To the Land of the Living

by Robert Silverberg

“A Jewish what?”

  “Never mind,” said Herod.

  The chariot pulled up in a holding area in front of the stadium. At close range the circular structure was enormous, a true Roman coliseum on the grand scale, five or perhaps six levels high. The topmost tier was partly in ruins, many of its great stone arches shattered; but the rest of the building seemed intact and splendid. There were throngs of people in colorful holiday garb walking around on every level.

  As he got out of the car Gilgamesh caught sight of Vy-otin, in slacks and a loose short-sleeved shirt, waving to him from a point near one of the ticket booths. The long-legged Ice-Hunter chieftain stood out clearly above the short, square-hewn, largely Sumerian crowd all about him.

  He came over at once. “There’s trouble,” he said.

  “Enkidu?”

  “You,” Vy-otin said. “One of my people overheard something in a washroom. Dumuzi’s putting snipers on the top tier. When things start getting exciting and everybody’s yelling, they’re going to open fire on Picasso’s box. The prime target is you, but they’re likely to hit Picasso too, and your mother, and anyone else who’s close by. You’ve got to get out of here.”

  “No. Impossible.”

  “Are you crazy? How are you going to guard yourself against shots from the sky? Someone your size will be the easiest target in the world.”

  “How many men do you have here?” Gilgamesh asked.

  “Nine.”

  “That should be plenty. Send them up on top to take out the snipers.”

  “There’ll still be a risk that—”

  “Yes. Maybe there will. Where’s your warlike spirit, Vy-otin? Have you truly become Henry Smith? Dumuzi can’t have put a hundred sharpshooters up there. There’ll be two or three, is my guess. Five at most. You’ll have plenty of time to find them. They’ll be easy enough to spot. They won’t be Sumerian, and they’ll be looking nervous, and they’ll have rifles or some other cowardly Later Dead armament. Your men will locate them one by one and push them off the edge. No problem.”

  Vy-otin nodded. “Right,” he said. “See you later.”

  Picasso closed his eyes and let memory come seeping back: the old life, the thyme-scented tang of dry Mediterranean air in the summer, the heat, the crowds, the noise. If he didn’t look, he could almost make himself believe he was eight or nine years old, sitting beside his tall sandy-bearded father in the arena at Malaga again where the bullfights were the finest and most elegantly conducted in the world. Sketching, always sketching, even then, the picador on his little bony blindfolded old horse, the haughty matador, the mayor of the city in his grand box. Or he could think this was the bull-ring of La Coruna, or the one at Barcelona, or even the one at Arles in southern France, an old Roman stadium just like this one, where he would go every year when he was old, with his wife Jacqueline, with his son Paul, with Sabartés.

  Well, all that was long ago in another world. This was the Afterworld, and the sky was murky and the air was thick and acrid, and the crowd around him was chattering in English, in Greek, in some Mesopotamian babble, in just about everything but good honest Spanish. In the midst of the hubbub he sat motionless, waiting, hands at his sides, silent, solitary. There might well have been no one else around him. He was aware that the priestess-woman Ninsun was beside him, more splendid than ever in a robe of deep purple shot through with threads of gold, and that her giant son the warrior Gilgamesh sat beside him also, and the faithful Sabartés, and the little Jewish Roman man, Herod, and the other Roman, the fat old dictator, Simon. But all those people had become mere wraiths to him now. As he waited for the corrida to begin he saw only the ring, and the gate behind which the bulls were kept, and the shadows cast by the contest that was to come.

  “It will not be long now, Don Pablo,” Sabartés murmured. “We have been waiting for the king. But you see, he is in his box now, el rey.” Sabartés gestured toward his left, to the royal box just alongside theirs. With a flicker of his eye Picasso saw the foolish-looking king waving and smiling to the crowd, while his courtiers made gestures instructing everyone to cheer. He nodded. One must wait for the king to arrive, yes, Picasso supposed. But he did not want to wait any longer. He was formally dressed, a dark blue business suit, a white shirt, even a necktie: the corrida was a serious matter, it demanded respect. But in this humidity he was far from comfortable. Once the fight started he would no longer notice the weather or the pinching at his throat or the sweaty stickiness along his back. Just let it start soon, he thought. Let it start soon.

