𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑲𝒊𝒕𝒄𝒉𝒆𝒏-𝒀𝒂𝒓𝒅 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑺𝒖𝒏𝒌𝒆𝒏 𝑻𝒆𝒎𝒑𝒍𝒆, 𝑬𝒓𝒊𝒅𝒖𝒈-𝑲𝒊.

𝐙 𝐀 𝐆 𝐄

◬

Day 26
× Dusk into Dark

The grain-barrel smelled of barley dust and the cedar oil the kitchen-boys rubbed into the storehouse door.

He had been smelling it since the shift changed. Cedar oil, barley, the woodsmoke from Ki-Aga's banked oven coming around the corner in a thin warm ribbon. He had learned the smells of this corner the way he had learned the weight of footsteps. The smells did not change. He liked that they did not change.

He had the three shards in his pocket.

He pressed the two grey ones together. They hummed at the shared note. He released them. The note stopped. He pressed them again. The note came back. He had been doing this for the length of one lamp-finger, maybe two. The bone-coloured one had not hummed since the council. He pressed it too, sometimes, to check. It stayed quiet. He kept checking anyway.

Nanāya came around the corner at the kitchen-girl angle.

She did not look at him. She sat on the barrel beside him without asking. She had an apricot. She did not offer it. She bit it. The juice went on her thumb and she licked the thumb and looked at the storehouse wall.

She said: "You asked where the rest of the pieces are."

He pressed the grey shards.

"There's a woman in the Sunken Temple. She's kept the songs for forty years. Longer than I've been alive. Longer than your mother was alive." A breath. "She might know where the other shards went. She might know what the humming is."

He looked at the wall too.

"I'm not allowed."

"You weren't allowed past the South Gate either."

He did not answer.

He pressed the grey shards. He released them. The note came and went under the cloth. Nanāya finished the apricot. She set the stone of it on the barrel between them. She did not push. She had stopped pushing after the second time on the barrel; she had learned he decided better when no one was filling the air. She let the air stay empty.

He decided into the empty air.

"Yes."

She did not say good. She did not stand up fast. She picked up the apricot stone and put it in the pocket of her tunic, because Nanāya did not leave things on barrels, and she stood.

Behind them, the blind boy was still at the spit.

He was on the evening turn. He hummed the lullaby under his breath, low, the kitchen way, the third note going down. The going-down was for sleeping. Šub-Ana brought the third note down too when she hummed at the rug. The blind boy brought it down now and the grey shard in Zage's pocket hummed once at the going-down and stopped.

The blind boy turned his head toward the step.

He did not point his eyes at anything. He smiled at a place a half-breath behind where Nanāya stood. His ear stayed cocked at the meat.

Zage looked at Nanāya.

She was already walking.

◬

The kitchen-gate smelled of the same cedar oil and then, past the threshold, of something else.

Tannery hide. Frying oil. Canal water underneath both, the green-cold smell the canal carried up the lower streets at dusk. The smells layered the way the smoke layered over the kiln-district, except these were not kiln smells. These were the smells of people cooking and tanning and living close to water that did not move fast enough.

The yard had emptied for shift-change. Ki-Aga's back was to them at the central oven; he was banking it for the night, the paddle scraping ash. Two boys at the water-vat were too tired to lift their heads. Lamassu-Ki was at the gate, half-asleep against the post, his spear at the tired-man angle. His wife was at the fourth month now. He did not sleep well.

"Night, Nan."

"Night, Lamassu."

They passed through.

Zage stopped at the gate.

The palace wall was behind him. The lower city was in front of him. He had been outside the wall twice. Once in the palanquin, a box he had hated, the curtains embroidered, the bearers' step he was not supposed to feel. Once on Mir-Sag with fifty cloaks around him in a wide ring. Both times the outside had come to him through a frame, or with a wall of men between him and it.

He had never been outside and small.

He was small now.

He looked at the lower city. It went on. The street ahead was unpaved, turning soft where a water-pot had spilled. Mud-brick walls leaned at angles a palace wall did not lean at. Lamps were lit in some windows and not in others. A dog crossed at the far corner with something in its mouth and did not look at him, because the dog did not know he was Lugal, because nothing here knew he was Lugal.

Nanāya did not say come on.

She did not say it's all right.

She stood a step ahead and let him look until the looking had finished and the lower city had become a thing he had decided to walk into.

He walked.

She fell in and pointed things out the way a person pointed things out to a friend. Not a tour. The dye-vat alley, where the wall ran blue at the bottom from a hundred years of splash. The bread-stall that stayed open past the others because the woman who ran it could not sleep either. The wall with the fish painted on it---a fish with a man's face, the paint old, the man's face solemn over the fish-body.

