1The ember came down from the walled villages to the flat land between two rivers. There the people dug ditches and led the water where they wished. The barley stood so thick that one village became ten, and ten became a city. The city was called Uruk.
2In Uruk there were more people than any one person could know. That was a new thing on the earth.
3In the middle of the city stood the house of Inanna, and beside it the storehouses. All the barley of the land came there, and the sheep, and the wool, and the jars of beer. From there it went out again: to the diggers of ditches, to the weavers, to the farmer who had lost his seed to the flood and must borrow or starve.
4Who knew what had come in, and what had gone out, and who owed? One man knew. His name was Dudu, and he was called the Rememberer.
5Dudu was old, with a face like a dried fig. He kept it all behind his eyes. And for the great debts he kept clay.
6This was the way of it. For each measure of barley lent, there was a small clay token shaped like a cone. For each sheep, a token like a disc. The tokens were laid inside a ball of wet clay, hollow like an egg. The ball was closed, and Dudu rolled his seal across it. The seal was a little cylinder of stone, cut with a lion and a bull, and the bull had a chip in its horn. Then the ball dried, and the debt slept inside it until harvest.
7At harvest the ball was broken before the borrower's face, and the tokens were counted out. So no one could say more, and no one could say less.
8A boy worked in the storehouse whose name was Kuli. He was a potter's son, eleven years old, quick with his hands and slow to be quiet. His work was to dig the clay, and knead it, and shape the hollow balls for the Rememberer.
9Kuli's father kept a kiln at the end of the potters' street. Its fire had not gone out in Kuli's lifetime, nor in his father's. It was said the first coal of it had come down from the hill villages in a clay pot, in the arms of some grandmother's grandmother, and from somewhere else before that. No one knew where it had begun.
10Now Kuli had a trouble with the balls. "Grandfather," he said to Dudu, for so the boys called him, "when the ball is shut, no one can see what is in it. To know, you must break it. And when it is broken it proves nothing any more."
11"That is why it is broken only once," said Dudu.
12"But if I pressed each token on the outside, while the clay was wet, before I put it in? Then the ball would wear its count on its skin. Anyone could look."
13The old man turned this over, as he turned over everything, slowly. "Do it," he said. "This year. We will see what comes of it." So that year every ball that Dudu sealed had the prints of its tokens on the outside: small dents for the cones, round dents for the discs.
14In the month of sowing a woman came to the storehouse with a girl beside her. The woman's name was Geme. She farmed a field on the Heron Canal, and her husband was a year dead. The spring flood had broken the canal bank and taken her seed. The girl was her daughter Sisi, nine years old.
15"Five measures," said Geme. "To be paid at harvest, and one more for the house of the goddess."
16Dudu looked at her a long moment. Then he nodded, and Kuli counted five cones into his palm. He pressed each one against the wet ball, five small dents in a row, and dropped them in, and pinched the ball shut. Dudu rolled the lion and the bull across it.
17There was clay left on the board. He patted it flat like a small loaf, and for a game he pressed the five cones into it also. Then with a splinter of reed he scratched an ear of barley beside them. Then, because Sisi was watching him with round eyes, he scratched a heron, with long legs.
18"That is our canal," said the girl.
19"That is you," said Kuli. "Five barley, to the house of the heron."
20Dudu laughed, which he did not do often. "The boy has made a debt you can hold in one hand." And he leaned over and rolled his seal across the bottom of the little loaf, to make the joke complete. "Now it is a true thing," he said.
21Kuli carried it home and set it among his father's bowls to dry. He forgot it. When the bowls went into the kiln at the spring firing it went in with them, and came out hard and red as a roof tile. His father found it and frowned and threw it in a corner.
22In the hottest month the fever came up from the marshes. It came every year, and every year it took the very old and the very young. That year it lay down on Dudu.
23Kuli sat with him. The old man's skin was like hot paper, and his eyes, that had held forty years of the city, kept sliding away to the wall.
24On the second night Dudu took hold of the boy's wrist. "Listen," he said. "Listen and hold it. The fisher Abba owes two sheep and has paid one. The weavers of the north house had forty measures and have brought back thirty. The house of Lu-gal on the Reed Gate..." And he went on. He spoke debts until the lamp burned low, and Kuli held what he could, as a child holds water in his hands.
25Toward morning the old man stopped in the middle of a name. He looked at Kuli as if across a wide river. "It is too much for one head," he said. "It was always too much. I only never said so." He did not speak again. By noon he was dead.
26They buried him under the floor of his own house, as the custom was, with a cup and a bowl. The whole storehouse came. And each one who stood there was thinking the same thing, though none said it: What did I owe? What was owed to me? Who knows it now? It was as if the storehouse had burned to the ground in a night, and there was no smoke to show for it.
27There was an overseer of the storehouse named Mesag. He was a broad, smiling man who gave sweet cakes to children. He had wanted the fields along the Heron Canal for a long time, for they were the best land in the district, black and deep. When Dudu was laid out for burial, it was Mesag who washed the body with his own hands, and people praised him for it. The seal that had hung on a cord around the old man's neck was not seen again.
