To the Land of the Living (33 page)

Picasso, sketching away with astounding manic zeal, beckoned Gilgamesh on to one more
corrida
, and one more after that. And Ninsun, presiding in majesty over the now kingless royal box, looked on with warm pride, smiling, nodding in satisfaction each time her son drove his blade home.

After the third one Herod and Simon Magus began to look troubled, as though they found it unseemly for a king to be slaughtering strange creatures for amusement in front of his subjects, or – more likely – that they feared Gilgamesh would perish if he continued to risk his life in the bull-ring this way, and the city would be engulfed by chaos before they could make a safe escape. But Gilgamesh shook off their worried gestures, and when Herod sent him a folded note he cast it aside without looking at it. This was joyous work, this bullfighting, the closest thing to high pleasure that he had experienced in longer than he could remember, and he meant to make the most of it. When he left the arena joy would cease and responsibility begin: he was in no hurry for that. He braced himself and called for the next bull.

But at last the bull-pens were empty and the sky was streaked with the dark violet and scarlet of oncoming night. The wondrous day of combat was at its end. Gilgamesh and Enkidu stood side by side in the blood-streaked arena, sweaty, bloodied somewhat themselves, but unharmed.

“Come, brother,” Enkidu said. “To the palace, now!”

“To the palace, yes,” said Gilgamesh.

It seemed to him as he left the arena with Enkidu that they moved through the throng as if contained within a globe of impenetrable stillness. Royal guards who only this morning had protected the person of King Dumuzi preceded and followed them, flourishing ornate staffs of office, but such displays scarcely seemed necessary. The people of Uruk held back, wide-eyed, uncertain, as their new king passed by; and only when he had gone his way did the cries of “Gilgamesh!” and, sometimes, “Enkidu!” rise in the distance behind them.

In the vast and somber palace that had been Dumuzi’s, Gilgamesh held his first royal levee that night, seated on Dumuzi’s ponderous high throne and holding the thick,
intricately worked golden sceptre of Uruk indifferently on his lap. Enkidu stood to his left, Ninsun to his right, Herod and Simon Magus in the shadows by the wall, and Vy-otin near them in his strange suit of Later Dead cut, as the ministers and officers of the dead king came forward one by one to pay their homage. Little Picasso was there too, scribbling sketches of everyone and everything as fast as his hand could move.

For Gilgamesh all this felt like a dream more vivid and intense than reality itself. It was as if thousands of years had dropped away in an instant, and he was living the life of his first life again. Once more he was newly come to Uruk out of exile and wanderings; once more he had taken the crown from the weak and hated Dumuzi, just as he had when he was young. And once more Dumuzi’s viceroys and chamberlains, his overseers and stewards, his tax-gatherers and governors, came in procession to bend the knee before Gilgamesh the king.

That other time it had seemed inevitable to him that he would be king. He had been born to it. But he had never expected this. How often the Gilgamesh of the Afterworld had insisted to all who would listen that this was something he did not want, this grandeur, this pomp, this pageantry! How Caesar would mock him now! How Bismarck would laugh, or Lenin! “I crave no kingships,” he had said so often. “The quest for power in the Afterworld is folly and madness.”

Yet he was ensnared. One thing had led to another, and another, and another, and here he sat enthroned, feeling kingship rolling in upon him like an unstoppable torrent and bringing with it a loneliness more keen than anything he had known in his solitary years in the Outback.

“The chamberlain of the sash of Enlil! The master of provisions! The steward of the Ubshikkinakku sanctuary! The overseer of the royal splendor! The governor of –”

They filed by, on and on, somber-looking minor potentates in elaborate robes, looking desperately to the new king for confirmation of their continued high rank. And he nodded, glassy-eyed, waving his crowned head at this one and that and that, and it seemed to him that the noose of kingship drew tighter and tighter about his throat with each new moment.

Would it never end, this procession?

Enkidu reached across and touched his arm and winked.

“Show some cheer, brother Gilgamesh! Show some joy! After this comes the feast! And after that –”

Enkidu leered and clutched himself down the middle, and wriggled voluptuously and thrust his hips forward three or four times.

