Out of the Moon-God's Shadow

I kept the tally in my head before I kept it on the tablet, a habit from the edubba that never left me: three hundred and twelve votive figurines of Ningal fired and cooling in the yard, forty jars of linseed oil racked along the north wall, and against them a debt to the temple treasury of Terah's own devising, built up jar by jar and god by god until it had become, by my reckoning, the better part of his fortune. Long before that morning I had learned that a man's piety could be read in his storerooms the way another man's character might be read in his face, and Terah's storerooms were the most devout in the street of the image-makers.

The sun had not yet cleared the shoulder of the E-kishnugal when I came into the courtyard, and already the heat stood against the mudbrick like a held breath. Nanna's ziggurat threw its long morning shadow clean across the roofs of the quarter, over the dye vats and the bakers' ovens and the open drains, so that for an hour each day the god's house cooled the city it owned. Long enough inside that shadow, I had stopped noticing it, the way a man stops noticing the smell of his own house.

Terah stood over two apprentices at the molding table, watching them press river silt into the wooden forms for a batch of household shrines, his fringed robe dark with sweat under the arms though the day was young. He did not look up at me. He rarely did, until he needed something counted.

"Tell me the weight of cedar I paid out last month," he said, "and then tell me what the temple scribes say I owe them for the privilege of having bought it."

I gave him the figures. He made a sound in his throat that was not quite a laugh.

"They tax the timber coming in from Syria as though they felled the trees themselves and floated them down on their own backs. Nanna owns the moon, the canals, the barley, and now, it seems, the forest at Byblos." He turned the half-formed shrine in his hands, checking the seam. "Write to Ur-Nanna's office. Ask for the artisan's exemption. Tell them I am a servant of the god's own house, which is true, and that every shrine I sell puts another lamp before him in some farmer's wall, which is also true."

"I will write it," I said, "though I should tell you the exemption was denied to the potters' guild in the spring."

"The potters make jars. I make gods. There is a difference, and I expect the temple to see it, since the difference is what pays their granary."

I did not answer that, because an answer would have cost me something. I went instead to the kilns at the rear of the yard, where the firing had finished in the night and the bricks of the chamber still gave off heat enough to sting through a sandal. I pulled the trays myself rather than trust an apprentice with the count, and found among the cooling figures eleven cracked across the base, their plaster-smooth faces unbroken but their feet split like dry riverbed. Cracked stock could be claimed back against the temple's assessment of finished goods, a rebate of perhaps half a shekel of silver by weight, and I set the eleven aside and marked them in the wax before I thought further about whether Terah's own bronze stock, logged three cycles running now at a weight I knew to be low, would survive so close an accounting from anyone but me.

Of the bronze I had said nothing. It was not my part to say it. My part was to keep the figures that Terah wished kept, and to know, privately, which figures were true.

Abram was at the far end of the yard, seated on an overturned grinding stone with an adze in his hand, working a length of cedar meant for a crossbar, the kind that held a household figure in its niche. He did not greet the temple runners who passed through the gate with their waxed tablets and their soft sandals, and he did not mutter the blessing that the other craftsmen said over each piece before they set the tool to it, the small words asking the wood's spirit for patience under the blade. He worked in silence, the strokes of the adze even and unhurried, and the silence around him had a weight to it that the ordinary noise of the yard did not touch.

Sarai came through from the weaving rooms with an armful of wool skeins dyed the deep blue that Terah favored for the temple hangings, and she paused long enough to give me a nod, level and without warmth, the kind of acknowledgment one gives a measuring stick rather than a man. I returned it the same way. We had an understanding, she and I, built on nothing more than that neither of us pretended the household ran on anything but barley and silver, and that neither of us said so aloud where it could be repeated.

She did not look at the artisans at their molds. She never did. Long since, I had stopped wondering why.

A runner came through the gate before the sun had climbed much further, a boy of perhaps twelve summers in the plain linen of the livestock office, out of breath in the way boys are taught to be out of breath when they carry an overseer's word.

"Amurru Baqi," he said. "You are to come to the central storehouse. Ur-Nanna's steward wants the tally of this month's offering stock against the temple's count, before the noon reckoning."

"Tell him I am coming," I said, and set down the wax tablet I had been marking, though I kept the stylus tucked into my belt out of habit, the way another man might keep a knife.

I went to find Terah to tell him I was called away, and on my way back across the yard, past the grinding stone where Abram still worked, I saw the crossbar he had finished. It lay across his knee, the cedar smoothed and oiled and fitted at either end with the pegs that would seat it into a household niche, the kind of work that any buyer in the market would have praised for its clean lines. But the bar itself ran crooked along its length, a shallow bow from one end to the other that no eye would catch at a glance and every niche in the city would reject at the fitting. No figure could stand upright on it. It would hold nothing straight.

I looked at him, and he looked back at me without explanation, the adze still in his hand, and said nothing.

I wrote it down that night as I wrote down everything, the weight of the oil, the count of the cracked figures, the shekels owed and the shekels claimed, and at the bottom of the tablet, where no temple eye would ever read it, I wrote that Terah's eldest son had spent half a day's labor making a thing shaped like what his father sold, and fit for nothing his father sold it for.