Inanna by Emily H. Wilson

Author:Emily H. Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags:  
Publisher: Titan

CHAPTER FOUR

NINSHUBAR

In the near-dark before dawn, I crawled up onto a mess of mud and reeds, somewhere along the coast to the west of Eridu. Or was I to the north? For a while I simply lay there, cold, breathing in the dank smell of the vegetation, and listening to the extraordinary rasping-barking noise all round me: almost deafening. Could this cacophony be frogs?

While I’d been in the water, I hadn’t realised how much I was bleeding. Now I could see I was bleeding from so many gashes and scratches that it was hard to work out what was not bleeding. The side of my head, which had been getting better while I was in the dungeon, was now in sharp agony, as if the bone of my skull was pinching inwards. I had thought I was at sea, but when I accidentally swallowed some water, it was sweet. Was I upriver?

Eventually I got up onto my feet on the reeds and mud, keen to see what was beyond the reeds I was surrounded by, but I took one step forwards and fell into deep water again. Whatever scrap of solid land I had been clinging to, I could no longer find.

I thrashed my way out into the open water again, trying to get clear of the reeds, and then bobbed along through patches of clear water as day broke over the marshes. The reeds were all around me and so tall that I could see nothing beyond. Would I die here, treading water, and with no idea which way to go?

Then I saw a sort of beach of mud: praise be to all the fates. To the red moon. To the spirit of the cheetah. Praise be.

I thrashed over, elbowing and kneeing my way up onto the bare mud bank. Then for a while I lay down on my front, head turned to the side, my cheek in the dankest, slipperiest mud. Only breathing. Only resting, to the deafening music of what must be all the frogs that could possibly be alive in the world.

* * *

I woke up and an old woman in black hessian was standing over me, a rope tight round her forehead, a huge bundle of reeds on her back.

“Are you dead?” she said, in Sumerian, but in an accent that I had never heard before. “Are you a ghost?”

“No, I am alive. I think I am alive.”

“Are you a demon?”

“I don’t think so.”

She frowned down at me. “You look like a demon.”

“I’m a human,” I said. “Look at how I’m bleeding. Do demons bleed?”

She pondered that. “Maybe they do.”

“If I am a demon, I am not a threatening demon. I am only injured and in trouble.”

She looked around us, then looked back down at me.

“If you can get up and follow me, I can take you to my house. But if you try to hurt me, or steal from me, I will kill you with this knife.”

She pulled a knife from beneath her wrappings: a lovely flint blade.

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