The First Heroes Read online

  Had Sumer suffered from pestilence? Though Leslie recalled no references to the plague, or even to disease as something contagious, it seemed incredible that cities of thirty thousand people, which created standing bodies of water and relied upon wells for drinking, were not periodically ravaged by pandemics, especially during wars. Perhaps Nanshe loses much of her family to cholera during a siege; it was a more plausible involvement than engaging her somehow in the business of battle.

  No Sumerian myths mention plague; none of the images of piled dead picture it, nor is it mentioned in legal records. Mortality is ubiquitous, but the index entries for DEATH in Kramer’s Cradle show an exclusive interest in the Sumerian afterlife, while those for The Eden That Never Was focus on the archeology of grave sites. Gilgamesh showed no fear of catching Enkidu’s fever, nor Enmerkar of Lugalbanda’s. Death did not leap from victim to victim like a flea; each mortal possessed his own, patient and implacable. Whatever the hero’s achievements in life, in the Land of No Return he wandered naked, like all the other dead, hot and eternally thirsty.

  It was stifling on the second floor, the day’s unseasonable warmth undispersed by the mild evening, and Leslie kicked away the damp sheets to rise and open windows. She continued through Megan’s room and the baby room, now choked with books, opened the bathroom window (the tiles were barely cool beneath her soles and the toilet seat actually warm, as though someone had preceded her on it) and thence to the end of the hall, where the far window would allow a cross breeze. From there it seemed natural to descend the stairs, for the screened patio doors admitted the night air and she could walk around freely in the unlit rooms.

  Opening the refrigerator would illuminate the uncurtained kitchen, and an attempt to fill a cup in the dark clattered the stacked dishes so loudly that she jumped back. Leslie wandered instead toward the front of the house, slowly—she sank her bare foot into the warm furry side of Ursuline, too torpid even to stir—but guided by the faint light coming from the office. Her own computer adjoined an open window so she sat at Trent’s, where the monitor’s low setting cast just enough light to see by. Trent never kept loose papers on his desk, but she could make out a page of his handwriting lying between Odile and History Begins at Sumer. She turned the light up slightly, and saw the journal Megan had given him for his birthday, blank sheets bound in dyed silk, held open between the two volumes. He had written in it with his fountain pen—another gift—and weighted the pages flat to dry.

  If it had been a paragraph, manifest Dear Diary prose, Leslie would not have bent forward to read, but the two lines were centered like aphorisms, and there was something odd in the lettering. The monitor brightened slightly as the screen saver turned some corner in its workings, and the words leaped up at her.

  βeta-testing for βeta males? And underneath: Real men write their own βooks.

  The Mont Blanc rested in the gutter, a third object to disturb if she wished to turn back the page. Leslie sat back, feeling her face redden in the cool air. Seeking refuge for her gaze, she smacked lightly at the mouse, and the saver vanished, presented her a vista, dim in the darkness, on a burning city. Only the flames actually moved, the fleeing populace and spear-waving invaders caught as in a frieze, but the central building, one side lit by the conflagration, was a recognizable stepped tower, which its builders called “unir” and the successors to Sumer knew as “ziggurat.”

  Leslie moved her hands to the keyboard, hesitant lest she disrupt the game in progress. Within a minute, however, she had slipped past the undisturbed scenario and was reviewing Trent’s interaction with the program, which proved to be the only one open. She checked the system documentation and saw, with a start, that the game had been running for days.

  It was the work of a moment to settle in front of her own screen and search its flotilla of icons for Trent’s preferred word-processing program. She ran it and found a list of text files: research on Sumer, downloaded online data, and Ramparts.txt, which proved to contain The Ramparts of Uruk, 56,917 words, last revised that afternoon. Trent had moved his work files onto her computer, presumably (it seemed obvious after a second) to allow Ziggurat to run unimpeded on his older machine. She had forgotten what gluttons for RAM these new games were.

