Gilgamesh the King

c 1984 by Agberg, Ltd.

THERE IS in Uruk the city a great platform of kiln-baked brick that was the playing field of the gods, long before the Flood, in that time when mankind had not yet been created and they alone inhabited the Earth. Every seventh year for the past ten thousand years we have painted the bricks of that platform white with a plaster of fine gypsum, so that it flashes like a vast mirror under the eye of the sun. The White Platform is the domain of the goddess Inanna, to whom our city is consecrated. Many of the kings of Uruk have erected temples upon the platform for her use; and of all these shrines of the goddess none was more grand than the one that was built by my royal grandfather the hero Enmerkar. A thousand artisans labored for twenty years to construct it, and the ceremony of its dedication lasted eleven days and eleven nights without cease, and during that time the moon was wrapped each evening in a deep mantle of blue light as a token of Inanna's pleasure. "We are Inanna's children," the people sang, "and Enmerkar is her brother, and he shall reign forever and ever." Nothing remains of that temple now, for I tore it down after I came to the throne, and put up a far more splendid one on its site. But in its time it was a wonder of the world. It is a place that will always hold special meaning for me: within its precincts, one day in my childhood, the beginnings of wisdom descended on me, and the shape of my life was shaped, and I was set upon a course from which there has been no turning. That was the day on which the palace servants fetched me from my games to watch my father the king, divine Lugalbanda, embark upon the last of his journeys. "Lugalbanda goes forth now to the bosom of the gods," they told me, "and he shall live for all time among them in joy, and drink their wine and eat their bread." I think and hope that they were right; but it may very well be the case that my father's final journey has brought him instead to the Land of No Returning, to the House of Dust and Darkness, where his ghost shuffles about sadly like a bird with crippled wings, feeding on dry clay. I do not know.

I am he whom you call Gilgamesh. I am the pilgrim who has seen everything within the confines of the Land, and far beyond it; I am the man to whom all things were made known, the secret things, the truths of life and death, most especially those of death. I have coupled with Inanna in the bed of the Sacred Marriage; I have slain demons and spoken with gods; I am two parts god myself, and only one part mortal. Here in Uruk I am king, and when I walk through the streets I walk alone, for there is no one who dares approach me too closely. I would not have it that way, but it is too late to alter matters now: I am a man apart, a man alone, and so will I be to the end of my days. Once I had a friend who was the heart of my heart, the self of my self, but the gods took him from me and he will not come again.

My father Lugalbanda must have known a loneliness much like mine, for he was a king and a god also, and a great hero in his day. Surely those things set him apart from ordinary men, as I have been set apart.

The imprint of my father is still clear in my mind after all these years: a great-shouldered deep-chested man, who went bare above the waist in all seasons, wearing only his long flounced woolen robe from hips to ankles. His skin was smooth and dark from the sun, like polished leather, and he had a thick curling black beard, in the manner of the desert people, though unlike them he shaved his scalp. I remember his eyes best of all, dark and bright and enormous, seeming to fill his whole forehead: when he scooped me up and held me before his face, I sometimes thought I would float forward into the vast pool of those eyes and be lost within my father's soul forever.

I saw him rarely. There were too many wars to fight. Year after year he led the chariots forth to quell some fiprising in our unruly vassal state of Aratta, far to the east, or to drive away the wild marauding tribes of the wastelands that crept up on Uruk to steal our grain and cattle, or to display our might before one of our great rival cities, Kish or Ur. When he was not away at the wars, there were the pilgrimages he must make to the holy shrines, in spring to Nippur, in the autumn to Eridu. Even when he was home he had little time for me, preoccupied as he was by the necessary festivals and rituals of the year, or the meetings of the city assembly, or the proceedings of the court ofjustice, or the supervision of the unending work that must be done to maintain our canals and dikes. But he promised me that a time would come when he would teach me the things of manhood and we would hunt lions together in the marshlands.

That time never arrived. The malevolent demons that hover always above our lives, awaiting some moment of weakness in us, are unwearying; and when I was six years old one of those creatures succeeded in penetrating the high walls of the palace, and seized upon the soul of Lugalbanda the king, and swept him from the world.

I had no idea that any of that was happening. In those days life was only play for me. The palace, that formidable place of fortified towered entrances and intricately niched facades and lofty columns, was my gaming-house. All day long I ran about with an energy that never failed, shouting and laughing and tumbling on my hands. Even then I was half again as tall as any boy of my own age, and strong accordingly; and so I chose older boys as my playfellows, always the rough ones, the sons of grooms and cupbearers, for of brothers I had none.

So I played at chariots and warriors, or wrestled, or fought with cudgels. And meanwhile one day a sudden horde of priests and exorcists and sorcerers began to come and go within the palace, and a clay image of the demon Namtaru was fashioned and placed close by the stricken king's head, and a brazier was filled with ashes and a dagger put within it, and on the third day at nightfall the dagger was brought forth and thrust into the image of Namtaru and the image was buried in the corner of the wall, and libations of beer were poured and a young pig was slaughtered and its heart was set forth to appease the demon, and water was sprinkled, and constant prayers were chanted; and each day Lugalbanda struggled for his life and lost some further small part of the struggle. Not a word of this was said to me. My playfellows grew somber and seemed abashed to be running about and shouting and whacking at cudgels with me.

I did not know why. They did not tell me that my father was dying, though I think they certainly knew it and knew also what the con sequences of his death would be.

Then one morning a steward of the palace came to me and called out, "Put up your cudgel, boy! No more games! There is man's business to do today!" He bade me bathe and dress myself in my finest brocaded robe, and place about my forehead my headband of golden foil and lapis lazuli, and go to the apartment of my mother the queen Ninsun. For I must accompany her shortly to the temple of Enmerkar, he said.

I went to her, not understanding why, since it was no holy day known to me. I found my mother clad most magnificently in a coat of bright crimson wool, a headdress gleaming with carnelian and topaz and chalcedony, and golden breastplates from which hung ivory amulets in the form offish and gazelles. Her eyes were darkened with kohl and her cheeks were painted deep green, so that she looked like a creature that had risen from the sea. She said nothing to me, but fastened about my neck a figurine in red stone of the wind demon Pazuzu, as if she feared for me. She touched her hand lightly to my cheek. Her touch was cool.

Then we went out into the long hall of the fountains, where many people were waiting for us. And from there we went in procession, the grandest procession I had ever seen, to the Enmerkar temple.

'A dozen priests led the way, naked as priests must be when they come before a god, and a dozen priestesses as well, naked also. After them strode two dozen tall warriors who had fought in the campaigns of Lugalbanda. These were encumbered by their full armor, copper helmets and all, and carried their axes and shields. I was sorry for them, inasmuch as this was in the month Abu, when the scourge of summer lies heaviest on the Land, and no rain falls and the heat is a burden beyond bearing.

Following the warriors came the people of the household of Lugalbanda: butlers, maids, cupbearers, jesters and acrobats, grooms, charioteers, gardeners, musicians, dancing-girls, barbers, drawers of the bath, and all the rest. Every one of them was dressed in a fine robe, finer than anything I had ever seen them wear before, and they carried the implements of their professions as though they were on their way to wait on Lugalbanda. I knew most of these people. They had served in the palace since before I was born. Their sons were my playmates and sometimes I had taken meals in their dwellings.

But when I smiled and waved to them they looked away, keeping their faces solemn.

The last person in this group was one who was particularly dear to me. I went skipping up from my place in the rear of the procession to walk beside him. This was old Ur-kununna, the court harper: a long-shanked white-bearded man, very grave of bearing but with gentle twinkling eyes, who had lived in every city of the Land and knew every hymn and every legend. Each afternoon he sang in the Ninhursag courtyard of the palace, and I would sit at his feet for hour upon hour while he touched his harp and chanted the tale of the marriage of Inanna and Dumuzi, or the descent of Inanna to the nether world, or the tale of Enlil and Ninlil, or of the journey of the moon-god Nanna to the city of Nippur, or of the hero Ziusudra, who built the great vessel by which mankind survived the Flood, and who was rewarded by the gods with eternal life in the paradise on Earth that is known as Dilmun. He sang us also ballads of my grandfather Enmerkar's wars with Aratta, and the famous one of the adveritures of Lugalbanda before he was king, when in his wanderings he entered a place where the air was poisonous, and nearly lost his life, but was saved by the goddess. Ur-kununna had taught some of these songs to me, and he had showed me how to play his harp. His manner was always warm and tender toward me, with never any show of impatience. But now, when I ran up alongside him, he was strangely remote and aloof: like everyone else, he said nothing, and when I indicated that I would like to carry his harp he shook his head almost b~usquely. Then my mother hissed at me and called me back to the place that she and five of her serving-maids occupied at the end of the procession.

Down the endless rows of palace steps we marched, and into the Street of the Gods, and along it to the Path of the Gods that leads to the Eanna precinct where the temples are, and up the multitude 0fsteps to the White Platform, and across it, dazzled by the reflection of the brilliant sunlight, to the Enmerkar temple. All along the path the streets were lined with silent citizens, thousands of them: the whole population of Uruk must have been there.

On the steps of the temple Inanna waited to receive us. I trembled when I saw her. The goddess has since earliest time owned Uru~ and all that is within it, and I dreaded her power over me. She stood there was of course the priestess Inanna of human flesh, and not the goddess. But at that time I did not know the differene between them, and thought I was in the presence of the Queen of Heaven herself, the Daughter of the Moon. Which in a way was since the goddess is incarnate in the woman, though I could not have grasped such subtleties so young.

The Inanna who admitted us to the temple that day was the of Inanna, with a face like a hawk's and terrifying eyes, rather than the more beautiful but no less ferocious one in whom the goddess came to dwell afterward. She was clad in a bright cape of scarlet leather arranged on a wooden framework so that it flared out mightily beyond her shoulders and rose high above her. Her breasts were bare and painted at the tips. On her arms were copper ornaments in the form of serpents, for the serpent is the sacred creature of Inanna; and about her throat was coiled not a copper serpent but a living one of a thickness of two or three fingers, but sluggish in the terrible heat, barely troubling to let its forked black tongue flicker forth. As we went past her, Inanna sprinkled us with perfumed water from gilded ewer, and spoke to us in low chanted murmurs. She did not use the language of the Land, but the secret mystery-language of the goddess-worshippers, those who follow the Old Way that was it the Land before my people came down into it from the mountain, All this was frightening to me, only because it was so solemn and out of the ordinary.

Within the great hall of the temple was Lugalbanda.

He lay upon a broad slab of polished alabaster, and he seemed to be asleep. Never had he looked so kingly to me: instead of his usual half-length flounced skirt he wore a mantle of white wool and a dark blue robe richly woven with threads of silver and gold, and gold dust was sprinkled into his beard so that it sparkled like the sun fire. Beside his head rested, in place of the crown he had worn during his life, the horned crown of a king who is also a god. By his left hand lay his scepter, decorated with rings of lapis lazuli and mosaic of brightly colored seashells, and by his right was a wondrous dagger. with a blade of gold, a hilt oflapis lazuli and gold studs, and a sheath fashioned of gold strands woven in openwork like plaited leaves of grass. Heaped up before him on the floor was an immense mound of treasure: earrings and finger-rings in gold and silver, drinkingcups of beaten silver, dice-boards, cosmetics-boxes, alabaster jars of rare scent, golden harps and bull-headed lyres, a model in silver of his chariot and one of his six-oared skiff, chalices of obsidian, cylinder-seals, vases of onyx and chalcedony, golden bowls, and so much more that I could not believe the profusion of it. Standing arrayed about my father's bier on all four sides were the great lords of the city, perhaps twenty of them.

We took up our places before the king, my mother and I in the center of the group. The palace servants clustered about us, and the warriors in armor flanked us on both sides. From the temple courtyard came the great hollow booming of the lilissu, which is the kettledrum that otherwise is beaten only at the time of an eclipse of the moon. Then I heard the lighter sound of the little balag-drums and the shrill skirling of clay whistles as Inanna entered the temple preceded by her naked priests and priestesses. She went to the high place at the rear of the hall, where in a temple of An or Enlil there would be an effigy of the god; but in the temple of Inanna at Uruk there is no need for effigies, because the goddess herself dwells amongst us.

Now began a ceremony of singing and chanting, much of it in the language of the Old Way, which I did not then know and scarcely comprehend today, since the Old Way is woman-religion, goddessreligion, and they keep it to themselves. There were libations of wine and oil, and a bull and a ram were brought forth and sacrificed and their blood sprinkled over my father, and seven golden trays of water were emptied as ~ifts to the seven planets, and there were more such sacred acts. The snake of Inanna awoke and moved between her breasts, and flicked its tongue, and fixed its eyes upon me, and I was afraid. I felt goddess-presence all about me, intense, stifling.

I edged close to the kindly Ur-kununna and whispered, "Is my father dead?"

"We must not speak, boy."

"Please. Is he dead? Tell me."

Ur-kununna looked down at me from his great height and I saw the white light of his wisdom glowing in his eyes, and his tenderness, and his love for me, and I thought, how like his eyes are to Lugalbanda's, how large and dark, how they fill his forehead! He said gently, "Yes, your father is dead."

"And what does that mean, being dead?"

"We must not speak during the ceremony."

"Was Inanna dead when she descended into the nether world?"

"For three days, yes."

"And it was like being asleep?"

He smiled and said nothing.

"But then she awoke and came back, and now she stands before us. Will my father awaken? Will he come back to govern Uruk again, Ur-kununna?"

