To the Land of the Living Read online

  But though he struggled as he had never struggled in combat before, Gilgamesh was unable to budge Enkidu. Veins bulged in his forehead; the sutures that held his wound burst and blood flowed down his arm; and still he strained to throw Enkidu to the ground, and still Enkidu held his place. And matched him, strength for strength, and kept him at bay. They stood locked that way a long moment, staring into each other’s eyes, locked in unbreakable stalemate.

  Then after a long while Enkidu grinned fiercely and his hard grip of battle turned subtly but unmistakably into the warm embrace of indissoluble friendship, and he said, as once he had said long ago, “Ah, Gilgamesh! There is not another one like you in all the world! Glory to the mother who bore you!”

  It was like the breaking of a dam, and a rush of life-giving waters tumbling out over the summer-parched fields of the Land.

  Gilgamesh too eased and altered his grip. And from him in that blessed moment of release and relief came twice-spoken words also:

  “There is one other who is like me. But only one.”

  “No, for Enlil has given you the kingship.”

  “But you are my brother,” said Gilgamesh, and they laughed and let go of each other and stepped back, as if seeing each other for the first time, and laughed again, and those who stood in a ring about them seemed to turn misty and vanish from view, so that in all the world there was only Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Enkidu and Gilgamesh.

  “This is great foolishness, this fighting between us,” Enkidu said softly.

  “Very great foolishness indeed, brother.”

  “What need have you of shotguns and disruptors?”

  “And what do I care if you choose to play with such toys?”

  “Indeed, brother.”

  “Indeed!”

  Gilgamesh looked around. They were all silent, staring—the four party men, Lovecraft, Howard, the Hairy Man, Kublai Khan, Hemingway, all astonished, mouths drooping open. They seemed stunned. Only Schweitzer appeared alert to the meaning of the moment. The doctor was beaming warmly. He came up to them and looked up at them looming far above him and said in his quiet way, “You have not injured each other? No. Gut. Gut. Then you must go away. Leave here, the two of you, together. Now. You have found each other: you must keep each other. What do you care for Prester John and his wars, or for Mao and his? This is no business of yours. Go. Now.”

  Enkidu grinned. “What do you say, brother? Shall we go off hunting together?”

  “To the end of the Outback, and back again. You and I, and no one else.”

  “And we will hunt only with our bows and spears?”

  Gilgamesh shrugged. “With disruptors, if that is how you would have it. With cannons. With nuke grenades. Ah, Enkidu, Enkidu—!”

  “Gilgamesh!”

  “Go,” Schweitzer whispered. “Now. Leave this place and never look back. Auf Wiedersehen! Gluckliche Reise! Gottes Namen, go now!”

  Watching them take their leave, seeing them trudge off together into the swirling winds of the Outback, Robert Howard felt a sudden sharp pang of regret and loss. How beautiful they had been, those two heroes, those two giants, as they strained and struggled! And then that sudden magic moment when the folly of their quarrel came home to them, when they were enemies no longer and brothers once more—

  And now they were gone, and here he stood amidst these others, these strangers—

  He had wanted to be Gilgamesh’s brother, or perhaps—he barely comprehended it—something more than a brother. But that could never have been. And, knowing that it could never have been, knowing that that man who seemed so much like his Conan was lost to him forever, Howard felt tears beginning to surge uncontrollably within him.

  “Bob?” Lovecraft said. “Bob, are you all right?”

  She-it, Howard thought. A man don’t cry. Especially in front of other men.

  He turned away, into the wind, so Lovecraft could not see his face.

  “Bob? Bob?”

  She-it, Howard thought again. And he let the tears come.

  * * *

  SIX

  WITHOUT either of them saying a word they went westward, or what they hoped and thought was westward, Gilgamesh wishing that Enkidu would be the first to speak, and Enkidu, so it seemed, evidently wanting the same of him. It was a haunted land here of fire and frost, of mountains that had the shape of demons, of demons that had the shape of mountains. The sun was low on the distant horizon, but burning with a strange cold midday intensity, like a worm that was eating a hole in the sky. From time to time Gilgamesh saw some strange creature running before them, and raised his bow, and put it down again without shooting; or Enkidu it was who took aim but could not loose a shaft. It was as though the estrangement between them was not quite ended, and it was robbing them both of the will to hunt.

