To the Land of the Living

by Robert Silverberg

  “I have heard of you, you know,” Gilgamesh said.

  “Have you, indeed?”

  “Our paths nearly crossed once. There was a time when I was at the court of Prester John, and word came that you were traveling with an army of exploration across the southern boundary of his territory.”

  “That was quite some long time ago, your majesty, when I was in Prester John’s country.”

  “So it was. It amazed me greatly to hear that you and your troops had continued on the march all this while since.”

  “That was not our intention,” said Ralegh, and shot a bleak look toward the clerkish man Hakluyt, as though to say that he had served as the expedition’s guide, and had served none too well. “We lost our way. Our map proved to be useless.”

  “Indeed. They often are.”

  “It has been a hard journey for us. I am no stranger to hard journeying, but this one has been a burden to me of an unusual severity. We are more grateful for your kindness than can easily be put in words. But I assure you we will make no long demand on your hospitality. A few days to rest, if we may, and then—”

  “Stay as long as you wish,” said Gilgamesh, with a gracious wave of his hand. “It would be an unmannerly thing to send you on your way before you were recovered from your toil.” He heard Herod coughing and muttering behind him. Thinking of the depleted granaries, no doubt. Gilgamesh glared at him. To Ralegh he said, at last making his one final effort at returning the discussion to the point Enkidu had urged him to pursue, “When I was at the court of Prester John two men were there from King Henry’s land, ambassadors to Prester John, who said that your queen—what is her name?”

  “Elizabeth, majesty.”

  “Elizabeth, yes. Your Queen Elizabeth, they said, who is King Henry’s own daughter, desired greatly to find the gateway to the land of the living. It was their belief that she planned to create an English settlement at that place, if it existed, and extract a tariff from those who wished to travel through it to whatever lies beyond.”

  “They imagined such a thing, did they?” Ralegh said casually, as though the idea were the wildest fantasy.

  Shrugging, Gilgamesh said, “So I remember it, though it was only something I happened to overhear. There was some discussion of it at court between the ambassadors and Prester John in my presence. Their King Henry had sent them to raise an army from Prester John that was to intercept you before you could find what you sought.”

  Ralegh looked toward Hakluyt. “Do you hear, Richard? The treacherous vile old caitiff pig!”

  “Sir Walter!”

  “I can call him whatever I please, Richard. He was never king of mine in the other life, and I owe him no love here, which is not England, and if it is, it is Elizabeth’s England, not Henry’s, to me.” To Gilgamesh he said, “Well, the scheme miscarried, majesty. No army of Prester John’s ever gave trouble to us.”

  “No,” Gilgamesh said. “Prester John was distracted, just then, by an attack from another quarter, a rival Outback prince, some Chinese king.”

  “Mao Tse-tung,” said Ralegh. “The Celestial People’s Republic.”

  “The very one, yes.”

  “A clever devil, this Mao. My queen speaks highly of him. He sends her gifts of silks and ivories, and scrolls of his poetry, and many volumes of his own books on the art of governance—I read one once, and could make no sense of it, but perhaps the fault was mine—” Ralegh shook his head. “Well, and did Mao’s army destroy that of Prester John, then?”

  “I have no idea. I left the court as the battle was impending, and never heard another thing of it. My travels took me far away from that place, as far as the isle of Brasil—”

  At the mention of that name Ralegh caught his breath short between his teeth, as if he had been pricked by a needle.

  “You know of Brasil?” Gilgamesh asked.

  “I’ve heard of it,” said Ralegh in an oddly vague and distant way. “A place of witchcraft, and sorcerers, and much else of that sort, is it not?”

  “Very much. And strange to behold, also, looking like no other city I’ve seen.”

  “I hope to visit it one day,” Ralegh said. “Perhaps when I leave here. It has long been of great interest to me, the isle of Brasil.”

  “The Hairy Man my chief mage lived there many years,” said Gilgamesh. “As did my vizier here, Herod the Jew. They might be able to tell you the way.”

  “I would be most grateful for that, yes,” said Ralegh.

  As the audience came to its end and those in attendance began to stream from the hall, Enkidu felt the woman Helen catch hold of his arm, digging her fingers fiercely into his flesh. In a low harsh tone she said, “Come with me!”

  “But the king—”

  “The king can wait. Come!”

  He nodded. He was helpless before her. His throat was dry, his heart was hammering wildly in his breast. Far off in the dimness he saw Gilgamesh still enthroned, conferring with Vy-otin and Herod; and perhaps it was his duty to be there too. But there was no resisting Helen. Her face was bright with the heat of lust and Enkidu could see her nipples rising against the thin fabric of her robe. Gilgamesh would forgive him. She tugged eagerly at his arm, and though she stood scarcely rib-high to him and seemed to weigh no more than a cloak of feathers, Enkidu let himself be pulled along by her, onward into the flow of those who were leaving the chamber.

