title: "Those Who Came Down" subtitle: "The Anunnaki, as the dreamers tell it" author: "Andries J. Greyling" publisher: "Arjuna Badger Press · House of Greyling" rights: "© Andries J. Greyling. All rights reserved." ...

About this book

This is a fiction, and it is a particular kind of fiction: the story the late-night shelf has been telling in fragments for fifty years, told once, whole, and committed. In these pages the crossing-world is real, the gold is why they came, and the worker was made. The house has two other books on this same clay. The Walls of Uruk tells the poem plainly, as the scribes wrote it. The Princely Offspring follows the evidence and shows, wedge by wedge, why none of this happened. Read either of them after this one and you will feel the shelf disagree with itself. That is not an accident. Some stories are worth telling from inside even when the clay says otherwise, because the hunger that wants them true is itself a true thing, and it deserves better than cardboard.

Told in twelve tablets, after the old custom.

Tablet I — The Wounded Sky

The gold went up at dusk, always at dusk, when the wind off the plains of home lay down and the high air went still enough to hold it.

Enki had watched the throwing since he was a child at his father's knee: the long guns on the mountain rims coughing their pale freight upward, the dust catching the last light as it spread, so fine it did not fall, a bloom of warmth across the roof of the world. Ground finer than flour, finer than pollen, beaten from metal that did not rust and did not tire, the only thing they had found that would sit in the thin places of the sky and keep the heat of the far, small sun from leaking away between crossings. On the nights after a throwing you could see the difference with your naked eye, a faint gold smoke against the dark, and the old ones would say, there, that is another year bought, and pour beer on the ground for the miners.

The trouble was arithmetic. He was an engineer before he was a prince, and he had done the sums himself, twice, hoping to be wrong. The veins of home were thin and going thinner. The sky drank more each sar than the mountains gave. A world can be rich in everything and poor in the one thing, and the one thing was gold, and the ledger said that within ten crossings the nights would start to win.

So when the watchers of the deep sky came to An's court and said that the third planet of the small sun ran yellow in their instruments, yellow the way a river runs yellow over a reef, no one in the long hall asked whether. They asked who.

An looked down the table at his sons.

Enlil sat straight, as he always sat, firstborn of the reigning wife, Lord of the Command, a mind like a well-kept storehouse. Enki sat with his hands flat on the stone, second by an hour and first by an older reckoning that no longer counted, and he knew before his father spoke that the answer would be both of them, and that it would be him who went first, because the first task was water and mud and machines, and those were his.

The crossing took the better part of a year of home, which is to say most of four thousand years of the world they were falling toward, though nobody aboard felt it as more than a long, dull cold. He slept for much of it. He woke for the last turning and stood at the eye of the boat and watched the third planet come up out of the black like a held breath let go: white at the crown, blue past all sense, wrapped in weather. Nothing in the records had said it would be beautiful. The records said aurum, in quantity, hydrosphere, breathable envelope, and then column after column of numbers, and not one of the numbers had warned him that he would stand at the eye with his chest aching and think, we are going to owe this place.

They came down on fire, as everything comes down everywhere, thunder first, then the long white spear of the burn, then the hull sighing and ticking as the sea took the heat out of it. He had aimed for the mouth of two great rivers, where the charts promised shallows and silt. The boat settled into a brown warm marsh the size of a small sea, and the wake of their coming ran away from them through the reeds in rings, and the birds went up in one white shout, ten thousand of them, and then came back, because birds forgive.

He waded ashore at the head of a hundred of the young, the eager, the ones who had signed for adventure and would stay for lifetimes. The mud took his boots to the ankle. It was good mud, fat with the rot of reeds, and under the smell of it there was salt, and under that, very faint, iron. He stood in it while the others splashed past him whooping like boys, and he bent and took a handful and worked it between his fingers, feeling the grain of it, the fineness. You could build with this. You could fire it hard as stone.

They raised the first station on a low mound above the flood line, huts of cut reed first, then brick as soon as he could get a kiln standing, and he named it Eridu, home in the far place, which was sentiment, and he allowed himself exactly that much.

At night the sky here was crowded with stars in a way the sky of home had not been for a long age, and none of the stars was his. He noted where home would rise when it rose, three and a half thousand of this world's quick years away, and marked the line of it with two posts driven in the mud, and told no one why.

They had come for the yellow reef. In the morning they would start on the rivers.

The rivers, he wrote in the first report, are generous. Everything here is generous. That is the first fact about this world and I do not yet know what it costs.

Tablet II — The Edin

For the first years they took the gold the easy way, the way a child takes honey, from the surface of things.

The two rivers came down out of the northern mountains loaded with the rubble of ranges older than anyone's records, and in the rubble, gold. Enki built sluices at the bends where the current slowed, long stepped channels of fired brick, and the water ran down them all day and all night and left its freight on the riffles, and every tenth day the young ones swept the takings into pans and melted them into little standard loaves the size of a thumb. He sent the first shipment home on the boat that had brought them, eleven years to the day after the landing. He remembered the weight of the chest as four of them carried it up the ramp. He remembered thinking that it was not very heavy.

The reply came back down with the second expedition: the assay was good, the sky-smiths were pleased, and the quantity was one part in four hundred of a single year's throwing.

He read the tablet twice and then went and stood by his two posts in the mud and did the arithmetic he had been declining to do. The rivers were generous. The rivers were also slow. Panning the skin of this world, they would all die of old age, and their grandchildren too, before the freight amounted to a sky.

The second expedition brought better machines. It also brought Enlil.

His brother came down in the manner his brother did everything, at the appointed hour, on the appointed plain, with the manifest already read. He stepped off the ramp into the heat of the Edin in his court dress, looked out across the reeds and the sluices and the brick sheds with their roofs of woven palm, and Enki watched him take inventory of eleven years of work in one long moment, and find it, visibly, small.

"You have built a village," Enlil said. Which was true, and was meant kindly, and landed like a slap because both of them heard the word that came next in the sentence and was not spoken. Father expected a mine.

