"Oh no," Ioka said, genuinely frustrated. "We must make them forget, eventually. Honestly, Kiel should never have allowed us to come back here after the Flood. But In-nekel has some strange fascination with their buildings. He likes helping them to build their temples.”
“I remember the first buildings, round reed and mud huts. Even baked clay. They are improving.”
“I miss trees in all of this mud! I miss the forests. I may head north-west soon. I should be going, anyway." Alessia shrugged.
"Actually, if you want to stay with us a while, Alessia, the leader welcomes you.” Inn-nekel broke in. “He thinks he can bring us back to his city. He thinks his people will rise to power over Ki-engi if the powers of three gods are with them," In-nekel shrugged. "To tell the truth, though, I think it would be best it we all parted from the nomads and dull the memories in their minds of our intrusion. But, I was beginning to enjoy their hospitality," he added, half-wistful.
"What he means is that he’ll miss little Mesanni over there." Ioka said. "Just like the boy Meskiag-gaseir. So far In-nekel and I have been fortunate as to live undiscovered for several years in each place we’ve lived together. We even stayed long enough to foster a child in Uruk once. Then as usual something happens to disrupt the cloak on one of us–”
“What about Hinev’s–”
“We ran out of Hinev’s mixtures a while back, and as you know we haven’t been back to Selesta in a while to pick up more. Anyway, somehow our friends and foster children discover who we are, and we eventually have to move to another city. You know, I just can’t understand how, all this time, none of us has had any children of our own. I never cared about it before, and to tell you the truth, I find that strange, that here, of all places, I wished for something I never wanted before. It’s true we can foster children and love them, but I can’t help but wonder why the serum in our veins prevents us having children of our own.” Ioka shrugged.
“It’s hard to remember our former lives while we’re here. Even Seynorynael seems so distant in my memory, here in the heat. But the desert sun–the people call it blinding, but In-nekel and I are at home in it. I have almost forgotten our own home, though, in all these years.”
"How long have you been traveling alone, Alessia?" In-nekel asked suddenly.
Alessia paused, as though pondering an answer.
“Too long.” She replied after a moment. “Before I went to the island I traveled a while with Lierva and Celekar to the lands on the other side of the ocean."
“Well, stay with us a day or two. Then you can decide.”
* * * * *
I’ve come to stop this madness, Kellar. You have to stop. Now.
The man in the crude brick temple turned about, his iron sword swinging at his side like a pendulum around his thigh. As the sun set outside, the torches within the temple began to color the brick walls with an orange light.
Kiel. Friend, I cannot. I will not.
Then you force me to stop you.
The guards heard nothing but watched the ragged stranger who had suddenly appeared step forward into the temple. They did not stop to wonder why he was there or to question him. Instead, they drew their swords and stepped forward to protect their leader. Then suddenly, a faint ghostly light illuminated from the creature before them, growing to a blue flame. The man that stepped forward from the bright sphere was no human; a remnant of the light followed him, surrounding him, while the bright sphere dissipated into the air.
In a panic, the guards grasped at their swords frenetically, then circled around their leader to fend off the unnatural creature who approached.
The stranger’s silver clad arm flicked towards them. There was no sound, but a blast of compressed air suddenly struck them and threw them back against the walls, hard enough to knock them all but senseless.
I came here to stop you, Kellar, before it is too late. Kiel thought, in a voice that was steady as stone, yet with a hint of regret that he had to do what he threatened. You can’t continue this war against the descendants of Shatrevar. The man who raped and murdered your wife has been dead for more than a thousand years.
Tortured, Kiel. Kellar corrected. He tortured her while I wasn’t there. All because she chose me. All because I had her–and he didn’t.
That was long ago, my friend, Kiel thought reasonably, and Shatrevar is dead.
The dark-eyed man at the alter ignored him and raised an arm.
Kiel was struck by an invisible blast of air that hit him in the lungs.
I don’t like your tone of voice. Kellar returned, with an air of authority. Alas, can it be so easy to disempower the great leader of our mission? What can you do to me now, Kiel? Now that I no longer follow your orders?