  The image was poignant: Trent keeping his writing files in a crevice between her hard drive’s enormous programs—nothing takes up less room than text—while abandoning his own machine to the demands of Ziggurat. Doing his work at Leslie’s desk, getting his e-mail through the laptop, returning at intervals to his own computer where Ziggurat flourished, like a cowbird’s chick, to consult with the creature to ensure that his own work not exceed it in grace or wit: this was austere to the point of penitential. Was Trent setting burnt offerings before the thing?

  She clicked on another file, BookTwo.txt. It appeared to be mostly outline, but there was a title, Wheels for Warring. Leslie shook her head. It was just like Trent, to start with a safe title and have a better one ready for the next book.

  The outline was followed by notes, which Leslie scrolled through idly. Some comprised bits of research that she had passed to him; others surprised her. Only two types of personages are portrayed naked in Sumerian art: humiliated prisoners, and priests engaged in sacred ceremony. Why no sexual connotations? Leslie shifted her bottom on the wicker chair and smiled. For Trent all nudity held sexual connotations. The dogwalker outside, glimpsing screen light falling on her breasts, doubtless felt the same. Fragments of those statuettes of worshipers were found incorporated into the floors of the Inanna Temple. I.e., these objects remained sacred, even when no longer used?

  That lone blue eye in the display at the Met: they often used lapis lazuli for eyes (look at the blue-eyed ibex in the next case!), though they could never have seen such features. A legend of men with blue eyes?

  “No, Jurgen, you must see my palaces. In Babylon I have a palace where many abide with cords about them and burn bran for perfume, while they await that thing which is to befall them.” Epigraph? (No.)

  Afghanistan is the opposite of Mesopotamia: a land crumpled into inaccessibility. Geographical barriers everywhere, the bane of invaders; while Sumer was open to all armies, the “Kalam” as flat as a board game.

  Title for Book 3: A Game Without a Name. Problematic because the Sumerians of course knew its name; we don’t. The game as metaphor for war; if it was also used for divination, then a guide to the Sumerian cosmos & psyche. Historians call it the game “of Ur” since that is where the first boards were found; if I call it the Ur-game can I make allusions to the original FORTRAN “Adventure”? How many of Ziggurat’s players were even alive in 1975?

  Leslie created a new file, named it Book3.txt, and began to type. Trent, you don’t want to construct one of your novels around that board game. You are appealing to an audience that won’t spend its money on books.

  You want to write about a female protagonist, preferably young and, though not herself powerful, able to glimpse its workings. If you must include that game, you can show her watching it played: it was laid out in the streets, remember? A little girl can watch almost anything unnoticed.

  Women bring food, nurse the wounded, bury the dead. You want an aperture on war? Don’t use the viewpoint of a young soldier; soldiers see almost nothing of the totality of war, they are brought in like a load of rocks and then hurled. Women see everything, and when it is over, they are often what is left.

  The wind blew the smoke roaring through the streets, blinding the fleeing villagers and lofting scraps of glowing reed to settle like fireflies on the roofs not already burning. Scattered soldiers came at them, whom Nanshe first saw terrifyingly as the enemy, then realized with a greater shock were the defenders of Lagash. One flung away his shield as he sprinted past.

  They had sought to watch the battle from the rooftops, but the wheeling armies had raised a cloud of yellow dust, immense as those seen in the sky, which obscured everything. The city wall was lined with spectators, who enjoyed a bette
r view of the action, although the settlement across the canal was closer. Perhaps they saw the flank of battle shift then spill into the barley fields, concealed from the village by stands of date palm and poplars; perhaps the waving cityfolk had been trying to warn them. Nanshe could remember little of that disordered hour, of anxious inquiry between adults who blocked her view, the surmises and cries, people swarming down the ladders to shout questions, to call for their families, and finally to run.

  Nanshe had become separated almost immediately, buffeted by legs and swinging arms. She tried to head home, but a cry to make for the city gates sent the crowd rushing against her, and by the time she emerged from the side streets she could smell smoke. Someone lunged for her, not the person she later saw stabbed with a spear, though events seemed alike unreal save what was happening now, grit biting her legs where she crouched. She could see Sud lying in the road, and started repeatedly when a large scrap caught in the rubble waved like a sleeve.