They drew lots for the commands in the reed hall at Eridu with the whole company standing witness, because Enki insisted on the lots and Enlil insisted on the witnesses, and that told anyone with eyes everything about the both of them. An kept the sky and the crossings. To Enlil fell the Edin, the settlements, the landing fields, the discipline of the whole venture, the mouth that would speak to home. To Enki fell the waters, the machines, and the deep places. He held his lot in his fist a moment before he showed it, and Enlil watched him hold it, and neither of them said that the lots had fallen the way both of them would have chosen anyway, because some mercies you do not name.

It was the survey flights that changed the arithmetic. His pilots came back from the great land to the south and west with their instruments full to the brim: a country at the foot of the world where the yellow signature did not trace along riverbeds in threads but lay in the body of the rock itself, a buried reef like the rim of a drowned bowl, going down and down past the reach of the sounding, richer at depth. The oldest rock they had ever put a needle to. A treasure not scattered but banked.

He flew south himself to see it. Grass without end, running gold-coloured in the wind as if the land were advertising, herds moving on it like cloud shadow, and under it all, in the dark, the reef. He landed on a high ridge in the evening and the air was dry and sweet and enormous, and something coughed twice in the middle distance, deep as a drum, unafraid of him. The stars came up. He sat on his heels on the oldest rock in the world until well after dark.

He was an engineer. He knew what the reef would demand. Shafts, first of dozens of cubits and then of thousands. Heat that pressed on the chest like a hand the deeper you went. Rock that spat under the lamps. Lifetimes of it, an age of lifetimes, a labour without an evening. And the ones who would go down into that dark were the young who had splashed ashore whooping at Eridu, and the ones who kept signing on, sar after sar, princes of a tired world, offspring of the sky.

The word for them in the old tongue of home meant exactly that. The princely offspring. Those who from heaven came down.

He gave the order for the first shaft in the spring. For a long time afterwards he would remember that he gave it standing in grass to his waist with his back to the sunset, and that the surveyor who took the order down was smiling as she wrote, because the reef was beautiful work and everyone knew it, and that nobody on the ridge that evening, himself least of all, thought to ask what the dark down there would do to those who had to live in it.

Tablet III — The Abzu

They called the deep country the Abzu, which in the tongue of home meant the far waters, the underneath of the world, and the miners made it mean the dark.

The first shaft took nine years. The tenth took nine months. By the end of the first sar there were shafts down the whole rim of the drowned bowl, headframes standing on the grassland like a new kind of tree, and below them the galleries ran out under the country for distances Enki no longer told his brother honestly, because honesty had begun to sound like boasting. The reef paid. The reef paid the way nothing in the records of home had ever paid. The standard loaves went north by the boatload now, and up the sky by the shipload, and at the crossing the throwing-guns of home fired for forty nights on the freight of this one buried rim, and the elders poured beer on the ground for miners none of them had met.

The ones they poured for were called the Igigi, the lesser watchers, the young of the young, and by the second sar the name had a taste to it. Those who went below.

Enki went down with them oftener than a lord of the waters had any need to. He told himself it was the engineering. Partly it was the engineering: the heat was a real enemy, and he beat it with cold air driven down shafts of his own design, and the water in the deep galleries was an enemy, and he beat that too. But partly it was that he could not stay out of the dark while others were in it on his order, and he knew this about himself, and knew Enlil knew it, and knew Enlil considered it a flaw of command. A lord who cannot send others where he will not go is only leading a very large family. His brother had said that once, at table, not unkindly. Enki had thought about it for a sar and decided he could live with the size of his family.

It was on one of the down-days that he first saw the walkers.

Word had come up of tracks in the mud of a flooded gallery, and the shift-lords assumed a leopard, which happened, and was bad for sleep and discipline. What the lamps found instead, in a side-cut half a mile in, was a family. Upright, small, pelted thin, wide-eyed in the sudden light. They had come in past the gates for the same reason anything sensible goes underground on that grassland, which is that the season above was fire. There were five of them. The big male put himself between the lamps and the others and stood his ground trembling, which is the bravest thing a body can do, and in his fist he had a chopping stone, and Enki, looking at the stone, forgot entirely that he was supposed to be deciding anything.

The stone had been worked. Both faces, a long edge, struck clean with maybe sixty blows in a right order that could not be stumbled into. Whoever made it had held in its mind, before it began, the shape of a thing that did not yet exist.

He had the family fed and put out gently by the west gate, and then he did what he was and went and looked where no one had thought to look. It did not take long, once you knew. They were everywhere on that country. Fire, carried and kept, in ring hearths at the cave mouths. Middens that said seasons of planning. In one high cave above a river, in a layer of old dry dust, a grave. A child, laid on its side, knees drawn up, and over the small bones a scatter of pollen that had once, some hundreds of years before any boat of his came down on fire, been an armful of flowers.

He sat outside that cave until dark, the way he had sat on the ridge above the reef, and the two sittings argued with each other in him for a long time after.

He wrote none of it in the reports at first. He could not have said why, except that the reports went to the court of An, and the court of An would ask the court's question, which was, is it useful. And he was not ready to hear the question asked of the ones who buried their dead in flowers. Something old was moving on that grassland, moving slowly, the way rock moves, and it had been moving long before the watchers of the deep sky ever read this world's rivers as yellow. He had not lit that fire. The fire was burning when he got there. All any coming-down could ever do was crowd in beside it, and warm what it warmed, and owe what it owed.

Meanwhile, below, in the galleries, in the third sar of the digging, the Igigi had begun to go quiet at shift-change. An engineer notices load. He noticed. He told himself there was time.

Tablet IV — The Burning of the Tools

The rebellion began, as the worst things do, on an ordinary night, at the change of a shift like ten thousand shifts before it.

Afterwards everyone had seen it coming. Afterwards the signs were a road. The silence at the cage-heads. The way the songs of home had stopped, one gallery at a time, over half a sar, and nobody had marked the night the last one ended. The tally-clerks reporting seams worked slow and faces left rough, and the shift-lords answering discipline with doubled tasks, and Enlil, at the far northern end of a long chain of tablets, approving the doubling, because from the Edin the Abzu was a column of figures, and the figures had wavered, and you steady a figure with a firmer hand.

