CHAPTER 6

HARGA

In the marshes north of Eridu

I climbed, stiff-legged, onto the wooden jetty at the Refuge. As I reached down for a rope, I realised I had torn the muscle in my right shoulder again. Perhaps in that day’s fighting, perhaps before that without noticing. It was an old injury, from when I carried Gilgamesh out of Ur, and it didn’t need much to make it flare up again.

I thought to myself,I am too old for this. The same thing I always thought, these days, when I got out of a canoe.

I was old and I was dirty, befouled with marsh mud and other people’s blood. The boys were no cleaner and the three dogs were worse.

Tallboy took the rope from me when he saw me grimacing and the three boys made sure of the boat, tying it up close to the jetty. “We’ll get you a bucket of water, sir,” said Tallboy.

“Bring it to my hut,” I said.

As the two Uruk boys trailed off along the shoreline, giggling over something, the priestess Lilith appeared. She put her hands on her hips and placed herself as a firm block on the path that led to the heart of the Refuge. Her long soft waves of hair were gone, shorn off after the death of her lover, the goddess Ninsun, but she was still a beautiful and imperious woman even in a ragged apron and wooden clogs.

“Did you find the alleged spies?” she said.

“Who knows what we found.” I shrugged and winced again at the pain in my right shoulder. “But anyway they are all dead.”

I made to walk past the priestess, but she put a flat palm up to me.

“You should swim and get clean,” she said, lifting her chin at both me and the god-boy Marduk, who was by then stood behind me, fussing over his dogs. “You will attract rats. You will terrify the children. Swim first.”

“The boys are fetching me water,” I said. I was bone tired by then from the day’s heat and the savagery and I could not summon a smile for her.

“I don’t know why you don’t just swim,” she said.

A mosquito landed on my cheek and I slapped one exhausted hand at it. “There are swamp sharks here and they are hard to see coming, being all covered in green slime. And then also there are the crocodiles.”

As I said the words, Marduk began stripping. A moment later he dived naked off the end of the jetty, a pale streak against the red sky and the green of the reed beds. The dogs leaped after him, paws outstretched, into the brown marsh water.

“Marduk, there are more sharks at dusk,” I shouted. “Think of the dogs!” I turned back to the priestess, frowning. “It is not safe, Lilith.”

“Is that a cut?” she said, reaching for my blood-encrusted left arm.

“It’s a graze.”

“Harga, let me see it.”

“No.”

For some moments we glowered at each other, and then the priestess said: “Did the marshmen fight well?”

“Oh yes, most viciously. They are the very pattern of good allies.” I cast a glance out at the pale god-boy, who was laughing and splashing with the dogs in the slimy and fetid marsh water.

“We are not taking the dogs again,” I said.

“You should not have agreed to it.”

“You took Marduk’s side! Anyway, he did most of the killing, impossible as he is. He moves so quickly now it can be hard to keep your eye on him.”

“Do be careful of him, Harga,” she said. “He is not like your other lost ducklings.”

“I do not have ducklings,” I said, pulling myself more upright. “They are soldiers, not ducklings.”

At that moment my two young soldier-ducklings returned with heaving wooden buckets and a