“She-it, H.P. Philosopher? Musician? You talking about that old country doctor there?”
“Who founded the leprosy clinic in Africa, at Lambarene, yes. Who devoted his life to helping the sick, under the most primitive conditions, in the most remote forests of—”
“Hold on, H.P. That can’t be so.”
“That one man could achieve so much? I assure you, Bob, he was quite well known in our time—perhaps not in Texas, I suppose, but nevertheless—”
“No. Not that he could do all that. But that he’s here. In the Afterworld. If that old geezer’s everything you say, then he’s a goddamned saint. Unless he beat his wife when no one was looking, or something like that. What’s a saint doing in the Afterworld, H.P.?”
“What are we doing in the Afterworld?” Lovecraft asked.
Howard reddened and looked away. “Well—I suppose, there were things in our lives—things that might be considered sins, in the strictest sense—”
“What does sin have to do with anything?” Lovecraft asked.
“Well, isn’t this place Hell?”
“Is it?”
“It sure ain’t Heaven, H. P. Even if it does look a whole lot like Texas.”
Lovecraft shook his head. “Heaven. Hell. Who knows? There are those who think that this place where we have found ourselves is Hell, I agree. But I’m not one of them. All we know is that it’s the Afterworld, a life after life. Do you see a Devil with scaly wings and a long tail presiding over the place? Do we live in constant torment?”
“Well—”
“No,” Lovecraft said. “There’s no reason to think of this place as Hell, though some people do. There’s no reason to think of it as anything but the Afterworld. And no one understands the rules of the Afterworld, Bob,” said Lovecraft gently. “Everything’s random here, completely unpredictable. Sin may have nothing to do with it. Gandhi is here, do you realize that? Confucius. Were they sinners? Was Moses? Abraham? Those who call it Hell have tried to impose their own pitiful shallow beliefs, their pathetic grade-school notions of punishment for bad behavior, on this incredibly bizarre place where we find ourselves. By what right? We don’t begin to comprehend what the Afterworld really is. All we know is that it’s full of heroic villains and villainous heroes—and people like you and me—and it seems that Albert Schweitzer is here, too. A great mystery. But perhaps someday—”
“Shh,” Howard said. “Prester John’s talking to us.”
“My lords ambassador—”
Hastily they turned toward him. “Your majesty?” Howard said.
“This mission that has brought you here: your king wants an alliance, I suppose? What for? Against whom? Quarreling with some pope again, is he?”
“With his daughter, I’m afraid,” said Howard.
Prester John looked bored. He toyed with his emerald scepter. “Mary, you mean?”
“Elizabeth, your majesty,” Lovecraft said.
“Your king’s a most quarrelsome man. I’d have thought there were enough popes in the Afterworld to keep him busy, though, and no need to contend with his daughters.”
“They are the most contentious women in all the Afterworld,” Lovecraft said. “Blood of his blood, after all, and each of them a queen with a noisy, brawling kingdom of her own. Elizabeth, my lord, is sending a pack of her explorers to the Outback, and King Henry doesn’t like the idea.”
“Indeed,” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih, suddenly interested again. “And neither do I. She has no business in the Outback. It’s not her territory. The rest of the Afterworld should be big enough for Elizabeth. What is she looking for here?”
“The sorcerer John Dee has told her that the way out of the Afterworld is to be found in these parts,” said Lovecraft.
“There is no way out of the Afterworld,” Yeh-lu Ta-shih said quietly.
Lovecraft smiled. “I’m not any judge of that, your majesty. Queen Elizabeth, in any event, has given credence to the notion. Her Walter Ralegh directs the expedition, and the geographer Hakluyt is with him, and a force of five hundred soldiers. They move diagonally across the Outback just to the south of your domain, following some chart that Dr. Dee has obtained for them. He had it from Cagliostro, they say, who bought it from one of the Medici, to whom Nero had pawned it.”
