Gilgamesh the King Read online

  These things I had heard from the harper Ur-kununna, and from school-father in the classroom; but it had all seemed only words to me. Now it became real. I saw the richly laden fields of wheat and barley. I saw the date palms heavy with unripe fruit. I saw the mulberry and cypress trees, the vines bearing dark glistening grapes, the almonds and walnuts, the herds of oxen and goats and sheep. The Land was thick with life. In the lagoons along the canals I saw wallowing buffaloes, great flocks of birds with brilliant plumage, and an abundance of turtles and snakes. Once I saw a lion with a black mane; but he did not see me. I longed to see an elephant, of which I had heard wondrous tales, but the elephants were elsewhere that season. Of other creatures, though—boars and hyenas, jackals and wolves, eagles and vultures, antelopes and gazelles—there was a multitude.

  When I was in the wild places, I hunted hares and geese for my dinners, and found berries and nuts to eat as well. In the village the farmers took me in and shared with me their beans and peas and lentils, their beer, their golden melons. I told no one my name, nor where I was from; but my bearing was that of a young prince, and perhaps that was why they were so hospitable toward me. In any case it is an offense to the gods to turn away a peaceful stranger. The girls of these farms willingly kept me warm by night, and more than once I regretted having to move along, or debated with myself whether to take some one of these tender companions with me. But move along I did, and always I departed from the villages alone; and alone I was when I came at last to the great city of Kish.

  My father used to speak generously of Kish. “If there is any city that can with justice claim to be the equal of Uruk,” he would say, “it is Kish.” I think that is true.

  Like Uruk, Kish lies close by the Buranunu, so that it prospers from the river trade between city and city and from the sea trade that comes up the river from the ocean lands. Like Uruk, it is walled and secure. It has a great many people, though not quite so many as Uruk, which is probably the largest city of the world: my tax-collectors, in the fifth year of my reign, tallied ninety thousands of people, including the slaves. I think Kish has but two thirds as many, which is still a mighty number.

  Long before Uruk became great, Kish had already attained the highest power of the Land. This was when kingship had descended from heaven a second time, after the Flood had destroyed the earlier cities. Kish then became the seat of kingship, when Uruk was only a village. I remember the harper Ur-kununna singing us the tale of Etana king of Kish, he who stabilized all the Land and was hailed everywhere as overlord. Etana was the one who soared into the heavens with the aid of an eagle when, because he was childless, he sought the plant of birth, which grows only in heaven.

  The wondrous journey of Etana of Kish brought him the heir he desired; but all the same Etana dwells today in the House of Dust and Darkness, and Kish no longer has mastery over all the Land. By the time Enmebaraggesi was king in Kish, greatness had begun to grow in Uruk. Meskiaggasher, son of the sun, became our king, when Uruk was still not Uruk, but only the two villages of Eanna and Kullab. Meskiaggasher made Enmebaraggesi take note of him. After him came my grandfather the hero Enmerkar, who created Uruk out of the two villages; and after him, Lugalbanda. And under those two heroes we won our freedom from Kish and came into our full greatness, of which I have been the steward these many years.

  At this time of my boyhood Enmebaraggesi was long dead and his son Agga was king in Kish. On a day of bright winter sunlight I had my first glimpse of his city, rising high on the flat Buranunu plain behind a wall of many towers painted a dazzling white, from which long banners in crimson and emerald were streaming. Kish was a two-humped place, I saw, with twin centers to the west and east and a low district between them. The temples of Kish rose on platforms far higher than the White Platform of Uruk, with steps going up and up and up until they seemed to march into the sky. That seemed a grand thing to me, to put the houses of the gods so close to heaven, and when I rebuilt the temples of Uruk I kept the high platforms of Kish in mind. But that was many years afterward.

  I was unprepared for the awesomeness of Kish. Everything about it seemed to cry out, “I am great, I am all-powerful, I am the invincible city.” And I still merely a boy, going out from home for the first time. But there was no room in my heart for fear.

