Gilgamesh Immortal (Chronicles of the Nephilim) (16 page)

The next morning, Gilgamesh awoke to the news that Ishtar was gone. She had left in the night for the desert, after killing
half a dozen hierodules and male cult prostitutes in an orgy of violence.

He figured that she was so enraged at his rejection of her offer that she lashed out at her pleasure-givers and took off into the desert to cool off. Or maybe she was
traveling to Mount Hermon to attempt to worm her way back into their good graces. Or maybe she was engaged in diabolical plans of revenge. He had better stay close to Ninurta just in case.

But Gilgamesh was not
easily intimidated, and he was not above asserting his authority as king, even to a goddess. He detested the unsightly eyesore of that mammoth tree in the middle of Eanna, and he suspected it was like a weed of her own growing roots of manipulation. It was time to address this aggravating blight on the city of Uruk —
his city
.

He grabbed his huge axe that was crafted for his journey to the Great Cedar Forest and went to gather Enkidu.

When they arrived at the temple complex,
Ninurta stood sentry at the gates while Gilgamesh and Enkidu entered the complex and found their way to the immense Huluppu tree.

It was already
five hundred feet high and seventy feet round, its tangled roots clutching the ground like a reptilian claw.

Gilgamesh surveyed the surrounding buildings and open areas of the city to determine which way they should lay the huge tree to the ground.
They heard the caw of the mighty Anzu thunderbird in the sky and saw it launch from a nest high above and fly off into the sun. It must have sensed what was about to happen.

“Enkidu,” said Gilgamesh, “
let us chop some wood.”

They raised their axes high. But before they could swing
them, they were interrupted by the haunting sound of a female voice behind them, “Mighty Gilgamesh!”

They turned to see
a raven-haired woman in a translucent flowing robe and a wreath of flowers on her strikingly long hair. Her face was milky pale and almost seemed as translucent as her gown, which drew the eyes of both men to her voluptuous curves and titillating peeks of her sexuality. When she spoke, she sounded as if she was singing, or at least that was the effect on these men.

“I am Lilith, and I live in the folds of this mighty Huluppu
tree.”

The men glanced at one another curiously.

“It is the Great Goddess Earth Mother, the Tree of Life. She is the link between heaven and earth. Why would you seek to murder her?”

“Murder?” said Gilgamesh. “It looks like
just a tree to me, not a person.”

“Ah, but that is where you are wrong, O king. The mystery of life flows through her sap. Her branches bear the fruit of
love, and her roots are the very nourishment of the soil around you.”

Enkidu wisecracked
, “I think if you were to ask the soil, it might disagree with you, and consider itself a victim of depletion.”

Gilgamesh looked at the ground surrounding the tree. Enkidu was right. It was cracked dry and completely void of all
vitality and vegetation. The tree was sucking the life out of the soil, not nourishing it. If given more time, it would no doubt suck the life out of all of Uruk and expand to the cities nearby, Eridu, Ur and the others.

Lilith drew closer. Her curves and crevices becoming more distracting to the men.

Her voice became tinged with desperation. “Does Ishtar know what you are doing? Does she approve?” she said.

“
I am king of Uruk,” said Gilgamesh. “I built this temple, I rule the four quarters, and I do not approve of this tree.”

Lilith
said, “Do you build your kingdom on the exploitation and degradation of your environment?”

“
I have been accused of worse,” he responded.

At that moment, Enkidu could swear he felt the ground move slightly below his feet. He gripped his axe tightly.

“You leave me no choice but to call up the earth to fight back and protect itself,” she said.

“The earth is unruly enough,” said Gilgamesh. “It is mankind that has harnessed her and tended her to bring order out of the chaos.”

Lilith spoke, but did not address what Gilgamesh said. She simply stated, “Ningishzida, arise.”

Both Gilgamesh and Enkidu felt the earth move
again. There was something burrowing through the dirt beneath their feet, and it no doubt was this ‘Ningishzida’ that Lilith called forth.

Enkidu spotted the moving
mound, and with speedy reaction brought his axe down on the moving pile, burying it deep into the earth with an explosion of dirt. When he jerked his axe back out, a gush of blood spurted out of the ground. Whatever that Ningishzida was crawling beneath their feet, it was not going to arise to do anything.

Gilgamesh said to Enkidu, “S
he is a demoness. Let us get this done.”

As a Naphil with a sensitive connection to the spiritual world, Gilgamesh could sense when he was in the presence of a spirit being.

They turned to continue their chopping, only to see two young children standing in their way, hugging the tree behind their backs. They were both feminine, but one of them seemed to Gilgamesh like a boy dressed up as a girl.

“You would murder my
little girls, Lili and Lilu, as well?” cried Lilith. “What kind of monster are you?”

Gilgamesh threw a glance toward Enkidu and said, “
They are demons too.” And they both swung their axes at the children, who seemed to dissolve into the tree as the blades buried in deep.

A scream penetrated the air that reminded Enkidu of the screams they heard in the Great Cedar Forest, only this one was more evil sounding. Like they had just struck a dragon.

Then they noticed that the bark of the tree started
to writhe and twist like a living thing. They looked closer and noticed that the tree appeared to be made from the intertwining bodies of human beings that were all in torturous pain. It was like the tree was an imprisonment of the damned.

Another good reason to cut it down.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu continued their hacking away at the giant organism of torture for over an hour, until it finally began to creak and lean.

They stood back, and Enkidu shouted his signature, “HO, HURRAH!”

The mammoth timber fell and landed on a significant portion of Ishtar’s remodeled temple, crushing it to smithereens, exactly as Gilgamesh had planned.

“Whoops,” said Gilgamesh. “I guess Ishtar has some more work to keep her busy.” They both smiled.

