Naram-Sin was a man, or god, of his word. He had his men bring me by litter to the very gates of the House of the Great Light at the first light of morning, freshly bathed and well-fed, and he himself stayed behind that I might walk into my temple on my own. When I first stepped from the litter and approached the temple’s ruined gates, more ragged and smoke-stained than the gates of the Lugal’s palace had been, I felt flooded with emotion. Fear at what I might find within was the chiefest among them, but also happiness. I was home. Alone I had left, alone I returned. I whispered a final small blessing to Inanna and started down the path towards the temple sanctum. In the distance I heard the soft chanting of the morning prayer, though there seemed fewer voices than usual.

“Enship!” cried the priests who were the first to see me. They threw themselves to the ground and told me how relieved they were to see me.

“Where is my High Steward?” I asked. “Has Adda survived and returned to the temple?”

“He has,” said one of the priests. “We will fetch him for you at once.”

The moment I saw Adda stalking towards me across the temple compound I ran to embrace him. I could tell the gesture made him extremely uncomfortable. When I exclaimed my joy that he was still alive, he sputtered that he had a brother who captained a ship and had weathered the storm in the city of Umma, a few days travel up the Idigina. “It is most joyous to see you, Enship,” he said with his typical reserve of feeling. “I have been keeping a record of the temple personnel who have returned, as well as the extent of damages to the temple buildings. When you are ready, I can give you the full report.”

“I wish to know as soon as possible,” I said. “Even before the repairs can be scheduled, vacant positions must be filled so that the temple may be reopened for the petitioners.” How comfortably the Enship returned to me even before the aga had been placed back on my head.

My reception chamber was missing its fine chairs, so I stood while Adda recited to me a list of disappearance, death and destruction. The giparu and the inner sanctum of the temple had been ransacked, as had several of the workshops. Everything of value had been stripped excepting for a few hidden emergency stores which Lugal Anna’s men had not been thorough enough to find. The outer gates and some of the outlying buildings had had fires set, but there was less structural damage than I had feared. The captain of the guards had died on the day Lugal Anna came to the temple, along with most of the temple guardsmen, whose bodies had been cleared away by Lugal Anna’s men. Most of the priests and priestesses had returned by now, but many of the craftsmen were missing, especially the men of the House of Metalworkers, who, I had no doubt, had used their own weaponry against the invaders. Among the highest-level priests and priestesses, Baranamtarra had only just reappeared, alive but shaken, and Ugunu and Ningtuku were missing.

I swallowed. “What of Sagadu, my scribe?” I asked.

“He is at work in the library,” said Adda. “It seems that before he fled the temple he was able to save a good number of the records and songs preserved there by throwing them into a satchel, including your own originals. As soon as it was safe to return he began reorganizing the tablets.” It was all I could do to keep from clapping my hands with joy. I made the necessary commands to Adda, asking that emergency supplies be distributed and new leaders be appointed for the Tablet House and the libation-priests. They would be declared interim in case Ugunu or Ningtuku should reappear, though I was sorry to say that I rather doubted it. And then I dismissed Adda, took a deep breath, and went to the temple library.

Yes, Inanna, when I saw him again, I embraced him too. And no, Inanna, he did not break away. “Sagadu,” I said. “I owe you a great debt, for protecting all this from Lugal Anna and his army.” I gestured to the tablets laid out across the table beside us.

“And I owe you a debt, Enship,” he said. “For insisting that I leave. If I had not, I might not have been able to save anything. We have records going back twenty years and all the great songs of Nanna, as well as those of Inanna. I know that goddess, though your vow of priesthood is to her father, is an especial favorite of yours.”

I smiled. “I have another task for us, Sagadu. This is a powerful song, one that must echo from midday to midnight. A song of Inanna that I must spread out of gratitude, for it is she I credit with my return to the temple and the calming of the storm.”

“Nothing would give me more joy than to help you bring your words to life,” he said. And I embraced him again, just to make certain that he was real.

I could have stayed there in the library with Sagadu for a thousand years, but I knew there were other things I needed to attend to. I was, after all, the En, and my life had been nothing if not a string of moments that did not last as long as I wanted them to.

