To the Land of the Living (3 page)

Well, perhaps the Afterworld
was
a place of punishment. No question that there were some disagreeable aspects to it. The climate was always terrible, too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. The food was rarely satisfying and the wine was usually thin and bitter. When you embraced a woman in bed, generally you could pump away all day and all night without finding much joy of the act, at least as he remembered that joy from time out of mind. But Gilgamesh tended to believe that those were merely the incidental consequences of being dead: this place was not, after all, the land of the living, and there was no reason why things should work the same way here as they did back there.

In any event the reality of the Afterworld had turned out to be nothing at all like what the priests had promised it would be. The House of Dust and Darkness, was what they had called it in Uruk long ago. A place where the dead lived in eternal night and sadness, clad like birds, with wings for garments. Where the dwellers had dust for their bread, and clay for their meat. Where the kings of the earth, the masters, the high rulers, lived humbly without their crowns, and were forced to wait on the demons like servants. Small wonder that he had dreaded death as he had, believing that that was what awaited him for all time to come!

Well, in fact all that had turned out to be mere myth and folly.

Gilgamesh could no longer clearly remember his earliest days in the Afterworld. They had become hazy and unreal to him. Memory here was a treacherous thing, shifting like the desert sands: he had had occasion to discover over and over that he remembered many events of his Afterworld life that in fact had never happened, and that he had forgotten many that had. But nevertheless he still retained through all the mists and uncertainties of his mind a sharp image of the Afterworld as it had been when he first had awakened into it: a place much like Uruk, so it seemed, with low flat-roofed buildings of whitewashed brick, and temples rising on high platforms of many steps. And there he had found the heroes of olden days, living as they had always lived, men who had been great warriors in his boyhood, and others who had been little more than legends in the Land of his forefathers, back to the dawn of time. At least that was what it was like in the place where Gilgamesh first found himself; there were other districts, he discovered later, that were quite different, places where people lived in caves, or in pits in the ground, or in flimsy houses of reeds, and still other places where the Hairy Men dwelled and had no houses at all. Most of that was gone now, greatly transformed by all those who had come to the Afterworld in the latter days, and indeed a lot of nonsensical ugliness and ideological foolishness had entered in recent centuries in the baggage of the Later Dead. But still, the idea that this whole vast realm – infinitely bigger than his own beloved Land of the Two Rivers – existed merely for the sake of chastising the dead for their sins struck Gilgamesh as too silly for serious contemplation.

Why, then, was the joy of his hunting so pale and hollow? Why none of the old ecstasy when spying the prey, when drawing the great bow, when sending the arrow true to its mark?

Gilgamesh thought he knew why, and it had nothing to do with punishment. There had been joy aplenty in the hunting for many a thousand years of his life in the Afterworld. If the joy had gone from it now, it was only that in these latter days he hunted alone. Enkidu, his friend, his true brother, his other self, was not with him. It was that and nothing but that: for he had never felt complete without Enkidu since they first had met and wrestled and come to love one another after the
manner of brothers, long ago in the city of Uruk. That great burly man, broad and tall and strong as Gilgamesh himself, that shaggy wild creature out of the high ridges: Gilgamesh had never loved anyone as he loved Enkidu.

But it was the fate of Gilgamesh, so it seemed, to lose him again and again.

Enkidu had been ripped from him the first time long ago when they still dwelled in Uruk in the robust roistering fullness of kingly manhood. On a dark day the gods had had revenge on Gilgamesh and Enkidu for their great pride and satisfaction in their own untrammeled exploits, and had sent a fever to take Enkidu’s life, leaving Gilgamesh to rule in terrible solitude.

In time Gilgamesh too had yielded to death, many years and much wisdom later, and was taken into this Afterworld; and there he searched for Enkidu, and one glorious day he found him. The Afterworld had been a much smaller place, then, and everyone seemed to know everyone else; but even so it had taken an age for Gilgamesh to track Enkidu down. Oh, the rejoicing that day! Oh, the singing and the dancing, the vast festival that went on and on! There was great kindliness among the denizens of the Afterworld in those days, and there was universal gladness that Gilgamesh and Enkidu had been restored to each other. Minos of Crete gave the first great party in honor of their reunion, and then it was Amenhotep’s turn, and then Agamemnon’s. And on the fourth day the host was dark slender Varuna, the Meluhhan king, and then on the fifth the heroes gathered in the ancient hall of the Ice-Hunter folk where one-eyed Vy-otin was chieftain and the floor was strewn with mammoth tusks, and after that –

Well, and it went on for some long time, the great celebration of the reunion.

