To the Land of the Living

  “If I had been king of some city before Brasil, I think I would remember that.”

  “How long have you been here, Simon?”

  “Who can say? You know what time is like here. But I understand some two thousand years have gone by on Earth since my time there. Perhaps a little more.”

  “In two thousand years,” said Gilgamesh, “you might have been a king five times over in the Afterworld, and forgotten it all. You could have embraced a hundred queens and forgotten them.”

  Herod chuckled. “Helen of Troy—Cleopatra—Nefertiti—all forgotten, Simon, the shape of their breasts, the taste of their lips, the sounds they make in their pleasure—”

  Simon reached for his wine. “You think?” he asked Gilgamesh. “Can this be so?”

  “The years float by and run one into another. The demons play with our memories. There are no straight lines here, and no unbroken ones. How could we keep our sanity, Simon, if we remembered everything that has happened to us in the Afterworld? Two thousand years, you say? For me it is five thousand. Or more. A hundred lifetimes. Ah, no, Simon, I have come to see that we are born again and again here, with minds wiped clean, and the torment of it is that we don’t even know that that is the case. We imagine that we are as we have always been. We think we understand ourselves, and in fact we know only the merest surface of the truth. The irreducible essence of our souls remains the same, yes—I am always Gilgamesh, he is Herod, you are Simon, we make the choices over and over that someone of our nature must and will make—but the conditions of our lives fluctuate, we are tossed about on the hot winds of the Afterworld, and most of what happens to us is swallowed eventually into oblivion. This is the wisdom that came to me from the Knowing I had of Calandola.”

  “That barbarian! That devil!”

  “Nevertheless. He sees behind the shallow reality of the Afterworld. I accept the truth of his revelation.”

  “You may have forgotten Uruk, Gilgamesh,” said Herod, “but Uruk seems not to have forgotten you.”

  “So it would appear,” said Gilgamesh.

  Indeed it had startled him profoundly when the Sumerian border guards had hailed him at once as Gilgamesh the king. Hardly was he out of the Land Rover but they were kneeling to him and making holy signs, and crying out to him in the ancient language of the Land, which he had not heard spoken in so long a time that it sounded strange and harsh to his ears. It was as if he had left this city only a short while before—whereas he knew that even by the mysterious time-reckoning of the Afterworld it must be a long eternity since last he could have dwelled here. His memory was clear on that point, for he knew that he had spent his most recent phase of his time in the Afterworld roving the hinterlands with Enkidu, hunting the strange beasts of the Outback, shunning the intrigues and malevolences of the cities—and surely that period in the wilderness had lasted decades, even centuries. Yet in Uruk his face and form seemed familiar to all.

  Well, he would know more about that soon enough. Perhaps they held him in legendary esteem here and prayed constantly for his return. Or, more likely, it was merely some further manifestation of the Afterworld’s witchery that spawned these confusions.

  They were practically in Uruk now. The road out of the hills had leveled out. A massive wall of red brick rose up before them, and a great brazen gate inscribed with the images of serpents and monsters set in the center of it. It swung open as they drew near, and the entire procession rolled on within.

  Simon, far gone in wine, clapped the Sumerian lustily on the shoulder. “Uruk, Gilgamesh! We’re actually here! Did you think we’d ever find it?”

  “It found us,” said Gilgamesh coolly. “We were lost in a land between nowhere and nowhere, and suddenly Uruk lay before us. So we are here, Simon: but where is it that we are?”

  “Ah, Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, what a sober thing you are! We are in Uruk, wherever that may be! Rejoice, man! Smile! Lift up your heart! This city is your home! Your friend will be here—what’s his name, Inkibu, Tinkibu—”

  “Enkidu.”

  “Enkidu, yes. And your cousins, your brothers, perhaps your father—”

  “This is the Afterworld, Simon. Delights turn to ashes on our tongues. I expect nothing here.”

  “You’ll be a king again. Is that nothing?”

  “Have I said I feel any wish to rule this place?” Gilgamesh asked, glowering at the other.

  Simon blinked in surprise. “Why, Herod says you do.”

