Collected Short Fiction, page 1167
“And the city?” Gilgamesh asked. “Will it be destroyed?”
Herod laughed. “There’s an eruption just like this every week. Sometimes more often than that. The Pompeiians wouldn’t have it any other way. But it never does any harm. All light and no heat, that’s the deal in the contract. And never any particulate matter. After the way they got trashed in 79, it’s hardly surprising that they don’t want an encore. That’s 79 a.d., you know. If you count your years at all. At any rate it was after my time, probably after yours. You talk to someone who was there, he’ll tell you that it was a total nightmare, but he’ll also say that he can’t get to sleep at night if there isn’t a decent volcano rumbling away nearby. Amazing the way some people not only adapt to danger but actually come to depend on living in the constant presence of—”
Gilgamesh was barely paying attention. He was staring at the volcano-riven night sky. In that sudden fiery illumination a host of air-borne monsters and demons stood revealed. Things that were all mouth and no body, things that were all wing and no head, things that were mere claws, things that were nothing but giant red-streaked yellow eyes borne up by jets of green gas, all of them whirling and screeching high above the sea. Ajax, barking and snarling, capered up and down the deck, leaping wildly as if to challenge the monstrosities that thronged the sky.
Herod laughed. “Sulla’s pets. I told you, once you see Pompeii you never forget it. Demons everywhere you look. And wizards. Sorcerers, mages, thaumaturges. Sulla collects them, you know. You can’t walk nine paces without someone trying to turn you inside out with one of his tricks.”
“Let them try,” Gilgamesh said.
He drew an imaginary bow and sent an imaginary shaft soaring through the gullet of one of the foulest of the monsters overhead.
“Oh, they’d leave you alone, I think. Man your size, who’d fool around with you? And you look like you might have a little magic yourself. Sulla hire you for his bodyguard, did he?”
“I am not a mercenary,” said Gilgamesh stiffly.
“You look like you were a fighting man.”
“A warrior, yes. But never for hire, except once, when I was a boy in exile. I was a king.”
“Ah. A king! We have something in common, then. I was a king, too, you know.”
“Were you?” said Gilgamesh without interest.
“For four or five years, anyway, after Caligula finally banished my miserable uncle Antipas from Judaea and gave the place to me. Very popular with my subjects, I was, if you don’t mind my saying it. I think I did quite a decent job, and if I had lived a little longer I might actually have been able to wipe out Christianity before it really got started, thereby saving the whole world six bushels of trouble, but—” Herod paused. “You aren’t a Christian by any chance, are you? No, no, you don’t look the type. But you say you were a king. Where was that, may I ask? Somewhere out toward Armenia, maybe? Cilicia?”
This was becoming infuriating.
Gilgamesh drew himself up to his full looming height and intoned, “Be it known to you that I am Gilgamesh of Uruk, great king, king of Uruk, king of kings, lord of the Land of the Two Rivers.”
“King of kings?” Herod repeated. “Lord of the Land of the Two Rivers?” He nodded as though mightily impressed. “Ah. Indeed. And what rivers would those be?”
“You don’t know?”
“You must forgive me, my friend. I am a mere provincial, a Judaean, even though it was my good fortune to be educated at the court in Rome. Although I was probably taught something about those Two Rivers of yours they seem to have slipped through one of the many damnable holes in my memory, and therefore—”
Gilgamesh had heard such speeches many times before. Hell was full of Johnny-come-latelies.
Coolly he said, “You Romans knew my country by the name of Mesopotamia.”
“Oh, those rivers!” Herod cried. “Why didn’t you say so? King of Mesopotamia! A Parthian, then, is that what you are? Some relative of Mithridates?”
I will throw him overboard, Gilgamesh thought in fury.
With great control he said, “Not a Parthian, no. A Sumerian. We are before the Parthians. Before the Babylonians and Akkadians. Before the Romans as well. Long before the Romans.”
“A thousand pardons,” Herod said.
Gilgamesh glowered and turned away. He peered bleakly into the fire-riven night. The eruption over Pompeii was dying down, now. He wondered how much longer it would be before they reached the island. None too soon, if he had to listen to this Herod’s maddening jabber all the way across from the mainland.
