To the Land of the Living (11 page)

“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 shudder 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!

But it was not to be.

Empty and bleak as this country was, for the most part, yet it was not empty entirely. No part of the Afterworld could be, not the ice-entombed polar regions nor the blazing midworld belt nor this parched barren Outback; for there were uncountable billions of souls to house here – the souls, so it had been concluded by those who made it their task to study such matters, of everyone who had ever lived upon the former earth. And though the Afterworld was immense beyond the comprehension of even the wisest geographers, there was no territory of it that did not have its few scattered settlers or at least its roaming nomad packs. Gilgamesh and Enkidu were hard pressed, as they made their zigzag random way across the face of the land, to maintain their solitude pure and unbroken more than a few days at a time.

Now it was some dismal farm they stumbled across, with shimbleshamble barns of unpainted wood, and rooks and vultures perched in the crook-armed trees behind it, and a family of withered gray-faced folk struggling against the miserable land. And now it was some caravan plodding from hither to thither among the far-flung cities of the plain; and now it was a wandering pilgrim, a solitary like themselves. When they could, the Sumerians generally avoided those whom they encountered. But sometimes they could not avoid without giving needless and dangerous offense, or the only route ahead lay through populated territory; and sometimes, even, pressed by hunger or thirst or the simple need occasionally to hear the voices of their own kind, they chose of their free will to break their aloofness and allow themselves a few hours of company before moving on.

Thus it was, almost despite themselves, that they fell in with these folk or these or these, and sat by their firesides and traded gossip with them and learned the names of princes and nations of the Outback, and of the vain ambitions and hollow dreams that drove them, the wars that were being fought here, the schemes and follies, the madness. Thus it was that the two Sumerians, who had dwelled for more years than they could remember among the turbulent cities that crowded the eastern coast of the great landmass that was the Afterworld, learned that even here in this wilder place that was the Outback the same lunacies held sway, the same insane attempts to replicate in this life the errors of that other one. So the truth sank home:
humans are as humans do, there is no sanctuary from their frailty, all is the same everywhere no matter what sort of clothes are worn or languages spoken. It was a somber truth to learn, and Gilgamesh, searching in the misty depths of his time-choked memory, had the uncomfortable feeling that he was not learning it for the first time.

Though they had rarely journeyed in the same direction more than three days running, they discovered that in fact they had been moving westward more often than not, and now were almost at the Outback’s farther end. This they learned in a place called Vectis Minima, which was a crossroads and a hostelry of five huts presided over by a pale-eyed old man with a face more pitted and baleful than the Moon’s. Here they came to take refuge from a cold black rain which fell in furling sheets that did not strike the ground, but nevertheless sent forth a chill that reached the bone. And here Gilgamesh asked, in an idle moment of curiosity, where they might be and what lay ahead.

“You are some twelve days’ journey from the sea here,” the shriveled old innkeeper told them.

“The sea? What sea is that?” Gilgamesh said, startled.

“Why, the White Sea, the Demon Sea. What else? What other sea would you expect?”

“To be sure,” Gilgamesh muttered. “But we are strangers from the east.”

“Ah, the east,” said the innkeeper. “Vulking Land, you mean? Or Lord Wolfram’s Domain?”

“Farther east than that,” said Gilgamesh. “A thousand leagues farther. Ten thousand, perhaps. Nova Roma was our last home.”

“Nova Roma,” said the innkeeper, in a quiet way, as though Gilgamesh had named some other star. “Would you be of Nova Roma, then? Well, you are far from there now. Look you.” And he dipped his fingertip in the grim gray wine of the place, and drew a line on the peeling wooden tabletop. “Here. The sea is here, and we are over here. This is the road to Lo-yang, and this the road to Cabuldidiri. You know of those places? No? Well, you’ve missed very little. Straight on here, this is the road that leads to the isle of Brasil, which surely you know.”

“Brasil?” Gilgamesh said. “What is that?”

“I know of it,” said Enkidu suddenly. “By report, at least. It’s the famous island of wizards and sorcerers, is it not?”

“So it is, the magical isle, the haunted isle,” said the innkeeper. “Where Simon Magus is king, and may all the demons preserve you from meeting
him
. Well, then, and these mountains here, these are the Mountains of the Moths” – he drew them in with stipplings of wine on the dry wood – “and beyond them we have five cities, by name Torfaeus, Gardilone, Pizigani, Camerata, and – and – well, there is a fifth, it does not come to my mind. Then here, as we proceed to the north –”

“Enough,” said Gilgamesh. “You tell me more than I demand to know.”

His mood had grown darker with each name the old man had rolled forth. He had not thought to come to the desert’s end so soon; but he realized now that it might not have been soon at all, that he and Enkidu might have spent years or even centuries in the wasteland since leaving the court of Prester John, while thinking it was only a matter of months. The passage of time was always uncertain here. And just ahead of them now lay a coastal land that was new to him, and one that was obviously much the same as the coast he had left behind, more cities, more kings, more scheming, more folly. The thing to do, he thought, was to turn and go back, into the heartland once more. Surely they had not exhausted it all.

But that too was not to be. For they chose the road to the north, to the place that was called Cabuldidiri, thinking that from there they would cut back inland on some passable wilderness track. But they had gone no more than a league or two before the road began veering in a troublesome way toward the west, as if it were not of a mind to let them reach Cabuldidiri. They could see a valley far beyond, and a fair-sized town in it, resting upon a cleft between two slab-sided hills. Surely that town was Cabuldidiri. Yet the road would not allow them to go that way. Perpetually it swerved away. Even when they left the road and made their trek through the rough places that seemed to lead eastward, they found themselves moving before very long in the other direction.

“What is this?” Enkidu asked. “Why does the city slip away from us, brother?”

“Enlil only knows. Perhaps there’s no city there at all, or no road. Or wizards move the road each night, by way of amusing themselves.”

“What will we do?”

“Follow our feet,” said Gilgamesh. “And our feet will follow their destiny, and so we will learn our own.”

The destiny of their feet seemed to deliver them into an ever-narrowing canyon that ran, so far as they were able to tell, from east to west. Though that was the opposite of the direction they intended to follow, they had no choice but to obey, for the land rose up on both sides of them like walls of glass and they were compelled into the canyon like animals driven into a trap. Gilgamesh found this irritating, and walked along sullenly, eyeing the towering ramparts to the right and to the left in search of some opening in them. But there was none. The walls, now so close on either side that Gilgamesh could almost touch them with both hands at once, had a bright sheen, like that of polished pink marble, and the narrow path beneath their feet was of red earth marked by lines of busy green-and-black insects. In order to see the sky one had to bend one’s neck far back, and look straight up.

After a time wagon tracks began to appear before them.

“We are following a caravan,” Enkidu observed. “Look, do you see the fresh droppings? What shall we do, brother? Wait here until they have gone onward?”

“I think not,” said Gilgamesh. “This is a dead place, very stifling to the soul, and nothing in it to eat but bugs. We’ll move ahead, and overtake them, and perhaps we’ll travel with them awhile, if they prove friendly.”

“As you say, brother.”

Three days and three nights more, and then they overtook the caravan: a dozen ragged wagons, shabby and sad, some with landsails and some drawn by gaunt and weary-looking pack animals. A dog set up a frantic barking the moment the Sumerians came into view, and the caravan halted at once. Men and a few women armed with pistols and automatic weapons jumped down, crouching in the red earth as if expecting attack.

They were all Later Dead, Gilgamesh observed with distaste. “Come,” he said to Enkidu. “Let’s go peacefully toward them. They must think we’re scouts for a larger force coming
behind us, or else they are more than uncommonly nervous.”