In the distance we saw flames, bright pinpricks like stars fallen to earth. I remembered the story of Gugalanna the Bull of Heaven, your mighty champion with his body of stars and horns of fire, who descended to Unug from the firmament to rend Gilgamesh apart. The points of torchlight ranged along the outer wall of Urim, far from the temple but not far enough to comfort me. If I listened carefully I could hear the shouts of men, and what I fancied was the clattering of swords. War had come to Urim like a lion, stalking in the night and pouncing on ignorant prey.

Born in an Ishtar-city to a conqueror father, my entire life had been lived in the shadow of war, the memory of war, but what did I really know of it? The god Ninurta, dealing death to the Seven Champions with his talking mace and hanging their heads from his chariot. Songs of my father’s glories, parades for his triumphant return from the border countries of the Foreigner. Games my brothers played with sticks and later with real swords, training against one another for hours until they sweated and bled and cursed. But a story or a song or a game was not a real war. I had never tasted even a morsel of that bitter and poisonous dish, and now my heart was pounding as the horns sounded and the people of the temple swarmed around me, a flurry of barked commands and hurried ministrations.

I had a thousand questions on my lips. What was happening? Who was attacking us? Why? When would they reach the House of the Great Light? But there was no one I could ask, for no one knew. Then someone asked me a question: a young priest, his bald head glistening in the torchlight, asked me, “What are your orders, Enship?” I realized that even though I felt like a frightened maiden I was still En, and it was to me they looked for guidance.

I turned my face towards the sky and let the light of the moon pour down on my face. It was a three-quarter moon, halfway between the crescent of my husband and the full roundness of Ningal, my sister-wife. “Pray,” I said. “Gather all the priests you can into the temple, and other men besides. Raise your voice in song to Nanna and Ningal, to the gods of Urim.” They have never failed me yet, I wanted to add.

With the help of Ugunu and Baranamtarra, I herded all the women of the temple into the giparu. But there was one among them we could not find, and I spent a few panicked moments running with my robes lifted off the ground, calling “Zumbu! Zumbu!” I found her close to the Gardens of the Moon, cowering in the arms of one of the young men who worked the bellows in the House of Metalworkers.

“It is not safe here,” I told them. “You should come back to the giparu with me. The other women are there already.”

“I will not leave him,” she said, and I felt my stomach drop when I saw the look in her eyes. Perhaps they had come to love each other during my mourning period, when Zumbu had had to sleep in the common servants’ quarters and not the giparu. If it were any other time, I might have found it charming that the blossoming of love had been the result of my ceremonies for the dead.

“Young man,” I said to the man who held her. I realized I sounded like an old crone when the man was probably a few years older than me. “Can you protect her?”

“I can, Enship,” he said. He was terrified of me, I realized. He could not even meet my eyes. But he held on to her fiercely, and there was a dagger at his side. I wondered where he had taken it from, for he was certainly not permitted to wield one himself--most likely it had come straight off the anvils of the Metalworkers and was meant for shipment elsewhere.

I sighed, the aga heavy on my head. “I will not force you to come with me,” I told Zumbu. “But know the danger you might be in.”

“I do, Mistress,” she said, and they clung to each other even more tightly. I allowed myself one small glimmer of envy, crushing it just as quickly as it rose.

“I must go,” I said. “May Nanna watch over you both.” And with my brow furrowed in worry, I turned and left them. Again I deferred to the wisdom of the gods. My husband must be the only one who could answer any of my questions now.

My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of many voices clamoring over one another. Stepping out into the open I beheld the doors of the great temple sanctum and a crowd that was not made up of priests. The people of Urim were coming to the temple, streaming past the gates in pairs and groups and alone.

A small group of temple guards was trying to control the crowd, their spears pointed menacingly downwards. I ran to them. “Allow these people in and remain by the gates,” I ordered them. “But see that the gates are kept open all night, and the doors of the temple as well.”

I went to the temple myself. The priests were already there, singing a song that I knew, and I realized with a manic burst of laughter that it was the song about the cattle of the moon, the song Baranamtarra had once forced me to practice again and again. My pace towards the altar was impeded by the tugging of hands at my robes. Around me the men and women and children of Urim were prostrating themselves, mingling with the giant-eyed votive figures who prayed in endless stillness before the temple shrines. I pressed on through the wailing crowd with my head high, tugged like the tides by the inexorable pull of the moon. Someone pressed a rattle into my hands, I did not see who. Raising my hands and my voice, I prayed.

