Gilgamesh the King Read online

  I waited there a long while, pacing, before she arrived. She swept grandly into the room accompanied by four pages who carried the huge loop-topped bundles of reeds, half again as high as a man, that go wherever Inanna goes. With a quick gesture she sent the pages from us and we were alone.

  She held herself tall before me. She looked splendid and triumphant and terrifying. I could see that there was still some girlishness about her, but not very much. Since I last had spoken with her she had been transformed into something beyond my reach and beyond my comprehension.

  I thought of her lying naked in the embrace of the king who is the god, on the night of the Sacred Marriage, which was the first night of her high priestesshood, and the taste of bile came to my lips.

  She was clad in a simple tufted white robe that covered her from head to foot, with only her right shoulder bare. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and braided into a thick rope that was wound around her head. Her cheeks were lightly tinted with yellow ochre and her eyelids were darkened with kohl, but otherwise she wore no cosmetic. The only tangible sign of her new rank was a delicate coronet of gold chain, woven in the serpent-motif of the goddess, that encircled her forehead. But there were other, subtler signs. The aura of power was upon her. The radiance of heaven’s might glowed beneath her skin.

  I stared at her, but my eyes could not meet her eyes. I could think only of her body moving beneath Dumuzi’s, her lips to his lips, his hand between her thighs, and I burned with chagrin and shame.

  Then I reminded myself that the woman who stood before me was not merely someone I had once desired. She was the embodiment of the highest power of the world; she was the goddess herself. The gulf between us was immense. Beside her, I and all my petty desires were nothing.

  “Well?” she said after a long while.

  I made the goddess-sign to her. “Queen of Heaven and Earth,” I mumbled. “Divine Mother. First Daughter of the Moon.”

  “Look at me.”

  I lifted my eyes. They did not quite reach hers.

  “Look at me! Into my eyes, into my eyes! Why this terror? Am I that much altered?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. “Very much altered.”

  “And you fear me?”

  “Yes. I fear you. You are Inanna.”

  “Ah. Queen of Heaven and Earth! Divine Mother! First Daughter of the Moon!”

  She put her hand to her mouth and smothered a giggle, and then the giggle escaped as shrill laughter.

  Astounded, trembling, I made the goddess-sign again and again.

  “Yes, fear me!” she cried, unable to hold back her wild mirth. She pointed imperiously. “Down and grovel! Fool! Oh, what a child you are! Queen of Heaven and Earth! First Daughter of the Moon!”

  I could not comprehend her laughter, ringing in uncontrollable peals. It terrified me. I made the goddess-sign at her once more. She had never been anything other than bewildering to me, even when she was only a naked sparkle-eyed girl with budding breasts, laughing and hugging me fiercely in the corridor and prophesying great things. And the wily young priestess, playing mischievous flirting-games with me to my befuddlement: I had not understood her either. But this was too much, this mockery of the goddess, now that she was the goddess. I was frightened. I shivered with fear. Silently I called upon Lugalbanda to guard me.

  After a moment she grew more calm, and I felt a little less uneasy. Quietly she said, “Yes, I am different now. I am Inanna. But I always was: do you understand that? Do you think the goddess did not know from the beginning of time that she would choose my body when she was done with that other one? And now my turn has come. Were you there, the night of the Marriage?”

  “I was there, yes. I stood in the front row. You looked straight at me, but you never saw me.”

  “The fire of the goddess blinded my eyes that night.”

  “Or the fire of the god,” I said rashly.

  She stared at me in astonishment and sudden fury. Her cheeks reddened beneath the yellow ochre, and her eyes blazed. But her anger seemed to go as swiftly as it had come. She smiled and said, “Ah, is that it, Gilgamesh? Is that what gnaws at you?”

  I could not speak. My cheeks flamed. I stared at my feet.

  She came to me and took my hand in hers. Softly she said, “I tell you, think nothing of him. Nothing! It was a rite, which I dutifully performed, and that was all it was. It was the goddess who embraced him, and not the priestess. It changes nothing between you and me. Do you understand?”

  When you are king, I will lie in your arms.

  I looked up, and our eyes met squarely for the first time that day. “I think I do.”

  “So be it, then.”

  I was silent. She was still too powerful for me. The force of her was overwhelming.

  Then I said, after a time, “What was that name you called me a moment ago?”

  “Gilgamesh.”

  “But that is not my name.”

  “It will be,” she replied. “Gilgamesh: He-Who-Is-Chosen. You will reign by that name. It is a name of the old ones, the goddess-people, who held the Land long ago. The knowledge of it came to me as I dreamed, when the goddess first walked with me. Say it: Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh.”

  “Gilgamesh.”

  “Gilgamesh the king.”

  “That would be impious to say. Dumuzi is king.”

  “Gilgamesh the king! Say it! Say it!”

  Once more I shivered. “Let me be, Inanna, I pray you. If the gods mean to make me king, it will come in proper time. But Dumuzi has the high seat now. I will not name myself king before you, not now, not here in the house of the goddess.”

  The anger returned to her eyes. She did not like to be resisted.

  Then she shrugged and seemed to put all that we had been saying out of her mind between one instant and the next. In a different voice, flat, businesslike, she said, “Why are you concealing things from me?”

