The Dog Said Bow-Wow (37 page)

Whitemarsh was one of seven villages on an archipelago of low hills that rose gently from the reeds. On Great Island were Landfall, Providence, and First Haven. Further out on islands of their own were Whitemarsh, Fishweir, Oak Hill, and Market. Other, smaller communities there were, some consisting of as few as three or two houses, in such profusion that no man knew them all. But the chief and more populous islands were connected by marsh-roads of poured sand paved with squared-off logs.

By secret ways known only to children (though I was no longer a child, I had been one not long before), I passed through the marshes to a certain hidden place I knew. It was a small meadow clearing just above the banks of one of the numberless crystal-clear creeks that wandered mazily through the reeds. In midday the meadow lay half in sun and half in shade, so that it was a place of comfort whatever the temperature might be. There I threw myself down on the grass to await Silili.

Time passed with agonizing slowness. I worried that Silili had come early and, not finding me there, thought me faithless and left. I worried that she had been sent to Fishweir to make baskets for a season. A thousand horrid possibilities haunted my imagination. But then, at last, she stepped into the clearing.

I rose at the sight of her, and she knelt down beside me. We clasped hands fervently. Her eyes shone. When I looked into those eyes, I felt the way the People must have when the first dawn filled the sky with colors and Aruru sent her voice upward to meet them and so sang the first song. The joy I felt then was almost unbearable; it filled me to bursting.

We lay together, as we had every day for almost a month, kissing and fondling each other. Silili’s skin was the color of aged ivory and her nipples were pale apricot. Her pubic hair was light and downy, a golden mist over her mons. It offered no more resistance than a cloud when I ran my fingers through it. She stroked my thighs, my chest, the side of my face. Then, blushing and yet not once taking her eyes from mine, she said, “Gil…I’m ready now.”

“Are you sure?” It is a measure of how deeply I loved Silili that I asked at all instead of simply taking her at her word. And a measure of how much I wanted her that when I asked I did not stop stroking her gently with one finger, over and over, along the cleft between her legs, fearful that if I removed my hand her desire for me would go with it. “I can wait, if you want.”

“No,” she said, “now.”

We did then as lovers always do.

Afterwards, we lay together talking quietly, sometimes laughing. Inevitably, our conversation turned to what we would be wearing when next we saw each other.

Children, of course, go everywhere naked. But after this, Silili and I would need to wear clothing in public. Tonight she would go to Inanna and beg enough cloth to make a dress, and thus claim for herself the modesty of a grown woman. Like any male my age, I had already made a shirt and trousers and hidden them away against this very day.

Silili brushed her hands down the front of her body, imagining the dress. “What color should it be?” she asked.

“Green, like the forest. Reddish-orange, like the flames of the sun.”

“Which I am to be, then — forest or sun? You are as inconstant as the sky, Gil.”

“Blue,” I said, “like the sky. White, like the moon and the clouds. Red and yellow and blue like the stars. Orange and purple like the sunset or the mountains at dawn.” For she was all things to me and, since in my present frame of mind all things were good, all things in turn put me in mind of her.

She made an exasperated noise, but I could tell she was pleased.

It was at that instant that I heard a soft, heavy
thump
on the ground behind me. Lazily, I turned my head to see what it was.

I froze.

An enormous winged lion stood on the bank of the stream opposite us. Its fur and feathers were red as blood. Its eyes were black from rim to rim.

Silili, who in all her life had never feared anything, sat up beside me and smiled at the thing. “Hello,” she said. “What are you?”

“Hello,” the great beast replied. “What are you? Hello. Hellohello-hello.” Lifting its front paws in the air, it began to prance about on its hind legs in the drollest manner imaginable. “What are you are what. You are what you are what you are. Hello? Hellello. Lo-l o-lo-lo-lo! Hell you are lo you are. What what what!”

Silili threw back her head and laughed peals of silvery laughter. I laughed as well, but uneasily. The creature’s teeth were enormous, and it did not seem to me that the cast of its face was at all kindly. “A lion?” Silili asked. “A bird?”