Despite his growing gloom Gilgamesh managed a grin. It had always been Enkidu’s gift, to be able to rescue him from his prevailing sin of overseriousness. He gestured to the line of officials, speeding them along. From his place in the dimness of the far aisle Herod nodded his approval. He made a tiny circling movement of his hand as if to indicate that Gilgamesh could hurry the ceremony even more. Simon Magus, beside him, seemed asleep on his feet.

To Enkidu Gilgamesh said, “How many more are there?”

“The line goes outside the palace and halfway across the plaza.”

“Here,” said Gilgamesh, pushing his scepter into Enkidu’s hands. “Go down there among them and hold this up before them, and tell them that they are all reconfirmed in their posts, or we’ll never get on to the feasting. We can get rid of most of them later, when we’ve had a chance to find out how this place really works.” He shook his head. “Gods! What did Dumuzi need all these officials for?”

But afterward, when the interminable ceremony finally had wound down and he moved from the hall of the throne to the adjacent feasting-hall, he found himself thinking that most of these people probably did have real functions of some sort, and would be useful to him. Chaotic though the Afterworld might be, its cities still required governance, and it was not kings who kept a city running, but those who worked beneath the king at the daily toil of administration. That much he remembered from his own earlier days of power, both in the other world and in the first days of rule in this Uruk of the Afterworld, memories of which now were coming flooding back to him.

“Is it too heavy for you, brother, the crown?” Enkidu asked.

“It presses very close,” said Gilgamesh. “But no, no, I will wear it happily enough.”

“I never thought I’d see you enthroned again.”

“Nor I. I thought I had done enough of this for one lifetime, or even two. But I can hide from crowns only so long, and then they find me, eh?”

“So it seems, brother. A king is what you must be,” cried Enkidu. “But it’s not so bad, I think. All the wine we can hold, and women, and fine robes, and a warm place to sleep – not so bad, brother, not so bad!” And slapped him lustily on the shoulder, and they laughed together as they entered the great hall of feasting, where fat barrels of wine stood ready, and huge sides of meat were roasting on half a dozen spits. “Not so bad!”

Not so bad, no. But Gilgamesh was beginning to remember, also, that there was more to kingship than pomp and pageantry. Once – in the brief wink that had been his first life – he had found salvation at a troubled time in the knowledge that the wise wielding of responsibility was the true reward of the throne. The things that went with kingship, the palaces and women and fine robes and rich wines and shining jewels and such, were mere trifling ornaments, insubstantial as air. Only a fool sought power simply to have such things, and such fools, though they might wear a crown and sit upon a throne, had no quality of kingliness about them. A fool could wear three crowns at once, and still be a fool. Kingliness lay elsewhere than in outward show or private pleasure, Gilgamesh knew. To sustain and enhance the security of the realm was the king’s inward purpose and highest joy and fullest salvation.

Perhaps such salvation could be his again, he thought, even in this mad place that was the Afterworld.

And, thinking such things, Gilgamesh felt less trapped by the royal grandeur that had overtaken him in this seemingly accidental way. For it had been no accident, this coming to the kingship once more. There were no accidents, he knew. It was his destiny, and how can one’s destiny be deemed a trap, or an accident, since it is the will of the gods? Though he had tried to turn his back on that destiny, there had been no escaping it, and so be it. This was what he had been meant for: to rule, and to rule wisely. In shunning that in the Afterworld he had been shunning, all the while, the essential truth of his own nature. But now he had found himself again.

In the dawn hours, when the feasting was at its end and sated sleepers lay like discarded cloaks everywhere in the hall, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, still restless, prowled the dark corridors
of Dumuzi’s palace together. They wandered along the long sides of the place, peering into some of the many rooms that opened off the aisles – most of them were empty, though some held statuettes and other ritual objects – and going on upward by way of a narrow, winding stone staircase to the galleries above, where more chambers were to be found like the cells of a honeycomb in the cavernous walls of the huge building.

“This is a wondrous ugly place,” Enkidu said, after a time. “Why would he seek to build such ugliness?”

“There are those who find it beautiful,” said Gilgamesh. “Herod the Jew told me that it is a copy of some famous holy temple of the Later Dead.”

Enkidu shuddered “This? A temple? Gods forbid!”

