To the Land of the Living (17 page)

“– and for various wishes,” shouted the one called Eadfrith, “and for envy, and for terror, and that thou may have grace, and if thou hast this sort with thee, thou shalt be prosperous, and ever acceptable”

“Good sir! Here, good sir, here, if you please!”

“No harm? No harm?” The Hairy Man guffawed, showing huge chopper-like teeth. “No harm playing tag with a mastodon, either, eh, my friend? If you’re big enough, I suppose. Walk right up to it, tweak it by the trunk, pull its ears? Eh?”

“A mastodon?” Gilgamesh said blankly. A strange word: he wondered if he had heard it right.

“Never mind. You wouldn’t know, would you? Before your time. Never mind. But I tell you, this is no city to be strolling around in unprotected. Nobody warned you of that?”

“Herod said something about wizards and mages, but”

“Good sir! Good sir!”

“But you ignored him. Herod! That clown!” The small deep-set eyes of the Hairy Man were bright with contempt. “Sometimes even Herod will tell you something useful. You should have heeded his warning. Brasil’s a place of many perils.”

“I have no fear of dying,” said Gilgamesh.

“Dying is the least terrible thing that could happen to you here.” The Hairy Man placed a wrinkle-skinned leathery-looking hand on Gilgamesh’s arm. “Come. Here. Walk about with me a little, up and down.”

“Do you have a name?”

“Names are nothing,” said the Hairy Man. “It was a fright for you, what happened outside, eh?”

Gilgamesh shrugged.

The Hairy Man leaned close. There was an odd sweetish flavor about his furry body. “There are places in the streets here where the other worlds break through. That is always a danger, that the fabric will not hold, that other worlds will break through. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” Gilgamesh told the Hairy Man. “There was such a place in Uruk. A passageway that ran down from our world into this one. Inanna the goddess descended through it, when she went to Hell to visit her sister Ereshkigal. And during the rite of the Closing of the Gate I dropped my drum and my drumstick into that passageway when a girl startled me by crying out the name of a god.” He had not thought of these things in centuries. Recollection, flooding back now, swept him with uncontrollable emotion. “The sacred drum, it was, which Ur-nangar the craftsman made for me from the wood of the huluppu-tree, by which I entered my trances and saw the things that mortal eyes are unable to see. That was how I lost my friend Enkidu, the first time, when I dropped my drum and my drumstick into that dark and terrible hole of cinders and ashes, and he entered the nether world to bring them back.”

“Then you know,” the Hairy Man said. “You have to learn where these places are, and stay away from them.”

Gilgamesh was trembling. Old memories were surging with new life within him.

Enkidu! Enkidu!

Once again he saw Enkidu, gray with dust and snarled in masses of tangled cobwebs, coming forth from that pit in Uruk that led down to the world of the dead; and Enkidu as he came forth was a dead man himself, shorn of all life-strength, who within twelve days would be carried off forever to the House of Dust and Darkness. How great had been the mourning of Gilgamesh! How he had cursed the gods of death for taking Enkidu from him! And then, after Gilgamesh’s own time had run its course and he had joined Enkidu in the After world, losing him again – what pain it was, to be reunited with him and then to lose him that second time, when Enkidu had stepped between those quarrelsome Spaniards and Englishmen and caught a bullet meant for someone else–

“And once more he is lost to me,” Gilgamesh said aloud. “As though the curse of Inanna follows us even to the Afterworld, and we must find each other and be parted again, and find each other once more, and part once more, over and over and over”

“What is this you say?” asked the Hairy Man.

“We were on that far shore, Enkidu and I, among a caravan of strangers, of sleazy conniving Later Dead. And while I was gone from the camp, while I was away hunting, there was an
attack on the camp, and when I returned I found all of them dead except this brindle dog Ajax; but of Enkidu there was no sign. Brigands must have swept him off, or demons, to torment me by separating us once again. But I will find him, if I must seek until the gods grow old!”

“In the Afterworld there is no finding anyone,” the Hairy Man said, “except by accident, or the whim of those dark gods who rule this place. You surely must know that.”

“I will find him.”

“And if he is dead?”

“Then he’ll come back again, as all the dead here do sooner or later. I tell you I will find him.”

“Come, now,” said the Hairy Man. “Come and walk with me, until your head is clear.”

“Wait,” Gilgamesh said. He brushed the Hairy Man’s hand aside. “Do you think that these doctors here could give me a spell that would help me trace him?”

