The Tower

To my successor: To grow old is a terrible thing. As I reach my hundredth year, I am forced to confront the vanity of assuming that my life will go on. I look out upon the throng of people whom I have ruled now for many years after the removal of my predecessor at Babel, and I must admit I envy them. The tower at the center of our great city is nearly complete. My advisors tell me it is only months now until it pierces the heavens. And though I have worked on the tower nearly my entire life, long before I was king, I accept now that I may not see it to its completion, and I envy those who will. They will take the final step that I cannot. All I have wanted in these last years was to live with Marduk in the heavens, but now this will never happen. But I must remember to be grateful. For if I leave aside my envy and look out onto the tower, I see that things could have gone a much different way. I write to you now before I am gone, my successor, to leave you with what wisdom I have gathered over my strange and difficult life.

All the myths you have heard about me are true. I was born deaf and dumb to a deaf and dumb mother and a destitute father. They raised me as best they could. My mother carried me in her womb from Basra across the Euphrates. From Basra to Babel, she kept me as her burden. She certainly did not have to. All across the land, children were sacrificed for far lesser reasons than to save the life of a half-starved woman. In Elam, they sacrifice children whenever their gods demand, often many each day. My mother could have died to have borne me, but she carried me nonetheless. This is how I know she loved me, even though in many moments in my childhood she was less than kind. Moments when she would look upon me and weep at my ugliness. Moments when she would lay her hand on me as I failed at the simplest of tasks. I still remember when I spilled her basket of wheat in filthy, brown water, and she hit me again and again upside the head until there was an immense ringing in my ears. People walked by, eyes averted, too ashamed to look at the babbling woman beating her idiot son. But even still, it is from her that I learned of Marduk when she would take me to the temple. It was also from her that I learned to communicate with my hands, with contortions of my face, with grunts and with the swaying of my body. I have her to thank for this, as does all of Babel.

My father was a gentler sort. He was a shepherd before I was born. Not an honorable profession, but one that he could work and be proud of. He had received his flock on loan from a rich man in Babel. Then famine struck the land, and all his sheep were stolen. To pay back the loan, he had nothing to sell back to the lender but himself and his wife and unborn child. He humbled himself for my mother and me rather than risking our lives trying to run and survive in the wilderness. I always thought of him as quite noble for that. Though to the rest of civilization, he was scum, a man cursed by every god in the land. As was I.

I believe he had hoped I would be born with the gift of speech. Alas, this gift I could not give to him. I was his silent companion, no more useful in conversation than a dog. I know he did not view me this way. Nevertheless, it was how others viewed me, and in my childhood, it was how I viewed myself. It was some time before this great weakness became my great strength.

He would do the most delightful things for me, my father. Even on days when his master would come home in a rage—a business deal gone wrong, a donkey dead—and beat my father, he would always smile at me when he saw me and do some kind of trick for my amusement. I remember he would walk on his hands while juggling mud pies with his bare feet. It always made me laugh, and my father would laugh with me. And he would never abide my mother’s anger toward me. He would turn it toward himself. He could bear it. He taught me that love takes all evils and tries to turn them into good. If not for him, I would have grown twisted and warped like a juniper tree.

But enough of the nostalgic recollections of a doting old man. If I am honest with you, sometimes I wonder if the people I remember even were my mother and father, or if they are some figment, some story I have devised in my own mind to convince myself I had parents who loved me. They died when I was quite young, and by rights I should have no memory of them at all. And yet I feel their love in my heart and in the quiet moments of the morning when I stand in the heat of the rising sun and look out over my city and at the tower. That is proof enough. So I will bore you no longer with tales of my parents. They were people worried of deluge and hopeful for better times, and they brought me here. Marduk be praised.

If I was born deaf and dumb, you must be wondering how I came to know language, to feel its rhythm and pulse. Then I will ask of you in return to remain patient. I am an old man, and as any man rapidly approaching his death, I find that I take most delight in the telling of tales. Indeed, perhaps more so than others, for the spoken word was unknown to me for so long. Our ability to form our language and shape it into stories is perhaps the greatest act of spirit we have. Please humor me.