Enki was in the north when it broke, which he did not forgive himself, then or after.

They came up out of the shafts at the dark of the moon with their picks and their carrying-baskets and they made a hill of them at the main gate of the garrison and burned it. Tools of home, hafted in home's hard woods, worth their weight in anything. The fire could be seen from the relay station on the ridge, and the signal that went north with it was three words old as any tongue. Every one of us.

They marched on the residency where Enlil kept his southern court, and ringed it in the dark, torch after torch after torch, and there they stood. They did not storm the doors. That was the thing, Enki thought later, that no one who was not below had understood: they were not murderous, they were finished. A body can be worked to where the only thing left standing in it is no. Enlil came out onto the roof in the smallest hours and looked down at the ring of fire, at the sons and daughters of the sky with their empty hands, and demanded the name of the one who had raised them, and out of the dark a hundred voices answered with a hundred names, and then a thousand with a thousand, and Enki, arriving on the wind of that same night, heard it from the air, a sound like the sea deciding something, and understood that his family had gotten very large indeed, and that it was over, and that whatever came now, no honest ledger would ever write that the Igigi were wrong.

The council that followed was held above, in the cold, in the presence of An, because Enlil would not treat under siege and Enki would not let the siege be called by any other name.

He had rehearsed arguments the whole way up. Rates and rests, engines to take the worst of the rock, a rotation home. Standing in the long hall he found he did not believe his own remedies, and An, who missed nothing, saw it on him and set the remedies aside with one hand, the way you clear a table, and asked him the question directly.

The toil is real, then.

The toil is real, Enki said. The reef goes down for ever and the sky of home drinks a mountain a year, and we have asked the young of one tired world to carry another world on their backs in the dark, for wages of beer poured on far-away ground. They have carried it three sars. They will not carry it again, and I will not ask them to, and if the court asks them, the court will need new miners or new arithmetic, because it has used up the old of both.

The silence in the hall had weight and a temperature. It was Enlil, in the end, who broke it, and not with anger. His brother's voice was tired in a way Enki had not heard it since the drawing of the lots, and what it said had plainly been carried a long time, all the way down some private shaft of its own.

Then let a bearer be made, Enlil said. You have written of the walkers of the south. You have written of their hands. Father, my brother keeps a country of small burying creatures at the foot of the world, and he loves them too well to put them in his reports honestly, and I have read the reports and the love both. Let the clever ones of this world help carry this world's wealth. Make us a worker.

Every face in the hall turned one way. Enki stood where the turning ended and felt the room arrive on him like weather off the sea.

He could have said no. That was the truth he lived with afterwards, in the long years when the made ones filled the plain and sang and multiplied and wept exactly as he had been warned no tool would ever do. An would have heard a no; the old king was fair. He searched himself for the no, standing in the long hall, and what he found instead, shameful and shining and stronger than either, was that some door in him had been standing open since a lamplit gallery half a mile into the rock, since a fist gripping a worked stone, since flowers.

He heard himself say: it can be done.

He heard himself say it, and the hall breathed out, and somewhere below the world went on turning towards the version of itself that has us in it.

Tablet V — The House of Shimti

The house where it was done stood apart from the settlements, downwind and downstream, on a rise above the Abzu's largest river, and the miners called it the house of Shimti, where the wind of life blows in, and said it with their eyebrows, because nothing had come out of it yet but failures.

Enki did not work alone. He would not have known how to begin alone. The beginning was Ninmah's.

She had come down with the second expedition as the mistress of the healers, a broad calm woman of the old blood who had set the bones and delivered the children of the sky for longer than Enki had been alive, and who had, over three sars in the south, walked more of the walkers' country than he had. She knew their seasons. She had watched their mothers with their young. When the writ came south with the seals of An and Enlil upon it, she read it standing, twice, and then rolled it closed and said, they will have kept the word worker all through the drafting of this, so that no one at that table had to say the word child. And Enki had no answer, because he had been at the table.

The essence of the walkers they had in plenty; the walkers left themselves generously about the landscape, in hair and blood and bone. The essence of the sky they had in themselves. What the joining lacked was a quickening, and this is the part of the telling that the clay of a later age remembered in the only words it had, and the words were blood and clay, and the words were right.

The council's law was old and it was not cruel, though it sounded so: nothing lives but from a life. What the mix required could not be tapped like a keg or spared like a coin. It had to be given whole, once, by one.

Geshtu-e came south on his own feet, and he came before he was sent for, which mattered to everyone afterwards.

He was the oldest of the company on all that world, a singer of the court in his youth, a keeper of the crossings' calendar in his age, and his name in the tongue of home meant the ear. He had been present, he said, at more history than was good for anyone, and had noticed that he was tired in a way that sleep did not answer, and that the young no longer knew the songs he knew, so that most of what he was had become a library no one visited. He said all this in the reed hall of the house of Shimti quite plainly, with his hands around a cup, and then he said: I have listened my whole long life. Let the listening go on without me. Put my ear in the clay.

Enki, who could refuse his father and his brother, could not refuse him, and hated that he could not, and Ninmah watched the two of them with her arms folded and grief already stood up in her eyes, because healers know before anyone which gifts are the kind that cannot be handed back.

Of the giving itself, the tellings of a later age say only that a god was slain, and this telling will not say more, except that it was done in honour, at his own hour, with the calendar he had kept laid open beside him at the day's date, and that Enki held one of his hands and Ninmah the other, and that the last thing the ear of the court ever did was listen, with every sign of interest, to the wind coming up the river.

What Ninmah made with what he left, she made fourteen times.

Fourteen of the mothers of the sky had answered her asking, women of the settlements and two of her own healers, and they carried the mixed clay as their own, which no writ had thought to require and no writ could have. Enki spent those seasons in a state he had no engineering for. He checked sums that had no numbers in them. He walked the river path at night.

