1In the old city of Ur, by the lower river, stood the house of the moon. For forty years one woman had been its high priestess. Her name was Enheduanna, and she was the daughter of Sargon the king.
2Her father had set her there when she was young, to bind the old cities of the south to his new throne in the north. Perhaps he thought no more about it than that. But the girl he sent turned out to be something he had not reckoned on. She made songs.
3She made songs to the temples of the land, forty-two of them, one for each great house from the marshes to the hills. She made songs to Inanna, the lady of the morning star, fierce ones, that shook people who heard them. She did not sing as the old hymns sang, in words worn smooth by a thousand mouths. She sang what she herself had seen and felt, and she had her scribes press it into clay.
4There was a girl in the house of the moon named Mesi. She had been left at the temple gate in a basket, and she was fourteen in the year of this story. Her work was the lamps. At dusk she carried the fire from the kitchen court to the high room, and at dawn she carried it back, so that the house was never dark. She thought the priestess the greatest person in the world, and was afraid to breathe near her.
5By then Sargon was long dead, and his grandson Naram-Sin was king. And in that year the cities rose against him, all at once, like dry grass catching. In Ur a man named Lugal-ane called himself king.
6A new king needs the gods to say he is king. So Lugal-ane came to the house of the moon with armed men behind him, and stood before the priestess, and told her to speak his name before the god.
7She was past sixty. She wore the rolled crown of her office, and a string of long red beads from the far east that her father had sent her. She looked at him as she would have looked at a boy who had tracked mud across her floor. "I serve the god of this house," she said. "I do not hire him out."
8Mesi was behind a pillar with an unlit lamp in her hands. She saw what came next, and so we know it; and the priestess told it herself afterward, in her own song.
9Lugal-ane lifted the crown from her head with his own hands. Then he drew a dagger from his belt and held it out to her, handle first. He said it suited her better. Everyone in the court understood him. He was telling an old woman to make an end of herself and save him the trouble.
10She did not take the dagger. So his men took her by the arms and walked her through her own halls and put her out of the gate. In her song she says she was made to fly like a swallow from a window. Swallows do not walk as she walked. She walked like someone who has forgotten how.
11Two went after her. One was Zuzu, the old doorkeeper, who had opened that gate for her forty years and could not think what else to do. The other was Mesi. She had run back for the only thing she knew how to carry: a small clay pot with a lid, and in it, under ash, a coal from the kitchen fire.
12They went north and west, away from the river, into the dry country. No one goes there who can help it. The ground is cracked clay and thorn. They had no bread and no water skin. They had a priestess with no crown, an old man with bad knees, and a girl with a pot of ash.
13On the third day they found herders, black tents and thin sheep at a seep of bitter water. The herders did not ask who they were. They looked at the old woman's hands, which had never worked, and they knew enough. Enheduanna unknotted the string at her neck and slid off one long red bead and laid it on the ground. The headman's wife picked it up and held it to the sun. Then she brought them curds and a place in the shade.
14So it went, for more days than Mesi could afterward count. They moved from seep to seep, a bead for each camp. Twice they saw dust on the plain where spearmen were walking, and lay in a dry ditch until dark. The thorns tore the priestess's feet to rags. The string at the old woman's neck grew short.
15It was not the hunger that Mesi feared for her. It was the silence. Enheduanna, who had filled forty years with words, did not speak for nine days. She sat with her back to a rock and her eyes on nothing.
16On the ninth night she said, into the dark, "He will put another woman in my house. She will wear my crown and sleep in my bed and sing to my god. In a year the people will not remember there was ever anyone else. That is what he has done. He has not killed me. He has made it as if I never was."
17Zuzu was asleep. Mesi was fourteen and had no wisdom to offer. She did the one thing she knew. She took the lid off her pot and blew on the coal until it glowed, and fed it thorn twigs, and made a small fire between them.
18The priestess looked at the fire. She looked at it for a long time. Then she said, slowly, as a person speaks who is feeling for a step in the dark, a line of a song.
19It was a line to Inanna. It called her lady of all the powers, shining light. Then came another line. Then the old woman stopped, and said the two again, and changed a word, and went on.
20She worked until the stars turned. Mesi had heard the temple singers all her life, and she had never heard this. The priestess was not only praising. She was telling the goddess what had been done to her. The crown lifted off. The dagger held out. The thorns. She put Lugal-ane into the song by his name. And she put in her own.
21Old Zuzu had woken, and he heard that. He was shocked to his bones. "Lady," he said, "a hymn has no maker. A hymn belongs to the god. Who has ever stood up inside a hymn and said, I am so-and-so, and this happened to me?"
22"No one," said Enheduanna. "I know it. That is why I am doing it." She pushed her grey hair out of her eyes. "He has taken the house. He can take the bed and the crown and the beads. He thinks that is all I am. But if this song goes into the mouths of the singers, with my name in the middle of it, how will he get it out again? He would have to cut out every tongue from here to the mountains."
