Sharur was walking back toward his family's shop and home on the Street of Smiths when a fever demon that had been basking on a broken mud brick soaking up heat sprang at him, its batlike wings glistening in the sun. He leaped back so it could not breathe sickness into his mouth and pulled out an amulet marked with the eyes of Engibil, patron god of the city of Gibil.
"Begone, foul thing!" he exclaimed, and made the left-hand gesture every child in the land of Kudurru learned by the age of three -- every child, at any rate, that lived to the age of three. He thrust out the amulet as if it were a spear. "Greater powers than you protect me."
Screeching in dismay, the nasty little demon fled. Sharur strode on, his back straight now with pride. He returned the amulet to its proper loop on his belt. The belt, which also bore a couple of other amulets, a bronze dagger, and a stylus, held up a knee-length linen kilt that was all he wore between stout leather sandals and a straw hat shaped like a short, broad cone. Slaves -- and some freemen of a class poorer than Sharur's -- dispensed with shoes and sometimes with kilt as well. No one went without a hat, not in the land between the Yarmuk and the Diyala.
The streets of Gibil were narrow and winding. Sharur's sandals scuffed up dust and squelched in muck. A farmer coming at him leading a donkey with baskets of beans tied to its back made him squeeze up against the front wall of one of the two-story mud-brick homes lining both sides of the street: a prosperous home, because that front wall was whitewashed. The shiny white coating did not make the sun-baked mud any less rough on the bare skin of his back. Farmer and donkey plodded on, equally oblivious to having annoyed him.
His grandfather's ghost spoke in his ear: "You should follow that fellow and break a board on his head for the bother he caused you."
"It's all right, father to my father. He's on the way to the market square; he had to get by me," Sharur answered resignedly. His grandfather had been quarrelsome while he was alive, and was even more bad-tempered now that no one could break a board over his head.
"If only that fellow had known me in the flesh, I'd have hit him myself," the ghost grumbled. "He deserved it."
"It's all right, father to my father," Sharur repeated, and kept walking.
His grandfather's ghost sniffed. "All right, he says. It's not all right, not even close. Young people these days are soft -- soft, I tell you."
"Yes, father to my father," Sharur said. The ghost, he knew, would keep on haranguing him and trying to meddle in his affairs as long as he lived. He consoled himself by remembering that it would have no power over his children, whenever they might be born, for they would not have known his grandfather alive. And when I'm a ghost myself, he thought, I hope I don't plague the people who recall me.
He turned a last corner and stepped onto the Street of Smiths. It was probably the noisiest street in all Gibil, but he found the racket familiar, even restful, having lived with it all his life. Smiths banged and tapped and hammered and rasped and filed. Fires crackled. Molten metal hissed as it was poured into molds of wet sand.
Behind the racket, power hovered. Smithery was a new thing in the land of Kudurru, and thus in the whole world, however big the world might be. In the days of Sharur's grandfather's grandfather, no one had known how to free copper and tin from their ores, much less how to mix them to make a metal stronger than either. These days, smiths stood on an equal footing with carpenters and bakers and potters and those who followed the other old, established trades.
But smiths were different. The other trades all had their old, established tutelary gods, from Shruppinak who helped carpenters pound pegs straight to Lisin who got spots out of laundry. Smithery, though, smithery was too new for its great power to have coalesced into deities or even demons. Maybe it would, in time. Maybe, too, the smiths would keep the power in their own merely human hands.
Whenever that thought crossed Sharur's mind, it frightened him. If Engibil saw it there, or, worse, if one of the greater deities -- sun god, storm or river goddesses; the ugly, sexless demon that squatted underground and caused earthquakes with its quiverings; many more -- did so, what would they do with the smiths, to the smiths, for seeking to gain power thus? Sharur neither knew nor wanted to find out.