After my parents’ death from a plague that swept the lands, I too became slave to my father’s master, in accordance with the law of bondage. I wish I could tell you the man took pity on me, a poor deaf orphan with no discernible use in the world and as ugly as a malformed goat. But I must tell you, his treatment of me was very cruel. He gave me greater burdens than any man gave a camel or an ass, and when I collapsed from exhaustion, he would stand above me and whip me until I stood again. To me, my parents’ death was the end of my world. To him, it was yet another investment gone wrong, and I believe the man was at his wits’ end. His life was consumed by Tiamat, the great serpent of chaos, and to be swallowed up by chaos is a nearly indescribable state. I have been there myself. Not only does god’s light retreat from the world, but so too does his shadow. You will know this feeling yourself when you are king. It cannot be escaped. So as a slave did I go through the years that transformed my body, and they left me a scarred ruin, like a clay urn that has been broken and pieced back together with slime. But my body also learned to fully express what my tongue could not. I continued to develop a language with which to barter and haggle my master’s wares at the market. I would make as if to stuff my mouth, to show I needed to buy wheat for my master’s house. I would shake my head violently and sometimes make obscene gestures with my hands. Things such as this. Language became to me a full-bodied expression of all that was inside. You may not believe me, but in that time, I pitied those who spoke only with their mouths. I spoke with hands, eyes, dancing feet, snorts and shouts. It was liberating.

A few years after my parents’ death, Marduk saw fit to also take the life of my master. I offer the best fruits of my table once a year to Marduk. I pray that he was not thrown to Tiamat in the deep waters. I would say that he deserved nothing less than to be swallowed whole by chaos, but then I am only the judge of the living, not the dead. His fate is in the hands of Marduk, and Marduk is wise.

His death left me on the street. It was in those days that the tower underwent its initial construction. I begged for money each day, and many seemed to take their amusement in my language, my bodily contortions, and likely found humor in my wretchedness and threw me bread. As the days went by, the tower grew in the distance, in the middle of the city, far from the slums that were then my home. Some days, I still go to those slums and give those I see there bread and new clothes. I believe no one was meant to live such an existence. It is one of my great failings as king that there are many who still do.

I watched the tower grow with great interest. I would often gesture to my companions, fellow beggars in the street, to ask them what it was being built for. Perhaps it was a new temple, greater than all of those my mother took me to as a child. However, they did not know and shrugged their shoulders. Because of this, I was able to form my own philosophy of the tower without the input of anyone else. The tower became my symbol of hope, of mud and clay and slime somehow rising to greatness, one day reaching the heavens and allowing people to communicate face-to-face with Marduk. I dreamed of climbing the tower to the heavens and dancing my dance to god.

I longed to participate in work on the tower, but the only way I could was to sell myself once more into bondage. I did not wish to again have a master who would treat me with cruelty. However, the life I had in the slums, while free, did not fill me with the dream that filled me when I looked upon the tower. I decided to sell myself, the way my father had before me. But I was patient and discerning, waiting around the tower, begging the masters there with flailing limbs and pointing at the tower and kneeling before it until they understood, and finally they took me on and made me a brickmaker. I was to work at the base of the tower, mixing mud and straw and baking it in the hot sun before carrying it to the top of the tower where more skilled builder slaves were laying the brick with slime under the direction of the master builders. 

I forget sometimes when I look upon the tower’s current glory that it was once not so. To have called it a tower then seems now too grandiose a term, and to call it a tower now seems too small and feeble, like calling an epic poem a rhyme. For back then, it was little more than a pillar rising out of the earth, and now it is larger than any mountain I have ever seen or had reports of being seen. Its peak mocks the clouds. In my youth, it could be climbed like one would climb a foothill. But now, the master builders and craftsmen and servants spend a year-long shift at the top, so great is the difficulty in climbing and descending. And yet, we looked upon it then in the same way as we do now, with awe and wonder. How quickly we lose our sense of what is grand and what is small due to progress and time.

