There is no place like Mexico City.
It really doesn't matter how long I've been gone, or what I've done in the interim. The travels between arrivals or the experiences I've had out there in the world change nothing. No matter how long or how far I've gone, when I return to Mexico City, it fills a special place in my heart, like a second home, or perhaps even a second skin.
I was born to a corn farmer, and an elementary teacher in Nebraska. When my father died from an accident, my mother and I moved to Amarillo, Texas. I was twelve then.
There's not much to do in Amarillo for a long-legged blond from Nebraska, except to watch long legged boys from Texas ride horses, and round-up cattle. So, I was bored most of the time. Motivated to leave, motivated to see the world, any world with more to it than acres of corn, and miles of dust and cow shit.
Graduating early, I joined the Navy, two years in service, then three years of over scheduled college, with day and night classes and then to work. In the Navy I saw Japan, learned the language, adding it to four years of Spanish, and two years of German. Knowing the language had me stationed in Japan most of my time, which of course was the reason for learning.
Tokyo amazed me. It was a city as deep as it was high. The entire city felt, and looked like millions of people living together who actually gave a shit about each other, and their home.
Mexico City, looked, and felt like the antichrist of Tokyo. It was the Dread Steppes, the Nine Rings of Chaos, a city of Natural Selection. I loved it more than I can put into words and that says more than any words I could conjure — because I know a lot of words. Sei dankbar, dass ich keine Hexe bin.
Meeting up with Slate, the Unfortunate, was my reason for being here, but even without that, I might have flown here after what Kane did to me. I am not in the habit of handing out my heart. In fact, other than Kane, only one other had what I offered him, and that was my father.
Mexico City matched the pain I walked in, it felt like the only place on this planet able to bear my furious state inside its chaos. Not just anger or angst, but venomous thoughts raged in my mind as I exited the plane, and worked my way through the mass of people hurrying to luggage belts, exits, and looking for a cab.
I made a bargain, and I now understood the Powers I made that bargain with — and knew that backing out was not an option. Not if I wished to live outside of servitude to mind bending, will shattering beings. Oh yes, I understood the principle of human verse demi-god or whatever the fuck they were. I’ve studied my mythology well. Humans lose.
Perhaps Kami, was the better term. Kami were the Japanese gods and goddesses of all levels of power, and reach. Great and small, they numbered in the thousands. The greatest of them, the Okami, god of gods, was Amaterasu, the goddess of light — all light, and everything light shined on in the heavens, throughout the hells and across the earth. Without her all life dies, all worlds crumble, and the heavens fall into the hells, crashing.
Sounded like a blast of a time right now.
“Perdóneme,” I said, to a tall dark-haired woman standing in the middle of the stream of humanity, seeking luggage and escape from the throngs.
Instead of letting me pass, she stepped backward, blocking my way, bringing me up short with a jarring effort not to plow into her. “Perhaps not,” she said.
“What?” I said, surprised and confused.
“Excuse me. I meant, no,” she said, as she turned to meet my eyes with green gems harder than diamonds ever were.
“No, what?” I asked, stepping back.
She stepped forward, keeping a hand’s breath away from me. “No, I do not pardon you.”
“You don’t…” I looked right to left, unsure of what was going on, feeling that others must have been as confused by this woman’s aggressive move as I was — and found no one paying us the slightest bit of attention.
“Looking for help?” she asked. “You won’t find any such thing from me.”
“Who the fuck, are you?” I asked, feeling that if others couldn’t see my rage, then it was Go time, and if they could, well, this madness would be ended shortly.
“I am Inanna. You may call me Ishtar, Amaterasu or Gaia or Medb or Asherah or Mother Queen of the Northwest, or the Morrigan. I don’t care what you call me, I will not excuse you or be kind in any way if you do not cease your childish actions,” she said, and her words churned into my guts like ice drills.
Grabbing my stomach I stumbled back, away from her, and into the wall to the right of me. The pain was obnoxious. There was no reason my body should know how to signal this amount of pain. If I was really injured enough to warrant this, I should be dead. This pain, therefore, was all in my head, in my mind, and my mind right now was in this woman’s hands.
Her right hand came up, and she clenched it into a fist, snapping it closed. The pain doubled. Impossible, but it did. Then she twisted her wrist as if ripping out my guts, and I fell to my knees in utter disbelief that the threshold could spike that high. My mouth and throat opened to let out a scream I had no breath to evoke.
My vision faltered and blurred, black spots formed and grew — and then I saw a strawberry; a perfect single strawberry hanging in the air.
I stood, slow and faltering, but I stood. The pain washed over me like ocean waves, and it was terrible to behold, but I stood, and let them crash.
“You need to do better than that,” I growled. “What he did to me hurt much more than this.”
She raised an eyebrow, and the pain stopped, “Impressive. At least you’re the right one. I was hoping you weren’t, and would die. He’s made mistakes before. Well, once. It could’ve happened again. Let’s go.”
She turned, and started walking. When I didn’t follow right away, she stopped, and said without looking back, “Follow or I will force you to. It’s not flattering when I do that – people tend to walk stiff legged, and awkward for weeks after.” She shrugged, “Your choice.”
