Sarah: A Novel Page 11

  Sarai poured an infusion of thyme and rosemary into brass goblets. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” she said.

  “My father and brothers didn’t want me to. They’re terrified at the thought that my presence here is a blasphemy. They’re afraid of your father and your brother. We mar.Tu are like that. We fear many things.”

  His self-assured tone was as she remembered it. There was a new element to it now: a calm amusement, the detachment of a man who liked to reflect about ideas before he made them his. He drank some of the infusion.

  “I left our tents in the middle of the night, without them seeing me. I took some pottery from my father’s kiln so they would think that I was bringing it to the temple. I gave it to your handmaid. My offering to your goddess!”

  Sarai could feel her heart beating faster. These words were like the first glimpse of what was to come: He, too, was cheating and lying for her.

  “That last time, when we met on the riverbank, you also had to sneak out to bring food and skins.”

  Abram nodded and smiled. “Yes . . . It was so long ago . . .”

  “But you haven’t forgotten.”

  “No.”

  The embarrassment returned all at once. They ate dates and honey cakes. Abram clearly had a healthy appetite. As she watched him making these simple gestures, Sarai felt a strange new pleasure—new and also disturbing. Above the collar of Abram’s tunic, the skin at the base of his neck seemed to her extremely smooth. She wanted to touch it.

  “That morning,” she said, “the soldiers found me and took me back to my father’s house.” She gave a little laugh. “He was very angry. But a few moons later, I managed to escape again. I went to your camp. I wanted to . . . to thank you for your help. But they told me your family had gone.”

  “We’d left for the North, and we stayed there.”

  Abram told her how, after leading the flocks to the huge royal tax center at Puzri-Dagan, Terah had decided to settle in Nippur to sell his pottery.

  “There are temples everywhere there. The lords want new statues of their ancestors every year,” Abram said, amused.

  While his father’s workshop prospered, he and his brothers, Haran and Nahor, had raised herds of small livestock for the great families of Nippur. In three or four years, thanks as much to the livestock as to his father’s pottery, they had grown sufficiently prosperous to have their own herds. Soon they had so many animals that each time they left the tax center at Puzri-Dagan, they would move the herds from one city to another, from Urum to Adab, hugging the mountain slopes where the grass grew in abundance.

  “My father, Terah, has become the chief of our tribe. A large tribe, numbering more than five hundred tents . . . But last winter, war broke out again with the people of the mountain. On the way to Adab, the Gutis pillaged our homes and storehouses and stole our herds. That’s what always happens: Whenever a war breaks out between cities, they start by stealing our animals and raping our women, and nobody comes to our aid. We aren’t made for war, so my father decided to return to Ur.” Once again, his eyes creased in an amused smile. “The lords of Ur are very happy we’re back. They all like the mar.Tu Terah’s pottery. Your father, for one.”

  “I like it, too. It’s beautiful.”

  Abram laughed, ate a date, and waved his hand as if her words were smoke. “And you,” he said, his eyes still smiling, “how is it that you’ve become the most beautiful of women, and yet in all this time no lord of Ur has taken you as his wife?”

  Sarai felt her throat go dry and the blood burn her cheeks. Abram was like that. He did not beat about the bush, and knew how to catch her off guard, answering questions he had not yet been asked. She had thought about the words she would say to him. Now they all seemed to sound contrived.

  Sililli’s words echoed in her head: “Even the mar.Tu want women with fertile wombs!” Hers was barren, and had been barren for so long that she doubted she would ever again see the blood flow between her legs. But could she explain to Abram that she had taken a kassaptu’s drug in her despair at not having received a kiss from him? That she had been an irresponsible child, incapable of grasping the consequences of her acts?

  “No, no man can marry a handmaid of Ishtar,” she finally stammered.

  Abram’s face froze. Avoiding his gaze, Sarai told him briefly how she had become “sick” soon after their encounter, and how the soothsayer had understood the significance of her sojourn in the underworld and had encouraged her to become a daughter of the temple.