Yes, in those days, the closest you could get to the heavens was to look at them reflected in a puddle at your feet. Though I was an owned man, I was also a man with purpose. The tower suggested something greater than ourselves, a unified dream of a nation becoming its own. I was a small brick in that dream, but I was part of the dream nonetheless. I look back on those days fondly. There was a simpleness to my life then that eluded me for many years after Amasa’s death. All great things are simple. The tower is simple. All things within the tower, every brick, every arch, are aimed at a sole purpose: to come into contact with Marduk and the heavens. My life in those days was simple, and so I say it was great. 

I would arise each morning before my master even needed to awaken me and walk through the market to the tower. I, a slave, held my head high because I knew I had purpose. I would arrive at my station, which consisted of a bucket of mud that I would make myself, gathering dirt from the earth and mixing it with water. For the tower came from the earth. In a sense, it is a symbol of what the earth could have been, could still be, if we unify. In addition to my bucket of mud, there was a small tray and a mold in which I would place mud, lay within the mud long reeds to help the mud hold together, and then light a kiln each morning in which I would bake my bricks. I was coated always in mud in those days, and I smelled of dung. I am certain that many made comments, but that was one of the benefits of deafness. To not hear people’s insults as I walked by them coated in mud and sweat, my own self baking in the hot sun as my bricks baked in the kiln. I would load my bricks into a wheelbarrow and push the barrow up the wooden scaffolding around the tower to the very top, or wherever bricks were needed. 

I spilled a load of bricks over the side of the tower once. I lost my balance walking up the loose wooden planks, and the wheelbarrow tipped, and the bricks tumbled over the side. My breath fled from my body as I remembered my mother hitting me when I spilled her wheat. A master builder saw it all happen and struck me. I did not care. I was simply so thankful that there was no one below to be killed from my error. I keep this memory always in mind as king. My mistakes could be the death of others. 

And in those years, the tower grew. Oh, it grew! The master builders were always adding more to it: arches the likes of which have never been seen, great pillars that no one could break. And as the tower grew, so did Babel, for the tower acted as a beacon for others like me who saw its form in the distance and were drawn to it and made their life around it. Before the tower, Babel believed that nothing would bring more people than our bread, which we of all the great cities of Mesopotamia baked and fed to our inhabitants. But the hunger of the body is nothing to the hunger of the soul, and this the tower satiated more than anything else.

But there were nonbelievers as well, and this is where my story takes its turn. You may have heard the tales of the deluge and of Noah, the madman who built the ship. Another man came to Babel to preach about Elohim, or Adonai, the god of Noah. He brought his young wife along, and from what I gather, hardly anyone remembers him but me. One day when I was laying brick, this man approached me and began to speak. I did not see him at first, so focused was I on my work, and of course I did not hear him. But I did feel him, for after he failed to get my attention through speech, he brought his walking stick down on my head and gave me a good rap. I looked up, wondering if it was a builder or my master come to scold me for some mistake I had made. But here was a man with a great beard and long dark curls on his head, and he began to speak to me. I pointed at my ears and shook my head. Understanding came to his face. Then, he put his staff on the ground and dipped his hands into my bucket of mud. He spread the mud on his palms and spit on them both, then he rubbed thick globs of mud to my ears. Why I allowed him to do this, I cannot say. I suppose I was accustomed to being treated however others wished to treat me. But after he spread the mud, he spoke again, and this time I could hear his voice coming muffled through the mud on my ears. It was really as though I could hear silence, and his voice cut through it. I cannot imagine the look on my face, but he saw it and laughed a mighty laugh—the first I ever heard, and perhaps the greatest. Then he wiped the mud from my ears and spoke again. “I have come to Babel for the sake of Adonai, the Lord,” he said. 

I was listening. 

“He told me of this place. The tower you are building, it must end, for you are building it to be greater than the Lord.” He told me Adonai was his god and the god of Noah.

But I did not know Adonai. And I was not building the tower to be greater than any god.

Then Abraham reapplied mud to his palms and spit on them and ran them across my mouth. I did my best not to taste it, but it was far worse a taste than anything I had ever eaten. Worse than the rotten tomatoes and waste I would eat when I was a beggar and starving. Then Abraham told me to speak, and again, I found that I could.

I said to him, “We are building the tower to be closer to our god, not to surpass him.” I felt these were good first words to speak, and I have always remembered them.