In the spring, in the house of Shimti, with the wind of life blowing up the valley exactly as the miners' joke had it, the first of the fourteen was delivered, and it was small, and dark, and furious, and alive, and it did the thing its kind does first and has done first in every generation since.

It cried, and the cry went through Enki like a spear through a shield, and he understood, one breath too late to ever unknow it, what they had made in the house of Shimti. They had sat down to draft a tool. What was yelling in Ninmah's hands, with the ear of the court somewhere in it and flowers somewhere behind it, was a child.

Ninmah looked at him over the small head. She did not say the thing she had said when the writ came south. She did not have to say it ever again.

Tablet VI — The Fates of the Flawed

The made ones grew the way this world's creatures grew, at a gallop, whole childhoods inside a single year of home, and the court, watching from the north, called it efficiency, and Ninmah, raising them, called it what it was, which was heartbreak on a schedule.

They were people. Whatever the writ said, whatever the tally-clerks entered them as, that argument ended in every room they entered. They learned speech in two winters, laughter before that, deceit not long after, and the first time one of them looked at Enki sidelong and told him an untruth to protect a friend, he went out of the compound and stood in the grass with his heart going like a drum, because a tool does not lie. A tool has nothing to protect.

They went to the mines because they had been made for the mines, and this telling will not dress it up. The Igigi came out of the dark and the children of the clay went down into it, and the ledgers of the court steadied within a sar, and the beer was poured on the ground of home for a new kind of miner. Enki carried that and said little. The one thing he would not carry, he built into law with Ninmah standing beside him as witness: they were to be fed as kin, housed as kin, and worked to a measure, and any lord of a shaft who exceeded the measure would answer to the lord of the waters personally, below, in the gallery in question, at the rock face, where excuses have such poor acoustics.

It was in those years, at a feast at the house of Shimti, that Ninmah set her cup down hard and challenged him.

She had drunk, and so had he, and between them on the long table stood the leavings of the meal and a lump of the working clay in its dish of river water, brought out because the young healers had wanted to see her hands do the famous thing. She did the famous thing. And then she kept her hands in the clay, and looked at Enki down the table, and her look had the rebellion in it, and the writ, and the word worker standing in a drafted line where the word child should have been, and she said, loudly, so that the hall went quiet:

You are proud of the measure, my lord of the waters. You have made the world's first law for the world's newest backs. But your law loves the strong back. What if my hands slip? Body by body I could make them wrong, and what would your fine measure do with them then? Shall I show you? And your law can tell me which shaft they are fit for, or the court can tell me what is done with a made thing that fails the making.

The hall held its breath. This was the question under every question, and drink had only opened the door for it; it had lived in her since the fourteen wombs. What are they for, your children, when they cannot do the thing you made them for.

Enki looked at her hands in the clay a long time. Then he said, gently, and no one in that hall ever forgot it: shape, and I will answer.

She shaped one whose eyes would never see, and set it before him in the manner of the old game, as if the little figure stood for a grown one, for a life, and Enki did not hesitate. The dark is my own country, he said. He shall never fear what the strong fear at shift-end, and his ears will be Geshtu-e's own. Set him at the door of the king with an instrument in his hands, and the music in this land will change within a generation, and they will feed him first at every feast.

She shaped one whose hands would not close, and he said: messenger and judge's companion, for he alone takes no bribes, and his word will be weighed the heavier for it. She shaped one whose legs would not carry, and he said: the smith works sitting, and so does the seal-cutter, and the seal-cutter's art is patience, and who has more. She shaped one who would neither bear nor beget, and he found that one a place at the court itself, keeper of the households of the great, trusted past all others. Seven times she shaped and seven times he answered, and no figure was set aside, and no fate he named was a corner to rot in; each was a seat at the fire, with work that wanted exactly the body in question and honour stitched into the work.

When she was done Ninmah looked at the seven little figures in their row, and then at him, for a long moment, the length of a grief, and said quietly: the court drafted the writ, but the clay came out of your river, Enki. Remember this table when they fail your purposes. All of them will, in the end. They die so fast.

He did remember it. He remembered it in the worst hour there would ever be, which was coming toward them all even then, riding up out of the deep sky at its appointed pace, needing no lamps.

And in the mines, in those same years, the shift-lords of the Abzu sent north a report the court did not know how to file. The new miners had begun, unbidden, at the rock face, in the dark on their backs in the heat, to sing.

Tablet VII — The Black-Headed People

They multiplied. It was the one instruction nobody had needed to give the clay.

Within Enki's lifetime, which was the trouble and the wonder of it, within one lifetime of one lord of the waters, the children of the house of Shimti went from fourteen squalling firstborn to a people. They overflowed the compounds of the Abzu. They walked north along the coasts in bands, generation over generation, and reached the Edin, and the Edin might have been made for them, or they for it, the fat mud, the generous rivers. They called themselves, in the speech they had built for themselves out of the bones of two worlds' tongues, the black-headed people, and they called the mud brick their own invention, because it was. Enki had fired the first kiln on that plain before their great-great-grandmothers were clay in a dish, and he never once corrected them, and could not entirely have said why, except that watching them re-invent his own tricks and improve on them was the purest pleasure remaining to him.

They improved on everything. That was the thing the court had never drafted for. Beer, which no one of the sky had taught them, they found for themselves in a forgotten crock of barley-mash, and within three generations had made better than home's. They bred the grasses fat, they coaxed the date palm, they netted the rivers, and they traded, endlessly, shamelessly, delightedly, a people whose favourite discovered thing was each other. Their towns grew rings like trees, and the rings became walls, and one morning Enki stood on the flood-mound of Eridu, where his reed huts had been, and could not see the edges of the town the black-headed had raised on it, and the town was not his. It wore his old name the way a grandchild wears a grandfather's, affectionately, without obligation.

They died so fast. Ninmah had said it at the table of the fates and it never stopped being the deepest fact about them. A friendship with one of the black-headed was a season. You learned a face, you learned the mind behind it, you came to lean on some quick decent clever soul who understood your jokes, and then the face lined and the walk slowed and you were carrying an armful of flowers up a hill, again, and going home to rooms that stayed the same age for ever. Some of the sky-born hardened themselves and kept to their own compounds. Enki could not. He had signed for these griefs in the house of Shimti, at the first cry, and he paid them one by one for a thousand years, and each one, he found, was also somehow the same first grief, the child in the high cave, under the pollen, before any boat came down.

