“Perhaps this is so,” Sharur agreed, nodding. Enzuabu wanted the Alashkurri cup stolen from Engibil’s temple. Sharur also wanted it removed from that temple. Sharur was willing to return it to the mountains of Alashkurru, though other notions had also crossed his mind. He was not sure what Enzuabu would do with it if it came into the thief-god’s hands.
He did not ask Habbazu whether Enzuabu had spoken of his plans for the cup. Having already put more thoughts than he wanted into Habbazu’s mind, he did not wish to give the thief any further ideas he had not already had.
Habbazu looked around with interest as he and Sharur made their way toward the Street of Smiths. “Poverty does not pinch Gibil,” he remarked. “Hunger does not stalk this city. In Zuabu, they say women here are poor. In Zuabu, they say women and children here starve.”
“Many people say many things that are not true about Gibil and the Giblut,” Sharur answered. He looked at Habbazu out of the coener of his eye. “Many gods say many things that are not true about Gibil and the Giblut. If this were not so, Zuabi, would you be here now?”
“After all this time, I doubt my skeleton would have much meat left on its bones,” the thief said coolly. “My ghost would be wandering my city, telling anyone who could hear what vicious, wanton murderers the men of Gibil were.”
That struck Sharur as an honest answer. He shook his head in bemusement. Getting an honest answer from a thief was like plucking sweet, fat dates from the branches of a thombush.
When they came out onto the Street of Smiths, Habbazu pointed down its length. “What is that great building there, the one that looks to be almost the size of the temple to your city god?”
“That is the lugal’s palace,” Sharur replied. “That is the building wherein the mighty Kimash makes his residence, as his father and grandfather did before him.”
“All that, for a mere man?” Habbazu shook his head in slow wonder. Then his eyes lit, as if torches had been kindled behind them. “He must have many treasures. And how can a mere man guard what is his as well as a god?” Instead of being angry at the lugal for usurping the god’s place, he saw that usurpation as an opportunity for himself.
“Do you know, Zuabi,” Sharur said, “you are farther along the path toward thinking like a man of Gibil than you may suspect.”
The thief drew himself up, the very image of affronted rectitude. “You have caught me,” he said. “You have spared me. Do you think this gives you the right to insult me?”
“I meant it for a compliment,” Sharur said mildly. That Habbazu made a joke of it meant he did not take it seriously, either, no matter what he said. Sharur thought Enzuabu would take it seriously. Wherever men lookbd first to their own advantage and only then toward service to their gods, there the unquestioned, unchallenged rule of the gods tottered.
And, as Habbazu walked along the Street of Smiths, he watched with keen interest. His eyes flicked to left and right, studying donkey trains, peering into smithies and shops. “We have smiths in Zuabu,” he said after a while. “I do not think we have so many smiths as do you Giblut. We have merchants. I do not think we have merchants so busy as do you Giblut.”
Sharur’s chest puffed out with pride. “Trade here is slow these days, too,” he said. Habbazu did not look as if he believed him, though that was simple truth.
Ereshguna was pressing a stylus into a tablet of damp clay when Sharur led Habbazu into his home. His father looked unhappy as he wrote, which likely meant he was reckoning up accounts. As trade with other cities and other lands declined, the accounts gave less and less reason for a man to look anything but unhappy.
Thus, when Sharur and the thief came in, Ereshguna set down the tablet with every sign of relief. “I greet you, my son,” he said, bowing. He turned to Habbazu and bowed again. “And I greet your companion as well, though I have not yet had the pleasure and honor of making his acquaintance.”
“Father, I present to you Habbazu, who visits Gibil from the city of Zuabu,” Sharur said. “He practices the Zuabi trade. Habbazu, here is Ereshguna my father, the head of the house of Ereshguna.”
Habbazu bowed. He had polished manners when he chose to use them. “I greet you, Ereshguna of the house of Ereshguna. Your fame is wide, as is the fame of your house. But you should be most famous for the mercy your splendid son showed a thief who intended to steal from his caravan outside Zuabu.”
“Ah.” Ereshguna’s eyebrows rose. “You are not any Zuabi thief. You are that particular Zuabi thief. I did not know your name.”
“Yes, I am that particular thief.” Habbazu bowed once more.
“When I met him outside Zuabu, I did not know his name,” Sharur said.
His grandfather’s ghost shouted in his ear, and, no doubt, in Ereshguna’s: “Are you mad, boy? Has the sun baked the wits from your head? Have the demons of idiocy crept in through your ears and built a home between them? Why do you bring a Zuabi thief into this house? Do you want to wake up in the morning and find half the walls missing?”
“It will be all right, my father,” Ereshguna murmured in the tone people often used when ghosts interrupted their conversations with fellow mortals. Habbazu looked up at the ceiling and said nothing. That tone would have been familiar to him, too. Ereshguna clapped his hands together and, raising his voice, called for bread and onions and beer.
He set out an extra, partly filled cup for the ghost of Sharur’s grandfather, surely in the hope that, having consumed the essence of the beer, the ghost would grow gay or grow sleepy and would in any case shut up. To Sharur’s relief, that hope, or at least the last part of it, was realized.
Having drunk, having eaten, Ereshguna asked Sharur, “Why has Habbazu come to Gibil to practice the trade of the Zuabut?” Why did you bring him here? underlay the words.
In a voice as light and casual as he could make it, Sharur said, “Enzuabu charged Habbazu to steal something from the temple of Engibiclass="underline" a cup of baked clay that came to the god’s house from the mountains of Alashkurru.”
“Really?” Ereshguna said. Sharur nodded. So did Habbazu. Ereshguna plucked at his beard. “Isn’t that interesting?”
“I thought so, Father,” Sharur said, having been too well brought up to say something as impolite as, What did I tell you.
“Why such a fuss over one worthless cup?” Habbazu asked.
Sharur did not directly answer that question. Sharur could not directly answer that question, having sworn in the market square of Imhursag by all the gods of Kudurru that he would not. Instead, he said, “Think, thief. Would Enzuabu have sent you to Gibil to steal one worthless cup?”
“Who know what a god would do?” Habbazu returned. “Who can guess what is in a god’s mind?” But he leaned forward, his sharp-featured face alert. “Speaking as a mere man, though, I say you are likely right. And so I ask a different question: What is the true value of this cup that seems worthless?”
Again, Sharur did not answer. Again, Sharur could not answer. His father had taken no oath to speak of the power contained in the thing from the Alashkurru Mountains only to the folk of his own city. But Ereshguna said only, “We are not certain ourselves.” Sharur thought that wise; the less Habbazu heard, the less Enzuabu would learn.
Being no fool, Habbazu noticed he was getting something less than straightforward answers. “You know more than you are saying,” he remarked, although without any great rancor.
“Yes, we know more than we are saying,” Sharur agreed. “You have come into our city to steal from our god. Should we be delighted at that? Should we drink ourselves foolish and dance in the street because of it? You have not come here to help Gibil. You have not come here to help the Giblut.”