“And,” I said, “the custom of offering the king, upon his return to the city from a journey, a bowl of wine that kills.” I went a few steps closer to her. “Take off the mask, Inanna. Let me see your face again.”
“I will not,” she said.
“Take off the mask. I ask you.”
“Let me be. I will not take off the mask.”
But I could not speak with this metal-faced stranger. It was the woman of flesh and blood I sought to look upon again, the treacherous and beautiful woman I had known so long, she whom I had loved, in my fashion, as I had loved no other woman. I meant to behold that woman one more time.
Gently I said, “I would see the splendor of your face once more. I think there is no face more beautiful in all the world. Do you know that, Inanna? How beautiful you have seemed to me?” I laughed. “Do you remember the nights we made the Sacred Marriage together? Of course. Of course. How could you forget? That year when I was the new king, and I lay all night in your arms, and in the morning the rain had come. I remember. I remember those times before you were Inanna, when you called me to the chambers deep below the old temple. I was just a frightened boy then, and I scarcely knew what games you were playing with me. Or that first time, when they were saying the coronation rite for Dumuzi, and I wandered off into the corridors of the temple and you found me. You were just a child yourself, though you already had your breasts. Do you remember? Do you remember? Ah, Inanna, in time I came to understand the games you were playing with me! But now I would see your face again. Put down the mask.”
“Gilgamesh—”
“Put down the mask,” I said. “Put it down.” And I called her by her name: not her priestess-name but her other, older, name, her birth-name, which no one had spoken since she had become Inanna. By that name I conjured her. At the sound of it she gasped and held up her hands in a secret goddess-sign, shielding herself. I could not see her eyes behind the mask, but I imagined that they were fixed on me, unblinking, piercing, cold.
“You are mad to call me by that name!” she whispered.
“Am I? Then I am mad. I would see your face once more, one last time.”
Now there was a quiver in her voice. “Let me be, Gilgamesh. I meant you no harm. What I did, I did for the sake of the city—the city must have a king, and you were gone—the goddess commanded me—”
“Yes. The goddess commanded you to remove Dumuzi, and you did. The goddess commanded you to remove Gilgamesh, and you would have done it. Ah, Inanna, Inanna—it was for the sake of the city, yes. And for the sake of the city I grant you my pardon. I forgive you all your schemes. I forgive you what you have done in the goddess’ name to harm me and to undermine my power. I forgive you your hatred, your anger, your fury. I even forgive you your vengeance, for it was you that called the gods down upon Enkidu whom I loved, and I think but for you he might be alive this day. But I forgive you. I forgive you everything, Inanna. If we had not been king and priestess, I think I would have loved you even more than I loved him, more than I loved life itself. But I was king; you were priestess. Ah, Inanna, Inanna—”
I did not use the sword. I took the dagger from my hip and put it into her side between the breastplate and the beads of lapis around her waist, and twisted it upward until I reached her heart. She made a single small sound and fell. I think she must have died at once. I let my breath forth slowly. At last I was free of her; but it had been like cutting away a part of my soul.
Kneeling beside her, I unfastened the mask and lifted it from her face.
I wish that I had not done that one thing. What had become of her since last I had looked upon her was difficult for my mind to credit. Her eyes had lost none of her beauty, nor her lips; but all else was a ruin. Some spreading blemish had seized her face and ravaged it. She was pocked and cratered, red and raw here, gray-skinned and sagging there: a nightmare hag, a demon-faced thing. She looked a thousand years old. It would have been better that I left her covered. But I had laid her bare, and I must carry the burden of that. I bent forward; I put my lips to hers and kissed her for the last time; then I fastened the mask back into its place, and rose, and went outside to the temple porch to summon the people and tell them of the new order of things that I meant to proclaim as I resumed my kingship in Uruk.
41
THESE HAVE BEEN BUSY YEARS, and fulfilling ones. The gods have been kind to Uruk and to Gilgamesh its king. The city thrives; the wall stands high; we have painted the White Platform with a fresh coat of gypsum, and it gleams in the sun. All is well. We have many tasks yet to carry out, but all is well. I sit now in my chamber in the palace, inscribing the last of my tablets, for I think the tale is told. I will not cease striving—I will never do that—but a certain peace has come over me that I never knew before, and that is new; I had no peace in the times of which I have been writing, but now I do. I tell you: all is well.
It was easy enough to bring the soaring ambitions of Meskiagnunna of Ur back down to earth: that was my first enterprise after my restoration. I sent him a message confirming him in his kingship of Ur, and granting him the administration of Kish as an additional fief. He knew what I was saying, when I condescended to let him hold the cities he already held. “But Nippur and Eridu,” I told him, “I reserve to myself, as the gods have decreed: for they are the holy cities, subject to the rule of the high king of the Land.”
By that message I sent forth my claim to the supremacy. And at the same time I dispatched my army, under command of the faithful Zabardi-bunugga, to enter Nippur and persuade the soldiers of Ur to depart. I did not leave Uruk myself, since I had so much to do there—the choosing of a new high priestess, for instance, and the proper training of her so that she would understand the role she must play in my government.