Kingship they asked for themselves. That, too, no one had planned. Their towns quarrelled over water and grazing, as towns will, and their elders came upriver to Eridu in a body, to the compound of the lord of the waters, and asked, with enormous ceremony, for what they called a shepherd, one voice set over the herd of voices. The court of An, when the request went north, was charmed, and granted it the way you grant a child's petition, with gifts: a crown, a staff, a standard. Enlil himself came south to lower them to the first chosen king, and the black-headed wrote the day down, in their tallies, as the day kingship came down from heaven, and Enki, reading how they had written it, felt the first cold touch of a thought that would grow all his long life: they are starting to remember us wrongly, and we are letting them, because it flatters.

And the young of the sky, the ones born on this world who had never seen home except as a bright wanderer at the crossings, did the thing the young do, which no writ had forbidden because no writ had imagined it. They fell in love. With the quick faces, the mortal laughter, the black hair. They took wives and husbands among the made people, defying nothing, since no law spoke, and the children of those matches were tall and long-lived and burning, heroes in one town, tyrants in the next, two parts one thing and one part the other, and the black-headed made songs about them that were half pride and half complaint.

Enlil watched it all from the north, and what he saw was increase without a governor, a graph climbing out of its margins. He was not wrong. He was the kind of ruler who is never exactly wrong, which is a dangerous kind. In the correspondence of those years his tablets to Enki say one thing over and over, in the varying words of a man losing sleep.

Brother, the noise.

He meant the towns, the festivals, the endless business of the plain, ten thousand cookfires' worth of shouting and singing and hammering that never once stopped at a decent hour. But Enki, who knew him, read the older complaint under it. Home was quiet. Home was dying quietly and with dignity, and this loud borrowed world would not stop living, and his brother could not forgive either of those things, and had begun, in the watches of his sleepless nights, to do sums of his own.

Tablet VIII — The Omen

The keepers of the calendar saw it first, as was proper, since watching for it was the whole of their office.

Home came back every three thousand six hundred of this world's years, and its coming was the clock of the whole venture, the crossing at which freight went up and relief came down and the two worlds stood near enough to speak. The black-headed knew the wanderer well by now and had folded it into their sky-lore, the star of the crossing, the one that goes away and returns, and they marked its risings from their temple towers with an accuracy that had begun to embarrass the sky-born's own junior staff. Three crossings had passed since the house of Shimti. The people of the clay had watched all three from below, festival occasions, torches on every roof.

The fourth would be different, and the difference was written in the sums half a sar in advance, for anyone whose instruments could weigh a world.

Every orbit is a negotiation, and this world and home had been renegotiating their terms since before either carried a living thing. This time the tally came out wrong. Home would cross low and near, nearer than in any record kept, and its pull, sweeping through the deep places, would take hold of the one loose thing this world kept at the foot of itself, which was ice. A country's weight of it, banked over ages at the bottom of the world, resting on its own melt. The wandering star would lean on the ocean and the ocean would lean on the ice, and somewhere in the far south, past even the Abzu, a shelf the size of a kingdom would let go and slide into the sea.

The engineers ran it nine times. The wave came out different in height each time and in nothing else. It would go around the world. The Edin, the low generous mud where most of mankind now lived between its two rivers, would be sea from the mountains to the mouth for a season, and after the sea, silt, and under the silt, everything.

The council met above, in the cold, in the old hall, and it was the emptiest great council in the venture's history, because what was there to decide? The sums were the sums; nobody argues with a mass. What remained was only the one question, and Enlil, Lord of the Command, had come with his answer drafted, and Enki understood, listening to his brother read it in the level voice of a man who has slept badly for a hundred years and tidied his desk for the end of the world, that the drafting had not been cold. It had cost him. It was simply that his brother's account came out at a different place, and had, if you audited it, its own bleak mercy in it.

The venture is accomplished, Enlil said. The sky of home is fat with the Abzu's gold; the store-worlds are stocked; the last freight can rise at this crossing. What we made here, we made for a labour that is ending. They multiply past any measure, they mix their blood with ours against all wisdom, they have begun to worship us, brother, which no one ordered and no one stopped, and it corrupts them and it corrupts us. We cannot take a world's population up the sky. We cannot stand between an ocean and its arithmetic. What comes is coming whether we weep or no. Let it come, then, and let it be, for the made ones, quick, and for this world, clean, and let the venture close its books like honest stewards and go home. All I ask of this council is silence. Tell them nothing. Hope is the one cruelty we can still spare them: do not set a whole people clawing at high ground for a generation, fighting one another for boats that cannot be built in time, cursing the sky that they can see and we can no longer answer. The kind lie, and then the wave, and grief only for us, who have the years to carry it.

And the terrible thing, Enki thought, standing in his place with his hands flat on the old stone, was that it was not a monster speaking. It was a steward. Every beam of the argument bore weight. If you began where his brother began, at the ledgers of two worlds, you arrived where he arrived, and the arrival was even a kind of love, the love of the surgeon for the clean cut. The flaw was all the way down at the beginning, in the first entry, where the made ones were carried in the books as an undertaking of the venture, and not as what had yelled in Ninmah's hands.

An asked for voices. The hall gave its assent in the grey way halls do when no one will meet another's eye. And then, because An was old and had watched Enki hold a lot in his fist a very long time ago, the king required the assent to be sworn, each prince singly, by name, on the calendar of the crossings that had been Geshtu-e's.

Enki, second to swear, laid his hand on the old god's book and gave his oath in the form the law prescribed, precisely, word for word, and not one word more.

He swore that he would tell no man.

He was an engineer, and engineering is the art of the letter of the law, and he had already, walking to the hall between white star-fields, worked out exactly what his oath left standing. A wall is no man. A house of reeds is no man.