“They will tell you they can. But in the Afterworld there is no finding anyone, Gilgamesh.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Gilgamesh went toward the rows of wooden tables and benches.

“Good sir, I am Aethelbald,” said one of the merchants of spells eagerly.

“I am Eadfrith,” said the one beside him, beckoning.

“I am Wulfgeat. I have here a drink that is good for giddiness and fever of the brain, for flowing gall and the yellow disease, for singing in the ears, and defective hearing”

Gilgamesh impatiently waved them to silence. “Who are you people?”

“We are Angles here,” said Wulfgeat, “except for this Saxon beside me, and masters of wortcunning and leechdom are we, and starcraft. Our work is substantial! Our skills are boundless!”

“Wortcunning?” Gilgamesh said. “Starcraft?”

“Aye, and may it be that we have a spell for you! What is your need, good sir? What is your need?”

“There is a man for whom I search,” said Gilgamesh after a moment. “A friend whom I have lost.”

“A lost friend? A lost friend?” The spell-mongers began to murmur and confer among themselves. “Viper’s bugloss?”
suggested one. “The ash of dead bees, and linseed oil?” Another said. “Cammock and thung, wenwort and elder root, steeped in strong mead or clear ale.” But the third shook his head violently and said, “It must be done by dreaming. The tokens must needs be induced. To see a well opened beside one’s house, or a hen with chickens, or to be shod with a new pair of shoes – aye, those are the tokens, and we must give him the potion that brings on such visions as will be useful, and then the next night”

“What is this?” a sudden familiar buzzing voice cut in. “What’s going on here?”

Herod, pushing and shoving his way through the throng, appeared abruptly at Gilgamesh’s side. The Hairy Man scowled and muttered something unintelligible beneath his breath. The merchants of spells looked alarmed, and turned away, gesticulating toward the opposite side of the building and loudly crying out the merits of their wares to those gathered over there.

“Where have you been?” Herod demanded. “Simon’s had people looking all over the place for you.”

“I thought I would walk through the town.”

“Gevalt! And came
here?
Ah. Ah, I think I know why. Shopping for a spell that’ll lead you to Uruk, are you? Is that what you’re up to? Despite everything I told you last night?”

From afar came the sound of a mighty voice crying, “The Book of the Fifty Names! Who will buy the Book of the Fifty Names?”

“The Hairy Man brought me in here,” Gilgamesh said. “I was simply wandering from one street to another when something strange happened to me, a fit, perhaps – in the days when I lived on Earth I was subject to fits, you know, though I thought I was exempt from that in the Afterworld – and I grew dizzy – I saw faces – I saw ancient streets –” Angrily he shook his head. “No, I’m not trying to buy a spell for finding Uruk. I seek only Enkidu. And if these wizards”

“Marduk! Marukka! Marutukku!” roared the mighty voice.

“These wizards are fishmongers and rabble,” Herod said scornfully, making the sign of the horns at Aethelbald and Eadfrith and Wulfgeat. They shrank back from him. “Peasants is what they are. Shopkeepers, at the very best.” He drew the six-pointed star in the air before them and they turned
from him, pale and shaken. “You see? You see, Gilgamesh? What can they do? Cure an ague for you, maybe? Stop up a sniveling nose? These are foolish men here. They will not find your Enkidu for you.”

“Can you be sure of that, Herod?”

A crafty look came into Herod’s eyes as he peered up at Gilgamesh.

“King of Uruk, if I show you a true wizard who will give you the answer you seek, will you abandon the idea of taking Simon off on this insane expedition?”

The Hairy Man’s yellow-rimmed eyes widened in surprise. “You speak of Calandola?” he asked in his thickest, harshest tone.

“Calandola, yes,” said Herod.

The Hairy Man scowled, twisting up his ape-like jaw and lowering his brows until he seemed almost to be winking, and emitted a rumbling sound from deep within his cavernous chest. “This is unwise,” he said, after a time. “This is most unwise.”

Herod glared at him. “Let Gilgamesh be the judge of that!”

“Asaraludu!” boomed the caller of the Fifty Names. “Nam-tillaku! Narilugaldimmerankia!”

“And who is this great wizard you offer me?” Gilgamesh asked.