As if in answer, the walls began to vibrate around the alter. Bricks tumbled from the highest walls down upon the bejeweled warrior, burying him in a heap of hardened clay, but only for a moment.
The warrior broke through the rubble like a stubborn shoot of life breaking its way into the sun, as several of his warriors burst into the temple to investigate the noise.
A paltry trick, Kiel. Kellar laughed, shaking the dust and dirt from his lustrous dark hair, letting the power of Hinev’s serum course over him, automatically removing all of the dirt from his body and attire; though he maintained the cloak of a warrior from the north, a faint aura of light now wrapped about him like a living flame, capturing the astonished eyes of his followers. You should know that it is useless to fight this way by now.
Before Kiel heard another word from the man who had once born the name of Maesan Kellar, Kiel felt a searing pain strike him like a bolt of lightening in the chest. Flame erupted in no more than a fraction of a second after the impact, engulfing him, searing his body. At the same time, violet blood dripped from the hole in his body where the intense beam of that unnatural fire had struck him. A violet pool spread over the hard ground, coloring the stones, before the body of Fielikor Kiel suddenly turned entirely to energy.
The faces of the onlooking warriors went white as a sheet.
But the warrior on the dais laughed, watching as the flames disappeared. His laugh was a maniacal sound, not quite human. It held a ring of triumph nonetheless, until he heard the scream.
It was the scream of Kiel in the state between life and death, mass and energy, facing the oblivion beyond Hinev’s serum; the words were Seynorynaelian, out of time and out of place here in this alien temple across the galaxies, words that faded into primal fear and horror, the blood curdling cry of a creature who saw his own death and beyond, who had been trapped for eternity in that moment of transition.
“Kiel?” The voice at the dais ventured, finding again the music that had all but faded from its lips. “Kiel!” The warrior screamed, stepping towards the fire as his sword clattered to the ground, useless.
Remember, Kellar? Remember Firien? Do you remember the childhood days we spent in Ariyalsynai? You were more than a brother to me... His inner voice called to him from the depths where all was calm, where his heart remained noble and pure, a place he had not visited for many long years.
“Kiel!!” Kellar’s voice was strange, but it was his own once again. “Kiel!”
Already Kellar felt his own body half-turning to energy in that flame, voluntarily plunging into the fire to save the lost soul of Fielikor Kiel.
A moment later, the man emerged, back in the humanoid form that was Fielikor Kiel. But his eyes were never the same again.
* * * * *
“Ur-Inanna, most exalted entu, why don’t you answer?!” A voice shouting at her brought her back to her present surroundings.
“Where–?” Alessia turned abruptly at the alter, feeling the weight of the headdress of gold on her brow. It was daylight, and the mosaic-patterned, recently restored ceramic walls of the god Enlil’s temple within the city-stat
e of Nippur surrounded her. A fine layer of bone white limestone had been plastered on the walls, further decorated by the lustrous reliefs of glazed, chevroned stones and noble animals in procession. One of the robed sal-me priestesses, Bau, searched Alessia’s face curiously, her eyes narrowed in alarm.
“You must have had a vision.” Bau judged after a moment. “The sanga priest will want to know what you foresaw.”
“No,” Alessia returned harshly, with a commanding chill in her voice.
“A dream perhaps?” The aging priestess pursued carefully, her dark brows joining.
“I do hope it was only a dream.” Alessia replied, quietly now. Her mind kept reviewing what she had seen. Kellar, from the looks of the environment, had ensconced his army to the northeast, in the small temple of a desert city, perhaps as near as the kingdom of Tuttul or in mighty Ebla. And Kiel, was Kiel truly in danger? she wondered. Had what she seen truly happened, or was it a premonition of something yet to happen? Kiel... Yet could any of the immortals be lost? The thought terrified her.
“I’ll go get the priest–”
“No, it does not concern him.” She waved a hand dismissively, with a heavy sigh.
The priestess hesitated anyway.
