Pretender

CHAPTER 2.

The boy came from a peasant hut on the Tigris River, at the fringe of the mighty Babylonian Empire. This region was increasingly menaced by the barbarian Medes. Yet what was that to his family, already so deeply in debt to the temple of Marduk that the charioteers could hardly bring more sorrow!

He was six. He had been born in the year Nebuchadnezzar died, and already he understood deprivation and hunger. His father labored all day in the hot barley fields, but lacked barley for his own bread. What was there for a boy to do?

He approached the great mound with a certain expectant thrill, though he had been here many times before. It was forbidden; that was why he came. This was the ruin of Nineveh, capital of the ancient Assyrian Empire. Well he knew its savage history, for it was still told by the old men of the region, some of whom claimed to have been there at its destruction.

Where was the god Asshur now, who had governed the world from this spot? Where was his power, his terror, his rows on rows of bloodstained stakes, the ghastly glee of his conquests?

Only these stones remained, the mighty rubble of a god.

The boy was looking for a god, or at least a shedu, an invisible winged bull to stay by his side and protect him from harm. And to protect his family too, lest he be forced to spend the rest of his life working off his father’s debt to the temple.

Something caught his eye. He would have missed it, had it not been directly in his path, for there was something extremely inconspicuous about it and a bit repulsive. It was a dead animal. Not a cat, exactly, for it seemed to have little hands; and not quite dead, for it shuddered. What was it doing here?

He squatted before it, perversely fascinated. He had schooled himself to look for shedu which were always where one never looked. This funny cat was surely hard to look at; could it be a shedu? But it had no wings, and it was dying. It could hardly be a powerful guardian spirit.

Unless. A god had ruled this city and the world, and that god had perished. Why could not a shedu perish too? Perhaps this was a strong spirit who had strayed into the forbidden region and been smashed by the ghost of Asshur, so that it lost its wings and became visible. If it were taken away from here, would it regain its strength? Would it then be a faithful shedu? He reached out to poke it, hesitated, then jeered himself into doing it. A dying animal—what harm could it do him?

His finger seemed to tingle as it touched the odd fur. Be my host! Startled, the boy drew back. But he was not hurt, and he had heard something. Something very like a shedu, maybe. It had not been unfriendly.

Cautiously, he touched the cat again.

Be my host!

This time he maintained contact. It was not a voice, exactly, yet it spoke. A soundless voice. The voice a spirit might have.

“Are you my shedu?” he asked. “Will you stay beside me wherever I go and grant my wishes?”

But the voiceless voice just kept begging him to be his host, whatever that meant.

“Oh, all right,” he said impatiently. “But you have to get money for my father to pay off the debt to the temple, and give me the magic power to read, so that I’ll be better than all the other boys in the village, and make me a fancy noble when I grow up, and, and—”

But the shedu didn’t seem to be paying attention. Magic creatures were funny that way. You had to learn how to handle them.

It was difficult, for this was no tame thoroughbred host, but a wild alien one, untrained in the prerogatives of hosting. NK-2 had made the transfer from necessity, not choice, for his original host was completely out of commission. The exchange had exhausted him; he required an extended period of rest while he adapted to the alien configuration and restored his resources. Only his umbra had survived the process; it would take time to develop a new penumbra. Meanwhile, perceiving through these strange senses was difficult; thinking with this unfamiliar brain was worse; and actual control of the unruly host was out of the question. The best he could do now was imprint a single fundamental urge: the need to locate Station A-10 before the relief craft arrived. Then hang on, letting the host take it from there.

Aten. He had to find Aten. Before something happened. Before a long time passed, because that was when it would happen. Wherever Aten was.

Enkidu shook his head. He could make no sense of it, but that didn’t much matter. He had a mission.

He also had a shedu, he thought. It hadn’t done much. It was just a kind of presence that resembled the grumbled warnings of a cautious old man: don’t do this, don’t do that, it might lead to trouble somehow. It was annoying to an adventurous boy, and he tried to ignore it.