  He listened without batting an eyelid while she explained, with a certain pride, how for five long years she had learned all the skills of the priestesses: writing on tablets, poetry, chanting, dancing, preparing offerings, and, finally, dominating the bull.

  “The bull?” he said in surprise.

  That was his only interruption.

  “Yes, that’s what it means to be the Sacred Handmaid of the Blood: to salute the bull and then offer his blood to the goddess of war.”

  She explained how the bull’s blood that flowed before the warriors leaving for battle protected them from injury and death. The gods, once their thirst was quenched, would breathe a little of their omnipotence into the arms of the human beings who had made the offering. She omitted that the priestess did not menstruate, and was as dry as dust under the feet of a conqueror.

  When she stopped, Abram thought for a moment, and shook his head. “You spill a bull’s blood to please your gods so that they should support you? But what if the warriors on the other side do the same? How can the gods choose which side to support? Perhaps they support both sides, and there’s no winner and no loser. Perhaps they support neither side, and the winner is simply the stronger or more cunning of the two? While the gods eat your offerings—”

  Once again, his voice was full of irony, but colder and harder this time.

  “No, you don’t understand!” Sarai interrupted him, tenderly. “The gods of the lords of Ur aren’t anyone else’s gods! We are the only ones who can invoke them!”

  “And you think, do you, that your gods took you off to the underworld? That they chose you to dance before the warriors until a bull dies, a bull my brothers and I have patiently reared?”

  Sarai hesitated. Abram’s cleverness impressed her. Indeed, how could she herself believe what the soothsayer and the priests said when she knew the true cause of her sickness? Even Sililli, who was always ready to see the presence of the gods in all things, trod very carefully whenever she touched on the subject.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “Sometimes, I think I was only sick. But the priests say it’s the gods who decide our sickness and health. And besides . . . it wasn’t the usual kind of sickness. Who can know the will of the gods?”

  “Yes. Who can know?”

  Abram looked skeptical. He became pensive, and ate and drank in silence. Sarai watched him, loving his every gesture: the grip of his fingers on the brass goblet, the movement of his chest as he breathed, the flexing of his shoulder muscles beneath the tunic. Her desire for him to touch her as he touched the objects and the food, the desire for his kiss—buried for so many years—came flooding back to her.

  “Who can know if these gods exist?” Abram said suddenly. “The gods of the lords of Ur, the gods of all the cities I’ve visited. That’s an awful lot of gods! Almost as many as there are men on earth. Where are they? What proof do we have of their presence? How are we to know if they help humans or threaten them? People say the gods are in everything. Whatever they do, even if they keep silent, there’s supposed to be a reason for it. A stone falls on a donkey and kills it: It’s the will of the gods. Why? Nobody knows, but they know, or their priests do. A woman dies giving birth, and her child dies at the same time: the will of the gods. But the woman is as pure as spring water, and her child has barely been born. Where’s the justice in that? Where’s the goodness of the gods? Why should these people suffer? The priests will say the woman’s husband or father-in-law or uncle or so
meone else forgot one day to salute a lord. Or had a bad thought. Or ate mutton when there was no moon . . . And there you have it, that’s the reason for the god’s anger!”

  He had raised his voice, which echoed in the small room. Suddenly aware of how outspoken he was being, he let out a great laugh.

  “Forgive these words in this place, Sacred Handmaid! Perhaps Ishtar will strike me dead when I leave here . . .”

  He fell silent, as if waiting for Ishtar herself to hear his laughter and respond. Perhaps it was also to give Sarai time to take offense, to protest, even to drive him away. But she remained impassive.

  Abram leaned forward, serious again. “The city of Urum is built on the banks of a river as wide as the Euphrates, called the Tigris because it can be as fierce as a tiger. I met an old man there who’d followed the river to its source, far away in the mountains of the north. He was looking for precious stones, but all he brought back was brass and diorites. But on the other side of the mountains, he met peoples who weren’t barbarians and who believed in just one god. A god whose one task and one wish was to give birth to the world and then offer it to men.”

