Collected Short Fiction, page 1196
Dumuzi, at any rate, seemed to do things with style. For his visitors he provided sumptuous lodgings in a grand hostelry back of the main temple, a massive block of a building that seemed to have been carved of a single slab of black granite. Within were fountains, arcades, so much statuary that it was hard to move about without bumping into something, and towering purple-leaved palm trees growing in huge ruby-red planters that glistened like genuine rubies. Perhaps they were. Gilgamesh saw Sulla fondling one covetously as though contemplating how many hundreds of egg-sized stones it could be broken into.
Each of the travelers had a palatial room to himself, a broad bed covered in silk, a sunken alabaster tub, a mirror that shimmered like a window into Paradise. Of course, there were little things wrong amid all this perfection: no hot water was running, and a line of disagreeablelooking fat-bellied furry insects with emerald eyes went trooping constantly across the ceiling of Gilgamesh’s room, and when he sprawled on the bed it set up a steady complaining moan, as though he were lying on the protesting forms of living creatures. But this was Hell, after all. One expected flaws in everything, and one always got them. All things considered, these accommodations could hardly be excelled.
Half a dozen sycophants appeared as if from a closet to help Gilgamesh with his bath, and anoint him with fragrant oils, and garb him in a white flounced woolen robe that left him bare to the waist in the Sumerian manner. After a time Herod came knocking at the door, and he too was garbed after the fashion of Sumer, though he still wore his gleaming Italian leather shoes instead of sandals, and he had his little Jewish skullcap on his head. His dark curling hair had been pomaded to a high gloss.
“Well?” he said, preening. “Do I look like a prince of Sumer the Land, Gilgamesh?”
“You look like a fop, as always. And a weakling, besides. At least your toga would have covered those flabby arms of yours and that spindly chest.”
“Ah, Gilgamesh! What need do I have of muscles, when I have this?” He touched his hand to his head. “And when I have the brave Gilgamesh the king to protect me against malefactors.”
“But will I, though?”
“Of course you will.” Herod smiled. “You feel sorry for me, because I have to live by my wits all the time and don’t have any other way of defending myself. You’ll look after me. It’s not in your nature to let someone like me be endangered. Besides, you need me.”
“I do?”
“You’ve lived in the Outback too long. You’ve got bits of straw in your hair.”
Automatically Gilgamesh reached up to search.
“No, no, you foolish ape, not literally!” said Herod, laughing. “I mean only that you’ve been out of things. You don’t understand the modern world. You need me to explain reality to you. You stalk around being heroic and austere and noble, which is fine in its way, but you’ve been paying no attention to what’s really been going on in Hell lately. The fashions, the music, the art, the new technology.”
“These things are of no importance to me. Fashion? And music? Music is mere tinkling in my ear. Art is decoration, a trivial thing. As for this new technology you speak of, it is an abomination. I despise all the inventions of the New Dead.”
“Despise them all you like, but they’re here to stay. The New Dead outnumber us a thousand to one, and more of them arrive every day. You can’t just ignore them. Or their technology.”
“I can.”
“So you may think. A bow and a couple of arrows, that’s good enough for you, right? But you keep running afoul of things you don’t comprehend. You blunder on and on and you get yourself out of trouble most of the time pretty well, but you fundamentally don’t know what’s what, and sooner or later you’ll come up against something that’s too much even for you. Whereas I have kept up with modern developments, and I can guide you through all the pitfalls. I’m aware, Gilgamesh. I know what’s happening. I stay in touch. Politics, for example. Do you have the foggiest notion of the current situation? The really spectacular upheavals that are going on right now?”
“I take great care not to think of them.”
“You think it’s safe, keeping your head in the sand that way? What happens on the far side of Hell can have a tremendous impact on how we operate here. This isn’t your ancient world, where it took forever and a half just to carry the news from Rome to Syria. Do you know what a radio is? A telephone? A microwave relay? Like it or not, we’re all New Dead now. You may still be living like a Sumerian, but the rest of the people here are neck-deep in modern life.”
“They have my compassion,” said Gilgamesh.