  What was this? Some new commotion close at hand?

  The huge Sumerian was up and prancing about and shouting like a lunatic. “Enkidu! Enkidu!”

  “Gilgamesh!” bellowed a newcomer, just as enormous but twice as frightful, shouldering his way into the box. “My own true brother! My friend!”

  This one was a Sumerian too, by the look of him. But he was strange and shaggy, almost like a beast, with a fiery, smoldering look about him and black hair tumbling into his eyes and a beard so dense it hid most of his face. Another Minotaur, Picasso thought: an even truer one than the first. They were embracing like two mountains now, Gilgamesh and this other, this Enkidu. Gilgamesh was like a child in his excitement. Now he clapped Enkidu on the back with a blow that would have felled a dragon, and now he dragged him over to meet Ninsun, before whom Enkidu fell in a pose of utter devotion, kneeling and kissing her hem, and now Gilgamesh was nodding toward Dumuzi’s box and both men began to laugh. “And this,” said Gilgamesh, “this is the painter Picasso, who is a great genius. He paints like a demon. Maybe he is a demon. But he is very great. This is his bullfight, today.”

  “This little man? He will fight bulls?”

  “He will watch,” Gilgamesh said. “He loves that more than anything, except, I think, to paint: to watch the bulls being fought. As was done in his homeland.”

  “And tomorrow,” said Picasso, “I will paint you, wild one. But that will be tomorrow. Now the bulls.” Out of the corner of his mouth he said to Sabartés, “Well? Do we ever commence?”

  “Indeed, Don Pablo. Now. Now.”

  There came a great flourish of trumpets. And then the grand entry procession began, the cuadrillas coming forth led by a pair of mounted alguaciles in eye-dazzling costumes. Everyone crossing the great arena, the banderilleros, the picadors riding demon-horses that looked almost like the horses of the other world except for their red blazing eyes and stiff lizardlike tails, and then finally the matador, this Blanco y Velez, this Spaniard of the time of Charles IV.

  Sabartés had organized everything very well, Picasso thought. It all looked as it was supposed to look. The men, the subordinates, moved with dignity and grace. They understood the grandeur of the moment. And the matador showed promise. He held himself well. He was a little thicker through the middle than Picasso had expected—perhaps he was out of shape, or maybe in the time of Charles IV the style had been different, matadors had not been so slender—but his costume was right, the skintight silken trousers, the richly embroidered jacket and waistcoat of satin embroidered in gold and silver, the hat, the cape, the linen lace shirtwaist.

  The procession halted before the two boxes of honor. The matador saluted the king, and then Picasso, who was the president of the bullfight today. The king, who had been staring at the newly arrived Enkidu as though he were some sort of demon that had materialized in Picasso’s box, and whose face now was as dour and foul as bile, acknowledged the salute with an offhand flick of his hand that Picasso found infuriating in its discourtesy. “Puerco,” he muttered. “Hijo de puta.”

  Then Picasso rose. As president he carried the keys to the bull-pens. With a grand swing of his arm he tossed them out to one of the alguaciles, who caught them nicely and rode over to release the first bull.

  “And so we commence,” said Picasso quietly to Sabartés. “Al fin, we commence.”

  He felt himself settling into the inviolable sphere of concentration that always enveloped
him at the bullfight. In a moment he would feel as though he were the only one in the stadium.

  The bull came galloping forth.

  Madre de dios! What a horror! That was no bull! That was an evil monster!

  Sabartés had told him what to expect, but he had never quite grasped it, apparently. This could have been something out of one of his own paintings. The creature had six many-jointed legs, like some giant insect, and two rows of terrible spines on its back that dripped a nasty fluid, and great flopping ears. Its skin was green with purple blotches, and thick like a reptile’s. There were horns, short and curved and sharp and very much like a bull’s, but otherwise this was pure hell-creature.

  Picasso shot a venomous look at Sabartés. “What have you done? You call that a bull?”

  “We are in the Afterworld, Pablo,” said Sabartés wearily. “They do not send bulls to the Afterworld, only human beings. But this will do. It is much like a bull, in its way.”

  “Chingada!” Picasso said, and spat.