Ur-kununna shook his head. "He will awaken, but he will not come back to govern Uruk." Then he put his finger to his lips, and would not speak again, leaving me to consider the meaning of my father's death as the ceremony went on and on about me. Lugalbanda did not move; he did not breathe; his eyes were closed. It was like sleep. But it must have been more than sleep. It was death. When Inanna went to the nether world and was slain, it was the occasion of great dismay in heaven and Father Enki caused her to be brought forth into life. Would Father Enki cause Lugalbanda to be brought forth into life? No, I did not think so. Where then was Lugalbanda now, where would he journey next?

I listened to the chanting, and heard the answer: Lugalbanda was on his way to the palace of the gods, where he would dwell forever in the company of Sky-father An and Father Enlil and Father Enki the wise and compassionate, and all the rest. He would feast in the feasting-hall of the gods, and drink sweet wine and black beer with them. And I thought that that would not be so harsh a fate, if indeed that was where he was going. But how could we be sure that that was where he was going? How could we be sure? I turned again to Ur-kununna, but he stood with eyes closed, chanting and swaying. So I was left alone with my thoughts of death and my struggle to understand what was happening to my father.

Then the chanting ended, and Inanna made a gesture, and a dozen of the lords of the city knelt and lifted to their shoulders the massive alabaster slab on which my father lay, and carried it from the temple through the side entrance. The rest of us followed, my mother and I leading the procession, and the priestess Inanna in the rear. Across the White Platform we went, down its far side, and toward the west a few hundred paces, until we stood in the sharp-edged shadow of the temple of An. I saw that a great pit had been excavated in the dry sandy earth between the White Platform and the temple of An, with a sloping ramp leading down into it. We arranged ourselves into a group at the ramp's mouth, and all the townsfolk by their thousands formed a great ring around the whole precinct.

Then an unexpected thing: the serving-maids of my mothel: the ú queen surrounded her and began to take her rich and costly garments from her, one by one until she stood naked in the bright sunlight in the full view of all the city. I thought of the tale of Inanna's descent, how as she went deeper and deeper into the nether world she gave up her garments and at last was naked, and I wondered whether my mother too was making ready for a descent into the pit. But that was not the case. The lady-in-waiting Alitum, who looked so much like my mother Ninsun that they seemed to be sisters, stepped forward now and put offher own robes, so that she also was altogether bare; and the serving-maids began to put the crimson coat of my mother on Alitum and her headdress and breastplates, and Alitum's simpler robes on my mother. When they were done, it was hard to tell which was Ninsun and which Alitum, for Alitum's face had been daubed with green paint just as had my mother's.

Then I saw a playmate of mine, Enkihegal the son of the gardener Gimishag, walking slowly toward me between two priests. I called out as he approached. But he made no answer. His eyes were glassy and strange. He seemed not to know me at all, though only yesterday I had raced with him from one side of the grand Ninhursag courtyard to the other, eight times without stopping.

The priests now began to pluck at my brocaded robe and stripped it from me and put my robe on Enkihegal, and gave me his ordinary one. They took my golden headband away, and put that on his head. I was as tall as he was, though he was three years older, and my shoulders were of the same breadth as his. When we were done exchanging clothes they left Enkihegal standing by my side, as Alitum stood by my mother's side.

Now a sledge-chariot came forth, drawn by two asses. It was decorated with blue, red, and white mosaic along the edges of the framework, and had golden heads of lions on its side panels with manes of lapis lazuli and shell; and great mounds of treasure were heaped upon it. Then the charioteer Ludingirra, who had ridden many times to the wars with my father, stepped forward. He took a deep drink from a huge wine-bowl that the priests had fetched, and made a sharp sound and shook his head as though the wine were bitter, and mounted the chariot and drove it slowly downward into the deep pit. Two grooms walked alongside to steady and calm the asses. Afterward a second and a third chariot followed, and each of the drivers and each of the grooms drank of the wine. Into the pit went vessels of copper and silver and obsidian and alabaster and marble, gaming-boards and tumblers, chalices, a set of chisels and saw made of gold, and a great deal more, all of it magnificent. Ther the warriors in armor went down into the pit; and then some of the palace servants, the barbers and gardeners and a few of the fine ladies in-waiting, with their hair done up in golden braid, and headdresses of carnelian and lapis lazuli and shell. Each of them drank of the wine. All this in silence, except for the steady beat of the lilissu drum.

Following this, a certain great lord of the city who had been amon! those carrying the bier of my father from the temple went to his side. He picked up the horned crown that lay beside him, and hell it high and showed it to all, as it glinted in the sun. I am forbidden to write the name by which that lord then was known, for afterward he became king of Uruk, and one may not write or utter the birth name of one who becomes king; but the king-name he took was

Dumuzi. And he who was to become Dumuzi held the horned crown out to the south and the east and the north and the west, and the he put it on my father's head, and a great outcry went up from the people of Uruk.

Only a god wears a horned crown. I turned to Ur-kununna and said, "Is my father now a god?" "Yes," the old harper said softly. "Lugalbanda has become a god. Then I am a god also, I thought. A giddy sensation of high excitement ran through me. Or at least-so I told myself-I am in some part a god. Part of me must be mortal still, I supposed, since I was born of mortal flesh. Nevertheless the child of a god must a god to some degree, is that not so? It was a bold thing for me to think. But indeed I have come to know that it is the case, that I am in part a god, though not entirely.

"And if he is a god, then will he come back from death as other gods who have died came back?" I asked.

Ur-kununna smiled and said, "These things are never certain, boy. He is a god, but I think he will not come back. Look you now, bid him farewell."

I saw three husky grooms of the bedchamber and three charioteers lift the alabaster bier and begin the descent into the pit with it. Before they lifted it they had sipped of the bitter wine. They did not come forth from the pit; no one who had gone down into it had come forth. To Ur-kununna I said, "What is that wine they all drink?"

"It gives a peaceful sleep," he replied.

"And they are all sleeping there in the ground?"

"In the ground, yes. Alongside your father."

"Will I drink it? Will you?"

"You will drink it, yes, but not for many years, I think. But I will drink of it in a few minutes."

"So you will sleep in the ground near my father?"

He nodded.

"Until tomorrow morning?"

"Forever," he said.

I considered that. "Ah. It will be much like dying, then."

"Very like dying, boy."

"And all the others who have gone underground, they are dying too?"

"Yes," said Ur-kununna.

I considered that also. "But it is a terrible thing to die! And they drink without a rhurmur, and they walk into the darkness with a steady stride!"

"It is terrible to go to the House of Dust and Darkness," he said, "and live scuttling in the shadows and feed on dry clay. But those 0fus who go with your father go to the home of the gods, where we will serve him forever." And he went on to tell me what a privilege it was to die in company with a king. I saw the white light of wisdom shining from his eyes again, and a look of sublime joy. But then I asked him if he could be sure that he would go to the home of the gods with Lugalbanda, rather than to the House of Dust and Darkness, and the light of his eyes went out, and he smiled sadly and replied that nothing is ever sure, and most particularly that. And touched my hand, and turned away, and played a little melody on his harp, and walked forward and drank from the wine and went down into the pit, singing as he went.

Others went into the pit too, sixty or seventy people all told. The last two to go were the woman Alitum wearing my mother's coat and jewelry, and the boy Enkihegal wearing mine; and I understood that they were dying in our place. That put a fear in me, to think that if the custom were only a little different, I might have been drinking the wine and going down into the pit. But the fear was only a small one then, because at that time I did not yet have a true understanding of death, but thought of it only as a kind of sleep.

Then the drums were stilled, and laborers began to shovel earth down the ramp and into the pit, where it must have covered everything over, the chariots and the asses and the treasure and the grooms and the ladies-in-waiting and the palace servants and the body of my father, and the harper Ur-kununna. After that, craftsmen fell to work sealing the ramp with bricks of unbaked mud, so that within a few hours there would be no trace of what lay beneath.

Those of us who remained, of the ones who had marched in the original procession, returned to the temple of Inanna.

We were a much smaller group now: my mother and I and the great lords of the city and other important people, but none of the palace servants or warriors, for they were in the pit with my father. We gathered ourselves before the altar and I sensed the goddesspresence again, close by and almost choking me. A welter of complexities pressed in on my spirit. I had never felt so alone, so forlorn. The world held only mysteries for me. It seemed that I was in waking dream. I looked about, seeking Ur-kununna. But of course he was not there, and the questions I meant to ask him would no, be answered. Which gave me one understanding of the meaning of death, which was, that those who are dead are beyond our speech and will not answer when we address them. And I felt as if I had been handed a skewer of grilled meat, and then the meat had been snatched away as I was about to eat, leaving me to bite only air.

There was more drumming and chanting and I thought a thousand different things about death. I thought that my father was gone forever; but that was not really so bad, since he had become a god and thus had made me in part a god, and anyway he had never had much time for me because of his absences at the wars, though he had promised to teach me the things of manhood some day. I would learn those from someone else. But Ur-kununna was gone too. I would never hear his singing again. And the boy Enkihegal my playmate, and his father Girnishag the gardener, and all those others who had been part of my everyday life-gone, gone, gone. Leaving me to bite on air.

And I? Would I die too?

I will not let that thing happen to me, I vowed. Not to me. I am in part a god. And although gods sometimes die, as Inanna once had died when she went to the nether world, they do not die for long. Nor would I. I swore never to let death have me.

For there is too much in the world for me to see, I told myself, and there are a multitude of great deeds that must be done. I will challenge death: so I resolved. I will defeat death. I have only scorn for death, and I will not yield to it. Death, you are no match for me! Death, I will conquer you!

And then I thought that if I do somehow die, well, I am in part a god and I am destined to be a king, and at my death I will be translated up into the heavens like Lugalbanda. I will not have to go down into the vile House of Dust and Darkness as ordinary mortals must.

And then I thought, no, there is no certainty of that. Even Inanna went down into that place, though she was brought forth; but if I go there, will I be brought forth? And I felt great dread. No matter who you are, I thought, no matter how many servants and warriors are put to sleep in the funeral-pit to serve you in the afterlife, you may still be sent into that dark loathsome place. The disdain for death that I had felt a moment before gave way to fear, an all-possessing fear that swept across my soul like the great chill of winter. A strangeness entered my mind, the kind of strangeness that comes when one dreams, and I did not know whether at that moment I dreamed or was awake. There was a pressure in my head, almost to bursting. It was a sensation I had never felt before, though I was to feel it many times later in life, and with far more power than in this first light touch. A god was attempting to enter me. Of that I was certain, though I did not know which god.

But I knew even then it was a god and not a demon, and that he bore a message for me, which was, You will be king, and a great king, and then you will die, and you may not avoid that destiny, try as you may.

I would not accept the god and his message. There was no room in my soul to admit such things yet. I was only a child.

In my chaos I saw the figure of death before me, all slashing talons and beating wings, and I cried out defiantly, "I will escape you!" And felt a great bravery in me for an instant, which gave up its place an instant later to dread, and dread, and dread. They are all sleeping now in the pit beside Lugalbanda, I thought. And where will I sleep? Where will I sleep?

Dizziness overwhelmed me. The god battered at my mind, demanding admission. But I could neither yield nor resist, for I was paralyzed by the dread of death, a thing that had never afflicted me before. I swayed and reached out for Ur-Kununna, but he was not there, and I fell to the floor of the temple and lay there I know not how long.

Hands lifted me. Arms enveloped me.

"It is his grief that has overcome him," someone said.

No, I thought. I feel no grief. Lugalbanda's journey is Lugalbanda's task. It is my own task that concerns me, not his, for his task is dying and mine is to live. So it was not grief that cast me to the ground, but the god, trying to enter my soul as I stood there wrapped in dread. But I did not tell them that.

IN THE month of Kisilimu, when the heavy rains of winter sweep like scythes over the Land, the gods bestowed a new king upon

Uruk. This occurred at the first hour of the month, that is, at the moment when the moon's new crescent appeared for the first time.

There came the beating of drums and the cry of trumpets, and by torchlight we made our way to the precinct of Eanna, to the White

Platform, to the temple built by my grandfather Enmerkar.

"A king is come!" shouted the people in the streets. "A king! A king!"

A city cannot go without a king very long. The gods must be served, which is to say, the proper offerings to heaven must be made at the proper time, for we are their creatures and their servants: so there must be grain, there must be meat. And thus the wells must be freshened and the canals dredged and extended, the fields must be kept green in the dry times, the beasts must be fattened. To achieve those things order must be maintained, and it is the king who bears that burden. He is the shepherd of the people. Without a king all things would fall to ruin, and the needs of the gods, for which they created us, would go unmet.

Three thrones had been erected in the great hall of the temple. The left-hand one bore the sign of Enlil, and the right-hand one had the sign of An. But the throne in the center was flanked on each side by the towering bundle of reeds, looped at the upper end, which is the sign of the goddess; for Inanna holds the power in Uruk.

On the throne of Enlil rested the scepter of the city, and on the throne of An was the golden crown that my father had worn when he was king. But on the throne in the center sat the priestess Inanna so resplendent that it pained my eyes to look upon her.

She wore no clothing that night. Yet she was far from bare, for her body was covered in every place by ornaments, beads of lapis cascading down over her breasts, a plate of gold in a triangle over her loins, golden braid in her hair, a circlet of gold about her hips, a jewel in her navel, jewels at her hips and nose and eyes, two sets of earrings in the shape of the new moon, one of gold and one of bronze. Beneath this her skin was oiled; by the light of the torches she gleamed like a being lit with an inner radiance.