“You don’t know the slightest thing about the revolutionary movements swirling in half a dozen cities back East, do you? The whole Dissidence? The Rebellion against the Administration? What Achilles is doing, and Che Guevara, and Frederick Barbarossa? The latest deeds of Rameses? The present status of Hadrian? No, no, Gilgamesh, you’re out of things. And proud of your ignorance. Whereas I have kept up with the news, and—”
“I have spent time in New Hell, Herod. I have seen Julius Caesar and Machiavelli and Augustus and Kleopatra and the rest of that crowd putting together their petty schemes. Why do you think I went to the Outback? I wept with boredom after half an hour among them. Their intrigues were like the squeakings of so many mice to me. Whatever they may be planning to do, it will all wash away like a castle of sand by the edge of the sea, and Hell will go on and on as it always has. And so will I. The demons who are the masters here laugh at the pretensions of the rebellious ones. And so do I. No, Herod, I haven’t any need of your guidance. If I choose to protect you against harm, it’ll be out of mercy, not out of self-interest.” He glanced at his watch. “It grows late. We should be on our way to the feast.”
“The wristwatch you wear is a despised invention of the New Dead.”
“I take what I choose from among their things,” said Gilgamesh. “I choose very little. You are not the first to try to mock me for inconsistency. But I know who I am, Herod, and I know what I believe.”
“Yes,” Herod said, in a tone that was its own negation. “How could anyone have doubt of that?”
Gilgamesh might have pitched him from the window just then, but the sycophants returned to lead them to the feasting-hall. Sulla, waiting for them amid the splendors of the lobby, greeted them with wine-flushed face. He had spurned Sumerian robes altogether and was decked out in a purple toga and high gilded buskins in the Greek style.
As they moved toward the door Sulla caught Gilgamesh by the wrist and said quietly, “One moment. Tell me about this king we are about to meet, this Dumuzi.”
“If it is the same one, he succeeded my father Lugalbanda on the throne of Uruk—the first Uruk—when I was a boy, and drove me into exile. He was a coward and a fool, who neglected the rites and squandered public funds on ridiculous adventures, and the gods withdrew the kingship from him and he died. Which made the way clear for me to become king.”
Sulla nodded. “You had him murdered, then?”
Gilgamesh’s eyes widened. Then he laughed, seeing how quickly Sulla had drawn the correct conclusion of murder from the innocent phrase, the gods withdrew the kingship from him. This man might be a drunkard but his mind was still shrewd.
“Not I, Sulla. I had nothing to do with it. I was in exile then; it was the great men of the city who saw that Dumuzi must go, and the priestess Inanna who actually gave him the poison, telling him it was a healing medicine for an illness he had.”
“Mmm,” said Sulla. “You and he take turns succeeding one another in the kingship of Uruk, here and in the former life. Now it’s his turn to rule. And yours may be due to come again soon. Everything revolves in an endless circle.”
“It is the way of this place. I am used to it.”
“He was afraid of you once. He’ll be afraid of you still. There’ll be old grudges at work tonight. Perhaps an attempt at some settling of scores.”
“Dumuzi has never frightened me,” said Gilgamesh, making the gesture one might make to flick away a troublesome fly.
Sabartés said, “Which is it, Pablo, that has you so excited these days? That you have a new mistress, or that we are finally to have a bullfight for you to attend?”
“Do you think I am excited, brother?”
With a sweeping gesture Sabartés indicated the litter of sketches all about the studio, the dozen new half-finished canvases turned to the wall, the bright splotches everywhere where Picasso, in his haste, had overturned paints and not bothered to wipe them up. “You are like a man on fire. You work without stopping, Pablo.”
“Ah, and is that something new?” Rummaging absentmindedly in a pile of legal documents, Picasso found one with a blank side and began quickly to draw a caricature of his friend, the high forehead, the thick glasses, the soft fleshy throat. A little to his surprise he saw that what he was drawing was the old pedantic Sabartés of the last years on Earth, not the incongruously young Bohemian Sabartés who in fact stood before him now. And then the sketch changed with half a dozen swift inadvertent strokes and became not Sabartés but a demon with fangs and a flaming snout. Picasso crumpled it and tossed it aside. To Sabartés he said, “She will be here soon. Do you have anything you must tell me?”