At the same time, though, knowing himself to be a worm in the eyes of the gods, he longed to be a strong worm. His eyes traveled down the Street of Smiths to the lugal's palace at the end of it, the only building in the city that came close to Engibil's temple in size and grandeur. Kimash the lugal gave Engibil rich presents, of course, but he ruled Gibil in his own right, as had his father and grandfather before him.
One or two other cities in the land of Kudurru had lords who were but men. The rest were about evenly divided between towns where ensis -- high priests -- transmitted the local god's will to the people and those where the gods ruled directly. Sharur was glad he did not live in one of those towns. Everyone who did struck him as a step slow.
Thinking of power, he almost walked right past Ningal without seeing her. "Well," she called as he went by. "Don't say hello."
"Hello," he said, and felt very foolish.
Ningal set down the basket of eggs she was carrying back to her father's smithy: had she kept holding it, she couldn't have set both hands on her hips to look properly annoyed. "Sometimes," she said, "I think you live too much of your life inside your head instead of in the world out here."
"Not when I look at you," Sharur said. Ningal's smile said he'd gone partway toward redeeming himself. Like other well-to-do women of Gibil, she wore a linen tunic that covered her from the neck almost to the knee, but it clung to her in the heat and did little to hide her shapely figure. Her eyes sparkled; all her teeth were white; her hair fell to her shoulders in midnight curls. Sharur went on, "With the profit I make from my next trip to the mountains, I'll have enough to pay bride-price to your father."
"How do you know I'll want you to, when you don't even notice I'm here?" she asked with a toss of her head that sent those curls flying.
Sharur felt his cheeks heat, though he doubted Ningal could see him blush. Like her, like everyone in the land between the rivers, he was swarthy, with dark hair and eyes. In Laravanglal, the distant southeastern land whence tin came, the people were the color of dark bread, and men grew beards scanty rather than luxuriant. A few of the mountaineers of Alashkurru had eyes of green or even gray, and hair that might be brown or even, rarely, the color of copper instead of black. More, though, looked like Sharur and his countrymen.
He said, "Well, if you don't, you can always tell your father."
"Do you think he would listen to me? I don't. He's set on marrying me to you, to join our houses together." Ningal's smile showed a dimple in her cheek. "And so I guess I won't bother telling him that."
"Fair enough." Sharur tried hard not to show how relieved he was. He very much wanted the marriage to go forward. As in every other marriage in Gibil, the partners would join at their families' instance, not their own. But Ningal and he had known each other since they were toddlers playing in the dust of the Street of Smiths. They'd always got on well, even as children. And ever since he'd thought of marrying anyone, hers was the face he saw in his mind.
" 'Fair enough'?" she mimicked, exasperated at him again. "Is that the best you can do?"
He knew she wished he were more demonstrative. He took off his hat, then stooped, picked up a handful of dust, and let it fall down into his hair, a gesture of mourning and contrition. "O gracious lady, please forgive your slave," he wailed, his voice cracking convincingly.
Ningal made as if to throw an egg at him. Laughing, she said, "I may -- eventually." She carried the basket into her father's smithery. Sharur watched her hips work under the clinging linen.
Once she was out of sight, he went on to his own house. His father, Ereshguna, was counting leather sacks of ore. "Seventy-two, seventy-three...Oh, hello, son." He got to his feet and bowed to Sharur. The two of them looked much alike, though his face was more strongly carved by the years and gray flecked his hair and elaborately curled beard.
Sharur's younger brother, Tupsharru, also bowed. He held a tablet of damp clay in his left hand, a stylus in his right. "Do you want to finish this lot now, Father, or shall we set it aside for a while?"
"It will keep," Ereshguna answered. "That tablet's not going to dry up if you set it on the table. You'll still be able to write on it after we all have a cup of beer." The jar of beer and several earthenware cups sat on a small table made of golden, fine-grained wood brought down from the mountains of Alashkurru. Only palms and poplars grew in Kudurru. Their lumber, while cheap, was neither lovely nor particularly strong.
