What Seeps

Seven came up out of the water. History wrote them down as fish.

At the bottom of the water beneath the earth, a god fills seven bodies with everything he knows and sends them up. They walk out of the reeds into Eridu. A fisherman holds up a carp from his net, looks at the fish, looks at them, and the corner of his mouth moves.

They learn his words. They eat his wife's flat cake. Then they scatter, and the land learns from them — straight canals, the paths of stars, which leaf for which sickness. The lessons are pressed into clay and the clay goes up on a wall. Nobody writes down how the wife makes the flat cake. And at the far end of the bank, where no one goes, someone sits who came from nowhere and stayed. No scales. No gills. When a hand rests on the water, the water rises to meet it.

Warmth Below, Void Above

Before she was Queen of the Dead, she was a daughter.

A prophecy says the sun will not rise. The dark is eating it from the edges — not killing it, but erasing it. There is one way to close the abyss: give it a life of the same blood. Ereshkigal's parents choose her. They send her out at the blackest hour to gather a flower that opens only in deepest night, and her father shears a fistful of moonlight from the air and pours it over her head, and she believes it is protection. It is a road, laid so she will not lose her way down.

She climbs to the one crack that let light in and drives stones into it until her knuckles scream and blood runs from under her nails. Her own work. After that a bull lies against her side in the dark and is warm, and for a while that is enough. Up here is gold, and praise, and a sister who takes the mes and takes whatever is set in front of her — and who wants a man dead, and calls that bull up out of her sister's dark to do it. Then word comes up that the one below has lost her consort. Inanna says she will go down and pay her respects, and packs the jewels they will not have there.

Near and Not Mine

Every season he comes back. She counts the days and will not say she is counting.

Half this book is above ground, with a shepherd and his flock, and a girl in a white kaunakes at the tail of a festival procession, whom he hears someone call Ereshkigal. He kneels where she knelt because the dirt is still warm from her knees, and he does not touch the flower she left. She goes under the earth. Long after, her sister Inanna goes down as well and comes back up through the seven gates, and the price of that return is a body to take her place. The shepherd walks down.

Nobody in these books says what they feel. The hands do it. He sweeps the dust and fills the cracks Ereshkigal cannot fill herself — she is the one who sealed the last one shut. She sits with five shallow grooves worn into the armrest by years of holding, and does not move. One evening, when the hall is quiet, she kneels at a crack he filled that morning and presses her thumb into his thumbprint. Then she rises and goes back to the throne.

Written in Earth

Her father called her his seal on their clay. A seal can be filed off.

Before her, writing belonged to no one. Lists of grain. Hymns no one signed. Dedications that named the king. Then a conqueror's daughter is installed as high priestess in Ur — a Sumerian city her Akkadian father took by force, and she is the instrument that presses his design into its ground. She holds the office twenty-five years and writes forty-two hymns. Her name is nowhere inside them. It sits at the end of the collection, outside the work: the maker's mark on the made thing. Then a man takes the temple and puts her out of it, and she writes one more — with an accusation built into its grammar — and sets her name not at the end, not as a signature, but in the body of the hymn, in the line where the god's name stands. I, Enheduanna. Kings were removed and their seals filed off. Hers was in the weight-bearing place. Five hundred years later her tears were a line in a school exercise, pressed and wiped and pressed again. Through all of it she kept a river stone she had picked up at eight, the one thing nobody wanted.