“When I first saw it, I said to myself that if I am ever king in this city, I would tear it down as my first deed. But now the kingship has come to me and my mind begins to change.”

“You’ll
keep
it?”

“The light is very beautiful when it shines through those windows of colored glass. And the high ceilings – those strange pointed arches – the carvings on the front – the great buttresses outside that hold the place up –” Gilgamesh shook his head. “Gradually I come to admire what I hated on first sight. I think I will keep it, yes. Perhaps I’ll build a palace of my own, something more like what we’re accustomed to, but I think to rip this one down would be wrong.”

Enkidu laughed. “Do you remember, Gilgamesh, when first I came to Uruk – the other one, the old one – and you showed me the Enmerkar temple, the one your grandfather had built, thinking I’d be awed by it? And I had never seen any sort of temple before, so I wasn’t impressed at all, I was expecting much more –”

“Yes – yes –”

“– so I looked at it and shrugged and said, ‘It’s very small and ugly, is it not?’ And you were very upset. But afterward you tore it down and built your great temple in its place.”

“The Enmerkar temple was old and badly in need of repairs. But I never realized that until you said what you did.”

“It was a wonderful temple that you built, brother.”

“Are you saying I should rip this palace down the way I did the Enmerkar temple, simply because you don’t care for it?”

“Not at all,” replied Enkidu. “What I’m saying is that perhaps I’ll see this place through your eyes, and come to admire it as you have, just as once you saw the Enmerkar temple through my eyes, and came to see it as it really was.”

“Ah,” Gilgamesh said. “I understand now.”

They walked on, until they reached the loftiest of the galleries. Looking over the edge, Gilgamesh saw the feasting-hall floor, far below, and some of the sodden sleepers beginning at last to rise as morning light entered the palace windows.

“Tell me,” he said after a time. “What was it like, that day in the canyon when I went hunting and the caravan was attacked?”

“I was slain,” said Enkidu.

“I know that. I saw a vision of it, that a black wizard conjured for me in the city of Brasil, by a means that I hesitate to speak of even with you. The helicopter attack, the bandits, the grenade –”

“Then you know,” Enkidu said in a brusque way.

“I know what happened. But will you speak to me of the moment of your dying, brother? For it is a thing that I have a great curiosity about.”

Enkidu looked strangely at Gilgamesh. There was a somberness about him that Gilgamesh had rarely seen, or never: for Enkidu was a rough and earthy man, forever laughing, untroubled by moments of the darkness of the spirit, and that was one of the things Gilgamesh loved him for. But now – now –

“It was nothing,” he said finally. “As it always is when we die here. An end, and sometime afterward another beginning. There was heat, there was noise, there was, I suppose, an instant of great pain, and then it all ended. And when next I knew anything, I was whole again and I was in this city of Uruk, which I had not seen for more years than I could count. Well, that was not the worst thing that might have befallen me, to awaken in Uruk, so I was pleased. I thought you might be here too, and I went about asking after you, until Dumuzi grew uneasy and had me imprisoned. And then you came. The rest you know.”

Gilgamesh said, staring, “So you knew about this Uruk of the Afterworld?”

“Of course.”

“I mean this one, and not the Uruk of our first life.”

“This one, yes, Afterworld-Uruk, which you yourself built long ago, and ruled over for I could not tell you how many hundreds of years. With me by your side all those years, in this very place, Gilgamesh.”

Gilgamesh felt his mind whirling. “The whole time we wandered together in the Outback, you were able to remember that we had once lived here, that I had been king here?”

“Of course. Of course.”

“And never spoke a word about our life here to me?”

Enkidu looked mystified. “But I did. Often. Many times did we recall the good times of Afterworld-Uruk to one another, Gilgamesh, as we sat about the campfire late after a day’s hunting. Many times.”

“Could this be so? I remember nothing of it.”

“Do you say it never happened that we spoke that way?”

“I say I have no memory of it.”

“That you have no memory of it is not the same as that it never happened, brother.”

“Perhaps you never spoke of it with me.”

“But I did! I did!” Anger began to gleam now in Enkidu’s eyes. “Gilgamesh, what do all these questions mean? What is troubling you? I tell you, we spoke many a time of Afterworld-Uruk, and wondered who was ruling here now, and whether he was just, and much more in the same vein.”