For uncountable years, so Gilgamesh recalled it, he and Enkidu dwelled together in Gilgamesh’s palace in the After-world as they had in the old days in the Land of the Two Rivers. And all was well with them, with much hunting and feasting. The Afterworld was a happy place in those years.

Then the hordes of Later Dead began to come in, all those grubby little unheroic people out of unheroic times, bringing all their terrible changes.

They were shoddy folk, these Later Dead, confused of soul and flimsy of intellect, and their petty trifling rivalries and vain strutting poses were a great nuisance. But Gilgamesh and Enkidu kept their distance from them while they replayed all the follies of their lives, their nonsensical Crusades and their idiotic trade wars and their preposterous theological squabbles.

The trouble was that they had brought not only their lunatic ideas to the Afterworld but also their accursed diabolical modern gadgets, and the worst of those were the vile weapons called guns, that slaughtered noisily from afar in the most shameful cowardly way. Heroes know how to parry the blow of a battle-axe or the thrust of a sword; but what can even a hero do about a bullet from afar? It was Enkidu’s bad luck to fall between two quarreling bands of these gun-wielders, a flock of babbling Spaniards and a rabble of arrogant Englanders, for whom he tried to make peace. Of course they would have no peace, and soon shots were flying, and Gilgamesh arrived at the scene just as a bolt from an arquebus tore through his dear Enkidu’s noble heart.

No one dies in the Afterworld forever; but some are dead a long time, and that was how it was with Enkidu. It pleased the unknown forces that governed this land of the no longer living to keep him in limbo some hundreds of years, or so it seemed to Gilgamesh, given the difficulties of tallying such matters in the Afterworld. It was, at any rate, a dreadful long while, and Gilgamesh once more felt that terrible inrush of loneliness that only the presence of Enkidu might cure.

Meanwhile the Afterworld continued to change, and now the changes were coming at a stupefying, overwhelming rate. There seemed to be far more people in the world than there ever had been in the old days, and great armies of them marched into the Afterworld every day, a swarming rabble of uncouth strangers who after only a little interval of disorientation and bewilderment would swiftly set out to reshape the whole place into something as discordant and repellent as the world they had left behind. The steam-engine came, with its clamor and clangor, and something called the dynamo, and then harsh glittering electrical lights blazed in every street where the friendly golden lamps had glowed and factories arose and began pouring out all manner of strange things. And
more and more and more, relentlessly, unceasingly. Railroads. Telephones. Automobiles. Noise, smoke, soot everywhere, and no way to hide from it. The Industrial Revolution, they called it. It was an endless onslaught of the hideous. Yet strangely almost everyone seemed to admire and even love the new things and the new ways, except for Gilgamesh and a few other cranky conservatives. “What are they trying to do?” Rabelais asked one day. “Turn the place into Hell?” Now the Later Dead were bringing in such devices as radios and helicopters and computers, and everyone was speaking English, so that once again Gilgamesh, who had grudgingly learned the newfangled Latin long ago when Caesar and his crew had insisted on it, was forced to master yet another tongue-twisting intricate language. It was a dreary time for him. And then at last did Enkidu reappear, far away in one of the cold northern domains; and he made his way south and for a time they were reunited a second time, and once more all was well for Gilgamesh of Uruk in the Afterworld.

But now he and Enkidu were separated again, this time by something colder and more cruel than death itself. What had fallen between them was something beyond all belief: they had quarrelled. There had been words between them, ugly words on both sides, such a dispute as never in thousands of years had passed between them in the land of the living or in the land of the Afterworld, and at last Enkidu had said that which Gilgamesh had never dreamed he would ever hear, which was, “I want no more of you, king of Uruk. If you cross my path again I will have your life.” Could that have been Enkidu speaking, or was it, Gilgamesh wondered, some demon of the Afterworld in Enkidu’s form?