The giparu was not yet fit for habitation, and in any case it had been desanctified by Lugal Anna’s intrusion. It would require many repairs and the blessings of a team of priestesses before I could sleep there again. So it was to the quarters of the zirru-priestesses that I now went in search of Baranamtarra. To my surprise the first people I saw there, crouched outside the door beating laundry on a stone, were none other than Elamitu and Ilum-Palilis. Now it was they who ran to embrace me.

“Did they harm you?” I asked them. Ilum shook her head no. Elamitu said “Yes,” and when I looked into her eyes I knew how.

I felt the fires of Inanna welling in my breast. “We shall find the man, or men,” I said gravely. “I shall have my nephew bring every rebel soldier who stood with Lugal Anna before you, one by one, so that you may identify the culprit. Then you shall decide the manner of his death, whether he is to be stoned or flayed or bound and flung into the river.”

“It does not matter,” Elamitu said.

“What do you mean?” I asked furiously. “Of course it matters! You must not suffer such an insult.”

“I was not a maiden before this and I am not a maiden now, so what have I lost?” she said. “If my father is not dead by now, I would not know his face from that of Gilgamesh. Whose virtue have I soiled? And besides: I don’t want anyone else to die. I am alive. And so are you.”

I sighed. I have never really understood Elamitu. Even now when she brings me my bread and beer, though her step is slower than it was, she is the same complacent creature, inscrutable. She is wise in her way, but I do not know whether she is the product of a life of servitude, or the cleverest of us all, who says one tenth of what she knows and who will go down to the Palace of Dust with a smile on her lips. So I let the matter lie, and asked if they could take me to Baranamtarra.

“She is not well, Mistress,” said Ilum-Palilis. “I have never seen her so. She lies in her bed mostly, staring at the wall, and when someone tries to speak to her she either screams at them in rage or begins to weep. She frightens me.”

I gritted my teeth. “Take me to her,” I said. And they led me inside and down the narrow hallway, to a little room with a modest cot on which a stout and familiar figure was sitting with her back to the door.

“Baranamtarra,” I said. Ilum and Elamitu scurried away. Alone, always alone, I walked towards her.

She turned without getting up and I saw that her face was puffy and her eyes red from crying. Once that face had reminded me of a stone. It was as unreadable now as ever, but not, it seemed, from any concerted effort. She was empty, and I knew that in some way her power had been broken.

Baranamtarra gave me a blank, dull stare. “Is this how it is meant to be?” she asked me.

“How what is meant to be?” I replied.

“That every time a king dies, the earth shudders and tries to shake off its yoke?” she said.

“I did not think you had much love for my family and our line of kings,” I said. “Nor for me, for that matter.”

“No,” she said. “But I loved this temple. I loved my life here. But now...” her voice trailed off and she began to weep, gulping, ugly sobs that contorted her face, the crying of someone who is not accustomed to crying.

“Baranamtarra,” I said gently. “We will rebuild. I have spoken to my nephew, and he has great respect for the gods and their houses. He will give us all the money and resources we need. All will be as it was before, you will see.”

She looked up at me with her swollen eyes and quivering lip and said, “I did this.” Her voice was like a death rattle.

“No,” I said. “This was Lugal Anna’s doing. We are not to blame for his blasphemy.” I did not understand. How could Baranamtarra, implacable, incorruptible, lover of ritual and tradition, be to blame for what had happened? She had never really approved of my being En, I knew, but I could not believe her capable of conspiring to remove me from power. Not when it would mean so much chaos and upheaval to the temple itself.

“I have never spoken these words aloud,” said Baranamtarra. “But whether I do or do not I am damned all the same.” She breathed sharply in and out for a time. Then she said, “I questioned the power of the gods.”

I gaped, uncomprehending.

There were tears rolling down her cheeks. “I served Nanna for such a long, long time,” she said tremulously. “I gave him my dowry, my youth, my life. I served his temple and I saw such wonders, such joy, but also...I have seen maidens bound in marriage to tyrants older than their fathers. I have wiped the brows of children who died screaming in the night with skin like fire. I have poured broth into the mouths of beggars without teeth, without eyes, of lepers and limbless men, the misbegotten of Urim. And I have known sorrow. I loved our old En as though she were my mother, when my own mother had sold me to the temple too young for me to remember. And I saw the En sicken and die and be replaced by--by you, Enship. And there came a day--I do not know precisely when, but there came a day when it was all too much. When I spoke the litanies of Nanna but could no longer feel his light. When I buried another innocent, saw another life spoiled and ruined, and could fathom it no more. And I began to disbelieve. I thought, ‘Nanna has no power over men and women. We say his words and watch him rise in the sky, but that is his only trick. Either he cares but lacks the power to help, or he does not care at all.’

