He would never forget the grand celebration of the funeral that heralded his own ascension to the throne. His father had died of unknown sickness when he was young. Neither the ashipu magic shaman nor the ashu medical doctor could cure him. He was anointed with oil and interred in the large vault on an elaborate bed-like pallet along with his beloved wife, who joined her husband in death.

The funeral procession had begun at the palace gates. A small band of musicians led the funerary lamentation playing lyres, lutes, and harps. The deathbed with its king and queen followed the musicians, surrounded by six personal guards. Behind them trailed twenty ladies-in-waiting and fifty other servants. The crowd of citizens lined the streets to catch a glimpse of their deceased grand ruler. Once the procession arrived at the temple, they were escorted by an entourage of priests out of the public eye and down into the secret recesses below the ziggurat.

They were led into the large crypt, where the priest-king was laid in his sarcophagus. Then the entire train of guards and palace servants filled the chamber, drank a poison, lay down and embraced their fate in union with their lord and master. They were to follow him into the afterlife where they would continue to serve him. The guards were fully clothed in armor and the servants in golden headdresses with necklaces of cornelian and lapis lazuli. A second vault next to them contained some gold and other riches along with two chariots and onagers, also killed with poison. The crypts were then sealed and their occupants left as the city mourned publicly. Considering how gloomy and hopeless the "land of no return" was, Lugalanu was grateful to still be a part of the land of the living.

He imagined how grand and glorious his own burial would be with Emzara poisoned beside him along with his own staff of attendants.

Lugalanu and Ham finally reached their destination, a large set of doors in the dead end of an una.s.suming pa.s.sageway. It was large enough to accommodate Nephilim.

Ham gulped with a mixture of excitement and fear.

Lugalanu turned to him and said, "You are about to enter the inner sanctum of the G.o.ds. Few humans will ever see what you are about to see. At no point are you to express anything other than wonder and awe. Should you be appalled or revolted by what you see, remember, you do not understand the wisdom of the G.o.ds. Their ways and their thoughts are as high above you as the heavens are above the earth. Is that understood?"

"Yes," said Ham. A shiver went down his spine. He wondered just what might cause him to be "appalled or revolted."

They entered the door and closed it behind them. They travelled through a hallway lined with seven cubit tall, recessed doorways. Lugalanu stopped at one of them and opened it. They stepped inside a long, narrow room, an infirmary sectioned off by rows of brick walls, creating small stalls for beds.

"This is the breeding room for the sacred women who bear the Nephilim for the G.o.ds," Lugalanu explained.

As they walked down the hallway of stalls, Ham saw beds full of very pregnant women, one to a stall, with accompanying holes for refuse. The women were restrained with leather straps or metal shackles, depending upon their level of risk. It seemed more like a prison than a breeding room.

Lugalanu answered Ham's unspoken question in a whispered tone, "These are the ones nearest to giving birth. At earlier stages of pregnancy they have much more freedom. But the final stage can be violently painful so they have to be restrained for their own good."

"What happens after birth?" Ham asked, innocently enough. He had known of women chosen for this holy high honor, but had never seen them again.

"Unfortunately, it kills them," said Lugalanu matter-of-factly. Lugalanu had always felt sorry for the women and their plight. He tried to comfort Ham with what he comforted himself often, "Death is just a doorway into higher service of the G.o.ds. In some ways, they are better off than us."

The women looked drugged, not as giddy and hopeful about their future as Lugalanu seemed to suggest. One of the women screamed in agonizing pain just as Ham and Lugalanu pa.s.sed her stall. She writhed desperately in the bed, straining against her bonds. A few midwives ran to her with a bucket and rags. Ham stared with fascination, wanting to see what happened, but Lugalanu pulled him away.

He escorted Ham back out into the hallway. The piercing scream of the woman giving birth rang in Ham's ears and echoed through the corridors.

The next doorway led them into another long hallway of stalls. These compartments did not hold pregnant women. Instead there were various versions of human-animal chimeras that Ham already knew well, seeing them around the palace and temple grounds. They too were chained to the walls with straw for beds and holes for excrement. These were new kinds he had not seen before and they appeared to be in varying stages of mutation or development. Some looked like they had body parts attached surgically, such as a human body with a pig's head in one stall and a huge pig's body with a human head in the next. Others appeared to be an essential fusion of kinds, such as a humanoid whose body was completely covered with hair and whose face looked as much like a wolf as it did a man. It lunged at Ham, snarling for his blood. Ham jumped back, but the chain jerked the wolf man back into its stall.

