Between the Rivers

Начало книги

Sharur was walking back toward his family’s shop and home on the Street of Smiths when a fever demon that had been basking on a broken mud brick soaking up heat sprang at him, its batlike wings glistening in the sun. He leaped back so it could not breathe sickness into his mouth and pulled out an amulet marked with the eyes of Engibil, patron god of the city of Gibil.

“Begone, foul thing!” he exclaimed, and made the left-hand gesture every child in the land of Kudurru learned by the age of three—every child, at any rate, that lived to the age of three. He thrust out the amulet as if it were a spear. “Greater powers than you protect me.”

Screeching in dismay, the nasty little demon fled. Sharur strode on, his back straight now with pride. He returned the amulet to its proper loop on his belt. The belt, which also bore a couple of other amulets, a bronze dagger, and a stylus, held up a knee-length linen kilt that was all he wore between stout leather sandals and a straw hat shaped like a short, broad cone. Slaves—and some freemen of a class poorer than Sharur’s—dispensed with shoes and sometimes with kilt as well. No one went without a hat, not in the land between the Yarmuk and the Diyala.

Читать дальше →