  I presented myself before the walls of Kish and a sullen long-bearded gatekeeper came out, idly swinging his bronze mace of office. He looked me over as though I were nothing at all, merely some meat walking on legs. I returned his insolence glare for glare. And with my hand resting lightly on the pommel of my sword I said to him, “Tell your master that the son of Lugalbanda has come from Uruk to give him greetings.”

  9

  THAT NIGHT I DINED ON golden plates in the palace of Agga the king, and so began my four-year sojourn in Kish.

  Agga received me warmly: whether out of respect for my father, or out of some crafty intent to use me against Dumuzi, I had no way of telling. Very likely some of each, for he was a man of honor, as I had been told, but also Agga was in every fiber of his body a monarch, who meant to turn everything that came his way to the advantage of his city.

  He was a robust pink-skinned man, fleshy and big-bellied, who loved his beer and meat. His head was entirely without hair. He had it shaved every morning in the throne-room of his palace, before an audience of courtiers and officials. The blades that his barbers used were made of a white metal that I had never seen before, and were very keen. Agga said it was iron, which puzzled me, for I thought of iron as a darker stuff and not of much real use: it is soft and will not take a sharp edge. But later I asked a chamberlain, who told me that it was a special kind of iron that had fallen from the sky in the land of Dilmun, and was mixed with another metal without a name which gave it its color and its special hardness. Many times since then I have wished to have a supply of such metal for my weapons, and the secret of working it, but I have been unable to obtain either one.

  Be that as it may, I have never seen a man closer shaved than Agga was. His high officials went hairless too, except for those who traced their ancestry to the desert people, whose thick curling hair is too great a chore to shave. I can understand that, for my hair is similar, as was Lugalbanda’s. I think I must have some desert blood in me: my height and the texture of my hair and beard argue for that, although my nose is not as sharp and hooked as theirs tend to be. Though every city of the Land has many of these sons of desert-folk living in it, there were more of them in Kish than in any other place I have seen. They must have accounted for full half the population, and I heard their language, so different from ours, almost as often as I heard our own.

  Agga knew that I had fled from Dumuzi. He seemed to know a great deal of what went on in Uruk; far more, indeed, than I. But it was no surprise to me that a king as powerful as Agga maintained a network of spies in the city that was his greatest rival. What did surprise me was the source from which his information came. But I did not learn that until much later.

  “What have you done,” Agga asked, “to have caused the king to turn against you this way?”

  I had wondered that myself. It was strange that Dumuzi would suddenly choose to look upon me as an enemy, after paying so little heed to me in the six or seven years since the death of my father. During that time I had certainly offered no challenge to his power. Though I was strong and tall beyond my years, I was far from ready for any sort of role in the government of the city. Surely Dumuzi and everyone else realized that. If I had sometimes boasted in my boyhood of becoming king some day, why, that was only a boy’s loud talk, while the kingship of my father Lugalbanda had still been bright in my memory. Whatever dreams of royal power I had had since then—and I could not deny that I had had such dreams—I had kept entirely to myself.

  But as I sat at Agga’s table considering these things, I remembered that there was someone else in Uruk who was much given to the pastime of predicting my destiny, and who seemed to have no doubt I would be king. Had she not
whispered of the pleasures we would share when that day came? Had she not gone so far as to devise the name under which I would reign?

  And she was one who was close to the ear of Dumuzi.

  “What would Dumuzi be likely to think,” I asked Agga, “if he were to suspect that my soul had been entered by divine Lugalbanda, and his godlike spirit now resided within me?”

  “Ah, is that the case?” Agga asked quickly, his eyes gleaming.

  I picked up my bowl of beer and sipped at it and offered no reply.

  He said after a moment, watching me carefully, “If that should be the case, or if Dumuzi should merely think it is the case—why, then I believe you would seem very dangerous to him. He knows that he is not worth five hairs of your father’s beard. He fears the very name of Lugalbanda. Yet Lugalbanda dead is no menace to the throne of Dumuzi.”

  “Yes, that is surely so.”

  “Ah,” said Agga, smiling, “but if it should become known in Uruk that the spirit of the great and valorous Lugalbanda now has come to reside within the sturdy body of Lugalbanda’s noble son—and if that son is growing toward an age when he might be expected to begin playing some part in the governing of the city—why, yes, you would seem a great peril to Dumuzi, a very serious peril indeed—”

  “Serious enough to have me slain?”

