Gilgamesh the King

  It troubled me to take it from her. I felt as though the price of that statuette was my soul.

  I said, “How can I accept anything so precious?”

  “You may not refuse. That would be a sin, to turn back the gifts of a goddess.”

  “The gifts of a priestess, rather.”

  “The goddess speaks through her priestesses. This is yours, and while you have it, you are under the protection of the goddess-power.”

  Maybe so. But it made me uneasy. In Uruk we are all under the protection of the goddess-power; but nevertheless Inanna is a dangerous goddess, who deals in mysterious ways with her subjects, and it is unwise to get too close to her. My father had done his service to Inanna, as a king of Uruk must, but whenever he had gone in private to a temple it had been to Sky-father An. And I myself felt more comfortable with Enlil of the storms than I did with the goddess. But I had no choice but to take the amulet. It may be perilous to worship Inanna but it is far worse to anger her.

  When I left her that day I felt strange, as though I had been forced to surrender something of great value. But I had no idea what it was.

  I was summoned several more times in the next few months to the audience-chamber at the end of that passageway of demons and wizards deep below the Enmerkar temple. It was the same each time: an inconclusive conversation, a puzzling display of threatening flirtatiousness that led nowhere, a sense at the end that she had outplayed me in a game with rules I did not understand. Often she had some little gift for me, but when I brought her one she would not take it. She wanted to know many things—news of the court, of the assembly, of the king. What had I heard? What were they saying in the palace? She was insatiable. I grew cautious with her, saying little, answering her questions as briefly and vaguely as I could. I did not know what she wanted from me. And I feared the power of her beauty, which I knew was strong enough to sweep me to destruction. With anyone else I would have said, young as I was, “Come with me, lie with me,” but how could I say such words to her? Shielded as she was by the aura of the goddess, she was unattainable, until she gave consent. At a word from her, at the crooking of a single finger, I would have knelt to her. But she did not speak the word. She did not crook the finger. I prayed that the gods would deliver her into my arms, one of these times when she sent for me. But though the warmth of her smile said one thing, the cool icy sparkle of her eyes said another, and held me back from her as though I were a eunuch. She seemed altogether beyond my reach. Yet I had not forgotten the astonishing thing she had said to me in my childhood, on the day of Dumuzi’s coronation: When you are king, I will lie in your arms.

  6

  THEN IT WAS THE MONTH of Tashritu, the season of the new year, when the king enters into the Sacred Marriage with Inanna and all things are reborn. That is the time when the god strides across the threshold of the temple like a rumbling storm and casts his seed into the goddess, and the rains come again after the long dry harsh death-in-life that is the summer.

  It is the greatest and most holy festival of Uruk, on which all else depends. The preparations occupy everyone in the city for weeks as the summer wanes. That which has been defiled during the year must be purified by sacrifices and fumigations. Those who are ritually unclean by birth, members of the impure castes, must take themselves outside the walls and build a temporary village for themselves there. Weak and deformed animals must be slain. All houses and public buildings in need of repair are put in order, and the festive decorations are brought forth. Then at last come the parades, led by harpers and tympanists. The whores don brightly colored scarves and the cloak of the goddess. Men adorn their left sides with women’s clothing. Priests and priestesses carry through the streets the bloody swords, the double-edged axes, with which the sacrifices have been performed. Dancers leap through hoops and jump over ropes. In her temple Inanna bathes herself and anoints herself and dons the holy ornaments, the great ring of carnelian and the beads of lapis and the shining loin-plate of gold, and the jewels for her navel and for her hips and for her nose and for her eyes, and the earrings of gold and bronze, and the breast-ornaments of ivory. And the god Dumuzi, the bringer of fertility, enters into the king, who goes by boat to the temple district and through the gateway of the Eanna sanctuary, leading a sheep and holding a kid. They stand together on the porch of the temple, priestess and king, goddess and god, while all the city hails them in joy; and then they go within, to the bedchamber that has been prepared, and he caresses her and goes into her and ploughs her and pours his fruitfulness into her womb. So it has been since the beginning, when the gods alone existed and kingship had not yet descended from heaven.

