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the horns resembled those of a species of ram found in the mountain
regions, whose present-day inhabitants wore pointed slippers. So perhaps the
figure had been made there:
no one knew.
". . . It wasn't the actual film at all, just the video projected onto a big
screen, so we saw the clamshell version with its sides trimmed off." Trent was
talking about a kid's movie that had been shown as part of an exhibit. It was
raining on the ride back, and Leslie was concentrating on the road.
"So what were these creatures like?" she asked dutifully. She was
trying to get onto the Whitestone
Bridge, but the lane for the turnoff was stalled as a stream of cars, most
bearing American flags, passed on the left to cut in just before the exit.
"They were mammals, I guess: furry, with serene expressions. You
couldn't tell from the dubbing whether totoro was a made-up word or the
Japanese term for a forest spirit."
"Like Huwawa?" Trent was always gratified when she remembered an earlier
subject of interest to him.
"Hey, maybe. Huwawa fought back, but then the totoro were never attacked. They
did have enormous teeth."
Leslie wanted to ponder the nature of wheeled vessels, but consented to
discuss Gilgamesh and Enkidu's journey to the Cedar Forest to slay its
guardian. The strange passage held more interest than
Zig-gurat's political macaronics, and spoke (in some way) of the distances
Sumerians had to travel to get wood for
their roof beams and chariots.
"Huwawa was supposed to be evil," Trent mused. "An odd quality for a forest
guardian."
"It was Gilgamesh who called him that," Leslie pointed out. "It seemed pretty
plain that he wanted to kill him for the glory. You will recall that Enkidu,
closer to nature, hated the whole idea."
"A
totoro wouldn't kill anyone for the glory," Megan observed from the
backseat. "They don't need glory."
Her parents exchanged glances. "Good girl," said Trent. "More people should
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think that way."
After dinner Trent showed Megan a game board on his computer.
"Archeologists called it 'the Royal
Game of Ur,' because the first boards were found in the Ur royal cemetery. But
other versions were found elsewhere, even drawn on paving-stones, so it wasn't
just for kings."
Megan studied the irregularly shaped board, which comprised a rectangle made
of twelve squares and another made of six, joined by a bridge two squares
long. Each square was brilliantly colored with one of several complex designs.
"How do you play?" she asked.
"Nobody really knows. Some rules were discovered for a much later
version, and it seems that each player threw dice to move tokens around
the board. The two players each move in opposite directions, and can land on
each other's tokens and bump them off, especially along the narrow stretch
here."
Megan reached out and traced her finger down the board's side. "Can we play it
online?"
Trent shook his head. "Sorry, this is just an image of the original board. It
wouldn't surprise me if there was a website somewhere to play it, though."
"Maybe the designers should add that feature to
Ziggurat,"
he said later to Leslie.
"They know their audience better than you do," she replied. "You know what
they would say? 'There's no place here for a game.'"
Trent laughed. "True enough. I like the narrow defile, though. It compels the
player to move his tokens along the equivalent of a mountain trail."
"No mountain trails in Sumer. Were you hoping to give players a
pleasant suggestion of the Khyber
Pass?"
That night Leslie opened a file on her laptop and began to organize her notes
on Sumer into something that could provide the outline of a novel. War had to
be the theme of at least one book, Trent had said, and present in the
background for the other two. Leslie decided to think about agriculture and
water rights, a likelier cause for conflict than the poems suggest. Even a
prosperous landowner would have no reason to read, but Leslie suspected
that a middle-class audience would have problems with an illiterate
protagonist, so she invented a younger son who was intended to become a
scribe. Worldly doings would dominate the action, but it was the kid
sister who would prove the novel's secret protagonist, and not merely
for Leslie.
Women always constitute more of these books' audience than the men
realize, Trent had told her. You craft the book to please them, like the baby
food that is flavored for the mother's palate.
She sketched out some paragraphs about a girl who helped her younger brother
prepare practice tablets for school, while the older brother learned the
family business with their father. Nobody knew how the clay tablets were made,
though she could make some obvious guesses. Nobody knew the location of
Agade, Sargon's magnificent capital. Leslie was tempted to set the novel
there, though of course she realized she should use sites that readers would
find in
Ziggurat.
In fact. . . Leslie padded into the office, where the flexing
trape-zoids of Trent's screensaver moved silently across their bit of
darkness. Trent used her own machine's better speakers to play music, so
had left the
Ziggurat
CD in his drive, its icon present (she saw after tapping the side of the
mouse) on the task bar at the bottom of his screen. She twirled the volume
knob, then brought the cursor gliding down to click on the tiny pyramid. As
the game instantly resumed, she brought the volume up to the lowest audible
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level, and the clashing sounds of battle faintly reached her.
Leslie clicked rapidly backward, undoing whatever war Trent had
gotten himself involved in, then paused in the silence to examine the
lists of artifact images. Might as well use implements actually pictured in
the game, if you're going to write a tie-in. But the subdirectories showed
few agricultural or domestic tools (the designers favoring scenes of
splendor or warfare), and she found herself studying the gorgeous works of
art, museum photographs had the producer cleared the rights for
these? of enormous-eyed statuettes; gold jewelry of exquisite workmanship;
goddesses carved of alabaster and serpentine, the later ones of Attic
accomplishment, the earlier ones deeply strange.
What kind of culture could carve these stone figures, hands clasped [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]