To the Land of the Living Read online

  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 practiced 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.

  But now—for the sake of finding out where Enkidu had gone this time—

  Down. Down. Herod’s torch flickered and sputtered. The air was thick and oppressive here. There was the taste of fire in it. In the dimness Gilgamesh saw hideous scenes carved on the tunnel walls, that made his eyes throb and pound. It was all he could do to tear his gaze away from those dreadful pictures.

  The tunnels curved and twisted, now plunging almost straight down, now rising in steep ramps. They crossed one another and seemed to blend and meld, and then to split apart again, so that it was all but impossible to remember which path they had originally been bound upon. Herod seemed to know the way, but even he was baffled now and again, and turned to the Hairy Man, who would gesture brusquely with one finger, jabbing the long dagger of his fingernail in the right direction: this way, this, this. No one spoke. They encountered few others in the tunnels. Occasionally demon-sounds reverberated in the distance: cacklings, screechings, hissings, moanings.

  And then music: a dreadful barbaric drumming, with the jabbing shriek of flutes or fifes rising above it.

  “The house of Calandola lies just beyond,” said Herod.

  “What must I do as we enter?” asked Gilgamesh.

  “Stand upright. Show no fear. Meet him eye to eye.”

  Gilgamesh laughed. “That will be no great task.”

  “Wait,” Herod said. “Tell me that five minutes from now.”

  The tunnel swung abruptly to the left, and Gilgamesh found himself staring into a secondary tunnel, long and narrow and lit only by the faintest of star-gleams. The only way to enter it seemed to be through an opening hardly suitable for a dwarf. “In here,” Herod said, clambering through. Gilgamesh, crouching, had to shuffle in on his knees, crawling at an angle, first this shoulder, then that one. The Hairy Man followed.

  Beyond the single narrow point of light that illuminated the opening, the darkness within was like a night within night: blackness upon blackness, so stark and deep that it struck the eyes like the hammering of fists. Gilgamesh was stunned by the depth of that darkness. He understood now for the first time what it must be like to be blind.

  “This way,” Herod said confidently. “Follow me!”

  And what if a fathomless pit yawned before them on the path, with boiling oil or colossal serpents waiting at the bottom? What if swinging scythes were to reach forth from the sides of the tunnel to disembowel any comers who passed close by? What if swords on tripwires hung overhead, ready to descend and cleave? He could see nothing. He must surrender himself totally to faith.

  And yet, and yet, being blind in this fashion, other senses came into play—

  He could hear Herod’s Roman robe rustling on the heavy air, and the tread of Herod’s sandal-shod feet pattering against the ground. The skin of his cheeks and forehead told him of the breeze that Herod’s movements created. Like a hunter tracking his prey in the night Gilgamesh read these signs, and more, and followed along without fear or hesitation.

  The tunnel narrowed until it pressed like a clammy fist on all sides. The tunnel widened until it became a vast echoing cavern. The tunnel narrowed again. It dipped; it rose; it twisted about and about. And abruptly it delivered them into an immense deep-shadowed room irregularly lit by smoldering torches set in brazen sconces, a room of angles, where ceiling met walls in a manner that oppressed and bewildered the eye. And toward the center of the room there sat enthroned a man of immense presence and authority who could only have been the great sorcerer Imbe Calandola, of whom it was rumored in the Afterworl
d that he was the Archfiend, the King of Evil, the true Lucifer, the Lord of Darkness.

  Gilgamesh saw at once that this was not so. He knew with one glance that this Calandola was neither god nor demon nor devil, but a man of human flesh and blood, such as he was himself, or had been when he had lived. But having perceived that, Gilgamesh perceived also in that same moment that the man before whom he stood was one who was extraordinary in the extreme. Who, mortal though he might have been, might well have the blood of gods in him.

  As did Gilgamesh, who had known from childhood that he was two parts god and one part mortal, which was the source of his great stature and the depth of his wisdom. Though none of that had spared him from dying and coming to make his home these long years in the Afterworld.

  “Stand and give obedience,” a deep rumbling voice commanded out of the shadows behind Calandola’s throne. “Yield yourselves, strangers, for you are in the presence of the great Jaqqa, Imbe Calandola.”