  But they were making a brave attempt down in the arena. The banderilleros were dancing around the bull, striving to plant their little lances in the beast’s neck, and sometimes succeeding. The hell-bull, maddened, charged this way and that, going for the horses of the picadors, who warded it off with thrusts of their pikes. Picasso could see that these were experienced men out there, who knew what they were doing and were doing their best, though plainly the hell-bull puzzled them. They were trying to wear it down to make it ready for the Hour of Truth, and by and large they were achieving that. Picasso felt the bullfight slip around him like a cloak. He was wholly engulfed in it now. He saw nothing else but the bull and the men in the ring.

  Then he looked toward the matador, waiting his moment to one side, and everything turned sour.

  The matador was frightened. You could see it in his nostrils, you could see it in the angle of his chin. Perhaps he had been a master of his art back there in the time of Charles IV, but he had never fought anything like this thing, and he was not going to do it well. That was plain. He was not going to do it well.

  The trumpets sounded. It was the moment.

  Blanco y Velez came forward, holding out the muleta, the little red silk cape, and the capote, the big work cape. But he moved stiffly, and it was the wrong stiffness, the stiffness of fear rather than the stiffness of courage. The picadors and the banderilleros saw it, and instead of leaving the ring they withdrew to one side, exchanging uneasy glances. Picasso saw it. The hell-bull saw it. The matador’s moves were awkward and hesitant. He didn’t seem to know how to use his capes—had the art not progressed that far, in the time of Charles IV?—and he had no grace and he took quick, mincing steps. He led the bull around and around, working closer and closer to him, but that should have been beautiful and it was merely depressing.

  “No,” Picasso said under his breath. “Get him out of there!”

  “He is our only matador, Pablo,” Sabartés said.

  “He will die. And he will die stupidly.”

  “He looked better when I saw him yesterday. But that was with a heifer.”

  Picasso groaned. “He will die now. Look.”

  There had been a shift of equilibrium in the ring. Blasco y Velez was no longer working the bull; the bull was working Blasco y Velez. Round and round, round and round—the bull seeming not angry now but amused, playing with him, dancing around, picking up speed—the picadors trying now to intervene, Blasco y Velez backing away but now finally putting a brave face on things, trying a desperate veronica, a farol, a mariposa, a serpentina, a media-veronica—yes, yes, he knew his work, he understood the art, except that he was trying to do everything at once, and where was his control, where was his stillness, where was his art? The bull, passing him, snarled and nipped him in the shoulder. Blood flowed. Blasco y Velez jumped back and went for his sword—forbidden, to use the sword in mere self-defense—but the bull knocked it from his grasp with a contemptuous whirl, and swung on past, throwing down a picador’s horse and goring it, and coming back again toward the matador—

  “No!” came a tremendous roar from Gilgamesh’s shaggy friend, the huge Enkidu.

  And then the second Sumerian giant leaped from the stone bench and vaulted down into the arena.

  “Enkidu!” Gilgamesh cried.

  Picasso gasped. This was becoming crazy, now. This was turning into a nightmare. The big Sumerian picked the hapless matador up and tossed him aside to safety as though he were a doll. Then he came toward the bull, caught it by the double rows of spines, swung himself up easily on to the beast’s back, and began to throttle it.

  “No, no, no!” Picasso muttered. “Clown! Butcher! Sabartés, stop this idiocy! What is he doing? Riding the bull? Strangling the bull?” Tears of rage crowded into his eyes. His first corrida in who knew how long, and it had been a dreadful one from the start, and now it was dissolving into absurd chaos. He stood on his seat, bellowing. “Butchery! Madness! For shame! For shame!”

  Enkidu was in trouble. He was on the bull and had made a brave beginning of it, but now the bull’s anger was rising once again and its strength was in the ascendant, and in another moment the creature was going to roll over and kill him by falling upon him, or hurl him loose and fall upon him with its hooves. Enkidu’s peril was great and it was immediate. That was the one thing Gilgamesh saw, and nothing else mattered to him. To have won him back once more, and then to lose him again so quickly in this craziness of a bullfight—no, no, it could not be.

  It was like that time in the other life when the Bull of Heaven was loose in old Uruk, and Enkidu had mounted it and seized it by its horns and tried to force it to the ground. It had taken both of them to slay the bull that time. It would again.