28Harvest came. The borrowers gathered in the court of the storehouse, and Mesag sat in the Rememberer's place, and the balls were brought out and broken one by one.
29When Geme was called, Mesag broke her ball on the edge of the bench. The tokens rolled out. A storehouse man counted them aloud. He did not stop at five. He counted fifteen.
30Geme cried out. "Five! It was five! The old man knew it!"
31"The old man is under his floor," said Mesag gently. "The clay says fifteen, and here is his seal on it, the lion and the bull. Will you call the clay a liar? I am sorry for you, woman. Your harvest is not fifteen measures. The field will come to the storehouse. The girl can work in the weaving house until the rest is paid. She will be fed."
32Sisi began to weep without any sound. Kuli, standing by the clay board, felt the ground go from under him. For he had picked up a piece of the broken ball. He had made every ball that year with his own hands, and every one wore its count on its skin. This one was smooth.
33He opened his mouth. Then he saw Mesag's eyes rest on him, mild as milk, and he shut it again. He was eleven. He was a potter's son. Mesag had forty men.
34But that evening he could not eat. He told his friend, the brewer's boy, what he had seen. He told him also about the little red loaf with the heron on it, lying in a corner at home. The brewer's boy told his brother, and his brother swept floors in the storehouse.
35They came in the dark, four men with staves. They did not say who had sent them. They said they were looking for stolen temple goods, and they began with the shelves. Bowl after bowl went to the floor. Kuli's mother stood against the wall with the small ones behind her. His father stood in the middle of his broken house with his hands hanging, and when he stepped forward one of the men struck him across the mouth with a stave, and he sat down.
36They did not find it. Kuli had run to the corner at the first shout. The only place he could think of was the place no one would put a hand. He had pushed the little loaf deep into the hot ash at the mouth of the kiln.
37When the men were gone, his father sat a long while among the pieces, holding his jaw. Kuli raked the red loaf out of the ash and brought it to him.
38His father turned it over in his big cracked hands. He looked at the five dents, and the barley, and the heron. He could not read it, for there was no such thing yet as reading. But he was a potter. He knew what the fire does to clay. "This cannot be changed," he said slowly. "A man can change his word. This has been through the fire. It will say five until the world ends." He looked at his broken shelves. "So that is why they want it."
39"They will come back," said Kuli's mother.
40"Yes," said his father. "So we will go before they do."
41At first light the two of them stood at the city gate, where the elders sat to hear quarrels, as they had sat since before the walls. Geme was sent for, and came running with flour still on her arms. Mesag was sent for too.
42"A toy," he said, when he saw the red loaf. "A child's mud pie. Will the elders of Uruk weigh a mud pie against a sealed ball?"
43The eldest of the elders was a woman named Ninda, nearly blind. She took the loaf and ran her thumb across the bottom of it. "Here is a lion," she said. "Here is a bull. The bull has a chip in his horn." She held out her other hand. "Give me the pieces of the widow's ball."
44They were brought. She felt them over. "The same seal," she said. "So. Two clays, one seal, and they do not agree. One of them was sealed by a dead man." She turned her white eyes toward the boy. "You made the balls this year. Tell me how you made them."
45So Kuli told her about the count on the skin. Ninda sent to the storehouse for every ball still unbroken, and for the pieces of those broken at the harvest. They were laid out on the ground at the gate, more than two hundred, and the elders went down the rows on their old knees.
46Every ball wore its dents, cones and discs, as the boy had said. All but four. Four were smooth as eggs. And when the elders asked whose they were, all four belonged to fields on the Heron Canal.
47No one spoke for a while. Then Ninda said, "Mesag. Where is the Rememberer's seal?"
48Mesag did not answer. He was looking at the little red loaf as a man looks at a snake he has stepped on. A thing a child had made for a game had lain in the fire and waited, and had stood up at the gate and spoken with a dead man's voice.
49They did not kill him. They took the storehouse from him, and his house, and sent him out of the gate with what he could carry, and the four fields stayed with the four families. Geme paid her five measures and one for the goddess. Sisi did not go to the weaving house.
50Then the elders sat and looked at one another, for the harder matter was still before them. "The Rememberer is dead," said one. "Who will remember?" They asked through the whole storehouse. No one could.
51Ninda still held the loaf. She had not put it down. "Boy," she said. "Can you make more of these?"
52"As many as there is clay," said Kuli.
53"And if there are a hundred herons? How will we know one house from another?"
54Kuli thought. "I will find a mark for each," he said. "A fish for the fisher. A loom for the weavers. I will find a mark for everything there is."
55He did not find a mark for everything. No one could, in one life. But he began. He sat in the Rememberer's place, a boy with a reed and a board of wet clay, and he drew the ox and the jar and the sheep and the ear of barley. Other boys came to learn the marks from him.
56His name is not written anywhere. In his day there was no way yet to write a name. We call him only the scribe.
57But this is known. On the day Dudu died, forty years of the city went under the floor with him, and nothing could bring them back. All but five small dents and a bird with long legs. And on a morning at harvest, at the gate of Uruk, a man who was dead told the truth, and the living had to listen.
58It had never happened before in the world. It has not stopped happening since.