  On the day of the new moon that marked the beginning of the new year I went with all the others to the White Platform, to wait outside the Enmerkar temple for the showing-forth of Inanna and Dumuzi. A light wind, moist and fragrant, blew from the south. It was the wind we call the Cheat, which promises springtime, but in fact heralds the winter.

  The king appeared, with his sheep, with his kid, at the western end of the platform. The crowd parted to make way for him as he walked slowly up the steps and toward the temple. He looked splendid. The god-light was upon him, and his body gleamed from within.

  There is something about performing the Sacred Marriage that exalts any man, I suppose. This was the sixth time Dumuzi had performed the rite since he became king, and each year, watching him cross the platform, I had been astonished by the awe he inspired in me, this man who at all other times seemed to me so ordinary, so flabby of soul. But when the god is in the king, the king is a god. I would never forget how my father had looked on the night of this rite, powerful and grand and immense, glancing neither to one side nor the other as he went past the place where my mother and I stood watching, and entered the temple, and returned with Inanna by his side, and stretched forth his hands to the people of the city, and went inside once again to lead the goddess to her bedchamber. But Lugalbanda had looked majestic at all times. I would not have expected Dumuzi to be able to rival his magnificence; yet on this night each year he did.

  Tonight, though, something unusual seemed to be happening. The king and the priestess customarily emerge to show themselves together at the instant when the crescent of the new moon appears above the temple. But this night the moment came and went and the temple door remained closed. I do not know how long we waited. It seemed like hours. We looked toward one another with questioning eyes, but no one dared speak.

  Then at last the great brazen door swung open and the holy couple appeared. At the sight of them, the silence grew more intense: it was like a chasm of stillness that engulfed all the sound in the world. But only for an instant. A moment later a low murmuring and hissing could be heard, as those toward the front of the crowd began to mutter and murmur in surprise.

  From where I stood, far in the back, I was unable at first to tell what was amiss. There was Dumuzi in shining crown and royal robe of rich deep blue; there was Inanna close by his side. Then I realized that the woman wearing the sacred ornaments of ivory and gold and carnelian and lapis was not Inanna, or at least not the Inanna who had stood forth on this night all the previous years of my life. That woman had been short and sturdy of body, and this one appeared to have been drawn out to a finer consistency, slender, almost frail, and tall, her shoulder virtually of a height with Dumuzi’s. And, when a moment later I came to perceive who she must be, I understood that I was about to lose that which had never been mine, and I was helpless to prevent it.

  I had to see her face. I pushed my way forward, shouldering people aside as though they were dry sticks.

  At a distance of twenty paces I looked straight into her eyes, and beheld the dark mischief that sparkled there. Yes, of course, it was she, plucked suddenly from her underground chamber to the height of sacred power in Uruk: no longer handmaiden to the goddess, but suddenly, astoundingly, made into Inanna herself. I could not move. A heaviness invaded my legs and rooted them to the pavement. There was a thi
ckness in my throat, like a lump of sand that could not be swallowed or expelled.

  She stared at me but did not seem to see me, though I was more than a head taller than the tallest person around me. The ceremony consumed her entirely. I watched her hand Dumuzi the sacred white flask of honey, and receive from him the sacred vessel of barley. I heard them exchanging the words of the rite: “My holy jewel, my wondrous Inanna,” he said, and she to him, “O my husband Dumuzi, you are truly my love.”

  Thick-voiced I said to some lord who stood beside me, “What has happened? Where is Inanna?”

  “There is Inanna.”

  “But that girl isn’t the high priestess!”

  “From this evening onward she is,” he replied. And another, on the far side of me, said, “They say the old one was ill, and worsened all day, and then she died at the sunset hour. But they had another all ready to be consecrated. They brought her forth in a hurry to be bathed and dressed, and she will marry Dumuzi tonight. Which is why there was such a delay.”

  I heard the words go echoing through the caverns of my mind, she will marry Dumuzi tonight, and I thought I would topple to the pavement.