  I was startled by that. “Concealing?”

  “You know what you are concealing.”

  I felt a pressure behind my right ear, a warning. Then I knew what she wanted me to tell her, and I feared letting her know it. I said nothing. Speaking with her was like crossing a stream where the footing is tricky: at any moment I might slip and be swept away.

  “Why do you hide things from me, Gilgamesh?”

  “You must not call me by that name.”

  “I suppose not, not yet. But you will not evade me so easily.”

  “Why do you think I am hiding something from you?”

  “I know you are.”

  “Can you see into my mind?”

  She smiled enigmatically. “Perhaps I can.”

  I forced myself to stubborn resistance. “Then I have no secrets from you. You know everything already,” I said.

  “I mean to hear it from your lips. I thought you would have come to me days ago to tell me; and when you did not come, I had you summoned. You have changed. There is something new within you.”

  “No,” I said. “You are the one who has changed.”

  “You also,” said Inanna. “Did I not ask you, when a god has chosen you, to come to me and tell me which god it is?”

  I stared at her, amazed. “You know that?”

  “It is easy to tell.”

  “How? Can you see it in my face?”

  “I could feel it halfway across the city. You have a god within you now. Can you deny it?”

  I shook my head. “No, I will not deny that.”

  “You promised to tell me when you were chosen. It was a promise.”

  Looking away from her I said in a downcast way, “It is a very private thing, being chosen.”

  “It was a promise,” she said.

  “I thought you were too busy to see me—the Marriage festival, the funeral of the old Inanna—”

  “It was a promise,” she said.

  The whole of the side of my head was throbbing now. I was helpless before her. Lugalbanda, I prayed, guide me, guide me! But all I felt
was the throbbing.

  She said, “Tell me the name of the god who protects you now.”

  “You know all things,” I ventured. “Why must I tell you what you already know?”

  That amused her, but it angered her as well. She turned from me and strode up and down the room, and grasped her great reed-bundles and squeezed them tightly, and would not look at me. There was a silence that bound me like bands of bronze. I was choking under its force. It is no small thing to reveal one’s personal god: it means surrendering a portion of the strength which that god provides. I was not yet secure enough in my own strength to be able to afford that surrender. But likewise I was not yet secure enough to withhold from Inanna the knowledge she demanded. It was a priestess to whom I had promised, but it was the goddess who laid claim to that promise.

  I said very quietly, “The god who has entered me is my father, the hero Lugalbanda.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Ah!”

  She said nothing else, and the frightful silence descended again.

  I said, “You must tell no one.”

  “I am Inanna!” she cried, infuriated. “No one commands me!”

  “I ask you only not to tell. Is that a great deal to ask?”

  “You may not ask anything of me.”

  “Simply promise—”

  “I make no promises. I am Inanna.”

  The goddess-force flooded the room. The true divine presence creates a chill deeper than the deepest cold of winter, for it draws all the warmth of life toward itself; and in that moment I felt Inanna taking mine, pumping it from me, leaving me a mere frozen husk. I could not move. I could not speak. I felt young and foolish and innocent. I saw rising before me the true goddess incarnate, with yellow eyes glowing like those of a beast in the night.

  8

  A FEW DAYS AFTERWARD, WHEN I returned to my home after a day at play on the javelin-fields, I found a sealed tablet lying on my couch. This was, I remember, on the nineteenth day of the month: always the unluckiest of days. Hastily I broke open the envelope of brown clay and read the message it contained, and read it again, and read it once more. Those few words inscribed on the tablet struck hard at me. Those words swept me in a single moment away from the comfort of my native city and into a strange life of exile, as though they were not words, but the stormy breath of Enlil the high god.

  What the tablet said was: Flee Uruk at once. Dumuzi means to have your life.

  It was signed with the seal of Inanna.

  My instant response was one of blind hot defiance. My heart thundered; my hands rolled up into fists. Who was Dumuzi, that he could threaten the son of Lugalbanda? What did I have to fear from a mere torpid slug such as he? And also I thought: the power of the goddess is greater than the power of the king, so there is no need for me to flee the city. Inanna will protect me.

  As I paced up and down in the heat of my anger, one of my servants entered the room. He saw my rage and began to back out, but I called to him to stay. “What is it?” I demanded.

  “Two men, O lord—two men were here—”

  “Who were they?”

  For a moment his mouth had trouble making words. Then he got it out: “Slaves of Dumuzi, I think. They wore his red band around their arms.” His eyes were bright with fear. “They carried knives, my lord. They were hidden in their robes, but I saw the glint of them. My lord—my lord—”

  “Did they tell you what they wanted?”

  “To speak with you, they said.” He was stammering. Fright had made him pale and sickly-faced. “I s-s-said you were with the g-goddess, and they answered that they would return—they w-w-w-would return this evening—”

  “Ah,” I said softly. “So it is true, then.” I caught him by the corner of his robe and pulled him close and whispered, “Keep watch! If you see them nearby, come to me at once!”

  “I will, O lord!”

  “And say nothing to anyone about where I might be!”

  “Not a word, O lord!”

