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Shapshu is forever promising Anat these negotiations will be fun – even this one, to a collective nation of city-states as backward as Kengir. Despite that Anat has yet to ever find any of these things so. No matter how much her friend insists the war goddess just needs to try harder.
It’s different for Shapshu – everyone loves a sun goddess. The brightness of her countenance and demeanor make their Ugarite delegations welcome whatever nation or city-state they visit; Anat certain the only reason Shapshu drags her to these ridiculous events and away from Anat’s hunting in the hills and sacred mountains of their homeland – what occupies most of her time, since her people won’t let her pre-emptively slaughter potentially threatening nations – is because Anat doesn’t fawn over the sun goddess like all these other preening pheasants.
Anat watches the love-struck gods and mortals of Unug cluster round Shapshu’s blazing orbit from behind a raised cup as she drinks, its bowl hiding the war goddess’s sneer. At least the beer for the event is, admittedly, quite good. Whatever else she may have to say about the Sag Gig-Ga, and she’s had plenty over the years, she can’t deny Ninkasi’s divine touch makes the goddess’s libations exceptional. With it on Anat’s lips, even the cold stone of the pillar at her back feels warm, despite how washed the walls are in that same ʾiqnʾu everywhere – za-gin to the people in whose home she lingers, she reminds herself; for to know the language of the enemy is to know them – the cooling blues and golds of the stone’s facade offset by how lush the warm greenery of the room rolls and curls from every pot and towering tree.
Her hosts have worked hard to make their temple home feel like their fabled Cedar Forest; to bring part of that divine, lush realm into their city-state. It seems to Anat a strange adornment for the joint temple home of a sky goddess and a goddess of barren Kur, their underworld; though perhaps time away from their own distinct realms is preferable to Lamma and Ereshkigal. Anat can’t speak to the whims of married gods, and what compromises they make; Anat believes only in victory, absolute and total.