“Just leave me,” Alessia ordered, this time in a voice long used to shouldering authority. “The scribes or weavers may require some assistance. You’d do better to join them.” The other priestesses nodded and left; the priestess Bau lingered a moment longer, more out of concern than disobedience, then finally withdrew as instructed. Alessia numbly removed the gold headdress and lapis and carnelian jewelry from about her limbs and cast them to the ground, then sat down on the dirt floor before the altar, her knees drawn up, her head resting on her folded arms. It was mid-morning, but she did not stir until mid-afternoon, when shouts abruptly reached her ears from the city outside. A moment later, one of the boys being tutored at the temple cantered in, kicking up dust with his heels.
“Lady Ur-Inanna, they’ve brought the fallen king to the gate!” He sang out in excitement as she came lithely to her feet. “King Sharru-kinu has defeated Lugal-zaggisi, son of the grain goddess Nidaba, patesi of Umma, and former King of Uruk!”
“Thank you, Elim,” Alessia said tiredly while readjusting her headdress. Former king? The reigns of kings were short indeed, she thought…
“They’re binding him to the gate of Ekur!” The boy chirped and headed off to spread the news.
Ekur?! Alessia reacted after he was gone, standing alone by the alter. Lugal-zaggisi was being bound to the gate of the temple of Enlil!? The air in the Ekur temple seemed suddenly stifling in the mid-afternoon heat as she realized that the spectacle was going on–just outside!
The city-state of Uruk, the former king of Ki-engi’s seat of power, now seemed so far away, yet she knew the city well. It was one of the oldest, most civilized cities in the world. So, Uruk had fallen when Lugal-zaggisi was defeated. Was the city of Nippur to be next?
Sharru-Kinu, King of Kish (a title which often gave a king lordship over Akkad, or Ki-uri, and sometimes even Ki-engi), had become King of all Akkad to the north fifty years ago. Afterward, he had slowly captured first Tuttul, Mari, Yarmuti, and Hahhum. Then he had struck a treaty with Ebla and secured all of the lands up to the Cedar Forest and Silver Mountains, the plain of Taurus, Purushkanda, his armies marching and conquering all the land to Elam and the eastern mountain peoples.
In the course of his wave of conquest he also took Der, Barakshi, Dilmun, Magan, and Meluhha in the far eastern lands; finally he had returned from this circular journey to take Akkad back under control. Word had it he had even once taken the western land of Kemet, conquering part of the remet people of the delta of Iteru aa and their temples of Nut, Ptah, Horus, Anubis, Atum, and Amun-ra, their giant pyramids to dead per-ao in the afterlife, their cities of Mimpi, Men-nefer, and Saqqara.
Recently, however, Sharru-kinu had turned his attention to capturing all of ancient Ki-engi to the South, this land with its rich trade, its refined culture and religious superiority, that strongly wielded a cultural influence over Sharru-kinu’s once nomadic Akkadians. After all of his conquests, Sharru-kinu had had one remaining ambition, and that was ousting Lugal-zaggisi, the King of Uruk, who had boldly claimed kingship over all the city-states of Ki-engi, the territory which bordered Sharru-kinu’s native land of Akkad. Sharru-kinu had left Ki-engi and the South alone while he campaigned across the rest of the known world, conquering cities and nations and earning a remarkable reputation for himself. But at the end of his quest as a self-made emperor stood Lugal-zaggisi, who seemed to be fashioning himself into an emperor at Sharru-Kinu’s back door.
Lugal-zaggisi’s defiant political act was a direct sign of rebellion against the Akkadian King who had become the world’s very first emperor-conqueror, and Sharru-Kinu had gone to Uruk to crush that rebellion.
The rebellion had been crushed.
It might have seemed strange that the Un-sanni people of Nippur had taken the defeat of Lugal-zaggisi, their former king, so well. However, Ki-engi and Ki-Uri, also called Akkad, together formed “the lands between the two rivers” and shared a common culture and two main language groups, the languages of two races evenly dispersed over these lands; for many centuries, there had been no territorial boundaries delineating the countries into north and south, only territories of the city-states, each with its own king.
Sharru-kinu had just become the first king to rule them all.