After a while Herod said, “Do you intend to be king again?”
“What? Why should I?”
“Most kings who come here do.”
“Are you a king again?” Gilgamesh asked, without turning.
“I prefer not to be. I never found being a king all that fascinating, to tell you the truth. And I like living in Pompeii too much. It’s the first place that’s felt like home to me since I died. But Pompeii is Sulla’s town, and I don’t have the urge to try to take it away from him, not that I’d be able to. If he enjoys being boss here, let him do it, is what I say.”
“I understand,” said Gilgamesh. “You are beyond these ambitions.”
“Well, you know the old line about how it’s better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven. That might be true, though I don’t really know much about Heaven. Assuming there is any such place. But so far as I’m concerned it feels better to let someone else reign in Hell. My notion is neither to reign nor serve, but just to do my own thing. I suppose that doesn’t make much sense to you, does it. If you’re like all the rest of the big goyishe sword-swingers I’ve known here, you’re itching to get yourself up on a throne again, some throne, any throne—”
“No,” Gilgamesh said.
“No?”
“What was that line you used? ‘Just to do my own thing’ ? I like that. My own thing. Which was for me, as for you, to be a king; but that was a long time ago, in another life. Here I have no interest in it. What is there to rule, here? This land of trickery and sorcery, where places come and go as though in dreams, and time itself flows fast or slow according to some demon’s whim?” Gilgamesh spat. “No, Herod, you mistake me if you think I would be king again! Let me rove freely, let me hunt where I will. And let me find again my one beloved companion, whom I have lost in this land of Hell as I lost him once in the land of the living. Let me be reunited with Enkidu my true brother, the friend of my heart, who is the only one I have ever loved, and that is all I require. Let others be the kings here. While the likes of you and me do our own thing.” Gilgamesh grinned and slapped Herod broadly on the back, knocking the little man up hard against the rail. “Eh, Herod? I think we have more in common, you and I, than it seemed at first. Is that not so, King Herod? Is that not so?”
2.
The mainland and the louring fury of all its roaring, sputtering volcanoes dropped away aft and the royal yacht slipped gracefully through the gleaming water toward Pompeii. The city stood large before them now. Green ghost-fires danced on its many-towered walls.
Here on the verge of arriving at a place unknown to him, Gilgamesh felt a faint flicker of excitement. It was the merest shadow of his ancient curiosity, that world-devouring hunger for knowledge and adventure that had sent him roving everywhere within the confines of the Land and far beyond it. Once the bards of Sumer and Akkad had sung of him as the man to whom all things had been made known, the secret things, the truths of life and death. They hadn’t been so far from wrong, those long-ago singers. He had wanted to know everything, to see everything, to taste everything, to do everything.
Most of that was gone from him now, burned out of his soul in the thousands of years he had spent roving this immense and incomprehensible place after death that was known as Hell. He lived quietly now, seeking little, asking scarcely anything for himself. But some fragment of the old vanished Gilgamesh must yet remain alive within him; or else why did he stare so intently at the bizarre island-city that rose glittering before him out of the phosphorescent sea?
“Make ready for landing!” someone shouted. “All hands make ready!”
Herod disappeared belowdecks. Crewmen sprang from nowhere, half a dozen little oily-looking Levantine types who ran around doing busy things with lines and capstans. Surprisingly, a Hairy Man emerged from the depths of the boat: squat, thick-bodied, heavy-jawed, with hardly any chin and great jutting brows. He was wearing Roman costume. You found them in the most unlikely places, those harsh-voiced beings out of the dawn of time, from that lost and forgotten world before the Flood. This one appeared to be in the service of Sulla, judging by his dress and the decorations he was wearing.
Sulla came out next, leaning on Herod’s arm: a balding, portly, fleshy-faced man, his face mottled with red blotches, his eyes red-rimmed from too much wine and too little sleep. The dictator of Pompeii was known to be a man much given to the excesses of the body; and yet you could see the power of his spirit within the flab and behind the blotches, you could see the iron strength of soul, the unwavering hunger for power. That hunger had survived Sulla’s own life. It was a pity, Gilgamesh thought, that a man of Sulla’s caliber wasn’t able to transcend his own lustful appetites. Gilgamesh knew something about appetite himself, and about lust and excess; but he had never allowed it to show on the surface the way this man did. His body was his temple and throughout his life he had kept it holy. And throughout his long death-life too.