Ereshguna poured three cups full. He and his sons murmured thanks to Ikribu, god of barley, and Ikribabu, goddess of brewing, before they drank. The sour beer washed some of the dust from Sharur's mouth. "That's good," he said, and praised the god and goddess again.
"Here, give me a cup, too," his grandfather's ghost said.
"Yes, my father." Ereshguna held the jar over an empty cup and tilted it, not far enough to let more than a couple of drops of actual beer come out. Symbolically, though, it was full. Ghosts dwelt more in the symbolic world than the material one in any case. The efforts of Sharur's grandfather's ghost to drink the actual beer made the cup quiver on the table, but that was all.
"It is good beer," the ghost said, judging by the essence, "but I remember a jar I drank when I was a young man. It -- "
Ereshguna rolled his eyes. He'd heard that story more often than Sharur and Tupsharru put together. It had been boring when his father was alive. It was deadly dull now. At last, the ghost finished and fell silent.
Trying not to show how relieved he was, Ereshguna turned to Sharur and asked, "What do the harness makers say?"
"They will have the new straps ready when we need them, at the price on which we already agreed. I can lead the donkey train to Alashkurru when the goddess Nusku carries the boat of the moon a couple of days past full, as we had planned."
"Good. That's good," Ereshguna said. "We don't want to run low on ore." He and his family brought more copper and tin into Gibil than anyone else, along with whatever other interesting things they found along the way. When Sharur laughed and pointed to the sacks he'd been inventorying with Tupsharru, he shook his head. "Those will go soon enough, my son. Almost all of them are already spoken for. We need more. We always need more."
He pointed toward the clay tablet and stylus Tupsharru had put down. His younger son picked them up again and said, "The last one you counted was number seventy-three."
"Yes, that's right. Seventy-three. It was this one right here. Then Sharur came in." Ereshguna pointed to the next sack and resumed his count: "Seventy-four, seventy-five..." Tupsharru made fresh tally marks in the damp clay.
Sharur listened to the reckoning with half an ear. Inventory was necessary, but not exciting. He was about to go upstairs when a customer came in and gave him something to do. Bowing, he said, "How may I serve you, honored Irmitti?"
Irmitti was a plump man who looked as if his stomach pained him. "I've come to give you another payment on those dozen fancy lamps and the perfumed oil that goes with them you sold me," he said, and tossed Sharur a gold ring. "It should be the last."
Sharur caught it out of the air, hefted it, bit it, and nodded. "It is good gold." He walked over to a small balance and set it in one pan. In the other, he set weights that he took from a cedarwood box. "It weighs one keshlu, and a quarter part, and a half of a quarter part. Let me examine your contract, honored Irmitti. If it is too much, I shall repay to you whatever the excess weight may be."
He rummaged through a basket of clay tablets till he found the one he needed. Syllable by syllable, he sounded out the words written there. The polite smile faded from his face, to be replaced by a polite frown.
"I am sorry, honored Irmitti, but the amount you still owed was three keshlut of gold. The writing is very clear. That means you have left to pay" -- he worked out the answer on his fingers -- "one keshlu's weight of gold, and a half part, and a half of a quarter part. When I have it, I will give you the tablet, and you may break it."
"I will give you the rest of the gold when I have it," Irmitti said. "One keshlu, and a half part, and a half of a quarter part." He repeated the amount several times so he would remember it. Having done that, he went on, "Truly I thought I owed you only this smaller amount."
"Memories can slip," said Sharur, who thought Irmitti was probably telling the truth. He added, "Mine often does," which was not true but was calculated to console the customer. He hefted the clay tablet. "The writing here, though, is the same as it always was. It does not forget. It cannot forget."
As he spoke, he wondered whether writing might not prove an even greater creator of power than smithery. Prayers, invocations, spells...all centered on words. And writing pinned them down. It made them stay as they had always been. And it let a man command more of them than he could hope to do with even the capacious and accurate memory Sharur enjoyed. If that wasn't the raw stuff of power, what was?
