Lions prowl, released by men for sport, searching for escape under an open desert sky, any way back to the plains they were captured from. They do not last long under the weight and volley of arrows of soldiers on chariots. Men scream holy rage down at the beasts of the world and, for a moment, the hand of a God sanctifies the death of one so frightened. This is as was always meant to be. The fear makes death burn holy.

There is glory in lion killing. The pelts are worn and the heads made into masts, skulls decorate gates, and scenes are carved into palace walls. That is the reason for the hunt. Even when the lions are men, and men are lions themselves, the anointed must prove divinely named or another will take sacred favor in their place. See them as they are, weak to fate and violent-ended all. See them as they must be, raging like bulls with teeth sharp for rending meat.

*     *     *
“Lion-hunter, archer-extraordinaire!” His priests proclaimed. It was not enough to call Him back. My King did not answer His title.

He lay dying, reed-fragile in his bed.

The genies he’d been gifted by the sun lifted their cones of liquid lapis, relief, and dabbed it to his brow. By day they lay in low carvings, surrounding his bed and his throne with a ritual of fertilization by the same instruments. By night they prepared him for rebirth, a new life, born again on the back of a racing chariot with bow in hand.

“King,” a reedy accounts keeper knelt before his bedside in the stark light of noon, “grant us the wealth of your daughter’s temple. Lay boons upon our life as the moon sheds rays across our vast lands at the hands of Nanna.”

“Ur-Nammu,” another pleaded, daring to use the name of a man touching the pleated skirts of the gods, “you have left the roads to Larsa unfinished. This is a blemish on your reign. You must awaken to restore them.” Under the guise of a miserly man, his voice shook. He begged not for the roads to be finished, but for the voice to utter such a command once more. He will not hear your mortal cries. He does not even hear my own, I thought, words echoing in the cavern of my chest and pinging between ribs.

The priests begged at my King’s swaddled, sweat-soaked side for the turn of an oil lamp before it was time for them to leave.

The offending bureaucrats must be removed, the genies said with less than words, for there is more water to lay on His lips.

I swept the aggravators from His bedside with the butt of my staff. “His Majesty will not listen to any more requests today. He is scheduled for reverent, silent, prayer for the remainder of the evening.”

Dregs of men entrenched in the building of ziggurats and lengthening of roads trickled from the royal chamber until it was myself, my King, and four genies who pulled themselves from the carvings behind his bed. Tall not-men-but-spirits with beards braided and adorned with gold knelt in the place of the soul-suckers. My King could not lift the weight of his eyes, but the furrow in his brow eased when the genies sprinkled relief upon him once more. His Majesty lay in the flickering oil-lit shadow of death, unmoving.

Resume your post, the flick of their chins said.

*     *     *
Before, in a chamber unseen by the king and out of view from guards, a young man wept. He wept for peace in his lands, and for their bloody expansion. He wept because he was able to, and because from this moment on he could weep no longer.

Look there, on him. See his small hands tremble while the genies collect his tears for water. See the not-yet stubble on his chin. See the twisting and rending of his stomach deep within him, of the bile rising in his throat and its expulsion on the imported marble floors. See him and know fear is holy. There is a lion hiding in the brush before its existence is made anointed by the water of the spirits.

*     *     *
Crack.

The lamps had long burned out, His Majesty's pained breath the only sound keeping me company. The wheeze kept demons of the night at bay. There was no sweeter sound than that of a man, almost god, entrusted to the care and keeping of an empire, resting, gentle in the dark’s embrace. Shoulders that bore the weight of lion-carcass and the heads of his enemies lay soft against woven sheets.

All this was broken with the lock on His chamber door.

Staff at the ready. Saber on the hip. My hands curled around the jeweled hilt of the blade. It should have been a blade for ceremony only, but what guard would stand unreadied in a palace where rooms were dedicated to the art of conquest, relief after relief of genocide cast for peace? It was only fitting for a warrior to find his bed filled with the blood of traitors in his final moments. It would bring Him great honor to bathe in it once again.

He, too tall to be a woman and too short to be a genie of malintent, crept into the chamber with feet silenced by silk-woven shoes. He shut the door to the lit hall. The intruder was at a disadvantage when the world washed dark. If he were part of the palace he would know my oaths, my stature, and my ever watching eye glinting in the dark. If he were not, the guards at the front gates would have had his hands removed from his arms and draped about him like a necklace so all could see the punishment for picking locks in the house of the King.

The intruder pulled an ornate knife from his belt, gleaming under lily-white moonlight filtering in from the sliver of the window deemed tactically safe for a king to sleep beneath. Before he could unsheath the blade, my own pulled at his throat, his hair in my hand. One swift move and the gates would have new decoration.

“Speak a final prayer before you are eaten by dogs,” I whispered. Dogs were the kindest threat. I would have his skin as a coat or stretched over wood to be laid as a canvas in my quarters. I would have his eyes for jewels in my hair and teeth to adorn my belt.

“Ninos,” the intruder spoke against the blade. It pressed so close that his throat cut with the movement required to speak. Thin lines of blood trickled down the blade. “Ninos. Drop your sword.”

The young face of his father sat in profile against my blade. I dropped it, and it rang clanging to the floor.

“My lord,” I asked, wiping treason from his throat. “Why are you here?”

Shulgi, His radiant son, turned but did not meet my eye. “You can’t know,” he said. “You can’t know what it’s like.”

“Your grace?”

