He knew it, too. His steps, already laggard, slowed still further. By the time he reached his father’s house, he was staggering. Ereshguna was dickering with a smith. On seeing Sharur, he broke off in alarm. “My son!” he exclaimed. “What has happened to you?”
“Fever demon.” Sharur got the words out through chattering teeth. Even in the heat of Gibil’s summer, he shivered.
“Have to be careful of those demons,” the smith said, clicking his tongue between his teeth. If was good advice. Like so much good advice, it came too late to do any good.
Ereshguna shouted for his slaves. Two men and the Imhursaggi woman with whom Sharur had lain came running at his summons. “Put Sharur on blankets,” he told them. “Put wet cloths on his head. A fever demon has breathed into his mouth.” The men helped support Sharur, who was wobbling on his feet, as he went into the courtyard and lay down in the shade of the southern wall.
“Fetch blankets, as the master said,” one of the men told the other. “He should not lie on the naked ground.” The second slave nodded and hurried off. So did the slave woman.
He came back, blankets in his arm, along with the woman, who carried rags and a pot of water. The two men raised Sharur, first at the shoulders, then at the hips, so they could get the blankets under him. “Is that not better, master’s son?” one of them asked with a slave’s solicitude, sticky as honey.
“Better,” he said vaguely. His wits were already wandering. He told himself over and over he was a fool for not having seen the fever demon sooner. A man could die of the sickness a demon breathed into him. Regardless of how often he repeated them, no thoughts wanted to stay in his mind. He drifted from thinking he was a fool for not having seen the fever demon to thinking he was a fool for believing Kessis and Mitas to thinking he was a fool for not having gladly accepted Kimash’s offer of one of his daughters and bride-price to boot to thinking he was a fool for worrying about women, considering how he felt.
Through it all, the one thing that did not change was that he thought himself a fool.
The Imhursaggi slave woman dropped a rag into the pot of water, then wrung it out and set it on his forehead. “It is cool,” she said in her quiet voice. “It will help make you cool.”
“I thank you,” Sharur said. For a little while, when the damp linen first touched him, the demon’s fever fled, and he was himself again, or someone close to himself. But the fever was stronger than a cold compress. It quickly came back, and his wits went their own way once more.
“Will you watch him?” one of the men asked the woman. “Will you tend to him?”
“I will watch him,” she answered. “I will tend to him. It is easier workman most they might give me.” The men went away. The woman soaked another compress, wrung it out, and set it on Sharur’s forehead to replace the one that the heat of the day and the heat of his fever had dried. Her hands were cool and damp and deft. He noticed—as much as he noticed anything then. She sat beside him, humming a hymn to Enimhursag.
Somehow, he recognized it for what it was. Had his mind been fully under the control of his will, he would have known Enimhursag had no power here, not in the heart of the city of the god who was his rival. But he did not think of that. He had forgotten where he was. He thought of Enimhursag, and of Enimhursag’s hunt for him. He thought Enimhursag was hunting him again, or perhaps that Enimhursag had never stopped hunting him.
He moaned and writhed on the blankets. The wet rag fell off onto the ground beside him. The Imhursaggi slave stopped humming. “Lie easy,” she said, and put the compress back on his head. And, because he no longer heard the hymn, he did lie easy for a bit. But, seeing him relax, the Imhursaggi woman also relaxed, and began to hum once more. That brought fear flooding back, as melting mountain snow brought the Yarmuk’s flood every spring.
Before long, though, his mother and his sister came out into the courtyard, both of them exclaiming over him. They dismissed the slave woman and took over caring for him themselves. “There—do you see?” Betsilim said triumphantly to Nanadirat. “He is better already.”
His sister set a hand on his forehead. “He is still hot as a smelting fire,” she said, worry in her voice.
“The demon only just now breathed its foul breath into him,” his mother answered, sounding as if she was trying to reassure herself and Nanadirat both. “He will mend.”
“He had better.” Nanadirat stared fiercely down at Sharur. “I am so angry at him. How could he not spy a fever demon waiting to pounce?”
Betsilim wrung out a new compress and started to put it on Sharur, but he tried to roll away from her. “No, no,” she said, as she had when he was very small. “You have to hold still. You have to rest.”
He heard her and Nanadirat as if from very far away. Everything seemed very far away, his own body very much included. He had quieted for a moment when his mother and sister replaced the slave woman, but not because he preferred their touch to hers, only because he no longer heard her humming the hymn to Enimhursag. He tried to explain that to them, but forgot what he was going to say before the words could pass his lips.
His spirit drifted away from his body, almost as if he had become a ghost while still living. He wondered if ghosts were as confused as he was, then wondered what he had been wondering about, and then wondered if he had been wondering.
Huzziyas the wanax raised a cup to toast his health. An army of spearmen and donkey-drawn chariots drove another, identically equipped, army back against a canal, trapping it. Some men shouted Engibil’s name. Some shouted Enimhursag’s. Which were which? He could not tell. The army trapped against the canal broke like a shattered cup.
Ningal’s face drifted over him like a full moon. He reached up to touch it and it broke like a shattered cup. He started to cry. Suddenly, without warning, everything went white. I am dead, he thought. The fever has slain me. Now I am a ghost, as my grandfather is. I will hunt down that fever demon and pull off its wings. How it will wail!
He heard it wailing already, though he had not yet begun the hunt. Then he heard a woman’s voice—Ningal’s? No, it was another’s. “Fix that compress, Mother,” Nanadirat said. “I don’t think he wants it to cover his eyes. Did you hear him moan?”
“I heard him,” Betsilim said. “The fever has sent him out of his head. But maybe you are right.” Color and shapes—swirling, floating shapes with no plain meaning— filled Sharur’s vision once more. Maybe he wasn’t dead after all. The demon would escape, to sicken other people.
“How is he?” a man’s voice asked. Huzziyas the wanax? Kimash the lugal? Engibil the god? Whoeyer it was, his voice sounded very much like that of Sharur’s brother Tup- sharru. But Tupsharru was not in the mountains of Alashkurru, was he? Sharur knew he was in the mountains, in the snowy mountains. How else could he have been so cold?
After a while, it started raining on him. So he thought at first, at any rate. Then he wondered whether the gods were angry at him or pleased with him, for it was raining beer. The gods talked among themselves. “Sit him up a little more, can’t you? It’s spilling all over him,” a goddess said.
“I’m sorry,” a god answered. “Here, try again.” More rain or beer or whatever it was spilled on Sharur’s face and chest.
“You have to drink, Sharur,” another goddess said.
Dimly, he wondered why the gods had voices so much like those of his mother and sister and brother. They were gods, though. They could do as they pleased. And if they ordered him to drink, he could only obey. Drink he did, even if he choked a little doing it.
“There, that’s better,” the goddess who sounded like his sister said.