To the Land of the Living Read online

  “Then he’s an even greater fool. I’ve been in the Afterworld twice as long as your Simon, or even longer. Doesn’t he think that in all that time I’d have heard of it, if my countrymen had built a new Uruk for themselves here?”

  Herod rocked slowly back and forth on the windowsill, smiling to himself. “You two have really screwed each other over, haven’t you?”

  “What?”

  “The valiant Gilgamesh and the shrewd Simon have led each other ass-deep into confusion. He believes you can find Uruk for him. You believe he can find it for you. Each of you thinks the other one holds the secret of Uruk’s location. But in fact neither of you knows anything at all about the place.”

  “I certainly don’t, at any rate.”

  “Neither does Simon. I assure you.”

  “Then how—”

  “Some wandering swindler came to him a little while ago. One Hanno, a Carthaginian, claiming to be a maker of maps. You know how reliable maps are in the Afterworld, Gilgamesh? But this Hanno began telling tales of the treasures of Uruk, and Simon’s eyes lit up like the jewels he covets so hungrily. Where can I find this Uruk, Simon asked. And Hanno sold him a map. Then he disappeared. When Romans start buying maps from Carthaginians no good can come of it, I say. The day after Hanno left Brasil, Simon proudly brought me the map and told me the story. Let us plan an expedition of conquest, he said. And unrolled the map. And its lines ran crazily in every direction, so that it would make your eyes ache to follow them, and even as we stared they flowed and twisted about. And then in five minutes the map was blank, just an empty piece of demon-hide. I thought Simon would have a stroke. Uruk! Uruk! That was all he could say, over and over, grunting like that Hairy Man wizard of his. Then off we went to the mainland, where some caravan was supposed to arrive from the Outback, scoundrels and villains of some sort, dealers in stolen gems. Simon had business with them. He’s mixed up in all sorts of garbage of that kind. I don’t have to pay any attention to it. And what do we hear but that there are two gigantic hulking Sumerians traveling with the caravan, and one of them is Gilgamesh the king of Uruk! Uruk again! The caravan doesn’t arrive—hit by bandits in the pass, so the word is—but Gilgamesh does. Which is all the better for Simon Magus. What does the loss of a few caskets of gems matter, if he can hope to loot all of Uruk? Do you see, Gilgamesh? He means for you to lead him to Uruk so that he can plunder it!”

  “Sooner would I be able to lead him to Paradise. There is no Uruk here in the Afterworld, Herod.”

  “Are you certain of that?”

  “Who can be certain of anything here? But why haven’t I ever heard of it, if it truly exists?”

  “The Afterworld is very large, Gilgamesh. There is no one who can claim to have explored it all. Perhaps it grows ever larger each day, so that no one could possibly see every part of it, even if he never rested a moment. I’ve traveled in it for twice a thousand years and I haven’t even seen a tenth of it, I suspect. And you, much older even than I—even you, I wager, are a stranger to much of the Afterworld. You told me yourself that you had never been in Brasil before.”

  “Agreed. But Uruk—a city built by Sumerians, inhabited by Sumerians—no. Impossible that it could exist without my knowing of it.”

  “Unless you knew of it once, and have forgotten that you did.”

  “Also impossible.”

  “Is it? You know what memory is like here.”

  “Well—”

  “You know, Gilgamesh.”

  “But how could I forget my own city? No. No. There is no Uruk in the Afterworld,” said Gilgamesh sullenly. “Accept the truth of that or not as you like, King Herod. But I know where the truth lies in this matter.”

  “Merely a fable, then?”

  “Absolutely. A phantom of this Hanno’s imagination.”

  “Why would he name his phantom Uruk, after a city which time itself has forgotten, if what you say is true?”

  “Who knows? Perhaps he met me once, and I told him where I was from, and the name stuck in his mind. I am well known in the Afterworld, Herod.”

  “So in truth you are.”

  “There is no Uruk. Simon deceives himself. If he thinks I know how to lead him there, he deceives himself doubly.”

  Herod was silent a long moment.

  At length he said, “Then answer me this, Gilgamesh. If this Uruk really doesn’t exist, why have you agreed to join Simon in an expedition to find a nonexistent place?”