One day the priest of Marduk came to his house. The local temple was small, since Marduk himself resided far away in Babylon. But the debt was great—and there was no way to pay.

Enkidu looked at the seamed face and weary stoop of his father as though for the first time. The priest was making some obscure threat, and his father was appalled and his mother terrified, and his younger sisters were beginning to whine because of the general tension, but still there was no way to pay. If only he had found a decent shedu, he could order it to lift up that mean priest and cast him headfirst into the Tigris!

“Choose,” the priest said relentlessly. “Choose—or I will choose for you!” And he looked meaningfully toward the two little girls.

Then the shedu spoke. Enkidu, transfixed by his parents’ hopelessness and fear, yielded to the nagging urge and echoed its sentiment: “Take me! I am young, I can work, I can learn. I am worth more than both my sisters—more than all the shekels you have loaned my father!”

Surprised, the priest studied him. Enkidu was almost paralyzed with fear, but the shedu forced him to hold up his chin and stare boldly back.

“Perhaps you are,” the priest agreed, smiling.

NK-2 was exhausted again. He had been recovering nicely, considering the liabilities of his residence in an alien host, and had been ready to work on his penumbra. He had formulated a long-range three-fold thrust, to execute once his full strength had been recovered. First: strengthen the host’s incentive to find Station A-10, so that this became the most important single objective in life. Second: free the host from his circumstantial and intellectual limitations, so that he could indulge that incentive. Third: arrange to travel to Babylon, the most likely present location of A-10.

The first was merely a matter of judicious and continued reinforcement, to be peaked about a year before the repair craft was due. Opportunity for the second had come unexpectedly, before he was ready for it; he had had to exert control for a key moment though it devastated his scant present resources. But it was done: he had transferred the boy from his backplanet habitat to a major artery of this society’s power structure: the temple of Marduk.

By this world’s time-scale, he had seventeen years in which to accomplish the third. Considering the difficulties entailed, it was an adequate but hardly generous amount. He should be able to train the boy to a certain extent while that boy grew into manhood. Though hardly comfortable in this wild host, he was secure. He would not have to change hosts again. This was fortunate, because he doubted he would be able to manage a second such change if he had to. The near-death of his original host before he departed, the adverse conditions of his transfer, the backwardness of this culture—all these reduced both his capacities and his opportunities drastically. It would be long before he recovered his full powers, especially if he had to exercise control too often. What was routine for a conditioned host was a feat of incredible stamina for a wild one.

He knew now what had happened to the city in which A-10 had been located. Nineveh had been the capital—but Assyria had been overthrown by its subject city Babylon in conjunction with the fierce Medes. This host had been born fifty years after that destruction. NK-2’s charts had been about a century old—quaint as it was to date a galactic chart in terms of the revolutions of one inconsequential planet—so had not reflected the local change. Now the effective capital of the world was Babylon.

He would have to rest for a few months, as this recent effort following so close after the transfer had brought him to his dimmest point ever. The host would have to look out for himself until NK-2 was ready and able to make further suggestions.

The temple was strange to him, but the priests were not unkind. They deloused him and oiled him and gave him a bed in one of the many alcoves surrounding the main temple. They fed him regularly, so that he soon grew alert and sleek, and they did not brand him until he tried to run away.

This was Calah, actually quite close to his home village as distances went within the empire. In time his homesickness wore off, but his discontent continued and grew. He did not like the enforced discipline of the temple!

At first he was put to work as a kitchen slave, carrying the great masses of bread from the oven, cleaning the floors and even learning to milk one of the temple goats. But his active mind often strayed from such tasks. He did not always remember to remove the bread from the oven in time, so that it burned and tasted bad. When he brought in a pail of milk with fresh droppings in it the priest in charge became very upset for no good reason. But he did not beat Enkidu, strangely.

Instead, the priest talked with him, inquiring the reason for his carelessness. This was not the one who had taken him slave in payment for his father’s debt, but a gentler man. Still, Enkidu did not dare tell him about his odd shedu, that had come to him amid the ruins of Nineveh and bade him find Aten. Aten was surely a rival god, and that could anger Marduk. But he did confess his ambitions: to have fine clothing and to be a literate man, set apart from the common peasants.