While I occupied myself with those matters, Zabardi-bunugga managed the liberation of Nippur effectively enough, though not without some small damage. The men of Ur took refuge in the Tummal, which is the house of Enlil there, and it was necessary to break down the walls of that temple in order to remove them. I have sent my son Ur-lugal to rebuild the Tummal, now that Nippur is ours.
These are full times for me. Indeed, there is never a moment to rest. I would not have it any other way. What else is there, but to plan, to work, to build, to do? It is the salvation of our souls. Listen to the music in the courtyard: the harper plays, and by making his melodies he pays his birth-price. Look at the goldsmith, bending over his table. The carpenter, the fisherman, the scribe, the priest, the king—in the performing of our tasks we all fulfill the commandments of the gods, which is the only purpose in this life for which we were made. We find ourselves thrown by the whim of the gods into a chancy world, where uncertainty reigns; within that whirlwind we must make a secure place for ourselves. That we do by work; and my work it is to be king.
So I toil and my people toil. The temples, the canals, the city walls, the pavements in the streets—how can we ever cease rebuilding and repairing and restoring them? It is the way. The rites and sacrifices by which we hold back the surging powers of chaos—how can we ever cease performing them? It is the way. We know our tasks, and we do them, and all is well. Listen to that music, in the courtyard! Listen! Listen!
Soon—let it not be very soon, but I will be ready whenever the hour arrives—I must begin the last of my journeys. I will go down into the dark world from which there is no return. My musicians will be beside me, and my concubines and stewards and valets, my charioteer, my jugglers, my minstrels; and together we will make our offerings to the gods of the world below, to Ereshkigal and Namtar, to Enki, to Enlil, to all those who govern our destinies. So be it. It does not trouble me now to think of that prospect. I have never considered returning to Dilmun to beg a second pearl of Grow-Young-Again: that is not the way. That old priest who calls himself the Ziusudra tried to tell me that, but I had to learn it in my own fashion. Well, I have learned it now.
The light is going. There is the rite to perform tonight on the te
mple roof, and I must hasten to it; I am the king, it is my task. We honor Ninsun my mother, whom I proclaimed a goddess this time last year when her days on earth were done. Already I hear the chanting in the distance, and the scent of burning meat is in the air. So, now, an end to all my stories. I have spoken much of death, my great enemy with whom I have grappled so fiercely, but I will speak of him no more. I have feared him greatly. I have walked with terrible fear of his shadow. But I have made my peace with death now. I have come to understand the truth, which is that the escape from death lies not in potions and magic, but in the performance of one’s task. That way lies calmness and acceptance.
I have done my work, and I will do more. I have made a name for myself that will last down the ages. Gilgamesh will not be forgotten. He will not be left to trail his wings mournfully in the dust. They will remember me in joy and pride. What will they say of me? They will say that I lived, and I lived well; that I strived, and I strived well; that I died, and I died well. I feared death as no man ever did, and went to the ends of the world to escape him, in which I failed; but when I returned I feared him no longer. That is the truth. I know now that we need not fear death, if we have done our tasks. And when we cease to fear death, there is no death. That is the truest truth I know: There is no death.
Afterword
WE HAVE NO REASON TO doubt that Gilgamesh of Uruk was an authentic historical figure. His name occurs frequently in the king-lists of the Mesopotamian land of Sumer—what is now the southern part of Iraq—and it is likely that he lived about 2500 B.C. Beyond much question he was a strong and successful king; until the end of independent Mesopotamian civilization, two thousand years later, he was regarded always as the prototype of the great leader, a warrior and statesman beyond compare. Myths of all sorts grew up about him; he became a legendary culture-hero, who combined in himself the best traits of Hercules, of Ulysses, of Prometheus.
It is primarily with the historical Gilgamesh that I have concerned myself in this book, but I have dealt also with that mythical one who is the hero of the oldest work of tragic literature which has survived into our time. I refer to the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is perhaps two thousand years old—more than a thousand years more ancient than the Iliad and the Odyssey—and which may be even older than that. Our text of it, which is incomplete but conveys the essential story, comes to us in various forms that have survived by mere luck out of the ruins of antiquity. The longest known version was found by archaeologists in the nineteenth century in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal—the Assyrians were the final inheritors of the ancient Mesopotamian culture, long after the Sumerian founders had been absorbed by younger and more vigorous races—and was set down on clay tablets about 700 B.C. In addition we have a fragmentary version perhaps a thousand years older, written in the language of the Babylonians who dominated Mesopotamia between the time of the Sumerians and that of the Assyrians; and there is also a version in the language of the Hittites of Syria, indicating that the story was widespread throughout the Near East. All of these are probably based on some Sumerian original that is lost to us.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a profoundly disturbing work: a meditative poem on the necessity of death. Gilgamesh is shown to be a superhuman figure, confident to the point of arrogance, bursting with vitality; and yet the fear of his own mortality reduces him to a kind of paralysis, out of which he emerges to undertake a desperate pilgrimage to the immortal survivor of the Flood, Ziusudra (Utnapishtim in the later versions). It is worth noting in passing that the entire tale of Noah and the ark as told in the Bible is almost certainly based on the Flood narrative embodied in the Gilgamesh epic, which precedes it by at least a thousand years and perhaps much more.
