To the Land of the Living (40 page)

“Yes,” said Enkidu, “that is so, brother.”

And Gilgamesh had said that it was the same with him, that
there was something unsleeping in him also, forever questing, forever unsatisfied. The gods had played a jest on him, said Gilgamesh, fashioning him in such a way that he would yearn always for a peaceful life but never would be satisfied when he had attained it.

Enkidu laughed then, and said, “We are like two overgrown boys, casting about forever for new diversions.”

That was the time when they went off into the Land of Cedars to bring back the fine wood that grew in the forest there, and encountered the demon Huwawa, and slew him in his fiery lair, and returned in triumph to the city of Uruk, as joyous as though they had conquered six kingdoms.

But all that had been in the other life, the old one long ago, before the first of the many deaths that they were destined to die. Now here was Enkidu once again restless for new adventure, and here was Gilgamesh king in Uruk again, settled in his tasks. What was it Enkidu had said, when he had urged Gilgamesh to come away on this quest with him?
Would you rather sit and grow fat in Uruk for another ten thousand years?
But this time Gilgamesh was uncertain of his way. There was a part of him that yearned to go with Enkidu in search of the land of the living – that part that was forever restless, forever seeking, and which was not yet entirely dead within him – but also there was another aspect of him that had grown within him during his time in the Afterworld, which said,
Stay, stay, rule your city, do the tasks that you alone were meant to do.
And that voice was as strong in him, or nearly, as the other.

And yet –

Stay? For what, he wondered? To play out yet again all that had happened before, in this world and the one that had preceded it? Was there no more to this existence of his than an eternal cycle of wielding power and then renouncing it, of governing and wandering, governing and wandering? Had nothing any end? Had nothing any purpose? When would he ever simply rest?

He heard the beating of mighty wings overhead, though there was nothing there. He saw the great hill beyond the city’s north wall stirring and slowly beginning to move, lifting itself like the humped back of an awakening dragon. The air grew blood-red and very heavy, and a thick insistent buzzing came from it, as if from a million million angry flies.

A voice that spoke without speaking aloud said, “This is your kingdom, Gilgamesh of Uruk. How deeply do you love it?”

And the buzzing air echoed, “Do you love it? Do you love it? Do you love it?”

Ninsun said, “So you will go, then.”

“I must, mother. He leaves me no choice.”

She shook her head. “It seems a great mistake to me, this journey.”

“And to me also,” came Vy-otin’s ringing voice from the far side of the hall. “How can you say you have no choice? Are you and he like twins who are joined by a band of flesh at the waist, that you have to follow him wherever he goes?”

Gilgamesh stared sadly at the Ice-Hunter a long moment.

“Yes, Vy-otin. That is exactly what we are.”

“Then tell him you won’t go. He’ll have to give the idea up.”

“He will go anyway,” said Gilgamesh.

“Ah,” said Herod. “Then you’re a Siamese twin, but he isn’t? How very peculiar.”

“No,” said Gilgamesh. “To enter the land of the living is something that he wants more than anything else. Such a need severs all bonds. He died his first death when he went down into the House of Dust and Darkness to bring back the drum that I had lost, the drum that the craftsman Ur-nangar made for me out of the wood of the huluppu-tree – do you remember, mother? That was the drum by whose beating I could send my spirit free to rove in strange realms of gods and monsters, and when I lost it he gave up his life that “I could have it back. Ever since that time, I think, he has sought to regain the thing he lost that day. And he is certain now that the Hairy Man’s witchcraft will help him find it.”

“Then let him go and look for it,” Vy-otin said. “But why must you –”

“Because I must,” said Gilgamesh.

Herod laughed. “There’s no reasoning like circular reasoning, is there?”

Gilgamesh whirled on the little Judaean with such wrath that Herod jumped back five paces. “You understand nothing of this! Nothing!”

“Forgive me, Gilgamesh,” said Herod in a chastened voice. “But couldn’t you simply forbid Enkidu to do it, if doing it causes you such grief?”

“I could, yes.”

“But would he obey?”

“He’d obey me, yes. If I told him that I wouldn’t go with him because of my duties here, and that I couldn’t bear his going without me. But how could I ask that of him, Herod? To give up something for which he has yearned so long, simply because I –”

“But he asks that of you,” Herod said.