Irmitti's thoughts had run along different lines. A discontented look on his face, he said, "My great-grandmother's ghost tells me that, in her time and the time of her father, only a few priests scratched marks on clay. A man's unaided memory was enough to take him through his whole life, and a tablet did not strike like a snake and make him out to be a liar."
"Honored Irmitti, I do not take you for a liar, only for a man who forgot," Sharur said. "We have more things to remember than they did in your great-grandmother's time."
"Life was simpler then," Irmitti said. "Life was better then, I think. I mean no offense to you and your family, but are we better for having so much bronze in the city? The smiths make it into knives and swords, and we kill each other with them. A wood sickle edged with polished stone was good enough for my great-grandfather. Why would anyone need a bronze tool now, when you metal merchants have to travel to the ends of the world to find the stuff the smiths use to make it?"
"You may be right," Sharur said with a small bow. Never insulting a customer was a merchant's first rule. But he did not believe what he was saying, not for a moment. Where new things seemed to frighten Irmitti, they excited him. He could hardly hold still, he so much wanted to point out all the interesting, useful, beautiful things that were easy to accomplish with metal but slow and difficult if not impossible with stone.
After grumbling a little longer, Irmitti left. Ereshguna looked up from his counting and said, "You did well there, son. The worst sort of fool is a man who does not know he is a fool."
"Irmitti could be worse," Sharur said. "Some forget they owe us anything, not how much they owe us. Then the lugal's men have to remind them."
"Oh, yes, I know that, and you are right," Ereshguna said. "But when he talks about sickles edged with stone, from where does he think the stone came? It did not come from the land of Kudurru. Here between the rivers we have water and mud and the things that grow from them, not much else. Merchants brought the stone here, as we bring in ores today. But he does not want to think of that, and so he does not."
"If he wishes for things to be as they were in the time of his great-grandmother..." Tupsharru let that hang, for what he meant was unquestionably something like, He would wish Engibil ruled the city in his own right once more. Saying such things aloud was dangerous. The god might be listening. If he was, he might choose to punish the speaker in any number of unpleasant ways. Or he might even decide to overthrow the line of lugals and resume his direct rule. That was the last thing Sharur and his family wanted; they had gained too much from the changes over the past couple of generations.
Engibil might also be listening to Tupsharru's thoughts. If the god chose to do so, he could go through a man's mind as Sharur had gone through the basket of tablets looking for what he wanted. Engibil had no particular reason to be listening to Tupsharru's thoughts, but that did not mean he wasn't.
Sharur took from his belt the amulet with which he'd routed the fever demon. He covered Engibil's eyes with his own two thumbs for a moment, symbolically masking from the god what was passing in this house. His father and brother imitated the gesture. Each of them looked nervous. They did not know for certain whether the charm bound the god, or merely distracted him, or in fact did nothing to restrain him. They did not want to find out.
Ereshguna said, "Sometimes I feel like an ant in a line of ants crawling up a wall inside a house. We think we are doing something fine and grand. But one day the kitchen slave will notice us crawling there and smash us with her hand or sweep us away with a broom."
"We are ants who know copper and tin," Sharur said. As his brother had before, he spoke with great care. One of the things for which metal was better than stone was making weapons. But he had not spoken of fighting the gods, nor even come close. "We are ants who write down the way to the dates in the larder. Even if the kitchen slave smashes us, our brothers will know where they are."
"We are still ants," Ereshguna said. "We would do well to remember it."
Copyright © 1998 by Harry Turtledove
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Young Sharur is the scion of a merchant family in the city of Gibil, loyal--he thinks--to his city's god, Engibil, and to that god's human deputies. But like his fellows in Gibil, Sharur is less interested in gods than in progress in invention and trade. Then, on a routine trading expedition, he learns that the gods of the other cities, resentful of Engibil's relaxed attitude toward his people, are uniting to punish Gibil and squelch the growing power of human creativity, epitomized by the city-state's easygoing ways. Now only Sharur's wits can save the city from the aroused divinities ... and he's going to need all the inventiveness he can muster.
