Cruisin' down the Tigris

On a Sunday afternoon. . .

. . . sang Hani as they lounged in the back of a reed boat. Their friend and host, Nukhu, laughed as he poled the boat through the reeds and into a clear channel.

'Is it Sunday?' asked Ori lazily.

Hani laughed. 'Nah. It's Ninurta, Saturday. Cruisin' down the Tigris on Ninurta afternoon. . .'

Ori sighed. 'I wish. . . '

'Hush!' said Hani. 'You can't make a wish on Ninurta.'

'Why not?' asked Ori, puzzled.

Hani shrugged. 'I dunno. It's a rule, or something.'

Nukhu had heard all this and shook his head. 'You two can do whatever you want. There's nobody around but me – and I know you're gods.' He winked.

'Just how do you know that?' demanded Ori with a sharp look in Hani's direction. That angel blushed and Nukhu grinned.

He pointed to the little goat kid in the other end of the boat – bow or stern, nobody could say for sure, the boat tended to turn around to suit itself, but was completely watertight. 'You see that little rascal? He's called Arrow, because if he weren't tied up he'd be heading straight for where he could do the most mischief. While we were loading at Nineveh, Arrow kept trying to head-butt your friend. Of course, that's not so easy to do, even for a goat. Not when the party in question can rise up and hover in the air. That was one confused little goat.'

Ori sighed. 'I told you, no wings.'

Hani held up hands in protest. 'And I didn't use none, neither. It may have escaped your notice, partner, but them wings ain't gotta be visible to be functional. It's a nice trick, that.'

Ori thought about it, and rose a few feet into the air, still in a cross-legged seated posture – then had to grab for the railing as the boat threatened to glide out from under the experimenter.

From the other side of the boat, Arrow bleated in what sounded exactly like a loud snigger. Ori, Hani, and Nukhu laughed, too.

'I have never met a human who laughed as much as you,' Hani told Nukhu. 'What is the secret of your good humour, friend?'

'I've seen some things,' said Nukhu thoughtfully, 'such that if I hadn't been able to see the funny side of them, they might have got the better of me. Know what I mean?'

Ori nodded. 'Like the time when somebody mistook me for a – something, er, someone I wasn't. It was maddening at the time, but I suppose it was kind of funny.'

'It ain't necessarily so. . .' drawled Hani. 'It's about time you saw the humour in that story. Say, Nukhu, have you ever seen a carp flood?'

Nukhu laughed. 'Carp flood? Oh, yes. And every other kind of flood, too. Do you remember the Gilgamesh flood story? The one about Utu-napishtim?'

Ori's ears pricked up. 'I've heard that one, yes. Where the god warned him and his family, and they built a big boat like this one and put all the animals in?'

Nukhu nodded. 'That's the one. That pretty much happened to me once.'

'Tell,' demanded Hani, bright-eyed.

Nukhu looked out at the river, which wasn't doing anything particularly interesting other than appearing to spawn the occasional duck or heron, and decided to go into story-telling mode.

'I used to be a house carpenter, a long time ago, way upriver in Hamazi, in the foothills of the big mountains. I was a young man then. Not married all that long. The children were small. I liked it there, and I liked the work. Hamazi was a nice town, not too big, not too small, good garden soil, government not oppressive. Never too many obligatory offerings to the gods. . .no offence intended.'

'None taken,' said Hani in a dry tone, ignoring Ori's eyeroll. 'Nobody wants all that stuff, anyway.'

'Life was good in Hamazi. It would have been better if it hadn't been for my mother-in-law. Dinni, bless her heart, was a really annoying woman. I wish I could say, 'She meant well,' but I don't really think she did. It wasn't just that I wasn't good enough for her daughter – by which she really meant, I wasn't good enough for her and she'd expected her daughter to marry somebody who would support her in the style she wanted for herself. My wife Abi could have married up, d'ye see? A shopkeeper might do well, buy a bigger shop, even move into the merchant class. But a plain old carpenter? Not much money in reed houses. Not enough to satisfy Dinni.


Like I said, it wasn't just that. Sure, Dinni was disappointed because she wasn't as rich or successful or popular as she wanted to be. But as far as she was concerned, if she couldn't be happy neither could anybody else. She carped at Abi morning, noon, and night. The house wasn't clean enough. The food didn't suit her. The kids were turning into a bunch of ignorant savages like their pa. It went on and on. I was thoroughly tired of her, my wife was, too. As for the kids, they'd play outside until after dark just to avoid their grandmother.'

'That's sad,' said Ori, and Hani agreed. 'So then what happened?'

'As it happened, the local priest of Elil – he's the weather god, but of course you know that, you probably know him personally. . . '

'Oh, him, yeah,' said Hani, deftly dodging a jab in the ribs. 'Big fella. Sort of a windbag.' The little goat let out a bleat of seeming agreement, and Ori gave up. Nukhu seemed not to notice as he steered around a sandbar.

'As I said, the local priest of Elil was a good one when it came to weather patterns. He announced to everyone who'd listen that his calculations of trends and the meteor shower we'd had, plus the granddaddy of all giant fish nightmares, had led him to the scientific conclusion that we were in for a millennium flood. Not just a century flood, mind you: one that only happened once in a thousand years. The sort of out-of-control rainy season full of gullywashers that change the course of rivers.


Sell up, said the priest. Invest in transportation, he advised. Take your wives, kids, animals, seed corn, and furniture and pack it all up in something that floats. He was very convinced of this. I for one was convinced of his meteorological expertise.


Besides, I was young. Talk of moving stirred up my wanderlust. I began to wonder what was downriver, you know?

'Brother, I hear you,' said Hani. 'I allus like to see what's over the next rise myself.' Ori agreed.