Abraham said that the Lord had cured me of my ills, and I would do well to follow his will. “Adonai gives each person a mission, and we should do all we can to fulfill it.”

I told him Marduk allowed us to build the tower, which was a far greater miracle than even my hearing and speech. I told him I would follow Marduk’s will, whatever it may be. I asked him if he would follow his Lord’s will in anything asked of him.

“Yes,” he said to me. “For he has promised me many sons. Sons as numerous as the stars.”

“Where are those sons?” I said, for I wanted to see if this Adonai would deliver on his promises. Abraham’s head lowered, and he was silent. I understood then that they had not come, that he had no sons to show. I told Abraham that I was thankful for the gift his lord had given me, but that I could not abandon my life’s mission. He told me there would be grave consequences to disobey. But disobey I did. I wonder often how my life would have been had I followed his command. Perhaps Amasa would still be alive. But that is for a later time, and it does no man good to question things that cannot change. Abraham left me and Babel then, never to return.

You can imagine the surprise of my master and my fellow builders when I began to speak to them. My master called me a liar, said that I had always been able to speak and had hidden it for special treatment, and he beat me. As he did, he called me by my name, the first time I had ever heard it—Ajam. But this pain was nothing compared to the joy of sound. Men and women’s voices. Children laughing. And music! Sweet music played upon the harp at night around fires and in the market square. And with the music were stories. Great stories of our ancestors. Of Marduk and Tiamat. These stories that once had only vague shape from what I could see of temples and statues came alive with the poetry and the music. I have tried my hand many times over the years at writing songs, but none have ever captured the feeling I had when I heard my first songs and danced my first dances along to them. There was an increase of joy in that time, and I often found myself only wishing that my father was there that I could dance and converse with him, and that my mother could receive the gift Abraham had given me and hear this music. I believe she can hear it now in the heavens. I thought often of Abraham and wondered where he had gone. To this day, I still do not know. But I thank him and his Adonai for their gift to me, and I offer meat and wine from my table every day for he and his wife to bear sons. 

However, I came also to hear of others’ purpose for the tower, and I was greatly disturbed. They meant for it to eclipse Marduk, to show him that humanity could calm primordial chaos better than he by shaping his earth into a great tower. There were even those who wished to send the army of Babel up to the heavens when the tower was complete, or at least our finest warriors, to go and kill Marduk. This shook my faith deeply, and I reconsidered Abraham’s words. I wished to quit work on the tower. But this decision was not mine to make, and I cursed myself for offering my body in bondage. But there was nothing to be done about it, for if I ran, I would only be chased and arrested and even put to death, and there was nowhere to run to. So, I worked on and focused on the sounds around me, which were to my ears what drinking from a cool stream was to my tongue. Often in the hard days that followed, I drew strength from the culture we had during that time.

It was from the stories I heard that I came to realize that the others’ plans for the tower did not have to be my own. I could create my own story for the tower as these songwriters did for the heroes of our past. The others could build the tower for war against Marduk, but I could build it for unity. After all, does not one man use a rock to smash the head of his neighbor, while another uses it to build his neighbor’s house? I thought then, perhaps foolishly, that my own beliefs about the tower could spread to the others, that through my example people would change. Many laughed at me when I told them of my beliefs. Others still ignored me. And the tower continued to grow.

That all changed the day of the great cacophony. I began that day with my same routine. I walked to my brick station, my head perhaps held slightly less high than it once was, knowing that the tower was one of treachery and blasphemy. But still I worked, and I hoped, and I dreamed. From all around me came the sounds of work. For a structure of that magnitude to be created, much had to be communicated. Master builders conversed with other master builders about the plans of the day and of the next day and of the next years. Then the master builders commanded the slave builders. The slave builders in turn commanded the brick makers, the brick layers, the slime procurers, the water transporters. When heard correctly, all this noise could become like a beautiful song, all melody and harmony and rhythm. Then, though it was a cloudless day, a great clap of thunder came from the sky, and everything changed, like a harp player’s string breaking mid-song. Or perhaps that is not an apt comparison. It was rather as though a wild beast charged into a concert and gored the harp player, the singer, the dancers, and everyone in the audience. All this to tell you what you must already know. For on that day when the sun was in its zenith, some vengeful god struck our city dumb. In hindsight, I have thought many times about what Abraham said to me. I have even wondered if it is possible that his Adonai and my Marduk were the same god by a different name, for of course Marduk must have been angered by his people’s revolt against him. But in that moment, I had no time to think about Abraham and Adonai and Marduk. I had only time to act.