  At last, when the silence had grown until it had the weight of a great globe of iron pressing against his back, Gilgamesh drew his breath as deep into his lungs as it would go and said suddenly, unable any longer to bear it, “Well, and will you tell me something, brother?”

  “Yes?” said Enkidu, in a rush of eagerness. “Whatever it is, brother, only ask.”

  Gilgamesh formed the first question that came to his mind, for the sake only of ending the silence between them: “In the time that you were off by yourself, however long a time that may have been—what was the strangest thing that you saw, and where was it that you saw it?”

  “Ah,” Enkidu said. “The strangest thing that I saw.” And he fell into a new silence so lengthy that Gilgamesh feared it would engulf them both, as the last one had, and shroud them in the chilly darkness of the soul for days to come. But then finally Enkidu said, “It was in a place in the north, beyond Cibola, beyond even Cold Sargasso. It was the doorway to the land of the living that I was seeking then, and they told me that I could find it in that place.”

  “The land of the living?” Gilgamesh said. “You’ve been looking for it also, then? For I hear that the English Queen Elizabeth has sent men in search of it, here in the Outback.”

  “Everyone seeks it, brother.”

  “Not I. Not I. It is mere fable to me, and folly.”

  “Be that as it may,” said Enkidu. “I was off in quest of it. Perhaps I thought I would find you there, beyond that doorway in the north. But in any case there was no such doorway there, to my best awareness. Yet what I found was curious enough. I was crossing a barren plain much like this, except that there were swirls of pale blue snow everywhere in the air, and when you kicked the earth you would stir up clouds of crystals that sparkled like diamonds and gave off musical sounds. And I saw a woman before me, a fine woman with soft golden hair and heavy breasts, standing in the road and calling my name, and smiling to me.”

  And with that he was silent once again, as though he had finished his tale.

  Gilgamesh waited, knowing there must be more, and knowing too that Enkidu had his own style in these matters of story-telling. But the moments passed, and nothing more was forthcoming. They walked on. Gilgamesh, after a time, turned toward Enkidu and said, “Did you embrace her, then?”

  “Embrace her? Oh, yes, yes, that I did. I came up to her and reached for her and drew her into my arms, and quite willingly she came.” He laughed. “Why would I not embrace her? She was very beautiful, brother.”

  “And the strangeness? What was that?”

  “The strangeness, yes,” Enkidu said, speaking as though from an immense distance. “I’ll tell you of that. When she was in my arms, I went to stroke the smoothness of her back, as women will often like you to do. But there was no smoothness there, brother. She was a fine woman from the front, but from the back she was like a hollow tree with a rough bark”

  “A demon,” said Gilgamesh, and he made a gesture to invoke the protection of Father Enlil.

  “A demon, yes, perhaps,” Enkidu said. “But also a great disappointment, and a waste of beauty, to find that she was only half beautiful, and monstrous in the other half.”


  “She did you no harm, though?” asked Gilgamesh uneasily.

  “Only to my sense of what is fitting and proper. A beautiful woman should be beautiful through and through, or else there should be no beauty about her at all. That is what I believe.” After a pause Enkidu said, “There is more.”

  “Go on, then.”

  “I let go of her and went from her, and in a little while I came to a second woman standing beside the road, whose hair was scarlet and whose skin was white and whose face was like that of a goddess. She held out her arms to me, and I drew her close, and her far side was all bones, bare and hard and cold, not a scrap of flesh to cover them.”

  “How sad.”

  “Sad, yes, very sad. And the next woman—”

  “The next? How many were there?”

  “The next,” said Enkidu, “had black hair and golden skin, and small breasts so lovely they would make you cry. And I turned her around and her back was all seaweed and shells. And the next after that—”

  “The next after that, yes.”

  “Snakes and toads behind her, and the marks of leprosy. But in front she was shining like a maiden, and her eyes were blue and her hair was the color of sunrise. You would have wept, brother, at the beauty of her, and at the evil that was behind her.”

  “There were others after her,” Gilgamesh said, “and each was worse than the last, is that not so?”