In retelling the story of Gilgamesh I have drawn freely on the original epic, relying mainly on the two standard English translations, that of Alexander Heidel (1946) and E. A. Speiser (1955). I have also incorporated into it the far older Sumerian poems dealing with other aspects of the life of Gilgamesh, making use of the translations by Samuel Noah Kramer (1955). But at all times I have attempted to interpret the fanciful and fantastic events of these poems in a realistic way, that is, to tell the story of Gilgamesh as though he were writing his own memoirs, and to that end I have introduced many interpretations of my own devising which for better or for worse are in no way to be ascribed to the scholars I have named.
Perhaps it need not be explained—but I will—that the two rivers referred to in the novel by their Sumerian names as the Idigna and the Buranunu are those known to later civilizations as the Tigris and the Euphrates. The ruins of Gilgamesh’s Uruk are to be found near the modern Iraqi town of Warka, which is twelve miles from the present course of the Euphrates; but the literary and archaeological evidence strongly indicates that the river flowed much closer to the city in the time of Gilgamesh.
Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to various friends who read the manuscript in its preliminary stages and offered useful criticism. I am indebted in particular to Merrilee Heifetz for her rigorous scrutiny of the book and for the depth of insight and technical expertise that she brought to her reading of it. She provided an extraordinary and invaluable service.
—Robert Silverberg
Oakland, California
February 1984
A Biography of Robert Silverberg
Robert Silverberg (b. 1935) is an American author best known for his science fiction titles, including Nightwings (1969), Dying Inside (1972), and Lord Valentine’s Castle (1980). He has won five Nebula Awards and five Hugo Awards. In 2004, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America honored Silverberg with the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.
Silverberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, on January 15, 1935, the only child of Michael and Helen Silverberg. An avid reader and writer from an early age, Silverberg began his own fanzine, Spaceship, in 1949. In 1953, at age eighteen, he sold his first nonfiction piece to Science Fiction Adventures magazine. His first novel, Revolt on Alpha C, was published shortly after, in 1955. That same year, while living in New York City and studying at Columbia University, Silverberg met his neighbors and fellow writers Randall Garrett and Harlan Ellison, both of whom went on to collaborate with him on numerous projects. Silverberg and Randall published pieces under the name Robert Randall. In 1956, Silverberg graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor of arts degree in comparative literature, married Barbara Brown, and won the Hugo Award for Most Promising New Author.
Following the whirlwind of his college years, Silverberg continued to write consistently for most of his life. Writing under various pseudonyms, including David Osborne and Calvin M. Knox, Silverberg managed to publish eleven novels and more than two hundred short pieces between 1957 and 1959. Having established himself as a science fiction writer by this time, Silverberg went on to show dexterity in other genres, from historical nonfiction with Treasures Beneath the Sea (1960) to softcore pornography under the pseudonym Don Elliot.
Silverberg continued to write outside science fiction until Frederik Pohl, the editor of Galaxy Science Fiction, convinced him to rejoin the field. It was in this period, from the late 1960s to early 1970s, that Silverberg’s classics, including Tower of Glass (1970), The World Inside (1971), and The Book of Skulls (1972), came to life. After taking a break from writing, Silverberg returned with Lord Valentine’s Castle in 1980.
Though they had been separated for nearly a decade, Silverberg and Barbara officially ended their marriage in 1986. A year later, Silverberg married fellow writer Karen Haber. They went on to collaborate on writing The Mutant Season (1990) and editing several anthologies. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, Silverberg published important titles including Star of Gypsies (1986), and continued his established Majipoor series with The Mountains of Majipoor (1995) and Sorcerers of Majipoor (1997). In 1999, Silverberg was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
With a career that spans half a century, multiple genres, and more than three hund
red titles, Silverberg has made major contributions as a writer. He currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife.
Silverberg at six months old with his parents.
Silverberg at summer camp in August 1952, reading the September issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which featured a story by Theodore Sturgeon.
The first page of Silverberg’s manuscript for his first novel, Revolt on Alpha C, published in 1955.
An early rejection letter dated July 18, 1949.
Silverberg conversing with a nymph at author Brian Aldiss’s home in Oxford, England, after the 1987 Brighton Worldcon. (Courtesy of Andrew Porter.)
Silverberg with his wife, Karen, at the 2004 Nebula Awards in Seattle, where he received his Grand Master Award.
(Unless otherwise noted, all images taken from Other Spaces, Other Times by Robert Silverberg, courtesy of Nonstop Press.)
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