To the Land of the Living Read online

  The one who called himself Howard, the one who could not help stealing sly little glances at him like an infatuated schoolgirl, was at the wheel. Glancing back at his passenger now, he said, “Tell me, Gilgamesh: have you had dealings with Prester John before?”

  “I have heard the name, that much I know,” replied the Sumerian. “But it means very little to me.”

  “The legendary Christian emperor,” said the other, the thin one, Lovecraft. “He who was said to rule a secret kingdom somewhere in the misty hinterlands of Central Asia—although it was in Africa, according to some—”

  Asia—Africa—names, only names, Gilgamesh thought bleakly. They were places somewhere in the other world, that world of shadows from which he was so long gone. He had no idea where they might be.

  Such a multitude of places, so many names! It was impossible to keep it all straight. There was no sense to any of it. The world—his first world—the Land—had been bordered by the Two Rivers, the Idigna and the Buranunu, which the Greeks had preferred to call the Tigris and the Euphrates. Who were the Greeks, and by what right had they renamed the rivers? Everyone used those names now, even Gilgamesh himself, except in the inwardness of his soul.

  And beyond the Two Rivers? Why, there was the vassal state of Aratta far to the east, he remembered, and in that direction also lay the Land of Cedars where the fire-breathing demon Huwawa roared and bellowed, and in the eastern mountains lay the kingdom of the barbaric Elamites. To the north was the land called Uri, and in the deserts of the west the wild Martu people dwelled, and in the south was the blessed isle Dilmun, which was like a paradise. Had there been anything more to the world than that? Why, there was Meluhha far away beyond Elam, where the people had black skins and fine features, and there was Punt in the south where they were black also with flat noses and thick lips, and there was another land even beyond Meluhha, with folk of yellow skins who mined a precious green stone. And that was the world he had known when he lived in the world, that other world, the world through which he had so briefly passed before coming to this world of eternal life. But evidently there had been other places in that world, places of which he had had no inkling, or places that had come into being after his time there. Where could all these other latter-day places of the other world be, this Africa and this Asia and Europe and the rest, Rome, Greece, England? Perhaps some of them were mere new names for old places. The Land itself had had a host of names since his own time—Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Iraq, and more. Why had it needed all those names? He had no idea. New men made up new names: that seemed to be the way of the world. This Africa, this Asia—America, China, Russia—a little man named Herodotus, a Greek, had tried to explain it all to him once, the shape of the world and the names of the places in it, sketching a map for him on an old bit of parchment, and much later a stolid fellow named Mercator had done the same, and once after that he had spoken of such matters with an Englishman called Cook; but the things they told him all conflicted with one another and he could make no sense out of any of it. It was too much to ask, making sense of these things. Those myriad nations that had arisen after his time, those empires that had risen and fallen and been forgotten, all those lost dynasties, the captains and the kings—he had tried from time to time to master the sequence of them, but it was no use. Once in his former life he had sought to make himself the master of all knowledge, yes. His appetites had been boundless: for knowledge, for wealth, for power, for women, for life itself. Now all that seemed only the merest folly to him. That jumble of confused and confusing places, all those great realms and far-off kingdoms, were in another world: what could they matter to him now?

  “Asia?” he said. “Africa?” Gilgamesh shrugged. “Prester John?” He prowled the turbulent cluttered recesses of his memory. “Ah. There’s a Prester John, I think, lives in Roma Nova. A dark-skinned man, a friend of that gaudy old liar Sir John Mandeville.” It was coming back now. “Yes, I’ve seen them together many times, in that dirty squalid tavern where Mandeville’s always to be found. The two of them telling outlandish stories back and forth, each a bigger fraud than the other.”

  “A different Prester John,” said Lovecraft.

  “That one is Susenyos the Ethiop, I think,” Howard said. “A former African tyrant, and lover of the Jesuits, now far gone in whiskey. He’s one of many. There are seven, nine, a dozen Prester Johns in the Afterworld, to my certain knowledge. And maybe more.”

  Gilgamesh contemplated that notion in a distant, distracted way. Fire was running up and down his injured arm now.