Other hybrid fusions looked more like developmental failures of miserable creatures with human bodies and malformed appendages or misshapen body structures. These were chimeras gone wrong. It was all a den of sorcery, an experimental chamber of breeding horrors.

Ham felt the urge to vomit rising in his throat. He remembered Lugalanu's words, and suppressed his reaction with a sense of awe and wonder-and morbid curiosity. He could see the practical use for the bird-men soldiers and other creatures like the pazuzu and the crossbred throne guardians. But these monstrous miscegenations suggested a deeper strategy at work in the minds of the G.o.ds. Just what, he did not know.

Lugalanu could see the wheels churning in Ham's mind. He said simply, "You will learn soon enough, and it will all become clear."

They exited the chamber of horrors and stopped at a final doorway. Lugalanu wanted the importance to sink into Ham's consciousness. "This is the holy of holies. The secrets of the Watchers reside here. The very knowledge of heaven." He opened the door.

Inside was a large vault of potions and vials, jars and vases, strange structures whose technology seemed far advanced from Ham's known world. Ham had been taught the rudiments of Mesopotamian science. He knew taxonomic categories of plants and animals, astronomical and astrological systems, and drugs for use with medicine and sorcery. But the things in this room were like nothing Ham had ever seen.

He looked upon the rudimentary forms of biological and genetic experimental science, mysteries beyond his education. Because the Sons of G.o.d were divine beings, they had occultic knowledge of which humans could only dream. But as earth bound creatures, they were limited to the resources at hand. Drugs and potions created a certain amount of magic, but they knew biological alteration was more fundamental than that. So they sought the manipulation of that basic nature through a primitive form of genetics.

Ham became fixated on a series of gla.s.s jars before him. He had heard of gla.s.s when it was first introduced to the economy, but he had not seen any of it until now. He stared, fascinated. But what the jars held was even more spell-binding. Ten jars contained fetuses of varying development and at varying stages of transformation from human to something shiny, slender, and reptilian like the G.o.ds.

"Are you impressed with my creations?" a voice said, behind Ham.

Ham started out of his trance-like stare. He turned to see the mighty Anu standing behind him. He dropped to the floor in worship. "Greatly, my lord and G.o.d, greatly," he gulped, his heart beating out of his chest.

Anu offered his hand to help him up. Ham did not know what to do. He had never touched the hand of a G.o.d.

Lugalanu whispered with humor, "Your G.o.d awaits."

"Please, stand," said Anu.

Ham took Anu's hand with fear and trembling, and stood before his G.o.d. The skin was cold, clammy and slightly scaly. But Anu was kind, gentle, and very patiently aware of Ham's virginal experience with deity. He smiled.

"You are to become an ensi high priest?"

"Eventually, almighty one. My next promotion is to sanga." Ham's voice cracked with trembling.

Anu smiled warmly. "Your patience and loyalty shall be rewarded soon enough. And I hope you will find your initiation satisfying and calming to your fears." His voice was so compa.s.sionate Ham felt as if he spoke telepathically to his heart and mind.

"It is my intent to be found worthy of such a holy honor," said Ham.

"Well then, welcome to the secrets of the Watchers," said Anu.

"My Lord, if I may," began Ham.

Lugalanu had watched the exchange carefully. He could spot Emzara's feisty inquisitiveness in her son starting to show itself.

"How can I begin to understand such wonderful sorceries?"

Anu welcomed the curiosity. "That is where faith comes in. What were you taught in school about the creation of the heavens and the earth?"

Ham recited from memory the rote words he had learned from the temple scribes about Inanna's Tale of the Huluppu Tree and the Eridu Genesis, "The sky G.o.d, Anu, carried off the heavens, and the air G.o.d, Enlil, carried off the earth. The Queen of the Great Below, Ereshkigal, was given the underworld for her domain. And Anu, Enlil, Enki, and Ninhursag fashioned the darkheaded people of Sumer."

"Well done," smiled Anu. "And now I will tell you the truth. That creation story is a lie."

Ham's stomach dropped. What could he be saying? The Most High G.o.d and the Lord of the Air, did not separate the heavens from the earth?

"What you have been taught is a myth that is intended to protect humankind from what they could not understand. There are some truths that are so sacred only the most wise and most loyal are to be entrusted with them."

Ham swallowed. Lugalanu saw him sweating. He had cultivated this young man with great care. He had confidence that Ham would rise to the honor of this high calling.