The city-state of Nippur itself lay between Akkad and Ki-engi but enjoyed something of a neutral position in the wars over control of the region between the rivers and the desert of Edin. Nevertheless, Lugal-zaggisi had once claimed Nippur for his own, bowing to the tradition that a legitimate king of Ki-engi had to be crowned by the sanga priest of the temple of Enlil, the chief sky-god of all the gods in heaven. That was, of course, why Sharru-kinu had dragged Lugal-zaggisi there, to depose him and set himself up as ruler over Ki-engi in the former King’s place.
Yet Lugal-zaggisi couldn’t command the people’s sympathy in his misfortunate fate because he had deposed the reforming king Uruinimgina in his own campaign to conquer Uruk and Ki-engi twenty-four years earlier, during which he had destroyed the city of Lagash and the temple of Inanna in Uruk. Many of Nippur’s inhabitants had long anticipated that it was only a matter of time before Nippur peacefully surrendered to Sharru-Kinu, leader of the greatest empire the world had yet seen.
Alessia heard the cries outside the walls of the people clamoring to see the former king humiliated; she turned and headed through an arch into an inner chamber to set about writing a tablet to the sanga priests in Uruk. Some time later, a voice echoing in the temple interrupted her.
“Sal-me! Where the devil have all the priestesses gone?” The male voice thundered in Akkadû, then submitted with a hint of amusement to the futility of trying to be heard above the noisy crowd outside.
Alessia crept quietly from the inner chamber and peered around the doorway at the man kneeling before a small figurine at the altar; a copper helmet lay beside it. The man had cast his axe and bow to the ground thoughtlessly, letting them fall by a group of ceremonial alabaster jugs that contained holy waters and linseed oils; one of the jugs had fallen over, but it had been stopped by a seal to protect the contents.
The man at the altar wore a short chiton, yet more a kilt than a statesman’s robe, over which a fringed shawl had been carelessly draped over his left shoulder and drawn under his right arm; his garb was dirty, as was his face, and there was no outward sign on his person to indicate that he was a warrior other than the copper scimitar hanging at his side with its glittering golden hilt. His angular face, like polished bronze, was attractive in an unusual way; his eyes shone as though amplifying the light of inner ambitions.
A mark across the curling crown of hair at his brow betrayed that he had recently been wearing a cer
emonial headdress of some sort, rather than the helmet he had brought with him. Yet it did not even occur to her to read his thoughts to determine who he was. He had already spied her by the open doorway.
“Thank Enlil. I was beginning to think all of you had gone to look at Zaggisi.” He said in accented Emegir now, looking at her.
“I had no desire to watch.”
“Yes, of course. Because Zaggisi was once a priest here at the temple,” he guessed.
“Exactly.”
“Well?” he said after a moment’s pause, apparently upset that she kept standing in the doorway.
“I am not one of the sal-me priestesses.” She informed him. “You’ll have to seek elsewhere for your pleasure.”
“A pity, then,” he returned with an air of boldness, his steady dark eyes running over her as though still contemplating the possibility that she was one of the sal-me. “Because you, whoever you are, are surely more beautiful than even Ishtar herself.”
She wished he hadn’t said that.
“Isn’t that blasphemy, to revile or humble a goddess by comparing her to a mortal?” She returned, all the while wishing he would go away. If he was a soldier, he had no business coming into the temple uninvited and unannounced. “You should pray that Inanna won’t hear you and have Lamashtu send a daimon to curse you with disease.”
“Inanna harm me?” He laughed, aghast; his manner made it clear he found the idea ridiculous. “By your name for her or by mine, the goddess Ishtar protects me,” he declared with a shrug. “Perhaps my ignorance of dreary Un-sanni spiritual matters exempts me from arousing her anger. You see, I was raised but a poor gardener’s foster-son before I became cup-bearer to a king. I don’t know much about priests or gods, though some say my mother was an entu, a high priestess. I only know that the goddess Ishtar saved my life when I was but a child–”
He stopped suddenly, while watching her closely, and his sharp eyes narrowed critically. “I see my shimtu is at work here, as the dagil-issuri predicted… perhaps the birdwatchers and augurers of your people can predict the future. Tell me, what color are your eyes? Come here,” he demanded curtly.