Whether the old king saw it in his face, whether his brother chose that night to be tired, whether the ear in the clay had somehow heard its way ahead of him, Enki never knew, and the telling does not either.

Tablet IX — The Reed Wall

In the city of Shuruppak, on the river Euphrates, in the last years before the water, there lived a man named Ziusudra, and he was Enki's son.

The law that never spoke had never forbidden the lords themselves. Enki had loved late, a long lifetime after the house of Shimti, and quietly: a weaver of Shuruppak, a woman with a low laugh and no awe of him whatsoever, who had let him grieve at her table one evening for a friend the years had taken, and then, over the seasons, taught the lord of the waters the black-headed art he had never mastered, which was living at their pace, one bright day at a time, spending it all. She was forty years dying young by his people's clock. He would have given the reef and the sky it bought to slow her one winter. What she left him was a son with her laugh and his patience, and the son grew grey in his turn while his father did not, and became in his greyness the most honoured man in Shuruppak, a keeper of granaries, a settler of disputes, the kind of man to whom a whole city brings both its harvest and its quarrels.

To him the god came in the last spring, and did not lie, and did not break the oath.

Enki walked up from the river at dusk to his son's house, where he was known to the household and beloved of the grandchildren, and he did not go in. He stood outside the courtyard's south wall, a good wall, reeds cut thick and bound in the old first pattern that Enki himself had shown this plain before any grandmother of any wall-builder had been born, and the evening meal was loud inside, and he stood in the blue dark with his hand flat on the reeds, and spoke, clearly, to the wall.

Wall, listen. Reed wall, hear me. This is no man I speak to; let no oath be strained. Wall, if a man stood behind you, a man of Shuruppak, son of a weaver, keeper of grain, such a man should tear down his house and build a boat.

Inside, the meal went quiet.

Let him abandon riches, said Enki to the wall, and seek his life. Let him take no counsel of his neighbours, who will laugh, and no permission of his king, who will delay. The boat shall be square to the measure I say, floor upon floor upon floor, six decks, seven levels, her seams payed with the pitch that seeps black at the edge of the marshes, so much pitch that the boat drinks a fortune of it, and let the man not grudge the pitch. Let him take aboard his household and his kin, the beasts of his pens two by two, seed of every grain in his keeping, tools, and the craftsmen his heart trusts, and let him set a roof over all against a rain such as no telling holds. And when the star of the crossing stands at its brightest, at the season the towers have marked, let the door be shut.

The wall said nothing, as walls do. Behind it, a chair scraped, once.

Enki stood a moment longer with his hand on the reeds. There was more in him than the oath's loophole would let out: that he was ashamed; that a council of the wise had audited his son's species and closed the account; that a wall was what his own great oath had made of him, this once, a thing you speak past instead of to. The lords of the sky would ride out the wave in their high boats, above the weather, and watch. He would watch too. That was the sentence he had written for himself in the long hall, swearing narrow: to save what one loophole could carry, and watch the rest go under, and live after, unaging, remembering.

What came out, in the end, was none of it. Only, very low, not in the voice of a god giving specifications but in the voice in which he had once told bedtime lies to the boy behind that wall about where the wanderer in the sky goes when it goes away:

Build fast, boy. Love the pitch better than the timber. And when the door shuts, do not open it for anything that calls your name, because I will not be what is calling.

He went back down to the river. Behind him the house had come out into the courtyard, and someone stood a long time at the reed wall in the dark, breathing, one hand flat on the reeds from the inside, at the height where a hand was flat on them from the outside, and neither moved, and no oath in heaven was broken.

In the morning Ziusudra of Shuruppak began, to the open delight of his neighbours, to tear down his beautiful house.

Tablet X — The Water

The star of the crossing stood at its brightest, and the ice at the foot of the world let go.

The high boats rode above the weather with all the sky-born aboard, and so it is from above, through their instruments, that the telling knows what the last day of the old world looked like. It looked, at first, like nothing. A pale line on the southern ocean, drawn slowly, as if the sea were being edited. Then the line reached the shallows of the world and stood up.

The wave came into the Edin from the south in the third watch of the night. The water carried its own weather ahead of it, a wind that flattened the standing grain of the whole plain in one gesture, and after the wind, rain of a kind the plain's tellings genuinely do not hold, the sky and the sea exchanging places. What the wave did not take at a stroke, the rain unmade patiently. For six days and seven nights, the instruments record, the storm walked back and forth over the drowned land like a herdsman counting.

Aboard the high boats no one spoke at the viewing-eyes, and then everyone stopped looking at the viewing-eyes, and that was worse.

The sky-born discovered, in those six days, what they were. They had lived among the black-headed for forty generations of them. There was no one aboard who was not, by marriage or fostering or friendship or blood, kin to something under that water. The young wept openly in the corridors. The tally-clerks wept over their annulled ledgers. Ninmah stood at an eye the whole six days, unmoving, ancient, and what she said became the oldest lament there is, the one the clay of a later age put in the mouth of a goddess crying out like a woman in labour: the olden days are turned to clay, because I said yes in the council, I, who carried them fourteen times.

And Enki learned what his narrow oath had bought, which was arithmetic with a face. One boat. Against the viewing-eyes' slow editing of a world, one square boat of pitched reeds, somewhere under that herding storm, carrying perhaps six hundred souls and a farmyard, riding seams he had specified against a sea he had not. He did not pray, having no one upward of himself to pray to; that direction was empty, and he knew it better than any man ever has. He did engineering instead, the only devotion left him, recalculating her freeboard through the storm's worst, over and over, a rosary of load and beam.

On the seventh day the storm, having nothing left to teach, stopped.

The world from above was water and silence. The sun came out over the sea it had made and the sea flashed, festive, obscene. And the gods were hungry. This is the detail the clay remembered when it remembered nothing else kindly, and the telling keeps it because it is true and it is just: the venture had fed for forty generations on the plain's tithes and offerings, the first fruits, the fat of ten thousand festivals, the whole broad table of a living mankind, and the high boats had provisioned for a campaign, not an age, and rationing began on the eighth day. The princes of the sky learned in their stomachs what the ledger had never carried: who, in fact, had been carrying whom.