Anu continued, "What do you know of the deity called Elohim?"

"A distant G.o.d of a lost Garden in Eden?" It was all he could muster, as if it was all he knew. But it was not all he knew.

Emzara had actually taught him much about Elohim, for she worshipped him in secret. She had constantly admonished Ham to worship him as well whenever they had their clandestine meetings. It was all rather distasteful to him. She spoke of Elohim creating the heavens and the earth; and of Adam of the earth and Havah his wife, the mother of all the living; of how they were images of Elohim on earth much like the statues of Anu and Inanna in the temple were images of the deities. She spoke of the Serpent, Nachash, the Shining One, a Watcher himself, who drew them away from Elohim in disobedience and how Elohim expelled them from the Garden, away from his presence. She had told him how Elohim revealed that a Chosen Seed would come who would end the rule of the G.o.ds and bring judgment upon the G.o.ds, and rest to the land. And that a king would come from his lineage that would ultimately destroy the seed of the Serpent.

It seemed like conspiratorial myth to Ham. Worse, it was treason to the G.o.ds. It was the one thing Ham worried deeply about regarding his dear mother. He wondered what inspired her to be so fanatically devoted to such delusionary rambling. What made her satisfied with slavery and poverty over the rich pleasures and glories of the Kingdom of Anu? And her commitment to a dead man who, she kept reminding Ham in secret, was his real father. The only father that Ham knew was his adopted father Lugalanu, who loved him and took care of him. That man was his father, and that man stood with Ham right now in the presence of deity, supporting his rite of pa.s.sage into the secrets of the G.o.ds.

Anu brought Ham out of his thoughts. "Elohim is the true creator of heaven and earth."

The words jolted Ham out of the blue. He did not see it coming. Was Anu telling him right now that his mother was right? How could that possibly be? His entire view of the world was just turned inside out.

"But Elohim is an evil G.o.d," continued Anu. "He is a jealous and bitter old spirit." Anu paced around the room and launched upon a diatribe against the deity. "This so-called 'creator of heaven and earth' has hidden from mankind the secrets which you see before you this day. He has sought to keep humankind in bondage to ignorance, jealous of allowing them to become enlightened like himself. He has sought to keep everyone and everything separate. He separated light from dark, he separated heaven from earth, human from animal, male from female, man from G.o.d." Anu was histrionic in his delivery, but it served to underline his righteous indignation with such injustice.

"That is a rather selfish deity, would you not agree?" asked Anu.

"Yes, my lord," said Ham without thinking.

Anu stopped his pacing near the doorway. He sniffed the air. After a quizzical look, he returned to his pacing.

He had just missed discovering Neela, who hid on the other side of the open door. Anu had been close enough for her to reach around and touch him. She had managed to escape detection.

Anu concluded his tirade, explaining his plan. "But I bring new hope and change. I want to undo the separation, to erase the distinctions between creatures. I want to make all things into One." Anu bent down and looked into one of the jars of fetuses on the shelf. "By combining my seed with human seed, I will fundamentally transform humankind. I will create man in my image rather than in Elohim's image. I will give man his proper destiny. I will make man into a G.o.d."

All of Emzara's words came flooding into Ham's mind, causing doubts and fears. The prophecy of the Chosen Seed ending the rule of the G.o.ds and bringing the judgment of Elohim down upon their heads.

Anu drew Ham's attention to the jars of fetuses. "The Nephilim are the offspring of our union with the daughters of men. But I have been working on another way of combining our flesh with human flesh, in a way that may not be so obvious as our giant progeny." Anu could not describe in detail the molecular genetics to which he was referring. Mankind's knowledge and technology were not advanced enough yet for Ham to understand this. He would have to simplify the language. "Our goal is to breed a Naphil that would look like a normal human being. It would not be a giant, it would have ten fingers and ten toes, but it would have the heart and soul of a Naphil. It would be a demiG.o.d. It would carry in its blood the ability to breed a race of Nephilim that would spread across the land."

"Are these demiG.o.ds among us?" asked Ham.

"Not yet," said Anu.

Ham cautiously ventured out, "And what of the Chosen Seed? Is the Revelation true? How can we fight it?"

For the first time in his sermon, Anu became visibly perturbed. It was not a secret that the Revelation was spreading about by word of mouth, first in the temple and palace and then within the city walls. It would soon be unavoidably known by every single soul.

"That is why the G.o.ds are seeking to create an alliance between all the cities," he answered, "to overcome our differences in a coalition of common purpose. Together, we will create an army of legions for war against the Seed of Havah."