'Abi and I talked it over. I started gathering materials for a boat and talking to some boatwrights. After all, I had the reed-weaving skills. The kids helped. I made a deal: traded some carpentry work for pitch. Abi sewed bags and filled chests. We made a game of it and sang as we worked.


In the meantime, I stored away grain and hay and beer and accumulated a bit of livestock, goats and ducks and a couple of cows and a pair of donkeys. Financing the move turned out to be easier than I'd thought: people who didn't believe the priest were eager to snap up waterfront property and would pay top shekel for bottom land.


All of this didn't sit well with Dinna, my mother-in-law. She had no intention of moving, she said. She was happy where she was, she said. This was news to me: I'd never known her to be happy anywhere. But just about then, she developed an interest in one of the local widowers. He had a little brewery and his own tavern and he was paying her some attention. That suited the rest of us down to the ground. While they were busy gossiping and complaining all day, the rest of us could work undisturbed. We put some effort into the thing.


Pretty soon, we had ourselves a nice boat: a living area, sleeping rooms with hammocks, watertight storage areas, the works. We had stalls for the animals. I'd been talking to the rivermen and made myself a map, from the source waters clear down to where the river joined the Euphrates and beyond, all the way to the sea. I figured we couldn't get too far lost, even if the Tigris changed course.


Of course we told Dinna she was welcome to come with us – but she wouldn't hear of it. Blah, blah, fools on a fool's errand, blah, blah. Besides, she and the widower were busy bonding over how much smarter they were than anybody else. Tavernkeepers keep their ears to the ground, she insisted: they know things. And he'd invested heavily in local real estate. He was going to be a major landowner come the rainy season, which was when all of us who were going planned to pull out.

Ori was intrigued by all the planning. Hani said, 'I like where this is going. I'm assuming the rains came down, and the floods came up?'

Nukhu laughed. 'Boy, did they ever!'

'The first few days of the rainy season didn't seem like much. Just normal rain. But I trusted the meteorological priesthood. They had science on their side. We started loading up the boat, which Abi had named Nukhu's Ark, just for fun.


To tell you the truth, by this time we were itching to go, anyway, rain or no rain. We figured we'd find out what downriver was like. So when the rain fell down harder, we loaded faster. Finally, everything was stored away. We led the animals down to the dock and settled them in. Not any too soon: by the time we all climbed aboard ourselves, the dock was almost completely under water. We untied the Ark, just in time, and started off.


The kids were excited, of course. They waved to everybody they knew as we floated past – and some people we didn't know. Some waved back, others were busy loading their own boats, and some just stared. I don't know why: it wasn't as if they hadn't seen a reed boat before. Even if ours was a bit fancy, what with the name on the side and the figure of Elil on the front.


Anyway, we were halfway through the town and on our way to passing the Sign of the Onager, which was Dinna's widower's tavern, when Abi gave a yelp.


'Oh, no! I forgot to give Mama her laundry!'


Dinna had taken to staying over the tavern – with another widow woman for company and respectability, of course, just until she could get that widower to marry her. But she'd still send a boy over to our place with her laundry for Abi to do. And Abi, bless her heart, would do it and send it back to her. She's still like that, Abi is: she'll do anything for a neighbour. Only what with all the excitement, she'd clean forgot to messenger that laundry back to her mama.


Not that there were any messengers to be found that day, anyway: they were all too busy trying to stay dry. And by this time the Tigris was rising – and I mean, rising. The banks were flooded and water was already filling the lower storeys of houses.

'Well, we can make it to the road in a homemade boat, 'Cause that's the only thing we got left that'll float. . .' sang Hani happily. Ori joined in, 'it's two feet high and risin'!'

Two boys passed them in a mashuf and looked toward the singing, puzzled, as yet another heron flew past. Hani, Ori, and Nukhu waved, and they waved back.

'We got to where we could see the tavern, and sure enough, the downstairs was flooded. There were some people on the roof – yep, the tavern owner, the other widow, and my mother-in-law, waving like mad. No way we could get to them. I had an idea.


'Shumer!' I yelled to my eldest. 'Bring me a bow and arrow and some of that washing line!'


I tied one end of some washing line to the arrow, took aim at the tavern roof, and fired. The arrow stuck in the thatch, nice as you please.


'What in the world are you doing?' yelled the tavernkeeper.


'Delivering your laundry!' I yelled back. 'Send that arrow back this way!' He got it. He yelled for one of his brewery men to come up with a bow. They passed the line around the chimney pole and fired it back at us, hitting the flagpole I'd had the foresight to install. We tied it all together and had us a washline.


'Hand me the laundry!' I called to the kids. So they did, while Shumer rowed against the current to keep us in range as long as he could. We passed sheets and tablecloths and handkerchiefs and Grandma's nightie. We pinned 'em up, they hauled away, and when the next bit of line became free, we sent the next item. Just when we about couldn't hold her any longer, I added the piece duh resistance: a set of Dinna's drawers, beet red. She saw 'em coming and almost died, I could tell. She tried to wave it off, but the widower was bent on his heroic rescue of his beloved's belongings and didn't pick up the signal. The drawers arrived safely. Then we cut the rope.


The last time I saw my mother-in-law, she was shaking both fists at me, while the tavernkeeper was looking at a pair of red drawers with a bemused expression. We floated on out of their lives and didn't stop until we reached Parthosas.

'And I bet you laughed all the way,' said Hani.

Nukhu nodded. 'Like I said, you've gotta be able to see the funny side of things.'

Hani and Ori sang Prajapati's song. Nukhu learned it and sang along.

I was born about ten thousand years ago,

There ain't nothing in this world that I don't know,

I saw reed boats out of Hades floating down the wide Euphrates,

And I'll whup the guy who says it isn't so.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

28.08.23 Front Page

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