Hero Historia: Aea Watched 3

Aea Watched is the second chapter of the historical superhero web serial Hero Historia, set in ancient Sumer.

“Enlil, to bring forth the seed of the land from the ground,

Hastened to separate heaven from earth,

Hastened to separate earth from heaven.”

The words were familiar. Aea could remember her father speaking them when she was young. She followed them back to consciousness, and found herself in an enclosed space with the priest Kuwari. There were cushions below her, silks above, and heavy curtains all around, with barely enough room to sit. From somewhere came the sensation of movement.

The thin priest noticed her awakening. “Do you know the words?”

“I think so.”

“Then you are not entirely without education. Fortuitous.” He handed her a leather pouch. “Drink.”

Taking it, she realized how parched she was, how dry her throat. She didn’t hesitate, pouring thin beer down her throat, quenching her pain.

“Better?”

Aea nodded. “You found me?”

“The will of the gods,” Kuwari gestured languidly. “Though for a few days I thought they were having a jest, and that you were going to pass on to the next world anyway.”

“Days?” Worry flashed through her. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Long enough to miss the journey to the sea,” Kuwari said. “Behold!”

He swept the curtains aside, revealing that Aea rode alongside him upon his litter. Ahead the broad reddish expanse of clay gave way to the most brilliant blue the young girl had ever seen, a darker blue that met the sky in an unexpectedly orderly line. She’d heard about the great waters, of course, greater even than the rivers from which the life-giving irrigation came, but they were all the way on the other side of the world.

The understanding that she was as far from home as one could be while living broke through her awe, and Aea realized that she would never see her father, her village, her brother or mother again.

“And there,” Kuwari said, “Beyond it. Nippur!”

She followed his gesture up the coast and saw a great walled city, easily the match of Lagash. Rising from its center, visible above the wall, was an impossibly large structure, tiered, reaching for the sky.

“What is that?” she gasped, her loneliness forgotten as soon as it had grown.

“That? The ziggurat. Where the god Enlil lives.”

She looked at him. “Enlil that created the world?”

“The same.”

“Are you taking me to serve Him in the ziggurat?”

“No,” Kuwari said. “That is not your fate.”

Her eyes widened. “Are you going to sacrifice me?”

The priest actually laughed at that. “No, girl, no. This is not Ur we’re talking about. No. It is as I said before. You are coming to the school for children who may be reborn gods.”

“Am I Enlil?” Aea asked.

“Do you feel like Enlil?”

“I feel like Aea.”

“Then probably not,” Kuwari said.

***

The litter passed into the city through massive gates in the thick mud walls. Aea wanted to see Nippur, but Kuwari pulled the curtains back, concealing them.

“The low-people,” he explained. “Always leering about. It’s unseemly. Besides, you’ve seen one outer-city, you’ve seen them all.”

“I’ve never seen an outer-city.”

“Then let me spare you. Shops and cramped houses and workshops all mashed together among filth and vermin. There, now you’ve no need to waste your tie.”

“Vermin? Like rats?”

“It would not surprise me in the least had they an affinity for rats.”

“What?”

“Dreadful, isn’t it.”

Aea found his tone vaguely insulting, though she wasn’t sure why, or if she was the one being insulted. Her shift was chafing her skin, her heart felt fit to beat its way out of her chest, and her mouth was dry. She waited in silence alongside him, suppressing the urge to leap through the curtain and flee.

If she ran, though, she would be lost in a strange city, and Kuwari would only send his servants to go get her. Worse, she might anger Enlil, and who knew what an angry god might do. What little her parents had spoken of the gods, she knew that displeasing them was the root of all suffering.

Father never really sounded like he believed it. He never cursed his luck, only his own failings.

And where was Father now?

Kuwari seemed to be listening to something, and Aea strained her ears as well. She could hear a babble through the curtains, as of an entire village speaking simultaneously. Some of them sounded joyous, others angry, some yelled, others laughed. There seemed to be so many voices. She imagined a swarm of people around the litter, swimming like fish between the litter bearers.

The priest’s smile broadened as the voices grew less distinct. He reached ahead, throwing the curtains open. “Behold! The city of Enlil!”

The first thing Aea saw, craning her neck over the side of the litter, was the Ziggurat. It rose to the sky ahead of her, as awe-inspiring as the sea had been, built of square platforms stacked on top of one another, each slightly smaller than the last. She had no idea how high it rose, but surely the sun must scrape it as it crossed the sky.

“That is where the God lives,” Kuwari said.

Aea could believe it.

There were other structures in the shadows of the Ziggurat, grand in their own way, but none stood so tall. Past them she could see that the entire complex was surrounded by another stone wall, and the broad clay streets were lined with gardens. Men and women walked alone and in pairs, tending the plants, off on errands, and simply having discussions. Most amazing, Aea saw no farms, no workshops, no laboring.

