To the Land of the Living (2 page)

“I will hunt as I hunt,” said Gilgamesh. “There is no sport in it, when you do it with guns. There is no grace in it.”

Caesar shook his head. “I never could understand hunting for sport, anyway. Killing a few stags, yes, or a boar or two, when you’re bivouacked in some dismal Gaulish forest and your men want meat. But hunting? Slaughtering hideous animals that aren’t even edible? By Apollo, it’s all nonsense to me!”

“My point exactly.”

“But if you must hunt, to scorn the use of a decent hunting rifle –”

“You will never convince me.”

“No,” Caesar said with a sigh. “I suppose I won’t. I should know better than to argue with a reactionary.”

“Reactionary! In my time I was thought to be a radical,” said Gilgamesh. “When I was king in Uruk –”

“Just so,” Caesar said, grinning. “King in Uruk. Was there ever a king who wasn’t reactionary? You put a crown on your head and it addles your brains instantly. Three times Antonius offered me a crown, Gilgamesh, three times, and –”

“– you did thrice refuse it, yes. I know all that. ‘Was this ambition?’ You thought you’d have the power without the emblem. Who were you fooling, Caesar? Not Brutus, so I hear. Brutus said you were ambitious. And Brutus –”

That stung him where nothing else had. Caesar brandished a fist. “Damn you, don’t say it!”

“– was an honourable man,” Gilgamesh concluded all the same, greatly enjoying Caesar’s discomfiture.

The Roman groaned. “If I hear that line once more –”

“Some say this is a place of torment,” said Gilgamesh serenely. “If in truth it is, yours is to be swallowed up in another man’s poetry. Leave me to my bows and arrows, Caesar, and return to your jeep and your trivial intrigues. I am a fool and a reactionary, yes. But you know nothing of hunting. Nor do you understand anything of me.”

All that had been a year ago, or two, or maybe five – even for those who affected clocks and wristwatches, there was no keeping proper track of time in the Afterworld, where the ruddy unsleeping eye of the sun moved in perverse random circles across the sky – and now Gilgamesh was far from Caesar and all his minions, far from Nova Roma, that
troublesome capital city of the Afterworld, and the trivial squabbling of those like Caesar and Bismarck and Cromwell and that sordid little man Lenin who maneuvered for power in this place. He had found himself thrown in among them because – he barely remembered why – because he had met one, or Enkidu had, and almost without realizing what was happening they had been drawn in, had become entangled in their plots and counterplots, their dreams of empire, their hope of revolution and upheaval and transformation. Until finally, growing bored with their folly, he had walked out, never to return. How long ago had that been? A year? A century? He had no idea.

Let them maneuver all they liked, those tiresome new men of the tawdry latter days. All their maneuvers were hollow ones, though they lacked the wit to see that. But some day they might learn wisdom, and was not that the purpose of this place, if it had any purpose at all?

Gilgamesh preferred to withdraw from the center of the arena. The quest for power bored him. He had left it behind, left it in that other world where his first flesh had been conceived and gone to dust. Unlike the rest of those fallen emperors and kings and pharaohs and shahs, he felt no yearning to reshape the Afterworld in his own image, or to regain in it the pomp and splendor that had once been his. Caesar was as wrong about Gilgamesh’s ambitions as he was about the reasons for his preferences in hunting gear. Out here in the Outback, in the bleak dry chilly hinterlands of the Afterworld, Gilgamesh hoped to find peace. That was all he wanted now: peace. He had wanted much more, once, but that had been long ago, and in another place.

There was a stirring in the scraggly underbush.

A lion, maybe?

No, Gilgamesh told himself. There were no lions to be found in the Afterworld, only the strange nether-world beasts, demon-spawn, nightmare-spawn, that lurked in the dead zones between the cities – ugly hairy things with flat noses and many legs and dull baleful eyes, and slick shiny things with the faces of women and the bodies of malformed dogs, and worse, much worse. Some had drooping leathery wings and some were armed with spiked tails that rose like a scorpion’s and some had mouths that opened wide enough to
swallow an elephant at a gulp. They all were demons of one sort or another, Gilgamesh knew. No matter. Hunting was hunting; the prey was the prey; all beasts were one in the contest of the field. That fop Caesar could never begin to comprehend that.

Drawing an arrow from his quiver, Gilgamesh laid it lightly across his bow and waited.

“A lot like Texas, yes,” Howard went on, “only the After-world’s just a faint carbon copy of the genuine item. Just a rough first draft, is all. You see that sandstorm rising out thataway?
We
had sandstorms, they covered entire counties! You see that lightning? In Texas that would be just a flicker!”