  Lovecraft was saying, “—not a true name, but merely a title, and a corrupt one at that. There never was a real Prester John, only various rulers in various distant places, whom it pleased the tale-spinners of Europe to speak of as Prester John, the Christian emperor, the great mysterious unknown monarch of a fabulous realm. And here in the Afterworld there are many who choose to wear the name. There’s power in it, do you see?”

  “Power and majesty!” Howard cried. “And poetry, by God!”

  “So this Prester John whom we are to visit,” said Gilgamesh, “he is not in fact Prester John?”

  “Yeh-lu Ta-shih’s his real name,” said Howard. “Chinese. Manchurian, actually, twelfth century A.D. First emperor of the realm of Kara-Khitai, with his capital at Samarkand. Ruled over a bunch of Mongols and Turks, mainly, and they called him Gur Khan, which means ‘supreme ruler,’ and somehow that turned into ‘John’ by the time it got to Europe. And they said he was a Christian priest, too, Presbyter Joannes, ‘Prester John.’” Howard laughed. “Damned silly bastards. He was no more a Christian than you were. A Buddhist, he was, a bloody shamanistic Buddhist.”

  “Then why—”

  “Myth and confusion!” Howard said. “The great human nonsense factory at work! And wouldn’t you know it, but when he got to the Afterworld this Yeh-lu Ta-shih founded himself another empire right away in the same sort of territory he’d lived in back there, and when Richard Burton came out this way and told him about Prester John and how Europeans long ago had spoken of him by that name and ascribed all sorts of fabulous accomplishments to him he said, Yes, yes, I am Prester John indeed. And so he styles himself now, he and nine or ten others, most of them Ethiopians like that friend of your friend Mandeville.”

  “They are no friends of mine,” said Gilgamesh stiffly. He leaned back and massaged his aching arm. Outside the Land Rover the landscape was changing now: more hilly, with ill-favored fat-trunked little trees jutting at peculiar angles from the purple soil. Here and there in the distance his keen eyes made out scattered groups of black tents on the hillsides, and herds of the little demon-horses grazing near them. Gilgamesh wished now that he hadn’t let himself be inveigled into this expedition. What need had he of Prester John? One of those upstart Later Dead potentates, one of the innumerable little princelings who had set up minor dominions for themselves out here in the vast measureless wastelands of the Outback—and reigning under a false name, at that—one more shoddy scoundrel, one more puffed-up little nobody swollen with unearned pride—

  Well, and what difference did it make? He would sojourn awhile in the land of this Prester John, and then he would move on, alone, apart from others, traveling a separate path without destination or purpose, mourning as always his lost Enkidu. There never seemed any escaping that doom that lay upon him, that bitter solitude, whether he reigned in splendor in the Uruk of his ancient life or wandered in the forlorn wastes of this Afterworld.

  “Their Excellencies P.E. Lovecraft and Howard E. Robert,” cried the majordomo grandly though inaccurately, striking three times on the black marble floor of Prester John’s throne-chamber with his gold-tipped staff of pale green jade. “Envoys Plenipotentiary of His Britannic Majesty King Henry VIII of the Kingdom of New Holy Resurrected England.”

  Lovecraft and Howard took a couple of steps forward. Yeh-lu Ta-shih nodded curtly and waved one elegant hand, resplendent with inch-long fingernails, in casual acknowledgement
. The envoys plenipotentiary did not seem to hold much interest for him, nor, apparently, did whatever it was that had caused His Britannic Majesty King Henry to send them here.

  The emperor’s cool imperious glance turned toward Gilgamesh, who was struggling to hold himself erect. He was beginning to feel feverish and dizzy and he wondered if he should point out that there was an oozing hole in his arm. There were limits even to his endurance, after all, though he usually tried to conceal that fact. He didn’t know how much longer he could hold out. There were times when behaving like a hero was a heroic pain in the ass, and this was one of them.

  “—and his Late Highness Gilgamesh of Uruk son of Lugalbanda, great king, king of Uruk, king of kings, lord of the Land of the Two Rivers by merit of Enlil and An,” boomed the majordomo in the same splendid way, looking down only once at the card he held in his hand.

  “Great king?” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih, fixing Gilgamesh with one of the most intensely penetrating stares the Sumerian could remember having received. “King of kings? Those are very lofty titles, Gilgamesh of Uruk.”