  Sarai held his gaze, not sure she understood what he was trying to say by telling her this story.

  Abram gave a gentle smile. “A god who loves humans enough not to force his priestesses to dance between the horns of bulls. A god who allows his priestess to take a husband.”

  Fire went through Sarai’s stomach like a wave, and her neck and her shoulders felt stiff. “I’ve never been able to forget your face, Abram,” she said, lowering her head, “or the night we spent by the river. You’ve been in my thoughts and in my dreams, although I never imagined that I’d see you again. All I knew of you was your name, Abram. But since our night on the riverbank, I’ve wanted your lips to touch mine and protect me for the rest of my life. None of that has changed. I don’t know the will of the gods. Unlike you, I haven’t thought about their injustices or their powers. Sometimes I think I can feel their presence, sometimes not. But I know I almost died because I didn’t receive your kiss.”

  “A mar.Tu can’t kiss the daughter of a lord of Ur,” Abram replied, in a changed voice, a voice full of sorrow. “My younger brother, Haran, found a wife in Adad. They have a son. It’s rare among us for a younger child to be a husband and a father before his elder brother. Hardly a day goes by that my father doesn’t worry about my solitary state.”

  Sarai managed to smile. “I’m not the daughter of Ichbi Sum-Usur. He told me so himself. I’m no longer my brother’s sister. I’m only a handmaid of Ishtar.”

  “A mar.Tu can’t kiss a handmaid of Ishtar whom no man has the right to marry.”

  “In three moons, during the great seedtime festival,” Sarai said, in a trembling voice, “our king Shu-Sin will open my thighs, up there in the Sublime Bedchamber. He’ll lie with me like a husband, as the Lady of the Moon did with almighty Dumuzi. I still need your kiss to protect me.”

  Abram first froze in astonishment, then rose to his feet, shaking with anger. “You’re mad!” he cried. “You Lords of the Cities are all mad!” He seized the petrified Sarai by the shoulders. “How could you do such a thing?”

  She did not have time to reply.

  “Sarai, Sarai!” Sililli was calling.

  She appeared in the doorway, and looked at them in astonishment. Abram let go of Sarai and took a step back.

  “Quick, quick,” Sililli said, catching him by the sleeve of his tunic. “You mustn’t stay here. Kiddin is in the big reception courtyard, asking to be received by the Sacred Handmaid of the Blood. He’s talking to the priests right now.”

  Abram pulled himself free of Sililli’s grip. “It was time for me to go anyway.”

  “No, wait!” Sarai protested. “There’s no question of my receiving my brother. He has no business here.”

  “The young handmaids are looking for you everywhere!” Sililli cried. “If they don’t find you, they’ll suspect something. You have to show yourself.”

  “I, too, have no business here,” Abram said.

  “Abram . . .”

  “I thank the Sacred Handmaid for her hospitality. Long may she reign in this temple.”

  His salute was as curt and cruel as his tone. He turned his back on her and was in the corridor before Sarai could react.

  “I told you,” Sililli muttered, her face a picture of distress. “You shouldn’t have done it. The gods don’t want it.”

  The Shawl of Life

  This was the man she loved.

  A hotheaded, rebellious man, his mind bursting with ideas! A brave, combative, handsome man. A man who loved her without saying it in words, but who showed it through his jealousy and rage.

  And now all hope had gone.

  In the days that followed, Sarai thought about Abram constantly. Sleep was impossible. While reports flooded in that the mountain barbarians were getting ever closer to the city and the temple, cloudy with the smoke of scents and crammed with offerings, hummed with invocations and chants, she continued to perform her duties as Sacred Handmaid without emotion. Pleading the excuse that she needed a special purification to please Ishtar, she spent as much time alone as she could. She ordered Sililli to stop her endless moaning and her old wives’ tales.

  “The mar.Tu has gone back to his tent. We won’t be seeing each other again. Just keep quiet now, and tomorrow I won’t even remember his name.”