  “Yes. Every hundred paces, a different one. They seemed to spring like flowers from the ground. And I went on and on, until I was running, at last, and they were waving their arms at me with a motion that was like that of the branches of the trees that grow beneath the sea, and I ran, and ran, and ran, until I came to the last of them, who was more beautiful even than any of the others, and she said, Here I am, Enkidu, I am the one. But I shook my head. I told her to keep back from me. I am the one you seek, she said, I am the one. When she came toward me I raised my bow, and put an arrow on the string, and told her I would send her to her next life if she came another step closer.”

  “And did she?”

  “No,” said Enkidu in deepest sorrow. “She turned, then, and walked very slowly away with her shoulders downcast, never once looking back. And from the other side she was lovelier yet than in front. She was perfect. She was without flaw. I watched her go until she was lost to my sight. And then I ran the other way, not stopping until the darkness came. For it seemed certain to me that the door to the land of the living was not to be found in that place. And I knew, brother, that if I had gone after her and embraced her she would have changed in my arms, and become something far more loathsome than any that I had seen earlier, and the pain of that would remain with me forever. That is so, would you not say?”

  “Who can tell, when demons are involved? But perhaps you were right to flee. And in any case it is a very strange story, yes, very strange, Enkidu.”

  “It is the strangest one that I can tell you, of all the things that befell me while I was wandering alone.”

  Gilgamesh nodded.

  “It is a very strange story,” he said again.

  “And you, brother? What did you do, in that time when we were apart from each other?”

  “I hunted,” said Gilgamesh. “By myself, seeking no company, though occasionally finding some, or rather being found. It was a cold time for me, brother.”

  “We should never have been apart.”

  “No,” said Gilgamesh. “Never. But we were. And now that time is over.”

  “It was demons that came between us,” Enkidu said. “It was demons that made us quarrel.”

  “Yes,” said Gilgamesh. “I think so too.”

  They fell silent yet again. Then Enkidu said, “Well, brother, where shall we go now? Is there any special path through this Outback that you follow?”

  “Only the path that my feet find for me, step by step by step.”

  “Ah. I understand. Well, that path will be my path, too,” said Enkidu.

  They made camp that night at a place where two dry rivers crossed in the flatlands, and jagged narrow mountains rose before them like blades, straight from the desert floor to bewildering heights. Enkidu chased a thing that was like a black gazelle, but with ropy green strands sprouting from the rim of its back and startling red horns that were curved like scimitars, and caught it and threw it down and slew it. They skinned it together, and roasted it by a fire that Gilgamesh made out of curious gray coals that were heaped in the riverbed; and afterward they sat quietly together, neither sleeping nor fully awake, saying very little. It was sufficient to be together again. From the first, from the time in lost ancient Uruk of the other world when they had met and wrestled and dropped at once into fast friendship, each had seen in the other an equal, a complement, a second half. They were nothing like each other in any way but size and strength, for Gilgamesh in that other life had been a king’s son, raised in luxury to inherit power, and huge shaggy Enkidu had been born in the wilderness, a wild thing himself who ran with beasts and spoke no tongue but the tongue of beasts until he reached manhood; but they had seen at first sight that each fitted the other like two parts of a single whole, and it had been like that ever since for them, except for this time of estrangement that now was at its end.

  In the moment just before first light, when souls hang suspended between eternity and oblivion, Gilgamesh sat suddenly upright, oppressed with the feeling that the sea was about to sweep down upon him with killing force. But they were far from the sea here, as far as they could possibly be.

  “Brother?” he said.

  “Listen!” said Enkidu, already alert.

  Gilgamesh nodded. He heard foul mocking chittering sounds, like those of dung-birds or grave-jackals. His hand went to his weapon and he leaped to his feet, taking a dancing stride forward and swinging around. Just then the thin strands of first sunlight came over the low ridge behind them, and with it came a dozen creatures of the darkness, creatures with the shape of men but horridly distorted, burly short-legged things with great dangling arms that seemed infinitely long in the pale red light of the newly risen sun.

  “Enki! Enlil!” Gilgamesh bellowed, and he and Enkidu went unhesitatingly toward them.