“If you could drive just a little more slowly, Bob –”

“More slowly? Cthulhu’s whiskers, man, I
am
driving slowly!”

“Yes, I’m quite sure you believe that you are.”

“And the way I always heard it, H.P., you loved for people to drive you around at top speed. Seventy, eighty miles an hour, that was what you liked best, so the story goes.”

“In the other life one dies only once, and then all pain ceases,” Lovecraft replied. “But here, where one can lose one’s life again and again, and each time return from the darkness, and when one returns one remembers every final agony in the brightest of hues – here, dear friend Bob, death’s much more to be feared, for the pain of it stays with one forever, and one may die a thousand deaths.” Lovecraft managed a pallid baleful smile. “Speak of that to some professional warrior, Bob, some Trojan or Hun or Assyrian – or one of the gladiators, maybe, someone who has died and died and died again. Ask him about it: the dying and the rebirth, and the pain, the hideous torment, reliving every detail. It is a dreadful thing to die in the Afterworld. I fear dying here far more than I ever did in life. I will take no needless risks here.”

Howard snorted. “Gawd, try and figure you out! In the days when you thought you lived only once, you made people go roaring along with you on the highway a mile a minute. Here where no one stays dead for very long you want me to drive like an old woman. Well, I’ll attempt it, H.P., but everything in me cries out to go like the wind. When you live in big country, you learn to cover the territory the way it has
to be covered. And Texas is the biggest country there is. It isn’t just a place, it’s a state of mind.”

“As is the Afterworld,” said Lovecraft. “Though I grant you that the Afterworld isn’t Texas.”

“Texas!” Howard boomed. “Now, there was a place! God damn, I wish you could have seen it! By God, H.P., what a time we’d have had, you and me, if you’d come to Texas. Two gentlemen of letters like us riding together all to hell and gone from Corpus Christi to El Paso and back again, seeing it all and telling each other wondrous stories all the way! I swear, it would have enlarged your soul, H.P. Beauty such as perhaps even you couldn’t have imagined. That big sky. That blazing sun. And the open space! Whole empires could fit into Texas and never be seen again! That Rhode Island of yours, H.P. – we could drop it down just back of Cross Plains and lose it behind a medium-size prickly pear! What you see here, it just gives you the merest idea of that glorious beauty. Though I admit this is plenty beautiful itself, this here.”

“I wish I could share your joy in this landscape, Robert,” Lovecraft said quietly, when it seemed that Howard had said all he meant to say.

“You don’t care for it?” Howard asked, sounding surprised and a little wounded.

“I can say one good thing for it: at least it’s far from the sea.”

“You’ll give it that much, will you?”

“You know how I hate the sea and all that the sea contains! Its odious creatures – that hideous reek of salt air hovering above it –” Lovecraft shuddered fastidiously. “But this land – this bitter desert – you don’t find it somber? You don’t find it forbidding, this Outback?”

“It’s the most beautiful place I’ve seen since I came to the Afterworld.”

“Perhaps what you call beauty is too subtle for my eye. Perhaps it escapes me altogether. I was always a man for cities, myself.”

“What you’re trying to say, I reckon, is that all this looks real hateful to you. Is that it? As grim and ghastly as the Plateau of Leng, eh, H.P.?” Howard laughed. “‘Sterile hills of gray granite … dim wastes of rock and ice and snow … .’” Hearing himself quoted, Lovecraft laughed too, though not exuberantly. Howard went on, “I look around at the Outback
of the Afterworld and I see something a whole lot like Texas, and I love it. For you it’s as sinister as dark frosty Leng, where people have horns and hooves and munch on corpses and sing hymns to Nyarlathotep. Oh, H.P., H.P., there’s no accounting for tastes, is there? Why, there’s even some people who – whoa, now! Look there!”

He braked the Land Rover suddenly and brought it to a jolting halt. A small malevolent-looking something with blazing eyes and a scaly body had broken from cover and gone scuttering across the path just in front of them. Now it faced them, glaring up out of the road, snarling and hissing flame.

“Hell-cat!” Howard cried. “Hell-coyote!
Look
at that critter, H.P. You ever see so much ugliness packed into such a small package? Scare the toenails off a shoggoth, that one would!”

“Can you drive on past it?” Lovecraft asked, looking dismayed.

“I want a closer look, first.” Howard rummaged down by his boots and pulled a pistol from the clutter on the floor of the car. “Don’t it give you the shivers, driving around in a land full of critters that could have come right out of one of your stories, or mine? I want to look this little ghoul-cat right in the eye.”

“Robert –”

“You wait here. I’ll only be but a minute.”

