Authors: John Koetsier
And as we conversed, I revealed pieces of my plan to Sargon. I would go to the king, somehow, and reveal that there was a plot. I would remain close to the king, and watch for the execution of the plot. When they came, I would protect the king. There was one small detail of the plan that I kept to myself, however.
I did not intend to succeed.
The next night I slipped out of my quarters, late. Making my way through the palace complex silently, I saw a soldier who just happened to be keeping Sargon’s door under close observation. Sargon was very definitely being watched, which gave my errand extra urgency.
Coming into the central courtyard and seeing the glorious panoply of stars told me more than anything else that I was in an almost pre-historical time, before human-made light drowned them out, I carefully and slowly slipped onto the roof and, taking extreme care to make no sudden motion or noise, I worked my way towards the king’s rooms, considering how to make my move.
The king could not fail to interpret a nighttime approach to his quarters as an attack. Either raising the alarm or simply misidentifying me as an assassin would prove fatal to my plans. But creeping up on the lugal and forcibly keeping him quiet with a hand over his mouth ran the risk of insulting him too deeply to be forgiven, which would be just as dangerous.
I decided to wait until he was asleep and then to wake him as gently as possible, trying to buy time to explain why he was still half-drugged. I did not count, however, on the king being on his balcony in the wee hours of morning, staring moodily out at the night sky, the dark night-time waters of the Euphrates, and the brooding mass of the temples of Kish.
Abandoning all strategy, I dropped down silently to the balcony and padded over to the king.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” I asked casually. “And peaceful.”
The king gasped, reached for the sword that was not hanging from his side, and filled his lungs for a shout. Showing my empty hands, I raised one finger to my lips in the universal signal for silence, and counted on his courage. And my luck.
Luck won the day. Or courage.
“What are you doing here, Geno!” the lugal asked in a savage whisper. He backed up to the edge of the balcony and finally his questing fingers found a sword.
I sat down on a chair, spreading my hands again to show no weapon, no threat, and relaxed, leaning back.
“My lugal, I am not here to hurt you. I am here to save you.”
In swift sentences I told him of the plot — the generals’ anger, their intentions, what we knew and what we did not know. And of Sargon’s and my intention to frustrate their plans. The lugal’s eyes grew wide in the moonlight as he heard me out, and he dropped the sword and came near, then sat next to me.
“I believe you. Oddly enough, I believe you. Partly because a man like you, a warrior who fights like the wind, could have killed me several times over before I even noticed you.”
Lugals and kings and leaders not being particularly noted for modesty, this surprised me somewhat, and I tipped my head in respect. A clear thinker, this lugal, smart, and unclouded by too much pride.
“I also have noticed a change in several of my generals,” he continued in a musing tone. “Their attitude — love, respect, deference — is somewhat less than I would wish for. And I have no son old enough to take the throne, so they see opportunity …”
He came to a speedy decision, and nodded.
“You will stay with me, Geno, and you will accompany me. You will sleep near me, and when I am in court you will be near in the chamber behind the throne room. And you will frustrate the plans of these traitors.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. Success, so far.
But that night I was troubled and sleepless, and was not because of the makeshift bed in a small room connected to the king’s suite. I paced and tossed, and pondered the will of the gods, and the words of Hermes, and the thing that I must do — or not do — and only when light touched the edges of the horizon early in the dawn was I able to rest my eyes for an hour or so.
I would have given much to know, then, that I would need to endure this agony for only one more day.
By morning I had tossed and turned myself into something resembling resolve. I followed the lugal as discreetly as I could, and when he moved to his court chambers to receive petitioners, I set myself up, weapons at hand, in a screened antechamber just behind his ornate judgment seat. Through the screen I saw tribal leaders, rich merchants, and priests come on errands of supplication or penitence, depending on their need, and then I saw a group of his generals approach.
They were the men that Sargon had told me might be involved. I shifted in my seat, getting ready for action, and I could also see that the lugal became subtly agitated. He glanced behind his back through the straw screen to me. I nodded, not knowing what was coming at this moment but wishing to give him some assurance, false as it might be.
Then it began.
The generals’ aides — all veteran, armed soldiers — spread along the sides of the room. The three generals approached the king, shouting that he had betrayed the great nation of Kish by not wiping Ur under the soles of his sandals when he had the chance. The lugal looked back behind him, expecting me to come out. I sat in my chair, gripping the handles with hands drained bloodless.
I saw it all in shards, like a pieces of a dream become nightmare, hating myself for not moving but forcing myself to carry out the plan.
They approached the throne and the lugal’s guard melted away: they had been bought or suborned. He drew his sword and prepared to fight, but arrows from the men at the sides of the rooms suddenly sprouted from his body, and finally I acted.
Bursting through the screen and leaving it dangling in crazed tatters behind me, I almost physically shifted into an inhuman speed, running forward and decapitating the first general’s head, slicing the second’s guts so deeply only his spine slowed my blade, and spitting the third with the point of my sword. Continuing, dashing, whirling, I ran to one side of the room, killing two of the lugal’s guards who had allowed this to happen and not pausing to think that I had, also. The generals’ aides who had just filled his body with arrows were frantically pumping shot after shot at me, and missing just as frequently. Picking up a sword from a fallen guard, I threw it like a dagger, pinning one to the wall, and the rest, out of arrows, fell back.
I grabbed the nearest courtier off the floor, trembling in fright, speckled with the blood of the king’s dead guard, and yelled his in face.
“Get Sargon now!”