“Ah,” Sulla said. “The king of Uruk. Well, there’s Pompeii, just a few hundred yards off our bow. Your first glimpse of my little city. What do you think of it, Gilgamesh?”
“It is not without merit,” said Gilgamesh.
“Not without merit? Is that the best you can say of it, king of Uruk?” Sulla’s red blotches deepened to angry scarlet. Then, in a softer, more diplomatic tone, he said, “But of course my Pompeii is as nothing beside your great capital. I understand that.”
“Your city is most splendid,” Gilgamesh said.
In truth he had almost begun to forget the look of Uruk in all this time. The details of construction and design were going from him; about all he remembered were general outlines, low brick buildings with flat roofs, narrow streets, a temple high upon a platform of whitewashed brick. Which was the way Hell’s own cities too had looked, or some of them, at any rate, when first he had come here. But that was all so long ago, and everything was changed now. This Pompeii was a place of narrow spires set with bands of precious stones, parapets that went curving off at improbable angles, boulevards that wound in eye-baffling zigs and zags up the slopes of the lava-rimmed mountain that dominated the island. A gaudy place indeed, no doubt much transformed over time from the simple old Roman town after which it had been originally modeled. Nothing stayed the same in Hell for very long. Not even the mountains and rivers.
Sulla said, “My prime minister, the Jew Herod.”
“We have met,” said Gilgamesh.
So Herod, for all his pious disclaimer of interest in power, nevertheless was prime minister here? Well, perhaps that was his way of—what was the phrase he had used?—doing his own thing. Let others be the kings here, he had said, but nevertheless he had managed to worm his way into a high enough position among these Romans. Gilgamesh was reminded of that Mongol, Kublai Khan, whom he had encountered while he was wandering the kingdoms of the Outback. The tale was that Kublai in his time on Earth had been one of the grandest of emperors; but here he claimed to have no imperial ambitions and avowed himself quite content to serve as minister of war for Mao Tse-tung’s Celestial People’s Republic. Which was easier than being an emperor, no doubt: but it was still a position of power.
It seemed that your life on Earth determined the way you lived here. Perhaps it was so. The mountains and rivers might be in constant flux and transition here, but human souls, so it seemed, never really changed. Look at all those Achaean Greeks, off there somewhere still fighting and refighting their absurd little Trojan War. Or that little man Che Guevara, feverishly launching plot and crazy counterplot in his endless pointless insurrection against the invisible and probably nonexistent demonic rulers of Hell. And all the kings and emperors trying to replicate their ancient realms in this other world, Caesar and Mao and Elizabeth and Prester John and the rest. This soldierly Sulla, reconstructing his Pompeii right down to the volcano that once destroyed it. Even those like Herod and Kublai who claimed to have renounced the lust for power tended to turn up somehow among those people who gave the orders rather than among those who took them.
No, Gilgamesh thought, no one ever truly changes in Hell.
Except me. Except me. I was the king of all the Land, and gloried in my mastery, and made all men bow to me. I conquered cities; I erected temples; I built walls and canals. Here I have done nothing for untold thousands of years but hunt and roam, roam and hunt, and it has been sufficient for me. Whether they will believe it or no, it has been sufficient.
“And this,” said Sulla, “is my grand mage and high wizard, whose name, of course, I am unable to tell you.”
He indicated the Hairy Man.
“Peace and gladness, king of Uruk,” said the Hairy Man. Or so Gilgamesh thought. He never had an easy time understanding the speech of those peculiar folk. Like everyone else here now they spoke English, and before that they had spoken Greek when Greek was the main language of Hell; but whatever language they spoke, they spoke it in a deep, gruff, furry, all but incomprehensible way, as though speaking through a thick stack of oxhides and as though their tongues were attached the wrong way on. Perhaps they spoke their own language that way, too.
