To the Land of the Living Read online

  “Enkidu! Enkidu!”

  Gilgamesh went on bellowing his friend’s name until his voice was in shreds, but to no purpose. Night was falling now. Enkidu would certainly come down from those hills as darkness approached, if he was up there at all. Gone again, then? Dead? Carried off into slavery?

  Baffled, sorely troubled, Gilgamesh hauled the smoldering wagons together to form a pyre, and threw the mutilated bodies of the dead on them, and stood by, uttering the words that were proper, while the flames blazed upward. Then he turned and walked away, heading swiftly westward in the gathering shadows. He did not want to spend the night in this place of death. His soul felt empty. He had had so little time, this last reunion, before Enkidu was snatched away once more. Gods, thought Gilgamesh, are we never to be allowed to remain together?

  The dog Ajax followed him. Gilgamesh waved him back, but the dog, barking in such a frenzy as if he were struggling to speak in words, would not be dismissed. Gilgamesh had no wish for a dog; and yet he realized he could hardly abandon the animal here to die. In any case sending the dog away appeared impossible. “Come, then,” Gilgamesh told him, and they walked on together through the night.

  When there was light enough for him to see again, Gilgamesh realized that he had come to the mouth of the canyon. The walls had opened here and were so low that they were nothing more than an embankment, far off on each side. To the north and south rose great mountains that belched flame and smoke that stained the sky. Ahead of him lay a broad plain, strangely dotted with ghostly twisted masses of pink stone something like the stalagmites one sometimes sees in caves, rising by the hundreds and seeming for all the world to be a multitude of petrified souls set close by one another. Behind these he saw a camp of tents, with people moving about them; and still farther in the distance was a shimmering body of water, and a ship with a scarlet sail riding at anchor just off shore. He had reached the White Sea of the far west.

  Breaking into a steady loping trot, Gilgamesh ran forward through the field of strange stone shapes toward the place of the tents. Men in costumes that seemed Roman to him looked up as he approached.

  “Who are you?” a sentry demanded.

  “Gilgamesh of Uruk is who I am. I seek my friend, Enkidu by name, who—”

  “Come with me.”

  “You know where Enkidu is?”

  “Come with me,” said the sentry again, impassively.

  Wearily Gilgamesh let himself be led along into the group of tents, and to one that was larger than the rest, made of fabric of great richness and many colors. Within, sprawling on a sort of wooden throne, was a man of late middle years, balding, portly, fleshy-faced, his face mottled with red blotches, his eyes red-rimmed from too much wine and too little sleep.

  The sentry said, “We found him wandering around near the Frozen Souls, your majesty. He calls himself Gilgamesh of Uruk, and he says that he’s looking for—”

  The man on the throne waved the sentry to silence. Leaning forward, he studied Gilgamesh with keen curiosity.

  “Uruk?” he said. “You come from Uruk?”

  “It was the city of my birth.”

  “Indeed. Gilgamesh of Uruk. Uruk, truly?”

  “Of Uruk, yes,” said Gilgamesh with some irritation.

  “That city of great treasure,” the other said, and a misty look came into his eyes. “That city so dear to my soul. How remarkable, to meet one who comes from Uruk! And have you been there lately, my friend?”

  Gilgamesh stared. “How could that be? Uruk is long gone, and all but forgotten.”

  “Is it? No, I think not. Neither gone nor forgotten, but merely hard to find, according to the reports I hear.” The man on the throne gave him a long slow look. “Yet perhaps we could find it, you and I.”

  “Uruk was a city of the other world.”

  “It is a city of this world also. With many people of your kind living there.”

  “It is?” said Gilgamesh, bewildered. “There are?” That was impossible. In all his years in the Afterworld he had heard nothing of that. “A new Uruk, here? Who says? Where? What are you telling me?”

  “Where? Ah, that is something I hope to learn. For I would like greatly to find this place Uruk, you see. Its wealth is beyond counting. Its treasure fills storehouse upon storehouse. You and I could find it together, I think. We are in need of a grand adventure, we Brasilians, and what could be more splendid than to go in quest of Uruk, eh? Does that interest you, friend Gilgamesh, to journey with me in search of Uruk?”