  “Because,” said Gilgamesh carefully, “the thought came to me that I might just be wrong, that perhaps there is such a place as Uruk after all and it has escaped my memory.”

  Herod’s eyes widened in amazement. “What? You told me the absolute opposite, no more than two minutes ago!”

  “Did I?” said Gilgamesh. “Well, then so I did.”

  “Your way of joking is very odd, my friend.”

  Gilgamesh smiled. “With all my heart, Herod, I am convinced that this Uruk of Simon’s is a mere myth. But this is the Afterworld. Nothing is ever as we expect it to be here. There was Simon, telling me that he has heard wondrous tales of Uruk. It sounded crazy to me, that there should be any such place, but what if I was wrong about that? I must allow for that possibility. As you said, the Afterworld is large beyond anyone’s comprehension. For all I know, Uruk does perhaps exist somewhere far off in this incomprehensible place and through some fluke I have never heard of it. Now the powerful dictator Simon is offering me a chance to go searching for it. Why should I say no? What do I have to lose?”

  “The only information that Simon has about Uruk is absolute nonsense. He’s gambling that you can fill in the blanks on his map for him.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “He means to use you. He’ll let you take him to Uruk, if there is any such place, and he’ll allow you to help him get his hands on all those strongboxes full of precious gems that Hanno said were there. And in return he’ll set you up as Uruk’s king.”

  “As you know, I have no wish to be king of any city. Particularly one that doesn’t exist.”

  “But Simon doesn’t know that. He thinks you’d jump at the chance.”

  “I told you. I want only Enkidu.”

  “Your missing friend, you mean?”

  “My friend. My hunting companion. My true brother. Closer to me than any brother could be.”

  “And where might he be?”

  “Gone. A mystery. Vanished into the sky, it would seem, or into the bowels of the earth. He must have been carried off.”

  “By whom?”

  “I have no idea. The bandits who raided van der Hey den’s caravan, I suppose. But I mean to search for him.”

  “Even though you have about as much chance of finding him as you do of finding Uruk?”

  “At least I know that Enkidu exists.”

  “But he could be anywhere. A million miles away. Ten million. He could be dead. Who knows? You could look for a thousand years and never find him again.”

  Shrugging, Gilgamesh said, “I have lost him before, and eventually found him. I’ll find him again: and if it takes me a thousand years, Herod, so be it. What’s a thousand years to me? What’s ten thousand?”

  “And meanwhile?”

  “Meanwhile what?”

  “Uruk,” Herod said. “What do you plan to do about that, now that you know Simon’s been bluffing you? Will you go along with him anyway on this lunatic expedition? With him hoping that you really do know the way—or at least can figure it out somehow—and you absolutely sure that there’s no such place, but praying that somehow you’ll get to it anyway?”

  Herod’s waspish buzzing was beginning to bother Gilgamesh again. The little man was constantly probing, pushing, maneuvering. For what purpose?

  Gilgamesh walked to the window and loomed over him.

  “Why are you so concerned about the Uruk journey, Herod?”

  “Because it means nothing but trouble for me.”

  “Trouble for y
ou? Why for you?”

  “If Simon takes off on a crusade to God knows where with you, I’m going to be stuck here running the shop until he gets back. Which could be centuries, and me trying to preside over this madhouse all the while. His viceroy, do you see? The regent, while he’s gone. Do you think I’m looking forward to that? Brasil is stacked to the rafters with crazy military types, most of them oversized and mentally underfurnished, who’d like nothing better than to kill me, or you, or each other, and if they aren’t enough trouble there are all these sorcerers too, turning the air blue with their incantations, a great many of which unfortunately are quite potent. I’d go out of my mind without Simon here to keep a lid on everything.”

  “If being regent of Brasil would be such a burden for you, King Herod, you could always come with us to Uruk.”

  “Fine! Much better! March day and night for a hundred years through the godforsaken wilderness looking for some place that isn’t even there!” He shook his head. “Meshuggenah, that’s what you are. But I’m not.”

  “And if Uruk is there?”

  “And if it isn’t?”

  Gilgamesh felt himself losing the last of his patience. “Well, then move somewhere else! You don’t have to stay in Brasil. Get yourself a villa in Nova Roma, or have one of the Outback princes take you in. You could settle with the Israelis, for that matter. They’re Jews like you, aren’t they?”