Behind and to the sides of the thrones stood those officials of the court who had not gone down into the pit with Lugalbanda: the high constable, the throne-bearer, the war-chamberlain and the water chamberlain, the secretary of state, the supervisor of fisheries, the gatherer of taxes, the overseer of stewards, the master of the bound aries, and many more. The only one I did not see among them was the great lord who had placed the horned crown of divinity on my dead father's brow. He was missing for good reason, for he was the man upon whom Inanna had chosen to bestow the kingship this day, and the king at that time was not permitted to enter the temple of the goddess until he was summoned by her to do so. In later years

I saw to it that the custom was altered.

The summoning of the new king into the temple wasmany hours in coming, or so it seems to me in recollection. First came prayer and libations, the invocation of each god in turn, commencing with the lesser ones, Igalimma who is the doorkeeper of the gods and

Dunshagana their steward, and Enlulim the divine goatherd and

Ensignun the god of charioteers, and so many others that I could hardly keep a tally of them, until Enki and Enlil and An finally were reached. The hour was late and my eyelids were heavy, and to remain awake was a struggle.

And I grew terribly restless. No one seemed to remember that was there, or to care. The chanting droned and droned' and at one point I wandered away into the darkness beyond the torchlight finding an entrance somehow into a passageway that led to a mass of lesser chapels. It seemed to me that I heard the fluttering ofinvisible wings there, and scratchy laughter far away. I grew fearful and wished I were back in the great hall. But I was unable to find the way Desperately I called upon Lugalbanda to guide me.

But instead of Lugalbanda, one of Inanna's handmaidens came for me, a tall sparkling-eyed girl of ten or eleven years. All she wore were seven strings of blue beads about her waist and five amulets of pink shell tied to the ends of her hair, and her body was painted down front and sides with serpent motifs. She laughed and said,

"Where are you going, son of Lugalbanda? Are you trying to find the gate of the nether world?"

I despised the mockery in her voice. I drew myself tall, though she remained taller still, and said, "Let me be, girl. I am a man."

"Ah, a man! A man, are you! Yes, so you are, son of

Lugalbanda! You are a very great man!"

Now I could not tell whether I was being mocked or not. I began to shake from anger at her, and from an inner rage at myself, for not understanding the game she was playing with me. I was too young then. Taking me by the hand, she drew me against her, as though I were a doll, and she put my cheek against the buds of her breasts. I smelled the sharp perfume of her. "Little godling," she murmured, and again her tone was somewhere on the borderland between irony and true deference. She stroked me and called me by my name, very familiarly, and told me hers. When I struggled and tried to pull away, she took both my hands in hers and tugged me about so that my eyes looked into her eyes. She held me and whispered fiercely, "When you are king, I will lie in your arms!" In that moment her tone held no mockery at all.

I stared at her in amazement. Once again I felt that strange pressure in my brow that was the god brushing against the edges of my soul, merely for a moment. My lip trembled, and I thought I would cry, but I did not permit it of myself.

"Come," she said. "You must not miss the coronation ceremony, litfie godling. One day you will need to know how these things are done."

She took me back to the great hall just as a great flourish of music was sounded, flutes and double flutes, the long trumpets, the cymbals and tambourines. The new king had made his entrance at last. He was bare to the waist, wearing a flounced skirt below. His long hair was plaited and wound round his head and gathered behind. He lit a globe of incense and set down gifts before each of the thrones, a golden bowl filled with some fragrant oil, and a mana of silver, and a richly embroidered robe. Then he touched his forehead to the ground before Inanna, and kissed the ground also, and gave her a woven basket filled to overflowing with grain and fruits. Now the goddess rose from the throne and stood glittering like a beacon in the torchlight. "I am Ninpa the Lady of the Scepter," she said in a voice so deep I could not believe it was a woman's; and she took the royal scepter from the throne of Enlil and gave it to the king. "I am Ninmenna the Lady of the Crown," she said, and took the golden crown from the throne of An and placed it upon the head of the king. Then she called him by his birth-name, which from that moment onward could never be uttered again; and then she called him by his king-name, saying, "You are Dumuzi, the great man of Uruk. So the gods decree."

There was no mistaking the sounds of surprise in the hall: gasps, murmurs, coughs. What I did not learn until long afterward was the reason for the surprise, which was that the new king had chosen to call himself by the name of a god, and not a minor god at that. No one in memory had done that before.

I knew of Dumuzi the god, of course. Any child would know his tale-the divine shepherd who wooed the goddess Inanna and won her for his wife, and reigned as king in Uruk for thirty-six thousand years, until Inanna, so that she might rescue herself from the demons of the nether world who held her captive, sold him to them to take her place below the ground. To pick that name by which to reign was strange indeed. For the tale of Dumuzi is the tale of the defeat of the king by the goddess. Was that the destiny that Uruk's new ruler sought for himself?. Perhaps he had considered only the grandeur of the first Dumuzi, and not his betrayal and downfall at the hand of Inanna; or perhaps he had not considered anything at all. Dumuzi he was, and king he was.

When the rite was done the new king led the traditional procession to the palace for the final phase of his ceremony of investiture, followed by all the high dignitaries of the city. I also returned to the palace, but only to go to my own bedchamber. While I slept, the lords of the realm presented gifts to Dumuzi and laid down their badges and other insignia of office before him, so that he would have the right to select his own officials. But the custom long has been that such changes are never made on the day of the coronation, and so Dumuzi declared, as kings had always declared before him, "Let everyone resume his office."

All the same, changes soon were forthcoming. The one most important to me was that my mother and I left the royal palace that had been my home all my life, and took up residence in a splendid but far less imposing dwelling in the Kullab district, westward of the temple of An. It was to An's service that my mother dedicated the rest of her life, as his chief priestess. She is now a goddess in her own right, by my decree, so that she might be reunited with Lugalbanda. For if he is in heaven, then it is fitting that she be at his side. And though I have said that I do not believe he is in heaven, nevertheless it may be that he is, and in that case it would have been remiss of me not to have sent Ninsun to join him there.

It was hard for me to understand why I had been forced to leave the palace. "Dumuzi is king now," my mother explained. "The assembly has chosen him, the goddess has recognized him. The palace belongs to him." But her words were like the blowing of the dry wind over the plain. Dumuzi could be king, for all I cared; but the palace was my home. "Will we return to it after Inanna sends Dumuzi to the nether world?" I asked, and she looked stern and told me never to speak such words again. But then in a softer voice she said, "Yes, I think you will live in the palace again one day."

This Dumuzi was young and strong and vigorous, and came of one of the greatest families of Uruk, a clan that long had held the sheshgal-priesthood in the temple of Inanna, and the supervisorship of the fisheries, and many another high office. He was handsome and of kingly bearing, with thick hair and a heavy beard.

Yet there seemed something soft and disagreeable about him within, and I did not understand why he had been chosen to be king. His eyes were small and had no shine, and his lips were fleshy, and the skin of him was like a woman's. I imagined he had it rubbed with 0ils every morning. I despised him from the first moment of his reign. Perhaps I hated him simply because he had become king in my father's place; but I think it was not only for that. At any rate, I harbor no hatred for him now. For foolish Dumuzi I have only pity: even more than the rest of us, he was the toy of the gods.

NOW MY life became very different. My days of play were over, my days of schooling began.

Because I was a prince of the line of Enmerkar and

Lugalbanda, I did not have to attend the common tablet-house, where the sons of merchants and foremen and temple administrators are taught to become scribes. Instead I went each day to a small low roofed room in an ancient little temple at the eastern side of the White

Platform, where a priest with shaven scalp and face conducted a private class for eight or nine high-born boys. My classmates were the sons of governors, ambassadors, generals, and high priests, and they had great regard for themselves. But I was the son of a king.

That created difficulties for me. I was accustomed to privilege and precedence, and I demanded my usual rights. But in the classroom

I had no rights. I was big and I was strong, but I was neither the biggest nor the strongest, for some of the boys were four or five years older. The first lessons I learned were painful ones.

I had two chief tormentors. One was Bir-hurturre, the son of Ludingirra, who had been my father's master of the chariots and who had gone down into the death-pit to sleep beside him. The other was Zabardi-bunugga, the son of Gungunum the high priest of An. I think Bir-hurturre bore a grudge against me because his father had had to die when mine had died. What quarrel Zabardi-bunugga had with me, I never fully understood, though possibly it grew from some old jealousy his father had felt toward Lugalbanda. But these two were determined, whatever the reason, to make me see that my high rank and privilege had ended when the crown had passed to the king Dumuzi.

In the classroom I took the front chair. It was my right, to go before the others. Bir-hurturre said, "That chair is mine, son of

Lugalbanda."

The way he said son of Lugalbanda, he made it sound like son of

Dung-fly, son of Trash-picker.

"The chair is mine," I told him calmly. That seemed self-evident to me, in no need of defense or explanation.

"Ah. Then the chair must be yours, son of Lugalbanda," he an swered, and smiled.

When I returned from midday recess I found that someone had gone down to the river and captured a yellow toad, and had skewered it into the middle of my seat. It was not yet dead. To one side of it someone had drawn the face of the evil spirit Rabisu, the croucher in-doorways, and on the other side was drawn the storm-bird Im dugud with her tongue thrust out.

I pulled the toad free and turned to Bir-hurturre with it. "You seem to have left your midday meal on my seat," I said. "Here. This is for you to eat, not for me." I seized him by the hair and thrust the toad toward his mouth. Bir-hurturre was ten years old. Though he was no taller than I was, he was very broad through the shoulders and extremely strong. Catching me by the wrist, he pulled my hand free of his hair and wrenched it down to my side. No one had ever handled me like that before. I felt rage rising in me like a winter torrent rushing down upon the Land.

"Doesn't he want to share his seat with his brother?" asked Zabardi-bunugga, who was looking on with amusement.

I broke loose of' Bir-hurturre's grasp and hurled the toad into Zabardi-bunugga's face. "My brother?" I cried. "Yours! Your twin!" Indeed Zabardi-bunugga was amazingly ugly, with a nose fiat as a button, and strange coarse hair that grew in widely spaced bunches on his head.

They both came at me at once. They held me with my arms behind my back and jeered at me and slapped me. I had never been held so impiously in the palace, not even in the roughest of play: no one would have dared. "You may not touch me!" I shouted. "Cowards!

Pigs! Do you know who I am?"

"You are BugaMugal, son of Lugal-bugal," said Bir-hurturre, and they laughed as though he had said something enormously clever.

"I will be king one day!"

"Bugal-lugal! Lugal-bugal!"

"I'll break you! I'll feed you to the river!"

"Lugal-bugaMugal! Bugal-lugaMugal!"

I thought my soul would burst from my breast. For a moment I could neither breathe nor see nor think. I strained and struggled and kicked, and heard a grunt, and kicked again, and heard a whimper.

One of them released me and I pulled myself free of the other, and went running from the classroom, not out of fear of them but out of fear that I would kill them while the madness was upon me.

The school-father and his assistant were returning just then from their midday meal. In the blindness of my wrath I ran right into them, and they caught me and held me until I was calm. I pointed into the classroom, where Bir-hurturre and Zabardi-bunugga were staring at me and making faces with their tongues, and demanded that they be put to death at once. But the school-father replied only that I had risen from my place without permission, I had spoken to him without permission; and he gave me over to the whipping-slave to cane me for my unruliness. It was not the last time those two tormented me, and occasionally some of the others joined in, the bigger ones, at least. I found I could do nothing against any of this persecution. School-father and his assistant always took their side, and told me I must hold my tongue, I must master my temper. I wrote down the names of my enemies, both my schoolfellows and my tutors, so that I could have them all flayed alive when I was king. But when I came to understand things a little better, soon afterward, I threw those lists away.

Writing and reading were the first things I learned. It is important for a prince to understand such matters. Imagine trusting everything to the honesty of one's scribes and ministers when messages are going back and forth on the battlefields, or when one is engaged in correspondence with the king of another land! If the master cannot read, any kind of deceit may be practiced on him, and a great man could be betrayed into the grasp of his enemies.

I wish I were able to claim with any honesty that my reason for turning to those arts was anything so astute and far-sighted. But no such princely notions were in my mind. What attracted me to writing was my notion that it was magical. To be able to work magic, that magic or any other, was tremendously attractive.

It seemed miraculous that words could be captured like hawks in flight, and imprisoned in a piece of red clay, and set loose again by anyone who knew the art of it. In the beginning I did not even think such a thing was credible. "You invent the words as you go along," I told the school-father. "You pretend that there are meanings, but you simply make everything up!" Coolly he handed the tablet to the assistant, who read from it everything that the school-father had read, word for word. Then he called in one of the older boys from another room, and he did the same; and then I was whipped on the knuckles for my doubting. I doubted no longer. These people-ordinary mortals, not even gods-had some way of bringing the words alive out of the clay. So I paid close heed as the school-father's assistant showed me how to prepare the soft clay tablets, how to cut a reed stylus to a wedge-shaped end, how to make the marks that are writing, by pressing the stylus into the tablet. And I struggled to comprehend the marks.