“There. The school,” Kuwari said.

On a raised platform on the edge of the Ziggurat’s courtyard was a broadly built structure with recessed alcoves and a thin roof supported by pillars. While dwarfed by the Ziggurat, the school on its own was easily larger than her entire village had been.

“Impressed?” Kuwari seemed pleased.

“It’s all so… large!”

“The gods demand it,” the priest said. “The best of everything is delivered to the gods in gratitude. The fattest cattle. The freshest crops. The purest beer. The most well-mannered servants. They will stand for nothing less, and it is why we were created to serve them.”

“We were?”

“Of course,” Kuwari. “Even the highest king of the greatest city is but a slave to the gods. Hmph. So much for hopes you’d been educated.”

Aea felt faint. “I only ever knew my village.”

“Well then. Welcome, Aea, to the rest of the world.”

***

When the litter reached the school the carriers lowered it to the ground, and Aea crawled out after Kuwari. There were a few priests or teachers outside in the shadow of the building, along with a few children her own age. She gawked at their clean goatskin skirts and linen wraps, and felt instantly insecure of her own ragged clothing, stained with clay and mud, torn from the hardships of the events that had brought her to Nippur. She felt filthy next to them, small, poor, uneducated.

A tall woman with a serene expression met Kuwari. “You are the first to return.”

“And I was behind schedule,” the priest screwed his face. “Had to give chase to this one.”

The woman seemed surprised. “But why?”

Kuwari shook his head. “I know less of the ways of little girls than I do little boys. Can you see her cleaned?”

The woman offered a hand to Aea. “I am Puabi. Will you come with me?”

Aea stepped to her side. She, at least, seemed nicer than Kuwari. “I’m Aea.”

“Aea. What a pretty name. It means ‘bounty’, and is the name of a foreign water god.”

“Am I a water god?”

“You might be.” Kuwari snorted.

Puabi shot him a look. “It’s not that simple, young one. But come with me. You must be tired after your journey.”

Aea let Puabi lead her around the back of the school and through a tall fence. Servants not much older than herself joined them, and they stripped the girl’s tattered wrap from her back. She felt a moment’s anxiety as it was taken, the only thing she had left, but as she watched it pass from hand to hand she realized how torn and ruined it was. If that dress was all she had, then she truly had nothing.

She was escorted into a small cistern built into the back of the school, filled with water. It was pleasantly cool inside, and as the servants scrubbed her skin and scraped her hair, she found herself entranced by the waters’ reflection dancing on the fired clay walls. She found her mind drifting back to the sea that the city rested on, all that water, as ancient as the world. It was all too easy to love it, to let her imagine herself a water-god in the form of a young girl.

Maybe what they were suggesting wasn’t so strange after all.

Maybe it could be true.

***

After she’d been cleansed, Puabi brought her a fresh linen wrap and fastened it over her shoulder with a small metal pin.

“How do you feel?” Puabi asked.

“Better.” Aea looked down at her hands, clean even under the nails, then back up at the older woman. “What is to become of me?”

“What did Kuwari tell you?”

“Something about… the gods? Being reborn?”

Puabi gave a small laugh. “Kuwari does not always have the patience to explain everything. That is why he is the school’s father, not a teacher.”

“Father?”

“The school is a family. The master of the school is the father.”

“Are you the mother?”

“Oh, gods no. I’m a teacher. An older sister.”

“Are you a god too?”

She looked uneasy. “It doesn’t work quite that way.”

Aea closed her eyes, upset with herself for looking foolish again. “Oh.”

Puabi took her hand. “All will be explained, little one. But Kuwari wants to wait until the others have returned.”

“What others?”

Puabi put a hand on Aea’s back, guiding her out of the bathhouse and into the warm day’s light. “Other teachers. Other older brothers. They go out into the world, looking for boys and girls like you, children who might serve as incarnations of the gods.”

“I think that’s the part I’m having difficulty understanding.”

“Kuwari will explain more once all of the children have been gathered, but sometimes the gods… they tire of their old bodies, and are reborn. They are gods, they can be reborn into any form, and live their youths not remembering who they are. Sometimes there are signs–”

“Omens?” Aea’s mother had told her about omens.

“Sometimes,” Puabi said. “Sometimes they just manifest the powers of the gods, without remembering who they really are. It’s easier to find them when they do, but it’s easier for them to resume godhood if they’re found and educated first.”

“How do the older brothers’ find them?”

“There are signs,” Puabi said. “They know what to look for. They’re not always right. Not all the children brought back to the school will host the gods’ power. Some will, though.”

Aea felt her stomach drop. “What if… what happens if there’s no god in me?”

Puabi smiled, and there was a hint of sadness to it. “Do not worry, little one. What you learn at the school will take you far in life, even if you’re just a girl. Kuwari will explain it all.”

Aea smiled back, but couldn’t shake the uneasiness that had settled in her belly.

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