We prayed all night. That morning as the priests fetched animals for sacrifice, I received a messenger from the front who confirmed my deepest fears. Urim was in open rebellion against my brother’s rule, and the army at the gates was Rimush’s. Apparently while I mourned my father, Lugal Kaku had been scheming, making another opportunity from a death.

It all became clear to me as I listened to the words of the messenger. Urim had longstanding alliances with the nearby cities of Lagash and Unug. Lagash was another pride of my father’s Empire; it rivaled Urim for power and strength and was dedicated to the cult of Ningirsu-Ninurta the Warlord, Slayer of the Seven Champions. Unug, called Uruk in the North, a lesser city of Inanna’s whose power had long-faded since the days when it was ruled by giant Gilgamesh, was entirely dependent on Urim. I had heard it said among the temple’s administrator-priests that the Lugal of Unug was ruled by Lugal Kaku first and my father second.

Though he was only a boy when his father ceded Urim to Sharru-kin, Kaku had nursed resentment towards the Empire all his life, and I cannot say that I was surprised to discover this, for I never heard a genuine word from the man’s mouth in all the years I knew him. In secret he had made a plan for rebellion with Kikuid, the Ensi or governor-priest of Lagash, and with the Lugal of Unug. His arrogance as limitless as his pride, Kaku then sent word to my brother in Akkade that these three cities would govern their own selves as in ages past. No more tribute would be sent to Akkade, no men of Urim would march for the Akkadian cause against Martu or Elam, and the word Lugal would revert to its original meaning of King.

But the messenger said something else that gave me a strange, bright jolt of hope: “We have heard, Enship, that the King himself stands at the head of the Akkadian host. Rimush has come to put down this rebellion in person.” Only when I heard that my brother had come did I realize my hunger and eat. Only when I heard that the King of the World led the host outside the city walls was I able to return to the giparu, embrace Elamitu and Igiru and sleep.

By the mercy of Nanna, the rebellion against my brother’s rule did not reach the House of the Great Light after all. Most of the fighting happened outside the walls of Urim, and later, when my brother’s army breached those walls, in the streets of the city itself and in the Great Household where Lugal Kaku had his court. The siege of Urim went on four nights and a single day in total. The arrival of relief forces from Lagash intensified the fighting briefly, but once the walls were breached there was little hope for Lugal Kaku’s men, and little for my brother’s generals to do but pile high the bodies. What I know of the fighting I learned in snatches from petitioners, priests, couriers. War had come close, and it would come closer still in my lifetime, close enough to taste, but at the time I maintained as much as I could the blissful unawareness of such things. I made sure we shared our food and water with those who had come seeking sanctuary in the temple, and only allowed the women to leave the giparu when I was certain it was safe.

The walls of Urim are strong, and the cities of Urim and Lagash and Unug are ten days or more by water and even longer by land from Akkade. I am sure that Kaku and Kikuid felt safe, believing that Rimush was an untried boy and their own cities too far and too mighty to be brought back into the Empire. Given enough time, perhaps they would have sent soldiers to fetch me out of the temple as a hostage. Perhaps they had forgotten me, and thought my brothers would as well. I was grateful for the rigorous training Northern cities gave their soldiers, grateful that my brother had come to crack open Kaku’s walls and with them his power. If I had learned anything from my tutors about my father’s conquests, it was that he suffered not disloyalty. I did not doubt Rimush was the very image of Sharru-kin in this regard, and would extinguish an ancient and noble bloodline long before he would forgive a traitor. If Lugal Kaku had succeeded thus far in holding onto his head, he would not do so long, and whoever my brother appointed to be the new Lugal of Urim, it would be no blood of Kaku’s.

On the sixth day since the horns sounded, when the people in the temple had begun to drift back to their homes and life was beginning to return to normal, a courier came bearing the Akkadian royal seal of Ishtar rampant, to announce that my brother was coming to me at last. I wore the jewels of my mother along with my aga and had Igiru and Elamitu brush my hair until it shone. And I paced in the audience chamber, unable even to sit down, only standing still when my brother’s guards came in and made their obeisance before me.