Lugalanu saw these disclosures overwhelming Ham. He put his arm around him in support. "This is why we need leaders of your will to power," he said.

Anu continued, "If we cannot breed out this coming king, we will find the Chosen Seed by killing every last remnant of the nomadic tribes of humanity who do not worship the pantheon."

The seriousness of it all settled upon Ham.

Anu had moved near the door again. But this time, he spun like a coiled snake and reached around the doorway, pulling out a choking Neela by the neck.

"What is this eavesdropper slithering in the dark? A slender conspirator?!" shouted Anu, his voice booming with supernatural reverberation.

Neela stared mesmerized into Anu's penetrating cold blue eyes. He saw into her very soul. He sniffed her with relish and satisfaction, justified that he had caught her scent earlier. He released his grip around her neck.

Ham fell to his knees before Anu.

"My G.o.d, forgive me! She is my wife. I did not know she followed me."

Anu looked down on Ham, groveling at his feet.

"My G.o.d, she has not a conspiratorial bone in her body. She is recklessly curious. That is all. I beg of you, if you must punish, punish me instead."

This surprised Anu. Such love for such puny worth.

"Her curiosity brought her into your service many years ago. You honored her for it. Please remember your goodness in your name."

Anu tilted his head with interest. He had a vague recollection. He inhaled her scent deeply this time. A smile spread across his face. "The White Temple. I do remember. This is now the second time this little t.i.tmouse has managed to scurry her way under the eye of the cobra."

Neela quivered. Immediate death no longer hovered over her. But it did not matter. She was a disobedient child caught with her hand in the fig jar.

Anu slowly smiled, and his warm lightheartedness returned. Neela could feel it in her own body relaxing.

"A curious wife you have, my priest. She is a willing subject. She will serve us both well."

Ham breathed a sigh of relief. But then a chill went through him when Anu took yet another intoxicating inhale of her scent into his nostrils.

Chapter 22.

Noah and Uriel rode their horses at a canter into the Zagros Mountains about seventy leagues northeast of Erech. When they had escaped Sheol, the other archangels stayed behind to finish their task of binding the Rephaim. Uriel had explained to Noah that the archangels would get reinforcements and seek out the last of the human tribes in the West. A war was coming, a war of G.o.ds and men. The fallen Watchers had been planning it for a long while. They had seduced most of the people of the land into their sorceries and idolatries and were now determined to exterminate the rest. The only chance humanity had was for the angels to organize them to defend themselves. But getting the last of the human tribes to agree on anything was a nearly impossible project. Nevertheless, they had to try. It might take months to accomplish this goal, but other angels were sent out as well.

The one advantage of a war for the archangels was that if they could get all the Watchers together in an allied effort, it would enhance the angels' opportunity to bind the fallen into the heart of the earth as Elohim had commanded. Noah and Uriel discussed the possibilities of such an impossible task for a goodly portion of their trek through the plains and into the mountains. There were two hundred of the G.o.ds and they were not all mustered at Erech. Nevertheless, the most important leaders were and those were the priority for the archangels.

"Where is this Hidden Valley you keep speaking of?" Noah asked.

"If I told you, it would not be hidden," Uriel chortled.

Uriel had often reminisced about the old days when he, Methuselah, and Noah's mother and father had ended up in the Hidden Valley, hemmed in on all sides by natural formations making it virtually invisible to explorers. He would speak of their adventures being hunted by the cursed Cain's wolf tribe, and how they had triumphed over that man of wrath to live another day. There would be no lineage of demon dogs left in the Hidden Valley. He a.s.sured Noah they were all taken care of.

After days of riding, they sought one of the few secret pa.s.sageways into the valley.

Noah said, "Strange that we are so close to the cities of the plain, yet they are unaware. Right under their filthy noses."

"I am sure the entrance is near here, as far as my memory serves me," said Uriel.

A deep bellowing roar interrupted them. It shook the very trees around them to the roots. Noah gaped at Uriel. This was a beast very large and very near.

"Did I forget to tell you, this is the realm of Behemoth?" quipped Uriel. "Do not worry, he is much too big to get through the pa.s.s."

"Well, that is comforting," shot back Noah snidely. "Have you ever seen Behemoth?" he asked.

Uriel said, "He is like Leviathan, but on land."

"Well, I hope you are happy," said Noah. "You succeeded in ruining my day."

"It is not that bad," added Uriel. "Behemoth only has one head."

"Oh, that makes it all better," said Noah.