  Agga turned up his hands, palms outward. “What does the proverb say? ‘The coward sees lions where brave men see only cats’? I would have no fear of the ghost of Lugalbanda, if I were Dumuzi. But I am not Dumuzi, and he perceives things in a different way.” He gave me more beer, waving away the slave and pouring from the ewer himself. Then he said, “If indeed Lugalbanda is the god who has chosen you—and I would not be amazed if that was the case—then you know it was far from wise of you to let Dumuzi have any hint of that.”

  “I understand that. But whatever Dumuzi has learned, he has not learned from me.”

  “He has learned it from someone, though, and that someone must have learned it from you. Is that not so?”

  I nodded.

  “Then you have spoken carelessly to a friend who is not a friend, and you have been betrayed, eh? Is that not so?”

  Through tight lips I said, “I asked her not to speak a word of it to anyone! But she would not promise me that. She grew angry, in fact, when I asked the promise of her.”

  “Ah. Ah. She?”

  My face turned red. “I am telling you more than I should be revealing.”

  He laid his hand atop mine. “Boy, boy, you tell me nothing I don’t already know! But you are safe from Dumuzi here. You are under my protection, and no treachery can reach you in my city. Here. Here, take more beer. What good sweet stuff this is! The barley from which they make it is reserved entirely for the use of the king. Here, drink, boy, drink, drink! Drink!”

  And I drank, and drank some more. But my mind remained clear, for it was burning with an anger that burned away any drunkenness Agga’s beer might have brought me. No doubt of it, she had gone running to Dumuzi with the tale the moment she had had it from me, without once thinking that she might be betraying me into danger. Or was that what she intended? To betray me? Why? I could see no reason for it. Perhaps it had been mere thoughtlessness, her telling Dumuzi the one thing that I had begged her not to tell anyone. And yet again she might have been following some design too subtle for me to comprehend. I understood none of it, only that she was certainly the one who had engineered my exile by giving away my secret to the man most likely to be threatened by it. At that moment such rage rushed through me that had she been within my reach just then I would have struck her down, priestess that she was.

  The fury went from me after a while. We sat together late into the night, Agga and I, and he told me tales of his wars with Lugalbanda, and of a day when they had engaged in single combat outside the walls of Kish, axes battering on shields for hour after hour until darkness came, neither man able to inflict a wound on the other. He had always held my father in the highest regard, he said, even when they were sworn to be enemies to the death. Then he ordered another flagon of beer to be opened—I was astounded at how he drank; no wonder there was so much flesh on his bones—and as he grew hazier with liquor so too did his stories, and I could scarcely follow them. He began telling of the campaigns of his own father Enmebaraggesi and of those of my grandfather Enmerkar, stories of wars fought when he had been just a boy, and afterward he drifted off into a jumble of legends of ancient Kish, involving kings who were only names to me, and strange names at that, Zukakip, Buanum, Mashda, Arurim, and the like. As he grew drunker and sleepier I grew more wide awake. But I sensed that he was less hazy than he seemed, and was watching me always with keen vigilance: for I did not forget that this old man before me was king of Kish, the great ruler of a great city, the survivor of a hundred bloody battles, the shrewdest man, perhaps, in all the Land.

  He gave me a suite of rooms within the royal palace, very splendid ones, and sent concubines to me in any quantity I desired; and after a while he gave me a wife. Her name was Ama-sukkul. She was a daughter of Agga’s own loins, by one of his handmaidens, thirteen years old and a virgin. When he offered her, I did not know what to say, for I was uncertain about the propriety of marrying a woman of a strange city; and I thought I should at least obtain the consent of my mother Ninsun. But Agga felt strongly that a visiting prince of Uruk should not go wifeless in Kish. It was not hard to see that I would offend him deeply if I spurned his hospitality by showing disdain for his daughter. A marriage in Kish, I reckoned, would not be binding upon me in my native city, if ever it seemed desirable to free myself from it. So I took the first of my wives. Ama-sukkul was a cheerful girl, round-breasted and sweet-smiling, though she had little to say: I think she never once spoke except when spoken to, throughout the time of our marriage. I wish we had been closer. But the gods have not given me the good fortune of opening my heart to a woman in marriage. I have had wives, yes: a king must. But they all have been like strangers to me.

