Then he did remember something else. Something—he could not remember what—would try to stop him. Something, if it got the chance, would do worse than try to stop him.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than something—the something he did not know—stirred the tops of the barley stalks, shoving them aside so that the sun stabbed down into the green-tinged twilight through which he moved. He scurried away from that light, for he did not want it to pin him to the ground. Whatever was up there would find him then.
Glistening with sweat in the sunlight, a hand and arm groped toward him. Each finger on that hand was longer than he was; he could have stood and danced on that immense palm. But if those fingers and that palm closed on him, he did not think he would dance. He did not think he would dance ever again.
He realized then, as he had not realized before, that he was not the only manikin moving through the field of barley. Others also scurried along beneath the growing grain. That enormous hand closed around one of them and lifted him up toward the light. A thin wail of terror rose, and then cut off abruptly. Sharur dove into a hollow in the ground. A cockroach already sheltered there. It was not much smaller than he; for a moment, he thought it would fight him to hold its hiding place. But then it fled, hairy legs flailing.
That immense hand descended once more. Blood now stained palm and fingers. A drop fell on Sharur as the hand passed over him. It went after the cockroach, whose motion must have drawn attention away from his hiding place. Looking up through the shifting barley stalks, he saw an intent, serious face as big as the world. He shut his eyes as tight as he could, not so much to keep the eyes in that face from seeing him as to keep himself from seeing them.
The hand groped after the cockroach. When it rose, though, it was empty; the scuttling bug had escaped. A great bellow of rage filled the sky, as if a thunderstorm cried out with the voice of a man.
Sharur woke in the stable to the sound of his donkey— indeed, all the donkeys in their narrow stalls—braying frantically. His chest was wet. Some of the straw around him was wet. His first thought was that the donkey, in its fright, had kicked over or broken the pot of water the stablehands had left for it.
But that was not so; the light from a guttering torch outside the stall showed him the bowl where it belonged. It also showed him the liquid that splashed him was dark, not clear. A hot, metallic smell rose from it.
“Blood!” he exclaimed, recognition and horror mingling in his voice. He snatched up unstained straw from the floor, dipped it into the donkey’s water pot, and washed himself as clean as he could.
While scrubbing at himself, he remembered the barley field. What had been hunting him through it, and what had that great hand caught instead of him? That it had wanted him he had no doubt.
Slowly, the donkeys calmed. As their racket subsided, Sharur heard more racket—the racket of men, outside the stable. He ran out into the night to find out what was going on.
“Lord Enimhursag!” people were shouting, and “The god!” and “The power of the god!” and “Who was the evil-doer the god chose to punish?”
People were running from the inn as Sharur came out of the stables. Some of them had the same sorts of questions as did he. Others knew more, or said they did. “Squashed him flat!” one of them shouted. “Squashed him flat as a cockroach!” (Sharur shuddered.)
“He must have had it coming,” someone else said—the innkeeper. He was carrying a torch. In its light, his eyes were wide and glittering. Catching sight of Sharur, he said, “You’re a lucky bugger, Zuabi, and you had better believe it.”
“Why?” Sharur asked. “What happened?”
“When that room didn’t suit you—and curse me if I know why it didn’t—I put another traveler from your city into it,” the man answered. “The god only knows what crimes he’d committed—and the god made him pay for them.”
“Reached right through the roof and squashed him flat!” that first fellow repeated, in a voice suggesting he’d had enough beer and then some the night before.
“Enimhursag knows a man’s heart. Enimhursag sees a man’s soul,” the innkeeper said. “The god of our city is a just god. The god of our city is a righteous god. The god of our city is a mighty god.”
The god of your city is a stupid god, Sharur thought. The god of your city is a clumsy god. Enimhursag had discovered that one man in Imhursag claiming to be a Zuabi was not what he seemed. (That was anything but stupid, a point on which Sharur ehose not to dwell.) The god had tracked the false Zuabi to a particular inn. (That was anything but clumsy, another point Sharur would sooner have forgotten.) At the inn, though, Enimhursag had slain the wrong Zuabi, choosing the true instead of the false. (He might well have slain the right one, a point about which Sharur refused to think in any way whatever.)
“Was he kin of yours, this other fellow from your city?” the innkeeper asked.
Sharur thought for a moment before he answered. If he said yes, the innkeeper might let him look at or even take the effects of the other Zuabi, the true Zuabi, and who could guess what he might learn from them? But, on the other hand, if he said yes, he might draw Enimhursag’s notice back to himself where the god now, believed his troubles with Zuabut were over. That last consideration decided Sharur. “No,” he said.
“An honest Zuabi,” the innkeeper said. “Isn’t that funny? Next thing you know, we’ll be seeing a pious Gibli.” He laughed loudly at his own wit. Sharur thought he heard other laughter, deeper laughter, echoing through and around that of the innkeeper. He told himself he was imagining that other laughter, and wished he could have made himself believe it.
“If the excitement’s over, I’m going back to bed,” he said, and forced out a yawn. He was not sleepy anymore; the yawn was as artificial as any of the expressions he wore while haggling over the price of a spearhead. Like those artificial expressions, this one served its purpose.
Before he lay down again, he shifted the straw in the donkey’s stall to make sure he did not lie on any that was bloodstained. After he lay down, he sent a prayer in the direction of Enzuabu, apologizing that the god’s subject had been taken in his place. And after that, to his surprise, he slept.
When he woke the next morning, he saw he had not done such a good job of cleaning himself as he had thought. But what had escaped his eye in the night had also escaped the eyes of the innkeeper and the guests who had spilled out of the inn after Enimhursag visited it in his wrath. He did better before letting anyone see him by light of day.
The barley porridge the innkeeper gave him for breakfast was bland and watery. He gulped it down anyhow, and then loaded trade goods onto his donkey and hurried out to the market square.
Arriving not long after sunrise, he found a better place than that from which he had done business the day before. He set out knives and swords and pickled palm hearts and started crying for customers. Before long, as if by chance, the Alashkurrut with whom he’d talked the day before came by. It wasn’t chance, either on their part or on his: one of the reasons he reckoned the spot where he’d set up better than that which he’d had the day before was that it lay close to the display the men from the mountains had made for their own goods.
Bowing to them, Sharur said, “The gods give you a good day, my masters. How may I serve you?”
“Perhaps, since we are here, we will look further at these blades of yours,” Piluliumas said, picking up one and hefting it. “I suppose I can say they are not the worst blades I have seen in the land between the rivers.”