Pretender

CHAPTER 4.

Enkidu awoke, chilly and stiff, to the morning light filtering in from the bleak courtyard. He reached for his tunic—and learned the price he had paid for his lodging.

Tunic and tablet were gone.

He jumped up, snatching for his money pouch. It, too, was gone, its cord neatly cut. He was left with no more than his sandals and his coarse under-tunic. What an innocent he had proved to be!

The tablet—an illiterate harlot could have no use for that! Perhaps he could salvage some of his treasure. The money, of course, was gone—but that could be replaced, as could the tunic. But the tablet—He dashed down the steps, almost tumbling, not pausing in the courtyard to splash his face with water.

He found it by the front door, carelessly tossed aside as valueless. Valueless! He exclaimed joyfully—but sobered instantly, for the cover was broken.

He contemplated this disaster, leaning against the wall in his undergarment. This tablet, stamped with the seals of the priests of Marduk, could not be replaced. It was a letter recommending the bearer as a scribe to the Temple of Marduk in Babylon. Such a letter, sealed in its clay envelope, was an inviolable guarantee. It could not be forged. With such a recommendation, his position in the Temple of Marduk was virtually assured. Without it—Enkidu pressed his wrist against his forehead, as though to stave off his sudden anguish. A broken tablet was worthless. He would have to return to Calah for another, if he hoped to enter the service of the local priesthood. Calah was a month’s journey distant, even with money and a camel.

He brushed off the inner section of the letter and tucked it and the cover fragments under his arm. His only chance was to find the woman and bring her before the priests of Marduk to testify to what she had done: stealing and breaking the tablet. This could hardly be the first time an innocent stranger had been robbed in Babylon; they might accept it, at least until confirmation was obtained from the Calah temple.

Daylight was new, but already the hawkers were in the streets, and with them the beggars and menials going about their business. Enkidu, too, had business this morning. He took note of the house’s location and set out in search of authority.

The alleys of the Merkes differed sharply from the splendors of the Processional Way. Were both of them part of the same city?

His mishap could be set right, now that he had assessed the situation realistically. Cheered, Enkidu became aware of a wisp of savor. Fresh river fish, boiled in oil. The hearty appetite of youth asserted its claim. He had not eaten since early yesterday, and he was ravenous.

He followed the scent to a bandy-legged oldster hawking hot fish from a big tray balanced on his head. The savory river fish were almost under Enkidu’s nose before he remembered that he had no wherewithal. He had a wild impulse to snatch a fish and make off with it. He half-raised his hand toward the tray. But it would be a great breach of dignity. Besides, the old man turned without warning; his sharp black eyes raked Enkidu up and down. He glared at the disheveled young man abroad in his undergarments, and moments later he was several paces down the street.

Enkidu found time to marvel as he passed up one smelly street and down another that the city was going about its business just as though Cyrus the Persian were no threat. Yet Cyrus was a fact that Babylon must one day reckon with. Probably soon. Even a futile siege was no laughing matter.

He found authority. Burly guards in the uniform of the King’s service marched down the streets, herding before them a ragged multitude of beggars and thieves. Enkidu waited for the wailing multitude to pass, then stepped up to the nearest guard. This was a full-bearded veteran, scarred on bare arms and legs, with a conic helmet and a military tunic extending halfway down his brawny thighs. Heavily laced boots came up to the man’s knees, and indeed his tread was solid.

“Well, what is it with you?”

“I must take a woman to the temple,” Enkidu said, finding the explanation awkward. “Her house is down the street, but she’s gone—”

The trooper was unimpressed. “Plenty others,” he grunted. “Just as good. Try Ishtar’s temple.”

“No. You see she broke my tablet—”

The soldier looked him over, noting his partial dress and tousled hair. “Broke your tablet?”

“She stole my tunic and my money, but it’s the tablet that hurts the most,” Enkidu explained. Then he began to understand the expression on the man’s face.

“Broke your tablet!” the guard repeated. Laughter rumbled up from his deep throat. “So that’s what you call it. Was it too brittle!”

Enkidu took his first serious look at the guard, instead of the uniform. He saw the incipient brutality of the man, the hard, glittering eyes, now screwed up with cynical mirth. He should have been alert for crude interpretations.

“I’ll bet it hurt…”

“My identification document,” Enkidu said with what dignity he could salvage, and showed the tablet. Everywhere, it seemed, the unlettered were lewd. “The envelope has been violated. That’s why I need—”

“Yeah,” the guard said, still grinning. “That’s what happens when you fool with these peasant sluts. Violated—” His face sobered at last. “All right, boy, we’ve had our little joke. Now just you get in line with the rest.”

“You don’t seem to understand—” Enkidu protested. But the man put his hand behind his pointed helmet, tilted it forward, and shoved him into the center of the street. “What are you—”

He was rewarded by a sharp slap on the buttocks with the flat of a sword. “Get along now, boy,” the guard said amiably. “Good food, good wine, good bathing up ahead!”

Enkidu found himself brutally herded with the motley crowd scrambling before the soldiers’ prodding. The people were not, he now saw, quite the rabble he had supposed. Some men were emaciated, some diseased. One was too old to walk upright, another was blind. There were a few women: old, snaggle-toothed, bitter. The thing they all had in common was evident: extreme poverty. Bare feet, hollow cheeks, the men without headcloths and the women in rags, clad worse than slaves. Thieves were far better dressed than these!

Now he was one of them. Where were they being driven?

The stumbling group was herded out of the Merkes district to the avenue of Sin; it jogged south to the avenue of Marduk, out the gate of Marduk through Imgur-Bel, the lofty inner wall of Babylon, and on to a part of the outer city Enkidu had not seen the day before.

Enkidu took the blind man’s arm, guiding him safely beyond the wide moat. The guards seemed indifferent to the fate of the ragged group of human refuse so long as it kept moving. Now they left the street and approached the dilapidated huts between the walls. Here was the slimy bank of the Kebar Canal.

“There!” a guard guffawed. “Eat and drink your fill!” A shove sent Enkidu sprawling knee deep in stagnant water. He choked on the overpowering stench of human excrement and other filth. All about him were mounds of sickening refuse. This, it was obvious, was the dump, the sewer, the emptying place for putrid garbage, animate and other. Vultures circled above.

“Mercy!” the blind beggar cried. “I will die here!”

The guard Enkidu had first encountered grasped the man’s frail tunic, tearing it. He shoved, and the victim tumbled backward into the canal, there to splash helplessly until others waded into the foul water to pull him out.

Enkidu had been too stunned, too confused, and too ignorant to protest effectively when first mistaken for these people. Now he realized that he was one of them, in spirit, and this treatment was beyond toleration. Before he could think things out properly, he was charging up the slippery bank, sandals lost in the muck.

The powerful guard was just turning away as Enkidu bashed at him with the tablet and knocked that conical helmet askew. The hardened clay shattered, forever destroying the message upon it, but he was too excited to care. He grabbed for the guard’s sword, looking into the man’s dazed and angry face.

Something struck him from behind.

The soldiers were methodical and very careful. Enkidu never quite lost consciousness. Only when they stripped him and spotted the mark on his shoulder did the expert application of pain cease. Then, finally, they allowed him to slump to the ground, retching and spewing up the watery contents of his unfed stomach, while they huddled in conference.

They had not suspected that their captive bore the spade—the brand of a slave to the Temple of Marduk.