“A bird a bird a bird! A lion a lion a bird!” the beast sang. “You are a lion you are hello what are a bird hello you are a what a what hello. Bird-lion bird-lion lion lion
bird!
” Then he bounded up into the air, snapped out his mighty wings, and, flapping heavily, flew up and off into the sky, leaving nothing behind him but a foul stench, like rotting garbage.

We both laughed and applauded. How could we not?

But when later I returned to Whitemarsh, and my sister came running out from the village to meet me, I raised my hand in greeting and I could not remember what word I normally used in such circumstances. I wracked my brain for it time and again, to no avail. It was completely gone. And when I tried to describe the beast I had seen, I could remember the words for neither “bird” nor “lion.”

Still, that strange incident did not stay long in our minds, for that was the summer when Delondra invented dancing. This was an enormous event among our generation not only for its own sake but because this was the first major creation by anyone who was not of the First. As adults we had to spend our days in labor of various sorts, of course, but we met every evening on the greensward to dance until weariness or romance led us away.

Music had been invented by Enlil years before and we had three instruments then: the box lute, the tabor, and the reed pipe. When the evening darkened, we lit pine-tar torches and set them in a circle about the periphery of the dancing ground and so continued until the stars were high in the sky. Then by ones and twos we drifted homeward, some to make love, others to their lonely beds, and still others to weep and rage, for our hearts were young and active and no way had yet been invented to keep them from being broken.

Which is what we at first thought had happened when Mylitta, who had hours before wandered off into the woods with Irra, returned in tears. (This was late in the summer, when we had been dancing for months.) Mylitta and Irra were lovers, a station or distinction we of the second generation had created on our own. None of the First had lovers, but rather coupled with whoever caught their fancy; but we, being younger and, we thought, wiser, preferred our own arrangements. Even though they did not always bring us joy.

As, we thought, now. Everybody assumed the worst of Irra, of course. But when Mylitta’s friends gathered around to comfort her, it turned out that she had been frightened by some creature she had seen.

“What was it like?” Silili asked.

“White,” Mylitta said, “like the moon. It came up from the ground like…something long and slithery that moves its head like this.” She moved her hand from side to side in a sinuous, undulating motion.

“A snake?” somebody said.

Mylitta looked puzzled, as if the word meant nothing to her. She shook her head, as if dismissing nonsense and, still upset, said, “Its mouth was horrible, with teeth set in circles. And it…and it…
talked!
”

Now the forgotten lion came to my mind again and, apprehensively, I asked, “Did it say anything? Tell us what it said.”

But to this Mylitta could only shake her head.

“Where is Irra?” Silili asked.

“He stayed behind to talk some more.”

There was then such a hubbub of talk and argument as only the young can have. In quick order we put together a party to go after our friend and bring him back to us safe. Snatching up knives and staves — knives had been invented long ago, and even then staves had been employed as weapons — we started towards the woods.

Then Irra himself came sauntering out of the darkness, hands behind his back, grinning widely. Mylitta ran to his side and kissed him, but he pushed her playfully away. Then he made a gesture that took in all of us, with our knives and staves and grim expressions, and raised one eyebrow.

“We were going to look for you.”

“Mylitta said there was a…” With Irra’s eyes boring into mine, I could not think of the word for snake. “One of those long, slithery things. Only large. And white.”

“Why won’t you talk?” Mylitta cried. “Why don’t you say anything?”

Irra grinned wider and wider. And now a peculiar thing happened. His face began to glow brighter and brighter, until it shone like the moon.

He held out his hand, fingers spread. Then he squeezed it into a fist. When he opened it again, the fingers had merged into one another, forming a smooth brown flipper. “The…whatever…showed me how to do this.”

Nobody knew what to make of his stunt. But then Mylitta started crying again, and by the time we had her soothed down, Irra was gone and it was too late for dancing anyway. So we all went home.

After that evening, strange creatures appeared in more and more profusion at the edges of our settlements. They were never the same twice. There was a thing like an elephant but with impossibly long legs, like a spider’s. There was a swarm of scorpions with human faces that were somehow all a single organism. There was a ball of serpents. There was a bird of flame. They arrived suddenly, spoke enigmatically, and then they left.

Every time somebody talked to one of these monsters, words vanished from his or her vocabulary.

