1In the days of Hammurabi, king of Babylon, there was a soldier named Ubar who had a field outside the city of Sippar.
2It was not a large field. It had a row of date palms along the ditch and it grew good barley. The king had granted it to Ubar's father for his service with the spear, and it had come to Ubar on the same terms: the field was his while he marched when the king called. He had a wife named Tabni and a son, Iddin, who was two years old and afraid of the donkey.
3The king called. There was war in the east, against the cities under the mountains. Ubar kissed his wife, and lifted his son onto the donkey to cure him of his fear, which did not work, and went.
4In the second month of that war his company was cut off at a river crossing. Ubar took a spear through the thigh and woke with a rope on his neck. He was sold twice. He ended in the hill country, turning a millstone for a man who owned forty like him.
5He was there eight years.
6A man can live a long time on one thought, if it is the right one. Ubar's thought was the row of palms along the ditch. He counted them at night: eleven. He thought of the boy growing. He did not let himself think of Tabni overmuch, for that way he would have broken.
7In the eighth winter the master's house burned, and in the smoke and shouting Ubar walked away. He walked by night for forty days, down out of the hills, limping on the bad leg, eating what he could find or steal. He came to the gate of Sippar in the spring, as thin as a rake, with a beard to his chest. The gate guard did not know him. He had stood watches with that guard.
8He went out along the ditch to his field. The palms were there. He counted eleven.
9A woman was cutting green fodder at the field's edge, bent double, with a boy of ten working beside her. She straightened to ease her back, and saw a ragged man standing in the road, and went white to the lips.
10That meeting will not be told here. Some things are not for telling. But when they could speak again, she told him how it stood.
11After Ubar's company was lost, his captain had come to her. This was a man named Awil-Adad, rich, with a house in the city and friends in the governor's hall. He said that the soldier was dead, and the field was a soldier's field, and must go to one who could serve for it. He gave it to his own sister's son. Tabni had a child of two and no brothers. She could leave, or she could stay and work the land for hire. She stayed. For eight years she had been a hired hand on her own ground, and so had the boy since he could carry a basket. They slept in the reed hut where Ubar used to keep the donkey.
12Ubar listened to this. He had been a slave for eight years, and he had learned in that time how not to move his face. "And the house?" he said.
13"The captain's nephew lives in the house."
14"Then I will go and speak to the captain."
15"He will have you beaten," said Tabni. "Or worse. Who is to say you are not a runaway slave? You look like one. You are one."
16He went. She was right. Awil-Adad heard him out in his gateway, picking his teeth. Then he said he had seen Ubar's body himself at the river crossing, and that this was some beggar who had heard the story. His servants threw the beggar into the street and broke two of his ribs doing it.
17Ubar lay in the reed hut for six days. His son brought him water and looked at him sidelong, as at a stranger, which he was. On the seventh day Tabni came in from the field and stood over him with her arms folded.
18"There is a stone," she said.
19He thought he had misheard.
20"In the court of the sun god's house. It came up the river last year on a barge, from the king. It is black, and taller than a man, and it is covered with writing from top to bottom. They say it is the king's judgments. All of them. What is owed for an ox that gores. What becomes of a wife if her husband is taken. They say anyone with a wrong may stand before it." She was twisting her hands. "I never went. I cannot read. And I was afraid of what it might say."
21"What can it say?" said Ubar bitterly. "It is the king's stone. Awil-Adad is the king's captain."
22"I do not know what it says," said Tabni. "That is what I am telling you. No one has told me. So let us go and find out."
23They went the next market day, the three of them. The court of the sun god's house was crowded. In the middle stood the stone.
24It was as she had said: black, shining, a tall finger of rock. At the top the king was carved, standing with his hand raised before the sun god on his throne. Below that, row on row, close as a weave, ran the signs. Ubar put his hand on it. It was cold even in the sun. He could not read a mark.
25Near the gate of that court sat the women scribes of Sippar, for that city had such women. They were daughters of good houses who lived apart and kept accounts and wrote letters for a fee. One of them was named Erishti, a small woman with ink on her fingers and a sharp tongue. Tabni went to her with the only thing of worth she owned, a copper pin.
26"I will not take your pin," Erishti said, when she had heard it. "Sit down, you are swaying. Do you think you are the first? I have read from that stone forty times this year. The king wrote on it that the wronged should have it read out to them. So. A soldier, taken in the king's service. Come."
27She walked along the stone, running her finger down the rows. She stopped partway down the front. Then she read aloud, in a clear hard voice, so that people nearby turned their heads.
28She read that if a soldier is taken captive while in the service of the king, and his field is given to another who does his duty, then when the soldier returns and reaches his city, his field and his garden shall be given back to him.
29Ubar stood without moving.
30"There is more," said Erishti. She read that if the soldier's son is too young to serve, a third of the field shall be given to the mother, and she shall bring him up. Tabni made a small sound. No one had given her a third. No one had told her there was a third.
