To the Land of the Living (4 page)

And that glow in the fellow’s eyes – what sort of look was that? A look of adoration, almost the sort of look a woman might give a man when she has decided to yield herself utterly to his will.

Gilgamesh had seen such looks aplenty in his day, from women and men both; and he had welcomed them – from women, at least. He scowled. What does he think I am? Does he think, as so many have wrongly thought, that because I loved Enkidu with such a great love that I am a man who will embrace a man in the fashion of men and women? Because it is
not so. Not even here in the Afterworld is it so, said Gilgamesh to himself.

“Tell me everything!” the red-faced man was imploring. “All those exploits that I dreamed in your name, Conan: tell me how they really were! That time in the snow-fields, when you met the frost-giants daughter – and when you sailed the
Tigress
with the Black Coast’s queen – and that time you stormed the Aquilonian capital, and slew King Numedides on his own throne –”

Gilgamesh stared in distaste at the man groveling at his feet.

“Come, fellow, stop this lunatic blather now,” he said sourly. “Up with you! You mistake me greatly, I think.”

The second man was out of the Land Rover now, and on his way over to join them. An odd-looking creature he was, too, skeleton-thin and corpse-white, with a neck like a water-bird’s that seemed barely able to support his long big-chinned head. He was dressed oddly too, all in black, and swathed in layer upon layer as if he dreaded the faintest chill. Yet he had a gentle and thoughtful way about him, quite unlike the wild-eyed and feverish manner of his friend. He might be a scribe, Gilgamesh thought, or a priest; but what the other one could be, the gods alone would know.

The thin man touched the other’s shoulder and said, “Take command of yourself, man. This is surely not your Conan here.”

“To the life! To the very life! His size – his grandeur – the way he killed that beast –”

“Bob – Bob, Conan’s a figment! Conan’s a fantasy! You spun him out of whole cloth. Come, now. Up. Up.” To Gilgamesh he said, “A thousand pardons, good sir. My friend is – sometimes excitable –”

Gilgamesh turned away, shrugging, and looked to his quarry. He had no need for dealings with these two. Skinning the huge beast properly might take him the rest of the day; and then to haul the great hide back to his camp, and determine what he wanted of it as a trophy –

Behind him he heard the booming voice of the red-faced man. “A figment, H.P.? How can you be sure of that? I thought I invented Conan too; but what if he really lived, what if I had merely tapped into some powerful primordial
archetype, what if the authentic Conan stands here before us this very moment –”

“Dear Bob, your Conan had blue eyes, did he not? And this man’s eyes are dark as night.”

“Well –” Grudgingly.

“You were so excited you failed to notice. But I did. This is some barbarian warrior, yes, some great huntsman beyond any doubt, a Nimrod, an Ajax. But not Conan, Bob! Grant him his own identity. He’s no invention of yours.” Coming up beside Gilgamesh the long-jawed man said, speaking in a formal and courtly way, “Good sir, I am Howard Phillips Lovecraft, formerly of Providence, Rhode Island, and my companion is Robert E. Howard of Texas, whose other life was lived, as was mine, in the twentieth century after Christ. At that time we were tale-tellers by trade, and I think he confuses you with a hero of his own devising. Put his mind at ease, I pray you, and let us know your name.”

Gilgamesh looked up. He rubbed his wrist across his forehead to clear it of a smear of the monster’s gore and met the other man’s gaze evenly. This one, at least, was no madman, strange though he looked.

Quietly Gilgamesh said, “I think his mind may be beyond putting at any ease. But know you that I am called Gilgamesh, the son of Lugalbanda.”

“Gilgamesh the Sumerian?” Lovecraft whispered. “Gilgamesh who sought to live forever?”

“Gilgamesh am I, yes, who was king in Uruk when that was the greatest city of the Land of the Two Rivers, and who in his folly came to think that there could be some way of cheating death.”

“Do you hear that, Bob?”

“Incredible. Beyond all belief!” muttered the other.

