Free Twilight in Babylon by Suzanne Frank

building, and we crashed into each other.”
    “Is she ugly, since she’s a female?” the brat said.
    Nimrod shrugged. “She’s Khamite. Dark, like all the city women.” His gaze touched on the fair heads of Nirg and Lea. They were like flax and wheat. “Spoke like she was from somewhere north.”
    “She’s a refugee, a sheepherder. Ningal, out of the goodness of his aged heart, apparently has taken her in, Roo,” his father explained.
    Nimrod saw the look his mother gave his father. Everyone knew Ningal spent time with priestesses only. There were going to be a lot of unhappy widows, not to mention how his children were going to feel, if the leading justice of Ur took up with a young Khamite girl. A refugee, which was worse.
    It was so much simpler in the mountains, Nimrod thought. People meant what they said. If they didn’t like you, they killed you. If you didn’t like them, you killed them. Animals were honest. Mountain people were honest. Nimrod got tired sometimes, just trying to figure out which smiles were real and which were not.
    It was time to meet Kidu, the incoming
en
and Nimrod’s friend, for a friendly wrestling match and cool beers. He was straightforward, and a good companion. An honest mountain man.
    The girl was like that, today. Honest. No, she couldn’t be from the city.
    “She was trying to see you,” he told his father.
    “Why, so she could throw up on something else?”
    The brat snickered. Nimrod elbowed him. The little urchin squealed and fell off his chair. The remonstrations were immediate and expected, and Nimrod helped the brat up and served him some more food. Lea’s gaze was laughing now; she hated Roo. Nirg ate on undisturbed.
    “Thank the gods I left a few minutes early today,” his father said. “I’ll do it tomorrow, too, just in case.”
    The brat snorted a pea up his nose, then made a loud hacking noise and spat it out his mouth onto his dish. Their father turned away. Nimrod looked at his food. He missed the mountain people… their honesty, simplicity, the sense it made when you lived in the mountains. You fought to stay alive, you treasured the moments of dawn and twilight, you valued a woman who could feed a fire, and you protected the man who fought at your back.
    Everyone had the same goals, to live a good life, to not irritate the gods, to feed the children, the animals, themselves.
    But none of them knew how to read or write; for this reason, Nimrod had returned to the city. He was a hunter, and he loved the mountains, but he needed the energy of the city.
    He just wished he could start Ur over. Build it up from a slate of blank clay.
    Get it right.
    *      *     *
    “See! It’s just there!” Ezzi said, pointing at the sky. The men, the venerable priests of the Temple of Sin, stared up at the blackness. “It’s new. I think tonight is its fourth night.”
    They stared long and hard. The exorcist among them held up his clay copy of a sheep’s liver and pointed to various spots. They muttered and stared and consulted each other. He could have a cloak like that, Ezzi thought. Then everyone would know he was a stargazer. Dark, like the night, sprinkled with the signs of stars and moon, falling to the ground with the rustle of gold fringe.
    “Next week is the New Year,” one of them said to Ezzi. “Watch this star every night until then. We’ll cast omens and see what secrets the gods hold for us.”
    “Yes, sirs,” he said, bowing his head.
    “Keep a good watch on it, boy. We’ll talk to the
lugal’s
stargazer when he gets here.”
    “Yes, sirs.”
    “Let us know if there are any changes in its position, or the time it appears. Anything at all.”
    Ezzi could barely control his excitement.
    “Are you a stargazer professionally?” one of the cloaked men asked.
    “Ye-yes, sir.”
    “Employed by anyone?”
    He cleared his throat. “Not yet, I just completed the Tablet House. I’m entertaining some offers from various businessmen