  “A mere formula,” Gilgamesh replied, “which I thought appropriate when being presented at your court. In fact I am king of nothing at all now.”

  “Ah,” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih. “King of Nothing-at-all.”

  And so are you, my lord Prester John. Gilgamesh did not let himself say it, though the words bubbled toward the roof of his mouth and begged to be uttered. And so are all the self-appointed lords and masters of the many realms of the Afterworld.

  The slender amber-hued man on the throne leaned forward. “And where then, I pray, is Nothing-at-all?”

  Some of the courtiers began to snicker. But Prester John seemed to be altogether in earnest, though it was impossible to be completely certain of that. He was plainly a formidable man, Gilgamesh had quickly come to see: sly, shrewd, self-contained, with a tough and sinewy intelligence. Not at all the vain little cock-of-the-walk Gilgamesh had expected to find in this bleak and remote corner of the Outback. However small and obscure his principality might be, Prester John ruled it, obviously, with a firm grasp. The grandeur of the glittering palace that his scruffy subjects had built for him here on the edge of nowhere, and the solidity of the small but substantial city surrounding it, testified to that. Gilgamesh knew something about the building of cities and palaces. Prester John’s capital bore the mark of the steady toil of centuries.

  The long stare was unrelenting. Gilgamesh, fighting back the blazing pain in his arm, met the emperor’s gaze with an equally earnest one of his own and said:

  “Nothing-at-all? It is a land that never was, and will always be, my lord. Its boundaries are nowhere and its capital city is everywhere, nor do any of us ever leave it.”

  “Ah. Ah. Indeed. Nicely put. You are Early Dead, are you?”

  “Very early, my lord.”

  “Earlier than Ch’in Shih Huang Ti? Earlier than the Lords of Shang and Hsia?”

  Gilgamesh turned in puzzlement toward Lovecraft, who told him in a half-whisper, “Ancient kings of China. Your time was even before theirs.”

  Shrugging, Gilgamesh replied, “They are not known to me, my lord, but you hear what the Britannic ambassador says. He is a man of learning: it must be so. I will tell you that I am older than Caesar by far, older than Amenhotep, older than Belshazzar. By a great deal.”

  Yeh-lu Ta-shih considered that a moment. Then he made another of his little gestures of dismissal, as though brushing aside the whole concept of relative ages in the Afterworld. With a dry laugh he said, “So you are very old, King Gilgamesh. I congratulate you. And yet the Ice-Hunter folk would tell us that you and I and your Belshazzar and your Amenhotep, whoever they may be, all arrived here only yesterday; and in the eyes of the Hairy Men, the Ice-Hunters themselves are mere newcomers. And so on and so on. There’s no beginning to it, is there? Any more than there’s an end.”

  Without waiting for an answer he asked Gilgamesh, “How did you come by that gory wound, great king of Nothing-at-all?”

  “A misunderstanding, my lord. It may be that your border patrol is a little over-zealous at times.”

  One of the courtiers leaned toward the emperor and murmured something. Prester John’s serene brow grew furrowed. He lifted a flawlessly contoured eyebrow ever so slightly.

  “Killed nine of them, did you?”

  “They attacked us before we had the opportunity of showing our diplomatic credentials,” Lovecraft put in quickly. “It was entirely a matter of self-defense, my lord Prester John.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it.” The emperor seemed to contemplate for a moment, but only for a moment, the skirmish that had cost the lives of nine of his horsemen; and then quite visibly he dismissed that matter too from the center of his attention. “Well, now, my lords ambassador—”

  Abruptly Gilgamesh swayed, tottered, started to fall. He checked himself just barely in time, seizing a massive porphyry column and clinging to it until he felt more steady. Beads of sweat trickled down his forehead into his eyes. He began to shiver. The huge stone column seemed to be expanding and contracting. Waves of vertigo were rippling through him and he was seeing double, suddenly. Everything was blurring and multiplying. He drew his breath in deeply, again, again, forcing himself to hold on. He wondered if Prester John was playing some kind of game with him, trying to see how long his strength could last. Well, if he had to, Gilgamesh swore, he would stand here forever in front of Prester John without showing a hint of weakness.

  But now Yeh-lu Ta-shih was at last willing to extend compassion. With a glance toward one of his pages the emperor said, “Summon my physician, and tell him to bring his tools and his potions. That wound should have been dressed an hour ago.”