Understanding them was enormously troublesome at first. The marks were like the scratchings of a hen in the sand. I learned to tell the differences out of which their meanings sprang. Some of the marks stood for sounds, na and ba and ma and the like, and some stood for ideas, like god or king or plough, and some showed how a word was meant to stand in relation to the words around it. Then I caught the knack of this wonderful witchcraft. I found that almost without effort I could make the marks yield their meanings to my eye, so that I could look down a tablet and read from it a list of things, "gold, silver, bronze, copper," or "Nippur, Eridu, Kish, Uruk," or "arrow, javelin, spear, sword." Of course I could never read as a scribe reads, swiftly scanning the columns of a tablet and bringing from it its full wealth of meaning and nuance: that is the task ofa lifetime's devotion, and I have had other tasks. But I learned my writing-signs well, and know them still, and can never be deceived by some treacherous underling who means to play me false. We were taught also concerning the gods, and the making of the world, and the founding of the Land. School-father told us how heaven and the earth had come forth from the sea, and the sky been put between them, and the moon and the sun and the pla~ were fashioned. He spoke of the bright and shining Sky-father who decrees what must be done, and of Ninhursag the great motl and of Enlil the lord of the storm, and of the wise Enki and radiant sun Utu, the fount of justice, and cool silvery Nanna, ruler of the night; and of course he spoke much oflnanna the mist'. of Uruk. But when he told how mankind was created it saddel and angered me: not that we were brought into being to be serfi the gods, for who am I to question that, but that the work was done in such a cruel and slipshod way.

For look, look you, how the job was managed, and how we sm for our makers' foolishness!

It was at a time when the gods lived like mortals on the earth tilling the soil and caring for their flocks. But because they were gods they would not deign to work at their tasks, and so the gr withered and the cattle died, and the gods grew hungry. Thereafter the sea-mother Nammu came to her son Enki, who dwelled lazily then in the happy land of Dilmun where the lion did not kill and the wolf did not snatch the lamb, and she told him of the sorrow a distress of his fellow gods. "Rise from your couch," she said, "all use your wisdom to bring forth servants, who will assume our task and minister to our needs."

"O my mother," he replied, "it can be done." He told her to reach into the abyss and scoop up a handful of clay from the depths of the sea; and then Enki and his wife the earth-mother Ninhursag and eight goddesses of birth took the clay and fashioned it, and shape the body and the limbs of the first mortal being, and said, "Or servants will look like that."

Enki and Ninhursag, out of joy at what they had achieved, gave a great feast for all the other gods, and showed them how the creation of mankind would ease their lives. "See," he said, "each of you will have your own estate on the earth, and these beings will assure your tasks and minister to your needs. These will be the serfs who toil, and over them we will place bailiffs and sheriffs and inspector: and commissioners, and above them kings and queens, who will life in palaces just as we do, with butlers and chamberlains and coachmen and ladies-in-waiting. And all of these creatures will toil day and night to provide for us." The gods applauded, and drained many a mug of wine and beer; and they all grew gloriously drunk.

In their drunkenness, Enki and Ninhursag continued to bring forth beings out of the clay. They brought one forth that had neither male organs nor female, and said it would be a eunuch to guard the royal harem; and they laughed greatly at that. And then they brought forth beings with this disease and that, of the body or of the spirit, and set them loose into the world as well. And lastly they made one whose name was "I Was Born Long Ago," whose eyes were dim and whose hands trembled, and who could neither sit nor stand nor bend his knees. In this way did old age come into the world, and disease and madness and everything else that is evil-as the drunken joke of the god Enki and the earth-mother his wife, the goddess Ninhursag. When the mother of Enki, the sea-mother Nammu, saw what he had done, she exiled him in her anger to the deep abyss, where he dwells to this day. But the injury was done; the drunken gods had had their joke; and we suffer under that and always will. I will not quarrel with their having made us to be their creatures and their things, but why did they make us so imperfect?

I asked the school-father that question, and he had me whipped on my knuckles for the asking.

I learned other things that confused and frightened me. These were the tales and legends of the gods, the same ones that the harper Urkununna had sung in the palace courtyard. But somehow when the stories fell from the lips of that sweet and gentle old man they had lit a warm light of pleasure in my soul, and when I heard them in the dry precise voice of the pinch-faced school-father they seemed transformed into dark and disturbing things. Ur-kununna had made the gods seem prayful and benevolent and wise; but in the schoolfather's telling the gods seemed foolish and ruthless and cruel. And yet they were the same gods; and yet they were the same stories; and yet even the words were same. What had changed? Ur-kununna had sung the gods loving and feasting and bringing forth life. Schoolfather gave us quarrelsome bickering untrustworthy gods who cast darkness upon the world without warning and without mercy. Urkununna lived in joy, and walked to his death uncomplaining, knowing he was beloved of the gods. School-father taught me that mortals must live their lives in endless fear, for the gods are not kind. yet they were the same gods: wise Enki, lordly Enlil, beautiful anna. But the wise Enki had created old age for us, and the weak~ of the flesh. The lordly Enlil had in his unquenchable lust raped young girl-goddess Ninlil, though she cried out in pain, and he l fathered the moon upon her. The beautiful I nanna, to free her, from the nether world, had sold her husband Dumuzi to the demo The gods, then, are no better than we are:just as petty, just as selfi just as thoughtless. How had I failed to see these things, whe~ listened to the harper Ur-kununna? Was it merely that I was t young to understand? Or was it that in the warmth of his singi the doings of the divine ones took on a different semblance?

The world that school-father revealed to me was a world that x~ bleak and chancy. And there was but one escape from that wor] to an afterlife that was even more harsh and terrifying. What hop then? What hope for any of us, king or beggar? That was what t] gods had made for us; and the gods themselves are just as vulnerai: and frightened: there is Inanna, stripped bare in her descent into he standing naked before the queen of the nether world. Monstrot Monstrous! There is no hope, I thought, not here or anywhere afte

Heavy thoughts, for so young a child, even a child that is the so of a king, and who is two parts god and only one part mortal. I w: filled with despair. Alone I went one day to the side Of the city b the river, and peered over the wall and saw the dead bodies floatin in the water, the corpses of those who could not afford a burial. An I thought, it is all the same, beggar or king, king or beggar, an there is no meaning anywhere. Dark thoughts! But after a time I pu them from my mind. I was young. I could not brood forever o~ such things.

Later I saw the truth within the truth: that even though the god are as ruthless and as capricious as ourselves, it is also the case tha we can make ourselves as exalted as gods. But that lesson was one that I was a long time in learning.

BECAUSE THERE is divine blood within me, I grew swiftly to extraordinary size and strength. When I was nine I was bigger than any of the boys in the little temple-school, and I had no more trouble with the likes of Bir-hurturre and Zabardi-bunugga. Indeed they looked to me as their leader, and played the games I called for playing, and gave me the first seat in everything. The only difference between us was that they had hair on their bodies and their cheeks, and I did not.

I went to a sage in the Kullab district and bought from him, for ninety se of silver and half a sila of good wine, a potion made of powdered juniper root, cassia juice, antimony, lime, and some other things, which was meant to hasten the onset of manhood. I rubbed this stuff under my arms and around my loins, and it burned like a thousand devils. But soon hair was sprouting on me as thickly as on any warrior.

Dumuzi launched military campaigns against Aratta, against the city of Kish, and against the wild Martu tribesmen of the desert. I was too young t0 take part in these wars. But already I was training every day in the skills of the javelin, the sword, the mace, and the axe. On account of my size the other boys were afraid to stand forth on the training-grounds against me, and I had to practice with the young men. When dueling with axes one day with a warrior named Abbasagga, I split his shield in half at a single blow, and he threw down his weapon and ran from the field. After that it was hard for me to find opponents, even among the men. For a time I went off by myself and studied the art of the bow and arrow, although that is a weapon used only by hunters, not by warriors. The first bow that was made for me was too weak, and I snapped it as I tried to draw it; then I bought a costly bow of several woods cunningly laminated together, cedar and mulberry and fir and willow, which better served my purpose. I still have it.

Another thing I learned was the art of building. I studied the mixing of mastics and mortars out of bitumen and other kinds of pitch, the making of bricks, the plastering and painting of walls, and many another humble thing, and in the full heat of day I labored sweating among the artisans, deepening my skills. One reason I did this is that it is our custom to educate princes in such things, so that they can play their proper roles in the construction and dedication of new buildings and walls. In other lands, I know, princes and kings do nothing but ride and hunt and have sport with women, but things are not like that here. Above and beyond the matter of the responsibilities I expected one day to have to assume, though, I found keen pleasure in mastering those crafts. To make bricks and set them in courses to form a wall gave me a powerful sense of accomplishment, as strong as any that I have had from more heroic endeavors: in some ways stronger, perhaps. And there was something altogether voluptuous about the making of bricks, the mixing of the clay and straw, the pressing of the wet clay into the mould, the scooping away of the excess with the side of my hand.

Of course, there are other and more obvious sources of pleasure, and other sensations more immediately voluptuous. I began my education in those things early also.

My first teacher was a little squint-eyed goat-herder I met in the Street of the Scorpion on a day in late winter. I was ten or eleven and she, I suppose, must have been a bit older than that, since she had breasts, and hair down below. She begged for the bit of golden braid I had wound in my hair, and I said, "What will you give me for it?" and she laughed and said, "Come with me."

In a dark cellar atop a pile of old damp straw she earned the price of the braid, tllough what we did was more like wrestling than coupling. I am not even certain that I entered her that day, so much of a novice was I. But we met two or three more times, and I know that what we did on those occasions was the true deed. I never asked her name or told her mine. She reeked of goat's milk and goat's urine, and her face was coarse and her dark skin was blemished, and she wriggled and writhed in my arms like some slippery creature of the river. But when! embraced her she seemed as beautiful as Inanna, and the pleasure she gave me struck straight through me like the lightning of Enlil. So was I initiated into the great mystery, a little earlier than such things are supposed to happen, and in a highly irregular way.

There were many more after her. The city was full of smudgefaced little girls willing to go with a sturdy young prince for an hour, and I must have sampled half of them.

Then I discovered that the same delights, minus the rank odors and the other little drawbacks, could be had from girls of a higher dass. Few refused me, and those who did, I think, said no only out of fear of discovery and punishment. For my part I could never have enough: I felt that when my body quivered with that ecstasy I was entering into direct communion with the gods. It was like being hurled straightaway into the sacred domain. And is that not the truth? The act of engendering is the way of entry into all that is holy. Until you have done it, you dwell outside the bounds of civilization; you are little more than a beast. The joining of flesh and spirit in that act is the thing that brings us close to thegods. I found myself thinking every time, in that wild instant just before the pouring forth of my seed, that this was no ordinary girl of Uruk beneath me, but fiery Inanna herself-the goddess, not the priestess. It is a sacred business.

Apart from all such lofty considerations, I should add that I noticed, very early, that coupling had a wondrous way of calming my spirit. For I boiled then, and for many years thereafter, with turbulent inner frenzies that I scarcely understood and against which I had no defense. I think that hot lust of mine sprang not only from the ordinary passiofis of the flesh but from something deeper and darker, which was the painful loneliness that assailed me like a wolf in the darkness. Often I felt myself to be the only living being in a world of chilly phantoms. Having no father, no brother, no real friendM set apart from all others by the godlike strangeness that any simpleton could see lay upon me-I found myself engulfed in a bewildering emptiness of the soul. It stung me and burned me like mountain ice against my skin. So I reached toward women and girls for the only comfort I could find. The fulfillment of passion did at least give me a few hours of respite from that agitation of the spirit.

When I was a month short of twelve one of my uncles, observing in the baths that my body had become that of a man, told me, "We will go to the temple cloister this afternoon. I think the time is overdue for you."

I knew what he meant. And I did not have the heart to tell him that I had not waited for a proper initiation.

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.

Then she said, almost fiercely, "Well? Do you remember me?"

"I have seen you serving Inanna at the rites."

Her eyes flashed. "Of course you have. Everyone has. But you and I have met. We have spoken." "Have we?"

"Long ago. You were very young. It must have gone from your mind."

"Tell me your name, and I will know if we have met."

"Ah, you have forgotten me!"

"I forget very little. Tell me your name," I said.

She smiled mischievously, and spoke her name, which is one that I may not set down here, for, like my own birth-name, it has been replaced by a holier one and must be abandoned forever. The sound of her name lifted the latch of my memory, and from the storehouse of my mind came a rush of recollection: strings of blue beads, amulets of pink shell, a bare sinuous girlish body painted with serpent designs, budding breasts, a sharp perfume. Was this woman one and the same with that sly child? Yes. Yes. Her breasts were more than buds, now, and her face had grown broader from cheek to cheek, and the wicked sparkle of her eyes was obscured by the womanly cosmetics with which she had painted them. But I was certain that I saw the girl hidden within the woman.

"Yes, I remember now," I said. "The day of the naming of the new king, when I was lost in the maze of the temple, and you came after me, and comforted me, and led me back to the ceremony. But you are greatly changed."

"Not so much, I think. I was already beginning to be a woman, then. I had bled goddess-blood three times. I think I look not so very different now. But you are altogether changed. You were only a child, then."

"It was six years ago, or a little more than that."

"Was it? What a sweet child you were!" She shot me a flagrant glance. "But a child no longer. Abisimti tells me you are truly a man."

Abashed, appalled, I cried, "I thought the doings of priestesses were sacred secrets!"

"Abisimti tells me everything. We are like sisters."

I shifted my weight restlessly. As before, long ago, I felt anger and uncertainty, because I was unable to tell whether I was being mocked. I was strangely helpless before her guile. I had grown older, yes, but so had she; and if I was not much past twelve, she was at least sixteen, and still far ahead of me. There was a sharp edge on her, that cut me wherever I tried to take hold of her. I said, a little too brusquely, "Why am I here?"

"I thought it was time we met again. First I saw you one day during the festival, when you were at the temple bearing offerings. My eye fell upon you and I wondered about you, and I asked someone, Who is that man? And she said, that is no man, that is only a boy, the son of Lugalbanda. It surprised me, that you had grown so swiftly, for I thought you were still very young. Then a few days later Abisimti said that a prince had come to her in the cloister and she had conveyed him into manhood, and I asked her which prince that was, and she told me that he was the son of Lugalbanda. I thought I would speak with you again, after hearing Abisimti. The ' words of Abisimti made me curious about you."