  Gilgamesh stared, and felt an emotion as close to awe as anything he could remember feeling in five thousand years.

  The blackness of Calandola was like the blackness of Calandola’s tunnel: a blackness upon blackness, the blackness of a void without suns, a blackness so intense that it seemed to suck light from all that was around it. Black-skinned men had not been unknown to Gilgamesh in his life before the Afterworld. In his wanderings in distant places he had seen the flat-nosed thick-lipped woolly-haired sailors of the kingdom of Punt, who came from a land in the south where the air was like fire and darkened the skins of those who lived there. From far-off Meluhha had come other black ones with thin noses and lips, and long straight hair so dark it was nearly blue. And in the Afterworld itself he had encountered many who were black in one of these fashions or another, native to lands whose names meant nothing to him—Nigeria, Ethiopia, Nubia, Mali, Quiloa, India, Socotra, Zanzibar, and many more. Perhaps there were blacks in every part of the world of first life, as also there were yellows and reds and browns, and, for all Gilgamesh knew, blue and green and piebald ones. But he had never seen anyone in either world who was like Calandola.

  His skin had the blackness of the people of Punt but his nose was straight and his lips were narrow and harsh, something like the features of the men of Meluhha and India, though they were small men and this Calandola was huge, a giant verging on the great size of Gilgamesh himself. His hair was thick and long and curling and there were sea-shells woven into it, and around his neck was a collar of large shells of a different kind, that stood out like twisted turrets. A strip of glittering copper as long as a man’s small finger was thrust through his nose, and two more such strips dangled from his ears. His loins were clothed in a swath of brilliant scarlet cloth, but the rest of his massive body was bare. Red and white designs had been painted down his sides; and where he was not painted, his skin had been cut and carved and otherwise tormented into astonishing raised welts, some sort of monstrous decoration, that had the form of flowers and knots and lines. His skin also was oiled to a high gloss, so that reflections of the torchlight gleamed on him.

  And his eyes—!

  Gods! Enlil and Enki and Inanna, what eyes!

  They were black and bright and deep, pools of utter darkness set in fields of dazzling white. Gilgamesh knew them at once for the eyes of a true king. They were eyes that could seize and hold, eyes that could beat and oppress. Eyes that could charm if they had to, eyes that could kill.

  Who was this man? Where had he reigned in life? Why did he dwell now in this cavern beneath Brasil in the depths of the Afterworld?

  Calandola rose. Stepped down from his throne, took a few slow steps toward Gilgamesh. There was a curious dark odor about him, a sour reek, which Gilgamesh suspected came from the oil that made his body shine. He moved with extreme deliberation, calm and measured and sure. It became apparent now that Calandola was not as tall as Gilgamesh by half a head; but, then, few men were. His look of great size he owed to the massiveness of his neck and the mighty breadth of his shoulders and the power of his upper arms, which were as thick as thighs.

  He nodded in a sniffing way at the Hairy Man, and shrugged at the trembling, fawning Herod. To Gilgamesh he said in a black powerful voice that seemed to rise from some tunnel beneath even this tunnel, “Why have you come to me?”

  “I have questions, and they say that you have answers.”

  “I know where answers may be found, yes. Give me your hand.”

  And he put forth his own, extending it palm upward. It was dark below and pink in the palm, and its span was enormous, enough to have allowed him to take a man’s head in his grasp and squeeze it like a lump of river clay. Gilgamesh, after a moment, placed his hand outspread atop Calandola’s, and waited. The outermost two of Calandola’s thick black fingers closed in on the sides of Gilgamesh’s hand and dug deep, and deeper still, until Gilgamesh could feel a faint stirring of pain, and the bones beginning to move about. A test of endurance? Very well. It was childish, but Gilgamesh would accept it. He withstood the terrible clamping pressure of those two fingers as though he were being stroked with feathers; and when the pain became too intense, he sent the pain from him as one might banish an annoying fly.