All around me, the people who once shared my tongue now babbled like idiots or crazed prophets. To my right, a master builder shouted words that I could not make out, then said, to the best of my memory, “Che cazzo sta succedendo?” I do not know what he meant, but he seemed angry and upset. I asked him to repeat himself and found my own words to be foreign to me, and I clasped my palms over my mouth. 

From the market, a great din was rising. Like in any disaster, people sought the comfort of other people. Only now, there was no solace to be found in another’s words. For each person spoke of their own tongue, like a language had developed from the contortions of their own soul. When I arrived at the market, there was only chaos. Patrons strangled shopkeepers. Wives tearfully clung to husbands. Children screamed and barked like dogs in mad delight. I saw that whatever was happening, if not fixed, could be the end of Babel.

Then the terrible realization hit me, that I was the only one equipped to handle this situation. For I had learned, before Abraham had given me my hearing and speech, to communicate with others with the language of my body, and I could do so again. I had never given an order, never told another what to do. All my life, I had been ignored. I doubted I had the power to help these people, but it was act or have all of Babel consumed by chaos. 

I mounted a stall in the market and began to move. It must have looked almost like a dance, but instead of joy coursing through my body, there was only distress, fear, urgency. I gesticulated and pointed and made wild eyes at the crowd. At first, only those closest to me stopped and paid attention. But slowly, like a great wind blowing across the desert sand, everyone was affected, and I heard, to my immense satisfaction, once again the beautiful sound of silence. The people watched me wide-eyed. I pointed to my lips and made like I was sealing them together with slime. I pointed to homes, held my hands beneath my tilted head as a sign of sleep. I pointed at the sun in the sky and twirled my pointed arm in a full circle. Once my finger was aimed at the sky again, I quickly pointed it down to the market. Go home, I willed them. Go sleep and we will try to figure this out tomorrow. Go hug your children and kiss your spouses. Go pet your dogs and play your instruments. Come back tomorrow. We will see about all this tomorrow.

And, to my relief, it worked. The people went to their homes. The earth was silent. My master was in the market and waited for me, and we returned to his hut.

The next day, people gathered again at the market. I had prepared another dance, or another speech, depending on how you wish to view it. I showed them that we must all be silent for a time, wait to figure this out. A man with rage in his eyes pointed toward the palace, which stood a few blocks from the market. “No lo necesitamos,” he said. People looked toward him with confusion. “Nimrod,” he said. And then everyone understood. The man then pointed at me. They understood that too, and they agreed. We had not heard from Nimrod at all. There was no news from the mighty palace. But I did not want to be king, and I shook my head vigorously. The people seemed unsatisfied, but for the time being, they took no action.

However, Nimrod’s silence stretched for days and weeks. I organized some greatly diminished work on the tower. Basic brickmaking and laying. But the complex work could not be done without our language, without the master builders directing us from their carefully laid plans. The people grew restless, and I believe they came to see me as some sort of champion. There was not much order to be found in those frightening days, but where it could be found, so too could I. The people saw that. When Nimrod would not answer, and in doing nothing only prolonged their suffering, they all stood outside the palace and yelled. Still no sign came. A constant vigil was kept outside the palace walls. What began with shouts was replaced with the people’s cold, angry silence. 

Nimrod must have been quite frightened. For finally, after over a week of waiting, he emerged from the palace. Or rather, armed guards emerged from the palace and began to beat the people who were there. This proved too much for those poor souls, to experience violence in retaliation for the simple desire for order and understanding. So they fought back. Even the most highly trained hundred men cannot withstand the might of the multitude, and so the multitude overwhelmed the guards and stormed the great palace. 

From what I understand, the decision to make me the new king was silent and unanimous. After the commotion at the palace, those same people came to where I directed work at the tower and lifted me upon their shoulders and carried me to the throne. Myself, who had once been reviled and mistreated by all in Babel, now sat as king to a people who looked to me for order and direction. Strange times, indeed.