  Smoke spattered the sky, and when night fell she thought it another gout from the burning market, to recede after some minutes.

  At some point she found herself stumbling over littered ground, eyes stinging in the darkness. Unnatural sounds reached her, a loud snap or the crash of walls. A groan from somewhere, and for an instant she imagined the slave moving confidently through the blackness, eyeless and unsmarting, calling out in an accent the marauders would recognize.

  A shift in wind pushed aside smoke to disclose still-burning houses, flames from their collapsed roofs flickering through doors like glowing ovens. Occasionally Nanshe could hear a faint shout call down, and so knew the direction of the city walls. Lips cracked, she groped across open ground to the well, which she discovered surrounded by corpses. Desperation drove her to the exposure of the levee, where at last she fell forward to drink.

  It is Gilgamesh come to subjugate Lagash, if you like, or else the Gutians sweeping out of the hills. Better perhaps a Sumerian enemy, for Nanshe had been assured that the armies would clash on the plains beyond the cultivated fields, or else before the city gates, and that soldiers would only kill soldiers. Hiding in the tamarisk brush, Nanshe understands only that what the boys had said about war was not true. She is not pondering the implications of this, any more than she is thinking about her parents or their smoldering home, for she is in a kind of shock. Alert to any movement in the brightening morning, she knows that nothing around her will proceed as she had been told.

  Can you tell that story? The vaunting steles do not, nor any poems that officials preserved.

  It cannot be reduced to a game, nor presented in terms of one. The metaphor itself is immoral.

  A wail floated down the stairs, its eerie pitch catching the agelessness of the dreaming mind. Leslie left the room at once, negotiating the darkened floor’s furniture and doorways with intimate familiarity. At the top of the stairs she heard it again, wavering between frightened and querulous, and went to her daughter’s room. Megan was asleep but in distress, her head turning from side to side in the faint moonlight as her mouth shaped half words. As Leslie approached, she saw the dim glint of open eyes.

  “It’s all right, honey.” Experts advise that children having nightmares not be wakened, but her parents had learned how to offer Megan comfort without disturbing her. Leslie stroked her daughter’s hair and murmured that everything was okay.

  “I heard the plane and it scared me.”

  “Plane?” The Bridgeport Airport was a few miles away, and corporate jets sometimes landed late at night. Leslie tried to recall whether she had heard a plane a minute before.

  “It sounded like a jet,” Megan said lucidly.

  Leslie doubted that her daughter had ever heard a nonjet engine overhead, but she took her true meaning. Storm-tossed but hearing the lighthouse, she realized with a pang that her misery did not matter, nor Trent’s professional tribulations nor his baffled fury, but only her daughter’s well-being, which she had heeded but not enough. “It’s all right,” she said, leaning forward and touching foreheads in the dark. “No more bad planes.”

  What is wrong cannot soon be put right—at least not what lies in the mind, which occupies not two or even three dimensions, but the infolds of a space no one has mapped. Leslie began attending her daughter more closely, reading to her at night (no Homer) and stopping with her for hot chocolate on their way back from the library or soccer practice. Megan worried about the school’s winter pageant, holiday plans, a classmate’s parents’ divorce. She mentioned the World Trade Center only when discussing an assignment to summarize the week’s news. What more concerned her was an image she had come upon while searching the Net with a friend’s older sister: a condemned woman being forced to kneel while a Taliban executioner put a rifle to her skull.

  “It’s a horrible picture,” Leslie agreed. She was furious that her daughter had been shown it.

  “The people who did that . . .” Megan spoke with unaccustomed hesitancy. “They belong to al Qaeda, don’t they?”

  “Not exactly.” If you want to get technical. “The Taliban let al Qaeda stay in their country, but they did not help carry out the attacks. The President insisted that they turn over Osama bin Laden, which they probably couldn’t do, so he launched an invasion.”

  “I don’t care,” said Megan firmly. She was staring into the middle distance, where the woman kneeling facedown was visible to both of them. “I’m glad he’s dead.”

