Hunters Aim for the Heart

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Zalag considered there to be two great injustices in her life. The second was committed the day the mystic, deep in euphoric trance – golden robes billowing under an azure sky and blazing sun beating down in the already warm Kengir summer, her arms and face raised to the sky in glassy-eyed awe – declared her a sacred warrior. Her mother’s rage – Ensumur’s pure, primal scream of fury – had drawn all eyes in shock; even the mystic had come out of her stupor at the raw rage of it. Ensumur having envisioned greater things for her daughter.

The first injustice was, of course, also tied to her mother. And given so much earlier as to be beyond the capacities of Zalag’s not unexceptional memory: the day Ensumur named her.

“Bright and beautiful, shining as the morning sun!” her mother had declared her daughter in a booming voice for all assembled, a sizable crowd gathered in her home, as befit her wealth and station as entu to Ninhursag, the Lady of the Sacred Mountain. Never mind that the high priestess, still abed among bloodied sheets, had just given birth and was still torn from her child’s passage. Nor that Ensumur had, immediately after her daughter came screaming into the world, banished the midwives of lesser stature among Ninhursag’s adherents who had actually helped birth Zalag, and declared that she alone had birthed her daughter in a feat of goddess-endowed strength.

Indeed, Zalag’s name, as with so many of Ensumur’s whims, was a spoiled woman’s indulgence, a destiny for her daughter declared and subsequently outlined in quick, sharp marks etched in clay, brooking no refusal. No matter that the name was unusual. No matter that her mother would tell no one who Zalag’s earthly father was, claiming it was Enki himself who had gotten her with child. Zalag certainly didn’t feel possessed of divine qualities or parentage. Of course, the worst part was that it wasn’t impossible. Enki had hardly learned his lesson after Ninhursag had cursed him for getting their daughter Ninmu with child, and then their grandchild Ninkurra, and also their great grandchild Uttu. Uttu’s children at least he did not fuck. Though there only because they had been born as eight fruits. So, he had devoured them instead. For a god of wisdom, he rarely showed it. Content instead to, like his other province, water, spread everywhere and get into everything.

Honestly, Zalag was surprised it had taken the Lady of the Sacred Mountain so long to kick him out of Dilmun. Zalag found the gods endlessly confusing and was grateful she had little interaction with them.

The story continues in Hunters Aim for the Heart.