1Two lifetimes after Ugarit burned, the hunger had not lifted from the land between the rivers. Babylon still stood, but it stood like an old man in a wind. Raiders from the western desert rode up to its very walls. Some years they cut the roads so close that the great feast of the new year could not be held, and the gods stayed shut in their houses.
2In that city lived a scribe named Kidin. He was seventy, and he had taught in the tablet-house of the temple since he was a young man. Now the temple could not feed its teachers. The boys had stopped coming. He sat in an empty court among ten thousand tablets.
3He had a son, who was a scribe too, and went out with a grain convoy one autumn and did not come back. The son left a daughter named Amata, ten years old, with a stubborn chin. She and the old man had each other and no one else.
4That winter the raiders burned a town two days upriver. Kidin went to look at what was left of its tablet-house. The roof had come down and the rain had come in, and the unbaked tablets on the shelves had turned back into mud. He put his hand into it. A thousand years of copying ran through his fingers like porridge.
5He went home and did not speak for a day. Then he began to pack.
6He chose forty tablets. He could not carry more, and it was like choosing among his own fingers. He took the tale of Gilgamesh, in the eleven tablets of the newest telling. He took the lists of the stars and their risings. He took the tables for reckoning, and a copy of the old king's laws, and the songs of a priestess of Ur that every schoolboy had copied for longer than anyone could remember. He wrapped each in wool and laid them in two baskets.
7"Where are we taking them?" said Amata.
8"Up," said Kidin. "Where the river cannot reach and the raiders do not go."
9There was a horse-trader in the city that season, come down from the mountains of the east with a string of the small tough horses that the kings prized. He was going home before the passes closed. His people lived on the high country beyond the mountains, and had come into it from the north, some generations back, with their herds. His name was Frada, and he was perhaps twenty.
10Kidin offered him silver to take an old man, a child and a mule. Frada looked at the old man's chest, which rattled, and at the mule's baskets.
11"What is in them?"
12"Words," said Kidin.
13Frada lifted a wrapping and looked at the clay, the rows of tiny wedges. He did not seem impressed. "My people have words," he said. "We do not need a mule to carry them." But he took the silver. He was honest about it. He said that the old man would likely die in the pass and that he would not give the silver back if so.
14"That is fair," said Kidin.
15Amata carried one thing herself. It was a small pot with a lid, on a cord round her neck, and in it under ash was a coal from the lamp of the tablet-house. Her grandfather had told her that the lamp had not been dark in his time or his master's. She did not see why it should start now, only because they were leaving.
16They went out by the east gate in the grey of a morning. They crossed the plain in six days, keeping away from smoke. Then the ground began to climb.
17Amata had never seen a hill. Now there were mountains piled on mountains, blue and then white. The road was a ledge cut by goats. The air got thin and hard. Each morning there was ice on the water skins, and each morning her grandfather took longer to stand.
18Frada rode ahead and sang. It was not like any singing she knew. It had no drum under it. The lines came out even and strong, one after another, in his own tongue, for an hour at a time, and he never once stopped to search for a word.
19On a night when they were camped below the pass, Kidin asked him what it was.
20"A praise," said Frada. "To the fire, and to the one who made the horse swift. My father taught it to me, and his father taught him. It is very old."
21"How long is it?"
22"That one? As long as from the evening star to moonrise."
23"And you have it all? Every word? What if you change one?"
24Frada looked at him as if he had asked what would happen if a man forgot to breathe. "It is not changed. A boy learns it from the time he can sit a horse. He says it to his father each day, and if he puts one word in the wrong place he says the whole of it again. I have nine such praises. My uncle has thirty. He will die without having lost a word, and his sons have them already."
25Kidin was silent. He had spent sixty years believing that what is not written is as good as lost. "A mouth can die," he said at last. "A plague, a raid. One winter, and every mouth that held it is shut."
26"A pot can break," said Frada. He nodded toward the baskets. "And who in my country could read your pots if they did not? You carry forty of them over the mountains to people who would use them to weight a tent. A word in clay is a dead word, grandfather. It lies there. A word in the mouth is alive."
27"A dead word can wait," said Kidin. "I have read things written by people a thousand years gone. Can your uncle do that?"
28"My uncle is that," said Frada.
29They looked at one another across the fire, the old man and the young one. Neither gave way. But each of them lay awake a while afterward. Amata, between them, kept her hand on her pot and thought that both of them were right, and that this was a nuisance.
30They went up into the pass the next day, and the snow came early.
31It came sideways, on a wind that screamed in the rocks. In an hour the ledge was white and the drop beside it was white and no one could tell one from the other. Frada roped them together. He walked in front, feeling for the edge with a spear butt.
32It was the second mule that fell. A stone turned under its hind foot. It scrabbled, and for a breath it hung there with its eyes rolling. Kidin had its halter rope wound round his wrist. He was an old man with a bad chest and he did not let go.
33"Cut it!" Frada was shouting. "Cut it, he will go with it!"
