To the Land of the Living Read online

  Howard snorted. “Gawd, try and figure you out! In the days when you thought you lived only once, you made people go roaring along with you on the highway a mile a minute. Here where no one stays dead for very long you want me to drive like an old woman. Well, I’ll attempt it, H.P., but everything in me cries out to go like the wind. When you live in big country, you learn to cover the territory the way it has to be covered. And Texas is the biggest country there is. It isn’t just a place, it’s a state of mind.”

  “As is the Afterworld,” said Lovecraft. “Though I grant you that the Afterworld isn’t Texas.”

  “Texas!” Howard boomed. “Now, there was a place! God damn, I wish you could have seen it! By God, H.P., what a time we’d have had, you and me, if you’d come to Texas. Two gentlemen of letters like us riding together all to hell and gone from Corpus Christi to El Paso and back again, seeing it all and telling each other wondrous stories all the way! I swear, it would have enlarged your soul, H.P. Beauty such as perhaps even you couldn’t have imagined. That big sky. That blazing sun. And the open space! Whole empires could fit into Texas and never be seen again! That Rhode Island of yours, H.P.—we could drop it down just back of Cross Plains and lose it behind a medium-size prickly pear! What you see here, it just gives you the merest idea of that glorious beauty. Though I admit this is plenty beautiful itself, this here.”

  “I wish I could share your joy in this landscape, Robert,” Lovecraft said quietly, when it seemed that Howard had said all he meant to say.

  “You don’t care for it?” Howard asked, sounding surprised and a little wounded.

  “I can say one good thing for it: at least it’s far from the sea.”

  “You’ll give it that much, will you?”

  “You know how I hate the sea and all that the sea contains! Its odious creatures—that hideous reek of salt air hovering above it—” Lovecraft shuddered fastidiously. “But this land—this bitter desert—you don’t find it somber? You don’t find it forbidding, this Outback?”

  “It’s the most beautiful place I’ve seen since I came to the Afterworld.”

  “Perhaps what you call beauty is too subtle for my eye. Perhaps it escapes me altogether. I was always a man for cities, myself.”

  “What you’re trying to say, I reckon, is that all this looks real hateful to you. Is that it? As grim and ghastly as the Plateau of Leng, eh, H.P.?” Howard laughed. “‘Sterile hills of gray granite…dim wastes of rock and ice and snow…’” Hearing himself quoted, Lovecraft laughed too, though not exuberantly. Howard went on, “I look around at the Outback of the Afterworld and I see something a whole lot like Texas, and I love it. For you it’s as sinister as dark frosty Leng, where people have horns and hooves and munch on corpses and sing hymns to Nyarlathotep. Oh, H.P., H.P., there’s no accounting for tastes, is there? Why, there’s even some people who—whoa, now! Look there!”

  He braked the Land Rover suddenly and brought it to a jolting halt. A small malevolent-looking something with blazing eyes and a scaly body had broken from cover and gone scuttering across the path just in front of them. Now it faced them, glaring up out of the road, snarling and hissing flame.

  “Hell-cat!” Howard cried. “Hell-coyote! Look at that critter, H.P. You ever see so much ugliness packed into such a small package? Scare the toenails off a shoggoth, that one would!”

  “Can you drive on past it?” Lovecraft asked, looking dismayed.

  “I want a closer look, first.” Howard rummaged down by his boots and pulled a pistol from the clutter on the floor of the car. “Don’t it give you the shivers, driving around in a land full of critters that could have come right out of one of your stories, or mine? I want to look this little ghoul-cat right in the eye.”

  “Robert—”

  “You wait here. I’ll only be but a minute.”

  Howard swung himself down from the Land Rover and marched stolidly toward the hissing little beast, which stood its ground. Lovecraft watched fretfully. At any moment the creature might leap upon Bob Howard and rip out his throat with a swipe of its horrid yellow talons, perhaps—or burrow snout-deep into his chest, seeking the Texan’s warm, throbbing heart—

  They stood staring at each other, Howard and the small monster, no more than a dozen feet apart. For a long moment neither one moved. Howard, gun in hand, leaned forward to inspect the beast as one might look at a feral cat guarding the mouth of an alleyway. Did he mean to shoot it? No, Lovecraft thought: beneath his bluster the robust Howard seemed surprisingly squeamish about bloodshed and violence of any sort.