“No. How does he do that?”

“By putting you in a position where you have to choose between your friend on the one hand and your city, your entire world, on the other.”

“He has done nothing of the sort,” said Gilgamesh, though without much conviction.

“If you make the crossing into the land of the living,” Ninsun asked, “will you ever be able to return to the Afterworld again?”

“I have no way of knowing that. Perhaps the Hairy Man can tell me. But I came here once from that place. I should be able to do it again, if I wanted to.”

“By giving up your life again, you mean?” she said.

“Yes.”

“But if you return a second time, will you ever be able to find Uruk, do you think?”

“I suppose that I could. Or perhaps not. How can I say?”

“There is no way of knowing that, is there?” Ninsun said. “If you returned, you might come into the Afterworld anywhere. You might arrive a thousand years from now, and a thousand thousand leagues from this place. Everyone you had known here before would have been scattered to the seven corners of the world. You would be alone, Gilgamesh.”

He gave her a long sorrowful look. But when he spoke there was renewed firmness in his voice.

“I have been alone before, and have been reunited somehow with those I love. You and I, mother, we were separated for thousands of years, and we found each other again, did we not?”

“And now you’re proposing to head off to God knows
where, even though you may never see her again!” Vy-otin cried. “Leaving your mother, leaving your friends, leaving all you’ve built here in Uruk, leaving every single thing that you know and love – no, Gilgamesh! It’s not right!”

“Let him be, Vy-otin,” Ninsun said. “He has made up his mind, can’t you see that?”

“The Hairy Man,” Herod murmured.

“Peace and gladness, king of Uruk,” the ancient one said, entering the throne room. He made a quick, offhand gesture of respect. “I have fetched the materials I need from Brasil,” he said. “Have you decided?”

“You’ve obtained everything already?”

“Yes, all that I need.”

Gilgamesh gaped at him. “How can you have brought anything from there so quickly? What has it been, one day, two? To get to Brasil and back takes weeks – months –”

“Sometimes less, King Gilgamesh. I tell you, I have all that I need.”

More witchcraft, Gilgamesh thought. This creature of time’s dawn was beyond his understanding.

“So be it,” he said, shrugging.

“You will make the journey?”

“I will. And Enkidu. And the woman Helen of Troy.”

“Helen also?”

“Enkidu wishes it.”

The Hairy Man was silent a moment.

“Simon Magus is aware that she is here,” he said, after a time. “It is the wish of Simon Magus that Helen of Troy be sent to him, O king.”

“Ah, is it?”

“Very much so.”

“Does Simon think that she’s mine to bestow, like a casket of rubies?”

“They were lovers once. He wishes to see her again.”

“If Helen had to be shipped back to everyone she’d been lovers with every time one of them snapped his fingers, she’d be whizzing around the Afterworld like a comet,” Herod said, laughing.

Gilgamesh signalled him angrily to be quiet. To the Hairy Man he said, “I regret having to disappoint so powerful a wizard as Simon Magus.”

“You will not send her to Simon?”

“No,” Gilgamesh said. “She wants to go with Enkidu. Enkidu wants her to go with him. Why should I separate them? Simon’s had his jewels from me, hasn’t he? That should be enough for him.”

The Hairy Man seemed unperturbed. “As you wish, O king. But you should know that no one goes from here to the land of the living with anyone else. Those who go, go alone.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means what it means.”

“Only one of us can go?”

“You all may go. But each goes separately and arrives separately. It is the only way.”

“Enkidu and I won’t be together when we get there?”

“You will make the journey alone and you will arrive alone.”

“But we’ll be able to find each other once we’re there?”

“Perhaps.”

Gilgamesh drew a long breath. “You aren’t sure?”

“I have not been to the land of the living myself, King Gilgamesh, in more years than there are hairs on your head. How can I say what will happen there? But come: come, now. Everything is ready for the journey.”

“Wait a little,” Gilgamesh said. He glanced around the great dark hall. “Where’s Enkidu?”

“I’ll get him,” Herod said, and went from the room.

He returned after a while, with Enkidu behind him like a walking boulder, and Helen radiant at Enkidu’s side. Gilgamesh said at once, “The Hairy Man’s been to Brasil and back already, don’t ask me how. He has the things he needs to open the way to the land of the living.”