He laughed at the fish.

It came out before he had decided it. The laugh did not flinch at itself this time; it came and went and he let it. Nanāya heard it. She did not say anything about it. She let the laugh be a thing in the street the way she let the silence be a thing on the barrel.

She put her hand at his shoulder and moved him a half-step up, level with her.

"Behind is hiding," she said. "Beside is belonging. No one looks twice at belonging."

He did not turn it over.

He walked beside her.

The street looked at the two of them and saw a kitchen girl and a boy, belonging, and looked away.

◬

The cordon smelled of cold stone and a frying oil that had gone out.

The new breadmaker's stall was shuttered. The cedar of it was clean, untouched by lower-city smoke, the joinery tight in the way good joinery was tight. The man with the scarred palm was not behind it. The shutters were down and pegged.

The shard hummed.

His hand went to his pocket before he had told it to.

He stopped.

Nanāya stopped beside him. She had learned his stillness. She did not ask what he had stopped for. She waited the half-breath it took him to find the words for it.

"What is it."

"It hummed."

"Here."

"Yes."

It was not the lullaby. Not the going-down, not the new note the two greys made together. It was a third sound, lower, with a roughness in it. A sound a thing made when it was warning. He did not yet know what warning meant for a shard. He only had the sound, and the sound had a shape, and the shape was not a shape he wanted in his pocket.

Nanāya looked at the shuttered stall.

Her face did not change. She marked it. She did not tell him what she was marking. She set her thumb against the strand of hair at her temple, where the star-lily was, and then she brought the thumb down.

"The temple's close," she said. "She might know what the note means."

He nodded.

They walked on. He kept his hand near his pocket. The note had stopped, but his hand stayed near it.

◬

The canal-bend smelled of mud and wet reeds and old wet stone.

Nanāya took him off the main street, down a slope of packed earth gone soft at the bottom, to the place where the canal turned and the bank was reed and silt. The shrine sat half-sunk in the mud at the turn. Small. Older than the street above it. A fish with a goat's head, carved into the stone, worn smooth by water until the carving was almost gone. The eye gone, the fin a suggestion, the goat-horn a curve the thumb could find but the eye could lose. A clay basin at the foot of it held dead reeds and a finger of black water.

He stopped at the shrine.

The shard was not humming.

But his chest went still. The same stillness he had felt at the arch on the ride with Nungal, the stone gate where the two rivers met. That had been a wide gate, in the grass, with the sky over it. This was a small gate. A forgotten one. In a canal-bend at full dark, with the reeds dead in the basin.

"What is this place."

She crouched at the bank. She put her fingers in the black water of the basin and did not take anything out; she only touched it.

"Shrine of Enki. The old one. Before the priests kept the shrines, the lower city kept them. The priests stopped coming here a long time ago. We didn't."

He looked at the fish-goat.

He looked at the worn place where the eye had been.

"He gave us writing."

He did not ask it. He set it down, a fact about a god worn smooth in front of him, and the fact landed in his chest the way the arch had landed, low, where the words did not reach.

"He did," she said.

He looked at the shrine for a long count.

A frog moved in the reeds and went quiet. The canal turned past the bend with the small sound of water finding the same path it had found for a thousand years. He looked at the fish that had given humans the thing the priests fired into tablets, the thing his own voice had become in the council chamber, gold and terrible, and he did not say that. He only looked.

Then: "The temple."

He turned. He walked. She came up out of her crouch and followed.

◬

The coracle smelled of hide and the silt the river carried.

It was tied at the bend, a circle of stretched hide on a frame of bent sticks, riding low. He had been on a reed boat once. With his father. The river-festival, when he was four. His father's hand had been on his shoulder and the boat had been larger and the sway of it had gone up through him while his father held him still. He remembered the sway. He remembered the hand. He did not remember his father's face on the boat, only the hand. The hand had been warm. He had not understood until now what that meant about the sway.

This boat was small.

He took her hand to step in. The coracle rocked under his foot. He sat too fast. The boat tilted hard to the side his weight had gone. Nanāya shifted her weight against it without looking, the way a person shifted who had done it a thousand times, and the coracle settled flat.

"You're still dry."

"I'm still dry."

"Good. Pick up the paddle."

He picked up the paddle. It was a short one, the blade worn thin at one edge. She showed him the stroke, the dip, the pull, the small turn of the wrist at the end that kept the boat from spinning. He tried it.

The coracle turned a full circle.

She laughed. Not at him. Beside him.

He tried again. He turned the wrist at the end. The coracle wobbled and went forward, slow, the bank sliding past on his left.