I decided to follow.
I started to follow, and then we were in the back of a limo. I don’t mean to say that I followed her through the airport, out the doors and got into a limo waiting at the curb. I mean, I began to follow, and then I was sitting with her in the back of a limo – without all that other stuff bothering to happen.
I looked to her. She was gorgeous. Beautiful enough to make me catch my breath, and I’m not a lesbian at all. “Why bother with the limo? Why not just materialize at your home, or a hotel?”
She smiled, “You don’t get thrown much do you?”
“I’m a reporter. We report what happens, not what we want or think is possible.”
She seemed to accept this. “Then to answer your question, because I’m not staying. This is not our time. It is stolen.”
“To what purpose?” I asked, feeling that she wouldn’t bother if there wasn’t a truly important purpose.
“Perspective, and your lack of it,” she answered. “You have a narrow view of the world. It’s not your fault, you’ve required little more than the average mortal. Your boundaries are wider than most but that’s not really saying anything impressive. Most mortals see less than cattle. This is not an excuse however for what you’re playing at. You made a bargain.”
“I made the bargain only because of Kane,” I defended.
“I don’t care why you made it. You may as well have made it because your stomach hurt, and now it doesn’t. It makes zero difference. You made a bargain. Now you’re being a child.”
“A child? My heart is that meaningless to you?”
“Your heart has no meaning to me. A child does. What you fail to see is what’s at stake,” she told me, and jabbed her finger into my forehead.
What I saw wasn’t half as interesting as how I was seeing it — every plant, bird, fish, squirrel, bear, beast, man, woman and child; every single one of them. Not as a group, not as a mass of flesh, fur, and leaves, but each one, in personal view as if each had my full attention. And seeing isn’t correct. I knew each of them; their names, their dreams, their children, their lives, their fears. Each and every pain, and pleasure.
“If you continue on this path,” her voice entered the vision from the cold planets above, “over two thirds of all you see will burn in dragon fire.” And then columns of hellfire hit the earth. It struck from the heavens, it roared up from the earth, it split the sky, and wiped whole cities away in roars and tidal waves of lava.
“The dragons will war!” Inanna shouted from the scarred night above.
I screamed.
I felt them dying. I felt them clinging to me, all of them, millions of little hands, and wide begging eyes rolling in pain, washing away in flame.
Her finger left my forehead, and I fell to the floor of the limo gasping and sobbing, my body wracked, and convulsing in terror and grief.
“Now, ask me what I think of your heart,” she said, picking up a bottle from the side bar, and reading at the label. “Rum’s always a good choice.”
I tried to rise but my body ignored my will, until she upended the bottle, and poured it on me.
“Fuck!” I yelled.
“Yes, fuck. That’s the issue, isn’t it? What to fuck, who to fuck, what fucking means, what it means to you, what it means to them, what it might mean… blah blah blah. You’ve read Gilgamesh. You’re an educated woman. Wake up! Of course, you fuck them. You civilize them. You tame them. You are their woman, the only power they will ever hold sacred. They chose this method of war long ago. They did it in the spirit that men used to decide wars through single combat. Two heroes fought, instead of two armies. One death, instead of thousands of deaths, and the spread of disease, crippled men, thousands of orphans, famine and the robbers and pirates who would swoop in soon after. Slavery, and the spread of despair avoided because one hero fought another. And what do you choose? Armageddon because of your heart? What a beautiful ethic you have. I hope it will comfort you, when you stand on scorched earth and the crumbling of infant bones.”
The limo came to a stop and the door opened. “Now, get out.”
“What…?” I gasped.
“Get out. The meter is running. We’re done. Good-bye.”
Then I was lying on the sidewalk in front of a hotel, and the limo was entering the traffic stream.
I was wrong. I had no idea what Powers I was dealing with. None at all. Not the slightest notion. And now I was reduced to maniacal sobbing by my arrogance.
My only saving grace was that my mind was mortal. It could not sustain that level of awareness, and soon the whole experience was a vague dream, and then it was difficult to remember a face, and then I could not conjure any element of the vision she subjected me to. It all just faded.
If it had remained in the stark clarity she cast it with, I would have gone mad. I have no doubt of this. Feeling thousands – millions of children burn as they clutched at me to save them — how long could anyone sustain that, and not crack? Minutes? For me, I knew I wouldn’t have lasted half an hour. I don’t have any particular fondness for children, but I was human.
Kane wasn’t just right, he was fucking right.
He also sent the strawberry.
I sighed, got up off the sidewalk, and dusted myself off. “Fine, I fucked up. And I was fucked in the head. Not the first time.”
Two items were spinning in my brain, and now I allowed myself to look at them. One was the Epic of Gilgamesh. The second was the word, ‘dragons’. I also decided it was time to find out more about this woman, Inanna.
Looking up at the hotel, it appeared to be a nice one, and probably not random. She seemed more the Fate kind of gal, rather than the Random kind.