  Sililli may or may not have believed her, but she did not need to be told twice. Saying these words, though, had opened Sarai’s heart to despair. It was true: Abram had refused to give her the kiss she had been waiting for, and she could expect nothing more from him. At one and the same time, he had condemned the laws of Ur, the gods, and any happiness they might give each other, even in secret. The best thing to do was to forget him. That should be easy: There was so little to forget. A long-ago encounter on the riverbank, a few words, his presence for a short while in a small room.

  All that was left for her was to serve Ishtar according to the rules she had been taught, if not with devotion. All that was left for her was to wait for almighty Shu-Sin to put his erect penis between her thighs in the Sublime Bedchamber. Without the thought of Abram to protect her. Without the memory of his kiss to ward off fear and disgust.

  Abram was right to condemn her for accepting the will of men, men who claimed she was no longer a wife, a daughter, or a sister, merely a sacred womb with no other fate but submission.

  But Abram had no idea what made her a handmaid of the Lady of War: the fact that her womb was barren. And Sililli had spoken the truth: Even a mar.Tu would want a wife with a fertile womb!

  If the gods had the power to punish humans, Sarai’s punishment had been decided long ago.

  In the dead of night, unable to sleep, as if at any moment she might fall, for the second time in her life, into the pit of the underworld, Sarai lay with her eyes wide open.

  It was on the third night of this torture that she heard a slight shuffling sound. It came again, and a faint light passed her door, moved along the corridor, and vanished.

  Without a noise, taking care not to wake Sililli, Sarai wrapped herself in a woolen toga and slipped into the corridor, just in time to see the light disappear on the right, toward the great courtyard.

  She knew this part of the giparù well enough to find her way in the dark. Holding her hands out in front of her, feeling the brick walls, it took her only a moment to reach the great courtyard, where the entrance to the kitchens and the door leading to the Sublime Esplanade were permanently lit by torches. Above the temple, as they did every night, the naphtha fires illuminated the staircases and terraces of the ziggurat.

  AT first she saw and heard nothing.

  Then she made out two shadows moving in the corner of the courtyard opposite the kitchens. Sarai thought of calling the guards. Could the Gutis be so close to Ur that they were already sending their spies into the temple?

  One of the shadows rose to its full
height. She hesitated. If it was the barbarians, they would have time to kill her before the guards arrived. The small of her back tingled with fear.

  The two shadows also hesitated, ready to flee. Sarai heard a whisper. “Sarai!” They had spoken her name!

  She advanced cautiously. The shadow waved his hand. Another whisper. Her heart beat faster: She recognized his voice.

  “Abram? Abram, is that you?”

  One of the two shadows took a pottery lantern from behind his back and raised it to his companion’s face.

  “Abram, what are you doing here?” Sarai breathed in astonishment.

  He took her by the hands. At this simple contact, a shiver ran down the back of Sarai’s neck, like a fever.

  “This is my brother, Haran,” he said. “I’ve come for you, if you want me.”

  “Come for me?”

  “The Gutis aren’t going to arrive where the lords of Ur are expecting them. They’re cleverer than that. They’ve made an alliance with the Huhnurs, and are using their boats. They’ll be on the river by tomorrow, and land in the lower city.”

  “Almighty Ea!” she cried.

  The exclamation drew a smile from Haran. He was a little shorter than Abram, rounder in face and body, with laughing eyes.

  “You’re right to invoke him, Sacred Handmaid. The lords of Ur are going to need his help.”

  Abram frowned to silence his brother. He clasped Sarai’s hands tighter and, speaking low and quickly, told her that their father and all the tribe had struck camp two days before and headed north, anxious to get their flocks and herds out of reach of the Gutis.

  “Haran agreed to come back here with me . . .”

  “Because Abram assured me he knew how to get into your temple and how to find his way around,” Haran said, smiling broadly. “Well, we got in all right. But finding our way in this labyrinth is another matter! If you hadn’t come to us . . .”