  I dismissed him and he scurried out. Once more I began to pace the room. I found myself dry-throated and shaking, not so much with fear, but with rage and dismay. What else could I do except flee? I saw the folly of what I had been thinking a little while before, when I had been so bold. I could go on being bold, yes; but I would surely die for it. How cocky I had been! Asking, who was Dumuzi, that he could threaten the son of Lugalbanda? Why, Dumuzi was the king, and my life was forfeit to him if so he decreed. And if Inanna had any way to protect me, why would she have sent word to me to take flight? I stared into a terrible emptiness. I could not tarry a moment, I knew, not even to seek explanations. In the twinkling of an eye Uruk was lost to me. I must go and go swiftly, without even pausing to bid farewell to my mother, or to kneel at Lugalbanda’s shrine. At this moment the two assassins Dumuzi had chosen might be on their way back there to find me. I could not hesitate.

  I did not mean to be gone for long. I would take sanctuary in some other city for a few days, or if necessary a couple of weeks, until I could learn what I had done to make myself the enemy of the king, and how the breach could be repaired. I did not then realize that I was setting forth into four years of exile. But so it proved to be.

  Numbly, with shaking hands, I gathered together a few possessions. I took as much clothing as would fit in a pack on my back, and my bow and a sword, and the Pazuzu amulet that my mother had given me long ago, and the little goddess-statuette of green stone that I had had from Inanna when she was still just an ordinary priestess. I had acquired a tablet on which some magical phrases were inscribed, things for use in case of injury or illness, and I took that along, as well as a leather pouch of the drug that one burns to drive away ghosts in the desert. Lastly I took a small knife of antique style with a jeweled hilt, not very keen but beloved by me because it had been brought to me by Lugalbanda returning from one of his wars.

  At the first watch of the night, star-rise time, I slipped from my house and made my way warily through the narrow tangles of streets, heading toward the North Gate. A light rain was falling. Plumes of white smoke from the lamps of ten thousand houses rose toward the darkening sky. My heart ached miserably. I had never left Uruk before. I had no idea what lay beyond the city walls. I was in the hands of the gods.

  The city of Kish was where I chose to go. Eridu or Nippur were much closer and more easily reached; but Kish seemed a safer choice. Dumuzi had great influence in Eridu or Nippur, but Kish was hostile to him. I did not care to arrive at a place where I would immediately be packed up and shipped back to Uruk as a kindness to Uruk’s king. King Agga of Kish was not likely to feel any need to do favors for Dumuzi; and Lugalbanda had often spoken of him, I recalled, as a sturdy warrior, a worthy opponent, a man of honor. To Kish, then: to offer myself to Agga’s mercy.

  Kish lay a great distance away to the north, a march of many days. I could not go by water. There was no ready way for a small boat or a raft to travel upstream on the fast-flowing Buranunu, and it was too risky for me to try to slip aboard one of the great royal sailing vessels that ply the river between cities. But I knew that there was a caravan track that flanked the eastern bank of the river. If I followed it northward and put one foot forward and then the next, sooner or later I was sure to get to Kish.

  I walked briskly, and sometimes I ran at a light trot, and soon Uruk was falling away behind me in the darkness. I did not halt until the middle hour of the night. By then I had a sense of being far from home, of embarking on a great journey that would take me to the far corners of the world, a journey that would never end. Nor has that journey ended, to this day.

  That night I slept in a freshly ploughed field, with my cloak around me and the rain falling in my face. But I slept, and I slept soundly. At dawn I rose, and bathed in some farmer’s muddy canal, and helped myself to a breakfast of figs and cucumbers. Then I took myself toward the north once more. I felt tireless, full of an inexhaustible energy, and it did not trouble me to walk all the hours of the day. It was the g
od within me, driving me on, as ever, to more than mortal deeds.

  The Land was more beautiful than I had ever imagined. The sky was vast and luminous: it trembled with god-presence. On the rich broad river-plain the first tender grass of autumn was beginning to sprout in the soft meadows after the harsh summer drought. Along the canals the mimosa trees, the willows and poplars, the reeds and rushes, all were stirring with new green growth. The dark-hued river Buranunu ran to my left, rising high above the plain on its bed of its own silt. Somewhere far off to the east, I knew, was the second great river, the swift and wild Idigna, that forms the other boundary of the Land: for when we speak of the Land, we mean the territory between the two rivers. All that lies outside is foreign to us; that which lies within is the dominion allotted to us by the gods.

  From the rivers come hardship and danger—terrible torrents, killing floods—but also from them comes fertility, and I saw signs of that great gift on all sides. This we owe to Father Enki. They tell the tale of the wise god taking on the form of a wild bull, who thrust his great phallus into the dry beds of the two rivers and cast forth his seed in mighty spurts to fill them with the sweet sparkling water of life. So is it always: the water of the father gives fecundity to the Land, which is our mother. It was Enki too who, once the rivers were filled with his fertile flow, devised the canals that convey the water of the river to the fields, and brought forth the fish and the reeds of the marshlands, and the green grass of the hills, and the grains and vegetables of the cultivated lands, and the cattle of the pastures, and gave each of these into the hands of its special god.