The boat found the mountain the way a seed finds a crack. She grounded on the peak the southern people call the place of descent, and held, and for six days her keeper did as he had been told through a wall: he opened nothing.

On the seventh he loosed a dove, and she came back to him, having found no resting place. He waited, and loosed a swallow, and she came back. He waited, and loosed a raven, and the raven saw the waters receding, and ate, and circled, and did not come back, and then Ziusudra of Shuruppak opened the door of his boat, and light fell on his face, and he knelt on the mud of the drowned world and did the thing his kind does. He built a fire. He set food on it, the little he could spare, cane and cedar and myrtle to sweeten the smoke, a meal for whoever was left in the emptied sky, cooked by a man with almost nothing, on the grave of everything, in thanks.

The smoke went up. And the hungry gods came down around that one poor fire from every quarter of the ruined air, and the clay says they gathered like flies, and the clay is not mocking them, or it is, and it has earned the right either way. They crowded the smell of cooked food and burning sweetness like the starving crowd bread, princes of a tired world, offspring of the sky, and some of them wept at what the smoke meant. There was still someone below. Below still forgave.

Enlil came down last, and saw the boat, and knew it at once for engineering, and turned on his brother in front of every power of the venture with the annulled world shining behind him.

What was sworn was sworn. How is a man alive?

And Enki, who had crossed the sky for gold and stayed for flowers, stood between his brother and his son's fire and answered for himself at last, out loud, with the oath's whole cunning discarded, because past a certain hour cunning is just another wall to hide behind. He said: I spoke to a wall. Punish me for the acoustics. But look first at what your clean arithmetic came out to, brother, and smell the smoke. You closed the books on them, and the first thing the remnant did, with death not yet dried off their hands, was feed us. Whom shall we say is princely now, of them and us? Lay on the guilty man the guilt; I am he, and I would be he again. But the flood you may not send twice. The next time the sums come out against them, send a lion, send a famine, send less, always less, and let the punishment know the name of the punished. They are not a column in the venture's ledger. They were never ours to annul. They are kin, and the proof is on the fire.

The council on the mountain is the oldest trial there is, and it ended the way the clay says it ended. Enlil, Lord of the Command, who was not a monster, stood a long time in the smoke of the world's first thanksgiving, downwind, breathing it, saying nothing, being fed by it exactly as his hunger was fed, and no record, of clay or of memory, holds what moved in him. Then he went up onto the boat, alone, and found the keeper and his wife kneeling, waiting for whatever came, and he raised them up by the hands, the man his brother's crime and his brother's son. He touched their foreheads, and he said the words that made it law: formerly Ziusudra was a man; now he and his wife shall be as we are, and dwell apart, far away, where the sun rises, and be the memory.

So the one man was taken out of mankind, and lived. And mankind itself, the remnant of the remnant, uncounted small boats and high-ground survivors the great telling never names, came down off their hills into the silt with nothing, and looked at the ruined generous mud of the Edin, and buried their dead, and planted.

Tablet XI — The Going Up

After the water, the venture was a guest that has stayed past the meal, and everyone in the house knew it, on both sides of the sky.

The books, in the end, closed themselves. The Abzu's freight, banked over crossings, had done its slow work: the nights of home were losing again, the elders wrote, the gold smoke holding, the ledgers of the sky at last, cautiously, in balance. What remained below was garrison duty for a purpose already served, and grief, which does not staff well. The court of An set the leaving for the next crossing but one, and the long withdrawal began, seven thousand years of it by the quick clock of the plain, though the plain was never told, and misread the whole age, as the plain misread everything about them by then, worshipfully.

That was the thing Enki could not stop, and by then had stopped trying. Mankind after the flood did not remember the venture. It remembered gods. The remnant had come down off the hills with a story, and the story hardened generation by generation like silt into stone: the great ones who ride the storm, who made us from clay for their service, who sent the water in their anger, who must be fed. Temples rose on the flood-mounds, over the buried stumps of the old compounds, tended by shaven priests who got the rations to the ounce and the reasons entirely wrong. The sky-born were carved sitting, enormous, forty feet of diorite serenity, by sculptors whose great-grandmothers had sold those same sky-born fish.

Some of the young of the sky liked it. That was the ugliest lesson of the last age, and Enlil, to his credit, stamped on it wherever it flowered: garrison lords of minor stations letting themselves be fed on first fruits and first-born awe, wintering as deities. The Command's own hand wrote the withdrawal's standing order, and it was the best sentence his brother ever drafted, Enki thought, and the most like him: We came for gold. We will not leave as parasites upon the meaning of a young world.

What could be given, they gave, and it was less than the songs would claim and more than the sums required. The calendar of the crossings, entire, to the tower-priests of three cities, so the sky would never again arrive unannounced. The crucible arts, the wheel's trick of the turning platform, the loan-words for star and copper and beer that the plain's tongues keep to this day. Measures and weights, because Enki had learned what a people suffers whose bushel is negotiable.

But the count of what they did not give is the true inventory of that age, and Enki kept it with a fierceness that surprised him. They did not give the plough; a woman of Eridu built the first from a forked thorn-tree while the garrison slept. They did not give the sail; they woke one crossing-year and the river was white with them, an invention spreading town to town like laughter. They did not give the arch, or the loom's heddle, or the potter's glaze, or the law's idea, the enormous idea, that a wrong done to the weak is the king's own business. And on a morning late in the withdrawal, in Uruk, a temple accountant, some anonymous exasperated genius with a stylus of cut reed, tired of carrying a warehouse in his head, pressed the shapes of his tally-tokens into a damp clay tag, and looked at what he had done, and did it again.