Why didn’t we go to our elders? The First had powers that dwarfed anything we could do on our own. But we didn’t realize initially that this was anything to do with
them
. It seemed of a piece with the messy emotional stuff of our young lives. Particularly since, for the longest time, Irra was at the center of it.

We did not have a name for it then, but Irra had become a wizard. He had a wizard’s power and a wizard’s weirdness. He would pop up without warning—striding out of a thicket, jumping down from a rooftop — to perform some never-before-seen action, and then leave. Once he walked right past Mylitta and into her house and before her astonished eyes urinated on the pallet where she slept! Another time, he rode across the fields on a horse of snow, only half-visible in the white mist which steamed off its back, and when the children came running madly out to see, shouting, “Irra! Irra!” and “Give us a ride!” he pelted them with snowballs made from the living substance of his steed, and galloped off, jeering.

These were troubling occurrences, but they did not seem serious enough to warrant bothering the First. Not until I lost Silili.

I was working in the marshes that day, cutting salt hay for winter fodder. It was hot work, and I was sweating so hard that I took off my tunic and labored in my trousers alone. But Silili had promised to bring a lunch to me and I wanted her to see how hard I could work. I bent, I cut, I straightened, and as I turned to drop an armful of hay I saw her standing at the edge of the trees, staring at me. Just the sight of her took my breath away.

I must have looked pleasing to her as well for, without saying a word, she came to me, took my hand, and led me to that same meadow where we first made love. Wordlessly, then, we repeated our original vows.

Afterwards, we lay neither speaking nor touching each other. Just savoring our closeness. I remember that I was lying on my stomach, staring at a big, goggle-eyed bullfrog that sat pompously in the shallows of the stream, his great grin out of the water, his pulsing throat within, when suddenly the ground shook under us and a grinding noise filled the air.

We danced to our feet as something like an enormous metal beetle with a kind of grinder or drill in place of a head erupted from the ground, spattering dirt in all directions. The gleaming round body was armored with polished iron plates. A crude mouth opened at the end of an upheld leg and said, “Who.” Then, “Are.” And finally, “You?”

“Go away,” I said sulkily.

“Goooooooo,” it moaned. “Waaaaaaaaaay. Aaaaaaaaa.”

“No!” I pelted the thing with clods of dirt, but it did not go away. I snatched up a stick and broke it across the beetle’s back, to no visible effect. “Nobody wants you here.”

“Noooooobody.” Its voice was rough and metallic, like nothing I had ever heard before. It reared up on its four hind legs, waving its front pair in the air. “Waaaaaaants.” I smashed a stone against one of those hind legs, snapping it off at the joint. Untroubled, it snatched up Silili with its forelegs. “Yoooooouuuuu!”

Then the monstrosity disappeared into the forest.

It had all happened too quickly. For the merest instant I was still, stunned, unable to move. And in that instant, faster than quicksilver, the beetle sped through the trees so nimbly that it was gone before I could react. Leaving behind it nothing but Silili’s rapidly dwindling scream.

“Silili!” I cried after her. “Come back!
Silili!
”

Which is how, fool that I was, I lost her name.

Afterwards, however, I discovered that the limb I had torn from the beetle was that same one which held the creature’s mouth. “Where is she?” I demanded. “Where has she been taken to?”

“Ur,” it said. “Dum.” A long silence. “Heim.”

I ran back to Whitemarsh. There was an enormous copper disk, as tall as I was, leaning against the side of the redsmith’s forge. I seized a hammer and began slamming on it to raise a great din and bring out everyone within earshot. They say that this was the first alarm that was ever sounded, but what did I care for that?

All the village came running up. Several of the First — Ninsun, Humbaba, two or three others — were among them.

I flung down the hammer.

“Girl!” I cried. Then, shaking my head, “Not girl — woman!” I had questioned the beetle-limb most of the way back to Whitemarsh before concluding that I would learn nothing useful from it and throwing it away in disgust. The interrogation had been a mistake, however, for it half-drained me of language. Now, because I had lost the word
lover
, I slapped my chest. “Mine.” And, howling, “Gone, gone, gone!”