‘She smells like a gutter slut,’ observes the Keeper of the Second Gate, who gives light to this place. He is tall and built like a warrior. His skin is scarlet and flames burn about his head where hair should be.
Neti laughs. ‘She seeks to pass the Second Gate while still living.’
‘Then she must surrender her earrings.’ He closes until he is standing right before me, his feet nearly touching my splayed knees. I look up mutely, in dismay. His eyes are crimson.
‘Must I?’ When we write, the word for "ear" is the same as that for "mind".
‘The laws of the Underworld are perfect, Inanna. Do not question them.’
‘As you command,’ I say. He unhooks the heavy gold clusters from my ears and they turn to water in his palms and run away over his wrists. I bow my head.
I will do this, I tell myself, for the sake of Uruk, for the sake of my love; I will do whatever it takes. And Inanna is with me. I feel her move more strongly than ever in the heat in my blood, in the pulse that beats at my sex.
Thoughtfully, the Keeper of the Second Gate hooks his bare foot under my skirt. His foot nudges up against my mound and I gasp at the heat of his skin as he plays roughly with the folds below. He does not find me dry. ‘So the Lady Inanna is humbled before the Great Below,’ he rumbles.
‘Yes,’ I whisper.
‘Yes,’ gloats Neti. ‘Do with her as you wish. As I did.’
‘Do you suck cock, Queen of Heaven?’
Plot:
The setting is
the city of Uruk in the ancient land of Sumer,
approximately 2600 BCE. The king of Uruk, Tamuz, is dying - he has been
poisoned by his ambitious half-brother Nergal. Tamuz has an
ally
in Ishara, the high priestess of the love/sex/fertility goddess Inanna,
who embodies the goddess for nine days in every year in a very public
marriage ceremony uniting king and deity. Despite her grief and anger
Ishara is unable to act against Nergal because she must be seen to
support the new king. But when the Great Marriage takes place Nergal
rejects Ishara and publically insults the goddess. The priestess
decides to take magical revenge by descending into the Underworld (the
titular "House of Dust") and bringing back the rightful king Tamuz from
the dead. She has to pass through 7 Gates to the underworld, at each of which she must remove an item of her clothing or holy regalia. Thus she is symbolically stripped of her authority and identity, until she goes before the Queen of the Dead naked and powerless.
Ishara's quest does not go exactly as she had hoped, but nevertheless she restores Tamuz to life and they return to the city to confront Nergal.
Notes:I wanted to write a story in which the romantic hero dies. So he does - at the start.
I wanted to write something about death and sex.
I wanted to write an Afterlife story.
The House of Dust is based on two related myths from Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), which was the cradle of civilisation and the place writing (and written fiction) were invented. The first myth is The Descent of Inanna, which is about how the great love goddess journeys into the underworld to confront her sister the Queen of the Dead. This original myth includes the death and resurrection of Tamuz and the image of a seven-gated Underworld, at each gate of which Inanna has to remove a piece of her sacred regalia (her crown, her necklace, her belt etc). Some suggest this story is the original of the “dance of the seven veils.” In HoD my heroine is the priestess of Inanna and also treats this story as myth – only, because it is a myth about her goddess, she can use it to do the same thing by magic: open the way to the Underworld and go down.
This was a story I felt I really had to write. The Descent of Inanna is at least 5000 years old – probably the oldest story ever told by human beings and written down. And it’s about a woman undertaking a quest. And in it she has to remove her clothing piecemeal - How could I not turn it into an erotic story?
The second myth I use is a chunk of The Epic of Gilgamesh which deals with the stand-up row King Gilgamesh has with Inanna. Basically she says “Phwoar, come and get it, Big Boy,” and he says “No way, you dirty slag,” and then she gets really angry and releases the Bull of Heaven on him, which he kills. I used that for the political struggle that provides the background to my heroine’s quest. For certain reasons I transferred the struggle between Inanna and the King to Gilgamesh’s father, that’s all. Gilgamesh features in my version as a boy who helps Nergal/Lugalbanda fight the bull, and is eventually acclaimed as Tamuz' heir. In this way I stick to the original Sumerian king-lists.