  In rising annoyance verging on anger Gilgamesh cried, “Who are you? What is this all about? Enkidu is what I seek, not Uruk!”

  “I? Did no one tell you?” The blotchy-faced man laughed. “I am the master of the isle of Brasil, Simon Magus by name. That is my ship in the harbor. We will be sailing soon for my city, which lies just across the bay. Will you come with us? Yes, Gilgamesh, come with me to Brasil.” He beckoned a servant. “Some wine for Gilgamesh! Gilgamesh of Uruk!” Again Simon laughed. “Come with me to Brasil, yes. And let us speak of finding the treasures of long-lost Uruk, you and I. What do you say, Gilgamesh? What do you say?”

  * * *

  SEVEN

  THERE was fire everywhere: red fire in the sky, blue fire in the water, green fire dancing along the rim of the shore that receded behind the swiftly moving boat. The air had the stink of sulphur about it, and worse things. The clouds here were thick and heavy, with fat gray bellies that scraped against the nearby mountains. And the mountains themselves were demons in stone: a dozen angry volcanoes that were spewing fumes and flame up and down the coastal plain as far as Gilgamesh could see. Out here on the western edge of the Afterworld, beyond the bleak plains of the Outback, it seemed to the Sumerian that the whole world must be burning, down to its deepest roots.

  The dolphin-prowed vessel with the scarlet sail plunged on and on through the reef-strewn phosphorescent sea toward the island of Brasil. The boat was the royal yacht of the dictator Simon Magus, who was somewhere below decks, far gone in wine.

  It sounded like madness, all this talk of finding Uruk. But perhaps not. Perhaps not. It was worth at least listening to what Simon had to say. Why not? Gilgamesh wondered. He knew nothing of this supposed Uruk; but if it was true that the city of his life had been founded anew in the Afterworld, and these Brasilians had heard some tale that could help him discover where it might be situated, why not strike a deal with Simon? What was life, in this interminable life after death, if not one long unending Why Not? He was again without Enkidu. Very little mattered for him now. Why not go on this quest? Why not?

  The towering dark-haired Sumerian stared toward Brasil. Off in the distance the magical island glimmered in the half-darkness with a strange light of its own.

  “Been here before?” a voice said.

  Gilgamesh looked to his left and down, a long way down. “Are you talking to me?”

  “To my shadow,” the man standing beside him at the rail said. He was short and sharp-nosed, with thick curly hair and dark greasy skin. “I was trying to make conversation. It’s an old shipboard custom. Do you mind?”

  Gilgamesh glanced balefully at the little man. There was a soft, sleek, pampered look about him. He dressed well, a Roman-style toga and glossy Italian leather shoes, and some sort of little brocaded skullcap perched jauntily at the back of his head. A shrewd face. Bright beady eyes with undeniable intelligence in them. But something fundamentally unlikable about him, Gilgamesh thought. And pushy. Surely he ought to be able to see at a glance that Gilgamesh wasn’t the sort who cared to be approached by strangers.

  The big brindle dog Ajax, sleeping by Gilgamesh’s side, awoke, peered, growled. Ajax didn’t much care for the little man either, it would seem.

  Gilgamesh scowled. “I don’t know you.”

  “Who knows anybody in this Godforsaken place? My name’s Herod. Herod Agrippa, actually. What I asked you was whether you’d been to Brasil before.”

  “Probably,” said Gilgam
esh, shrugging.

  “Probably? You aren’t sure?”

  Gilgamesh considered tossing the tiresome little pest over the side.

  “Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t. You wander back and forth across the face of the Afterworld long enough and all places begin to look the same to you.”

  “Not to me,” Herod said. “And I’ve done my share of wandering. More than my share. A regular wandering Jew, that’s me. Anyway, Brasil’s different. I know, I know, memory’s sometimes a problem here, but if you’d been to Brasil before, you’d remember it. It’s unforgettable. Trust me.”

  “A wandering Jew?” said Gilgamesh vaguely. “I’ve heard that story, I think.”

  “Who hasn’t? But I’m not the Wandering Jew, you understand. That’s Ahasuerus. He’s still cruising around Upside, the way the original curse requires. Roaming Earth until the end of the world comes, which apparently hasn’t quite happened yet. I’m simply a Jew who wanders. A different one. Herod.”