“Imbe Calandola is his name,” said Herod. “A Moor, he is – no, a Nubian, or something of each, perhaps. Black as night, terrible to behold. He maintains a temple in the dark tunnels far below the streets of Brasil, and there he presides over the giving of visions. There are those who think he is the Lord of Darkness himself, the Prince of Hell, the Great Adversary, the vast Lucifer of the Abyss: Satan Mephistopheles Beelzebub, the Archfiend, the King of Evil. Perhaps he is; but I think he is in truth only a great savage, who knows the wisdoms of the jungle. In either case he will tell you what you wish to know. The Hairy Men, I understand, consult him frequently.”

Gilgamesh looked toward the ancient one.

“Is this true?”

The Hairy Man scowled again, screwing up his face even more bizarrely than before.

“He sees into the other worlds, yes, this Calandola. And he can make others see what he sees.”

“Then I mean to go to him,” said Gilgamesh.

“There are dangers,” the Hairy Man warned.

“So you frequently tell me. But what need I fear? Death? You know that death is a joke to one who has already met it once!”

“Have I not said already that death is the least terrible thing to be feared in Brasil?”

“You have said that, yes. But what you say means nothing to me.”

“Then go to Calandola.”

“I will do that,” Gilgamesh said. He turned to Herod. “How soon can you bring me before him?”

“Do we have a deal? I take you to Calandola, you persuade Simon to abandon the idea of going off in search of Uruk?”

It was maddening to be haggled with this way, as though he and Herod were tradesmen striking a bargain in the marketplace. With difficulty Gilgamesh resisted the urge to pick the little Judaean up and hurl him across the vast room.

“Let there be no talk of favors for favors,” said Gilgamesh icily. “I am a man of honor. That should be sufficient for you. Take me to this wizard of yours.”

Downward then they went, down into the depths, down into demon country, down into the tunnels of the devils, where the light of the sun never was seen, where this black and monstrous Imbe Calandola had his dwelling-place.

When he was still a boy in Uruk a slave wearing the badge of the goddess Inanna had come to Gilgamesh one day as he practised the throwing of the javelin, and had said to him, “You will come now to the temple of the goddess.” And the slave had conducted him to the temple that his grandfather Enmerkar had built on the platform of white brick, and down through winding passageways he had never seen before, into mysterious tunnels that descended beneath the white platform toward the depths of the earth. Past hallways where distant lamps glowed in the subterranean dark, and places where magicians did their work by candleglow, and crosspassages that afforded him glimpses of shaggy goat-hoofed demons silently going about their tasks, until at last he had come to the secret room of Inanna herself, far below the sun-baked streets of Uruk, where the slender priestess waited, cheeks colored with yellow ochre, eyelids darkened with kohl.

That had been long ago, in the days of his first life. It had been his first glimpse of the worlds that lie beneath the world, where invisible wings flutter and the sound of scratchy laughter echoes in dusty corridors. That day the young Gilgamesh had learned that there was more to the world than its familiar surface: that layer upon layer of mystery existed, far from the sight of ordinary mortals. Again and again he had entered that lower world in the course of his kingship.

Now here in the Afterworld, where nothing ever was familiar and mystery was everywhere, Gilgamesh found himself descending once more into a world beneath the world.

He had discovered long ago that the Afterworld had its own subterranean region, a land of tunnels and passageways of unfathomable dimensions and incomprehensible complexity. In the early years of the days of his death he had prowled those tunnels, for then he was still in the grip of the insatiable curiosity that once had driven him to the ends of the earth; but he had quickly lost interest in such explorations, as the aimlessness and passivity of his life in the Afterworld had settled upon him, and this was his first descent into the tunnels in an eon and a half, or more.

There were those who believed that a way out of the Afterworld lay through those tunnels. Gilgamesh doubted that. He did not share the fascination that long had obsessed Enkidu and many others, the dream of finding the way back into the land of the living. To him it was meaningless to speak of a way out of the Afterworld; he was certain, as much as he could be certain of anything in this place, that to those who had come to dwell in it the Afterworld was forever, the Afterworld was eternal. Some, he knew, had gone down into the tunnels and had never emerged. But to Gilgamesh that did not mean they had found a way out, only that they were lost in some doubly nether world, perhaps the House of Dust and Darkness itself, that terrible place of which the priests in Uruk had told, where the dead were clad like birds and sadly trailed their feathers in the dust. Gilgamesh had no yearning to go down into that forlorn land of unending night.