23"There is no clay here," said Zuzu. "There is no reed. How will it go anywhere?"
24The priestess turned her head and looked at the lamp-girl.
25"Child," she said. "How many songs of the house do you know?"
26"All of them, lady," Mesi whispered. "I hear them every day. I cannot help it."
27"Then you will learn one more."
28For six nights after, the priestess said the song and the girl said it back. It was long: a hundred and fifty lines and more. When Mesi dropped a word she was made to begin again from the start. She said it walking. By the seventh night the old woman could find no fault in it. She sat back against her rock and shut her eyes.
29"Go to Nippur," she said. "It is six days north by the big canal. That is the city where the priests decide which king the gods have chosen. Lugal-ane needs them, and they have not answered him yet. Find the tablet-house by the temple. Say it to a scribe there, all of it, and see that he writes it. Then it is no longer mine to lose."
30"And you, lady?"
31"I have two beads left," said Enheduanna. "And Zuzu's knees. We will be here, or we will not." She pulled off one of the two and closed the girl's hand on it. "For bread. Not for anything else."
32Mesi went alone. She walked at night and lay up by day in the reeds of the canal, and she said the song under her breath so as not to lose it and so as not to hear the jackals.
33On the fourth day she came to a bridge of boats, and there was no way round it. Lugal-ane's men held it. They were stopping all who crossed, for word had gone out that the old priestess was sending letters to her nephew the king.
34They took Mesi's bundle and shook it out. They broke her bread in half to see if clay was baked in it. They tipped the ash from her pot onto the planks and stirred it with a spear butt, and the coal rolled out and hissed in the canal. A woman was fetched to search her to the skin. They found one red bead. The captain kept it.
35"Where are you going, temple rat?"
36"To my aunt in Nippur," said Mesi. Her teeth were knocking together. "The house of the moon has a new mistress. She has put out the old servants."
37That was likely enough. The captain looked her over once more. She had no tablet. She had no seal. She had nothing in the world but a cracked pot. He was searching for a message, and he knew what a message was: it was a thing made of clay. He waved her across.
38She walked over the bridge with a hundred and fifty-three lines behind her teeth, and every one of them was safe.
39In Nippur she found the tablet-house. A scribe was sweeping its step. She was dirty and barefoot and he took her for a beggar. She did not argue. She stood in the street, and shut her eyes, and began.
40By the tenth line he had stopped sweeping. By the thirtieth he had gone in and come out again with wet clay and a reed, and two older men behind him. They sat her down in the court and gave her water, and she said the song from the first line to the last, slowly, while three reeds went at once. When she came to the name in the middle of it, the oldest scribe lifted his head. He had met the priestess once, when he was young. "It is hers," he said. "No one else in the land makes them so."
41They made copies. It was what they did with any fine thing. One went into the temple. One went down to Uruk with a singer, and one up to Kish. Within a month people were singing it who had never seen Ur: how the lady of the moon's house had been thrown into the thorns, and what kind of man had done it.
42Whether the song turned the hearts of the priests of Nippur, no one can say now. What is known is that they did not speak for Lugal-ane. And before that year was out, Naram-Sin came down from the north with his army and broke the rebel kings one after another, nine battles, and Lugal-ane was not heard of again.
43Soldiers of the king found the priestess at a seep in the dry country. She was alive. Zuzu was alive. She had one bead left.
44They carried her back to Ur in a chair. The rolled crown was set on her head again in the court where it had been lifted off. Mesi was there, behind her pillar, with a lit lamp. The priestess did not make a speech. She asked for clay.
45She lived some years more, and made more songs, and gathered up all she had made. At the end of her songs of the temples, the scribe wrote a line that is still there to be read: "The compiler of the tablets was Enheduanna. My king, something has been created that no one has created before."
46That is true, as far as anyone has found. In all the clay of all the cities before her, there are kings' names and gods' names and the names of men who owed barley. But there is no one before her who made a song and said, I made this. She is the first maker whose name we know.
47She died, as the high and the low do. Another woman wore the crown. Her father's kingdom, that had seemed to hold the whole world, fell to hill tribes within three lifetimes and was not raised again. Agade itself was lost. No one today can say for certain where it stood.
48But listen to what Mesi saw.
49She lived to be very old, a keeper of lamps to the end. One day, long after, she was crossing the court of the tablet-house, where small boys sat in rows learning their signs. They learned by copying, as children did in that land for two thousand years. A boy of eight was bent over his clay with his tongue between his teeth, pressing one sign after another. He read each line aloud as he made it, in a high flat voice, not thinking of what it meant.
50It was the song of the thorns. It was the line with her name.
51The boy had never seen the priestess. He did not know she had been old, or proud, or frightened, or that her feet had bled. He did not know that the words had once crossed a bridge of boats in the head of a girl who had nothing. He was only learning to write. Children were still copying that song five hundred years after her. Some of their tablets are what we read it from today.
52Mesi stood and listened until he reached the end. Then she went on across the court. It was nearly dusk, and there were lamps to light.