  “He does?” Gilgamesh skewered the little Judaean with a fierce glare. “Who are you to pretend to speak what is in my mind, Herod? How do you imagine you dare know my heart?”

  In a small voice Herod said, shrinking back as though he expected to be hit, “It is because I was with you when you had the Knowing, Gilgamesh. And had the Knowing with you. Have you forgotten that so soon?”

  Gilgamesh considered that. He could not deny the truth of it.

  Quietly he said, “This city must already have some king of its own. I have no thought to displace him. But if the gods have that destiny in mind for me—”

  “Not the gods, Gilgamesh. The demons. This place is the Afterworld,” Herod reminded him.

  “The demons, yes,” said Gilgamesh. “Yes.”

  They were well within Uruk now and the caravan had come to rest in the midst of a huge plaza. At close range Gilgamesh saw that Uruk was only superficially a Sumerian city: many of the buildings were in the ancient style, yes, but there was everything else here too, all periods and styles, the hideous things that they called office buildings, and the sullen bulk of a power-plant spewing foulness into the air, and an ominous-looking barracks of dirty red brick without windows, and something that looked like a Roman lawcourt or palace off to one corner. A crowd was gathered outside the Land Rover, many in Sumerian dress but by no means all; there was the usual mix, Early Dead and Later, garbed in all the costumes of the ages. Everyone was staring. Everyone was silent.

  “You get out first,” Simon said to Gilgamesh.

  He nodded. A gaggle of what were obviously municipal officials, plainly Sumerian by race, had assembled alongside the Land Rover. They were looking in at him expectantly. They seemed worried, or at least puzzled, by his presence here.

  He stepped out, looming like a giant above them all.

  A man with a thick curling black beard and a shaven skull, who wore the woolen tunic of Sumer the Land, came forward and said—in English—“We welcome Gilgamesh the son of Lugalbanda to the city of Uruk, and his friends. I am the arch-vizier Ur-ninmarka, servant to Dumuzi the king, whose guests you are.”

  “Dumuzi?” said Gilgamesh, astonished.

  “He is king in Uruk, yes.”

  “He who ruled before me, when we lived on Earth?”

  Ur-ninmarka shrugged. “I know nothing of that. I was a man of Lagash in the Land that was, and Uruk was far away. But Dumuzi is king here, and he has sent me to give you greeting and escort you to your lodgings. Tonight you will dine with him and with the great ones of the city.”

  Dumuzi, Gilgamesh thought in wonder.

  Memories of his first life, so much more clear to him than most of what had befallen him in the Afterworld, came flooding back.

  Dumuzi! That pathetic weakling! That murderous swine! Surely it is the same one, he thought; for in the Afterworld everything that has befallen befalls over and over. And so Dumuzi was king in Uruk once again, the same Dumuzi who in the old life, fearing Gilgamesh the son of Lugalbanda as a rival, had sent assassins to slay him, though he was then only a boy. Those assassins had failed, and in the end it was Dumuzi who went from the world and Gilgamesh who had the throne. No doubt he fears me yet, Gilgamesh suspected. And will try his treacheries on me a second time. Some things never change, thought Gilgamesh: it is the way of the Afterworld. As Dumuzi will learn to his sorrow, if he has new villainy in mind.

  Aloud he said, “It will please me greatly to enjoy the hospitality of your king. Will you tell him that?”

  “Th
at I will.”

  “And tell him too that he will be host to Simon, ruler of the great city of Brasil, and to his prime minister, Herod of Judaea, who are my traveling companions.”

  Ur-ninmarka bowed.

  “One further thing,” said Gilgamesh. “I take it there are many citizens of Sumer the Land dwelling in this city.”

  “A great many, my lord.”

  “Can you say, is there a certain Enkidu here, a man of stature as great as my own, and very strong of body, and hairy all over, like a beast of the fields? He who is well known everywhere to be my friend, and whom I have come here to seek?”

  The arch-vizier’s bare brow furrowed. “I cannot say, my lord. I will make inquiries, and you will have a report this evening when you dine at the palace.”

  “I am grateful to you,” said Gilgamesh.