It infuriated me that I was still too simple to read the meanings between her meanings. Was she saying that she wished to go to the cloister with me herself?. So it seemed, or why else had she summoned me, and why else would her eyes be so wanton with me? Well, gladly would I have gone with her-more than gladly! Her beauty drove me wild, even then. But I was not sure that that was what she wanted, and I did not dare put it to the test, out of fear of being refused. One may not have the priestesses of Inanna for the mere asking, only the ones who wait in the cloister, who have dedicated themselves as holy whores. It is shameful to approach the others, who are set apart as brides of the god, or of the king in whom the god is embodied. I did not know which class she belonged to. And perhaps this was simply a game for her, and I only her plaything, a man-doll now instead of the child-doll I once had been. I felt her spinning webs all about me, and I was lost in them.

She said, "How has it been for you? What do you do? I never leave the temple; I have no news of the city, except the gossip that the serving-maids bring me."

"My mother is priestess of An. I do some service at his temple. I study the things a young man studies. I wait to enter into the fullness of my manhood." "And then?"

"I will do as the gods require of me."

"Has any god chosen you yet to be his own?"

"No," I said. "Not yet."

"Do you wish it?"

I shrugged. "It will happen when it happens."

"Inanna chose me when I was seven."

"It will happen when it happens," I said.

"When you know, will you come to me and tell me which god it is?"

She was staring at me very hard. She seemed to be laying some sort of claim to me, and I did not understand why. Nor did I like it. But her power was intense. I heard myself saying meekly, "Yes,

I will tell you. If that is what you want." "That is what I want," she said.

Something became softer about her now: that mischievous edge went from her, and the look that I interpreted as wantonness. From a pouch at her waist she took an amulet and pressed it into my hands, a statuette of Inanna, with great breasts and swollen thighs, carved from some smooth green stone that I had never seen before. It seemed to shine with an inner flame. "Keep this by you always," she said.

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.

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 deathin-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 awehe inspired in me, thi~ 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 under stood 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 thickness 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 fiat 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 godpower, 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 puzzledlooking 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, li~rdship." 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.

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.

I waited there a!ong while, pacing, before she arrived. She swept grandly into the room accompanied by four pages who carried the huge loop-topped bundles of reeds, half again as high as a man, that go wherever Inanna goes. With a quick gesture she sent the pages from us and we were alone.

She held herself tall before me. She looked splendid and triumphant and terrifying. I could see that there was still some girlishness about her, but not very much. Since I last had spoken with her she had been transformed into something beyond my reach and beyond my comprehension.

I thought of her lying naked in the embrace of the king who is the god, on the night of the Sacred Marriage, which was the first night of her high priestesshood, and the taste of bile came to my lips.

She was clad in a simple tufted white robe that covered her from head to foot, with only her right shoulder bare. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and braided into a thick rope that was wound around her head. Her cheeks were lightly tinted with yellow ochre and her eyelids were darkened with kohl, but otherwise she wore no cosmetic. The only tangible sign of her new rank was a delicate coronet of gold chain, woven in the serpent-motif of the goddess, that encircled her forehead. But there were other, subtler signs. The aura of power was upon her. The radiance of heaven's might glowed beneath her skin.

I stared at her, but my eyes could not meet her eyes. I could think only of her body moving beneath Dumuzi's, her lips to his lips, his hand between her thighs, and I burned with chagrin and shame.

Then I reminded myself that the woman who stood before me was not merely someone I had once desired. She was the embodiment of the highest power of the world; she was the goddess herself. The gulf between us was immense. Beside her, I and all my petty desires were nothing.

"Well?" she said after a long while.

I made the goddess-sign to her. "Queen of Heaven and Earth," I mumbled. "Divine Mother. First Daughter of the Moon." "Look at me."

I lifted my eyes. They did not quite reach hers.

"Look at me! Into my eyes, into my eyes! Why this terror? Am I that much altered?"

"Yes," I whispered. "Very much altered."

"And you fear me?"

"Yes. I fear you. You are Inanna."

"Ah. Queen of Heaven and Earth! Divine Mother! First Daughter of the Moon!"

She put her hand to her mouth and smothered a giggle, and then the giggle escaped as shrill laughter.

Astounded, trembling, I made the goddess-sign again and again.

"Yes, fear me!" she cried, unable to hold back her wild mirth. She pointed imperiously. "Down and grovel! Fool! Oh, what a child you are! Queen of Heaven and Earth! First Daughter of the Moon!"

I could not comprehend her laughter, ringing in uncontrollable peals. It terrified me. I made the goddess-sign at her once more. She had never been anything other than bewildering to me, even when she was only a naked sparkle-eyed girl with budding breasts, laughing and hugging me fiercely in the corridor and prophesying great things. And the wily young priestess, playing mischievous flirtinggames with me to my befuddlement: I had not understood her either. But this was too much, this mockery of the goddess, now that she was the goddess. I was frightened. I shivered with fear. Silently I called upon Lugalbanda to guard me.

After a moment she grew more calm, and I felt a little less uneasy. Quietly she said, "Yes, I am different now. I am Inanna. But I always was: do you understand that? Do you think the goddess did not know from the beginning of time that she would choose my body when she was done with that other one? And now my turn has come. Were you there, the night of the Marriage?"

"I was there, yes. I stood in the front row. You looked straight at me, but you never saw me."

"The fire of the goddess blinded my eyes that night."

"Or the fire of the god," I said rashly.

She stared at me in astonishment and sudden fury. Her cheeks reddened beneath the yellow ochre, and her eyes blazed. But her anger seemed to go as swiftly as it had come. She smiled and said, "Ah, is that it, Gilgamesh? Is that what gnaws at you?"

I could not speak. My cheeks flamed. I stared at my feet.

She came to me and took my hand in hers. Softly she said, "I tell you, think nothing of him. Nothing! It was a rite, which I dutifully performed, and that was all it was. It was the goddess who embraced him, and not the priestess. It changes nothing between you and me. Do you understand?"

When you are king, I will lie in your arms.

I looked up, and our eyes met squarely for the first time that day. "I think I do."

"So be it, then."

I was silent. She was still too powerful for me. The force of her was overwhelming.

Then I said, after a time, "What was that name you called me a moment ago?"

"Gilgamesh."

"But that is not my name."

"It will be," she replied. "Gilgamesh: He-Who-Is-Chosen. You will reign by that name. It is a name of the old ones, the goddesspeople, who held the Land long ago. The knowledge of it came to me as I dreamed, when the goddess first walked with me. Say it:

Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh."

"Gilgamesh."

"Gilgamesh the king."

"That would be impious to say. Dumuzi is king."

"Gilgamesh the king! Say it! Say it!"

Once more I shivered. "Let me be, Inanna, I pray you. If the gods mean to make me king, it will come in proper time. But Dumuzi has the high seat now. I will not name myself king before you, not now, not here in the house of the goddess." The anger returned to her eyes. She did not like to be resisted. Then she shrugged and seemed to put all that we had been saying out of her mind between one instant and the next. In a different voice, fiat, businesslike, she said, "Why are you concealing things from me?"

I was startled by that. "Concealing?"

"You know what you are concealing."

I felt a pressure behind my right ear, a warning. Then I knew what she wanted me to tell her, and I feared letting her know it. I said nothing. Speaking with her was like crossing a stream where the footing is tricky: at any moment I might slip and be swept away.

"Why do you hide things from me, Gilgamesh?"

"You must not call me by that name."

"I suppose not, not yet. But you will not evade me so easily."

"Why do you think I am hiding something from you?"

"I know you are."

"Can you see into my mind?"

She smiled enigmatically. "Perhaps I can."

I forced myself to stubborn resistance. "Then I have no secrets from you. You know everything already," I said.

"I mean to hear it from your lips. I thought you would have come to me days ago to tell me; and when you did not come, I had you summoned. You have changed. There is something new within you."

"No," I said. "You are the one who has changed."

"You also," said Inanna. "Did I not ask you, when a god has chosen you, to come to me and tell me which god it is?"

I stared at her, amazed. "You know that?"

"It is easy to tell."

"How? Can you see it in my face?"

"I could feel it halfway across the city. You have a god within you now. Can you deny it?"

I shook my head. "No, I will not deny that."

"You promised to tell me when you were chosen. It was a promise."

Looking away from her I said in a downcast way, "It is a very private thing, being chosen."

"It was a promise," she said.

"I thought you were too busy to see me-the Marriage festival, the funeral of the old Inanna-" "It was a promise," she said.

The whole of the side of my head was throbbing now. I was helpless before her. Lugalbanda, I prayed, guide me, guide me/But all I felt was the throbbing.

She said, "Tell me the name of the god who protects you now."

"You know all things," I ventured. "Why must I tell you what you already know?"

That amused her, but it angered her as well. She turned from me and strode up and down the room, and grasped her great reedbundles and squeezed them tightly, and would not look at me. There was a silence that bound me like bands of bronze. I was choking under its force. It is no small thing to reveal one's personal god: it means surrenderin~ a portion of the strength which that god provides. I was not yet secure enough in my own strength to be able to afford that surrender. But likewise I was not yet secure enough to withhold from Inanna the knowledge she demanded. It was a priestess to whom I had promised, but it was the goddess who laid claim to that promise.

I said very quietly, "The god who has entered me is my father, the hero Lugalbanda."

"Ah," she said. "Ah!"

She said nothing else, and the frightful silence descended again.

I said, "You must tell no one."

"I am Inanna!" she cried, infuriated. "No one commands me!"

"I ask you only not to tell. Is that a great deal to ask?"

"You may not ask anything of me."

"Simply promise-"

"I make no promises. I am Inanna."

The goddess-force flooded the room. The true divine presence creates a chill deeper than the deepest cold of winter, for it draws all the warmth of life toward itself; and in that moment I felt Inanna taking mine, pumping it from me, leaving me a mere frozen husk. I could not move. I could not speak. I felt young and foolish and innocent. I saw rising before me the true goddess incarnate, with yellow eyes glowing like those of a beast in the night.

A FEW days afterward, when I returned to my home after a day at play on the javelin-fields, I found a sealed tablet lying on my couch. This was, I remember, on the nineteenth day of the month: always the unluckiest of days. Hastily I broke open the envelope of brown clay and read the message it contained, and read it again, and read it once more. Those few words inscribed on the tablet struck hard at me. Those words swept me in a single moment away from the comfort of my native city and into a strange life of exile, as though they were not words, but the stormy breath of Enlil the high god.

What the tablet said was: Flee Uruk at once. Dumuzi means to have your I~.

It was signed with the seal of Inanna.

My instant response was one of blind hot defiance. My heart thundered; my hands rolled up into fists. Who was Dumuzi, that he could threaten the son of Lugalbanda? What did I have to fear from a mere torpid slug such as he? And also I thought: the power of the goddess is greater than the power of the king, so there is no need for me to flee the city. Inanna will protect me.

As I paced up and down in the heat of my anger, one of my servants entered the room. He saw my rage and began to back out, but I called to him to stay. "What is it?" I demanded.

"Two men, O lord-two men were here-"

"Who were they?"

For a moment his mouth had trouble making words. Then he got it out: "Slaves of Dumuzi, I think. They wore his red band around their arms." His eyes were bright with fear. "They carried knives, my lord. They were hidden in their robes, but I saw the glint of them. My lord-my lord-"

"Did they tell you what they wanted?"

"To speak with you, they said." He was stammering. Fright had made him pale and sickly-faced. "I s-s-said you were with the g-goddess, and they answered that they would return-they w-w-w-would return this evening-"

'CAh," I said softly. "So it is true, then." I caught him by the corner of his robe and pulled him close and whispered, "Keep watch! If you see them nearby, come to me at once!" "I will, O lord!"

"And say nothing to anyone about where I might be!"

"Not a word, O lord!"

I dismissed him and he scurried out. Once more I began to pace the room. I found myself dry-throated and shaking, not so much with fear, but with rage and dismay. What else could I do except flee? I saw the folly of what I had been thinking a little while before, when I had been so bold. I could go on being bold, yes; but I would surely die for it. How cocky I had been! Asking, who was Dumuzi, that he could threaten the son of Lugalbanda? Why, Dumuzi was the king, and my life was forfeit to him if so he decreed. And if Inanna had any way to protect me, why would she have sent word to me to take flight? I stared into a terrible emptiness. I could not tarry a moment, I knew, not even to seek explanations. In the twinkling of an eye Uruk was lost to me. I must go and go swiftly, without even pausing to bid farewell to my mother, or to kneel at Lugalbanda's shrine. At this moment the two assassins Dumuzi had chosen might be on their way back there to find me. I could not hesitate.

I did not mean to be gone for long. I would take sanctuary in some other city for a few days, or if necessary a couple of weeks, until I could learn what I had done to make myself the enemy of the king, and how the breach could be repaired. I did not then realize that I was setting forth into four years of exile. But so it proved to be.

Numbly, with shaking hands, I gathered together a few possessions. I took as much clothing as would fit in a pack on my back, and my bow and a sword, and the Pazuzu amulet that my mother had given me long ago, and the little goddess-statuette of green stone that I had had from Inanna when she was still just an ordinary priestess. I had acquired a tablet on which some magical phrases were inscribed, things for use in case of injury or illness, and I took that along, as well as a leather pouch of the drug that one burns to drive away ghosts in the desert. Lastly I took a small knife of antique style with a jeweled hilt, not very keen but beloved by me because it had been brought to me by Lugalbanda returning from one of his wars.