  The king sipped from the flask of honey, and returned it to her so that she could sip of it also. They joined their hands and emptied the vessel of barley on the ground, and poured the golden honey over the seed. The temple musicians strummed their instruments and sang the hymn of the showing-forth of the god and goddess. It was almost done, now. In a few moments they would go within. In the divine bedchamber the handmaidens would take from her the rings and beads and breastplates and the shining three-cornered sheet of gold that covered her loins, and then he would caress her, and speak the words of the Sacred Marriage to her, and then—and then—

  I could not stay to watch them any longer.

  I turned and rushed from the platform like a maddened bull, knocking down anyone who did not get out of my way quickly enough. From behind me came the music of cymbals and flutes. I could not bear the sound of it. They are in the bedchamber now, I thought, he touches her, he strokes her secret places, his mouth is against her mouth, he will cover her with his body, he will enter her—

  I ran blindly this way and that into the darkness, not knowing or caring where I was going. A pain that I had known all too often was once more upon me. I felt alone, outcast, a stranger in my own city. I had neither father nor brother nor wife, nor even anyone I could truly call friend. My solitude was like a wall of fire around me. I yearned to reach toward someone—anyone—but there was no one. All I could do was run; and I ran on and on until I thought my breast would burst. At last I found myself stumbling through the deserted streets of the district known as the Lion, where the military barracks are. It was not by any accident that my feet had taken me there: when that kind of blindness comes over us, we are guided by the gods. There was then at the center of the Lion district a shrine sacred to the godhood of Lugalbanda, erected there by Dumuzi early in his reign—nothing very grand, only an image of my father a little larger than life size, lit from below by three small oil lamps that burned all night and all day, a small enough tribute to a great king who has become a god. I flung myself down before it and held tightly to the bricks of its base. And I suddenly felt a familiar strangeness enter my mind.

  It was the strangeness that first had assailed me on the day of my father’s funeral rite, and had touched me in a lighter way two or three times in the years since: a sense of pressure against my brow, the feeling of great invisible wings beating against my soul. But this time it was far more powerful than ever before. There was no withstanding its force. I felt a tingling in my skin, a numbness everywhere. I heard a faint buzzing sound, such as one hears when a distant swarm of locusts rises in the afternoon sky and comes across the plain. And then the buzzing grew louder, as though the locusts now were close at hand and thick black clouds of them were darkening the face of the sun. I smelled the pungent smell of burning candles, though there were no candles anywhere about. Out of the streets and buildings near me rose a cold blue fire that swept over me in flat surging sheets, enveloping me without burning me.

  I rose, or, rather, I floated to my feet. I saw before me a tunnel, perfectly round, with smooth shining walls from which a bright blue glow radiated. It drew me toward it. I yielded to its pull. I heard the slow, steady throbbing of a drum, growing louder and louder with each beat. I was without will, utterly in the thrall of the god-power, and that frightened me as deeply as I have ever been frightened in my life. For I felt myself lost, I felt myself drawn down into a place of destruction where all identities are merged in the blue fire that consumes everything.

  A quiet voice that arose behind my right ear said, “Fear nothing. Lugalbanda is with you. There is a covenant between us for all time to come.”

  With those words all dread and sorrow and pain lifted from me, and I knew boundless joy, an unending rapture, a sensation of deep ecstasy.

  There was no danger. A god was with me, and I was safe. I resisted nothing now. A god was with me. With every breath I took I breathed in divinity. I made the great surrender. At last I allowed the god to flow through the walls of my soul and enter me and possess me to the fullest.

  Fear nothing. Lugalbanda is with you.

  I danced a wild dance, roaring and stamping my feet against the ground. Lugalbanda placed in my hands a drum, and I beat upon it and sang a canticle in his praise. Power ran through me, and a great heat. Fearless, I ran forward into the blue tunnel, following a swirling, bobbing globe of brilliant purple light that blazed like a little sun just ahead of me. All night I ran without tiring, through every district of the city, across the Lion and the Reed and the Hive, through Kullab and Eanna, past the royal palace, up the steps of the White Platform and down them again, in and out of this temple and that, past the breweries, the taverns, the whorehouses, the spice market, the river quays, the cattle pens, the slaughterhouses and tanneries, the street of the scribes and the street of the diviners. I looked down into the heart of the earth and saw demons and ghosts toiling in fiery caverns. I perched myself on the right arm of Lugalbanda and flew through the heavens, and beheld the great gods far away in their spheres of crystal, and gave them my salute. I came down to the world again and journeyed from land to land, and sojourned in Dilmun the blessed, and Meluhha and Makan, and the devil-guarded Cedar Mountains, and many another distant place, full of wonders and miracles that I would not have believed, had I been in my ordinary mind.