  “Thank you, my lord,” Gilgamesh muttered, trying to keep the irony from his tone.

  The doctor appeared almost at once, as though he had been waiting in an antechamber. Another of Prester John’s little games, perhaps? He was a burly, broad-shouldered, bushy-haired man of more than middle years, with a manner about him that was brisk and bustling but nevertheless warm, concerned, reassuring. Drawing Gilgamesh down beside him on a low divan covered with the gray-green hide of some scaly hell-dragon, he peered into the wound, muttered something unintelligible under his breath in a guttural language unknown to the Sumerian, and pressed his thick fingers around the edges of the torn flesh until fresh blood flowed. Gilgamesh hissed sharply but did not flinch.

  “Ach mein lieber freund, I must hurt you again, but it is for your own good. Verstehen sie?”

  The doctor’s fingers dug in more deeply. He was spreading the wound, swabbing it, cleansing it with some clear fluid that stung like a hot iron. The pain was so intense that there was almost a kind of pleasure in it: it was a purifying kind of pain, a purging of the soul.

  Prester John said, “How bad is it, Dr. Schweitzer?”

  “Gott sei dank, it is deep but clean. He will heal without damage.”

  He continued to probe and cleanse, murmuring softly to Gilgamesh as he worked: “Bitte. Bitte. Einen augenblick, mein freund.” To Prester John he said, “This man is made of steel. No nerves at all, immense resistance to pain. We have one of the great heroes here, nicht wahr? You are Roland, are you? Achilles, perhaps?”

  “Gilgamesh is his name,” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih.

  The doctor’s eyes grew bright. “Gilgamesh! Gilgamesh of Sumer? Wunderbar! Wunderbar! The very man. The seeker after everlasting life. Ach, we must talk, my friend, you and I, when you are feeling better.” From his medical kit he now produced a frightful-looking hypodermic syringe. Gilgamesh watched as though from a vast distance, as though that throbbing swollen arm belonged to someone else. “Ja. Ja, certainly we must talk, of life, of death, of philosophy, mein freund, of philosophy! There is so very much for us to discuss!” He slipped the needle beneath Gilgamesh’s skin. “There. Genug. Sit. Rest. The healing now begins.”

  Robert Howard had never seen anything like it. It could have been so
mething straight from the pages of one of his Conan stories. The big ox had taken an arrow right through the fat part of his arm, and he had simply yanked it out and gone right on fighting. Then, afterward, he had behaved as if the wound were nothing more than a scratch, all that time while they were driving hour after hour toward Prester John’s city and then undergoing lengthy interrogation by the court officials and then standing through this whole endless ceremony at court—God almighty, what a display of endurance! True, Gilgamesh had finally gone a little wobbly and had actually seemed on the verge of passing out. But any ordinary mortal would have conked out long ago. Heroes really were different. They were another breed altogether. Look at him now, sitting there casually while that old German medic swabs him out and stitches him up in that slapdash cavalier way, and not a whimper out of him. Not a whimper!

  Suddenly Howard found himself wanting to go over there to Gilgamesh, to comfort him, to let him lean his head back against him while the doctor worked him over, to wipe the sweat from his brow—

  Yes, to comfort him in an open, rugged, manly way—

  No. No. No. No.

  There it was again, the horror, the unspeakable thing, the hideous crawling, the hell-born impulse rising out of the cesspools of his soul—

  Howard fought it back. Blotted it out, hid it from view. Denied that it had ever entered his mind.

  To Lovecraft he said, “That’s some doctor! Took his medical degree at the Chicago slaughterhouses, I reckon!”

  “Don’t you know who he is, Bob?”

  “Some old Dutchman who wandered in here during a sandstorm and never bothered to leave.”

  “Does the name of Dr. Schweitzer mean nothing to you?”

  Howard gave Lovecraft a blank look. “Guess I never heard it much in Texas.”

  “Oh, Bob, Bob, why must you always pretend to be such a cowboy? Can you tell me you’ve never heard of Schweitzer? Albert Schweitzer? The great philosopher, theologian, musician—there never was a greater interpreter of Bach, and don’t tell me you don’t know Bach either—”