Gilgamesh the King

  Zabardi-bunugga came running to me with the news. “They are torturing him, my lord! May Enlil eat their livers, they are torturing him!” Zabardi-bunugga was now my third-in-command, a sturdy man, no lovelier of face than he had been in boyhood, but loyal and steadfast. He told me that he had mounted the wall by the lookout post of Lugalbanda’s tower and had seen the men of Kish assaulting Bir-hurturre in plain view, striking him, beating him, kicking him as he lay in the dust. “Enlil will have their livers!” he cried. And he told me that when he had ascended the wall, the men of Kish had called out to him, asking if he were Gilgamesh the king. To which he had shouted back that he was not, that he was nothing in comparison with Gilgamesh the king.

  “Will we ride out to them now?” he asked.

  “Wait a little longer,” I answered him. “I’ll go up on the wall so that I can see what kind of enemy we have.”

  I strode quickly through the streets. Faces peered at me from the rooftops: the ordinary people, frightened, chilled. It was many years since an enemy had come to the gates of Uruk; they did not know what to expect, and they dreaded the worst. At the watchtower of Lugalbanda I ran up the wide brick stairs two and three at a time, carrying a yellow-and-blue banner that I had seized from one of the tower guardsmen, and I stepped out onto the wide platform at the top of the wall.

  My blood sang in my ears as I looked out at that sea of invaders.

  The longboats of Agga crowded our quays. The troops of Kish swaggered along the wharves. I saw the banners of Kish, crimson and emerald. I saw tough tanned faces, men I knew, the warriors with whom I had swept through the forces of Elam as though they were mere fleecy clouds. Under the fierce midsummer sun they wore their coats of thick black felt without show of discomfort; the light gleamed like fire from their shining copper helmets. I saw two of the sons of Agga; I saw six high officers of the Elam campaign; I saw Namhani, my old charioteer, and he saw me and waved and pointed and grinned his snag-toothed grin, and called me by the name by which I had been known in Kish.

  “No,” I roared back. “Gilgamesh! I am Gilgamesh!”

  “Gilgamesh,” they answered me. “Look, it is Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh the king!”

  I carried no shield and I stood exposed against the sky, but I felt no fear. They would not dare aim a shaft at the king of Uruk. I scanned them from south to north, the hundreds of them, perhaps the thousands. They had set up tents; they were here to stay for a lengthy siege.

  “Where is Agga?” I called. “Bring out your king. Or is he afraid to show himself?”

  Agga came. If I was unafraid of showing myself upon the wall, he could do no less. From one of the far tents he emerged, moving slowly, fatter than ever, a mountain of flesh, pink-skinned, freshly shaved from scalp to chin. He carried no weapon; he leaned on a staff of black wood carved in curves and angles that troubled my eye. When he stood close below me I made a gracious sign of reverence to him and said in a calm voice, “I bid you welcome to my city, father Agga. If you had sent word of your visit, I would have been better prepared to entertain you.”

  “You look well, Gilgamesh. I thank you for the embrace you sent me.”

  “It was only my obligation.”

  “I had expected more.”

  “Indeed, so you had. Where is my herald Bir-hurturre, father Agga?”

  “We are discussing matters with him, in one of our tents.”

  “They tell me he was beaten and kicked and thrown down in the dust, and taken off for torture, father Agga. I think I treated your envoys with more kindness.”

  “He was unruly. He lacked politeness. We are teaching him courtesy, my son.”

  “In Uruk I teach such lessons, and no one else,” I said. “Return him to me, and then I will invite you within for the feast that is my obligation to so noble a guest as you.”

  “Ah,” said Agga, “I think I will invite myself within. And I will bring your lackey with me, when I am done with him. Open your gates, Gilgamesh. The king of kings decrees it. The lord of the Land decrees it.”

  “So be it,” I replied. I turned away, and threw down my banner on the side within the wall. It was the signal: we opened every gate at once, and came riding forth upon the men of Kish.