31"And this," said Erishti. Her finger had moved on. She read that if an officer takes for himself what belongs to a soldier, or wrongs a soldier, or takes away the gift the king has given him, that officer shall be put to death.
32There was a ring of people about them by then. Somebody whistled softly.
33"It has stood there a year," Tabni said. Her voice shook. "It stood there a year saying that, and I walked past it."
34"Yes," said Erishti. "That is the trouble with a stone. It cannot call out. Someone must go to it." She looked Ubar up and down. "Now you need the judges, and that is harder. The stone does not bend. Judges do."
35The judges of Sippar sat in the gate of the temple. There were five. Ubar stood before them on his bad leg, and Erishti stood beside him, uninvited, and spoke the law. Awil-Adad came with his nephew and twelve friends. He said again that this was a beggar and a liar.
36But a city is not a hill farm. The gate guard had looked twice by now, and remembered. An old spearman of Ubar's company knew the scar on his thigh, for he had been beside him when he took it. The midwife who had delivered Iddin knew his voice. One after another they stood up. By the end of the morning the judges had no choice. They gave their judgment: the man was Ubar, the field was his, and it was to be handed back. A scribe wrote it on a tablet, and the five judges rolled their seals across it.
37The family slept that night in the reed hut for the last time, as they thought. Iddin asked his father how many palms there were. "Eleven," said Ubar. The boy nodded, as if a test had been passed.
38In the morning a messenger came. They were to appear again before the judges.
39The chief of the five was a man named Sin-nasir. He did not meet Ubar's eyes. He said that new witness had been heard in the night. He said the matter of who this man was could not after all be decided. He said the judgment was withdrawn, and the field would stay as it was until the governor returned, which might be in a year.
40Awil-Adad stood with his arms folded and looked at nothing. He had the look of a man who has paid for something and received it.
41Ubar felt the old stillness come down over his face. So, he thought. It is the millstone again. It was always going to be. He took Tabni's arm to lead her away.
42"One moment," said Erishti.
43She had not sat down. "The judgment was written," she said. "It was sealed. I saw five seals go on it. Is that so?"
44"The court has spoken, woman," said Sin-nasir.
45"The court spoke yesterday," said Erishti. "I want to know what the stone says about a court that speaks twice." And she turned her back on five judges and walked across the yard to the black stone. The crowd went with her like water following a ditch.
46She did not have to search. It was near the very beginning, the fifth judgment of the king. She read it at the top of her voice. If a judge has heard a case, and given a decision, and set it down under seal, and afterward changes his judgment, then he shall be called to account for it. He shall pay twelve times the sum at stake in that case. And he shall be driven from the judge's seat before the people, and he shall never sit in judgment again.
47For a moment there was no sound in the court but the pigeons.
48Then someone laughed, a short ugly laugh. Then a potter at the back shouted, "Read it again!" She read it again. People were pushing in from the street. Most of them could not read a sign. They did not need to. They had heard, and there were three hundred of them, and each could say to the next one, I was there, the stone says so.
49Sin-nasir had gone the colour of tallow. He looked for the other four judges. They had moved their stools a little way off from his.
50It was the eldest of the four who spoke. He said that yesterday's tablet stood. He said that the matter of the chief judge would go down to Babylon, with the matter of the captain. And he said it loudly, looking at the crowd and at the stone, like a man who feels eyes on his back.
51So Ubar had his field. He walked the ditch that evening with his son, slowly, because of the leg and the ribs. The captain's nephew had let two of the palms go sick. It could be mended.
52What became of Awil-Adad in Babylon, Ubar never learned and did not ask. The stone said death. Ubar had seen enough of death to be in no hurry for more.
53Now hear the truth about that stone, for you should not think it better than it was.
54It was a hard law. It said an eye for an eye, when a lord put out the eye of a lord. But for the eye of a poor man it asked only silver, and for the eye of a slave, less. It let a son be punished for a father's fault. There were things cut on it that would make you turn away. The king who set it up was a conqueror, and he praised himself on it at great length.
55But at the head of it, among his boasts, he had written why he was made king: "that the strong should not harm the weak." And at the foot of it he told any wronged person to come and stand before the stone and have it read, and understand his case, and set his heart at ease.
56He meant it or he did not. It no longer matters. He cut it where anyone could go. From that day a judge in Sippar gave his rulings in the knowledge that a small woman with ink on her fingers might walk across the yard.
57Hammurabi died an old man. His sons held Babylon a while, and then they lost it. Long after, a king from the east sacked the cities of the plain and carried the black stone home to his own city as plunder. It lay under the earth there for three thousand years. Men dug it up. It is standing in a great hall now, in a far country, and people who were never his subjects stop in front of it and read.
58Ubar and Tabni knew none of that. They brought in the barley that year. And on a day after harvest, Tabni took her son by the hand and walked him to the house of Erishti. She laid down the copper pin, and this time she would not take it back.
59"Teach him," she said. "I walked past it for a year. He will not."