Only then did I turn and face the man I had pretended to be ready to save. I walked up to him, knelt at his side, and turned him on his back. He looked up at me, dying, and knowing it, three arrows piercing his body. His eyes met mine and his lips, flecked with bloody froth from punctured lungs, moved spasmodically. A whisper left them, and I bent lower to hear.
“So … so this,” he husked as I put my ear to his mouth. “So this was your plan all along?”
Then all power left the muscles of his body and he slumped in my arms and the lugal of Kish died on the cold stone floor in a puddle of his own blood, just as Sargon entered the room. I gently laid the lugal’s head down, swallowed my self-loathing for a moment, stood, and opened my mouth.
“The king is dead,” I said. And, gesturing with both hands at Sargon, “Long live the king!”
Late that night, after the palace and the city has returned to some semblance of order, I spoke with Sargon in his chambers, now the royal chambers. I spoke the words that Hermes had given me, instruction to create an empire, the world’s first, and to rule it wisely, and to create centers of learning.
Then I gave him my sword, the sword of the gods I called it, and I gave him all of my armor. Finally I slipped out of the palace, feeling naked and light in only a short robe, and walked towards the city gates. A citizen saw me, my height, my bearing, and asked me if I was not a soldier of the king. I told him no longer, and I continued.
At the city gates I introduced myself to the guards, who recognized me, and ordered them to open the doors. Seeing something in my eyes to fear, they obeyed, and I slipped out of the city of Kish in the moon and starlight. I walked up the Euphrates, retracing the path I had ridden with the old man and his harvest, remembering the soldier with a broken leg and a broken life we had carried along to tell the lugal the tale.
I walked through the night and when morning came I did not stop, not for food, nor for drink. Everyone I passed on the road in the light of day looked the other way and choked off any greeting when they saw my face and the look in my eyes. The day grew hot and dusty, but I did not slow or stop. My feet, soft from weeks in the palace of the kings of Kish, grew sore, but I did not stop walking.
Finally after another cold and lonely night, on the morning of the second day, I reached the place by the river where I had arrived. I staggered down the steep side of the muddy bank, gulped huge mouthfuls of clean blue water from the river, bathed in the current, then found a spot in the shade of a tree on the soft grass.
There I sat for the rest of that day, eyes fixed on the far-off line where water met air. And I remembered the king of Kish, and I remembered his eyes, and I remembered his words.
“Not my plan,” I whispered to myself. “Not my plan.”
And then my head nodded, and my eyes closed, and I fell asleep. s.Leep took me, and I left that place.
But that place did not leave me.
’Curiouser and curiouser,’ cried Alice.
- Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
First there is the cold. Then the dark. Tubes disconnect, wires detach.
I rose through levels of sleep, consciousness slowly returned, the surrounding pod dimly visible, gently strobing lights waking, lid unsealing. And then the warmth came, and I was awake.
I got up, looked, and wondered. It had been a long mission, a long lonely trip. I half expected to see the crude bed from my chambers in Kish, the first and oldest city of humans, but around me were varipods, like mine, opening, and releasing people.
My people.
I stepped out gladly, seeing Sama, Helo, Kin, and Tonia … and then, turning, Livia. I hugged each one, and if I hugged Livia a little longer, a little more intensely than the rest, they forgot it in their surprise.
“What is this?” wondered Kin aloud. “Why are you hugging us?”
Smiling, almost laughing, I told them where I had been and when I had been, that I had been on a mission for over a month, alone. And that it felt good to be reunited with my team, with my friends.
They looked uncomprehendingly at me.
“A month?” said Tonia. “We’ve been sleeping a month?”
That spurred more conversation, and it became clear to all that they had been left in s.Leep for more than thirty days while I had been busy making Sargon king in Kish. They were not happy to hear it, especially Livia.
“We are a team,” she said. “It isn’t right that one of us goes off into danger and the rest of us are left here like spare batteries, in storage.”
The implied criticism of the gods left the room awkward and embarrassed, though I was glad to see that Livia was starting to have her own thoughts and her own point of view, separate from the gods. And I intended to talk to her about it, soon. But not with everybody watching.
“Whatever the case, we’re all here together now,” I said quickly to defuse the tension. “And you must all be both very well rested and very hungry.”
So we made our way down to the Hall, and the servitors came out as always, and we feasted and drank and talked and laughed, as always.
And, as always, Hermes joined us.
The sound and light show started, and we continued drinking and picking at our plates. We had seen this before. Only when the silver bubble appeared and Hermes began to arrive did we fully turn and start to pay attention. I fixed an attitude of respectful submission on my face, and glanced at Livia, getting her attention, to ensure she did the same. With an almost invisible shake of her shoulders, she did.
“Greetings,” he said, understated as always.
We all nodded our heads in an abbreviated bow.
“It was necessary to send Geno on a solo mission to Kish,” Hermes said, getting straight to the point. “There was no virtue in sending a larger team, and, as it turned out, Geno did not need any help on this particular task.”
“Rather than keep you all awake for the entire six weeks of his mission, we decided it would be best for you to simply sleep the entire time and wake up at the end. This saved you much worry and frustration.”
“But,” started Livia.
Hermes raised his hand. “I know it’s not easy to hear now, but it was the best strategy. However, that is all history right now. I have come to tell you about the future.”
And he proceeded to explain that we would be leaving on a mission of the utmost importance very soon. That the gods had finally discovered the enemy headquarters, the place from which our attackers were fighting to change time and the world, and that our role would be to “take it out,” as he put it. Obliterate it, annihilate it, and kill all we found, to make safe the cosmos.
“You will have two weeks here to train, prepare, and hone your skills,” Hermes said. “You will need every ounce of ability you can muster. It will not be easy.”
With that, he left, and we turned to each other and simply gazed.