He was paddling a coracle through the lower city in the dark with a girl who had a flower in her hair and a knife in her basket, who had called him Little Lion the first time she sat on the grain-barrel and had not once called him Lugal.

The grey shard hummed.

The first note. The going-down. The lullaby.

He stopped paddling.

"It's humming."

"The lullaby."

"Yes."

She did not ask why. She looked ahead. The Sunken Temple came up out of the black water, three tiers under the surface, four tiers dark above them, one low red lamp at the lintel where the dry floors began.

"She'll know we're coming," Nanāya said.

He did not ask how. The shard hummed the going-down and the temple grew in the dark and the red lamp held its small fire over the water, and the not-asking was easy, because the shard was humming his mother's note and the note made the not-asking easy.

◬

The hidden stair smelled of lamp oil and old wool and, under both, a cold that came up through the stone from the submerged floors below.

He did not flinch at the smell. He had been in the kitchen-yard.

Nanāya brought him up behind a fall of water the smell of which she did not have to warn him about, she only said breathe through your mouth on the stair, and then they were in a warm room, and he stopped at the threshold and inventoried it the way he inventoried every room he had learned to enter alone.

A woman at the bench, on the right, by the inner stair. She had a whetstone in one hand and a short blade in the other. She drew the iron along the stone in a long slow stroke. The stroke did not change when they came in.

A woman at the low table, on the left. A wilted flower in her loose strand of hair, the petals gone soft. She had a small knife for trimming lamp-wicks. She looked up. The shape of a joke started on her face and then it stopped, and the joke did not come.

A woman on a cushion at the back. Her eyes were the colour of old water, the canal-water in the basin at the shrine. Her eyes were not pointed at anything he could see. Her fingers rested on a clay tablet in her lap.

He stood. He waited.

The woman with the whetstone drew the iron once more and then her stroke held, the count of one breath, the iron stopped against the stone, and then it resumed, the long slow stroke going on as before. He filed the pause. He did not know what it was. He kept it.

Nanāya said: "This is Zage. He's been humming the lullaby wrong. I thought you should meet him."

The woman on the cushion did not speak at once.

She did not do the thing adults did when they saw him, the small startle, the rearranging of the face into the shape it made for a king. She turned her old-water eyes toward him. Her fingers stopped on the clay.

She lifted two fingers and beckoned.

He crossed.

He did not decide to cross. His feet went before his mind voted. He stopped at the edge of the cushion. She was small under her wrap, smaller than he had thought from the door, and the lamp made her face a thing of shadows and the shadows did not tell him what the face was.

Her hands came up.

They found his face. They went across his brow, slow, then his cheekbones, the thumbs setting in the soft place below the bone, then his jaw. The hands were dry. The nails were worn smooth. She read him with her fingers the way he read the shards with his thumb.

"You're the one who's been listening," she said.

He did not ask how she knew.

"The tablets hum. I don't know why."

"They hum because something in them remembers being whole." Her thumbs moved along his jaw. "You're the first in three thousand years who's been listening loudly enough for them to hear you back."

Her hands came down off his face. They found his hands. They moved down to his pocket and found the grey shard through the cloth. She did not take it out. She pressed it.

She hummed.

One note. The temple version. The third note going up. The rise.

His hand went to his pocket before he had told it to.

It was not the grey shard. It was the other one. The bone-coloured one. The loud one, the one that had been silent since the council, the one he had been pressing and pressing to check and finding cold.

It was warm.

He did not take it out. He pressed it through the cloth. It was warm against his fingers, warm in a way it had not been in twelve days, warm the way the grey shard had never been. He pressed it again to be sure. The warmth held under his thumb.

The woman on the cushion stopped humming.

She said---not to him, to the shard, low, the way Šub-Ana spoke to a kettle: "There you are."

She was quiet for a long count.

Then: "The song has a home. You've been carrying the loudest piece of it. When the other pieces find their places, you'll know what it means."

"What does it mean now."

"That you're not the only one who's been listening."

He marked this. He turned the not-knowing the way he turned the bone-coloured shard between his fingers. He did not ask who the others were. The shard was warm. That was the thing he kept.

He looked around the Silk Court while she was still.

The folded wool was on the bench at the east wall. Folded in three. The corner over, the fold tucked under. He had seen that fold before. Nanāya folded the wool that way at the grain-barrel when she set her basket down and tucked a cloth over the bread.

He had not known she did it here too.

He did not say anything about it. He filed it. He looked back at Namtar-Eri.

The woman with the whetstone was still drawing the iron across the stone. Through all of it. The lamp burned and the hands had been on his face and the bone-coloured shard had gone warm and the iron had gone on across the stone in the long slow stroke, steady, the room's other heartbeat. It did not hurry. It did not skip.