In any case he was gone. He vanished into the turmoil and infinite intricacy of the Afterworld and placed himself beyond Gilgamesh’s finding; and when Gilgamesh sent forth inquiries, back came only the report, “He will not speak with you. He has no love for you, Gilgamesh.”

It could not be. It must be a spell of witchcraft, thought Gilgamesh. Surely this was some dark working of the Later Dead, that could turn brother against brother and lead Enkidu to persist in his wrath. In time, Gilgamesh was sure, Enkidu would be triumphant over this sorcery that gripped his soul, and he would open himself once more to the love of
Gilgamesh. But time went on, after the strange circuitous fashion of the Afterworld, and Enkidu did not return to his brother’s arms.

What was there to do, but hunt, and wait, and hope?

So this day Gilgamesh hunted in the Afterworld’s parched Outback. He had killed and killed and killed again, and now late in the day he had put his arrow through the throat of a monster more foul even than the usual run of creatures of the After-world; but there was a terrible vitality to the thing, and it went thundering off, dripping dark blood from its pierced maw.

Gilgamesh gave pursuit. It is sinful to strike and wound and not to kill. For a long weary hour he ran, crisscrossing this harsh land. Thorny plants slashed at him with the malevolence of imps, and the hard wind flailed him with clouds of dust sharp as whips. Still the evil-looking beast outpaced him, though blood drained in torrents from it to the dry ground.

Gilgamesh would not let himself tire, for there was god-power in him by virtue of his descent from the divine Lugalbanda, his great father who was both king and god. But he was hard pressed to keep going. Three times he lost sight of his quarry, and tracked it only by the spoor of its blood-droppings. The bleak red eye that was the sun of the Afterworld seemed to mock him, hovering forever before him as though willing him to run without cease.

Then he saw the creature, still strong but plainly staggering, lurching about at the edge of a thicket of little twisted greasy-leaved trees. Unhesitatingly Gilgamesh plunged forward. The trees stroked him lasciviously, coating him with their slime, trying like raucous courtesans to insinuate their leaves between his legs; but he slapped them away, and emerged finally into a clearing where he could confront his animal.

Some repellent little demon-beast was clinging to the back of his prey, ripping out bloody gobbets of flesh and ruining the hide. A Land Rover was parked nearby, and a pale strange-looking man with a long jaw was peering from its window. A second man, red-faced and beefy-looking, stood close by Gilgamesh’s roaring, snorting quarry.

First things first. Gilgamesh reached out, scooped the hissing little carrion-seeker from the bigger animal’s back, flung it aside. Then with all his force he rammed his dagger
toward what he hoped was the heart of the wounded animal. In the moment of his thrust Gilgamesh felt a great convulsion within the monster’s breast and its foul life left it in an instant.

The work was done. Again, no exultation, no sense of fulfilment; only a kind of dull ashen release from an unfinished chore. Gilgamesh caught his breath and looked around.

What was this? The red-faced man seemed to be having a crazy fit. Quivering, shaking, sweating – dropping to his knees – his eyes gleaming insanely –

“Lord Conan?” the man cried. “Great king?”

“Conan is not one of my titles,” said Gilgamesh, mystified. “And I was a king once in Uruk, but I reign over nothing at all in this place. Come, man, get off your knees!”

“But you are Conan to the life!” moaned the red-faced man hoarsely. “To the absolute life!”

Gilgamesh felt a surge of intense dislike for this fellow. He would be slobbering in another moment. Conan? Conan? That name meant nothing at all. No, wait: he had known a Conan once, some little Celtic fellow he had encountered in a tavern, a chap with a blunt nose and heavy cheekbones and dark hair tumbling down his face, a drunken twitchy little man forever invoking forgotten godlets of no consequence – yes, he had called himself Conan, so Gilgamesh recalled. Drank too much, caused trouble for the barmaid, even took a swing at her, that was the one. Gilgamesh had dropped him down an open cesspool to teach him manners. But how could this blustery-faced fellow here mistake me for that one? He was still mumbling on, too, babbling about lands whose names meant nothing to Gilgamesh – Cimmeria, Aquilonia, Hyrkania, Zamora. Total nonsense. There were no such places.