Pretender

CHAPTER 3.

A newly impaled criminal kicked away his life beside the road to Babylon. The vertical pole on which the naked man was mounted dug slowly into his intestines. Enkidu paused to look, for he had not seen many such executions. This particular punishment was less common now than during the generations of Assyria—but specialists still knew exactly how to mount a felon so that he would not die too quickly, despite the pointed shaft that supported his torso via the anus.

A child dashed up to tug at one of the hanging feet. The mother hauled him back, scolding; she was afraid her baby would get tainted blood on his hands and be contaminated. Genii were always present, looking for a chance to take over the body of a careless person.

Enkidu realized he had led too sheltered a life. He was sickened by this display. Surely a quick death would have sufficed; why make any man suffer so deliberately?

He turned south and put the matter out of his mind. He had to, lest it torment him unduly. Executions were not his business.

The road to Babylon continued southward from the left bank of the Euphrates River, straight through the open gate of the invasion-proof outer ramparts and on into the ground between the walls. Enkidu was footsore and short of temper, and that roadside scene had not improved his outlook.

It was later than he had planned to arrive at this city at the center of the world. He would barely have time to seek out Aten’s temple before nightfall. But Enkidu was glad to be so nearly there. His spirits rose as he passed through the outer gates. Surely it would not take him too long to find it. Once he got on the Processional Way…

He discovered with new wonder that the road stretched ahead for more than a thousand paces before reaching the walls of the city-proper. Already it was clear that Babylon was vaster than he had imagined. Open barley fields, great groves of palms—within the outer walls!

He thought of Cyrus the Persian, whom Babylon had expected for some years now. When he came—if he came—Cyrus would find the walls stout. If he should actually succeed in breaking through the outer wall, he would still be excluded from the city proper. This entire area could be flooded at will, Enkidu had heard, though he had not realized the scope of the project. He saw that ground level was scarcely higher than the river here, and a large canal cut through the center of the enclosure.

Closer to the city proper there were houses and cross streets, the overflow of the original establishment. Traffic increased: tradesmen in yellow tunics, ragged loafers, men on the backs of tall half-wild asses. Two chariots of the city garrison swept grandly by. Enkidu stopped in his tracks to admire the magnificent black horses with their flying manes. A merchant’s cart clattered abruptly around a corner on two wheels. Enkidu jumped back, avoiding a leather-bound wheel by a finger’s breadth. Ah, commerce!

He looked down when he felt the surface change under his sandals. Large flagstones of fine limestone and red breccia formed the pavement now, and every slab bore an inscription. He squatted, heedless of the jostling, to read the angular wedge-writing: NEBUCHADNEZZAR, KING OF BABYLON, SON OF NABOPOLASSER, KING OF BABYLON AM I. THE BABIL STREET I PAVED WITH BLOCKS OF SHADU STONE FOR THE PROCESSION OF THE GREAT LORD MARDUK. MARDUK, LORD, GRANT ETERNAL LIFE.

Enkidu smiled. Marduk was master of Babylon, as surely as Ishtar was its mistress. But was it for the glory of the god that this inscription had been imprinted, or for that of the former king? This was the beginning of the Processional Way. His heart quickened and his eyes strained eagerly ahead.

The Way stretched before him—magnificent, incredibly wide, lined with temples and what must be palaces. The structures were white and gold and the broad earth between them was alive with red and yellow and green paintings, all laid out in leisured order. The sky above looked even bluer here than elsewhere. Truly, this was a city the gods themselves might proudly inhabit. But where was the temple of Aten?

He had realized before he came that Aten’s temple would not be great and showy like Shamash’s or the others. Yet he was vaguely disappointed to have his expectation confirmed.

But he really couldn’t afford disappointment until he was sure. There was still time to search out the temple in the city proper. Perhaps it was farther along on the Processional Way, and perhaps it was grand after all…

The renowned inner fortifications rose to the height of twelve tall men and more above the water level of the moat—a massive wall of sun-baked brick, with a roadway on top along which charged a chariot of the garrison. Already he could see what must be the famous lions, and above them frequent towers reared over battlements three times the height of a man. Archers at their summits could peer down some ninety feet. This resembled a mountain chain more than it did any human structure!