She paused, and I saw that she was shaking. “Those who have never served a temple will tell you that everything that happens is the justice of the gods. That when we face misfortune we are being punished for our sins, or else the sins of our ancestors. But I have seen famine and war turn men into beasts and children into spiders, all swollen belly and stick-thin limbs, and I can no longer believe that we are at fault for the ill that we do. So I ask you, En Kheduana, Chief Wife of that Moon which is not always in the sky; how can you still have faith? How can you still believe that what we say and do has any effect on them?”

I swallowed. I was suddenly weak. Her words had squeezed the air from my lungs like a vise. “Everything you say is true,” I said. I stepped closer to her. “And yet, it is not true. That is the power of the gods, to be both one thing and another, everything and nothing. They are not there when ill befalls us, yet they are there to give us the strength to endure it. They are harsh and cruel and uncaring, yet they are the source of every joyous moment and every good thing. They are change. And you must not lose your faith, because without the gods there is no change, no moments drifting from one to another, the dark becoming light becoming dark becoming light again. Trust in your gods, Baranamtarra, and their light will return to you.”

She did not speak, only fixed me again with that blank and empty look. Having nothing else to say, I left her.

I do not know if Baranamtarra followed my advice and put her trust in the gods again. She died only days later, without ever having left that room. And when she died, I mourned for her, not just because I had known her many years and it was the proper thing to do, but because the words she had spoken had shaken me. Still they haunt me sometimes, when I am slaughtering an animal for sacrifice or carrying a basket of ritual ointments or pressing my stylus into clay. How can I know, even I, the High Priestess of Nanna, that what I do has power? And when these thoughts like ghastly gidim chase at my skirts I remember the faces of the people of Urim, of Ninninnata and her neighbors coming to pay their respects, and I know that there, at least, is evidence enough.

Looking back at my good fortune, I do not know whom I should thank for it if not the gods. Looking back at the bad that has struck me, I do not know whose ire I incited if not theirs. Each moment of darkness led me to a great light; each light was in its time extinguished. Life is a series of moments witnessed by the gods, and whether our little flailings capture their attention, we cannot truly know. But if that belief puts a smile on the face of a sleeping child, or gives comfort to a woman cast out from the only home she has known for thirty years, then tell me, my Lady Inanna, does it really matter?

In his response to the rebellion of Lugal Anna, Naram-Sin more resembled his father than his uncle. He granted Anna a quick and private death, and rather than punish the people of Unug and Urim and Lagash, Naram-Sin sent them provisions and builders, and they gave him their support in turn. Ships from Urim began to sail North again, and there was no more talk of secession from the Empire. He lavished gifts upon the temple and placed within it a new shrine, small but unmistakable: the shrine of Naram-Sin, of the God and King, Beloved of the Moon and beloved of the people of Urim. Beloved of himself, if truth be told.

I thought of Ninninnata and her unshakeable faith in the gods, the way the vainglory of kings failed to frighten or impress her. How did a king who was also a god fit into this view of the world? Was his divinity a mark of ultimate arrogance or ultimate piety? Or yet again, was it nothing more than the shrewdness of a king who has seen other kings fall, and wishes to keep from retreading their steps?

I surveyed the reconstruction efforts of the temple with a wry smirk playing about my lips. I had another god in the family. Only time would tell which one he would grow to resemble: wise Enki or lofty Enlil? Cautious An or cocky Dumuzid? Utu with his righteous wrath or Nanna with his rays of cooling, empty light?

I, for my part, would be Nanna’s bride again, the bridge between the mortal and immortal worlds, the mistress of his temple. But a woman’s body given in marriage does not always include the offering of her heart, and if my body belonged to Nanna, my heart, I knew now, was another’s. It should not have taken me so long to see it; to realize that each time I defied another’s wishes, each time I yearned and burned for things I was not permitted, each time I did a thing that had never been done before, it was you, speaking through me, breathing through me. My life has been a letter of love to you, Inanna. With the fire of my song and the triumph of my return and the heaviness of my memories, I praise you, hail you, exalt you.