At the first watch of the night, star-rise time, I slipped from my house and made my way warily through the narrow tangles of streets, heading toward the North Gate. A light rain was falling. Plumes of white smoke from the lamps of ten thousand houses rose toward the darkening sky. My heart ached miserably. I had never left Uruk before. I had no idea what lay beyond the city walls. I was in the hands of the gods.

The city of Kish was where I chose to go. Eridu or Nippur were much closer and more easily reached; but Kish seemed a safer choice. Dumuzi had great influence in Eridu or Nippur, but Kish was hostile to him. I did not care to arrive at a place where I would immediately be packed up and shipped back to Uruk as a kindness to Uruk's king. King Agga of Kish was not likely to feel any need to do favors for Dumuzi; and Lugalbanda had often spoken of him, I recalled, as a sturdy warrior, a worthy opponent, a man of honor. To Kish, then: to offer myself to Agga's mercy.

Kish lay a great distance away to the north, a march of many days. I could not go by water. There was no ready way for a small boat or a raft to travel upstream on the fast-flowing Buranunu, and it was too risky for me to try to slip aboard one of the great royal sailing vessels that ply the river between cities. But I knew that there was a caravan track that flanked the eastern bank of the river. If I followed it northward and put one foot forward and then the next, sooner or later I was sure to get to Kish.

I walked briskly, and sometimes I ran at a light trot, and soon Uruk was falling away behind me in the darkness. I did not halt until the middle hour of the night. By then I had a sense of being far from home, of embarking on a great journey that would take me to the far corners of the world, a journey that would never end. Nor has that journey ended, to this day.

That night I slept in a freshly ploughed field, with my cloak around me and the rain falling in my face. But I slept, and I slept soundly. At dawn I rose, and bathed in some farmer's muddy canal, and helped myself to a breakfast of figs and cucumbers. Then I took myself toward the north once more. I felt tireless, full of an inexhaustible energy, and it did not trouble me to walk all the hours of the day. It was the god within me, driving me on, as ever, 'to more than mortal deeds.

The Land was more beautiful than I had ever imagined. The sky was vast and luminous: it trembled with god-~presence. On the rich broad river-plain the first tender grass of autumn was beginning to sprout in the soft meadows after the harsh summer drought. Along the canals the mimosa trees, the willows and poplars, the reeds and rushes, all were stirring with new green growth. The dark-hued river Buranunu ran to my left, rising high above the plain on its bed of its own silt. Somewhere far off to the east, I knew, was the second great river, the swift and wild Idigna, that forms the other boundary of the Land: for when we speak of the Land, we mean the territory between the two rivers. All that lies outside is foreign to us, that which lies within is the dominion allotted to us by the gods.

From the rivers come hardship and dangermterrible torrents, killing floods-but also from them comes fertility, and I saw signs of that great gift on all sides. This we.owe to Father Enki. They tell the tale of the wise god taking on the form of a wild bull, who thrust his great phallus into the dry beds of the two rivers and cast forth his seed in mighty spurts to fill them with the sweet sparkling water of life. So is it always: the water of the father gives fecundity to the Land, which is our mother. It was Enki too who, once the rivers were filled with his fertile flow, devised the canals that convey the water of the river to the fields, and brought ~orth the fish and the reeds of the marsh~ands, and the green grass of the hills, and the grains and vegetables of the cultivated lands, and the cattle of the pastures, and gave each of these into the hands of its special god.

These {railings I had heard from the harper Ur-kununna, and from school-father in the classroom; but it had all seemed only words to me. Now it became real. I saw the richly laden fields of wheat and barley. I saw the date palms heavy with unripe fruit. I saw the mulberry and cypress trees, the vines bearing dark glistening grapes, the almonds and walnuts, the herds of oxen and goats and sheep.

The Land was thick with life. In the lagoons along the canals I saw wallowing buffaloes, great flocks of birds with brilliant plumage, and an abundance of turtles and snakes. Once I saw a lion with a black mane; but he did not see me. I longed to see an elephant, of which! had heard wondrous tales, but the elephants were elsewhere that season. Of other creatures, thoughwboars and hyenas, jackals and wolves, eagles and vultures, antelopes and gazelles-there was a multitude.

When I was in the wild places, I hunted hares and geese for my dinners, and found berries and nuts to eat as well. In the village the farmers took me in and shared with me their beans and peas and lentils, their beer, their golden melons. I told no one my name, nor where I was from; but my bearing was that of a young prince, and perhaps that was why they were so hospitable toward me. In any case it is an offense to the gods to turn away a peaceful stranger.

The girls of these farms willingly kept me warm by night, and more than once I regretted having to move along, or debated with myself whether to take some one of these tender companions with me. But move along I did, and always I departed from the villages alone; and alone I was when I came at last to the great city of Kish.

My father used to speak generously of Kish. "If there is any city 'that can with justice claim to be the equal of Uruk," he would say,

"it is Kish." ['~ink that is true.

Like Uruk, Kish lies close by the Buranunu, so that it prospers from the river trade between city and city and from the sea trade that comes up the river from the ocean lands. Like Uruk, it is walled and secure. It has a great many people, though not quite so many as Uruk, which is probably the largest city of the world: my tax collectors, in the fiftyth year of my reign, tallied ninety thousands of people, including the slaves. I think Kish has but two thirds as many, which is still a mighty number.

Long before Uruk became great, Kish had already attained the highest power of the Land. This was when kingship had descended from heaven a second time, after the Flood had destroyed the earlier

~ties. Kish then became the seat of kingship, when Uruk was only a village. I remember the harper Ur-kununna singing us the tale of

Etana king of Kish, he who stabilized all the Land and was hailed everywhere as overlord. Etana was the one who soared into the heavens with the aid of an eagle when, because he was childless, he sought the plant of birth, which grows only in heaven.

The wondrous journey of Etana of Kish brought him the heir he desired; but all the same Etana dwells today in the House of Dust and Darkness, and Kish no longer has mastery over all the Land. By. the time Enmebaraggesi was king in Kish, greatness had begun to. grow in Uruk. Meskiaggasher, son of the sun, became our king, when Uruk was still not Uruk, but only the two villages of Eanna and Kullab. Meskiaggasher made Enmebaraggesi take note of him.

After him came my grandfather the hero Enmerkar, who created

Uruk out of the two villages; and after him, Lugalbanda. And under those two heroes we won our freedom from Kish and came into our full greatness, of which I have been the steward these many years.

At this time of my boyhood Enmebaraggesi was long dead and his son Agga was king in Kish. On a day of bright winter sunlight

I had my first glimpse of his city, rising high on the fiat Buranunu plain behind a wall of many towers painted a dazzling white, from which long banners in crimson and emerald were streaming. Kish was a two-humped place, I saw, with twin centers to the west and east and a low district between them. The temples of Kish rose on platforms far higher than the White Platform of Uruk, with steps going up and up and up until they seemed to march into the sky.

That seemed a grand thing to me, to put the houses of the gods so close to heaven, and when I rebuilt the temples of Uruk I kept the high platforms of Kish in mind. But that was many years afterward.

I was unprepared for the awesomeness of Kish. Everything about it seemed to cry out, "I am great, I am all-powerful, I am the in vincible city." And! still merely a boy, going out from home for the first time. But there was no room in my heart for fear.

I presented myself before the walls of Kish and a sullen longbearded gatekeeper came out, idly swinging his bronze mace of ofrice. He looked me over as though I were nothing at all, merely some meat walking on legs. I returned his insolence glare for glare. And with my hand resting lightly on the pommel of my sword I said to him, "Tell your master that the son of Lugalbanda has come from Uruk to give him greetings."

THAT NIGHT I dined on golden plates in the palace of Agga the king, and so began my four-year sojourn in Kish.

Agga received me warmly: whether out of respect for my father, or out of some crafty intent to use me against Dumuzi, I had no way of telling. Very likely some of each, for he was a man of honor, as I had been told, but also Agga was in every fiber of his body a monarch, who meant to turn everything that came his way to the advantage of his city.

He was a robust pink-skinned man, fleshy and big-bellied, who loved his beer and meat. His head was entirely without hair. He had it shaved every morning in the throne-room of his palace, before an audience of courtiers and officials. The blades that his barbers used were made of a white metal that I had never seen before, and were very keen. Agga said it was iron, which puzzled me, for I thought of iron as a darker stuff and not of much real use: it is soft and will not take a sharp edge. But later I asked a chamberlain, who told me that it was a special kind of iron that had fallen from the sky in the land of Dilmun, and was mixed with another metal without a name which gave it its color and its special hardness. Many times since then I have wished to have a supply of such metal for my weapons, and the secret of working it, but I have been unable to obtain either one.

Be that as it may, I have never seen a man closer shaved than Agga was. His high officials went hairless too, except for those who traced their ancestry to the desert people, whose thick curling hair is too great a chore to shave. I can understand that, for my hair is similar, as was Lugalbanda's. I think I must have some desert blood in me: my height and the texture of my hair and beard argue for that, although my nose is not as sharp and hooked as theirs tend to be. Though every city of the Land has many of these sons of desert-folk living in it, there were more of them in Kish than in any other place I have seen. They must have accounted for full half the population, and I heard their language, so different from ours, almost as often as I heard our own.

Agga knew that I had fled from Dumuzi. He seemed to know a great deal of what went on in Uruk; far more, indeed, than I. But it was no surprise to me that a king as powerful as Agga maintained a network of spies in the city that was his greatest rival. What did surprise me was the source from which his information came. But I did not learn that until much later.

"What have you done," Agga asked, "to have caused the king to turn against you this way?"

I had wondered that myself. It was strange that Dumuzi would suddenly choose to look upon me as an enemy, after paying so little heed to me in the six or seven years since the death of my father. During that time I had certainly offered no challenge to his power. Though I was strong and tall beyond my years, I was far from ready for any sort of role in the government of the city. Surely Dumuzi and everyone else realized that. If I had sometimes boasted in my boyhood of becoming king some day, why, that was only a boy's loud talk, while the kingship of my father Lugalbanda had still been bright in my memory. Whatever dreams of royal power I had had since then-and I could not deny that I had had such dreams -I had kept entirely to myself.

But as I sat at Agga's table considering these things, I remembered that there was someone else in Uruk who was much given to the pastime of predicting my destiny, and who seemed to have no doubt I would be king. Had she not whispered of the pleasures we would share when that day came? Had she not gone so far as to devise the name under which I would reign?

And she was one who was close to the ear of Dumuzi.

"What would Dumuzi be likely to think," I asked Agga, "if he were to suspect that my soul had been entered by divine Lugalbanda, and his godlike spirit now resided within me?"

"Ah, is that the case?" Agga asked quickly, his eyes gleaming. I picked up my bowl of beer and sipped at it and offered no reply. He said after a moment, watching me carefully, "If that should be the case, or if Dumuzi should merely think it is the case-why, then I believe you would seem very dangerous to him. He knows that he is not worth five hairs of your father's beard. He fears the very name of Lugalbanda. Yet Lugalbanda dead is no menace to the throne of Dumuzi."

"Yes, that is surely so."

"Ah," said Agga, smiling, "but if it should become known in Uruk that the spirit of the great and valorous Lugalbanda now has come to reside within the sturdy body of Lugalbanda's noble son-and if that son is growing toward an age when he might be expected to begin playing some part in the governing of the city-why, yes, you would seem a great peril to Dumuzi, a very serious peril indeed-"

"Serious enough to have me slain?"

Agga turned up his hands, palms outward. "What does the proverb say? 'The coward sees lions where brave men see only cats'? I would have no fear of the ghost of Lugalbanda, if I were Dumuzi. But I am not Dumuzi, and he perceives things in a different way." He gave me more beer, waving away the slave and pouring from the ewer himself. Then he said, "If indeed Lugalbanda is the god who has chosen you-and I would not be amazed if that was the case-then you know it was far from wise of you to let Dumuzi have any hint of that."

"I understand that. But whatever Dumuzi has learned, he has not learned from me."

"He has learned it from someone, though, and that someone must have learned it from you. Is that not so?" I nodded.

"Then you have spoken carelessly to a friend who is not a friend, and you have been betrayed, eh? Is that not so?"

Through tight lips I said, "I asked her not to speak a word of it to anyone! But she would not promise me that. She grew angry, in fact, when I asked the promise of her." "Ah. Ah. She?"

My face turned red. "I am telling you more than I should be revealing."

He laid his hand atop mine. "Boy, boy, you tell me nothing I don't already know! But you are safe from Dumuzi here. You are under my protection, and no treachery can reach you in my city. Here. Here, take more beer. What good sweet stuffthis is! The barley from which they make it is reserved entirely for the use of the king. Here, drink, boy, drink, drink! Drink!"

And I drank, and drank some more. But my mind remained clear, for it was burning with an anger that burned away any drunkenness Agga's beer might have brought me. No doubt of it, she had gone running to Dumuzi with the tale the moment she had had it from me, without once thinking that she might be betraying me into danger. Or was that what she intended? To betray me? Why? I could see no reason for it. Perhaps it had been mere thoughtlessness, her telling Dumuzi the one thing that I had begged her not to tell anyone. And yet again she might have been following some design too subtle for me to comprehend. I understood none of it, only that she was certainly the one who had engineered my exile by giving away my secret to the man most likely to be threatened by it. At that moment such rage rushed through me that had she been within my reach just then I would have struck her down, priestess that she was.