Howard swung himself down from the Land Rover and marched stolidly toward the hissing little beast, which stood its ground. Lovecraft watched fretfully. At any moment the creature might leap upon Bob Howard and rip out his throat with a swipe of its horrid yellow talons, perhaps – or burrow snout-deep into his chest, seeking the Texan’s warm, throbbing heart –

They stood staring at each other, Howard and the small monster, no more than a dozen feet apart. For a long moment neither one moved. Howard, gun in hand, leaned forward to inspect the beast as one might look at a feral cat guarding the mouth of an alleyway. Did he mean to shoot it? No, Lovecraft thought: beneath his bluster the robust Howard seemed surprisingly squeamish about bloodshed and violence of any sort.

Then things began happening very quickly. Out of a thicket to the left a much larger animal abruptly emerged: a ravening monstrous creature with a crocodile head and powerful
thick-thighed legs that ended in frightful curving claws. An arrow ran through the quivering dewlaps of its heavy throat from side to side, and a hideous dark ichor streamed from the wound down the beast’s repellent blue-gray fur. The small animal, seeing the larger one wounded this way, instantly sprang upon its back and sank its fangs joyously into its shoulder. But a moment later there burst from the same thicket a man of astonishing size, a great dark-haired black-bearded man clad only in a bit of cloth about his waist. Plainly he was the huntsman who had wounded the larger monster, for there was a bow of awesome dimensions in his hand and a quiver of arrows on his back. In utter fearlessness the giant plucked the foul little creature from the wounded beast’s back and hurled it far out of sight; then, swinging around, he drew a gleaming bronze dagger and with a single fierce thrust drove it into the breast of his prey, the
coup de grace
that brought the animal crashing heavily down.

All this took only an instant. Lovecraft, peering through the window of the Land Rover, was dazzled by the strength and speed of the dispatch and awed by the size and agility of the half-naked huntsman. He glanced toward Howard, who stood to one side, his own considerable frame utterly dwarfed by the black-bearded man.

For a moment Howard seemed dumbstruck, paralyzed with wonder and amazement. But then he was the first to speak.

“By Crom,” he muttered, staring at the giant. “Surely this is Conan of Aquilonia and none other!” He was trembling. He took a lurching step toward the huge man, holding out both his hands in a strange gesture-submission, was it? “Lord Conan?” Howard murmured. “Great king, is it you? Conan? Conan?” And before Lovecraft’s astounded eyes Howard fell to his knees next to the dying beast, and looked up with awe and something like rapture in his eyes at the towering huntsman.

It had been a decent day’s hunting so far. Three beasts brought down after long and satisfying chase; every shaft fairly placed; each animal skilfully dressed, the meat set out as bait for other demon-beasts, the hide and head carefully put aside for proper cleaning at nightfall. There was true pleasure in work done so well.

Yet there was a hollowness at the heart of it all, Gilgamesh thought, that left him leaden and cheerless no matter how cleanly his arrows sped to their mark. He never felt that true fulfilment, that clean sense of completion, that joy of accomplishment, which was ultimately the only thing he sought.

Why was that? Was it because – as some of the Christian dead so drearily insisted – because the Afterworld was a place of punishment, where by definition there could be no delight?

To Gilgamesh that was foolishness. Some parts of the Afterworld were extraordinarily nasty, yes. Much of it. It had its hellish aspects, no denying that. But certainly pleasure was to be had there too.

It depended, he supposed, on one’s expectations. Those who came here thinking to find eternal punishment did indeed get eternal punishment, and it was even more horrendous than anything they had anticipated. It served them right, those true believers, those gullible Later Dead, that army of credulous Christians.

He had been amazed when their kind first came flocking into the Afterworld, Enki only knew how many thousands of years ago. The things they talked of! Rivers of boiling oil! Lakes of pitch! Demons with pitchforks! That was what they expected, and there were clever folk here willing and ready to give them what they were looking for. So Torture Towns aplenty were constructed for those who wanted them. Gilgamesh had trouble understanding why anyone would. Nobody
among the First Dead really could figure them out, those absurd Later Dead with their sickly obsession with punishment. What was it Imhotep called them? Masochists, that was the word. Pathetic masochists. But then sly little Aristotle had begged to disagree, saying, “No, my lord, it would be a violation of the nature of the Afterworld to send a true masochist off to the torments. The only ones who go are the strong ones, the bullies, the braggarts, the ones who are cowards at the core of their souls.” Belshazzar had had something to say on the matter too, and Tiberius, and that Palestinian sorceress Delilah of the startling eyes, and then all of them had jabbered at once, trying yet again to make sense of the Christian Later Dead. Until finally Gilgamesh had said, before stalking out of the room, “The trouble with all of you is that you keep trying to make sense out of this place. But when you’ve been here as long as I have –”