Pilgrims and tourists squeezed around him as they crossed the moat. The river wandered to the right, but straight ahead loomed the north entrance to the great city. The Processional Way, he could see, passed into and directly through the gate of the goddess of battle and fertility. The Gate of Ishtar.

It would traverse Babylon’s center, he knew, this most famous avenue in all the world. It would be garnished by ornate temples inside; but first it had to feed itself into the tiny mouth of the fortress wall. On each side ran a magnificent enameled frieze with sculptured lions. They looked about to jump out of their bas-relief—some enameled in white, with yellow manes, and others yellow with red manes. There were some sixty on each side. Their jaws were open in macabre welcome to the stranger entering the city.

Enkidu took it all in, hard pressed to keep from running ahead like a puppy to sniff out new wonders. There would be time for such touring, he knew—after he had found the temple of his god.

The ramparts thrust up again, mound on mound, tower on tower. Square. Powerful. Beautiful. At last: the Gate of Ishtar itself. He pressed on in, and found himself between two close walls.

This interval was lighted by sunlight from above. Enkidu looked up—and spied silhouettes of enormous kettles hanging beside myriad narrow slits. He shuddered: in time of war those frightful vats would be filled with boiling oil, and skilled archers would be stationed behind the embrasures. What army would dare to come against these ready instruments? Woe to the soldier who invoked the wrath of Ishtar, most powerful and temperamental of goddesses!

The walls below the skylights were at least forty feet above the stone pavement at the ground level. Enkidu felt like a toy figure in this lofty enclosure. The bricks were glazed, and superimposed on them were fantastic sculptures in relief: great snorting bulls, life sized, brilliantly enameled and seeming to charge out at the intruders. Alternating with these were dragons, their sinuous bodies writhing out, nostrils flaring, fangs threatening. Rank on rank of these captive animals lined the walls, dozens of them, sixties of them, each an individual masterpiece of decoration.

The inner door stood open—solid planks of cedar, covered at the edges with copper, with strong bronze hinges embedded in its surface.

Beyond this door lay Babylon.

And Aten.

Yes, it was impressive, NK-2 agreed. It was amazing what substantial edifices could be constructed of such crude base materials. Yet this society remained at least a millennium from the development of true space travel, unless phenomenal breakthroughs occurred.

He was tempted to extend his penumbra and check for Station A-10 directly—but as always the spectre of enemy presence inhibited him. He would be vulnerable when extended, and an enemy infiltrator would be well versed in detection and combat techniques. Better to stick well within the anonymous shelter of his host until he was quite certain of the station.

It wasn’t as though this host lacked incentive. It would be impossible to stop the host from searching for A-10 at this point! NK-2 could well afford to ride. What was a few more hours, after sixteen years?

By evening Enkidu had not come upon Aten’s temple, but his eagerness had not abated. There was so much to see! He still paused many times to stare up at Etemenanki, the towering ziggurat of seven colors that dominated the city’s sky. His footsteps had taken him to the Temple of Marduk the Creator, richest of shrines—and on past it. Time enough later to present himself there. This day he would step up to the shrine of Aten himself, and Aten’s would be the first temple in Babylon that he would enter. Yet where was this shrine? Merkes?

The Merkes was a closed residential district, the oldest part of the city. It had been planned in spacious squares—but the ancient builders had not reckoned on its now-teeming numbers. It was packed to overflowing with citizens.

Enkidu gaped at the houses. He had seen double-level dwellings before—but these were three and four stories high, with small walled gardens and, he presumed, deep wells in their courtyards. As he strode on in his quest, the houses became poorer. Some of their walls had partly fallen in, exposing the sunbaked bricks beneath the higher quality facing, and the roofs looked long unclayed. Could Aten’s temple possibly be amid such debris?