No god was standing in that room. Enki learned of it, as everyone learned of it, years on, when the marks had already turned from pictures of things into pictures of sounds, and the sounds into sentences, and the sentences had begun their walk out from under the ledgers into laws and letters and lamentations and lies, the whole loud undying paper argument of mankind with itself. He held one of the early school-tablets in his hands, a child's exercise, the same sign practised twelve times, wobbling toward sureness, and he sat down where he was and laughed until the young ones came to see, and could not explain it to them, and did not try. The ear in the clay. Geshtu-e had asked them to put his listening into the mix, and here it was, come out the far side of forty generations and a drowned world: a creature that had taught itself how to make listening permanent.

They went up at the last crossing in the order of precedence, oldest blood last. He stood on the plain of the landing field through the whole long ceremony of it, the fires, the thunder, the hulls like weather going away, the young of the sky at the ramps looking back at the green mud world where they had been young, and the priests of six cities prostrate at the field's edge, filing the departure of the gods under omens, already redrafting it into theology.

Ninmah went among the last, an old woman now by even the sky's clock. At the ramp she took his hands, and looked at him the way she had looked over the head of the first crying child, and said: you are not coming.

It was not a question, so he did not answer it.

Remember this table, she had told him once, when they fail your purposes. He had it by heart. She searched his face, and found what there was to find, the whole shameless unrepented inventory of it, the fire he had not lit and could not leave. Then she kissed him on both eyes, one for each world, and named him, last of all his names, the one the clay would keep: he of the waters, friend of man, and went up the ramp and did not look back, because healers never do, having always another patient.

The thunder faded. The wanderer set. The plain lay dark and loud and living under its ordinary stars, and Enki, lord of nothing now, walked north along the river toward the lights of the nearest human city like any traveller at the end of the day's road, needing, for the first time in the whole telling, no title the black-headed had not given him for free.

Tablet XII — The Clay

There is an old man in Uruk, in the reign of the fifth king after the one they will make the poem about, and no record holds how long he has been old.

He keeps no house. He winters with the boatmen at the quay of the harbour temple, who value him because he can read the river's mood a day ahead and never gambles. Summers he walks. The city has known him past the memory of its grandmothers and assumes, without examining it, that it has always known him: the tall quiet ferryman's friend with the strange pale eyes, who speaks the oldest prayers with a wrong accent, as if he had learned them before the priests improved them, and who will not go into the temples. Children ask him where he is from. Upriver, he says, which is what he has always said, and true, and a lie, and no oath anywhere is strained, there being no wall left standing that the truth could be spoken to.

Whether this is the god himself, kept alive past his people's leaving by his people's slow blood, or the god's memory wearing a borrowed body, or only the story of him, walking as stories walk, the telling does not know, and the old man, if you asked him, would say the difference stopped mattering to him a long time ago, somewhere around the fourth time he watched the city rebuild the quay.

This morning he has come to see the walls.

The king two dynasties gone, the loud one, the one who was said to be two parts god, had thrown a rampart around Uruk so wide that chariots pass on its crown, and the fired brick of it comes up out of the plain the colour of dawn all day. The old man walks the circuit of it slowly, one entire morning, his hand trailing the brick the way a hand trails in river water, reading the courses. He knew the man who fired the first kiln on this plain. He is the man who fired the first kiln on this plain. And nothing of his is in this wall, this whole horizon of made stone raised by the short-lived out of mud and arithmetic and the fear of being forgotten, and the nothing sings to him. The songs inside the city say a god built the walls of Uruk. The bricks say otherwise, in their millions, course upon course. The bricks name their makers the way pollen names a flower: men, men, men, women carrying water, boys treading straw, a foreman dead of a fever the third summer, men.

At the school of the tablet-house near the great gate, where the scribes are made, he stops, as he always stops.

Through the doorway comes the sound of the morning's dictation, thirty boys and two daughters of rich houses saying the signs aloud together as they press them, the same drone in every generation, the sound, he has come to believe, of the axle the world actually turns on. He looks in at the door. No one minds him; he is old and clean and known. On the benches the children work their wet clay, tongues in the corners of their mouths, wiping errors with a thumb, and the master walks the rows with a cane he mostly uses for pointing, and on the wall of the courtyard, in the place of honour, the finished exercise of some vanished star pupil is mounted as an example: the flood story, the school text every child of the plain copies now, the boat, the bird, the smoke, the gods gathered to the smell of it like flies.

The old man reads it from the doorway, the whole tablet, at the pace of a man drinking slowly.

They got the boat's measurements wrong, and the name of the mountain, and the number of the days, and they have folded his brother and himself and Ninmah and the whole grieving venture into two or three interchangeable enormous angers, the way silt folds a city. It does not grieve him now. He has watched what the clay does with a thing over the long haul, and it is the same thing the river does: carries it, wears it, buries it, keeps it. Somewhere under the drone of the school-room the truth lies conformable, stratum on stratum, the ear folded into the mix. Kings will burn libraries on top of it, and the burning will only bake it harder. Empires whose names are still in the future will level this city and salt it and forget where it stood, and the tablets will lie in the dark under the tells, patient as reef gold, in the one language that cannot rust, waiting out the whole loud interval.

And some day, he thinks, watching a small girl in the second row frown her wedge into true, some day at the far end of the interval, in a cold grey city on an island this plain has no word for, a young man with no money and the wrong education, some keeper of small careful marks whom every academy has overlooked, will bend over a broken biscuit of this exact mud with a lamp and a lens. And the marks will open for him the way the door of the boat opened, light falling on a face. And he will read about the flood, and the boat, and the bird that did not come back, and he will understand in one vertical moment that the story is older than every roof he has ever prayed under, and he will stand up. He will stand up in that quiet room as if the water were rising under him, not able to keep still, beside himself, half out of his clothes with wonder, and the librarians will stare, and he will not care, because he will be the first man in two and a half thousand years to hear it.

The listening, going on without us. All of it in there. All of it waiting.

The drone of the dictation ends. The children spill out past him into the sun, shouting, already at play, quick, mortal, uncountable, carrying their tablets of an hour's clay like small squares of the future, and the old man steps back to let them pass, and stands a while in the emptied doorway, and then walks on along the bright brick of the human wall, upriver, toward whatever is next, with the morning warm on his back like a hand.

Here ends the twelfth tablet, and the telling.