Gilgamesh knew the world did not see the last of this damnable abomination. He had heard of the Huluppu tree from before the Deluge, and knew that its seed survived the waters and would seek to grow somewhere as long as there was a Mother Earth Goddess to worship. This demoness would never stop trying to rise up and take power. The world was just not ready for such a deity yet.

“
Let us get this thing cut up,” said Gilgamesh. “I have a surprise gift for when the goddess returns.”

• • • • •

The goddess Ishtar was planning
a return to Uruk soon. But she had her own surprise that she was working on for Gilgamesh. She had learned certain imprisoning spells of enchantment from Enki back before the Flood. They had used them on Leviathan, the sea dragon by luring it into an undersea cavern with the spells written on the rock walls. When Leviathan became surrounded by the engraved spells, it became temporarily under the control of its captors. From there, they unleashed the sea monster upon the field of battle in the desert of Dudael. The devastation had been massive.

And now, Ishtar had found her way into a certain
desert canyon where she could engrave those spells of enchantment on a gorge of steep walls. She had been focused on her task for a couple of days, and was almost done when she heard the sound of her intended quarry approaching her trap. A mighty roar bellowed through the canyon and echoed like thunder off the steep rock walls around her.

“
Come to me, my monster of chaos,” she muttered. “I have need of your talent for destruction.”

Ishtar returned to the city of Uruk a few days after her disappearance. But she did so without fanfare
and late in the evening when no one was out to see her except for watch guards.

She approached her temple complex only to discover that her tree, her beautiful single Huluppu tree was
, gone. Cut down. Ripped from the heart of the earth. Her Anzu bird flown away, her Ningishzida gone, and her Lilith disappeared.

Her guttural cry of
affliction ripped through half the city.

It woke Gilgamesh. He grinned to himself. The ever present never slumbering
Ninurta even gave a slight upturn of his lips.

Enkidu heard it as well, but he was not so pleased, because he knew that this would probably mean
a personal war of vengeance between Ishtar and Gilgamesh and he did not like the prospects. Ishtar would not give up until she was victor. And she could not die, so it would be an unending war. Gilgamesh however, could die.

Ishtar entered her temple area to be slapped
in her face with the sight of half her remodeled temple crushed to smithereens from the fallen timber. All the work she had commissioned was destroyed in an instant by the hand of that protected worm of a king.

We shall see who can do more damage to whose
walls by the midnight hour of this evening
, she thought.

As priest king of the city, he had complete jurisdiction over every structure, even the temple complexes of the gods.
He could do whatever he wanted to her temple. But Ishtar had wagered that her bold move would put him in a precarious political position as her temple grandeur in Nippur had placed Enlil in a precarious political position before the Flood. Enlil was at the top of the pantheon and Nippur was his patronized city, yet even he avoided the potential public relations damage of a quarrel with Inanna over her excessive temple enhancement. As a result she usurped his power in the city.

But Gilgamesh
is not so politically astute
, she thought. She had counted on his self interest, that he would seek to avoid doing anything that would reinforce the tyrannical reputation he was trying to overcome, and thus enable her to slowly encroach upon his authority.

She had figured wrong.
He was asserting his territorial claims over her and he damned the consequences.

She could crush him like a frog, were it not for his personal bodyguard, that
bilious overgrown brute, Ninurta, and for the oath of the pantheon not to transgress the narrative of the mythology they established. Well, oaths were
always
eventually broken. It was just a matter of time, and a matter of the right moment.

When she walked through the courtyard, it was full of servants and votaries playing a sport with wooden instruments called a pukku and mikku. Their fun annoyed her. She screamed, “Get out of here with your toys! This is my temple!” The servants scrambled and she continued on
, wondering when they had started wasting their time in such ways.

W
hen she stepped into her throne room, she received added insult to her injury when she saw the display of a newly carved wooden throne replacing her old one. On it was a letter sealed with the king’s own seal.

She opened it.
It read,
Dearest
Inanna
Ishtar
. The bravado of this meat sack fed her rage. Accidentally writing her old name and then crossing it out as if he forgot she had changed her name.

Please accept my apologies for the minor
demolition and inadvertent inconvenience I may have caused your remodeling with the downing of the Huluppu tree. It was an impediment to the architectural and structural integrity of the great city-state of Uruk. I would have preferred to tell you this personally, but you had been vacant from the city. Please accept these tokens of my appreciation of your patronage of my city.

Tokens, plural?
She thought.
What other object of spite did he create to vex me?

The letter concluded,
I had them expertly carved out of the wood of the Huluppu tree for your nostalgic remembrance, and included the pukku and mikku instruments for the sporting pleasure of your servants.

She crumpled the paper in her fist
and burned with malevolence,
for the sporting pleasure of my servants? I will send those players with their instruments into Sheol.

She
walked through her palace area to find the final offending object. When she got to her chambers, she saw it. The queenly bed of her intimate quarters had been replaced by a carved wooden one. This was an obvious attack on her sexual status and offer of marriage to Gilgamesh. She burst out in a fit of rage and cracked the bed into pieces. It was a good thing there were no servants or hierodules around her at the moment, because they would have lost their lives under her wrath.

She dragged her bed out of her chambers and down into the throne room where she set it on fire along with her
wooden throne. She procured some of the diviners to add incense and incantations to the flames. It would be a homing beacon for her revenge.

She whispered to the earth and sky, “Gilgamesh, you will regret the day you
disrespected my name.”

She was not going to wait for
the midnight hour after all. She wanted her revenge and she wanted it now.

A
mighty bellowing roar was heard throughout the land, and shuttered through the dark streets of Uruk. Something immense and very wicked was descending upon the city.