The journal was in my left hand. I hadn’t put it down the whole time. Couldn’t. Had to know. True or not.

Lorcan, whose “colouring” had evolved into gouging holes in the pages, got up and stormed out of the room.

“Go ahead,” Walker said. “I’ll keep an eye on these two. I’ll read it when you’re done.”

15

Long ago, long before Hattia and Assyria, before Sumeru, before the Pharaohs raised their big stones, palm shadows danced on the waters of Iteru under the eyes of the gods. These were the old gods, before Ra and Horus and Zeus and Hera, before young Yaweh and gentle Yeshua. Before An and Enlil, before Nin-khursag and Enkil, before even Taimat and Abzu, who were not the first. Before all these a travelling people stopped for a season by Iteru, thousands of years before it became the Nile. They built no stones, but lived in tents of skin and fur. Thin strong men and women. They loved the desert sky at night, where the gods wrote in stars that touched the earth’s face. They ate the meat of goat, cow and pig. They ate the date and the fig. They sacrificed to their gods.

The people were the Maru.

Edu was their king, and his wife was Liku, the queen. They had a three-year-old son, Imut.

In those days there were passages from the Middle world to the Upper and the Lower Realms. It was given to some among the Maru to open these passages. They opened them with songs and with the blood of the living and with the smoke and fire of burning. They were called, in their tongue, the Anum, the Guardians, and mightiest among them was Lehek-shi.

Lehek-shi was enamoured of Liku, the queen, and she of him. They became lovers. Lehek-shi made a drink of the bark of the aho tree and the berries of the nawar sweetened with dates and coconut milk, and in the evening Liku gave the drink to Edu, her husband, and made love to him. Then when he slept she stole from the tent and went through the darkness to meet Lehek-shi.

This went on for five moons, and the king never suspected. His wife worked with great care to give him pleasure and his sleep was deep. He confided to his closest friends that he was the luckiest of all the Maru, to know such wifely devotion and to sleep such untroubled sleep.

But Liku and Lehek-shi were not content. Stolen hours by the grace of drug and darkness were not enough. Their passion was rare and real and fiercer than the sacrificial fire, and its patience with secrecy was at an end. Therefore they resolved between the kisses of their mouths to kill Edu. After the period given for mourning, Liku would be free to choose a new husband—and naturally she would choose Lehek-shi.

But Lehek-shi was full of foreboding. He knew the ways of the Upper and Lower realms. When a Maru of pure heart died, the gods of the Upper realm sent down to earth one of their servants—the Kamu—to put its mouth upon the mouth of the corpse and breathe in the soul for its passage to the Upper realm. Released in the Upper realm the soul would tell its story—and the gods would take vengeance on the murderers.

“There is an another way,” Lehek-shi told Liku, with his arms wrapped around her in the darkness. “But it is a risk.”

“What other way?” Liku asked. Her hair was full of the scent of oranges.

“We can send his soul to the Lower realm. Amaz will take it. But Amaz is a hard god to bargain with.”

“If Amaz is a risk,” Liku said, climbing astride her lover, “the wrath of the Upper gods is a certainty.”

Lehek-shi entered her, and the decision was made.

Lehek-shi sacrificed and made a burning and inhaled the smoke of the branch that gave sight and sang the song that opened the way to the Lower realm and let his spirit go out to seek audience with Amaz.

The threshold of Amaz’s kingdom was guarded by three of his messengers, those dark opposites of the blessed Kamu, the Izul. Invisible in the Middle realm, in the Lower they were terrible to behold.

Lehek-shi was a diviner, one of the Anum, and had by birth the right to hold discourse with the beings of the other realms, but still, this was the kingdom of Amaz, and he was afraid.

One of the Izul carried his message to the demon god, and eventually Amaz himself came to the threshold.

“I will do as you ask,” Amaz said, after Lehek-shi had told him what he wanted. “In return for what issues from your first coupling with the queen after the king’s death. Understand me. If there is a child, its soul must come down to me. Thereafter I will hold our pact fulfilled.”

Lehek-shi vowed inside himself that there would be no child—even in those days there were the ways and means to make the chances of new life slight, and they had only to avoid conception once—and so he agreed to Amaz’s terms. (And even if there is a child, he thought, Liku will relinquish it if our happiness is at stake.) With the bargain sealed, therefore, Lehek-shi’s spirit took its leave of Amaz and returned to his body in the Middle realm.

The lovers had to wait. Even with the dark god’s bargain sealed Edu’s murder must have no earthly witnesses. So Liku began to beguile her husband.

“I never have you to myself,” she complained, sweetly. “Even at night there are guards outside the tent, listening to us.”

Edu was puzzled. “They are for our safety,” he said. “They are spears and shields. They aren’t listening to us! And what if they are? They are servants!”

But Liku persisted. “But don’t you understand that sometimes I want you simply, as a man, as my husband, just the two of us, alone under the stars?”

For a while Edu made light of it, but eventually Liku’s pleading prevailed, and he agreed to spend one night with her away from the camp, alone, man and woman, husband and wife, together under the stars.

“The soul has understanding,” Lehek-shi had warned Liku. “If it senses death near it will rush up into the head to be ready for the Kamu’s kiss. Therefore we must surprise the soul. You must keep the soul distracted.”

Liku kept the soul distracted. She even had thought for the approach of Lehek-shi’s shadow, and made Edu lie on his back with the low full moon in front of him so Lehek-shi, approaching with the long, sharpened flint stone from behind the king’s head, would make no change in the light.

Edu’s soul, at the moment of joy, knew nothing of what fell.

Lehek-shi struck hard and fast, and in three blows severed Edu’s head from his shoulders.

Amaz, the lord of the Lower realm, sent one of the Izul to claim the king’s soul. Not from the mouth, into which the soul in its ignorant bliss had had no chance to flee, but from the mouth between the buttocks, the speaker of filth. The soul had no choice. It could not remain in the body after death. It could not resist the indrawn breath of the Izul. The Izul swallowed it and carried it down to Amaz.