  What happened after that I do not recall. But then it was morning and I found myself lying sprawled on my back in the street in front of the shrine of Lugalbanda.

  I felt as stiff and sore as though monsters had been bending each of my limbs the wrong way. I had no idea how I had come to be where I was, nor what had taken place the evening before. But clearly I had spent the night sleeping in the open, and I knew I must have been doing strange things. My jaw ached miserably and my tongue seemed swollen and painful—perhaps I had bitten it once or twice—and there was dried spittle on my chin and robe. Two puzzled-looking young soldiers were bending over me.

  “He is alive, I think,” one of them said.

  “Is he? His eyes are like glass. Hey, are you alive? You!”

  “Speak more gently. He is the son of Lugalbanda.”

  “Makes no difference, if he’s dead.”

  “But he is alive. See, he is breathing. His eyes move.”

  “So they do.” And to me: “Are you indeed the son of Lugalbanda? Ah, I think you are. You wear a prince’s ring. Here, then. Here, let us help you.”

  I shook away his hand. “I can manage,” I said in a voice like rusted copper. “Stand back, stand back!”

  Somehow I got myself upright, not without much awkward lurching and staggering. The soldiers stood ready to catch me, looking a little apprehensive, I suppose, on account of my size. But I held my footing. One of them winked and said, “Been celebrating the Marriage a little too hard, is that it, your lordship?
Well, it’s no sin. Joy to you, lordship! Joy of the new year!”

  The Marriage. The Marriage! Recollection came flooding back, and with it pain. Inanna, Dumuzi, Dumuzi, Inanna.

  I turned away, wincing, remembering everything now. And that terrible sense of solitude, of knowing that I stood alone under the uncaring stars, returned to me. Through me once again ran a torment of the spirit that made the aches and bruises of my weary body seem like nothing.

  They frowned. “Will you be all right? Is there anything we can do for you?”

  “Just let me be,” I said bleakly.

  “As you wish, lordship.” They shrugged and began to move along down the street. “The sweetness of Inanna be upon you, lordship!” one of them called back to me. And the other laughed and said to him, “What a very sweet sweetness it must be, this year. Did you see her? The new young one?”

  “Ah, did I! What joy the king must have had of her!”

  “Enough!” I growled.

  And back from them, out of the distance: “The goddess is dead! Long live the goddess!”

  Then they were gone, and I was alone with my pain and my sorrow and my aching and my bewilderment. But I was not altogether alone. I still felt the divine presence, warm and glowing, far back in that place behind my right ear, saying: Fear nothing. Fear nothing. For now Lugalbanda was with me, within me, and always would be.

  7

  EARLY IN THE NEW YEAR, when the festival of the Sacred Marriage was over at last and the funeral rites for the former high priestess had taken place, I was summoned into the presence of She-Who-Is-Now-Inanna. It was a summons that I could hardly reject. Yet I was reluctant to see her, now that the shadow of Dumuzi had fallen between us like a sword.

  Three little temple slaves, looking upon me with rounded eyes as though I were some sort of giant demon, led me to the chamber of the goddess in the most holy sector of the Eanna district. No longer would she and I have to meet in obscure chapels along the haunted tunnels beneath the temple. The room in which she received me was a majestic hall of whitewashed brick, with pierced walls through which came fiery spears of sunlight. Along the line where the walls met the ceiling ran a curious row of strange decorations, swelling scarlet globes that looked very much like breasts. Perhaps they were intended to be. The goddess in one of her attributes is the great harlot, the queen of desire.