Rising until he towered above them both, Gilgamesh drew in his breath deeply and said with awesome resonance, “I am Gilgamesh to whom all things were made known, the secret things, the truths of life and death, most especially those of death. I have coupled with Inanna the goddess in the bed of the Sacred Marriage; I have slain demons and spoken with gods; I am two parts god myself, and only one part mortal.” He paused and stared at them, letting it sink in, those words that he had recited so many times in situations much like this. Then
in a quieter tone he went on, “When death took me I came to this nether world they call the Afterworld, and here I pass my time as a huntsman, and I ask you now to excuse me, for as you see I have my tasks.”

Once more he turned away.

“Gilgamesh!” said Lovecraft again in wonder. And the other said, “If I live here till the end of time, H.P., I’ll never grow used to it. This is more fantastic than running into Conan would have been! Imagine it: Gilgamesh!
Gilgamesh
!”

A wearisome business, Gilgamesh thought: all this awe, all this adulation.

The problem was that damned epic, of course. He could see why Caesar became so irritable when people tried to suck up to him with quotations out of Shakespeare’s verses. “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus,” and all that: Caesar grew livid by the third syllable. Once they put you into poetry, Gilgamesh had discovered, as had happened to Odysseus and Achilles and Caesar after him and many another, your own real self can begin to disappear and the self of the poem overwhelms you entirely and turns you into a walking cliché. Shakespeare had been particularly villainous that way, Gilgamesh thought: ask Richard III, ask Macbeth, ask Owen Glendower. You found them skulking around the Afterworld with perpetual chips on their shoulders, because every time they opened their mouths people expected them to say something like “My kingdom for a horse!” or “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” or “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” Gilgamesh had had to live with that kind of thing almost from the time he had first come to the Afterworld; for they had written the poems about him soon after, all that pompous brooding stuff, a whole raft of Gilgamesh tales, some of them retelling his actual deeds and some mere wild fantasies, and then the Babylonians and the Assyrians and even those smelly garlic-gobbling Hittites had gone on translating and embroidering them for another thousand years so that everybody from one end of the known world to the other knew them by heart, and even after all those peoples were gone and their languages had been forgotten there was no surcease, because these twentieth-century folk had found the whole thing and deciphered the text somehow and made it famous all over again. Over the centuries they had turned him
into everybody’s favorite all-purpose hero, which was a devil of a burden to bear: there was a piece of him in the Prometheus legend, and in the Heracles stuff, and in that story of Odysseus’ wanderings, and even in the Celtic myths, which was probably why this creepy Howard fellow kept calling him Conan. At least that other Conan, that ratty little sniveling drunken one, had been a Celt. Enlil’s ears, but it was wearying to have everyone expecting you to live up to the mythic exploits of twenty or thirty very different culture-heroes! And embarrassing, too, considering that the original non-mythical Heracles and Odysseus and some of the others dwelled here too and tended to be pretty possessive about the myths that had been attached to
them
, even when they were simply variants on his own much older ones.

There was substance to the Gilgamesh stories, of course, especially the parts about him and Enkidu; but the poet had salted the story with a lot of pretentious arty nonsense too, as poets always will, and in any case you got very tired of having everybody boil your long and complex life down into the same twelve chapters and the same little turns of phrase. It had gotten so that Gilgamesh found himself quoting the main Gilgamesh poem too, the one about his quest for eternal life-well, that one wasn’t too far from the essence of the truth, though they had mucked up a lot of the details with precious little “imaginative” touches – by way of making introduction for himself: “I am the man to whom all things were made known, the secret things, the truths of life and death.” Straight out of the poet’s mouth, those lines. Tiresome. Tiresome. Angrily he jabbed his dagger beneath the dead monster’s hide, and set about his task of flaying, while the two little men behind him went on muttering and mumbling to one another in astonishment.

There were strange emotions stirring in Robert Howard’s soul, and he did not care for them at all. He could forgive himself for
believing for that one giddy moment that this Gilgamesh was his Conan. That was nothing more than the artistic temperament at work, sweeping him up in a bit of rash feverish enthusiasm. To come suddenly upon a great muscular giant of a man in a loincloth who was hacking away at some fiendish monster with a little bronze dagger, and to think that he must surely be the mighty Cimmerian – well, that was a pardonable enough thing. Here in the Afterworld you learned very quickly that you might run into anybody at all. You could find yourself playing at dice with Lord Byron or sharing a mug of mulled wine with Menelaus or arguing with Plato about the ideas of Nietzsche, who was standing right there making faces, and after a time you came to take most such things for granted, more or less.

