Robert Silverberg - Gilgamesh the King

THEN IT was the month of Tashritu, the season of the new year, when the king enters into the Sacred Marriage with Inanna and all things are reborn. That is the time when the god strides across the threshold of the temple like a rumbling storm and casts his seed into the goddess, and the rains come again after the long dry harsh deathin-life that is the summer.

It is the greatest and most holy festival of Uruk, on which all else depends. The preparations occupy everyone in the city for weeks as the summer wanes. That which has been defiled during the year must be purified by sacrifices and fumigations. Those who are ritually unclean by birth, members of the impure castes, must take themselves outside the walls and build a temporary village for themselves there. Weak and deformed animals must be slain. All houses and public buildings in need of repair are put in order, and the festive decorations are brought forth. Then at last come the parades, led by harpers and tympanists. The whores don brightly colored scarves and the cloak of the'goddess. Men adorn their left sides with women's clothing. Priests and priestesses carry through the streets the bloody swords, the double-edged axes, with which the sacrifices have been performed. Dancers leap through hoops and jump over ropes. In her temple Inanna bathes herself and anoints herself and dons the holy ornaments, the great ring of carnelian and the beads of lapis and the shining loin-plate of gold, and the jewels for her navel and for her hips and for her nose and for her eyes, and the earrings of gold and bronze, and the breast-ornaments of ivory. And the god Dumuzi, the bringer of fertility, enters into the king, who goes by boat to the temple district and through the gateway of the Eanna sanctuary, leading a sheep and holding a kid. They stand together on the porch of the temple, priestess and king, goddess and god, while all the city hails them in joy; and then they go within, to the bedchamber that has been prepared, and he caresses her and goes into her and ploughs her and pours his fruitfulness into her womb. So it has been since the beginning, when the gods alone existed and kingship had not yet descended from heaven.

On the day of the new moon that marked the beginning of the new year I went with all the others to the White Platform, to wait outside the Enmerkar temple for the showing-forth of Inanna and Dumuzi. A light wind, moist and fragrant, blew from the south. It was the wind we call the Cheat, which promises springtime, but in fact heralds the winter.

The king appeared, with his sheep, with his kid, at the western end of the platform. The crowd parted to make way for him as he walked slowly up the steps and toward the temple. He looked splendid. The god-light was upon him, and his body gleamed from within.

There is something about performing the Sacred Marriage that exalts any man, I suppose. This was the sixth time Dumuzi had performed the rite since he became king, and each year, watching him cross the platform, I had been astonished by the awehe inspired in me, thi~ man who at all other times seemed to me so ordinary, so flabby of soul. But when the god is in the king, the king is a god. I would never forget how my father had looked on the night of this rite, powerful and grand and immense, glancing neither to one side nor the other as he went past the place where my mother and I stood watching, and entered the temple, and returned with Inanna by his side, and stretched forth his hands to the people of the city, and went inside once again to lead the goddess to her bedchamber. But Lugalbanda had looked majestic at all times. I would not have expected Dumuzi to be able to rival his magnificence; yet on this night each year he did.

Tonight, though, something unusual seemed to be happening. The king and the priestess customarily emerge to show themselves together at the instant when the crescent of the new moon appears above the temple. But this night the moment came and went and the temple door remained closed. I do not know how long we waited.

It seemed like hours. We looked toward one another with questioning eyes, but no one dared speak.

Then at last the great brazen door swung open and the holy couple appeared. At the sight of them, the silence grew more intense: it was like a chasm of stillness that engulfed all the sound in the world. But only for an instant. A moment later a low murmuring and hissing could be heard, as those toward the front of the crowd began to mutter and murmur in surprise.

From where I stood, far in the back, I was unable at first to tell what was amiss. There was Dumuzi in shining crown and royal robe of rich deep blue; there was Inanna close by his side. Then I realized that the woman wearing the sacred ornaments of ivory and gold and carnelian and lapis was not Inanna, or at least not the Inanna who had stood forth on this night all the previous years of my life. That woman had been short and sturdy of body, and this one appeared to have been drawn out to a finer consistency, slender, almost frail, and tall, her shoulder virtually of a height with Dumuzi's. And, when a moment later I came to perceive who she must be, I under stood that I was about to lose that which had never been mine, and

I was helpless to prevent it.

I had to see her face. I pushed my way forward, shouldering people aside as though they were dry sticks.

At a distance of twenty paces I looked straight into her eyes, and beheld the dark mischief that sparkled there. Yes, of course, it was she, plucked suddenly from her underground chamber to the height of sacred power in Uruk: no longer handmaiden to the goddess, but suddenly, astoundingly, made into Inanna herself. I could not move. A heaviness invaded my legs and rooted them to the pavement. There was a thickness in my throat, like a lump of sand that could not be swallowed or expelled.

She stared at me but did not seem to see me, though I was more than a head taller than the tallest person around me. The ceremony consumed her entirely. I watched her hand Dumuzi the sacred white flask of honey, and receive from him the sacred vessel of barley. I heard them exchanging the words of the rite: "My holy jewel, my wondrous Inanna," he said, and she to him, "O my husband Dumuzi, you are truly my love."

Thick-voiced I said to some lord who stood beside me, "What has happened? Where is Inanna?" "There is Inanna."

"But that girl isn't the high priestess!"

"From this evening onward she is," he replied. And another, on the far side of me, said, "They say the old one was ill, and worsened all day, and then she died at the sunset hour. But they had another all ready to be consecrated. They brought her forth in a hurry to be bathed and dressed, and she will marry Dumuzi tonight. Which is why there was such a delay."

I heard the words go echoing through the caverns of my mind, she will marry Dumuzi tonight, and I thought I would topple to the pavement.

The king sipped from the flask of honey, and returned it to her so that she could sip of it also. They joined their hands and emptied the vessel of barley on the ground, and poured the golden honey over the seed. The temple musicians strummed their instruments and sang the hymn of the showing-forth of the god and goddess. It was almost done, now. In a few moments they would go within. In the divine bedchamber the handmaidens would take from her the rings and beads and breastplates and the shining three-cornered sheet of gold that covered her loins, and then he would caress her, and speak the words of the Sacred Marriage to her, and then-and then- I could not stay to watch them any longer.

I turned and rushed from the platform like a maddened bull, knocking down anyone who did not get out of my way quickly enough. From behind me came the music of cymbals and flutes. I could not bear the sound of it. They are in the bedchamber now, I thought, he touches her, he strokes her secret places, his mouth is against her mouth, he will cover her with his body, he will enter her - I ran blindly this way and that into the darkness, not knowing or caring where I was going. A pain that I had known all too often was once more upon me. I felt alone, outcast, a stranger in my own city. I had neither father nor brother nor wife, nor even anyone I could truly call friend. My solitude was like a wall of fire around me. I yearned to reach toward someone-anyone-but there was no one. All I could do was run; and I ran on and on until I thought my breast would burst. At last I found myself stumbling through the deserted streets of the district known as the Lion, where the military barracks are. It was not by any accident that my feet had taken me there: when that kind of blindness comes over us, we are guided by the gods. There was then at the center of the Lion district a shrine sacred to the godhood of Lugalbanda, erected there by Dumuzi early in his reign-nothing very grand, only an image of my father a little larger than life size, lit from below by three small oil lamps that burned all night and all day, a small enough tribute to a great king who has become a god. I flung myself down before it and held tightly to the bricks of its base. And I suddenly felt a familiar strangeness enter my mind.