The fury went from me after a while. We sat together late into the night, Agga and I, and he told me tales of his wars with Lugalbanda, and of a day when they had engaged in single combat outside the walls of Kish, axes battering on shields for hour after hour until darkness came, neither man able to inflict a wound on the other. He had always held my father in the highest regard, he said, even when they were sworn to be enemies to the death. Then he ordered another flagon of beer to be opened-I was astounded at how he drank; no wonder there was so much flesh on his bones-and as he grew hazier with liquor so too did his stories, and I could scarcely follow them. He began telling of the campaigns of his own father Enmebaraggesi and of those of my grandfather Enmerkar, stories of wars fought when he had been just a boy, and afterward he drifted off into a jumble of legends of ancient Kish, involving kings who were only names to me, and strange names at that, Zukakip, Buanum, Mashda, Arurim, and the like. As he grew drunker and sleepier I grew more wide awake. But I sensed that he was less hazy than he seemed, and was watching me always with keen vigilance: for I did not forget asked Lugalbanda for guidance, I heard nothing within my soul telling me it was an error to swear the oath. One point that I considered was that in a certain sense everyone in the Land still owed allegiance to Kish, since it was to Kish that the kingship had descended after the Flood, and it had never formally been withdrawn by the gods in all the years since. So by swearing, I was merely confirming a fealty that already had a kind of shadowy existence. It also crossed my mind that it would make little difference to me that I had recognized Agga as my overlord, once I was king in Uruk, so long as I was not required to pay tribute to him or to submit to his commands; and there was nothing in the oath about either of those things. So I swore. By the net of Enlil I swore my loyalty to the king of Kish.

There was no question of my returning to Uruk in a matter of days or weeks, as I had originally imagined I might do. Not long after my arrival in Kish, emissaries from Dumuzi arrived and tactfully but firmly asked Agga to turn me over to them. "The son of Lugalbanda is sorely missed in Uruk," they said, most piously. "Our king craves his counsel, and seeks his strong arm for the battlefield."

"Ah," replied Agga, rolling his eyes and looking stricken with great sorrow, "but the son of Lugalbanda has become my son as well, and I would not be parted from him for all the Land. Tell Dumuzi that I would die of grief, if the son of Lugalbanda were to leave Kish so soon."

And privately Agga said to me that his spies reported Dumuzi beside himself with fear that I was organizing an army in Kish to overthrow him. In Uruk I had been proclaimed an enemy of the city, he said, and I would surely be slain if ever I came into Dumuzi's grasp. So I remained in Kish. But I managed to send word to my mother that I was healthy and prosperous and was only biding my time until the proper moment for my homefaring.

I found Kish a city not much unlike Uruk in most respects. In Uruk we ate meat and bread, and drank beer and date-wine, and the same in Kish. In Uruk and in Kish the clothing was of wool or of linen, according to the time of the year, and the fashion of wearing it was similar in each place. The streets of Uruk were narrow and winding, except for the grand boulevards, and so were the streets the frontier. So in my second year of exile I went forth with the army of Kish into that broad wind-swept plain behind which lies

Susa, the capital of Elam.

I had dreamed battle-dreams for many years, from the time in childhood when my father, home in brief respite from his wars, told me tales of chariots and javelins. I had played at battle on the fields of Uruk, drawing plans of formation and leading my playmates on wild charges against invisible enemies. But there is a song of battle that only a warrior's ears can hear, a high, keening sound that comes through the sluggish air like a blade, and until you have heard that song, you are no warrior, you are no man. I did not know about that song until I heard it, for the first time, beside the waters of a river called the Karkhah in the Land of Elam.

All night long, under a brilliant moon, we made ready for the attack, oiling that which was made of wood or leather, scouring everything of bronze until it gleamed. The sky was so clear that we could see the gods walking about in it, great dark horned figures, blue against the blackness, striding from cloud to cloud. The giant visage of An, calm, all-seeing, seemed to fill the sky. Great Enlil loomed on his throne, conjuring storms in distant lands. The power of these gods was hot and hard in the air, like the fever-wind. We lit fires to them and sacrificed bullocks, and they came down low to us, so that we could feel the pressure of their divine weight against our hearts. And at dawn, not having had an hour's sleep, I donned my shining helmet, and clad myself in a short skirt of sheepskin with a leather loin-guard beneath, and clambered into my chariot as though this were my twentieth year on the fields of war.

The trumpets sounded. The battle-cry roared from two hundred throats: "For Agga and Enlil! For Agga and Enlil!"

I heard my own voice, deep and hoarse, crying those same words, words I had never imagined I would find myself uttering: "For Agga and Enlil!"

And we went forward into the plain.

My charioteer's name was Namhani. He was a broad-shouldered thick-chested man of the city of Lagash who had been sold to Kish when a boy, and he had known no other trade but war: scars covered him like ribbons of honor, some an angry red, some long since faded into the darkness of his skin. He turned to me and grinned just before he charged. He had no teeth, only four or five wicked yellow snags.

Agga had given me a splendid chariot-four-wheeled, not a twowheeler as is usually provided for novices. The son of Lugalbanda, he told me, could ride in nothing less. To draw it, the king had provided four sturdy asses, swift and strong. I had helped Namhani myself to harness them, fastening the girth-straps about their chests, fitting them to the yoke and collar, attaching the reins to the rings in their upper lips. They were good animals, patient, shrewd. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to go into battle with a chariot drawn by powerful long-legged horses, rather than our placid asses: but to dream of harnessing horses, those wild and mysterious beasts of the mountainous northeast, is like dreaming of harnessing the whirlwind. They say that in the lands beyond Elam the people have found a way of taming horses and riding them, but I think that is a lie. Now and again in distant lands I have caught sight of black horses sailing like ghosts across storm-swept basins. I see no way such creatures, if they could be captured at all, could ever be broken to our use.

Namhani seized the reins and leaned forward against the leopardhide that covered the chariot's frame. I heard the groaning of the axle-rod, the creaking of the wooden wheels. Then the asses had the rhythm of it and hit a steady stride, and we went jouncing over the soft spongy ground toward the dark line of Elamites that waited along the horizon.

"For Agga! For Enlil!"

And I, shouting along with all the others, added war-cries of my own: "Lugalbanda! Sky-father! Inanna! Inanna! Inanna!"

Mine was the fifth chariot: a great honor, for the four in front of mine belonged to.the general and to three of the sons of Agga. Eight or ten more came after me. Behind the clattering chariots marched the columns of foot-soldiers, first the heavy infantry protected by helmets and thick cloaks of black felt, with axes in their hands, and then the light skirmishers, all but naked, wielding their spears or short swords. My own weapon was the javelin. I had a dozen of them, long and slender, most beautifully made, in my quiver. I carried also a double-headed axe with which to defend myself when my javelins were gone, and a little sword, a handy little skewer if all else failed me.

As we rumbled toward the enemy, I heard a music upon the wind like no music I had ever heard before: a single note, piercing and fierce, that began amazingly faintly but grew and grew until it filled all the air. It was something like the keening sounds the women make when they mourn the death of the god Dumuzi at the harvestfestival; but this was no mourning-song. It was bright and fiery and jubilant, and heat and light came from it. I did not need to be told what music this music was: it was the battle-song, bursting from all our souls at once. For we had fused into a single creature with a single mind, now, those of us who charged the Elamites, and out of the heat of that fusion came the silent song that only warriors may hear.

At the same time I felt the aura of the god upon me, the buzzing droning sound within, the golden glow, the sense of great strangeness, that told me that Lugalbanda was stirring within me. I held myself steady and it seemed to me that I was a rock submerged in a swiftly moving dark river, but I was not afraid. Perhaps my consciousness went from me for an instant. But then I was fully awake again, as awake as I had never been in my life. At full gallop we came rushing into the Elamite line.

The Elamites have no chariots. What they have is great numbers, and thick shields, and a thickness of soul that some might call stupidity, but which I think is true bravery. They stood piled up before us, heavy-bearded men with eyes dark as a month without moonlight, clad in gray leather jerkins and holding ugly broad-tanged spears. They had no faces: only eyes and hair. Namhani uttered a great roaring shout and guided my chariot right into their midst.

"Enlil!" we cried. "Agga!" And I: "Inanna! Inanna.t''

The warrior-goddess preceded us, bowling over the Elamites like gaming-posts. They fell shrieking before the hooves of the four asses, and the chariot rose and fell like a vessel laboring in heavy waters as the wheels passed over their fallen bodies. Namhani swung a great long-handled axe with a sharp-angled socket, chopping away with it at any Elamite spearsman who approached us. I gripped the shaft of a javelin in each hand and took my aim. Lugalbanda had told me many times that the task of the vanguard is to destroy the spirit of the enemy, so that the other battle-chariots and the infantrymen behind them can advance more freely. And the best way to achieve that, he said, is to pick out the greatest men of the other side, the officers and the heroes, and slay them first.

I looked about me. I saw mere chaos, a tumult of jostling forms and waving spears. Then I found my man. When my eyes lit upon him, the battle-song grew louder and hotter in my ears, and the glow of Lugalbanda's spirit flared up like the blue flame that comes when date-wine is flung upon a bonfire. That one. There. Kill him and all else will be easy.

He saw me, too. He was a mountain chieftain with hair like black fur, and a shield that bore a demon's face, yellow with blazing red eyes. He, too, understood the importance of killing the heroes first, and I think he had singled me out as a hero, though I was then hardly deserving of any such acclaim. His eyes gleamed brightly; he lifted his spear.

My right arm rose and I cast my javelin without hesitating. The goddess sharpened my aim: the point entered him at the throat, in the small place below his beard and above the rim of his shield. Blood spouted from his lips and his eyes rolled wildly. He dropped his spear and went over backward, furiously kicking his legs.

A great cry, like the sighing of some huge beast, came from the men about him. Several stooped to drag him to safety. That opened a place in the Elamite rank through which Namhani immediately took the chariot. I cast a second javelin with my left hand just as ably as I had the first, and another tall warrior went down. Then we were into the heart of the enemy force, with four or five other chariots flanking us. I saw the men of Kish staring at me and pointing, and though I could not hear what they were saying, they were making god-signs at me, as if they saw a divine mantle in the air above me.

I used all my javelins and did not miss once. Under the force of the charging chariots the Elamites were thrown into confusion, and although they fought bravely their cause was hopeless from the first minutes. One did manage to come up to my chariot and slash at the lefthand-most ass, wounding it badly. Namhani cut the man down with one blow of his axe. Then, leaping out over the poles, the brave charioteer slit the traces with his short-sword, freeing the injured animal so it would not slow us. An Elamite reared up with a spear aimed at Namhani's back, but I took him down with a swing of my own axe, and turned just in time to ram my axe-handle into the gut of one who had hopped upon the chariot from the rear. Those were the only moments of peril. The chariots went on and through, and turned to fall upon the enemy from the rear, and by then our foot soldiers were at work, marching in a frightful phalanx eleven men broad. So went the day for Kish. By nightfall the river ran red with blood and we had ourselves a joyful feast, while the harpers sang of our valor and the wine flowed freely. The next day it took us almost until twilight to divide the booty, there was so much of it.

I fought in nine battles and six small skirmishes on that campaign. After the first battle, my chariot was awarded the second position, behind the general's but ahead of the sons of the king. None of the sons of the king showed anger towarcl me for that. I took some small wounds now and then, but they were nothing, and whenever I cast my javelin it cost some enemy his life. I was not then fifteen years old; but I am of the blood of gods, and that makes a difference. Even my own men seemed frightened of me. When we had won our third battle the general called me aside and said, "You fight like no one I have ever seen. But there is one thing I wish you would not do when you go among the enemy." "And what is that?"

"You cast your javelins with either hand. I wish you would throw them with one hand or the other, but not with both."

"But I can cast equally well with right and left," I said.. "And I think it puts terror into the enemy, when they see me do it."

The general smiled faintly. "Yes, that it does. But my own soldiers see it as well. They are beginning to think that you are more than mortal. They think you must be a god, for no ordinary man can fight the way you do. Which may create problems for me, do you understand? It is a good thing to have a hero among us, when we go into battle, yes; but it can be very discouraging, perhaps, to have a god in our midst. Each man of the army hopes to do miracles of valor each day, and that hope strengthens his arm on the field. But when he knows that he can never be the hero of the day, because he is in competition with a god, it saps his spirit and puts a heaviness upon his heart. So cast your javelins with your right hand, son of Lugalbanda, or with your left, but with one or the other, not both. Do you understand?"

"I understand," I said. And thereafter I tried to use only my right hand in casting the javelin, for the sake of the other men. In the press of battle, though, it is not always easy to remember that one has promised to use only a certain hand when fighting. Sometimes when I reached for a javelin it was with my left hand, and it would have been folly to give it to my right one before casting it. So after a time I ceased to worry about such matters. We won every battle. The general did not speak of it to me again.

I THOUGHT often of Uruk at first, and then less often, and then hardly at all. I had become a man of Kish. In the beginning, hearing reports in Kish of what the army of Uruk had accomplished against the desert tribes or some city of the eastern mountains, I felt a certain pride at what "we" had achieved, but then I noticed that I was thinking of the army of Uruk not as we but as they, and the doings of that army ceased to matter at all to me.

And yet I knew, whenever I troubled to think of it, that my life in Kish was leading me nowhere. I lived at Agga's court as a prince, yes, and when it was the season to make war I was accorded high precedence in the camp, almost as though I were a son of the king. But I was not a son of the king, and I was aware that I had already risen as high in Kish as I was ever likely to go: a prince, a warrior, perhaps one day a general, nothing more. In Uruk I could have been king.

Furthermore I was troubled as ever by the greatness of that chilly gulf that separated me from other men. I had comrades, yes, fellow warriors with whom I could go drinking or.wenching or brawling. But their souls were closed to mine. What was it that cut me off from them? Was it my great size, or my regal bearing, or the godpresence that hovers always about me? I did not know. I knew only that, here as in Uruk, I bore the curse of solitude and had no spell by which I might lift it.