  He wasn’t the only one, though. As the death toll from the September attacks steadily dropped from the initial six thousand to just more than half that, a reciprocal number, of those killed in Afghanistan, rose to match it. The first, dwindling value was widely followed and subtly resented—one couldn’t actually accuse those compiling it of unpatriotism—while the second, swelling one was neither: its extent (reported only on dissident websites) unacknowledged and enjoyed.

  Leslie spoke twice with Megan’s teacher, and even rejoined the listserv of women who had become pregnant the same month she had, which she had dropped four years ago. She read online reports of children experiencing anxiety and bad dreams, spoke to her therapist of Megan rather than herself, and watched her daughter: eating breakfast, doing homework, asleep. When troubled Megan was before her, she ignored everything else.

  Rumblings from the shocked economy sounded dimly from work and home. Great Games, losing market share, canceled its plans for a line of Ziggurat novels, and Trent (midway through the second book but not yet paid for the first) slid from stunned rage into depression. Leslie comforted him distractedly. Truckloads of rubble filed by the thousands, like a column of ants reducing a picnic’s rubbish, from the still-smoldering wreckage of Ground Zero to Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill, where it was sifted for personal effects and body parts. Troops of the “Northern Alliance” (a cognomen worthy of Star Wars) drove the remains of the Taliban into the mountains, which shuddered beneath the impact of enormous American bombs called “daisycutters.”

  Leslie wanted to spend the hour before dinner with her daughter, but Trent finally protested at cooking every night. Coming from the kitchen, she heard them sitting in the office together, discussing return trips to favorite movies.

  “Dumbledore is kind of like Gandalf,” Megan was saying matter-offactly, “except I don’t think Gandalf would be very good with children.”

  “He treated those hobbits like children.”

  “. . . But Sauron and Lord Voldemort are even more similar, aren’t they?”

  “Well, it’s hard to put much spin on evil incarnate, isn’t it?”

  “Incarnate?” Leslie could hear her taste the word. “Is that what they call the ‘evil-doers’?”

  Trent groaned softly. “How I hate that term.”

  “Because they don’t think what they’re doing is evil,” said Megan wisely. Leslie stood outside the doorway, leaning forward slightly to see them. “They think that God wants them to do this.”

  “That’s right. And our culture—what
the President calls ‘Western Civilization’—believes that we are doing what God wants, though the government is careful not to say so in as many words. In the real world, your enemy doesn’t oblige you by acting like Sauron or Voldemort.”

  “Or Darth Vader.” Megan has a happy thought. “We’ll be seeing Part Two of all three movies next year! Too oh oh too!”

  “It must be the age of sequels.”

  “And the age of Evil-doers.”

  Trent laughed. “In movies, yes. In real life, it would be better if people were more careful about using that word.”

  “Or ‘cowardly.’ ”

  “Indeed.” Trent looked at their daughter closely. “You still think about that?”

  Megan shrugged. “Julie’s dad almost got killed.” She paused, then asked, “Did Gilgamesh represent Western values?”

  “Gilgamesh? He lived before there was a West, or a Middle East.”

  She is changing the subject, Leslie wanted to cry out, but Megan turned to face her father and said, “I’m sorry your book’s not going to be published.”

  Trent blinked. “Heavens, dear, don’t worry about that. Maybe someone else will publish it. Maybe I was writing the wrong book.” He extended an arm, and Megan slipped under it. “That’s an awfully tiny problem, if you think about it.”

  Lying awake, Leslie listened to her husband’s steady breathing and wondered at the loss of his dream, the rout of the last ditch. He had told her in college that prose narrative was dead, that they stood at the end of its era just as the—had he actually said ancient Sumerians?—stood at its birth. Science fiction was the mode of the era, but its future masterpieces would not come in strings of sentences. The Web—he had charmed her by admitting that he too had reflexively read www. as “World War Won”—had blossomed in their college years from jury-rigging of dial-ups to a vast nervous system, and Trent’s vision of nonlinear, multimedia fictions—richly complex structures of word, image, and sound, detailed as Cibachrome and nuanced as Proust—seemed ready to take shape in the hypertrophied craniums of the ever-cheaper CPUs.