Blood Song

1

Spirals.

Spirals of color and light.

And filtering through those spirals, like snatches of birdsong through a shimmer of leaves—music.

Stray notes, half heard, already fading, notes belonging to no melody of this world, no song ever sung before.

Her song. She was the singer.

She understood this, but nothing more. Not what she had sung or why or even who she was.

The spirals receded, water flowing down a drain, carrying away the last of the music, leaving her in silence except for a slow, steady, monotonous thudding which had to be her heart. Silence and darkness, alone.

No. Not alone.

In a corner, on a terra-cotta stool, sat a little gray-bearded man in a gray robe, hunched like a vulture, his scrawny arms wrapping his knees, his long bony fingers interlaced. Near him stood a brazier on a tripod. The glow of coals caught his face from below, teasing out deep grooves at the corners of his eyes.

He did not move, merely regarded her with a scowl while muttering to himself. His face was a study in perplexity.

Female. Wasn’t expecting that. But possibly an advantage. No one will look at her twice. If she’s up to it. But she must be. If Naqia could rule in Esarhaddon’s stead, this one, too, can serve.

With an unsteady arm she lifted herself off the reed mat where she lay.

You stir, he said in a louder voice. Good.

It was not her language he spoke, and yet it was. His words reached her ears as only so many guttural rasps, but in her mind they became clear. This didn’t make sense, but then, nothing did.

Slowly her eyes adjusted to the dim light. The room was small, hot, and windowless, with whitewashed walls and a floor of packed earth. Grotesque figurines, half-human and half-animal, leered down from recesses in the corners.

Where am I? Her voice was throaty, unfamiliar. She spoke his language as naturally as if she had been born to it.

Questions come later. First gather your strength. You are an unbaked vessel. You may shatter if handled roughly.

A sick feeling of vertigo shivered through her. She nearly swooned.

You see? he added. You are not fully arrived.

Arrived? What could that mean?

The spirals, the fractured music …

She looked down at herself. She was wrapped in a shapeless wool robe belted at her waist by a knotted cord. Her bare legs stuck out. Short legs. Small feet.

She flexed her left hand. Small fingers. Unpainted nails. Below the knuckles, a tattooed design she couldn’t make out.

She didn’t like tattoos. She remembered—

A tattoo parlor in Venice Beach. Her friend Ginnie insisting they needed matching ink. She went along at first, but at the first prick of the needle she rebelled. She let Ginnie get her art, a butterfly on her ankle, but she herself only watched, while Ginnie made cluck-cluck noises …

That had happened. But not to the person she was now.

This body she was in—it wasn’t hers.

A gasp of panic escaped her. Swiftly the little gray man crossed the room and knelt by her. He placed a hand on her shoulder.

Calm, calm.

It’s not real. This isn’t real …

Calm yourself.

I’m not—this isn’t—I’m in the wrong place.

All your questions will be answered.

It’s not my world!

It is not, child. It is mine.

And this body—it doesn’t belong to me. Look at my hand. I don’t have ink like this. And I’m supposed to be taller. And my hair—she ran a hand through it—it shouldn’t be so long. She didn’t think her complexion was quite so dark either, but she didn’t mention that detail, because it sounded a little racist.

You need not trouble yourself about it. The form you presently inhabit will serve for the time being.

The form I inhabit? You mean this is someone else’s body?

Not at all. You are no unsanctified ghost doomed to lick the scrapings from pots in the streets. You live and breathe, as I do.

Then where’d this body come from?

It is newly made. This clay has been fashioned solely for your spirit to inhabit.

You made a body for me?

I made nothing. It was the handiwork of the gods.

Did they have to make me so short?

He arched an eyebrow. You are not unduly so. You look to be about five spans high. Seeing her quizzical expression, he held his hands less than a foot apart. Behold one span.

So I’m, like, four foot something. Hobbit-sized.

Your body is unimportant. I summoned only your spirit, not your flesh, to this place and time.

What place? What time?

You find yourself in the month of Ab, in the year of Gir-sapunu during the reign of Sin-shar-ishkun. Do you understand?