I would like you to know that I took no pleasure in removing Nimrod from the throne. But the chaos of Tiamat had returned to the world, and the people decided that I was the only one who could fight against it. Who was I to disagree? I had been following orders my entire life. This was simply one more. Nimrod did not take it well, it seemed, and after being cast out of the palace he ran off in the direction of Elam. I have no doubt that his arrival there was the beginning of Elam’s decision to attack Babel. Their king, Lu-Shishan, would have never done so had he believed Nimrod still there and Babel in full strength. 

But that did not happen for some time. The task fell to me to restore language to our people. I gathered the wisest men and women in the city—inventors, masters of agriculture, architects, ambassadors, philosophers, and, of course, songwriters. For I had decided to base the new language in song. The musicians would be directed toward something, say the tower, a person they loved, a person they despised, a lizard, poison berries, and so on, and then they would be instructed to play. They were to play directly from the heart. Then, as they played, once there was agreement that they were expressing through music the emotion we felt while looking upon that object, they would begin to sing a single sound. From those sounds, the earliest words formed, and they were spread and taught to the people so that there was a universal language again. Then we would add, modify, subtract, expound, specify. We had the basic language of survival and community down in a few months, and over the years, the language continued to evolve. We began to assign symbols to the sounds we made and write them down in case language were ever confounded again.

But surely I weary you with these details. Much has been written about the invention of the new tongue, and I will spare you further boredom. It was the first crisis of my reign, and you will certainly face your own first crisis as king. Fear not, for there will always be crises. A king must learn to make peace with them.

My next crisis, once language was resolved and work on the tower continued, was my own loneliness. For so much of my life, I had worried about survival. But now that survival was taken care of, and in fact, more than taken care of, for I had all the food and drink twenty men could ever ask for, I was faced with the terrible despair of my lack of companionship. I still had my purpose, the tower, which I convinced the people was for unity with Marduk, and they listened, for I was their hero. But I had no one to share this purpose with, and no one who would share their purpose with me. I felt like I had when I was just a boy after my parents’ deaths, helpless and alone. That is, until Amasa came.

What to tell you of Amasa? She was my great love, and she died. You must cling to love if you find it, my unfortunate successor. For it is both the greatest test and greatest gift one can have on this earth. 

But of course there is more than that. Amasa was a woman from a noble family of Babel. We were introduced at a gathering of nobility at the palace, my first introduction to the nobles once things had settled. I wish I could tell you that the first sight of her struck me like a hammer strikes a nail, giving it purpose. But it did not. There were many beautiful women at the palace that night, with their hair done up high and golden hoops about their ears and necks and fingers, and I was an ugly man who had never received attention from any woman, let alone women this beautiful. Amasa was, and I hope she does not mind me saying so, plain. A forgettable face. Not ugly, no. She was a diamond compared to the moss-covered stone of my own face. But she was not beautiful, not one to stick in the memory of a man. It wasn’t until later that evening when she played her harp that I truly noticed her. She played a song of her own creation, and the immense loneliness of the melody—no harmonies, no frilly slides or rolls, just long, ringing notes of solitude—seemed like it was the song of my own soul. I fell in love then, and I approached her after her performance and, since the new language was still in its infancy and, moreover, I was terribly shy around such a woman, I said only a few words. “Beautiful. True. Me.” And, thank Marduk, she smiled in return.

We courted then for a time. More words followed. She told me how Nimrod had wanted her as part of his harem, had haggled with her father for her on account of his love for her harp playing. But her father was no friend of Nimrod’s, the king having slighted him at a courtly dinner in their younger years, and so Nimrod appealed to Amasa directly. She refused him even as his gifts grew more elaborate, ending with a gilded harp. She found the man domineering and crass, and she loved and respected her father. I, in turn, told her of my parents and life. It was difficult to speak about my mother and joyful to speak about my father. Even so, I was glad to be able to speak about them both. It was as though, through my words, they were given new life in Amasa’s mind and heart. Our sentences loosened and stretched and then became more precise as we discovered each other’s secret language, and there were times where we spent the entire day in conversation, walking to the tower, the market, the fields of wheat, even the slums. It did not matter where, so long as it was where she was. She had a lovely voice, husky and rough and full, like a river filling a canyon. I shall not write a word of our language here nor anywhere, for it may seem profane to you—Amasa and I were not ones to hold back any words—but to us it was sacred. She also taught me to play the harp. We would practice whenever I had free time from my kingly duties, and I grew to love her more than I had loved even my father and mother. We decided to be wed to one another. Preparations were made, and I looked forward each day to my union with Amasa.

