swim and get clean," she said, lifting her chin at both me and the god-boy Marduk, who was by then stood behind me, fussing over his dogs. "You will attract rats. You will terrify the children. Swim first."

"The boys are fetching me water," I said. I was bone tired by then from the day's heat and the savagery and I could not summon a smile for her.

"I don't know why you don't just swim," she said.

A mosquito landed on my cheek and I slapped one exhausted hand at it. "There are swamp sharks here and they are hard to see coming, being all covered in green slime. And then also there are the crocodiles."

As I said the words, Marduk began stripping. A moment later he dived naked off the end of the jetty, a pale streak against the red sky and the green of the reed beds. The dogs leaped after him, paws outstretched, into the brown marsh water.

"Marduk, there are more sharks at dusk," I shouted. "Think of the dogs!" I turned back to the priestess, frowning. "It is not safe, Lilith."

"Is that a cut?" she said, reaching for my blood-encrusted left arm.

"It's a graze."

"Harga, let me see it."

"No."

For some moments we glowered at each other, and then the priestess said: "Did the marshmen fight well?"

"Oh yes, most viciously. They are the very pattern of good allies." I cast a glance out at the pale god-boy, who was laughing and splashing with the dogs in the slimy and fetid marsh water.

"We are not taking the dogs again," I said.

"You should not have agreed to it."

"You took Marduk's side! Anyway, he did most of the killing, impossible as he is. He moves so quickly now it can be hard to keep your eye on him."

"Do be careful of him, Harga," she said. "He is not like your other lost ducklings."

"I do not have ducklings," I said, pulling myself more upright. "They are soldiers, not ducklings."

At that moment my two young soldier-ducklings returned with heaving wooden buckets and armfuls of cleaning rags. They had washed their faces and looked very young as they made their way towards us through the gloom. But that was neither here nor there.

The boys dipped heads and knees to the priestess and set the buckets down before me. When the priestess seemed not to be moving anywhere, I went to pull down my long under-trousers.

"All right, I will leave you to it," she said. "I will have some lamps sent down for you all."

"I'll see you in the Palace after," I said.

The priestess threw me back a smile. "Your curls are growing back, Harga," she said. "But there is silver in them now."

I ran my hand over my head. "I will shave it again tomorrow."

It had not yet been a year, after all, since Enlil and the others had been killed.

*   *   *

A long time before, in a war that only the gods remembered, Enki, the lord of wisdom, had created a secret hiding place in the deep marshes north of Eridu, his home city. He fashioned his hiding place on an island you could walk around in one hour, but it was solid mud at least in a land of floating islands and constant flooding.

For centuries after, Enki kept the island stocked and garrisoned, in case one day the land, and his city, were invaded.

We called the island the Refuge and it was a clever place to hide. First off, why would an Anunnaki, a lord of the Earth, choose to build a village in the most awful place imaginable? You could not look at the water without getting gut cramp. The frogs made so much noise you could not sleep. The island, such as it was, was home to rats as big as dogs and deadly snakes and everything was thick with fleas.

Then there were the marshmen, who would kill you if they didn't know you, but if they did know you then they would certainly kill you. Perhaps because of something your grandmother once said to their grandfather. Not to forget the marshwomen, who were twice as dangerous as the men.

Lilith, once high priestess of Uruk, once lover of Gilgamesh's mother, was now self-appointed queen of the Refuge. At one point we had had Enki's wives, past and present, on the island, but neither of them found the fleas to their taste, and they had ceded the ground to Lilith.

At the very centre point of the Refuge there stood a long reed hut that served as our main gathering place and that had come to be known as the Palace. It was built of reeds rolled together into logs and then fashioned very ornately into a high-ceilinged building.

"You do not believe the stories about spies in the marshes?" Lilith said to me as we ate our bowls of crocodile stew in the Palace that night.

"I don't think Adamen knows how to tell the truth," I said. Adamen, the leader of the marshmen, was someone I had disliked on sight.

"Adamen's brother was a good man, his father too."

"Yet somehow they are dead and he is who we have to deal with."

We were sitting together, cross-legged, on the rug at the centre of the Palace. The heat and the smoke and the fleas were just as thick upon the rug as in any other part of the Palace, but the rug had once been in Enki's palace at Eridu, and so by common consent was left for Lilith and her most senior counsellors.

On that muggy evening, with most of our ruling council away from the Refuge, the rug was ours alone.

All around the edge of the Palace sat a crowd of priestesses, orphaned children, and courtiers who had escaped the Akkadian slaughter.

"Adamen wants us to believe that there are spies creeping into the marshes," I said to Lilith, chewing determinedly at my crocodile. "That's about all I can be certain of."

Lilith put her bowl down. "These marshmen are warlike and murderous, it is true, but who in Sumer has been more loyal to the Anunnaki and their servants? I do not think there are any tricks here."

"This crocodile is inedible," I said.

"It's snake," she said. "Giant water snake. It's all the boys could catch today."

"Oh," I said, peering closer at it. "I did not think they could be eaten."

Lilith began to thread an ivory needle, holding it up to the dim light of the fire as she did so, her tongue between her teeth.

"How can you see to do your darning in here?" I said.

"I'm no god, but I have good eyes even in dim light. And anyway, I'm not going to darn, I'm going to sew up your arm, so pass it over."

"No."

"Quickly, Harga."

"I do not see why you are in charge of me," I said. But I moved over, sullen but obedient, and rested my arm on one of her knees.

I looked down at her neat stitches as she sewed and tried hard not to wince or flinch.

"I'll help your girls with the new garden tomorrow," I said.

Marduk arrived, stooping to pass beneath the reed lintel. His red hair was still wet from his swim but he had put on a clean smock. A moment later all three of his dogs were leaping on me. The dog of war put her snout into my bowl, rendering it instantly empty.

Marduk tipped his head to me in greeting. "I'm going out looking for Ninshubar tomorrow. I would like it if you came."

"I've got business here. I've said I'll help with the garden."

"Please come, Harga," he said.

"Oh, Harga," said Lilith. "We can do the garden without you."

Marduk cast his very beautiful smile down at her and then turned back, shining, to me. "I will do all the paddling," he said. "You can sit at the back of the canoe like a king."

I gave out a sigh. "The dogs must stay here." But I said it with no fight in me.

"We will find her," the god-boy said as he dropped down to sit beside me.

What was the point in arguing with him?

*   *   *

Much later, before turning in, I went to say goodnight to Lilith.

She was sitting out in...