“Rimush, son of Sharru-kin, King of Akkade and King of Kish,” said the steward who had entered with them. It had been so long since I heard the full royal address that I had nearly forgotten that Shar Kishati, “King of Kish”, was a play on words in Akkadian. It had been Sharru-kin’s royal title before he built Akkade for his new capital, but Kishati was close to kishatu, giving it the double meaning “King of Everything.” King of the World.

The guards parted and there he was at last in his crimson robes. My brother, the King! He looked older, his beard longer and fuller, his muscles more pronounced than I remembered. But his eyes were the same, his mouth, his brow; he was still the mighty figure of bronze who stood watch over the Gardens of the Moon, the elder brother who watched over Khedu the child in the Gardens of Akkade. Dropping all pretense of formality, we embraced one another.

“Little sister,” he breathed. I drank in every word of his Akkadian, marvelling that my native tongue had become foreign to my ears. “I was worried. We did not have word from your temple until after the siege began. If Kaku had harmed you...” His arm tightened protectively around the small of my back.

“I could not write you at first because of my mourning,” I said, with my face pressed against his breast. He was wearing perfumed oil but beneath it he smelled like any man would after two weeks’ march through the desert. I did not care. “Lugal Kaku did not harm me, though he kept your message from reaching me until my mourning was over. He tried to send me back to Akkade when Father died, but I refused him.”

Rimush drew back from me and smiled. “You are your father’s daughter,” he said. “A true princess. And High Priestess besides. He would be proud to see you today.”

I wanted to say that the only way I could make Sharru-kin proud was by doing exactly as he wanted, but I held my tongue.

“Manish is back in Akkade,” he said. “When he heard that Ur had rebelled he wanted to come to war with me, for your sake, but I left him there to manage the Great Household.”

“I understand,” I said. I wondered faintly if Manishtushu would see this as another slight or an increase in his responsibilities.

“You are safe now, I swear it,” he said fiercely. “You shall be safe so long as I am King of the World. You need not fear Lugal Kaku and his schemes any longer. I have taken the rebel lords prisoner, and many others besides. A third of the people of Ur, a third of the people of Lagash and a third of the people of Uruk.”

I gaped at him. “A third of the people?” I repeated, thinking of the petitioners who sang all night in the temple with me. It frightened me that he had said “people” and not men. “What crime have they done?”

Rimush crossed his arms, which I noticed were marked here and there with scars. “They rebelled against me,” he said, sounding suddenly like a petulant child. “Their cities must pay the price, so that their children and their children’s children remember it when my son and grandson have the throne. I will exact tribute from them, replace their lords with those loyal to my throne, and punish their men, women and children appropriately.”

I waited for him to explain, my heart pounding a dull rhythm of dread. Then he said, “We have need of stonecutters to the far west and north. It is a long journey, but I have enough loyal men pledged to my cause to escort these traitors across the desert and oversee them at their work. For as long as it may take.”

I stepped backwards. “Brother,” I said, as delicately as I could manage. “This is how you would punish three traitorous governors? By displacing their people, sending them far from their families, their cities, their gods, forcing them to work? Is it just that the people should suffer for the crimes of their leaders?”

In that moment I saw something in my brother’s face that frightened me more than anything I could have imagined. I saw Sharru-kin. “It is not my business to be just,” he said. “It is my business to be King. I leave the judging to Shamash. Let them feel his rays burning them as they labor in the camps I have established, and think on what it means to rebel against the True King.”

I thought of the children of Urim I had blessed, the cripples whose hands I had taken, the offerings laid before the altars of the gods with the greatest reverence no matter how meager. Then I imagined them being shackled and marched into the desert, never to see the marshes of Urim or the altar of Nanna again, and it was too much for me to bear. I found myself blinking back tears, and I heard my voice saying, “They had kings here a long, long time before we came, brother. You must understand that if you are to rule them.”

Rimush looked shocked. When he spoke again his voice was louder, harder, dangerous. “Once I told you to remember you were the Princess of the World, and perhaps you need reminding, little sister. Perhaps you have been left to languish in the South for too long. You talk as though you are one of them, a Southerner. Ur is your home now, yes, but Akkade is your family. Ur betrayed you, Lugal Kaku betrayed you. What do you think he would have done to you if I had not come to save you? Whose side are you on?”