Prester John did not appear to be impressed. “Let us say, for argument’s sake, that there is an exit from the Afterworld. Why would Queen Elizabeth desire to leave? The Afterworld’s not so bad. It has its minor discomforts, yes, but one learns to cope with them. Does she think she’d be able to return to the land of the living and reclaim her throne? She’s dead, my friend. We are all dead here, though we have the semblance of life. There is no other place for us to go. There is no throne waiting for her in another sphere.”
Howard stepped forward. “Elizabeth has no real interest in leaving the Afterworld herself, majesty. What King Henry fears is that if she does find a way out, she’ll claim it for her own and set up a colony around it, and charge a fee for passing through the gate. No matter where it takes you, the king reckons there’ll be millions of people willing to risk it, and Elizabeth will wind up cornering all the money in the Afterworld. He can’t abide that notion, d’ye see? He thinks she’s already too smart and aggressive by half, and he hates the idea that she might get even more powerful. There’s something mixed into it having to do with Queen Elizabeth’s mother, too—that was Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife—she was a wild and wanton one, and he cut her head off for adultery, and now he thinks that Anne’s behind Elizabeth’s maneuvers, trying to get even with him by—”
“Spare me these details,” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih with some irritation. “What does Henry expect me to do?”
“Send troops to turn the Ralegh expedition back before it can find anything useful to Elizabeth.”
“And in what way do I gain from this?”
“If the exit from the Afterworld’s on your frontier, your majesty, do you really want a bunch of Elizabethan Englishmen setting up a colony next door to you?”
“There is no exit from the Afterworld,” Prester John said complacently once again.
“But if they set up a colony anyway?”
Prester John was silent a moment. “I see,” he said finally.
“In return for your aid,” Howard said, “we’re empowered to offer you a trade treaty on highly favorable terms.”
“Ah.”
“And a guarantee of military protection in the event of the invasion of your realm by a hostile power.”
“If King Henry’s armies are so mighty, why does he not deal with the Ralegh expedition himself?”
“There was no time to outfit and dispatch an army across such a great distance,” said Lovecraft. “Elizabeth’s people had already set out before anything was known of the scheme.”
“Ah,” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih.
“Of course,” Lovecraft went on, “there were other princes of the Outback that King Henry might have approached. Ibn Saud’s name came up, and one of the Assyrians—Assurnasirpal, I think—and someone mentioned Mao Tse-tung. No, King Henry said, let us ask the aid of Prester John, for he is a monarch of great puissance and grandeur, whose writ is supreme throughout the far reaches of the Afterworld. Prester John, indeed, that is the one whose aid we must seek!”
A strange new sparkle had come into Yeh-lu Ta-shih’s eyes. “You were considering an alliance with Mao Tse-tung?”
“It was merely a suggestion, your majesty.”
“Ah. I see.” The emperor rose from his throne. “Well, we must consider these matters more carefully, eh? We must not come hastily to a decision.” He looked across the great vaulted throne-room to the divan where Dr. Schweitzer still labored over Gilgamesh’s wound. “Your patient, doctor—what’s the report?”
“A man of steel, majesty, a man of steel! Gott sei dank, he heals before my eyes!”
“Indeed. Come, then. You will all want to rest, I think; and then you shall know the full hospitality of P
rester John.”
* * *
FIVE
THE full hospitality of Prester John, Gilgamesh soon discovered, was no trifling affair.
He was led off to a private chamber with walls lined with black felt—a kind of indoor tent—where three serving-girls who stood barely hip-high to him surrounded him, giggling, and took his clothing from him. Gently they pushed him into a huge marble cistern full of warm milk, where they bathed him lovingly and massaged his aching body in the most intimate manner. Afterward they robed him in intricate vestments of yellow silk.
Then they conveyed him to the emperor’s great hall, where the whole court was gathered, a glittering and resplendent multitude. Some sort of concert was under way, seven solemn musicians playing harsh screeching twanging music. Gongs crashed, a trumpet blared, pipes uttered eerie piercing sounds. Servants showed Gilgamesh to a place of honor atop a pile of furry blankets heaped high with velvet cushions.