“Then it is the woman, Pablo.”
“She is splendid, is she not?”
“They were all splendid. La Belle Chelita was splendid, the one from the strip-tease place. Fernande was splendid. Eva was splendid. Marie-Therese was splendid. Dora Maar was—”
“¡Bastante, Sabartés!”
“I mean no offense, Pablo. It is only that I see now that Picasso has chosen once more a new woman, a woman who is as fine as the ones who went before her, and—”
“You will call me Ruiz, brother.”
“It is hard,” said Sabartés. “It is so very hard.”
“Ruiz was my father’s name. It is an honest name for calling me.”
“The world knows you as Picasso. All of Hell will know you as Picasso too as time goes along.”
Picasso scowled and began a new sketch of Sabartés, which began almost at once to turn into a portrait of El Greco, elongated face and deep-set sorrowful eyes, and then, maddeningly, into the face of a goat. Again he threw the sheet aside. He would not mind these metamorphoses if they were of his own choosing. But this was intolerable, that he could not control them. Painting, he had liked to tell people in his life before this life, is stronger than I am. It makes me do what it wants. But now he realized that he must have been lying when he said that; for it was finally happening to him, just that very thing, and he did not like it at all.
He said, “I prefer now to be known as Ruiz. That way none of my heirs will find me here. They are very angry with me, brother, for not having left a will, for having forced them to fight in the courts for year after year. I would rather not see them. Or any of the women who are looking for me. We move on, Sabartés. we must not let the past pursue us. I am Ruiz now.”
“And you think that by calling yourself a name that is not Picasso you can hide from your past, though you look the same and you act the same and you paint day and night? Pablo, Pablo, you deceive only yourself! You could call yourself Mozart and you would still be Picasso.”
The telephone rang.
“Answer it,” said Picasso brusquely.
Sabartés obeyed. After a moment he put his hand over the receiver and looked up.
“It is your Sumerian priestess,” said Sabartés.
Picasso leaned forward, tense, apprehensive, already furious. “She is canceling the sitting?”
“No, no, nothing like that. She will be here in a little while. But she says King Dumuzi has asked her to attend a feast at the royal hall tonight, and that you are invited to accompany her.”
“What do I have to do with King Dumuzi?”
“She asks you to be her escort.”
“I have work to do. You know I am not one to go to royal feasts.”
“Shall I tell her that, Pablo?”
“Tell her—wait. Wait. Let me think. Speak with her, Sabartés. Tell her—ask her—yes, tell her that the king’s feast is of no importance to me, that I want her to come here right away, that—that—”
Sabartés held up one hand for silence. He spoke into the telephone, and listened a moment, and looked up again.
“She says the feast is in honor of her son, who has arrived in Uruk this day.”
“Her son? What son?” Picasso’s eyes were blazing. “She said nothing about a son! How old is he? What is this son’s name? Who is his father? Ask her, Sabartés! Ask her!”
Sabartés spoke with her once again. “His name is Gilgamesh,” he reported after a little while. “She has not seen him since her days on Earth, which were so long ago. I think you ought not to ask her to refuse the king’s invitation, Pablo. I think you ought not to refuse it yourself.”
“Gilgamesh?” Picasso said, wonderstruck. “Gilgamesh?”
Motorized chariots painted in many gaudy colors conveyed them the short distance from the lodging-hall to the feasting-place of the king, on the far side of the temple plaza. The building startled Gilgamesh, for it was not remotely Sumerian in form: a great soaring thing of ash-gray stone, it was, with a pair of narrow spires rising higher than any of Pompeii, and pointed arches over the heavy bronze doors, and enormous windows of stained glass in every color of the rainbow and a few other hues besides. Ghastly monsters of stone were mounted all along its facade. Some of them seemed slowly to be moving. It was very grand and immense and massive, but somehow also it seemed flimsy, and Gilgamesh wondered how it kept from falling down, until he saw the huge stone buttresses flying outward on the sides. Trust Dumuzi to build a palace for himself that needed to be propped up by such desperate improvisations, Gilgamesh thought. He loathed the look of it. It clashed miserably with the classic Uruk style of the buildings that surrounded it. If I am ever king of this city again, Gilgamesh vowed, I will rip down this dismal pile of stone as my first official act.