I sighed. “Our side, brother,” I said. “Always.”

Rimush gave me a sidelong glance. “Our father did a thing no man had done before,” he said. “See to it that you honor and cherish his legacy as much as I.”

I nodded gravely. “Perhaps I, too, shall do a thing no man has done before,” I said. And my brother gave me a look that was very nearly pleased, though he held it a moment too long, as though searching for something in my face that he was not able to find.

O, Inanna, why am I cursed with long memory and long life, with the power to remember the things I did not say but wished to? I should have thrown myself at my brother’s feet and pleaded lā matār, addāniqa: please, no more. I should have told him that this land was never whole, has never been whole, and fifty years of calling my father True King did not make it so, did not wipe away the memories of a thousand thousand years of self-rule and self-pride. But I never said this to Rimush. Perhaps it is just as well, for would he have even listened to me if I had? Rimush was not the kind of man to seek a woman’s counsel, even an En. He was the kind of man who looks at the women of his own household as something precious, a faience bowl to be carefully stored and delicately handled. The kind of man who would fight in public for the honor of his sister but who visits whores in private and does not look them in the eye. O, Inanna. I feel guilty whenever I think of the things my brother did to his people, to his Empire, to our world, but I feel guiltier still when I think of how I loved him.

The only men I ever loved, the only men I ever allowed myself to love, were my twin brothers. I want to say I love Ibarum and Ilaba’ish-takal, just as I want to say I love my father, but in truth I barely know them, they were only children the last time I saw them. Over the years I gleaned from Rimush and Manishtushu that Ibarum became a priest in Nippur under the name of Shu-Enlil, and Ilaba married some Lugal’s daughter and settled with her far from Akkade, on the estate of some rebel lord my brother had displaced. I wish them the joy I was named for, but I do not know them enough to love them. And I know I do not love them because I can find no fault in them. When I think of them they are blameless, smiling entities, bright eyes below tousled curls, a rill of mirthful Akkadian like thunderheads moving across the sky. No sin, no crimes, no cruelty to be found, and that is how I know they are not human beings but my own hollow imaginings, empty chaff blowing in the wind.

I loved Rimush, who watched over me from afar, and I loved Manishtushu, who could not overcome the sorrow of being who he was, but they were monsters and fools and tyrants. I will admit I do not know much of the ways of men, but it seems to me that so are they all.

If I could not spare the people of Urim from Rimush’s wrath, I at least succeeded in sparing the people of the temple complex, under the pretext that as En I could not afford to lose them. In the end Rimush settled for common herders and fishermen unaffiliated with the temple to march into the desert while he and his generals returned to Akkade, and I cursed the limitations of my power.

Gradually the priestesses and priests returned to their normal schedule of prayer and sacrifice. Zumbu reappeared in the giparu. I did not ask her where her young man was, nor did she mention him to me. But I noticed that she seemed quieter than she had been before the rebellion, and there were nights when she slipped away from the giparu while I lay awake in the darkness, pretending not to hear. I thought of the songs of Inanna and Dumuzid’s love affair, and smiled to myself that there was someone in the temple who was happy in spite of all that had happened.

I received goodwill offerings of iab-butter and oil from Meshnannepada, a high-ranking merchant whom my brother had appointed the new Lugal of Urim. When he came to greet me I had to fight to keep from laughing at the irony of his name, because Mesh Nanne pada is Emengir for “Young One Chosen by Nanna,” and this upjumped merchant lord was anything but. Still, my brother could have done far worse; he could have, for instance, made an Akkadian Lugal, and I did not think Urim’s people would suffer both an En and a Great Man of Northern blood.