Intrigued, the priest brought a tablet bearing lines of sharp-pointed imprints. “Like this?” he asked softly, and Enkidu nodded, abashed at his own presumption, for not even his father could read. But the shedu was nagging him again, suggesting his answers. The kind priest questioned him further, then led him to another part of the temple, one Enkidu had not seen before. Here clay block-benches were fixed to the floor, and beside each was a large earthenware receptacle. Boys of various ages sat on these benches and worked busily on soft clay tablets before them, while a schoolmaster stood in front and barked directions.

“These boys are learning to be scribes,” the priest explained. “It is a very difficult trade, Enkidu, and many years will pass before they graduate. Some will fail to learn well enough and will be sent home in disgrace. Tupshar here is a hard master. But he will treat you fairly if you try hard. Do you wish to undertake this training?”

Enkidu stared wide-eyed at the jars containing clay, at the little water-troughs set in the benches, at the busy styli. He saw a boy sharply reprimanded for an inconspicuous error. Another snickered, and was rapped smartly on the arm. He heard loud instructions: words read by the master, that the boys struggled to record just so in their soft tablets, carefully imprinting the little wedge marks on the surface. He saw the sweat gleaming in the faces of many, though they were only sitting still and the room was cool, and he knew that they were tense and afraid of Tupshar. He had had no idea that literacy was so difficult to achieve.

The shedu prompted him. “Yes.”

“Then remain here,” the priest said quietly. “I will inquire again in a few days. It is a demanding school, and none of these boys is slave.”

Indeed they were not. Wealthy men had sent their sons to this school attached to the temple of Marduk at Calah, and these boys did not fancy the equal company of a branded slave. But Tupshar tolerated no inequalities; all felt the weight of his discipline alike.

Enkidu realized that his shedu was on the job. He had asked it to repay his family’s debt, and the debt had been paid. He had asked it to make him literate—and here he was, in training to be a scribe. He had supposed the gifts would be granted outright, if at all; now he understood that they were given only when he was willing to work for them. The shedu merely showed the way. In time it would make him free and rich, also—and then he would go in search of the god Aten.

Beside this dream, the taunts of his fellows were as nothing. He applied himself with gusto to writing and mathematics and all other studies deemed essential to men of quality. Enkidu learned rapidly and became, in time, Tupshar’s star pupil.

And the shedu was ever there, guiding him through the moments of crisis, nagging him to do better. He cursed it frequently, but in the end obeyed, for when he did what it wanted it left him alone. Without it, he realized grudgingly, he would never have come as far as he had.

As a young man he was given leave to return to his village for a visit. He remained a slave, while the villagers were free—but he wore rich robes now and spoke with eloquence and had a personal attendant, while the villagers were ignorant and poor. His father was dead and his mother and one sister had been sold outside the village in cancellation of new debts dating from the year the barley harvest failed. His other sister was now big with her third or fourth child and barely remembered him.

Enkidu was almost unable to converse with anyone in his home village, for no one there knew anything of mathematics, astronomy, economics or other civilized disciplines. They only knew how to irrigate their fields (incompetently), cultivate their grain (wastefully), and patch their squalid huts (leakily) with palm boughs. He observed the thriving lice that inhabited their hair, the snakes and rodents that shared their sweltering sun-baked domiciles, and their ubiquitous naked and hungry children. He turned away.

Even his old home was gone, the sundried bricks dissolved in one of the floods. He had all his childhood wishes, now—but he had lost the world he had known. Nothing remained for him but his quest for Aten.

When his host was twelve years old, NK-2 took note of a shift in the balance of contemporary power: Cyrus the Persian threw off his Mede overlord and went on to conquer the Mede empire itself. Four years later Cyrus also conquered Lydia, to the other side of Babylonia. Now Cyrus was considering new conquest. It was time to locate A-10.