He became aware that fewer people jostled him. The streets were clearing as men and women disappeared behind their red doors. It was late, and he was tired, and still he had not come upon the temple of his god!

He stepped onto an alleyway paved with flagstones well worn but firm, and saw that it led toward a temple. His spleen glowed once again with hope and he hastened his steps.

The altar faced the entrance. This was not Aten’s temple! Alluring priestesses stared at him discreetly from beside it. This had to be the temple of Ishtar of Agade. Enkidu looked at it in mingled appreciation and consternation, feeling foolish. He resumed his search.

Lost in the city’s splendors, exalted with his inner purpose, Enkidu had taken little thought for his night’s lodging. He had expected to find the temple within this stupefying city, and now that he had failed he was out of sorts. His feet were sore from hours of walking on hot hard pavements. How could the day have fled so swiftly?

The tall, shabby houses cast long, long shadows, and the sky was darkening. Only a scattering of people were still abroad. He intercepted a hurrying townsman—a tanner’s apprentice, from his smell and appearance—and inquired directly: what way should a stranger turn his feet in order to arrive at the Temple of Aten?

The youth’s eyes widened. He drew back, gave a blank stare, and pushed on past Enkidu quickly.

Enkidu drew similar responses from the other folk of Babylon, what few he could find to ask.

Twilight came over the city. Stars began to sparkle like lamps being lit in distant windows. It occurred to Enkidu that he might be forced to defer his visit to Aten’s temple until morning. He began to consider where he might lodge for the night.

The Temple of Marduk, of course. He would go there, present his credentials, accept their hospitality. He knew where Marduk was, at any rate.

Yet he was reluctant to visit Marduk first. Aten was the god who had drawn him to Babylon. Enkidu slowed his pace, considering his alternatives. Could he engage a room at an inn? For how much? He was not sure of the going rates in such a city. Despite his education, he remained a country lad. Still, he reasoned: half a shekel should be more than sufficient for a night’s room and a meal or two. He had fifteen of the silver half-sheckel coins on his person, and three full shekels. And other things of value. He tightened his finger on his clay tablet and looked about him.

He saw only closed doors.

It was dark now. Countless stars were out, and the half-moon rode high in the sky. The luminous arch had dimly materialized, spanning the entire sky, fascinating him as it always did. The planet Ishtar glowed in the west, seeming as close as fruit ripe for the plucking.

The street was far from divine, in contrast. Its tomb-like silence was broken only by the scurryings of rats and the barks of stray dogs that competed for street scavengings.

Enkidu had passed one or two places that might be inns. He struck out northward.

But the gate that separated Merkes from the rest of the city was now closed and locked. Enkidu’s shouts and bangings brought neither notice nor reply from the gatekeeper, if indeed there were one. Some system!

He would have to remain the night in Merkes.

He headed southward again with some vague plan of walking until morning or perhaps finding some place to sit or lie in the open, though he did not relish sullying his white cloak with the offal of the streets. But he was too tired to walk much longer, and it was not safe to stay out with one’s silver…

The streets continued to narrow as he moved on with something like panic supplanting his weariness. The paving ended and the houses closed in to a solid mass, one connected to the next—windowless, forbidding, gloomy. The only evidence that life went on behind the palmwood doors was the occasional openings and spewing out of table refuse. The street was in fact buried in offal and debris. The leavings of countless eaten shellfish crackled underfoot, and each step was a hazard of broken bricks half buried in settled clay. In some places the street level rose above that of the door stills, for the street was built of trampled refuse.

He had just dodged another post-priandal emission when another footfall crackled not far distant. He peered toward the sound.

A figure was approaching him, but the moon was behind it so that he could not see it clearly.

Enkidu stood very still. No point in inviting the attentions of a possible cutpurse.

As the person approached he could just make out a long, plain tunic, but it concealed the bodily outlines. The face seemed smooth. A woman? He could not tell her age in the shadow.

