But it was Dishon, alone.
The eunuch purposefully closed the gate and leaned against it, setting the lamp in the alcove where he usually set Enkidu’s meals. Enkidu clenched his hands at his sides and felt a lump form in his stomach. He felt the hour of the final and most terrible test of his faith racing toward him. His knees went wobbly. He squatted on his haunches to conceal their shaking.
But Dishon’s manner, though purposeful, was mild enough. “I come tonight that we may talk sense to each other.”
“Sargan sent you here to persuade me to recant?”
“No. He does not know that I am here.” Dishon now squatted opposite Enkidu, his eyes studying the prisoner’s face in the flaring light. “It is a waste to use physical persuasion when mental persuasion is just as effective.”
Enkidu smiled at the eunuch’s assumption that he could prevail intellectually. “So you hope to convince me that Aten is a false god?”
“Tomorrow is the festival of the Harvest. Recant tonight; then you and I will both be free to enjoy the celebrations of the city.”
So the torture-merchant was willing to pass the savings on to the client in return for prompt settlement. Strange that the eunuch should look forward to the festival; he could hardly enjoy the solicitations of the half-clothed Ishtaritu courtesans.
“Don’t you see,” Enkidu exclaimed suddenly, “that for you to take my god from me is as great an evil as for the slavemaster to take your manhood away from you! How can you dedicate yourself to such a thing?”
“When I was young,” Dishon said slowly, “I spoke as you do now. No one could tell me that I could survive without the constant favors of the full-breasted, fat-buttocked shes of my village. But now I do not miss them.”
Enkidu was appalled. Now he did not even miss them! Was this the way it was, also, to lose a god? Not only the faith, the religious exaltation, but even the desire for both? “If by some magician’s art you could be restored—”
“I would not give up the position I have now to return to such an addiction,” Dishon said positively. “No art of mine can match the tortures women inflict on men.” He looked at Enkidu. “Yet even so, women have their uses, and they are soft. Better that folly than to suffer for a god who does not exist at all.”
“How do you know he doesn’t exist! What if I denied your god like that?”
“I have no god.”
“And how long have you had no god? Were you not once a worshiper of Ishtar? Is that why you try to dissuade me from Aten?”
“I worship no god now. But if worship of Ishtar is a bar to the worship of Aten, your sojourn here is pointless. Are you not married to an Ishtaritu?”
“What do you mean?”
“The priestess Tamar claims to be your wife.”
“Priestess?”
Dishon nodded gravely.
Enkidu tried to absorb this information. She had made their sudden marriage in the gardens known, then. Perhaps she actually was working for his release. “What do you know of her?”
“What does anyone know of her, who worships the lioness? Swiftly she rose from the ranks of the Ishtaritu, for she was beautiful and skilled in service, men say. Many thousands of men she honored, great wealth she brought to the temple of the goddess. Now she has much influence. Some say she will be high priestess when the elder women slip.”
This was the woman he had taken to wife! The eunuch doubtless exaggerated, but had no cause to lie. The myth of Gilgamesh had given true warning: do not become involved with a goddess!
For what possible reason had such a one chosen to link herself to him? No one had smaller need of marriage than she!
“I see you did not know,” Dishon said.
“I see you are smarter than I thought,” Enkidu admitted. “But isn’t intelligence wasted in your profession?”
Dishon got to his feet, shrugging. “Intelligence is wasted in most professions. Had you been less alert you would never have found your way to this predicament. My first master trained me to these skills. Long ago I learned that life is easier for a slave if his master assumes him to be somewhat simple minded. So I perform my office and keep my thoughts to myself—most times.”
“But what an office!”
Dishon ignored that sally. “Ask yourself, pretender: is the evidence for the existence of your god—or any god—enough to justify undertaking torture for his sake? If gods do exist, they can hardly care what happens to a man. They will continue to exist, or not to exist, whatever may happen to you, and the world will go on as before.”
“I will think about what you have said,” Enkidu promised.
The eunuch put his hand on the gate.
“But I will not recant,” Enkidu added as the door scraped open. Yet the words came hard.
Dishon turned. “You will recant—one way or another. Sargan will not stop until you do.”
“How can I renounce my god?” Enkidu burst out. “I don’t want to be tortured—but any recantal I made would be a lie.” Though something in him suggested otherwise.
“It will be no lie when your flesh sizzles under the oil,” Dishon promised grimly. “I have seen it many times. Such faith as could lift Etemenanki itself vanishes like a genie in the smoke of boiling flesh. You will recant. I came here to spare you pain, but I go from here to ready the chamber. Sargan has ordered your persuasion to start at sunrise.”
Scarcely had the door banged shut behind Dishon before Enkidu was at work on a tablet. Both he and Amys had learned to soften the surface mud just enough to accept the imprint of the stylus, so that it hardened rapidly. They had also fashioned permanent mud envelopes impregnated with hair to set over the tablets; these did not fit perfectly, of course, but made almost immediate transmission feasible. A reply could be read scant hours after a query.
He had, Enkidu informed Amys, just received news concerning his esteemed and lovely goddess of a first wife, Tamar. Surely Amys, who had spent her life in Babylon, had known of Tamar’s business. Why hadn’t she informed him? What other secrets pertinent to his life had she withheld from her husband?
I MUST KNOW EVERYTHING IMMEDIATELY, he concluded. IN THE MORNING I GO TO THE TORTURE.
He snatched some sleep while awaiting her reply, but he was restless and tense. Still the dilemma tormented him. If Aten were real, and Enkidu were in the hands of Aten’s established priesthood, and if their methods were justified, and they were determined to destroy his faith—then did that mean that Aten did not want Enkidu’s worship? Was it Aten’s will that he recant? Yet if he recanted, if he swore and believed that Aten were a false god, less worthy of worship than Marduk or Ishtar—Marduk with his corrupt priests, Ishtar with her harlots—then surely the priesthood of such a lowly god was also to be despised, and their demand wrong.
They demanded that he recant. If they were wrong, that meant that he should not recant, which in turn meant that Aten was not a false god, and—Which came first: the slave or the slaver? One riddle was as good as another.
Recant! Recant! NK-2 urged, trying to undo in hours what he had built up in years. It was pointless to have his host destroyed so uselessly. But the host had a mighty will of his own, and progress was slow, too slow.
In Enkidu’s half-sleep he visioned Aten in turn as a fiery and beautiful horse of finest breed, with mane radiant as the sun, ready to carry his worshipers to everlasting joys… and as an ugly crocodile, ready to crunch the foolish mortal in its jaws and destroy him body and spirit. Which image was the true one? Surely both could not apply…