"Of course not. I don’t understand anything. All I know is, I shouldn’t be here. I should be—"

In her apartment. A studio in North Hollywood. If she stood at the window and craned her neck just right, she could glimpse a slice of the Hollywood Hills.

She was a long way from North Hollywood now.

Her heart was running like a rabbit in her chest. And that slow, steady thudding she’d heard from the beginning—it was not her heart, but something from outside. A heavy booming sound, regular as a metronome, muffled by distance.

You, er, you are not feeling faint again, I hope?

She refocused on this room and this man. No, she said firmly. I’m all right. I just need some of those answers you promised me.

Ask your questions.

First off, who are you?

Shamash-iddin.

Somehow she knew this meant Shamash has given. "Okay, that’s a start. But what I mean is, just who the hell are you? What’s your deal?"

"I am a kassapu, and I serve Shamash, the lady Ishtar, and the other good gods."

A kassapu. A sorcerer, but not one of the priesthood. She knew that. She was thinking in English and somehow automatically translating his foreign speech. Like reading subtitles in a movie, but super-fast.

You’re saying you’re a magician?

I am a metaphysician by trade. He spoke with an unmistakable note of pride. I am versed in the secret ways of magic.

"Oh, hell. I really am a hobbit. And you’re Gandalf. He blinked, mystified. So you cast a spell and brought me here, just like that? Easy as ordering out for pizza?"

No, it was not easy. The spell is one I discovered years ago in a long-forgotten text. He raised himself from his knees, wincing with effort, and recrossed the room to a table. He picked up a small, square object. This text.

He displayed it in the light of the brazier. A slab of baked clay impressed with rows of jagged wedges.

It is a book of secrets. Secrets that date back thousands of years. It is very rare, and only with the help of the goddess herself was I able to obtain it. Never, until now, had I dared make use of it. I purged myself, I fasted and prayed, I waited for a propitious day and hour. Then I performed the ritual.

And—poof—I popped into the room?

He nodded.

Sure. Things popped in and out of existence all the time. Nothing crazy about that.

How about my clothes? Did I show up naked? It was stupid, but she didn’t like the idea of him pawing her nude body, even if it wasn’t exactly her body.

You appeared as you are now. Wearing that robe.

You didn’t expect me to be a girl, did you?

Well … no. But it is no matter.

Is there a mirror I can use?

I have no use for a looking glass. I know my own face.

But she didn’t know hers. She touched her face and felt an unfamiliar shape, the cheekbones too high, the chin too angular.

If you are concerned about your appearance, I would say you are comely enough, though your hair wants cutting. But I have never been a judge of such things. My Ninlilhatsina was said to be no beauty, but she was lovely enough to me.

She sat up, tucking her legs under her. Air trickled in through a row of rectangular embrasures high in one wall. Hot air. Desert heat.

Las Vegas. She’d gone there often, sometimes with Ginnie, sometimes with Lydia and Imelda, and twice with a man …

His voice broke into the memory. How old are you in your world?

Around thirty, I think.

Your present body is younger. I would judge you to have attained fifteen years.

I’m just a kid?

Hardly that. You are old enough to take a husband. No doubt in your other life you are married?

"I … don’t think so."

Then you have consecrated yourself to some god.

I doubt it.

Well, perhaps you are simply too unappealing to catch a man.

She bridled at this insult to her other self. Maybe I haven’t met a man appealing enough to catch me. One of the booms from outside thudded louder, shaking the room. A basket fell from a table. What’s going on out there?

He hesitated. It is not important.

You said you’d answer my questions.

His frown deepened. She guessed that people—women, at least—didn’t talk to him that way.

Very well. He resettled himself on the stool, gathering his robe around him. It was a one-piece garment tied at the waist, over a sand-colored tunic. His feet were shod in open-toed sandals with leather thongs. You are in our capital city, the ruling city of the world. But not, I fear, for much longer.

What city?

"The home of the palace without rival. The renowned Ninua."

Ninua, he’d said, but her mind, automatically translating, received it as …

Nineveh.

A name out of the Bible. A name she knew, though she wasn’t sure how.