Lovecraft and Howard were already there, garbed like Gilgamesh in magnificent silks. Both of them looked somewhat unsettled—unhinged, even. Howard, flushed and boisterous, could barely sit still: he laughed and waved his arms around and kicked his heels against the furs, like a small boy who has done something very naughty and is trying to conceal it by being overexuberant. Lovecraft, on the other hand, seemed dazed and dislocated, with the glassy-eyed look of someone who has recently been clubbed.
These are two very odd men indeed, Gilgamesh thought.
One works hard at being loud and lusty, and now and then gives you a glimpse of a soul boiling with wild fantasies of swinging swords and rivers of blood. But in reality he seems terrified of everything. The other, though he is weirdly remote and austere, is apparently not quite as crazy, but he too gives the impression of being at war with himself, in terror of allowing any sort of real human feeling to break through the elaborate facade of his mannerisms. The poor fools must have been scared silly when the serving-girls started stripping them and pouring warm milk over them and stroking their bodies. No doubt they haven’t recovered yet from all that nasty pleasure, Gilgamesh thought. He could imagine their cries of horror as the little Mongol girls started going to work on them. What are you doing? Leave my trousers alone! Don’t touch me there! Please—no—ooh—ah—ooh! Oooh!
Yeh-lu Ta-shih, seated upon a high throne of ivory and onyx, waved grandly to him, one great king to another. Gilgamesh gave him an almost imperceptible nod by way of acknowledgement. All this pomp and formality bored him hideously. He had endured so much of it in his former life, after all. Back then he had been the one on the high throne, but even then it had been nothing but a bore. And now—
But this was no more boring than anything else. Gilgamesh had long ago decided that that was the true curse of the Afterworld: all striving was meaningless here, mere thunder without the lightning. It was impossible to build anything that would last. It was all castles in the sand here, with oblivion rolling in on the tides no matter how hard you struggled against it. You never could bring forth sons to extol your name and strengthen the walls of your city; your friends and allies appeared and vanished again like phantoms in a dream; you yourself lived half the time in some fevered dream yourself, uncertain of your own intentions. And there was no end to it. You might die again now and then if you were careless or unlucky, but back you came for another turn, sooner or later. There was no release from the everlastingness of it all. Once he had yearned desperately for eternal life, and he had learned to his pain that he could not have such a thing, at least not in the world of mortal men. But now indeed he had come to a place where he would live forever, so it seemed, and yet there was no joy in it. His fondest dream now was simply to serve his time in this Afterworld and be allowed to sleep in peace forever. He saw no way of attaining that. Life here, or what passed for life, just went on and on—very much like this concert, this endless skein of twangs and plinks and screeches.
Someone with the soft face of a eunuch came by and offered him a morsel of grilled meat. Now that the sting of his wound was ebbing he felt hungry, and he gobbled it. And another, and another, and a flagon of fermented mare’s milk besides.
A corps of dancers appeared, men and women in flaring filmy robes. They were doing things with swords and flaming torches. A second eunuch brought Gilgamesh a tray of mysterious sugary delicacies, and he helped himself with both hands. He was ravenous. His body, as it healed, was calling furiously for fuel. Beside him, the man Howard was swilling down the mare’s milk as if it were water and getting tipsier and tipsier, and the other, the one called Lovecraft, sat morosely staring at the dancers without touching a thing. He seemed to be shivering as though in the midst of a snowstorm.
Gilgamesh beckoned for a second flagon. Just then the doctor arrived and settled down cheerfully on the heap of blankets next to him. Schweitzer grinned his approval as Gilgamesh took a hearty drink. “Fuhlen Sie sick besser, mein Held, eh? The arm, it no longer gives you pain? Already the wound is closing. So quickly you repair yourself! Such strength, such power of healing! You are God’s own miracle, dear Gilgamesh. The blessing of the Almighty is upon you.” He seized a flagon of his own from a passing servant, quaffed it, made a face. “Ach, this milk-wine of theirs! And ach, ach, this verfluchte music! What I would give for the taste of decent Moselle on my tongue now, eh, and the sound of the D minor toccata and fugue in my ears! Bach—do you know him?”
