Next week Titan Books is due to publish Inanna, the debut novel from Emily H. Wilson. To mark he imminent publication, the publisher has provided us with this excerpt. It’s the first book in the author’s Sumerians trilogy. Check out the synopsis:
Stories are sly things… they can be hard to catch and kill.
Inanna is an impossibility. The first full Anunnaki born on Earth in Ancient Mesopotamia. Crowned the goddess of love by the twelve immortal Anunnaki who are worshipped across Sumer, she is destined for greatness.
But Inanna is born into a time of war. The Anunnaki have split into warring factions, threatening to tear the world apart. Forced into a marriage to negotiate a peace, she soon realises she has been placed in terrible danger.
Gilgamesh, a mortal human son of the Anunnaki, and notorious womaniser, finds himself captured and imprisoned. His captor, King Akka, seeks to distance himself and his people from the gods. Arrogant and selfish, Gilgamesh is given one final chance to prove himself.
Ninshubar, a powerful warrior woman, is cast out of her tribe after an act of kindness. Hunted by her own people, she escapes across the country, searching for acceptance and a new place in the world.
As their journeys push them closer together, and their fates intertwine, they come to realise that together, they may have the power to change to face of the world forever.
The first novel in the stunning Sumerians Trilogy, this is a gorgeous, epic retelling of one of the oldest surviving works of literature.
Now, on with the excerpt…!
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Chapter Two
Gilgamesh
I lay on my back on the muddy riverbank with two soldiers of Kish standing over me. One of them had a hard boot on my throat, and the other was prodding at the gaps in my armour with the nasty end of a spear. The warm rain fell, fat droplets of it, straight into my eyes and gasping mouth.
“I thought he’d be bigger,” throat man said, pressing down harder on my windpipe. He had to shout over the roaring of the river.
“Gill-garrr-mehsh,” the other man bellowed down at me, his spear piercing the skin on my belly. “Such a big name, for such a sorry creature.”
“We could kill him and keep his armour. He’s almost dead anyway.”
“The king did want him alive.”
“But who would ever know?”
At this they looked at each other, one hard and meaningful glance. And for the briefest moment, they did not have their eyes on me.
I immediately rolled with some violence to my left.
Straight into the raging Tigris.
For two or three long minutes I had cause to regret my decision.
First, it is hard to swim in bronze armour, and in a skirt sewn all over with pieces of thin-beaten copper. I hit the riverbed with force and was tumbled helpless along the rocky bottom.
Second, without the boot on my neck, I gulped for air, but found myself breathing water.
Moments into my newfound freedom, I was drowning.
My helmet hit something shatter-hard. Pain ricocheted through my skull. My neck was snapped backwards by my chin strap.
White bubbles, grey rock; a glimmer of heavy cloud through silver-capped water; rock again.
For a moment my face was in the air, but my lungs were full of water, and then I was hurtling along the river bottom face down and with my feet upriver.
Another moment, and I would have been lost to the Tigris, and no one would know the name Gilgamesh. But then I sensed something long and dark in the water and on a reflex, my left hand went out for it. My hand closed tight on rough, twisted wood, and at once every sinew in my body was working to keep a hold of it. In my panic I had inhuman strength, and as my body swung around with the river, I got my right hand onto the stick.
Legs, a man’s legs.
Harga.
Of course, Harga.
The next moment he had his hands upon me, and he was dragging me up onto rough, wet sand. There I vomited up river water with shocking force.
My heart was hammering so hard I thought it might break from my chest.
When the vomiting had finally subsided, and I was breathing air again, I looked up, my vision clearing, to Harga’s black curls, and creased, brown face.
“My lord Gilgamesh, we should hurry,” he said, his voice raised over the noise of the river. “They are close behind. We would be wise not to linger.”
I pushed myself onto all fours, but I had to stay there awhile, both hands flat on the sand, before I could find the strength to do more.
“How sorry I am to keep you waiting, Harga,” I began to say, only to be convulsed by a fit of coughing, with yet more water streaming from my mouth and nose.
Harga pulled me up to my feet, and although I swayed from side to side, I found I could stand.
The great Tigris was to my back, a league wide and wildly powerful. All around us in the rain and mist lay thick bush and the reek of rotting vegetation. It was impossible to see more than a few cords from where we stood, but to my immediate left stood our two mules, looking thoroughly wet and miserable. To my right, upriver, I thought I could hear voices over the noise of the river and the rain.
“We should leave, my lord,” Harga shouted.
“Let’s kill them first,” I tried to say, but my voice was not much more than a croak.
Harga tucked his wet hair behind his ears. “My lord, the whole of Akka’s army will soon be upon us. There are times when it is wise to stand and fight, but this is not one of them.”
I could happily have punched him at that moment, just for the pompousness of that small speech. But I was not sure I could lift my fists. “Very well,” I whispered.
As Harga helped me up onto my mule, my whole left side felt strangely numb, and I could not close my left hand upon the reins.
We headed west, as best we could with no sun to guide us.
The bush seemed only to grow more dense, and the rain more torrential.
I gripped on to my damp mule as hard as I could with my knees and one good hand, but I was struggling to breathe. Was my throat swelling?
I will tell you, I have felt better. My left shoulder was a molten mass of pain. My gut was bleeding heavily where the soldier had been poking at me. Indeed, I could not tell, as I looked down at myself, what was only wet with rain and river water, and what was wet with blood. My hand, when I put it to my belly, came away a brilliant red.
“Harga, where were you, when they had me?” I said, as loud as I could. “Did you have a plan to save me, or were you planning only to watch them kill me?”
“I was assessing, my lord.” He did not bother to turn his head.
“Whether to save me or not?”
He rolled his shoulders. “I like to be sure of the outcome.”
I felt myself listing off to the right, and then with no warning I was vomiting clear liquid over the front of my saddle. How could there still be river water in me?
Harga turned to scowl at me. “I will tie you to your saddle,” he said. He seemed about to say more, but then his face changed, all expression dropping from it. At the same moment there was movement behind him: men in dark armour, on dark animals, coming at us through the scrub.
There must have been thirty of them thronging the bushes around us. Men of Akkadia, in their distinctive copper chainmail, and sitting upon the thick-headed wild asses that they like to ride to war on.
I pulled in my mule with my one good hand, and came to a stop against Harga and his mount, our wet thighs pressed hard together in the crush. He cast a glance at me, and then dropped his reins and lifted both his hands over his head. I would have done the same, but was not sure I could lift my hands without falling.
A flash of kingfisher azure through the rain and leaves, and a rider in brilliant blue came pushing through the press of dark riders. I had never seen King Akka before, but I did not need to be told that this was him. The azure he wore was of course famous everywhere, and he was as large and thickset as they said in the stories. His fabled black beard was immaculately crinkled, even in the heavy rain, and his long, wet hair was held back from his face by the thin gold band that the kings of the north have always worn.
“My lord Gilgamesh!” he roared. “Welcome to Akkadia!”
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Emily H. Wilson’s Inanna is due to be published by Titan Books in North America and in the UK, on August 1st.
Civilian Reader 