  When an enemy comes to the gate of a walled city, it is often best to wait within, especially if the enemy has been so rash as to arrive in summer. In that dry time there is no food outside the walls, except whatever is stored in the outlying granaries, and when that is gone, there will be nothing left for the besiegers. Within, we had supplies enough to see us through to winter, and fresh water aplenty. They would suffer more keenly than we, and eventually they would withdraw: that is the usual wisdom.

  But the usual wisdom usually does not apply. Agga understood these things as well as I; far better, in fact. If he had chosen to lay siege in summer, plainly he did not mean the siege to be a lengthy one. And so I guessed that he intended a direct attack. The walls of Uruk—Enmerkar built them—were not high, then, as the walls of great cities go. No doubt there were ladders aplenty on those boats of Agga’s, and in a little while warriors of Kish would be scrambling up our walls in a hundred places at once. Meanwhile their axe-wielders would be attempting to breach the ramparts from below: I knew those axes of Kish, which could readily cut through the old bricks of our wall. So it was pointless to sit inside the city waiting for them to attack. I had more men at my command than Agga had brought with him; once they were within the walls, tossing torches about, we would be at their mercy, but if I could defeat them on the quay we would be saved. We had to carry the attack to them.

  We burst forth in chariots out of five gates at once. I think they had not expected us to emerge so soon, or even for us to emerge at all. They were confident and arrogant, and thought I would bow my knee to Agga without a struggle. But we fell upon them with axes high and spears flashing. Zabardi-bunugga’s chariot was in the vanguard, with ten others just behind it, carrying the finest heroes of the city. The men of Kish met that first wave with valor and energy. I knew how well they could fight; I knew them, indeed, better than my own soldiers. But while the first skirmishes were under way I came down from the wall and entered my own chariot, and led the second wave of the assault myself.

  I will be very plain about it: when the men of Kish beheld me, it struck them with terror and froze their souls. They had known me in the Elam wars, but though they remembered me they did not remember me as well as they should have, until they saw me riding into their midst, casting my javelins equally well with my right hand and my left. Only then did they remember.

  “It is the son of Lugalbanda!” they cried, and they began to panic.

  There is no pretending otherwise: I know no finer music than the music that sings through the air of the battlefield. Joy rose in me, and I rode into the enemy like the emissary of death. My charioteer that day was the brave Enkimansi, a narrow-faced man of thirty years who acknowledged no fear whatever. He drove the asses forward, and I stood high behind him, hurling my weapons as though I bore the wrath of Enlil upon Kish. My first cast took the life of a son of Agga; my second and third slew two of his generals; my fourth pierced the throat of one of the envoys who had borne Agga’s message to me. “Lugalbanda!” I cried. “Sky-father! Inanna! Inanna! Inanna!” It was a cry that these men of Kish had heard before. They knew that a god rode among them that day, or at least a godling, with divine keenness to his sight and divine strength to his arm.

  Into the breach made by Zabardi-bunugga and the rest of the front line of chariots I followed, cutting a deep hole in the forces of Kish. Behind me came my footsoldiers, crying out, “Gilgamesh! Inanna! Gilgamesh! Inanna!”

  I give the men of Kish credit for courage. They tried their best to slay me, and only some fast work with my shield and some deft maneuvering by the skillful Enkimansi kept me from harm. But there was no halting me. Terror overcame them despite themselves, and they turned and ran toward the water; but we cut them off from the sides and began to chop them a
part.

  It was over far more swiftly than I could have hoped. We sent multitudes of them rolling in the dust. We reached their longboats and took them, and cut their prows off and carried the images of Enlil away as trophies. We got Bir-hurturre free, and found him still well, though he had been shamefully bloodied and bruised. As for Agga, we fought our way through to him—he was no fighter himself, not at his age, but he was surrounded by a ring of a hundred picked guardsmen, who perished to the last man—and took him prisoner. Zabardi-bunugga led him to me as I stood leaning against my chariot, drinking a flask of the beer of Kish that I had taken from one of their stewards.