Also thoughts of my mother often crossed my mind. It saddened me that she was fated now to grow old without a son by her side. I sent her little tokens by secret messengers sometimes, and received messages in return from the priests who went as couriers between the cities. She never asked me when I was returning, and yet I knew that that must be uppermost in her mind. Then too I yearned to kneel before the shrine of my father and make the necessary observances to his memory. For though I knew his spirit rode in my soul, and beheld everything that I beheld, nevertheless that did not excuse me from the rites that were due his ghost. I could not perform those rites in Kish. That failure haunted me.

Nor could I banish altogether from my mind the memory of the priestess Inanna, her sparkling eyes, her slender supple body. Each year when autumn came, and it was the time of the Sacred Marriage in Uruk, I imagined I stood in the jostling crowd on the White Platform, seeing king and priestess, god and goddess, showing themselves forth to the people; and bitter anguish rose within me, to think that she would share her bed with Dumuzi that night. I told myself that she had been treacherous to me, or at best faithless; and yet she glowed in my mind and I felt a yearning toward her. The priestess, like the goddess she served and embodied, was a perilous but irresistible figure to me. Her aura was one of death and disaster, yet also one of passion and the joys of the flesh, and something more even than that, the union of two spirits that is the true Sacred Marriage. She was my other half. She knew that and always had known it, from that time I was a boy stumbling around in the dark corridors of the Enmerkar temple. But I was a warrior in Kish, and she was a goddess in Uruk; and I could not go to her, because she had made my life forfeit in the city of my birth through her scheming, or through her thoughtlessness.

In the fourth year of my exile a priest with shaven head, who was newly arrived from Uruk, came to me in Agga's palace and made the goddess-sign 'before me. He took from his robe a little black goatskin pouch and pressed it into my palm, saying, "It is a sign to Gilgamesh the king, from the hand of the goddess."

I had not heard that strange name, Gilgamesh, except once, long ago. And the priest, in using it, made it clear to me who the sender of the pouch must be.

When the priest had departed I opened the pouch in my private chambers. Within it was a small gleaming thing, a seal-cylinder, such as we employ on letters and other important documents. It was cut from a piece of white obsidian so clear that light journeyed through it as easily as through air, and the design carved upon it was intricate and fine, plainly the work of a great master. I called for a scribe and asked him to bring me his best red clay, and carefully I rolled the seal against the clay to see what imprint it made.

There were two scenes depicted on the seal, both drawn from the tale of the descent of Inanna into the land of death. On the one side I saw Dumuzi, dressed in noble garments, sitting proudly on his lofty throne. Before him stands Inanna, clad in sackcloth: she is newly returned from her sojourn in hell. Her eyes are the eyes of death, and her arms are upraised to call down a curse on him; for Dumuzi is the chosen scapegoat whose death will bring about her release from the nether world. The other side of the seal portrayed the sequel to that scene, a cowering Dumuzi surrounded by glowering demons who cut him down with axes, while Inanna looks on in triumph.

I did not think Inanna had sent me that seal merely to awaken in my mind some memory of that great poem. No. I took the sealcylinder to be a sign, aprophesy, a blunt message. It kindled a fire in my soul: the blood began to flow within me like turbulent riverwater, and my heart soared like a bird newly set free from a trap.

But caution returned, after that first burst of excitement. Even if I had read the message rightly, could I trust it, or her? Inanna the priestess had already led me once into peril; and Inanna the goddess, as everyone knows, is the deadliest of the gods. A message that comes from one, under the auspices of the other, might well be an invitation to doom. I must move carefully. That afternoon I sent word to Uruk, by one of my own slaves, saying simply, "Hail, Inanna, great lady of heaven! Holy torch, you fill the sky with light!" It is what the newly enthroned king sings, when he makes his first hymn to the goddess: let her see in that what she chose. I signed the tablet with the name she had given me, Gilgamesh, and the royal symbol.

A day or two afterward, Agga called me into the royal thronechamber, that great echoing alabaster-walled room where he liked to sit in state for hour after hour, and said, "Word has come to me from Uruk that Dumuzi the king lies gravely ill."

A joyous surging arose within me like the rising of the waters in the spring. I felt the fulfilling of my destiny now beginning to begin. Beyond doubt, I told myself, this is the confirmation of the message inscribed in pictures on the seal-cylinder. I have read the message rightly: she has already begun to work her deadly spell. And Uruk will be mine.

But to Agga I said only, with a shrug, "That news causes me very little grief."

He shook his head, freshly shaven, brows and beard and all, bald as an egg. He tugged at his jowls and leaned forward so that the pink folds of his bare belly piled one atop the other, and he peered down at me with dark displeasure, whether real or feigned I could not tell. At length he said, "Ah, you invite the anger of the gods, with words like those!"

My cheeks grew hot. "Dumuzi is my enemy."

"As he is mine. But he is an anointed king in the Land, who carries the blessing of Enlil upon him. His person is sacred. His illness should grieve us all: and especially you, a child of Uruk, a subject of his. I mean to send an embassy to Uruk to bear my prayers for his welfare. And I intend you to be my ambassador." "Me?"

"A prince of Uruk, of the line of Lugalbanda, a valiant hero -I could send no one better, not even one of my own sons."

Amazed, I said, "Do you mean to send me to my doom, then? For surely it is not safe even now for me to return to Uruk!"

"It will be," said Agga blandly.

"Can you be certain?"

"Dumuzi suffers with the sickness unto death; you are no threat to him any longer. All Uruk will welcome you, even Dumuzi. There is advantage in this for you, boy: can you not see that?" "If he is dying,, yes. And if he is not?"

"Even if he were not, a safe-conduct is granted to my ambassador. The gods would destroy any city that violated such an oath. Do you think Uruk would dare to lay hands on the herald of Kish?" "Dumuzi would. If that herald were the son of Lugalbanda." "Dumuzi is dying," said Agga again. "There will be need soon of a new king in Uruk. By sending you at this time, I put you into the position most useful to you." He rose slowly from the throne and came down to stand beside me, and laid his arm heavily across my shoulders, as a father might; for in truth he had been virtually a second father to me. Sweat glistened on his scalp. I felt the physical presence of him almost as I might a god's: he was massive, not only in his fleshly bulk but in his deep-seated regal authority. Yet there was the smell of beer on his breath. I did not think Father Enlil would smell of beer, nor An the Sky-father. Quietly Agga said to me, "It is all quite certain. My information comes to me from the highest power in Uruk."

"From Dumuzi, you say?"

"Higher."

I stared at him. "You are in communication with her?"

"We are very useful to one another, your goddess and I."

In that moment the full truth came to me, and it struck me like the fire of the gods, so that the breath was knocked from me for a moment. I heard the droning buzz of the god-aura within my brain.

I saw, enveloping Agga and everything else in the room, a luminous glow, gold with shadows of deep blue within it: the sign of the tempest in my spirit. I trembled. I clenched my fists and struggled to remain upright. What a fool I had been! From the first, Inanna had ruled me. She had engineered the necessity of my flight from

Uruk, knowing I would go to Kish and that during my exile I would make myself ready to replace Dumuzi upon the throne. She and

Agga had conspired that between themselves; and Agga had sent me to his wars and trained me to be a prince and a leader, and now I was ready; and now Dumuzi, no longer needed, was being pushed into the House of Dust and Darkness. I was no hero, but only a puppet, dancing to their tune. I would be king in Uruk, yes: but the priestess would have the power, she and Agga to whom I had sworn the oath. And the son I had engendered upon Ama-sukkul, daughter of the king of Kish, would be king in Uruk after me, if Agga's plan worked its way to its final flowering. So Agga's seed would come to reign in both great cities.

Yet I might still turn all this to my advantage, if I walked warily.

I said, "When am I to set out for Uruk?"

"Four days hence, on the day of the feast of Utu, which is an auspicious time for the commencement of great ventures." Agga's hand still tightly grasped my shoulder. "You will travel in majesty, and they will welcome you with joy. And you will bring with you splendid gifts from me for the treasury of Uruk, in recognition of the friendship that will exist between your city and mine when you are king."

On the eve of the feast of Utu, the moon, when it appeared, was covered by a veil, which is an omen that is widely understood to mean that the king will attain the greatest power. But the moon did not say which king was meant-Agga the king that was, or Gilgamesh the king that would be. That is the great trouble with omens, and with oracles of all sorts: they speak the truth, yes, but one is never sure what that truth truly may be.

MY JOURNEY toward Uruk was like that of a king already enthroned, and my entry into the city was like that of a triumphant conqueror.

Agga placed at my service three of his finest sailing vessels, of the kind used for the sea trade to Dilmun, with great spreading sails of scarlet and yellow cloth that caught the breeze and sped me downriver swiftly and in the grandest style. I had with me a great richness of gifts from the king of Kish-slaves, stone jars of wine and oil, bales of fine fabrics, precious metals and jewels, effigies of the gods. I was accompanied by three dozen warriors as a guard of honor, and by a good many high officials of Agga's court, among them his astrologer, his personal physician, and his steward of wines, who saw to my comfort at each meal. My wife Ama-sukkul did not come with me, for she was just then about to be delivered of my second son. I would never see her again; but I did not know thatthen.

At each town along the river the people came out to hail us as we passed by. They did not know who they were hailing, of course-certainly they did not suspect that the kingly bronze-skinned man who returned their homage with a regal wave was one and the same as the fugitive boy who had had their hospitality four years earlier-but they knew that a fleet such as ours must be an important one, and they stood on the banks shouting and waving banners until we were gone from sight. There were at least two dozen such villages, each of a thousand dwellers or more, the northern ones owing allegiance to Kish, the southern ones to Uruk.

By night the astrologer showed me the stars and pointed out the omens in them. I knew only the bright star of the morning and evening, which is holy to Inanna; but he showed me the red star of war, and the white star of truth. All these stars are planets: that is to say, wanderers. Also he showed me the stars of the northern sky that follow Enlil's way, and those of the southern sky that follow Enki's way, and the stars of the celestial equator, which are those that follow the way of An. He taught me to find the Chariot Star, the Bow Star, and the Fire Star. He showed me the Plough, the Twins, the Ram, and the Lion. And he imparted to me much secret knowledge of the mysteries of these stars, and how to know the revelations they offer. He taught me also the art of using the stars to find one's way at night, which was of great value to me in my later journeyings.

Often! would stand by myself in the darkest hours of the night at the prow of my ship and speak with the gods. I asked counsel of Enki the wise, and Enlil the mighty, and Sky-father An, who rises like the arch of heaven above all things. They granted me great favor by entering my spirit; for I know that the high gods have many things to attend to, and the world of mortal men can occupy very little of their time, just as mortal rulers cannot devote themselves greatly to the needs of children or beggars. But those potent princes of heaven inclined themselves toward me. I felt their presence and it was comforting to me. I knew from that that I was indeed Gilgamesh, that is, He-Who-Is-Chosen; for it is not the business of the gods to grant much comfort, yet they granted it to me as I sailed toward the city of Uruk.

On the morning of the ninth day of the month Ululu I came to Uruk under clear skies and a huge burning sun. Runners had gone ahead, bearing news of my coming, and half the city, so it seemed, was waiting for me when my ships docked at the White Quay. I heard drumming and the sound of trumpets, and then the chanting of my name, my 61d name, my birth-name, which I was soon to drop from me. There were some ten thousand people, I think, crowded along the rim of the Dike of the Ship of An, and flowing from there to the great metal-studded doors of the Royal Gate.

I leaped lightly from my ship, and knelt and kissed the bricks of the ancient dike. When I rose, my mother Ninsun stood before me.

She was wondrously beautiful in the brilliant light, almost like a goddess. Her robes were of crimson interwoven with strands of finely drawn silver, and a long curved golden pin fastened her cloak at her shoulder. In her hair she wore the silver crown of the high priestess of An, set with carnelian and lapis, and glinting with highlights of gold. She looked not a day older than when I last had seen her. Her eyes were shining: I saw in them the warmth that emanates not merely from one's own mother but from great Ninhursag, the fountain of repose, the mother of us all.

She studied me a long while, and I knew she was contemplating, me both as a priestess and as a mother. I saw her seeing the size and power of my body, and the presence that had come upon me in full manhood. There could have been no stronger confirmation of the godhood of Lugalbanda than the godly body of Lugalbanda's son.

After a time she put out her hands to me and called me by my birth-name, and said, "Come with me to the temple of the Skyfather, that I may give thanks for your return."

We walked at the head of a great procession through the Royal Gate and along the Path of the Gods. At each holy place there was a rite to perform. At the small temple known as the Kizalagga a priest wearing a purple sash lit a torch in which spices had been inserted, and sprinkled it with golden oil, and did the rite of the washing of the mouth. At the holy place called the Ubshukkinakku another torch was lit, and pots were broken. Near the Sanctuary of Destinies a bull was sacrificed, and its thigh and its skin were seared and offered up. Then we ascended to the temple of An, where the old high priest Gungunum mixed wine and oil and made a libation at the gate, smearing some of it on the doorsockets and some on the gate itself. When we were withi~n, he sacrificed a bull and a ram, and I filled the golden censers and made the offering to the Sky-father and to all the other deities in their turn.

Throughout all this I asked no questions and spoke no words out of turn. It was like moving through a dream. In the distance I heard the steady beating of the lilissu-drum, that is beaten only in the hour of an eclipse, and at the time of the death of kings; and I knew that Dumuzi the king was dead, and that they were going to offer the kingship to me.