She eyed him boldly, perhaps noting the richness of his cloak, the quality of cloth in his shawl, his knee-length tunic, his headband, and his soft leather sandals. Or was it his face she contemplated: the high-set eyebrows that people claimed lent his narrow face a look of half surprise, the dark brown eyes, the young man’s beard that half-concealed his cleft chin? He knew he was not precisely handsome, of course; still—“One shekel,” she said. Enkidu realized that he had been approached by a prostitute.

He was in no mood for such wares. Moreover, she did not wear the mark of a registered courtesan of the Temple of Ishtar, so she was probably diseased. He turned away. All he wanted was a place to spend the night.

Reacting instantly to his look of distaste, she caught his arm. “Half a shekel.”

Enkidu angrily shrugged off her hand. He was not trying to bargain! But then another thought struck him. “Where may a stranger spend the night?”

Her eyes appraised him cynically. “The night? Two shekels!”

He caught her meaning. “Not with you!” he grunted, at once embarrassed and exasperated. “I want to sleep—no more. A room for the night, alone.”

She stared noncommittally until he brought out a bright shekel, its head of Nabonaid frowning in the shadow.

She took it without a word and turned. He followed her down the alley and into a nondescript dwelling. Even in the darkness of the inner passage he could see its degenerate state. The thin clay lining the walls had cracked and fallen down to be trampled into the dirt floor, and the unbaked bricks behind it were crumbling. They passed into a courtyard whose stench heralded the stacked tiles of an untended privy. Next to that, great jars were filled with water for drinking and household use. A standard arrangement. Crude steps cut into the courtyard wall led to the upper stories.

Enkidu wondered what kept the top floor from settling down into the bottom, since the house was so close to collapse, but he took a breath and mounted the steps. It was only for a night. He took his blank room on the second floor, not even asking for a lamp.

Strange that this city, rich with its temples and palaces and ziggurats, should neglect the wants of its living masses. The silver and gold outlay for just one temple, out of the half-hundred in Babylon, could rebuild the entire Merkes. But the voices of the priests were ever louder than those of the needy.

As he removed his rich outer tunic so as not to foul it on the filthy palm-bough mattress on the floor Enkidu was glad he had no light. He could not see the racing roaches that he knew were disturbed and intrigued by his presence. He folded the tunic carefully, brushed a space clear with the side of his hand, and set the material down beside him. He weighted it with the clay tablet. His money pouch he kept on his body, not trusting it elsewhere.

As he lay in the silence, his nostrils pinched by the close odor of cramped quarters in this old city, of stale sweat and rind of milk spilled in the mattress, the droppings of rats and fat roaches, his hand reached out to touch the tablet beside him. As his long sensitive fingers passed over the wedge-shaped indentations in its surface, as he read it in the dark, the discomforts and ugliness of his surroundings faded.

This was the script that summoned him to a new position and made possible his search for a new god.

Babylon, whose ancient beginnings were lost in legend, was the city of gods. King Nabonaid, usurping his way to power six years after Nebuchadnezzar, was a scholarly, unpopular man, more concerned with the religions of remote antiquity than with the Persian menace of today. He had ordered the idols of the realm brought to the capital. He stored the foreign gods in his own palace and allowed only the deities of Babylon to remain in their temples. Enkidu well understood the fury of the outlying worshipers thus deprived of their holy objects, yet he sympathized also with the king, who understood that there were more gods than Marduk and who claimed to be protecting them against the onslaughts of the barbarous Medes.

If the god Aten were in Mesopotamia, he had to be here in Babylon. No idol of consequence had escaped the summons of the king. That simplified his search. No, Enkidu held no malice against Nabonaid!

Enkidu’s eyes closed in silent worship and prayer.

Aten.

NK-2 extended his penumbra. The host was alone now, making it safe, and asleep, making it easy. It was necessary to remove his perceptions from confinement within the host periodically, lest he become stunted. It was too easy to forget, during this extended habitation in a solitary wild animal, that his essence was not physical. But for the fact that he lacked most perceptions while discorporate, NK-2 would happily have spent the entire period free of any host.

The stars were there: the host’s recent memory made them clear. Home!

But first he had to find Station A-10.