  Agga was dusty and sweating and flushed, and his eyes were red with weariness and dismay. There was a small wound on his left shoulder, only a scratch, but it shamed me to see that he had been touched. I gestured to one of my field surgeons. “Clean and bind the wound of the king of kings,” I said. Then I went up to Agga and to his amazement I knelt before him. “Father,” I said. “Royal master of the Land.”

  “Don’t mock me, Gilgamesh,” he muttered.

  I shook my head. Rising, I put the flask of beer in his hand, saying, “Take this. It will ease your thirst, father.”

  He regarded me bleakly. Slowly he put his hand to his belly and kneaded the thick rolls of flesh. Rivulets of sweat ran down him, cutting through the dust that lay on his skin. I will not deny it: I savored my triumph, I doted on his discomfiture. It was sweet wine to me.

  “What will you do with me?” he asked.

  “You will be my guest at the palace this evening, and for two days thereafter. Then we will have the rite of the burying of the dead; and then I will send you back to Kish. For are you not my lord, the king of kings, to whom I have sworn my loyalty?”

  He understood me now, and anger flared in his eyes; but then he laughed, and looked sadly about at his warriors and his sons heaped in the blood-soaked dust, and at his mutilated longboats, and he nodded. “Ah, is that it?” he said after a time. “I did not think you were so shrewd.”

  “My debt is paid now, is that the case?”

  “Ah,” he said, “that is the case. Your debt is paid, Gilgamesh.”

  17

  SO IT WAS DONE. I gave a great feast to Agga, and sent him back to Kish with what was left of his army.

  But before he left I had sad news from him: my wife Ama-sukkul his daughter was dead, and both the children she had borne for me. These tidings went through me like blades. Death, there is no place to hide from you! I thought of how on my last day at Kish I had embraced her and patted her swelling belly so lovingly. The child in being born had been the death of her, though, and he perished with her; and then our first-born son had languished for lack of his mother and went quickly from the world. Doubtless the gods had not intended for me to plant my seed in Kish. I have had other sons since, many of them, but I wonder often what those two would have been like had they grown to manhood. And the sweet little Ama-sukkul: she was a gentle person and not the least loved of my wives.

  In the hour of Agga’s departure I insisted on pledging myself once again in fealty to him. This I did of my own free will, as everyone saw. Such a pledge given freely is a sign not of submission but of strength: it is a gift, it is a splendid offering, which loosed me rather than bound me. It was my way of acknowledging what Agga had done for me in years past, when he helped me gain my kingship upon the death of Dumuzi, and it freed me forever from any real sort of vassalage. At last I was king in my own right, through prowess in battle and greatness of soul. It would not be wrong to say that the true beginning of my reign could be dated to the time of the war with Kish.

  But if it was the true beginning of my kingship, it was the end of Agga’s, though he lived on a little while after. He withdrew within the walls of Kish and was not heard from again outside it. When he died it was the end of the dynasty of Kish after thousands of years, for Mesannepadda king of Ur marched north and seized the city. Soon we had reports that Mesannepadda had put to death the last of Agga’s sons and taken the throne for himself; and thereafter he called himself king of Kish instead of king of Ur. I allowed this to happen because I was preoccupied with other matters at that time, as I will duly tell; and later I had my own reckoning to make with the king of Ur and Kish.

  The first thing I did, when the excitement of the war had begun to recede a little into memory, was to rebuild the walls of Uruk. In truth I did not so much rebuild them as build them anew, for the old walls of Uruk were as no walls at all, compared with the ones that I constructed for the city. Perhaps they were good enough for Enmerkar’s time; but I had seen the walls of Kish. I knew what city walls should be.

  A wall must be high, so that the enemy cannot scale it with his ladders. It must be thick, so it cannot easily be breached. It must have a deep and broadly based foundation, so it cannot be undermined and tunnels cannot be dug beneath it. All that is evident enough; but the walls of Uruk were barely adequate in all those respects. We needed, also, more towers from which we could observe the approaches to the city, and a wide parapet along the top of the wall where defenders could take up positions and aim their fire upon the heads of the invaders. In particular there had to be guard-towers and parapets flanking each of the city gates, since the gates are the weak points in any wall.