34Amata had no knife. She did what she had. She threw herself on her grandfather's legs and held on. Frada came back along the rope and his blade flashed once. The halter parted. The mule went down into the white without a sound, with both baskets on its back, and they heard it strike a long time after.
35Kidin lay on the ledge with his face in the snow. He was not hurt. He would not get up.
36"Forty," he said. "I chose forty out of ten thousand. I carried them forty days."
37Frada stood over him. Then he did a thing Amata had not expected. He knelt down in the snow and put his arm under the old man's shoulders. "Grandfather," he said, "I said hard things at the fire. I am sorry for your pots. But if you lie here, the child will stay with you, and I will have three dead instead of one mule. Get up. Grieve on the other side."
38Kidin got up. They crossed the pass at dusk.
39Below them lay the high country. Amata had not known the earth could be so wide. It was a plain the colour of a lion, running out to the edge of the sky, with far mountains on every side like the rim of a bowl. There were no cities. There were herds, and here and there a thread of smoke going straight up.
40Frada's people were camped in a valley with a stream in it. They had tents and many horses, and in the middle of the camp, in a ring of stones, a fire. His mother kept it. It was never let die, Frada said. When the camp moved, the fire went first, in a bronze bowl. No one put anything unclean into it. They did not think it was a god. They thought it was the truest thing they knew.
41The old scribe was put to bed in Frada's mother's house. The pass had finished what seventy years had begun. He could not breathe lying down. He knew what it meant, and so did the women, and so, after a day or two, did Amata.
42She was angry with him. She sat by his bed with her chin out. "You brought me here to save the tablets," she said. "And they are at the bottom of a mountain. And now you are going to leave me with people who cannot read, in a place with no walls. It was for nothing. All of it."
43Kidin was a long time finding the breath. "Say me the stars," he said.
44"What?"
45"The risings. From the first month."
46She was too surprised to refuse. She said them. He had drilled her on them since she was five; she could not have forgotten them if she had tried. The star of the plough. The twins. The lion. She went through the year without a fault.
47"Now the table of nines."
48She said it.
49"Now the tale. Where the snake takes the plant."
50She said that too. She had heard it a hundred times, and copied it twice. Halfway through, she saw what he was doing and stopped, with her eyes full.
51"I was a fool on the mountain," Kidin said. "I lay down in the snow for forty pots. And all the while the best copy was sitting on my legs, shouting at me." He closed his eyes, and opened them again. "I am not sorry about the clay, child. Clay is a good servant. It waits when there is no one. Make it again when you can, wherever there is mud. But the boy was right as well. A word has to live in someone, or it is only a scratch."
52That evening Frada's uncle came to the house, the one who held thirty praises. He was a lean grey man. Frada had told him that this was a singer of the plain who had lost his songs in the pass.
53"I hear you have a long one," the uncle said, through Frada. "About a king who went looking for a way not to die."
54"It is long," said Kidin.
55"I have room."
56So for six nights the old scribe told the tale of Gilgamesh, a piece at a time, between coughs. Amata took it up when his breath failed. Frada turned it into the tongue of the high country, and the uncle sat with his eyes shut and his lips moving. On the seventh night he said the whole of it back to them, from the wall of Uruk to the wall of Uruk. He had not dropped a word.
57"It is a true song," the uncle said. "He looks for a thing that is not to be had, and comes home, and sees what he has. I will give it to my sons."
58Kidin died two nights later, toward morning, with his hand in the child's. He was awake at the end. He said one thing. He said, "Light the lamp."
59There was no lamp. Amata understood him anyway. She took the pot from her neck and lifted the lid. The coal from the tablet-house was a dull red eye in the ash. She had fed it every night for forty-seven days, through the plain and the pass and the snow.
60She carried it out to the ring of stones. Frada's mother was there, as she always was. Amata had no words of that tongue yet. She held out the pot.
61The woman looked in. She looked at the child's face, swollen with crying, and at the house behind her where the women had begun to keen. She did not ask whether it was a clean fire. She knew what a carried coal was. Every people on the earth knew that.
62She took two green sticks and lifted the coal and laid it in the heart of her own fire. It lay there dark for a breath. Then it caught, and it could not be told apart from the rest.
63They gave the old man to the hillside in the manner of that people. Amata stayed. She learned the tongue. Frada's uncle found that she held a song at one hearing, and he taught her, though she was a girl and a stranger, because it was a waste not to.
64And in the spring, by the stream, she dug clay. She made a flat tablet the size of her palm, and cut a reed, and pressed into it the first line of the tale. Frada's small cousins crowded round to see. She showed them which mark was which sound. They laughed at it. Then one of them asked for the reed.
65So the fire of the river cities went up onto the high country and burned in a ring of stones among a people of horses. They did not write for a long time yet. But they sang what was true, word for word, father to son and mother to daughter, and they had a great hatred of the crooked word, the word that says the thing that is not.
66Among that people, in a later day, a child would be born who would stand before that same fire and ask a question no one in the river cities had thought to ask.
67But that is another book.