  “So you told me.” Pushy little bastard, yes, Gilgamesh thought. From the pushiness alone, it would seem that the little man was one of the Later Dead. But yet there was some sort of Early Dead emanation about this man too. A borderline type, maybe. From that period when what the Later Dead called B.C. was shading into their A.D. time. Gilgamesh rummaged through his thousands of years of memories. “I met a Herod once. Some sort of minor desert prince, he was.”

  “King of Judaea, in fact.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Plump-faced man, bald in back, bloodshot eyes?”

  “He might have been. He had a rotten look about him, that much I recall. Like fruit left out in the rain too long.”

  “Herod the Great, that’s who you mean. My grandfather. A very nasty man, that one. A very bad piece of business indeed. Ten wives—that alone should show you how unstable he was. And other character deficiencies. A total paranoid, in fact. Though all that ugly nonsense about Salome and John the Baptist, the seven veils, the silver platter—that wasn’t him, you know. That was his son Herod Antipas, just as crazy. And it didn’t actually happen anything like that. The silver platter stuff was only a fable, and as for Salome—”

  “Silver platter? Salome? Little man, what are you prattling about?”

  “On the other hand,” Herod went on, as though Gilgamesh had not spoken, “My grandfather did order the slaying of the first-born. Including his own. The man was a lunatic. I’m not surprised you didn’t care for him. He cut a soft deal for himself with Augustus, though. Augustus was always willing to do business with lunatics if he saw political benefits in it for himself. Which is the only reasonable explanation of how my grandfather managed to hold his throne under the Romans for so long. But I understand Augustus won’t have anything to do with him now. That’s Cleopatra’s doing. Because Cleopatra still hates him—old Herod turned her down when she propositioned him, didn’t like the shape of her nose, or something like that, but imagine carrying a silly grudge for God knows how many centuries—”

  “You buzz like a wasp,” Gilgamesh muttered. “Do you never stop talking?”

  “I like to talk, yes. You don’t, I assume. The strong silent type. A difference of style, nothing to get upset about. Oh, I say, look there—there goes Vesuvius again!”

  “Vesuvius?”

  Herod gestured toward the island-city. “Our volcano. It’s named for the one they had back of Pompeii, in the other world. Smack in the middle of downtown, it is. You ever see anything so gorgeous?”

  Gilgamesh looked off across the channel toward distant Brasil. There was new fire in the sky, a single startling point of brilliant scarlet cutting through the murky smoke-fouled atmosphere like a torch, fifty times as bright as the flames coming from the mainland volcanoes. As though driven by a giant pump the blaze rose higher and higher, climbing toward the roof of the cosmos. Under its blinding glare the towers and battlements of the city took on a dazzling mirror-bright sheen.

  “And the city?” Gilgamesh asked. “Will it be destroyed?”

  Herod laughed. “There’s an eruption just like this every week. Sometimes more often than that. The Brasilians wouldn’t have it any other way. But it never does any harm. All light and no heat, that’s the deal in the contract. And never any particulate matter. You heard about Pompeii, didn’t you? In Rome, that was. I mean the real Rome, the original one. We’ve got a lot of Pompeiians living in Brasil. After the way Pompeii got trashed in seventy-nine, it’s hardly surprising that the Brasilians don’t want an encore here. That’s seventy-nine A.D., you know. If you count your years Later Dead style. If you count your years at all. At any rate it was after my time, probably after yours. You talk to anybody who was there who lives in Brasil now, he’ll tell you that it was a total nightmare, but he’ll also say that he can’t get to sleep at night if there isn’t a decent volcano rumbling away nearby. Amazing the way some people not only adapt to danger but actually come to depend on living in the constant presence of—”

  Gilgamesh was barely paying attention. He was staring at the volcano-riven night sky. In that sudden fiery illumination a host of air-borne monsters and demons stood revealed. Things that were all mouth and no body, things that were all wing and no head, things that were mere claws, things that were nothing but giant red-streaked yellow eyes borne up by jets of green gas, all of them whirling and screeching high above the sea. Ajax, barking and snarling, capered up and down the deck, leaping wildly as if to challenge the monstrosities that thronged the sky.