  With his first stroke he cut two in half, and Enkidu another. The sundered bodies went sprawling, spilling a thick golden fluid. Gilgamesh whirled, ready to face the next that came at him; but they were backing away, making cowardly little snuffling noises. Were they frightened off by this first slaughter? A deception, only: for six more came from the side, and at least as many from the other, flinging themselves on the two Sumerians without fear. Gilgamesh plucked one from Enkidu’s shoulders and hurled it far to the rear, and Enkidu, turning, sliced one free of Gilgamesh’s leg, at which it was tugging in an attempt to topple him.

  “Back to back, brother!” Enkidu cried.

  Gilgamesh nodded. They swung about and pressed close against each other, forming themselves into a single strange being with eight limbs and two furious swords. Neither needed to give the other any further cue; they moved with one accord, now this way, now that, slashing, skewering, slaughtering. Within moments half a dozen of the ugly attackers lay dead, and the rest were circling uneasily, mewling and hissing as they looked for some way of breaking through the defenses of the two men.

  Then the sun cleared the ridge entirely and its full light burst upon the scene; and the surviving creatures, making no attempt at seizing their dead, turned and went racing off toward the west as though afraid of being scalded by the newborn brightness of the day. One turned to glare back at them. Gilgamesh saw a cruel parody of humankind, a broad low dark forehead, a pair of glowering red eyes, claw-tipped hands wide outspread. He shook his fist at it and shouted in the old tongue of the Land, ordering it and all its kind to be gone. The creature fled, snuffling and hissing. The others ran beyond it, scrambling across the broken land and vanishing one by one into burrows and fissures.

  Enkidu stared at the corpses that lay strewn about. With a shud
der he said, “By Enlil, brother, it’s a foul land that spawns such hideous beasts as those.”

  “Demons, do you think?”

  “Mere apes, so it seems to me.”

  Shrugging, Gilgamesh said, “Apes or demons, it makes no difference. I would rather find myself among such creatures than in the company of fools.”

  “And which fools do you mean, brother?”

  Gilgamesh jerked his thumb fiercely backward, over his shoulder. “Fools such as dwell in the cities that lie behind us.”

  “Ah. Ah. Prester John, you mean?”

  “He is less of a fool than most. No, I mean such cities as Nova Roma, and the other ones of the distant east—”

  “Elektrograd, do you mean? Guillotine? The cities of the Later Dead?”

  Gilgamesh nodded. “Those are the ones, yes. My only purpose now is to keep myself far from those places where the little squabbling grasping ones are, the ones who yearn to be king of this, and emperor of that, and—what is the word?—president? Yes, president. Sultan, kaiser, tsar. Shah. I intend to put half the Afterworld, or more, between myself and all such people, and all such cities.”

  Enkidu laughed. “And to think that while I was wandering in far and lonely places I imagined that you were still living the soft life in Nova Roma, dining one night with Bismarck and the next with Cromwell, and then with Esarhaddon or Nefertiti—”

  “Nova Roma!” Gilgamesh scowled. “I hated the place. I couldn’t wait to be quit of it. If I never see Nova Roma again, or Bismarck, and Cromwell, and Lenin—or hear so much as their names, even—” He shook his head. “No, brother, that’s a phase of my life that’s over and done with. The simple huntsman’s way, that’s what I crave. I’ll keep myself far from all the capitals where the Later Dead may lurk. Elektrograd, Guillotine, Smoketown, Hypoluxo, High Versailles—I loathe their very names! No, Enkidu, it’s the Outback for me, now and forever.”

  “And for me also,” said Enkidu. And they embraced on it.

  It would have pleased Gilgamesh to spend an eternity and a half, and then an eternity more, roaming these wild unfriendly lands with no companion but Enkidu. Like hand and glove they fitted one another, so that there was scarcely any need for them to speak, but each knew the other’s mind. To march on, day after day under the harsh red sun, pitting themselves against the nightmare beasts of this cruel terrain, testing eye and hand and strength of arm against the diabolical vigor and force of the hell-creatures that lurked in the Outback wastelands—ah, that was the only true joy, Gilgamesh thought! That was the one life that held pleasure and fulfilment! Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Enkidu and Gilgamesh, just the two of them alone, far from the vanities and the foolishnesses and the false strivings of the chattering city-folk!