Since I didn’t care about price, I went in, got a good room with a bath tub and checked in. After a bath I had the porter come up, and did some quick shopping through him, then had two women come up and described some shoes and outfits, and sent them off with money.
I called down to the desk and had them send up a new laptop, after ensuring they had the specs I needed. Once all that was acquired, and the last of my minions dismissed, I spent four hours in an open robe, nude tanning on the deck, researching my three topics of interest.
Inanna was an ass-kicking bitch. Funny as hell too. Goddess of sex and war.
Yippy ki ya, mother-fuckers.
Her father appeared to be the god of gods, but Inanna clearly ran the show. She told heaven what they were going to do, and no one talked back. Except one, and he didn’t as much talk back as guide, and teach. His name was Enki. A wizard, I supposed. Powerful, and knowledgeable, but not quite a god in the regular sense. Also, someone not to fuck with, and no one did, including Inanna. They seemed to view each other as equals. Peers. Though Enki held the position of elder. This didn’t keep Inanna from taking all his shit, but did help Enki with getting some of it back. That story was hilarious.
Inanna was linked strongly with the dragon Kur. Kur appeared to be the first dragon of written history – which doesn’t mean it was the first, only that we don’t have any records of an earlier dragon. Kur lived in the nothingness, the void, the abyss of death which was also the gate for rebirth; a spiritual realm. Cylinder seals showing a goddess believed to be Inanna portrayed her standing on a dragon, for she is addressed in hymns as the dragon. It may be she who is prayed to as "my dragon who walks by side". Inanna's dragon aspect marks her underworld divinity.
The dragon is a powerful mythic symbol that represents feminine principles. Often associated with mountains (breasts) and caves (vagina or womb), Sumer's dragons are said to dwell in the great abyss of depth and nothingness, the nether world. In that the word for the great dragon of the abyss in Sumerian myths is the same as the word for the underworld itself (kur), some of their attributes may be conflated and thereby become synonymous. "The serpent and the dragon reveal her [Inanna's] connection with the underworld aspect of the Neolithic goddess and with Nammu, the serpent goddess of the abyss" (Baring & Cashford 195).
That was interesting to me, but where were the five brothers in all of that? Also, this appeared to talk about an actual dragon, not brothers who were princes. I couldn’t find anything about them at all, not in connection with her. There was mention of a husband – who she condemned to hell for half the year, every year…
Inanna was right, in that I had read the Epic of Gilgamesh, but that was in High School, a long time ago. Gilgamesh was an asshole. He was the strongest warrior, offspring of the gods, but living in the mortal world as a demi-god with no peer or equal. He became bored with no challenge and no friend. So, he terrorized people. He took their daughters and wives as he wished. Beat men when they objected.
To solve this, the gods created Enkidu. But he was wild. Born from the mountains he was little more than animal in human form. To civilize Enkidu, Shamhat, the priestess of the Uruk-Haven temple was called in.
Shamhat unclutched her bosom, exposed her sex, and he [Enkidu] took in her voluptuousness. She was not restrained, but took his energy. She spread out her robe and he lay upon her, she performed for the primitive the act of womankind.
His lust groaned over her; for six days and seven nights Enkidu stayed aroused, and had intercourse with her until he was sated with her charms. But when he turned his attention to his animals, the gazelles saw Enkidu and darted off, the wild animals distanced themselves from his body.
Enkidu ... his utterly depleted(?) body, his knees that wanted to go off with his animals went rigid; Enkidu was diminished, his running was not as before. But then he drew himself up, for his understanding had broadened.
Turning around, he sat down at Shamhat's feet, gazing into her face, his ears attentive as she spoke.
Shamhat said to Enkidu: "You are beautiful," Enkidu, you are become like a god. Why do you gallop around the wilderness with the wild beasts?
Come, let me bring you into Uruk-Haven, to the Holy Temple, the residence of Anu and Ishtar…
~ Epic of Gilgamesh: Tablet One
Wasn’t one of the names Inanna used for herself, Ishtar?
Sitting back from the desk, with these thoughts tumbling in my mind, an idea formed, which felt like it fit the situation, and the need. Inanna was right. Not so much that I was being childish, but rather thinking as a mortal, human, and of the present age. In Inanna’s time, in Sumer, this situation was much different, and it was easy to see how she would feel her point of view was more mature. Seen further up the history lines, into the middle ages and beyond, viewing this as seen by royal families, changed it as well. This was a matter of state and power. Marriages were political tools, not for love. In many areas of the world where royal families were concerned, this was still true to form. Marriages created allies and peace between countries.
Clearly Kane understood the situation. He understood it before I was ever born.
Also, didn’t I have a responsibility here to the world as well? Certainly I didn’t ask for this responsibility, but who gets to ask in these situations? My decision should not be based on who I loved the most or who bedded me best. It should be based on who I believed was best for the world. To make such a choice I must know each as best as I was able.
A man often showed who he was in bed more than any other situation. Not just in sex, but also in sleep, when the face no longer conformed to the demeanor chosen for facing the world. When he was relaxed in deep sleep, his true face could be seen.
Just after midnight, and a late diner, I decided on my course of action from this point forward.