Assyria, right? That was the question in her mind, but the words came out, The land of Ashur?

Indeed. Shamash-iddin, pleased by the recognition, showed his first smile. Our king is Sin-shar-ishkun, son of Ashurbanipal, son of Esarhaddon, son of Sennacherib, son of Sargon the Later, son of … no one in particular, for Sargon was a usurper not of royal blood.

Her head spun, not with musical spirals this time, but with a data dump of names and facts that were just familiar enough to be dismaying.

She knew little about the Assyrians, except that they had flourished before Rome and Greece, and had been notorious for cruelty. Her mind ran through half-remembered historical timelines and zeroed in on the first millennium BC. Assyria had fallen roughly six hundred years before what was now called the Common Era.

Damn, she must be a whiz at trivia games.

That was a long time ago, she said. Thousands of years.

"I hardly think that long, child. But indeed, you have come a great distance to be here."

I don’t remember getting an invitation.

The request was for the singer of the song. I did not know who it would be, or when or where the song would be given voice. I knew only that in the very instant when the last notes were sung, the singer would come to me.

The last notes. Fragments of music. A hole in the world. It had opened up, and she had plunged down, down …

What was the song I sang? she whispered. She tensed, afraid of the answer.

Shamash-iddin almost spoke, and then there was another boom, this one loud, startling, and close—the thump of a fist on a door.

His eyes narrowed. He stood. She thought she saw a shadow of fear flit across his face.

It cannot be, he breathed.

What can’t?

It is he. He has come.

Who?

He looked at her, and now it was unmistakable—blind terror in his gaze.

The king of all spiders, he said. The father of all lies.

2

That didn’t sound so good.

He has come, Shamash-iddin repeated. But it is not possible. He cannot know. Even with all his powers …

I’m guessing whoever’s at the door isn’t welcome.

It is Urad-Gula.

How do you know?

I see with my inner eye.

You mean, like, ESP?

This term means nothing to me. I possess the power of second sight.

Cool. What number am I thinking of?

Hush, child.

A second thump resonated through the house.

Quickly, he said. Into the courtyard.

He hurried out of the room, the tassels of his robe swishing about his ankles. Together they went down a narrow hallway, scaring a housecat into flight, then into another room, which opened on the courtyard in question.

Not much of a courtyard—a small square of beaten earth sloping to a central drainage hole, hemmed in by brick walls. A tree bearing a few sickly figs drooped in a corner. Along all four sides, doorways shaded by a leafy awning opened on the interior of the house.

She looked up. For the first time she saw the sky in her new world. It was slightly disappointing, nothing magical such as she might expect to find in Wonderland or Oz, just an ordinary twilight sky. The sun’s last rays were retreating, a dark blue blanket of night creeping in.

Outside it was even hotter, the superheated air pressing in on her with suffocating closeness. She could hear the sounds of the neighborhood—barking dogs, snatches of drunken song, strange shouts, wild laughter. And, louder than before, those rhythmic booms, too regular to be thunder.

Wait here, Shamash-iddin said. Stand with Zarpi by the stove.

He pointed to a little old woman, lost among the gathering shadows in a corner of the courtyard. She tended a crude stove made of two heaps of bricks, set wide apart at the bottom where fire burned, narrowing to a slit at the top where a sealed clay vessel and a tin pot cooked.

"Keep your head down and stir the pot. Be silent. Do nothing—nothing—to call attention to yourself."

You’re starting to scare me.

Do you understand? Shamash-iddin took hold of her chin. "Say nothing at all."

Mum’s the word.

He let her go and hurried out of the courtyard, muttering what sounded like a prayer.

She joined Zarpi, who had watched all this without the least sign of comprehension. Her only activity was to sniff the clay vessel occasionally, judging the doneness of whatever was inside. Wineskins, water jars, and cooking pots hung from the awning above the stove, along with a clay god who blessed the meal.

Zarpi, she noted, bore a tattoo on her left hand, matching her own.

The heavy knock sounded once more. A moment later she heard Shamash-iddin’s wheezy voice from several rooms away.

"Urad-Gula. This is an unanticipated honor. Long life, abundance of strength,