So why not think that this fellow was Conan? No matter that Conan’s eyes had been of a different color. That was a trifle. He looked like Conan in all the important ways. He was of Conan’s size and strength. And he was kingly in more than physique. He seemed to have Conan’s cool intelligence and complexity of soul, Conan’s regal courage and Conan’s indomitable spirit.

The trouble was that Conan, the wondrous Cimmerian warrior from 19,000 B.C., had never existed except in Howard’s own imagination. And there were no fictional characters in the Afterworld. If you had not lived, truly lived, in that other world of the first flesh, it was impossible for you to live again here. You might meet Richard Wagner, but you weren’t likely to encounter Siegfried. Theseus was here somewhere, but not the Minotaur. William the Conqueror, yes; William Tell, no.

That was all right, Howard told himself. His little fantasy of meeting Conan here in the Afterworld was nothing but a bit of mawkish narcissism: he was better off without it. Coming across the authentic Gilgamesh – ah, how much more interesting that was! A genuine Sumerian king – an actual titan out of history’s dawn, not some trumped-up figure fashioned from cardboard and hard-breathing wish-fulfilling dreams; a flesh-and-blood mortal who had lived a lusty life and had fought great battles and had walked eye to eye with the ancient gods and had struggled against the inevitability of death, and who in dying had taken on the immortality of mythic
archetype – ah, now there was someone worth getting to know! Whereas Howard had to admit that he would have no more to learn from a conversation with Conan than he could discover by interrogating his own image in the mirror. Or else a meeting with the “real” Conan, if it was in any way possible, would surely cast him into terrible confusions and contradictions of soul from which there would be no recovering. No, Howard thought, better that this man be Gilgamesh than Conan, by all means. He was reconciled to that.

But this other business – this sudden bewildering urge to throw himself at the giant’s feet, to be swept up in his arms, to be crushed in a fierce embrace –

What was that? Where had
that
come from? By the blazing Heart of Ahriman, what could it mean?

Howard remembered a time in his former life when he had gone down to the Cisco Dam and watched the construction men strip and dive in: well-built men, confident, graceful, at ease in their bodies. For a while he had looked at them and had revelled in their physical perfection. They could have been naked Greek statues come alive, a band of lusty Apollos and Zeuses. And then as he listened to them shouting and laughing and crying out in their foul-mouthed way he began to grow angry, suddenly seeing them as mere thoughtless animals who were the natural enemies of dreamers like himself. He hated them as the weak always must hate the strong, those splendid swine who could trample the dreamers and their dreams as they wished. But then he had reminded himself that he was no weakling himself, that he who once had been spindly and frail had by hard effort made himself big and strong and burly. Not beautiful of body as these men were – too fleshy for that, too husky – but nevertheless, he had told himself, there was no man there whose ribs he could not crush if it came to a struggle. And he had gone away from that place full of rage and thoughts of bloody violence.

What had that been all about? That barely suppressed fury – was it some sort of dark hidden lust, some craving for the most bestial sort of sinfulness? Was the anger that had arisen in him masking an anger he should have directed at himself, for looking upon those naked men and taking pleasure in it?

No. No. No. No. He wasn’t any kind of degenerate. He was certain of that.

The desire of men for men, he believed, was a mark of decadence, of the decline of civilization. He was a man of the frontier, not some feeble limp-wristed sodomite who reveled in filth and wanton evil. If he had never in his short life known a woman’s love, it was for lack of opportunity, not out of a preference for that other shameful kind. Living out his days in that small and remote prairie town, devoting himself to his mother and to his writing, he had chosen not to avail himself of prostitutes or shallow women, but he was sure that if he had lived a few years longer and the woman who was his true mate had ever made herself known to him, he would certainly have reached toward her in passion and high abandon.

And yet – and yet – that moment when he first spied the giant Gilgamesh, and thought he was Conan –