The Hairy Men were mysteries to Gilgamesh. They had no names, or at least none that they would tell to anyone not of their own kind. They worshipped gods without names, too. They looked almost like beasts, covered as they were with dense coarse shaggy pelts of brown—or, more usually, reddish—fur. Enkidu was famed among men for his rough thickhaired body, but even he, shaggy as he was, seemed nearly as hairless as a woman beside a Hairy Man. Bestial though they looked and sounded, however, they conducted themselves as men among men, and when you spent a little time with them you quickly came to see that they were shrewd and wise, with deep cunning and a mastery of many arcane skills.
The tale was that they came from the beginning of time, in those early days before the Flood, when the kingship of men first descended from heaven. Maybe so. But once when Gilgamesh had questioned one about those days, asking him what he knew of Alulim the first king who had reigned at holy Eridu, or Alalgar his successor, or En-men-lu-Anna who had been king after him with his capital at the city of Bad-tibira, the Hairy Man had simply shaken his head.
“These are only names,” the Hairy Man had said. “Names are nothing.”
“They are kings! Alulim was king for 28,800 years! Alalgar for 36,000! In Bad-tibira En-men-lu-Anna ruled for 43,200 years! Every boy learns of them in school. And you who lived before the Flood, you who come from deepest antiquity—how could you not know the names of the kings?”
“They were not kings to me,” the Hairy Man had replied indifferently. “They were never. They were nothing.” Or so he seemed to be saying, in his thick-tongued indistinct way. And when Gilgamesh had asked other Hairy Men about the same matters, the answers that he got from them were always the same.
Well, perhaps they had forgotten. It was such a long time, after all. Before the Flood! Or could it be that the Hairy Men were not men at all, but demons native to this other world? Nowhere in the books that Gilgamesh had studied when he was king in Uruk had he ever seen it said that in the days before the Flood men had looked like beasts. A mystery, yes. Maybe while he was in Pompeii he would attempt to learn more on these matters from this mage of Sulla’s.
Looking shoreward Gilgamesh beheld slaves bustling around at the pier, some waving flags to guide the royal yacht into its slip, others unrolling an astonishingly long magenta carpet for Sulla. A trio of gunners detonated bright smoke-bombs, perhaps as a salute to the returning monarch and perhaps just to scare off the evil-looking winged creatures with scaly yellow necks and long glistening fangs that flew in wild circles, flapping and screaming over the harbor.
Sulla said, “A few days to rest and enjoy the baths, yes, king of Uruk? A feast, a theatrical show, a circus in your honor with a hundred gladiators. And then we must get down to business, and discuss the expedition to find the kingdom that by rights is yours.”
Gilgamesh frowned. “But I covet no—”
Herod nudged him quickly to silence.
“What’s that you say, great king?” Sulla asked.
He needed no further warnings from Herod. “I said, How good it will be to enjoy your baths, Sulla. The feasting, the theatricals, the gladiators.”
“And then to search for your city of Uruk, eh?”
Gilgamesh made no reply. Serenely the royal yacht glided into its slip. Swarms of slaves and sycophants rushed forward to greet Sulla.
To search for Uruk, Gilgamesh thought. What Uruk? Where? Uruk was lost in the swirling mists of time. There would never be another Uruk. What he wanted was Enkidu, who had been carried off or perhaps even slain by that scuttling bunch of gun-wielding drug-running New Dead who had followed them here, even to the end of the Outback and beyond. He would accept Sulla’s help in finding Enkidu, yes. But Uruk? Uruk?
“You will enjoy our circus,” said Herod at his side. “In your honor we will send the hundred mightiest gladiators of Pompeii to the Undertaker.”
Gilgamesh gave him a sour look. “That matters little to me. Why should a hundred heroes die for my amusement? You Romans and your bloody games—”
“Please,” said Herod. “You keep calling me a Roman, but actually I prefer to think of myself as a Jew, you know. Although technically I suppose I could be thought of as a Roman—Julius Caesar did make my great-grandfather Antipater a Roman citizen, after all—but we Jews have a far more ancient lineage than the Romans, after all, and—”