But of course, this is when the forces of Elam came upon our land. Babel was returning to normalcy thanks to the advances of language, but we were still not fully capable in battle as we had once been. Lu-Shishan must have known this from Nimrod. Elam’s army came into our town at night, the cowards. They slaughtered many, and though we managed to push them back, they took many captors. Again, I shall not bore you with the details of things you already know. That day was one of the great victories of our kingdom, for even in our weakness, we pushed the forces of Elam back. I believe Marduk was smiling down on our city. But he was testing me. For Amasa was among those who were captured. I sent search parties for her. I would have participated in them myself if I hadn’t known that I would only slow them down and lower my chances of rescuing her. And so I waited, all my days with the wicked grip of the serpent Tiamat around my heart. 

Then one day, the search party returned. They had found Amasa, or rather, what was left of her. For Lu-Shishan had sacrificed all our people as a burnt offering to his wicked god. Sometimes now I take solace in the thought that this was likely a mercy compared to what Amasa must have endured as their prisoner. When the warriors told me, I thanked them and bid baths be poured and a fine meal served to them, and then I retreated to my private chamber. “Amasa,” I cried. “Oh Amasa. Amasa, oh my love, Amasa. Would that I had died instead of thee.”

Often still, when I am alone, I take up my instrument and play the first song I ever heard her play. Now, even more than upon our first meeting, it is the song of my soul. 

I wrestled then with the serpent Tiamat. Those days were all in the grip of chaos, even as my city bloomed before me. I took to drink, then when I broke from drink, I took to endless days of hard work, forcing my body to push itself until it was stretched and raw. I rarely slept. I ate too much food, then would eat no food at all for days at a time. I sent away all musicians who meant to console me, for they were but monkeys plucking ropes compared to the music of my love. And I sent out many soldiers to Elam. I hoped to punish them for what they had done. I wanted nothing more than to crush them beneath my heel. 

But that is not the end of my story with Amasa. Though I have not written it, I have been a celibate all my days. Our love was never consummated physically. But it was consummated with our secret language, the ways we could communicate the private desires of our own heart. And one day, in the depths of my grief, I spoke out the way I would have if Amasa had been before me. And I found that I could still speak this language to her and with her, for when either of us spoke, it was like both were speaking at once. When I spoke, it was as though Tiamat herself softened and loosed her grip from my heart. So, to this day, I speak with her and play her song, and our love has not died. 

But I will die soon, and when I do, it is my wish that my coffin be taken up the finished tower and tossed toward Marduk and my tomb be in the heavens. My truest wish is that I could be buried beside Amasa, but this simply cannot be.

It was when I came to understand that I could love Amasa despite the impossible distance between life and death, a distance I grow closer to covering each day, that I came to feel one again with my kingdom. I pulled my warriors from Elam, for they did not have to die for the sake of my grief. What was that war but human sacrifice on the altar of love? And love must reject that offering. I renewed efforts to build the tower. I funded the arts, especially the art of song. I commissioned great histories be written, which you have undoubtedly studied. I felt, even more so than in my early days making bricks for the tower, completely in union with my purpose and in union with those around me. I had unified with the Tiamat in my own heart. The years of my kingship passed by in peace and prosperity.