  Then things began happening very quickly. Out of a thicket to the left a much larger animal abruptly emerged: a ravening monstrous creature with a crocodile head and powerful thick-thighed legs that ended in frightful curving claws. An arrow ran through the quivering dewlaps of its heavy throat from side to side, and a hideous dark ichor streamed from the wound down the beast’s repellent blue-gray fur. The small animal, seeing the larger one wounded this way, instantly sprang upon its back and sank its fangs joyously into its shoulder. But a moment later there burst from the same thicket a man of astonishing size, a great dark-haired black-bearded man clad only in a bit of cloth about his waist. Plainly he was the huntsman who had wounded the larger monster, for there was a bow of awesome dimensions in his hand and a quiver of arrows on his back. In utter fearlessness the giant plucked the foul little creature from the wounded beast’s back and hurled it far out of sight; then, swinging around, he drew a gleaming bronze dagger and with a single fierce thrust drove it into the breast of his prey, the coup de grace that brought the animal crashing heavily down.

  All this took only an instant. Lovecraft, peering through the window of the Land Rover, was dazzled by the strength and speed of the dispatch and awed by the size and agility of the half-naked huntsman. He glanced toward Howard, who stood to one side, his own considerable frame utterly dwarfed by the black-bearded man.

  For a moment Howard seemed dumbstruck, paralyzed with wonder and amazement. But then he was the first to speak.

  “By Crom,” he muttered, staring at the giant. “Surely this is Conan of Aquilonia and none other!” He was trembling. He took a lurching step toward the huge man, holding out both his hands in a strange gesture—submission, was it? “Lord Conan?” Howard murmured. “Great king, is it you? Conan? Conan?” And before Lovecraft’s astounded eyes Howard fell to his knees next to the dying beast, and looked up with awe and something like rapture in his eyes at the towering huntsman.

  * * *

  TWO

  IT had been a decent day’s hunting so far. Three beasts brought down after long and satisfying chase; every shaft fairly placed; each animal skillfully dressed, the meat set out as bait for other demon-beasts, the hide and head carefully put aside for proper cleaning at nightfall. There was true pleasure in work done so well.

  Yet there was a hollowness at the heart of it all that left him leaden and cheerless no matter how cleanly his arrows sped to their mark. He never felt that true fulfilment, that clean sense of completion, that joy of accomplishment, which was ultimately the only thing he sought.

  Why was that? Was it because—as some of the Christian dead so drearily insisted—because the Afterworld was Hell, a place of punishment, where by definition there could be no delight?

  To Gilgamesh that was foolishness. Some parts of the Afterworld were extraordinarily nasty, yes. Much of it. It had its hellish aspects, no denying that. But certainly pleasure was to be had there too.

  It depended, he supposed, on one’s expectations. Those who came here thinking to find eternal punishment did indeed get eternal punishment, and it was even more horrendous than anything they had anticipated. It served them right, those true believers, those gullible Later Dead, that army of credulous Christians.

  He had been amazed when their kind first came flocking into the Afterworld, Enki only knew how many thousands of years ago. The things they talked of! Rivers of boiling oil! Lakes of pitch! Demons
with pitchforks! That was what they expected, and there were clever folk here willing and ready to give them what they were looking for. So Torture Towns aplenty were constructed for those who wanted them. Gilgamesh had trouble understanding why anyone would. Nobody among the First Dead really could figure them out, those absurd Later Dead with their sickly obsession with punishment. What was it Imhotep called them? Masochists, that was the word. Pathetic masochists. But then sly little Aristotle had begged to disagree, saying, “No, my lord, it would be a violation of the nature of the Afterworld to send a true masochist off to the torments. The only ones who go are the strong ones, the bullies, the braggarts, the ones who are cowards at the core of their souls.” Belshazzar had had something to say on the matter too, and Tiberius, and that Palestinian sorceress Delilah of the startling eyes, and then all of them had jabbered at once, trying yet again to make sense of the Christian Later Dead. Until finally Gilgamesh had said, before stalking out of the room, “The trouble with all of you is that you keep trying to make sense out of this place. But when you’ve been here as long as I have—”

  Well, perhaps this 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 Afterworld 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 fe
lt 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.