The city's heart was now beating. The granary stood secure, the waterwheel turned, the fields were green. But a new chaos emerged from the order. The Voice returned from successful trades with conflicting accounts of agreements. The distribution of grain from the granary to the families, based on their labor, became a source of quiet dispute. Human memory was proving to be the most fragile material of all.
Lulal came to him, frustration etched on his face. "Anu claims he was promised three measures of salt for one of barley, but the trader from the lagoon swears it was two. The wife of Baru says her husband dug three more rods of canal than his neighbor. How do we hold the truth?"
Enki looked at the busy square, at the foundation stone now surrounded by the evidence of their labor. "We give the truth a shape it cannot forget."
He led Lulal to a patch of wet clay by the river, away from the crowd. He did not draw a picture of a man or a sun. Instead, he pressed the tip of a sharpened reed into the clay.
"This," he said, making a simple wedge mark, "is one. One measure of grain." He made five more. "This is six." He then made a different, more complex mark beside it. "And this... this is 'barley'. Not a picture of it. A sign for it. A word."
Lulal stared, his breath caught. He was a mind built for structure, for the logic of physical things. This was a new kind of architecture—the architecture of thought itself.
"You are building a house for words," Lulal whispered, awe-struck.
"Together, we will," Enki said. "We will create signs for numbers, for goods, for names. We will scratch them onto damp clay tablets, and fire them hard. A man's contribution, a trader's promise... they will no longer live in a fading memory. They will live here." He tapped the tablet. "It will be the memory of the city."
Lulal's eyes shone with the prospect. This was power. Clean, precise, and enduring.
But then, the sky betrayed them.
It came from the north—a sudden, bruising purple cloud. There was no warning rain, only a furious, white hail. Stones of ice, hard as pebbles, hammered down upon the fledgling city. The villagers ran for cover as the precious green shoots in the fields were shredded, pounded into the mud.
The storm passed as quickly as it came, leaving a world of wreckage and a silence broken only by soft weeping. Their work, their hope, was battered and broken.
Enki walked out into the devastation. He did not speak. He went to the riverbank and gathered materials: a large, dried gourd, a piece of wood curved by the water, sinew from a recent hunt. He worked with a quiet intensity, and by the time the stunned people emerged from their shelters, he held a new creation—the first harp.
He did not play a gentle lament. He closed his eyes, and his fingers found the strings.
The music that came forth was the storm.
It was dissonant and sharp, a percussive rhythm that mimicked the terrifying crack of hail on mud-brick. The melody was the wail of the wind, a chaotic, frightening scale. The people flinched, reliving the fear. But then, weaving through the chaos, a second voice emerged from the strings—a clear, sweet, and stubbornly resilient theme. It was the memory of the green shoots, a melody that bent under the onslaught but never broke, rising again and again, defiant against the storm's fury.
He was not erasing the disaster. He was transforming it. He was giving their fear and their loss a voice, and in doing so, showing them that their resilience was the true counter-melody.
When the last note faded, the silence was different. It was no longer the silence of despair, but of awe.
Lulal stood, his scribe's stylus forgotten in his belt. He looked from the complex, beautiful harp to the simple, utilitarian marks in the clay. The clay could record a measure of grain. But this... this music could measure the depth of a human soul. It could hold a truth that no wedge-shaped mark could ever capture.
He did not write the first administrative tablet that day. Instead, he committed every note of "Enki's Hailstorm" to memory. It was a different kind of record. Not for accounting, but for the heart. It was the first song.