  Gilgamesh snatched up his sword. Herod saw him and grabbed at his arm, crying, “Gilgamesh! No! Don’t go out there!” The Sumerian swatted him aside and clambered down over the edge of the box. Enkidu, holding on with difficulty now atop the plunging, bucking monster, grinned to him.

  The whole stadium seemed to be going insane.

  People were up, some of them screaming, others just milling about in excitement. Fistfights were breaking out everywhere. Dumuzi was on his feet, eyes wild, face purple, making frantic gestures. Glancing upward, Gilgamesh had a quick glimpse of struggling figures outlined against the rim of the arena. Dumuzi’s snipers, fighting with Vy-otin’s men? And farther up, a flock of demon-birds circled in the sky, ghastly things with gaping beaks and long shimmering wings.

  The bull, lurching from side to side, was trying to shake Enkidu free. Gilgamesh rushed forward and took a spew of the bull’s sweat in his face. It burned like acid. He drew his sword, but the bull backed out of range, and twisted itself so violently that Enkidu nearly was flung from its back.

  Yet he showed no fear at all. He held tight, thighs gripping the bull’s back just in front of the spines, and took a firm hold on the thing’s diabolical horns. With all his great strength he fought to force the bull’s head downward.

  “Strike, brother, strike!” Enkidu called.

  But it was too soon. The bull had plenty of fight left in it. It whirled wildly around, and the rough scaly skin of its flank caught Gilgamesh across the ribs and drew blood. It leaped and bucked, leaped and bucked, slamming its hooves against the ground. Enkidu flailed about like a pennant flapping in the breeze. He seemed about to lose his grip; then he called out in his most confident tone and rose again, rearing high above the creature’s razor-sharp back. He regained his grip on the horns and twisted, and the bull yielded and weakened, lowering its head, turning so that the nape of its neck was toward Gilgamesh.

  “Strike!” Enkidu called again.

  And this time Gilgamesh drove the blade home.

  He felt a quivering, a shudder, a powerful movement within the creature. It seemed to resist its death a long moment; but the blow had been true, and suddenly its legs collapsed. Gilgamesh extended a hand toward Enkidu as he sprang free of it and came down b
eside him.

  “Ah, brother,” Enkidu said. “Like the old days, yes?”

  Gilgamesh nodded. He looked outward. On every level of the stadium there was frenzy, now. Gilgamesh was amazed to see that Dumuzi had left the royal box and had leaped into Picasso’s. As though fearing for his own safety, the king had one arm tight around Ninsun’s waist and held Picasso with the other arm around his throat, and was dragging them from the box, struggling with his two hostages toward the exit.

  “Your mother,” Enkidu said. “And your little painter.”

  “Yes. Come on.”

  They rushed back toward the stands. But suddenly Ninsun twisted about and reached toward one of the guards in the box adjoining. When she swung around again a dagger was in her hand. Frantically Dumuzi attempted to shove Picasso against it, but as Gilgamesh stared in amazement his mother pivoted away with the agility of a warrior, reached around, drove the dagger deep into Dumuzi’s side. In the same instant Simon, coming from the rear, put his sword through the king’s middle. Dumuzi fell and was swept under foot. Picasso stood unmoving, eyes focused far away, as if lost in a dream. Ninsun looked at the hand that still held the dagger as though she had never seen her hand before.

  “Up here!” Vy-otin called to Gilgamesh, not from Picasso’s box but from the royal one. “Quickly!”

  The Ice-Hunter extended a hand. Gilgamesh jumped upward beside him. Vy-otin pointed.

  “On the royal bench. Fast!”

  “What?”

  “Dumuzi’s dead. He panicked when the snipers didn’t open fire, and tried to escape with Picasso and your mother as hostages, and—”

  “Yes. I saw it.”

  “You’re the king here now. Get up there and act like one.”

  “King?” Gilgamesh said, struggling to comprehend.

  Vy-otin shoved him. Gilgamesh caught hold of the edge of the royal bench and pulled himself up on it, and turned and looked upward toward the many tiers of the arena. The sky had darkened and was full of screeching demons. Surging mobs were boiling back and forth. Everyone seemed to have gone berserk.