He watched her for the count of four breaths. She did not look at him. The iron went across the stone and came back and went across again.

He marked her where he marked Mir-Sag's ear turned back to listen, and the bone-coloured shard, and the arch where the rivers met. The place for the things that knew what they were.

The woman on the cushion's hands settled into her lap.

The woman with the whetstone rose from the bench without being asked. She crossed to the door. She put her head near the seam of it and held there, and then she said, quiet, to the cushion:

"Someone's on the water."

The woman in the cushion turned the old-water eyes toward the door.

"Take him home. The canal-bend, not the main channel. Go now."

The woman with the whetstone set the whetstone on the bench.

The first pause had been one breath and the stroke had come back. This stopping did not come back. The whetstone lay on the bench and the iron was in her other hand and she crossed to the wall where the rest of her blades hung, and she set two fingers to the first buckle, and then the next, and then the next, checking each in its order. The motion was not fast. It was the motion of a person who did not need to hurry, because the readying was already most of the way done, and the body knew the rest without being told.

The room had a silence in it where the stone-sound had been.

He had not noticed the rhythm until it stopped.

He did not know what the stopping meant. He marked it. He kept it beside the warm shard and the star on the canal and the fish with the man's face.

◬

The flight smelled of canal-cold and the hide of the coracle and the silt coming up where the paddle broke the surface.

Nanāya pulled him up. She moved very fast, the weight forward on the balls of the feet, the step soft. He kept up. He had learned the step from Nungal, on the ride, in the corridors, weight on the front of the foot, little king, the heel is for men who want to be heard. He did not want to be heard. He moved the way Nungal had shown him.

They reached the coracle. She pushed off. She paddled, and her stroke was not the stroke she had taught him; it was longer, deeper, the boat going faster than it had gone on the way in.

The canal was black. The torches on the banks had been lit on the way in. They were not lit now. Someone had been putting them out. She took the narrow cut, the one between the tanneries, the one that led back to the shrine.

Behind them, a punt.

Flat-bottomed. Three men. One torch. The torch put a long gold smear on the black water and the smear came after them.

He watched her watch the punt.

Her paddle did not change its rhythm. Her face did not change. He knew the face. It was the filing face. He had learned to read it on the barrel. The face she made when she had seen the thing she needed to see and was putting it where it went.

"The canal-bend. Now."

She steered them into the shadow of the shrine, the fish-goat dark above them. She tied the coracle with a knot that was not really a knot, a loop that would pull free with one tug. She pulled him out onto the bank.

"The drain. The laundry-drain. You know the way from here."

"You're not coming."

She was already looking back at the punt.

"I'm going to lead them off. I'll take the coracle up the main channel. They'll follow the torch-light on the water. You take the drain. You go straight. You don't stop. You don't look back."

"No."

"Zage---"

"You'll die."

She looked at him.

His face was the face from the grain-barrel the first morning. He was not going to cry. He was angry. He had not been angry at her before, in all the mornings on the barrel, and the anger came up now and he let it.

"I'm very hard to kill," she said. "Šerida-Zi taught me."

"Nanāya---"

He did not know who Šerida-Zi was. He held the name anyway.

"That's the second time you've said my name."

He stared at her.

She looked at him for one breath.

She took the star-lily from her hair. The morning's lily, the one she cut on the approach, the way she always cut one. She held it out. When it touched his palm it was warm, warm from her hair, warm the way the apricot had been warm on the barrel, the warm of a thing that had been against a body.

"For Bel-Sarra," she said. "If you get there before me."

He looked at the lily.

He looked at her.

Nanāya always brought Bel-Sarra a flower. He knew that from the barrel, from the way she talked about her, the cold fig and the pallet and the sister who slept facing her. A flower for Bel-Sarra was a thing Nanāya did when Nanāya came home. She was giving him the flower to carry. So it would be there.

So she would come back for it.

He took the lily.

She pushed him toward the drain.

He went.

He did not look back.

The drain was dark. He put his hand on the wall. The stone was cold and wet under his palm and the cold smell of running water came up out of the dark ahead of him.

He ran.

He knew this drain. Nungal had shown it to him once, on a night he could not sleep, where the water went out of the palace and into the river. He followed the water now. The water knew where it was going. He went where the water went.

Behind him, on the canal, the small knock of the coracle coming loose. Then men's voices, low, then sharper. Then the torch-light went up the main channel and got smaller on the wet wall of the drain-mouth. Not quieter. Further.

He did not stop.

He did not look back.

The lily was in his right hand. He had closed his fingers around the stem and he did not open them. The bone-coloured shard in his pocket pressed warm against his hip.

Two warm things in the dark.

He ran. The lily was still warm.