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 in 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.”