  All the rest of the summer there was scarcely anything done in Uruk but the making of bricks and the building of the wall that I think will be known until the end of days as the Wall of Gilgamesh. As in the repair of the canals, I worked alongside the common artisans, and I think no one worked as hard as I: I built that wall with my own hands, and that is the truth. Nor was there any artisan more skillful than I in the placing of the bricks as it must be done, on edge, leaning sideways against one another in careful rows, each row leaning in the direction opposite the one below it. That is the only true way to build. We ripped away the old wall of Enmerkar so that the city stood naked, and then, quickly as we could, we put up the new wall, or, rather, the walls, for there are two of them. The seven wise sages themselves could not have designed a better plan. I used only kiln-baked bricks, for what is the use of building with mud, and having to do it all over again five years later? And they were the finest of bricks. The outer wall shines with the brightness of copper, and the inner wall, a gleaming white, is a wall without equal anywhere. The foundation terrace is, I think, the mightiest ever built. The wall of Uruk is famous throughout the world. It will last twelve thousand thousand years, or I am not Lugalbanda’s son.

  I would not have you believe we finished the entire wall in a single summer. In truth, there has been no year of my reign when we have not continued to work on it, strengthening it, increasing its height, adding new parapets and watchtowers. But in that first summer we built the greater part of it, sufficient to defend us against any enemy we could imagine.

  In those early months I was in the fullest flush and most robust joy of my kingship. Scarcely did I even take the time to sleep. I worked all day at the things a king must do, and made my people work as I did. I suppose I made them work too hard; indeed, I drove them to exhaustion, and they began to call me tyrant behind my back. But I did not realize that. My energies were immense, and I did not understand that theirs were not. When their day’s toil was done, they wanted nothing but sleep. But I would feast magnificently with my court by evening, and then at night there were the women. Perhaps I was excessive, with the women, though I did not think so then. My appetite for them was like the unceasing hunger of the gods for meat and drink. I had my concubines, I had the priestesses of the holy cloister, I had the casual women of the town, and even they were not sufficient. You must never forget that I am in part a god, by my descent from Lugalbanda, and also from Enmerkar who called himself the son of the sun; and a god’s force blazes within me. How could I deny that force? How could I stifle it? The god-presence throbbed in me like the beating of a drum, and I marched to its tune.

  Within my joy and vigor, though, I must tell you t
hat there was a hidden melancholy. All Uruk waited upon me, yet I never could forget that I was a man alone, a lofty and isolated figure. Perhaps it is that way with everyone: I do not know. But it seems to me that others are bound in close league with wives, sons, friends, companions. I who had never had a brother, who had scarcely known his father, who had been set apart by size and strength from his playfellows, was now as king cut off as though by colossal walls from the normal flow of human intercourse. There was no one around me who did not fear me and envy me and in some way draw back from me. And I saw no way of altering that; but the toil by day and the feasting by evening and the women by night were my consolations for this pain of separation. Especially the women.

  My chamberlain of the royal concubines was hard pressed to meet my needs. When the wandering tribesfolk of the desert came to Uruk for the market, he brought their girls to me, tawny long-legged girls with dark shadows about their eyes, and wide thin-lipped mouths. When wedding contracts were drawn in the city, the brides were given first to me before their husbands had them, so that I might bring divine grace upon them. If the wife of one of my noblemen pleased me, that man would convey her to the palace for the night without murmur, should I ask for her. No one spoke out against me. No one would; no one could; I was king; my strength was like the strength of the host of heaven. I saw nothing wrong in what I did. Was it not my privilege, as king, as god, as hero, as shepherd of the people? Could I be left in need, when my hungers raged so powerfully? Ah, the wine, the beer, the music, the singing of those nights! And the women, the women, their sweet lips, their smooth thighs, their swaying breasts! I never rested. I never halted. The beating of the drum was unrelenting. By day I led the men in the building of walls or the playing of the games of war, until they were dull-eyed and drooping with fatigue, and by night I swept my way through their women as a raging fire roars through the dry grass of summer.