  “Jews, yes,” said Herod dourly. “But not like me. I don’t understand them at all. No, Gilgamesh, I don’t want to do any of those things. I like it here. Brasil is my home. I’ve got a sweet little niche here. I have no desire whatever to live anywhere else. But if Simon—”

  The ground rumbled suddenly as if monsters were rising beneath the tiled mosaic floor of Simon’s palace.

  “What’s that?” Gilgamesh asked.

  “Vesuvius!” cried Herod. He turned toward the window and stared out into the dusk. The ground shook a second time, more fiercely than before, and there was a tremendous roar. Gilgamesh plucked the little man aside and leaned out the window. An eye-dazzling spear of red flame split the darkness. Another roar, another, another: like the angry growls of some great beast struggling to break free. From the crest of the mighty volcano in the center of the city came cascades of bubbling lava, showers of pumice, choking clouds of dense black smoke: and throughout it all that single fiery scarlet lance kept rising and rising. Fearless though he was, Gilgamesh had to throttle back a reflexive impulse to run and hide.

  Hide? Where? Here on the slopes of that dread volcano there was no safety anywhere to be found.

  “Let me see!” Herod said, tugging at Gilgamesh’s arm. He was panting. His face was streaked with sweat. He forced his way past Gilgamesh’s elbow and thrust his head forth to have a better view. There came another world-shaking convulsion underground. “Fantastic!” Herod whispered. “Incredible! This is the best one ever!” There was awe in his voice, and reverence. Slowly it dawned on Gilgamesh that this eruption had aroused extraordinary delight in Herod. He looked transfigured. His eyes were aglow, shining; and there seemed something like a sexual excitement throbbing in him. He seemed almost crazed with ecstasy. “Twice in two nights! Fantastic! Fantastic! Do you see why I could never leave this place, Gilgamesh? You’ve got to talk Simon out of going off looking for Uruk. You’ve got to. I beg you!”

  Under the cloud-shrouded red light of the dreary sun Gilgamesh made his way through the daytime streets of Brasil. By Enlil, had there ever been a city like this in all the world? There was witchcraft and deviltry everywhere.

  Streets that wound in on themselves in tight spirals, like the spoor of a drunken snail. Narrow high-vaulted buildings that looked like snails themselves, ready to pick up and move away. Black-leaved trees with weeping boughs, from which came curious sighs when you got close to them. And everywhere the dry powdery smell of last night’s eruption, motes of dark dust dancing in the air, and little sparkling bits of flaming matter that stung ever so lightly as they settled on your skin.

  Hands plucked at him as he walked briskly along. Hooded eyes stared from passageways. Once someone called him by name, but he could see no one. Ajax, trotting along at his heels, paused again and again to howl and glare, and even to raise the fur along his back and spit as though he were a cat rather than a dog; but the enemies that Ajax perceived were all invisible to Gilgamesh.

  Now and again flying fiery-eyed demons swooped through the city at rooftop height. No one paid any attention to them. Frequently they came to rest and perched, preening themselves like living gargoyles, beating their powerful wings against the air and sending down dank fetid breezes over the passersby below. Gilgamesh saw one of the winged things suddenly sway and fall, as though overcome by a spell. Little glossy scuttling animals emerged from crevices in the gutter and pounced upon it. They devoured it before Gilgamesh had reached the end of the street, leaving nothing but scraps of leathery cartilage behind.

  When he looked off in the distance it seemed to him that there was some sort of translucent wall in the sky beyond the city, cutting Brasil off from the rest of the Afterworld. Its blue-white sheen glimmered with cold ferocity; and it seemed to him that there were monstrous creatures outside, not the usual demon-beasts but some other kind of even greater loathsomeness, all crimson beaks and coiling snaky necks and vast wings that flailed in fury against the wall that kept them out. But when he blinked and looked again he saw nothing unusual at all, only the heavy clouds and the dark glimmer of the light of the sun struggling to break through them.