  A vein stood out now on Calandola’s gleaming forehead. The strange ornamentation of raised scars that had been carved upon his skin appeared to rise still higher, and to throb and pulse. The two fingers pressed inward even more fiercely. Unflinching, Gilgamesh looked down with indifference at his hand and Calandola’s beneath it; and then, without a word, he slid two fingers of his own along the sides of Calandola’s wrist, and returned the pressure with one of his own that was just as powerful.

  Calandola seemed not to react. It was as though he felt no pain; or else that he knew how, as Gilgamesh did, to treat pain as unworthy of his notice and dismiss it from awareness.

  As they stood locked this way, hand in hand, fingers digging deep, Calandola said, “You are too big to be a Portugal and too dark to be an Angleez. But not dark enough, I think, for an African.”

  “No. I’m not any of those.”

  “Then what are you?”

  Gilgamesh stepped up the pressure. Still Calandola showed no sign of discomfort. They were unable to hurt one another, it seemed.

  “When I lived on the other shore,” Gilgamesh said, “my land was known as the Land of the Two Rivers. Or we called it Sumer.”

  “In Africa?”

  “Not in Africa, no.” Now and then Gilgamesh had seen maps. He put little faith in them, but other men seemed to live by them; and on the maps, Africa was the name they gave that great hump-shouldered land far to the south of his own where the sky was like fire. “Some called my land Mesopotamia.”

  “I know nothing of that place.”

  “Very few do, in these times. But once it was the center of the world.”

  “No doubt it was,” said Calandola, sounding unimpressed. He released Gilgamesh’s hand, casually letting go, not in any admission of defeat but merely, it would seem, because whatever test he had imposed had brought him whatever answer he sought. “These Two Rivers of yours: which two were those?”

  “The nearer was the Euphrates, as some call it. The other was the Tigris. We said the Buranunu, and the Idigna.”

  Calandola nodded remotely. Plainly those great names were nothing but noises to him. He seemed lost in private calculations.

  “Bring wine,” he called suddenly, gesturing to someone in the rear of the cavern.

  Gilgamesh saw that a considerable entourage lurked in the darkness behind Calandola: half a dozen black men nearly as huge as their master and perhaps eleven women of the same sort, all of them clad in little more than beads and shells, and their dark skins glossy with oil. One came forward now with a wooden bowl full of some thick sweet-smelling wine. Calandola dipped his fingertips into it, and shook wine out over Gilgamesh’s head as if anointing him, and then slowly rubbed the wine deep into his scalp, while murmuring in an unknown language. Gilgamesh sub
mitted to the rite unprotestingly. Then the black giant offered the bowl to Gilgamesh. For an instant the Sumerian wondered if he was supposed to anoint Calandola in return; but no, apparently all he was meant to do was take a drink. He sipped, and found it heavy and almost nauseatingly sweet. Calandola watched him carefully. After a moment’s hesitation Gilgamesh reached for the bowl again and took a second draught, draining deep.

  Calandola threw back his head and laughed. His mouth was enormous, a great world-gulping hole set about with huge white teeth of formidable size. Four of the teeth were gone, two above and two below, so symmetrical in their absence that it seemed likely to Gilgamesh they had been removed deliberately, perhaps for vanity’s sake, or in some witch-rite. And when Calandola’s laughter set the men and women of his tribe laughing with him Gilgamesh saw that they too were missing two upper and two lower teeth, in the same pattern.

  “You drink like a king,” Calandola said. “Do you have a name?”

  “I am Gilgamesh the Sumerian, who was king of Uruk.”

  “Ah. I am Calandola the Jaqqa, who was king of the world.” He clapped his hands. “Oil for King Gilgamesh!” he roared.

  Two of the black women came forward, struggling with a huge wooden tub that held some sort of dark grease. Dipping his immense hands in it, Calandola scooped up a great gobbet of the stuff and clapped it to Gilgamesh’s bare chest; and then, with a surprisingly tender touch, he rubbed it in, chest and back and shoulders and the column of the neck, until the Sumerian gleamed as brightly as any of the Jaqqa folk. The same sharp and sour odor came from the oil that emanated from Calandola himself. Gilgamesh felt it permeating his skin, sinking in deep.