Urim had been prosperous before my brother’s army came. Now its walls were in ruins and some of its greatest estates had been burned, or else given over to Akkadian retainers. There were fewer goats to sacrifice and our evening porridge was made from emmer, the rough grain that is raised to feed livestock. I sent as many workmen as could be spared from the workshops to assist in the repairs of the city walls, which was not many, but I saw to it that they carried the crescent standard of the horned moon, so that any passers-by would know it was me who had sent them. I found myself communicating not with the same familiar merchants and landowners but with Northerners, or else the cousins or sons or wives of the men I had once known. Some messengers and couriers I knew began to appear more frequently, picking up the work of two or three, while other familiar faces I did not see any longer, and still others were new faces who barely spoke a word of Sumerian, forcing me to conduct business for the first time in my native tongue. It was become a different Urim, a strange mix of my past and present and of a future as yet unknowable. The thought of my brother’s vicious punishment for the subjects of the rebel lords still throbbed in me like a gadfly’s sting, and worst of all I could not help but think that in trying to protect me, to “save” me, as he put it, Rimush had made things harder for me. Did he truly believe that in breaking down the walls of Urim and sending its sons and daughters into the waste, he would make the people of Urim more loyal to their King? I feared the resentment that might be brewing in the streets of Urim for the Empire, and what might happen when they remembered that the En was the king’s sister, the conqueror’s daughter. When petitioners came to the temple to pray for their kin who had died outside the walls or been sent to my brother’s camps, I made sure they had food and water and that I was seen offering libations and making sacrifices myself. I organized a vigil for the dead, inviting anyone who wished to attend, and hoped it was enough, though I knew it could never be.

What more could I do, Inanna? I did these things from a combination of guilt and sympathy and fear for my own self, a fear which beget even more guilt over the things my brother had done. Rimush believed I had a role to play in keeping the Empire intact, in protecting the legacy of our father, but he did not seem to know what it was. Did I? As I slaughtered white cattle in the moonlight, laid hands on men who had lost limbs or eyes in the rebellion, chanted in time with the throbbing drums of the temple sanctum, I began to think on how I could make Urim a city of the Empire and not a city that stood alone. I must keep my word, and do a thing that had never been done before.

My god’s strength completes my strength. I remembered how Baranamtarra had softened when she saw me paying homage to the old En Galusakar; how the people of Urim had stared and muttered at me when I was a Northern princess but cheered and held out their hands when I was En. My father and brother knew only one way of ruling a people: fear. But being En had shown me that there were other ways, that a people’s love, a people’s unity, was in their god. If I was to keep the Empire together I must show that I knew what Rimush did not. As the Ishtar-fountains in my father’s gardens poured endless water onto a land of endless dryness, so I must pour out love onto a land that was thirsting for it.

It was several weeks after the departure of my brother from Urim that I sent for one of the scribes of the men’s Tablet House, a young man named Sagadu. I asked him to go at once to the overseer priests, to Ugunu and Baranamtarra, to Lulakhtanakh and Ningtuku, to my poor old doddering Dubsang, the most learned men and women of the temple complex. “Ask them to name all the cities of the South, and the patron gods of those cities. List the names on clay and bring this list back to me.” Then I sent for a messenger and asked him to go to the nearby temples of Lagash and Unug and to ask the high priests there the same. “And remember me to the menwomen of Inanna’s temple at Unug,” I said. “Ask them to send word of Inanna’s exploits, her traits, her powers.”

And when these two men had gone, I sat down turning a stylus in my fingers and wracked my brain for the great cities and gods of the North. There was Akkade, of course, which belonged to Ishtar who loved my father. Eshnunna, gateway to the East, whose god Tishpak the Thunderer was brought by the Hurrians. Borsippa had Nabu, and Sippar was dedicated to Shamash, the Lord of the Sun, whom I had called only Utu for so long now I barely remembered his other name. But remember I must.

For each city I must find a man who had been there, who could describe its temple and god to me. And once I had, for each city I would write a hymn, as I had written to Nanna, in both Akkadian and Sumerian. How long it would take me, I did not know; I knew only that when my words had been written I would teach my priests and priestesses to sing them; I would send them across the Land Between the Two Rivers so that they could be sung in every city besides, and make it known that Rimush their king and En Kheduana, High Priestess and Chief Wife of the Moon at Urim, had decreed it so. Because no city stood alone in the Empire. Because my father and my brother only knew one way of keeping men together and it was not enough, had not been enough, or else they would not have rebelled as soon as my father died. Through my writing, I would not only embroider the Litany of Nanna as Baranamtarra had suggested. I would write the Litany of the Empire, the Litany of the World.