“Who?”
“Bach! Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach. The greatest of musicians, God’s own poet in sound. I saw him once, just once, years ago.” Schweitzer’s eyes were glowing. “I was new here. Not two weeks had I been here. It was at the villa of King Friedrich—Frederick the Great, you know him? No? The king of Prussia? Der alte Fritz? No matter. No matter. Es macht nichts. A man entered, ordinary, you would never notice him in a crowd, yes? And began to play the harpsichord, and he had not played three measures when I said, This is Bach, this must be the actual Bach, and I would have dropped down on my knees before him but that I was ashamed. And it was he. I said to myself, Why is it that Bach is in the Afterworld, if the Afterworld is Hell, as some would have us think? But then I said, as perhaps you have said, as I think everyone here must say at one time or another about himself, Why is it that Schweitzer is in the Afterworld? And I knew that it is that God is mysterious. Perhaps I was sent here to minister to the damned. Perhaps it is that Bach was also, to play for our souls. Or perhaps we are damned also; or perhaps no one here is damned. That is what I finally think, that those who call this place Hell are fools. Who knows what this place is, or why we are here, eh? Es macht nichts aus, all this speculation. It is a mistake, or even vielleicht a sin, to imagine that we can comprehend the workings of the mind of God. We are here. We have our tasks. That is enough for us to know.”
“I felt that way once,” said Gilgamesh. “When I was king in Uruk in the other world, and finally came to understand that I must die, that there was no hiding from that. What is the purpose, then, I asked myself? And I told myself: The gods have put us here to perform our tasks, and that is the purpose. And so I lived thereafter, performing my task according to my understanding of what it was that the gods required of me, until I died.” Gilgamesh’s face darkened. “But here—here—”
“Here too we have our tasks,” Schweitzer said.
“You do, perhaps. For me there is only the task of passing the time. I had a friend to bear the burden with me, once—”
“Enkidu.”
Gilgamesh seized the doctor’s sturdy wrist with sudden fierce intensity. “You know of Enkidu?”
“From the poem, yes. The poem is very famous.”
“Ah. Ah. The poem. But the actual man—”
“I know nothing of him, nein.”
“He is of my stature, very large. His beard is thick, his hair is shaggy, his shoulders are wider even than mine. We journeyed everywhere together. But then we quarreled, and he went from me in anger, saying, Never cross my path again. Saying, I have no love for
you, Gilgamesh. Saying, If we meet again I will have your life. And I have heard nothing of him since.”
Schweitzer turned and stared closely at Gilgamesh. “How is this possible? All the world knows the love of Enkidu for Gilgamesh!”
Gilgamesh called for yet another flagon. This conversation was awakening an ache within his breast, an ache that made the pain that his wound had caused seem like nothing more than an itch. Nor would the drink soothe it; but he would drink all the same.
He took a deep draught and said somberly, “We quarreled. There were hot words between us. He said he had no love for me any longer.”
“This cannot be true.”
Gilgamesh shrugged and made no reply.
“You wish to find him again?” Schweitzer asked.
“I desire nothing else.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“The Afterworld is larger even than the world, and the world is so large that it makes my head hurt to think of it. He could be anywhere.”
“You will find him.”
“If you knew how I have searched for him—”
“You will find him. That I know.”
Gilgamesh shook his head. “If the Afterworld is a place of torment, then this is mine: that I will never find him again. Or if I do, that he will spurn me. Or raise his hand against me.”
“This is not so,” said Schweitzer. “I think he longs for you even as you do for him.”
“Then why does he keep himself from me?”
“This is the Afterworld,” said Schweitzer gently. “I think we are meant to be tested here. And so you are being tested, my friend; but no test lasts forever. Not even in the Afterworld. Not even in the Afterworld. Even though you are in the Afterworld, have faith in the Lord: You will have your Enkidu soon enough, um Himmels Willen.” Smiling, Schweitzer said, “The emperor is calling you. Go to him. I think he has something to tell you that you will want to hear.”