  Herod laughed. “Simon’s pets. I told you, once you see Brasil you never forget it. Demons everywhere you look. And wizards. Sorcerers, mages, thaumaturges. Simon collects them, you know. You can’t walk nine paces without someone trying to turn you inside out with one of his tricks.”

  “Let them try,” Gilgamesh said.

  He drew an imaginary bow and sent an imaginary shaft soaring through the gullet of one of the foulest of the monsters overhead.

  “Oh, they’d leave you alone, I think. Man your size, who’d fool around with you? And you look like you might have a little magic yourself. Simon hire you for his bodyguard, did he?”

  “I am not a mercenary,” said Gilgamesh stiffly.

  “You look like you were a fighting man.”

  “A warrior, yes. But never for hire, except once, when I was a boy in exile. I was a king.”

  “Ah. A king! We have something in common, then. I was a king too, you know.”

  “Were you?” said Gilgamesh without interest.

  “For four or five years, anyway, after Caligula finally banished my miserable uncle Antipas from Judaea and gave the place to me. Very popular with my subjects, I was, if you don’t mind my saying it. I think I did quite a decent job, and if I had lived a little longer I might actually have been able to wipe out Christianity before it really got started, thereby saving the whole world six bushels of trouble, but—” Herod paused. “You aren’t a Christian by any chance, are you? No, no, you don’t look the type. But you say you were a king. Where was that, may I ask? Somewhere out toward Armenia, maybe? Cilicia?”

  This was becoming infuriating.

  Gilgamesh drew himself up to his full looming height and intoned, “Be it known to you that I am Gilgamesh of Uruk, great king, king of Uruk, king of kings, lord of the Land of the Two Rivers.”

  “King of kings?” Herod repeated. “Lord of the Land of the Two Rivers?” He nodded as though mightily impressed. “Ah. Indeed. And what rivers would those be?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “You must forgive me, my friend. I am a mere provincial, a Judaean, even though it was my good fortune to be educated at the court in Rome. Although I was probably taught something about those Two Rivers of yours they seem to have slipped through one of the many damnable holes in my memory, and therefore—”

  Gilgamesh had heard such speeches many times before. The Afterworld was full of Johnny-come-latelies.

  Coolly he said, “You Romans knew my country by th
e name of Mesopotamia.”

  “Oh, those rivers!” Herod cried. “Why didn’t you say so? King of Mesopotamia! A Parthian, then, is that what you are? Some relative of Mithridates?”

  I will throw him overboard, Gilgamesh thought in fury.

  With great control he said, “Not a Parthian, no. A Sumerian. We are before the Parthians. Before the Babylonians and Akkadians. Before the Romans as well. Long before the Romans.”

  “A thousand pardons,” Herod said.

  Gilgamesh glowered and turned away. He peered bleakly into the fire-riven night. The eruption over Brasil was dying down, now. He wondered how much longer it would be before they reached the island. None too soon, if he had to listen to this Herod’s maddening jabber all the way across from the mainland.

  After a while Herod said, “Do you intend to be king again?”

  “What? Why should I?”

  “Most kings who come here do.”

  “Are you a king again?” Gilgamesh asked, without turning.

  “I prefer not to be. I never found being a king all that fascinating, to tell you the truth. And I like living in Brasil too much. It’s the first place that’s felt like home to me since I died. But Brasil is Simon’s town, and I don’t have the urge to try to take it away from him, not that I’d be able to. If he enjoys being boss here, let him do it, is what I say.”

  “I understand,” said Gilgamesh. “You are beyond these ambitions.”

  “Well, you know the old line about how it’s better to reign in the Afterworld than to serve in Heaven. That might be true, though I don’t really know much about Heaven. Assuming there is any such place, which I very much doubt. But so far as I’m concerned it feels better to let someone else reign in the Afterworld. My notion is neither to reign nor serve, but just to do my own thing. I suppose that doesn’t make much sense to you, does it. If you’re like all the rest of the big goyishe sword-swingers I’ve known here, you’re itching to get yourself up on a throne again, some throne, any throne—”

  “No,” Gilgamesh said.