Also important to me was the fact that the fragments of the myths we still have date from different times (they were adopted by different cultures and rewritten over thousands of years, during which Inanna mutated into Ishtar who was goddess of war as well as sex) and are sometimes contradictory. For example, some versions say that Inanna descends in order to rescue Tamuz, some that the King dies because she orders it upon her return. Some have the Queen of the Dead single and lonely, some give her a husband. Some fragments treat Inanna and Gilgamesh as allies, but the later ones have him behaving with incredible hostility and rudeness toward her. I wanted to write a version that “explained” all these contradictions and how people might have got confused. To be honest, I was probably being just a tad ambitious for a sex novella!
Tamuz:
The "shepherd-king", beloved of Inanna, almost certainly a historical character, was remembered for millennia, his death and resurrection ritually commemerated by women across the Mediterranean region well into the Christian era.
I was struggling to get a mental picture of him that would be attractive at first: he had to be ruthless and masculine enough to make it as a successful king in a very cruel world, yet emotive enough to be tenderly mourned. And nowhere do the legends suggest that he was a strutting bag of machismo in the mould of Gilgamesh or Hercules, say. He was known as a lover rather than a fighter.
Then 300 came out and I looked at Leonidas ' relationship with his queen Gorgo, and said "Oh - that's him!"
Wouldn't you know it, eh?
The Seven Gates of the Land of the Dead:
The underworld in this novella is portrayed as in the original myths: as a place not of reward or punishment, but of of waterless dust where the feathered souls of the dead languish without pleasure or purpose. It's a very pessimistic vision of the afterlife, in line with that of most ancient cultures (Hades, Sheol etc) which rarely have people living "happily ever hereafter".
Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do
do it with all thy might:
For there is no work, nor device, not knowledge, nor wisdom
In the Grave, whither thou goest.
do it with all thy might:
For there is no work, nor device, not knowledge, nor wisdom
In the Grave, whither thou goest.
(Ecclesiastes)
To reach
the throne of
Ereshkigal, Queen of the Dead, Ishara/Inanna has to pass through 7
Gates. This section provides a BDSM ordeal that breaks her
down
- as her subsequent ascent rebuilds her again,
richer in
wisdom and understanding.
The Gates, their demonic guardians and the regalia removed go:
1 - wood - pallid - hairless humanoid guardian - her crown (earthly authority: Inanna's status as Queen of the Earth)
2 - bronze - red - firey ogre guardian - her earrings (her mental prowess)
3 - gold - yellow - guardian with ram's horns/body studded with eyes - her necklace (the Rainbow: her magical powers)
4 - glass - blue - serpent-man guardian - her belt ( the Zodiac: Inanna's status as Queen of Heaven)
5 - ivory - brown - lion-headed guardian - her bracelets and anklets (her will and pride)
6 - obsidion - black - scorpion-men guardians- her dress (her human dignity)
7 - lead - grey - hawk-headed genie - her makeup (her beauty and sexuality: the indwelling presence of Inanna)
Thus Ishara is reduced to her most naked, vulnerable self before she can even start negotiating.
The lion-headed Guardian of the 5th Gate is based on Ahriman, who much later on becomes the god of Evil in Persian Zoroastrianism. I just assumed he started off as a minor Sumerian demon.
The Gates, their demonic guardians and the regalia removed go:
1 - wood - pallid - hairless humanoid guardian - her crown (earthly authority: Inanna's status as Queen of the Earth)
2 - bronze - red - firey ogre guardian - her earrings (her mental prowess)
3 - gold - yellow - guardian with ram's horns/body studded with eyes - her necklace (the Rainbow: her magical powers)
4 - glass - blue - serpent-man guardian - her belt ( the Zodiac: Inanna's status as Queen of Heaven)
5 - ivory - brown - lion-headed guardian - her bracelets and anklets (her will and pride)
6 - obsidion - black - scorpion-men guardians- her dress (her human dignity)
7 - lead - grey - hawk-headed genie - her makeup (her beauty and sexuality: the indwelling presence of Inanna)
Thus Ishara is reduced to her most naked, vulnerable self before she can even start negotiating.
The lion-headed Guardian of the 5th Gate is based on Ahriman, who much later on becomes the god of Evil in Persian Zoroastrianism. I just assumed he started off as a minor Sumerian demon.
