No one seemed to have been hurt here, not by the cheerful way in which the family and a couple of slaves were biting chunks out of the one wall still standing with hoes and mattocks, and spreading and pounding the crushed mud bricks to make a floor for the new house they’d soon build on the site of the old one. They’d carefully saved their poplarwood roof beams and set them in the street next to the stacks of bricks from which the new house would arise.
The street had been narrow to begin with. Wood and bricks slimmed it further. And, of course, a crowd of people had gathered to watch the work and offer suggestions. “After you’re done with your house, why don’t you knock down mine?” somebody called.
“Knock down your own house, Melshippak,” the man of the laboring family answered, in tones suggesting that Melshippak was a close friend or a relative. “Me, I’m going to enjoy being on a level with the street for a change, instead of taking a big step up every time I want to go out my own front door. This is the first time we’ve had to build in more than twenty years.”
Over twenty years, a lot of people had, like Dimgalabzu, pitched their trash into the street. No wonder its level had risen in that stretch of time.
Sharur, however, did not care how high the street was, only how wide, or rather, how narrow. “Please move aside,” he called to Melshippak and the other spectators. When they didn’t move, he shouted, “Make way!” That shifted a few of them, but not enough. He nodded to the caravan guards. They swaggered forward. Even without any weapons but fists and knives, they were large, impressive men. With them at his back, Sharur shouted, “Clear out, curse you! Stop clogging this canal!”
People stared at him as if they hadn’t had the slightest idea he or the donkeys or the guards were anywhere nearby. Slowly, grudgingly, they gave way. One after another, the donkeys squeezed past the bottleneck. As soon as they had gone by, the crowd flowed back.
Like the god’s temple, like the lugal’s palace, the city wall was built of baked brick, far more costly than the sun-dried variety but far harder and more nearly permanent. In the Alashkurru Mountains, they made houses and walls out of stone, but in Kudurru that would have been even more expensive than baked brick.
“Engibil’s goodwill and all good fortune attend you, son of Ereshguna,” one of the gate guards said. They were Kimash’s followers to a man, and so well inclined toward traders and smiths.
Sharur led the caravan down the low hill atop which Gibil sat and onto the floodplain at the base of that hill. He had descended the hill countless times, never once thinking about it. Now he looked back and seemed to see it with new eyes. Had it always been there, a knob sticking up from the flatland all around? Or had Gibil-that-was started out on the floodplain and slowly risen, one basketful of trash, one knocked-down house, at a time, till now it stood some distance above the plain all around? If that went on for another thousand years, or two, or three, would Gibil end up sitting atop a mountain? Maybe it would, but not with him here to see it, nor even his ghost.
The road that ran west toward the Yarmuk River—a beaten track in the mud—passed any number of small farming villages. A few of the better houses in them would be made of sun-dried brick, like those of Gibil. Most, though, were built of the reeds that grew along riverbanks and, where untended, choked canals to death. Those huts resembled nothing so much as enormous baskets turned upside down.
“I wouldn’t want to live like that,” Sharur said, pointing toward one such hut in front of which a couple of naked children played. “You couldn’t go up to the roof to sleep without rolling off on your head.”
Mushezib’s laugh bared a fine set of strong, yellow teeth. “I grew up in a village like this one, but, after I’d gone into Gibil a few times to trade, I knew that was where I wanted to live out my days.”
Harharu nodded. “My story is the same. So many people, though, are happy to stay in the fields all their lives.” His wave over the landscape encompassed farmers weeding the growing wheat and barley, their wives tending garden plots of beans and onions and cabbage and melons and cucumbers, a couple of men digging mud from the bank of a canal and plopping it into square frames to make bricks, a woman spanking a child that had been naughty, and a fellow spearing fish out of a stream with a sharpened reed.
Sharur would have bet all those people would stay in their village till they died. He was lucky enough to have been born in Gibil, in a city that traded to east and west, north and south, and that boasted whole streets not only of smiths but also of potters and dyers and basketmakers and other artisans. Had he not been born there, he knew he, too, would have found a way to make it his home.
Then he thought again of Gibil-that-was, the town he imagined down on the valley floor rather than standing tall on its hill. In the time of his grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather, would it not have been a village much like any of these others? He wondered what had made it grow while they stayed as they always were.
Engibil, he thought. The god had always dwelt there. People who came to petition him would have stopped to trade and simply to gossip with one another. That alone might have been enough to push Gibil ahead of the neighboring villages. Sharur smiled nervously. He, a modem man, tried to stay out of the god’s shadow and stand in his own light as much as he could. Strange to think he might have been enabled to become a modem man because Engibil caused a city to come into being.
That night, the caravan camped by a village still in the territory ruled by Gibil. One of the donkeys carried trinkets to trade for supplies along the way. A few necklaces strung with pottery beads, brightly colored stones, and small seashells from the Sea of Rabia (into which the Yarmuk and Diyala flowed) got Sharur enough bread and beer and sun-dried fish to feed his men. He unrolled his blanket on the ground and slept till sunup.
“Come on,” he said as he splashed water on his face from a canal to help wake himself up. Several of the donkey handlers and guards knelt by the edge of the water with him, doing the same. Others, a little farther downstream, pissed away the beer they’d drunk the night before. Still yawning, Sharur went on, “This was the last night we’ll be able to rest without posting sentries. By tonight, we’ll be in the lands that belong to the city of Zuabu. Nobody with any sense will trust the Zuabut: they’re thieves.”
“That’s Enzuabu’s fault,” Harharu said. “They used .to have another god there, a long time ago, but Enzuabu stole the city from him and chased him out into the desert. Of course the people take after their god.”
“I heard it the other way round: that the city god takes after the people, I mean,” Sharur said. “I heard they were such thieves that they raised a power of thievery in their land, and that was how Enzuabu got to be stronger than the god they used to have.”
“It may be so,” the donkeymaster answered with a shrug.
“It’s not the tale I’d heard, but it may be so. Whether it is or it isn’t, though, you’re right—they steal.”
The caravan came to the border between Gibil’s lands and Zuabu’s not long after noon. The two towns, the two gods, were at peace. No guards patrolled the frontier, as they did between Gibil and Imhursag to the north. A bridge of date-palm logs stretched across a canal. Once over it, Sharur went on down the road to the west through Zuabu’s land.