  But his heart sank. Enkidu must not be here after all; for how could Ur-ninmarka fail to know of it, if a great roistering hairy giant such as Enkidu had come to Uruk? There is no city in the Afterworld so big that Enkidu would not be conspicuous in it, and more than conspicuous, thought Gilgamesh.

  He kept these matters to himself. Beckoning Simon and Herod from the Land Rover, he said only, “All is well. Tonight we will be entertained by Uruk’s king.”

  Dumuzi, at any rate, seemed to do things with style. For his visitors he provided sumptuous lodgings in a grand hostelry back of the main temple, a massive block of a building that seemed to have been carved of a single slab of black granite. Within were fountains, arcades, so much statuary that it was hard to move about without bumping into something, gigantic figures of gods with staring eyes and plaited tresses in the ancient manner, and towering purple-leaved palm trees growing in huge many-faceted planters of a shining red stone that glistened like genuine ruby. Perhaps it was. Gilgamesh saw Simon fondling one covetously as though contemplating how many hundreds of egg-sized stones it could be broken into.

  Each of the travelers had a palatial room to himself, a broad bed covered in silk, a sunken alabaster tub, a mirror that shimmered like a window into Paradise. Of course, there were little things wrong amid all this perfection: no hot water was running, and a line of disagreeable-looking fat-bellied furry insects with emerald eyes went trooping constantly across the ceiling of Gilgamesh’s room, and when he sprawled on the bed it set up a steady complaining moan, as though he were lying on the protesting forms of living creatures. But this was the Afterworld, after all. One expected flaws in everything, and one always got them. All things considered, these accommodations could hardly be excelled.

  Half a dozen servants appeared as if from nowhere to help Gilgamesh with his bath, and anoint him with fragrant oils, and garb him in a white flounced woolen robe that left him bare to the waist in the Sumerian manner. After a time Herod came knocking at the door, and he too was garbed after the fashion of Sumer, though he still wore his gleaming Italian leather shoes instead of sandals, and he had his little Jewish skullcap on his head. His dark curling hair had been pomaded to a high gloss.

  “Well?” he said, preening. “Do I look like a prince of Sumer the Land, Gilgamesh?”

  “You look like a fop, as always. And a weakling, besides. At least your toga would have covered those flabby arms of yours and that spindly chest.”

  “Ah, Gilgamesh! What need do I have of muscles, when I have this?” He touched his hand to his head. “And when I have the brave Gilgamesh the king to protect me against malefactors.”

  “But will I, though?”

  “Of course you will.” Herod smiled. “You feel sorry for me, because I have to live by my wits all the time and don’t have any other way of defending myself. You’ll look after me. It’s not in your nature to let someone like me be endangered. Besides, you need me.”

  “I do?”

  “You’ve lived in the Outback too long. You’ve got bits of straw in your hair.”

  Automatically Gilgamesh reached up to search.

  “No, no, you foolish ape, not literally!” said Herod, laughing. “I mean only that you’ve been out of things. You don’t understand the modern world. You need me to explain reality to you. You stalk around being heroic and austere and noble, which is fine in its way, but you’ve been paying no attention to what’s really been going on in the Afterworld lately. The fashions, the music, the art, the new technology.”

  “These things are of no importance to me. Fashion? And music? Music is mere tinkling in my ear. It is at best trivial, and usually worse than that. Art is decoration, an insignificant thing. As for this new technology you speak of, it is an abomination. I despise all the inventions of the Later Dead.”

  “Despise them all you like, but they’re here to stay. The New Dead outnumber us a thousand to one, and more of them arrive every day. You can’t just ignore them. Or their technology.”

  “I can.”

  “So you may think. A bow and a couple of arrows, that’s good enough for you, right? But you keep running afoul of things you don’t comprehend. You blunder on and on and you get yourself out of trouble most of the time pretty well, but you fundamentally don’t know what’s what, and sooner or later you’ll come up against something that’s too much even for you. Whereas I’ve kept up with modern developments. I can guide you through all the pitfalls. I’m aware, Gilgamesh. I know what’s happening. I stay in touch. Politics, for example. Do you have the foggiest notion of the current situation? The really spectacular upheavals that are going on right now?”

  “I take great care not to think of them.”