He met my gaze then. “To live at the wheel of a chariot and watch as it tramples the Sun.” Shulgi, Prince of the four corners of the universe, met his father with a hand on clammy cheek. “All of my life—all of my life I have lived in honor of him. I will do so until I am allowed peace in eternal sleep. You know this.”

I did. It was my whole life, and Shulgi’s, both, stretched in destiny long before our births. I was destined by the moon and the sun, by the gods of the city, and the hymns of the temple to stand here against the door while my King slept. Shulgi was destined to sleep there one day, in the shadow of a guard ever-watching. He would bring the world together through whatever means necessary and grip it in a vice so strong they melded into a new kingdom.

“I will keep his ziggurats and I will bring Akkad under heel so they will know the law of Ur-Nammu. I swore it to Nanna at his altar. I also swore another oath, Ninos—” Words choked in the young prince’s mouth.

He began again, “I promised my King, not my father then, but my King—I promised him a death worthy—” Shulgi knelt down at his father’s bedside and clasped his frail hand. “I promised him hymns of glory in his name. No one sings of old kings passing with lapsing breath and failing lungs.” He lifted the knife to his father’s chest and lay it there, holding His hand in the other, anointing the weapon with his father’s shallow breath. “So you see what I must do.”

Time froze in the moment between words and understanding. My King made him swear the oath. Rage and confusion ripped my soul in two.

The knife.

An honorable death. Fear and blood and bile in that death. The death of a man who conquered armies. An oath to commit a sin I could not allow. I could not disobey my vow to protect him. Nor could I disobey my Prince.

My face had long grown wet with tears. “I will protect him until his dying breath,” I said.

Shulgi laid his forehead on the edge of his father’s bed. “I know this.”

We wept together then because we could.

My Prince raised himself after a soft prayer to the moon itself, begging forgiveness. “You know what I ask.”

“Yes. And the burden we both bear.” It was the burden my King carried for asking this of his son. Of me. There could be no godhood for a King with the weight of such a sin. On the other hand, there would be no glory without transgression committed. If they did not act on His wish, who could sing His everlasting bravery? Who could make hymns and poems and carvings of one who eased gently into a final farewell?

“I will not have your head displayed like a traitor. This is not treason.”

“Thank you.”

My Prince lifted his blade off his father’s chest and aimed for my heart, unsheathed. My saber still lay on the floor, paces from where he threatened me. Shulgi lunged and we twined in combat, his knife chipping at the wood of my staff. I did not land a blow. I could not—could not disgrace a man in anguish. I ached for us. I ached for the duty that neither of us could abandon.

At last he broke the staff in two.

And with my back to my King, protecting Him from the blade’s purchase, Shulgi speared his knife into my heart.

White-blossomed agony ripped through my chest.

He twisted it further, and helped me fall easily to the floor when my legs gave way under the weight of pain. Numbness and the dull roar of blood in my ears made Shulgi’s words fairer than their place in my ear.

“We will write of honorable death in battle, both of you, and a protector until the end, Ninos. I swear it.”

Another oath, I thought, my last.

He placed my saber in hand. It was all I could now take with me. My prince turned away with the knife in hand, and from the bloody floor I prayed that Nanna take me before I watched my greatest failure.

But it was not Nanna who came, but the cool wash of a fruit-cone and the sprinkle of a genie. It was the hand of a staunch protector, reached out to stem the flow of my blood. It was the light of the moon and the radiant sun of the new King, crowned at midnight by Gods with blood on his left hand and his right placed in prayer over his heart.

Come, guardian, the genies commanded. My heart could not follow. My world and my world after life lay broken on a plush bed with a smile on his lips.

You will not come?

No. I told him my final request. I poured every ounce of duty from the depth of my leaking soul into my words.

Then you will stay.

Light and dark spun a weave around me, my vision flashing between the genie and my King. Power gripped my hands and feet and strength ebbed back into my limbs. I grew taller, and taller still. The skin I wore hardened to stone, and wings erupted from my back. Another leg. Teeth. Sharper than any ornamental knife.

The genie nodded and turned to my King, waiting to carry his grief into a life beyond palaces and lion hunts.

I took my post.

*     *     *
And the hands of the gods turn the wheel forward, onward, pushing like a slithering thing organic. Daughters are given to the goddess and the temple, sons are given to the world. Sons grow strong, or they do not grow at all. Sons pleat their skirts and wear their caps of kingship until dusk breaks over them. It is not the duty of a pious man to keep his son from honor bloody, honor befitting a king made to swallow the world whole and make peace in its devouring.

*     *     *
So sings the hymn of Ninos, the protector of Ur-Nammu, non-apotheosized, King of Ur and Sumer and Akkad:

Lamassu. Double-aspect. A guardian. Twinned in pairs, and perched in stone to protect the King from all those, foreign and domestic, who wish him harm. They are engraved in stone tablets and dug into the dirt under door frames of homes, bound as gateway guardians of the city walls. They walk eternal with five legs, a bull’s body, and eagle wings. They champion the powerful and rise sentinels where men fail.

Let them rest on the border between safety and violent ends. Let them snarl and rip prey apart with jaws unhinged. Let the King rest His hand at His heart with ease, for He knows He sits protected by the divine. Let Him forever chase lions over the thundering of horse-step.

*     *     *
Look there: There are two. The eater and the protector, lions both. See the man dying. Smell on him the stink of holy fear and failure, and hear his last request.

Let me be Lamassu.