I should tell you now of my final journey up the tower. Only a year ago, I had the reports that it was almost finished, the peak nearly penetrating the heavens. So I climbed to the top. I was impatient, sensing then the numbering of my days. My bones had grown weary, and there were times when my speech was interrupted by coughs of blood. I entered under the grand arches, which foreshadow the glory of the peak. There are mighty stairs and narrow stairs, stairs for armies to march across and stairs for solitary journeymen. As you climb, day turns into night and into day again. The air becomes cool and thin. You must rest several days to grow accustomed to this new air, as you know. There are markets and taverns to spend your time. There are even brothels, but I do not visit them. As you ascend, you walk through the clouds, and their cool mist passes through your fingers like running water. You know all this, of course, but I still delight in speaking the wonders of the tower. Many have told me that they are so fearful when they look down that they swoon. I find this interesting. For never once as I climbed did I consider looking down. I was always looking up.

After weeks of climbing, I made it to the top. The master builders saluted me, and I noticed you were there with them. You bowed deeply, your great beard grazing the bricks. I nodded and smiled back at you. Then I conferred with the master builders and asked if we were ready to make the final leap into the heavens. They frowned and shook their heads. “We are sorry, your majesty,” they said. “It is still not possible.” But I had come so far and likely could never make the climb again. I had to try. I bent my skinny knees and leapt toward the heavens. I nearly wept when my feet landed back on the tower instead of on the moon or some star. Then you made a stack of wood and brick for me, which I stood atop and leapt again, but to no avail. Thankfully, you caught me as I fell once more. I am so old, my bones so brittle, I likely would not have survived that fall. 

When I found that I could not reach Marduk in the heavens, only then did I finally look to the earth. As you age, you become so certain that you are correct about everything, that nothing about your world can change. Looking down from that great tower, I saw for the first time the world as one. The earth was so small from that vantage point, and all the landmasses seemed to connect to form a giant green beast. This was what Marduk had created, separating the land from the deep waters. Marduk’s primordial victory over the chaos of Tiamat was always described as a battle. But from so high above, it did not look like Marduk and Tiamat had done battle at all. There was a harmony there that does not exist in the aftermath of war. Excuse the potential blasphemy, brother, but for the first time I wondered if the stories of Marduk and Tiamat were false. It looked to me not as though he had attacked her, but that he had wooed her. Forgive an old man philosophizing. Perhaps it is due to my perpetual celibacy that I dream of Marduk and Tiamat as lovers. But when I saw the world as Marduk sees it, I wondered many things that I had never before wondered. I could see no people, and the lands and the sea were one. How foolish it seemed to me then to have waged wars on Elam. Elam and Babel were both so insignificant. I thought too of my own courtship with Amasa. Both my courtship and Marduk’s wooing of Tiamat are continual courtships. For the deep water can overwhelm the land if the land does not woo it. Perhaps this is superstition from my parents, who always feared a great deluge. But I believe when I meet Marduk, we will meet as kinsmen, two men who have spent the most of our lives engaging in perpetual romance. 

It was then that I looked back at you, my successor. You who had bowed so deeply when you saw me. You who had helped me by making a stack of wood and brick so I could jump again in my foolishness, who had caught me when I fell. There was great heart in you, a gentleness of way, a good humor. Please forgive my candor, but you reminded me of the nobility of my father. To have seen the earth from above, to feel unified with Marduk and see the world as he sees it, then to turn and see you as a slave, you who possessed my father’s great gentleness, who treated my frail body like I was a newborn. Well, language fails me. You should not be a slave. No person should be. The tower and the unity of all the lands of the earth mean nothing when men stand over another as master and servant. Tomorrow I will proclaim the decree that frees all slaves and the decree which names you as my successor. Those are already written. They are in safe hands. I write this to you now only in hopes that you will understand, in case I am gone before you descend from the tower and take your place on the throne. 

This is what I wish to leave you with, my friend and successor, companion in the loneliness of the crown. For I will always be remembered as the king who brought language back to the world, who fought off the flood of misunderstanding and cacophony. But language itself is not enough. No, for language can be used in violence. I have heard the cries. Language can be used in deception. Those snakes have slithered in my ears. Language can be used to tear down another. I have seen them collapsed in the streets. The only use of language that is justified in the eyes of Marduk is language used for love, to communicate truthfully the souls of human beings, singing the great song of understanding. That is what this letter is meant to be to you. Though I have known you only briefly, I understand you, and because I understand you, I love you, and because I love you, I write to you as witness of my soul.

Your predecessor,

King Ajam