Herod, though, seemed to admire it. “It’s a perfect replica of a Gothic cathedral,” he told Gilgamesh as they went inside. “Perhaps Notre Dame, perhaps Chartres. I’m not sure which. I’m starting to forget some of what I once learned about architecture. I had some instruction in it, you know, from a man named Speer, a German, who passed through Pompeii a while back and did a little work for Sulla—peculiar chap, kept asking me if I wanted him to build a synagogue for me—what use would we have for a synagogue in Hell?—but he knew his stuff, he taught me all sorts of things about New Dead architectural design—you’d be astounded, Gilgamesh, what kinds of buildings they—”
“Can you try being quiet for a little while?” Gilgamesh asked.
The interior of the building actually had a sort of beauty, he thought. Paradise was still glowing ruddily in the sky at this hour, and its subtle light, entering through the stained-glass windows, gave the cavernous open spaces of the palace a solemn, mysterious look. And the upper reaches of the building, gallery upon gallery rising toward a dimly visible pointed-arch ceiling, were breathtaking in their loftiness. Still, there was something oppressive and sinister about it all. Gilgamesh much preferred the temple in honor of Enlil that he had built, and still well remembered, atop the White Platform in the center of the original Uruk. That had had grandeur. That had had dignity. These New Dead understood nothing about beauty.
Dumuzi’s sycophants escorted them to the other end of the palace, where the building terminated in a great rounded chamber, open on one side and walled with stained glass on the other. A feasting-table had been set up there and dozens of guests had already gathered.
Gilgamesh saw Dumuzi at once, sumptuously robed, standing at the head of an enormous stone table.
He had not changed at all. He carried himself well, with true kingly bearing: a vigorous-looking man, heavy-bearded, with thick flowing hair so dark it seemed almost blue. But his lips were too full, his cheeks were too soft; and his eyes were small, and seemed both crafty and dull at the same time. He looked weak, unpleasant, untrustworthy, mean-souled.
Yet as he spied Gilgamesh he came down from his high place as though it were Gilgamesh and not he who was the king, and went to his side, and looked up at him, craning his neck in an awkward way—it was impossible for him to hide the discomfort that Gilgamesh’s great height caused him—and hailed him in ringing tones, as he might a brother newly returned after a long sojourn abroad:
“Gilgamesh at last! Here in our Uruk! Hail, Gilgamesh, hail!”
“Dumuzi, hail,” said Gilgamesh with all the enthusiasm he could find, and made a sign to him that one would have made to a king in Sumer the Land. “Great king, king of kings.” He detected a quick flash of surprise in Dumuzi at that: plainly Dumuzi was not expecting much in the way of subservience out of him. Nor would he get much, Gilgamesh thought; but Dumuzi was king in this city, and proper courtesy was due a king, any king. Even Dumuzi.
“Come,” Dumuzi said, “introduce me to your friends, and then you must sit beside me in the place of honor, and tell me of everything that has befallen you in Hell, the cities you’ve visited, the kings you’ve known, the things you’ve done. I want to hear all the news—we are so isolated, out here between the desert and the sea—but wait, wait, there are people here you must meet—”
Forgetting all about Sulla and Herod, who were left behind gaping indignantly, Dumuzi thrust his arm through Gilgamesh’s and led him with almost hysterical eagerness toward the feasting-table. It was all Gilgamesh could do to keep from knocking him sprawling for the impertinence of this offensive overfamiliarity. He is a king, Gilgamesh reminded himself. He is a king.
And the desperate bluster behind Dumuzi’s effusive cordiality was easy enough for Gilgamesh to see. The man was frightened. The man was scrambling frantically to gain control of a situation that must be immensely threatening to him.
For thousands of years Dumuzi had had the leisure in Hell to reflect on the shameful truth that he had been, in his earlier life, the feckless irresolute interpolation between the two great royal heroes Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh, a mere hyphen of history. Now he was king again, having risen by some mysterious law of incompetence to his former summit. And now here was that same hulking Gilgamesh for whose sake he had been thrust aside once before, materializing like an unwelcome spectre in New Uruk to claim his hospitality.