Enkidu grinned; but quickly his face grew solemn. “And will you be joining us in the crossing, brother?”

The room was very still.

“I will,” said Gilgamesh quietly.

“By Enlil! By Sky-father An! I knew you would! I always knew –”

“Wait,” said Gilgamesh. “There are other things you need to know. He says that Simon wants Helen sent to him as a gift.

“He says
what?”
Enkidu roared. A menacing rumbling sound came from him and he started toward the Hairy Man.

But Helen, stilling him at once with no more than a touch of her hand to his wrist, said lightly, “Rest easy. It will not be.”

“It had better not be,” said Enkidu.

She smiled. “Simon’s a sweet man, in his way. But if he wanted his chance with me, he should have taken it when we met long ago at the Abbey of Theleme.” To the Hairy Man she said, “Tell him he’s a thousand years too late. I’m going wherever Enkidu goes.”

Gilgamesh said, “The Hairy Man informs me also that we’ll be separated when we make the crossing, and we won’t necessarily be able to find each other afterward.”

Enkidu’s eyes blazed. “What is this?” he boomed. “Are you sure you heard him right?”

“There is no doubt that that is what he said.”

Enkidu wheeled around to confront the Hairy Man, who crossed his wrists in a strange gesture that might have been one of indifference, and looked off into the distance.

Helen said, turning to Enkidu, “Is it true? That we will lose each other in the crossing?”

“Do you mean to change your minds about making the attempt?” the Hairy Man asked placidly. “If that is so, let me know now, so that I may halt the preparations before –”

“No!” Enkidu cried. “This is some trick, that’s all. Something that Simon told him to say, to discourage us if Helen refused to go to him. He was Simon’s man before he was yours, brother. He’s still Simon’s man now.”

“What do you say to this?” Gilgamesh demanded.

With unruffled calmness the Hairy Man said, “The journey will be the way the journey must be. The terms are the terms. I have no power to alter them.”

“That is no answer at all,” said Gilgamesh.

Helen said, trembling and looking suddenly very small, “This frightens me. To go off into the unknown not knowing whether or not we’ll find each other on the other side –”

“We will find each other!” shouted Enkidu defiantly. “Somehow we will, that I know! You must believe that!” He looked down at her. “We found each other once, and we will do it again. You must believe it. You must.” And pulled her close against him. “What do you say?”

“Yes,” Helen murmured. Her eyes brightened, color came to her face. “Yes, I think we will. Yes. I have no doubt of it, Enkidu.”

“And you, brother? What do you think? Are you still with us?”

Gilgamesh looked about. Enkidu, Helen, the Hairy Man. Behind them Herod. Farther away, Vy-otin, Ninsun. They all were silent. That silence crashed upon him like the waves of a furious sea. A strange indecision gripped him: he felt immobilized by it, as though he were frozen.

He had decided to undertake this journey, perilous and mystifying though it was, only for the sake of remaining by Enkidu’s side. The Hairy Man offered no guarantee of that. And if what Enkidu said was true, that the Hairy Man meant to work some vengeance on them in Simon’s name, to show Simon’s displeasure over the withholding of Helen – but no, that would not be like Simon, nor had the Hairy Man ever showed treachery before –

“Well, brother?” Enkidu asked.

Gilgamesh stared at the Hairy Man. But that grizzled shaggy face was inscrutable. He looked toward Herod, but Herod only shrugged and looked away. He looked to Vy-otin, and found no answer in the Ice-Hunter’s single fiery eye. To Ninsun, then–

She was smiling. She was nodding.

“Mother?” he said.

“When did you ever turn away from risk before, my son?”

“You want me to go?”

“You want to go,” Ninsun said. “Why, then, do you hesitate?”

“But you said –”

“Of course I want you to stay. I would speak a lie if I told you anything else. But I see you are bound on this course, and no one could or should stop you. You are Gilgamesh: you do as Gilgamesh will do. Besides, Enkidu is right. You will find each other, somehow.”

“Yes,” Gilgamesh said, and it was like the breaking of a dam within him. “You have never spoken other than the truth, mother. How can I doubt you now?”

The Hairy Man said, “This is the salve. Rub it on your cheeks,
and on your throats, and above your eyes. Then make your minds calm, and wait.”