heya_baru | The North

Forty-two years after it started, the life of Nabû-zuqup-kēna unraveled under the Babylonian sun, returning to the cool waters of the Tigris in a spray of crimson. The man in question, a priest who hung his head before the idol of Marduk, heard a distant god whisper to him in a dream, a god whose name passed into history before mortal men laid the first bricks of Ur. After this fitful vision, Nabû-zuqup-kēna copied seven words onto a clay tablet moistened with the urine of a virgin sow, covered the tablet with another layer of clay to serve as an envelope, then sent it north on the back of a horse. His oneiric promise was thus fulfilled. The priest, hearing nothing but the bruit of the first three words calling him to the desert of his ancestors, used a stolen blade to peel the skin from his chest and sever the sanguine cords of his beating heart, as one would pluck a pomegranate from a tree.

Outside Sippar, at the borders of the Babylonian kingdom, the tablet demanded new custodianship. The young messenger dropped it onto the bricks of the city gate, shattering the unfired outer envelope. Sunlight cut deep shadows into the next three words, syllables that owed their heritage to a thousand dead scribes, to the first merchants and their tallies, to the laments for Ur wailed at a mourning moon in the languages of antiquity. The messenger extended his tongue from his mouth before falling chin-first onto a rock as to sever the organ from his head. He swallowed the resulting blood, then ran through the streets of Sippar before impaling himself upon the horns of a bull.

A priestess, Šima-ilat, saw the grizzly death unfold and covered the tablet with a linen cloth before placing it under her arm. Šima-ilat, one-third a woman and two-thirds a demon following a night in her adolescence when the northern winds clawed their way into her spine, heard the tellurian words whisper to her like the tuneful cry of a shorebird. How could something so wicked sing such honeyed songs?

She knew she should cast the thing into the Tigris, but its chant was too loud, her curiosity too desperate. She had to witness it. After reading the seventh word, the remaining third of her soul carved by Ištar fled from her liver and drowned itself in her stomach, taking her voice with it. She stumbled past the city gates, and flung herself upon a priest; Šima-ilat then bit off the fifth finger of her left hand, split the bone between her teeth, and used the shard as a stylus to press her prophecy into clay. The priest, reading words glazed by blood, did not know if confusion or horror came to him first.

Above the meek cradle of the Earth, Šamaš, daylight and justice incarnate, pulled himself from his divine throne and mournfully threw a lion's hide over the sun. Somewhere in the north of the world, a million tongues tasted the terroir of Šima-ilat's fear. They draped themselves in a shroud of tears before pouring down the mountains.

The North

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