Miszatu

"So you're sure you're going to go through with it?!" Shelibutu hissed through her teeth.

"Yeah, I mean, I don't see what the big fuss is." Miszatu whispered.

The girls' hushed conversation was interrupted by the echoing slap of the schoolmaster's cane. Across the classroom, Mullil-Shehushu, their delinquent classmate, continued to err repeatedly in his accounting lessons. The two cowered behind their desk in the growing severity of their schoolmaster's irritation before their desire to gossip once again overwhelmed their fear of authority.

"Well, didn't Sister Kabtaya say that you had to die or something!?" Shelibutu asked with a tone of disgust.

"What!? No, it's like..." Miszatu leaned in closer and whispered into her best friend's ear. "It's like, if you read the old liturgy and stuff, they talk about how sleep is really a little death. It's just a metaphor."

"Hmph! And then you'll be a 'riddler'... I don't see what good it will do you though! I'm just sticking to music. Everybody likes the sound of the meritu!" Shelibutu muttered dismissively.

"It's a very valuable service, actually!" Miszatu tried to explain, raising her voice with a tinge of indignation. "All sorts of people need help understanding what the gods tell them in their dreams! A hayyadu teases out the signs and helps them prepare for the consequences!"

"I guess." Shelibutu grumbled. "But thinking too much about that kind of stuff freaks me out!"

The class overseer, Enki-Kalama-Idi, turned from Mullil-Shehushu's shoulder and shot the two girls the evil eye. With the swiftness of vipers, Shelibutu and Miszatu ducked their vision to the list of ancient kings they were assigned to copy and raced the tip of their reed styli across the length of their practice tablets.

Enki-Kalama-Idi's gaze held on them for only a moment before he returned to his chastisement of Mullil-Shehushu. Looking over the boy's shoulder, the scribe lunged down and smudged his thumb over the erroneous marks in the clay, barking "Wrong! The digit carries over! Write it over again! Neater this time!"

Shelibutu snickered. Miszatu did not.

Sweat-sodden Mullil-Shehushu glanced back at the girls from across the room with a furrowed brow. Again the cruel and stinging tap of the instructors' rod on his shoulder drove his attention back to his tabulations.

"I wish he would stop doing that." Miszatu uttered.

"Hm?" Shelibutu prodded.

"Does the side of the cane really aid in Mullil-Shehushu's understanding? I am tired of watching his beatings." Miszatu said.

"It's his own fault for not being sharper, or at least not working harder! If it were not him we would be the ones coming home with bruises!" Shelibutu reasoned.

For some reason that Miszatu had difficulty grasping, the sound of each smack of punishment dealt to Mullil-Shehushu that afternoon continued to ring in her ears long afterward.

After class had ended for the day, the sisters walked back from the tablet-house down the slope of Zumun's sacred road. As Shamash began to descend towards the mountains, the Eykurkugbabbarani zikkuratu shone bright its white alabaster walls in his red glow. From the great temple mound they descended towards the canal into the beehive-like streets of the old town, eventually coming to the lovely powder blue walls of the E-Sirara's courtyard. The cry of one of the grounds' peacocks heralded their arrival.

Shelibutu stopped outside the gate and looked into Miszatu's brown eyes.

"Well, I guess I won't see you for the rest of the night. I just want to wish you good luck!" Shelibutu declared in a rare moment of bared sincerity, throwing herself at her friend and wrapping her arms around her in a big hug. "I don't care what the lady wants, you better come back to me!"

Miszatu smiled and kissed her on the forehead. "Oh silly, it's one night! You won't even notice I'm gone." she said.

"Oh yeah I will!" she laughed, pushing open the gate. Miszatu noticed as Shelibuttu stealthily brushed away a tear from the corner of her eye with her elbow.

Standing in the center of the courtyard beneath the shade of Mesumun, the sanctuary's sacred kishkanu tree, stood Miszatu's older sisters, Ahatu Erishtu and Ahatu Kabtaya. Shelibutu took one last look at Miszatu and smiled before turning to head towards her chamber.

"Shulmu, Ahatu Miszatu!" the young and elder woman greeted her in tandem.

"Shulmu, Ahatiyya!" Miszatu replied, bowing and clasping her hands over her belly.

"Sister Miszatu, Shamash has entered the netherworld. Will you be joining him?" the elderly Ahatu Kabtaya asked.

"If it please my lady that she should intercede on my behalf in his presence!" Miszatu affirmed.

"Good, then go make yourself pure and come to the chapel." Ahatu Erishtu bade.

Miszatu returned to her apartment cell around the courtyard to rub the sacred cedar oil across her skin. Then she put on her most precious gunakku gown of purest lamb's wool.

When she was ready she walked to the entrance of the ancient E-Sirara chapel.

Sister Erishtu greeted her and offered Miszatu a final caution in her heavenly voice: "O Miszatu, are sure you sure that you are ready to become a hayyadu? Once you do you will hear and see secret things that others cannot, so that you should serve our lady not only in your days, but also in your nights. Many things you take for granted will be made strange to you! Are you sure that you wish to proceed?"

Miszatu nodded. Sister Erishtu opened the chapel door.

The sanctuary was covered in lamps and torches which flickered their glowing reflections onto the black surface of the lady's sacred pond. The scales of the sagely apkallu fish, which floated gently in the lady's abyss, glittered gold. The old sleepers stared out of the alcoves like curious stray dogs and cats in the night.

The flame's glow did justice to the soft features of Lady Nanshe herself, who stood tall in her long feathered gown, the same kind as Miszatu wore, and gazed down at her initiate with an accepting smile. The lady's chamber, which Sister Erishtu had fumigated with incense of juniper and qunubu, could not have seemed more auspicious and inviting.

Sister Erishtu outstretched her palm and bade Miszatu to lie on her back before the image of Lady Nanshe. She lay so, and began to ask Sister Erishtu a question, but Sister Erishtu gazed into Miszatu's eyes with judgment and pressed her index finger to her lips to shush her.

Erishtu produced an offering bowl and drew from it a ration of flatbread, which she dabbed and wiped across Miszatu's skin and clothes, sponging her sister's impurities as one does to a corpse before burial. As with those on the verge of death, a chair for her ghost had been set beside Miszatu.

Then Erishtu got up, glanced at her young sister without warmth, and walked away. All Miszatu was left with was the face of her lady, gazing down upon her.

In spite of how graceful and auspicious the ceremony was, Miszatu was tired and restless. She could not sleep. The eyes of the watchers and her goddess weighed heavily upon her, and fear and excitement intermingled in her heart.

Yet she lay still. She did not know for how long, until finally, in her exhaustion, she began to softly murmur the old lullabye her wetnurse used to sing to her as a little girl. It is the song every Akkadu child knows by heart:

"O Little One, who dwelt in the house of darkness,

Well here you are outside! why do you weep!? Why do you cry!?

Why didn't you just wail in there?

The spirit of the house perks his ears,

the old kusarrikum, the hearth lord stirs,

Perturbed he whsipers "Who disturbed me!? Who woke me up!?"

'O Kusarrikum, the little one cries! the little one weeps!'

And the old lord of the house takes pity and sighs,

'Like sippers of spirits, like slothful drunkards,

Let Lord Dream pour forth before you'~"

And uttering that tune is the last thing she remembered of the night before Lord Ziqiqu seized her.