  Then he heard a sound that might have been the sound of a tolling bell. But the bell seemed to be tolling backward. First came the dying fall, and then the rising swell of sound, and then the initial percussive boom; and then silence, and then the dying fall again, climbing toward the clangor of the striking clapper:

  mmmmmmooo​MMMMNGB! mmmmmmooo​MMMMNGB! mmmmmmooo​MMMMNGB!

  The impact of the sound was stunning. Gilgamesh stood still, feeling the immense weight of time drop away, centuries peeling from him with each heavy reverberation. As though on a screen before him in the air he saw his entire life in the Afterworld running in reverse, the thousands of years of aimless wandering becoming a mad flight at fantastic speed, everything rushed and blurred and jumbled together as if it had happened in a single day, Gilgamesh here, Gilgamesh there, brandishing his sword, drawing his bow, slaying this devil-beast and that, climbing impossible mountains, swimming lakes of shimmering color, trekking across fields of blazing sand, entering cities that were twisted and distorted like the cities one enters in dreams, penetrating the far regions of this place even to the strangest region of all, in the north, where great drifting ivory block-shaped creatures of immense size and unknown nature moved about on their mysterious tasks. Now he was wrestling joyously with Enkidu, now he watched the brawling swarms of Later Dead come flooding in and filling the place with their ghastly noisy machines and their guns and their foul-smelling vehicles, now he was in the villa of Lenin in Nova Roma among Lenin’s whole unsavory crew of cold-eyed conspirators and malevolent bitchy queens, and now he sat roistering in the feasting-hall of the Ice-Hunter king Vy-otin, with Enkidu laughing and joking by his side and Agamemnon too, and Amenhotep and Cretan Minos, and Varuna the king of Meluhha, his great companions in those early days in the Afterworld. How long ago that was! And now—

  “Great king!” a woman cried, dashing up to him and clutching at his wrist. “Save us from doom, great king!”

  Gilgamesh stared at her, amazed. Not a woman but a girl. And he knew her. Had known her, once. Had loved her, even. In another life, far away, long ago, on the other side of the great barrier of life and death. For her face was the face of the girl-priestess Inanna, she whom he had embraced so rashly and with such passion in old Uruk, in the life he had led before this life! During his long years in the Afterworld he had thought more than once about encountering Inanna again, had even once or twice considered seeking her out, but he had never act
ed on the thought. And now, to blunder into her like this here in Brasil—

  Or was he still in Brasil? Was this the Afterworld at all?

  Everything was swirling about him. A thick mist was gathering. The earth was giving up its moisture. It seemed to him that he saw the walls of Uruk rising at the end of the street, the huge white platform of the temples, the awesome statues of the gods. He heard the clamor of his name on a thousand thousand tongues. Gilgamesh! Gilgamesh! And in the sky, instead of the familiar dull red glaring light, there was the yellow sun of the Land, that he had not beheld in so unimaginably long a time, blazing with all its midsummer power.

  What was this? Had that tolling bell lifted him altogether out of this world and cast him back into the other, the world of his birth and death? Or was this only a waking dream?

  “Inanna?” he said in wonder. How slender she was! How young! Strings of blue beads about her waist, amulets of pink shells tied to the ends of her hair. Her body bare, painted along its side and front with the pattern of the serpent. And her dark-tipped breasts—the sharp stinging scent of her perfume—

  She spoke again, this time calling him by his name of names, the private name that no one had called him in thousands of years, since that day when he was still half a boy and he had put on the mantle of kingship and had for the first time heard his king-name roaring like a flooding river in his ears, Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh. He himself had forgotten that other name, that birth-name: but as she spoke it the dam of recollection burst in his soul. What wizardry was this, that he should be standing before the girl Inanna again?

  “I am Ninpa the Lady of the Scepter,” she murmured. “I am Ninmenna the Lady of the Crown.”

  She reached her hand toward his. As he touched her she changed: she was older now, fuller of body, her dark eyes gleaming with wanton knowledge, her deep-hued skin bright with oil. “Come,” she whispered. “I am Inanna. You must come with me. You are the only one who can save us.”

  A dark tunnel before him—a buzzing in his ears, as of a thousand wasps about his head—a brilliant purple light glowing before his eyes—a mighty roaring, as though Enlil of the Storms had loosed all his winds upon the Afterworld—