  “You think it’s safe, keeping your head in the sand that way? What happens over there on the far side of the Afterworld can have a tremendous impact on how we operate here. This isn’t your ancient world, where it took forever and a half just to carry the news from Rome to Syria. Do you know what a radio is? A telephone? A microwave relay? Like it or not, we’re all Later Dead now. You may still be living like a Sumerian, but the rest of the people here are neck-deep in modern life.”

  “They have my compassion,” said Gilgamesh.

  “You don’t know the slightest thing about the revolutionary movements swirling in half a dozen cities back East, do you? The whole Upheaval? The People’s Rebellion against the administration in Nova Roma? What Cromwell is doing, and Lenin, and Frederick Barbarossa? The latest deeds of Tiglath-Pileser? The present status of Metternich? No, no, Gilgamesh, you’re out of things. And damnably proud of your ignorance. Whereas I have kept up with the news, and—”

  “I have spent time in Nova Roma, Herod. I have seen Cromwell and Bismarck and Lenin and Tiglath-Pileser and Sennacherib and the rest of that crowd putting together their petty schemes. Why do you think I went to the Outback? I wept with boredom after half an hour among them. Their intrigues were like the squeakings of so many mice to me. Whatever they may be planning to do, it will all wash away like a castle of sand by the edge of the sea, and the Afterworld will go on and on as it always has. And so will I. The invisible demons who are the true masters here laugh at the pretensions of the rebellious ones. And so do I. No, no, Herod, I haven’t any need of your guidance. If I choose to protect you against harm, it’ll be out of mercy, not out of self-interest.” He glanced at the watch he wore, a gift from Simon Magus. “It grows late. We should be on our way to the feast.”

  “The wristwatch you wear is a despised invention of the Later Dead.”

  “I take what I choose from among their things,” said Gilgamesh. “I choose very little. You are not the first to try to mock me for inconsistency. But I know who I am, Herod, and I know what I believe.”

  “Yes,” Herod said, in a tone that was its own negation. “How could anyone have doubt of that?”

  Gilgamesh might have pitched him from the window just then; but the servants returned to lead them to the feasting-hall. Simon, waiting for them amid the splendors of the lobby, greeted them with wine-flushed face. He had spurned Sumerian robes altogether and was decked out in a purple toga and high gilded buskins in
the Greek style.

  As they moved toward the door Simon caught Gilgamesh by the wrist and said quietly, “One moment. Tell me about this king we are about to meet, this Dumuzi.”

  “If it is the same one, he succeeded my father Lugalbanda on the throne of Uruk—the first Uruk—when I was a boy, and drove me into exile. He was a coward and a fool, who neglected the rites and squandered public funds on ridiculous adventures, and the gods withdrew the kingship from him and he died. Which made the way clear for me to become king.”

  Simon Magus nodded. “You had him murdered, you mean?”

  Gilgamesh’s eyes widened. Then he laughed. This man might be a drunkard but his mind was still shrewd.

  “Not I, Simon. I had nothing to do with it. I was in exile then; it was the great men of the city who saw that Dumuzi must go, and the priestess Inanna who actually gave him the poison, telling him it was a healing medicine for an illness he had.”

  “Mmm,” said Simon. “You and he take turns succeeding one another in the kingship of Uruk, here and in the former life. Now it’s his turn to rule. And yours may be due to come again soon. Everything revolves in an endless circle.”

  “It is the way of this place. I am used to it.”

  “He was afraid of you once. He’ll be afraid of you still. There’ll be old grudges at work tonight. Perhaps an attempt at some settling of scores.”

  “Dumuzi has never frightened me,” said Gilgamesh, making the gesture one might make to flick away a troublesome fly.

  * * *

  FOURTEEN

  SABARTÉS said, “Which is it, Pablo, that has you so excited these days? That you have a new mistress, or that we are finally to have a bullfight for you to attend?”

  “Do you think I am excited, brother?”

  With a sweeping gesture Sabartés indicated the litter of sketches all about the studio, the dozen new half-finished canvases turned to the wall, the bright splotches everywhere where Picasso, in his haste, had overturned paints and not bothered to wipe them up. “You are like a man on fire. You work without stopping, Pablo.”