Gilgamesh the King Read online

  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, though 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 I 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 smudge-faced 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 class. 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 the gods. 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 passions 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 friend—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.

  5

  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 high-vaulted 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 cross-passage, 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.