  I know why that is so. I will dare to say it here, though you will see it for yourself as the tale of my years unfolds. It is because all my life I have been tied in a strange unfathomable way to that dark-souled woman the priestess Inanna, who could never be my wife in the usual way of marriage but who has left no room in my heart for ordinary women. I have loved her and I have loathed her, often at one and the same time; and I have been locked in such struggle of the soul with that woman that I have not tasted the common sort of domestic love with any other. It is the truth. Who is it that believes the lives of kings and heroes are easy?

  Agga bound me to him in another way, by placing upon me an oath of allegiance that was meant to carry force throughout my life, even if I became king in Uruk. “I have sworn to protect you,” he explained, “and you must swear your loyalty to me in return.”

  I wondered about that, whether I was not shamefully selling Uruk to him by making myself his vassal. But when I knelt privately and asked Lugalbanda for guidance, I heard nothing within my soul telling me it was an error to swear the oath. One point that I considered was that in a certain sense everyone in the Land still owed allegiance to Kish, since it was to Kish that the kingship had descended after the Flood, and it had never formally been withdrawn by the gods in all the years since. So by swearing, I was merely confirming a fealty that already had a kind of shadowy existence. It also crossed my mind that it would make little difference to me that I had recognized Agga as my overlord, once I was king in Uruk, so long as I was not required to pay tribute to him or to submit to his commands; and there was nothing in the oath about either of those things. So I swore. By the net of Enlil I swore my loyalty to the king of Kish.

  There was no question of my returning to Uruk in a matter of days or weeks, as I had originally imagined I might do. Not long after my arrival in Kish, emissaries from Dumuzi arrived and tactfully but firmly asked Agga to turn me over to them. “The son of Lugalbanda is sorely missed in Uruk,” they said, most pi
ously. “Our king craves his counsel, and seeks his strong arm for the battlefield.”

  “Ah,” replied Agga, rolling his eyes and looking stricken with great sorrow, “but the son of Lugalbanda has become my son as well, and I would not be parted from him for all the Land. Tell Dumuzi that I would die of grief, if the son of Lugalbanda were to leave Kish so soon.”

  And privately Agga said to me that his spies reported Dumuzi beside himself with fear that I was organizing an army in Kish to overthrow him. In Uruk I had been proclaimed an enemy of the city, he said, and I would surely be slain if ever I came into Dumuzi’s grasp. So I remained in Kish. But I managed to send word to my mother that I was healthy and prosperous and was only biding my time until the proper moment for my homefaring.

  I found Kish a city not much unlike Uruk in most respects. In Uruk we ate meat and bread, and drank beer and date-wine, and the same in Kish. In Uruk and in Kish the clothing was of wool or of linen, according to the time of the year, and the fashion of wearing it was similar in each place. The streets of Uruk were narrow and winding, except for the grand boulevards, and so were the streets of Kish. The houses were flat-roofed in Uruk, one story or sometimes two, baked brick below, mud brick covered in white plaster above, and so they were also in Kish. The languages that were spoken in Uruk were the same as those spoken in Kish; in Kish they wrote on clay tablets as they did in Uruk, and the characters that they inscribed were the same. The only difference, and it was a great one for me, was in the gods. The chief temples in Uruk, of course, are those dedicated to Inanna and Sky-father An. In Kish no one would deny the greatness of An or the power of Inanna; but the temples in Kish are dedicated to Father Enlil, the lord of storms, and to the great mother Ninhursag. That was strange for me, to find myself constantly in the presence of those gods, and not those of Uruk. I feel more fear than love for Inanna the goddess, but there is love too, and it is hard to live in a place where Inanna is not present. Though everything may be the same externally, it is different underneath: in Kish even the air has a different color, and its taste is different too, because one does not breathe in Inanna with every breath.