  When they were outside she led him swiftly into a dark deserted corridor paved with smooth cobbles and roofed in a pointed arch, and pressed him against the wall. Her eyes were bright as jewels. Her breath was hot and sweet. Take her now, he wondered? Right here in the hall, pull up her robe, stroke the smoothness of her belly, seize her behind her thighs and hoist her to him just like that? He hesitated, though his yearning was strong. In the old days he would not have waited: against the wall, or on the paving-stones, or in a window-ledge, or wherever, take what is offered and take it swiftly. But they had pumped too much civilization into him over the centuries. And yet was it not foolishness to hold back? There she was, hot and ready.

  Well, if that was so—

  But no, he was reading her wrong, she seemed to want to talk. Even as his hands moved toward her there was some sort of change in her look: the glow was still there, but the heat was not, as if she could turn the furnace on and off to suit the moment, and this was not the moment to be ablaze. She baffled him. He felt clumsy, impossibly ponderous, bewildered, as if hypnotized by her.

  “Are you the king’s brother?” she asked.

  “His friend, only.”

  “Yet you call each other brother.”

  “It is because our friendship is so close.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  The way her eyes sparkled was maddening to him. There was the unmistakable look of invitation in them, but also something meant to keep him at a distance, at least for a little while longer. Enkidu’s trembling fingers hovered about her, but still he did not dare to touch. How easy it would be to seize her and take her. But no, he realized: not easy at all. She held him off with a glance, with a smile. She forced him to wait. This was new to him, this waiting, this holding back for the proper moment. But he had never known a woman like this before, either.

  There must be sorcery in this, Enkidu thought. How did she come to hold such power over him? This must be enchantment.

  She said, “I was the wife of a king, once, who had a greater king for his brother, and no end of trouble came of that. But it was a long while ago. Do you know who I am?”

  “Your name is Helen.”

  “Helen of Troy!”

  “I ask your pardon. Perhaps I should know that name, but I must confess—”

  “You are Early Dead?”

  “Of course.”

  “Egypt? Assyria?”

  “Sumer the Land, my lady. Between the rivers Idigna and Buranunu, it is.”

  “Can you speak Greek?”

  “I could once, I think. It was long ago.”

 
; “Never mind,” she said. “You must be very ancient. You know of the Trojan War, do you?”

  Enkidu thought a moment. “It is all so mixed together. But yes, yes, Homer’s war, that is what you mean: it was Achilles, Agamemnon—”

  “I was the wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus. The war started over me. Or so it is often said, though others say that it was about trade routes. But I know that it was over me, because I had left the king my husband and gone to live in the land of Troy, where Paris my lover took me, and Menelaus could not abide that insult, nor Agamemnon his brother.”

  “Indeed. Yes,” Enkidu said.

  He could understand that, wanting to start a war over this one. Those eyes, that skin, her breasts, the hair dark as a moonless night, the fire of her that he could feel throbbing so close by him—yes, she was maddening. Maddening. Here she was close in front of him, almost in his grasp, in his grasp if he wanted. And yet not so. It still seemed to him that she was alive with the same yearnings that he felt, but she was able somehow to hold them, and him, at bay.

  He thought of all the women he had known in all his years in this world and the other one, trying to remember whether there had been any with hair as fragrant as this Helen’s, with limbs as pale and enticing, but he found that he could not recall any of them now in any separate way: they were a smoky blur, a vague dark smudge in his mind. And this one, who was just beyond his reach, was crystalline and bright and hot, burning like a fiery diamond, clear and glittering and perfect.

  “And now you are the wife of this Ralegh?” he asked.

  She laughed, a growling lioness-laugh. “Him? No, though I could do worse. But we simply travel together. He thinks I’m impure, he thinks I’m unclean. And worse. A succubus, he calls me. The whore of Babylon, he calls me, though I’ve never seen Babylon in my life. I am not English, that’s his problem. He wants only English women, this Ralegh.”

  “Yet he keeps you with him?”

  “I was a damsel in distress. He found me abandoned in the Outback—I was traveling with another Englishman then, a Lord, very sweet, a little strange—Byron was his name, a poet, he was writing a new Iliad about me, he said, but he was massacred by a band of dervishes. Our whole company was. I alone escaped, and Ralegh found me and took me in, because he is so gallant, though he despises me. And I stayed with him, because I hoped he would come upon the way to the land of the living, which he seeks.”

  “The land of the living?”

  “I’m tired of the Afterworld, Enkidu. I want to be real again.”

  “We are real here, lady.”

  “You know what I mean. I want to live in a place where things make some sense, where the rivers don’t run uphill when they feel like it, where cities don’t move about like boats on a lake.”

  “Yes,” Enkidu said. “I do know what you mean. And I have the same wish. I would go to the land of the living myself, if I could find the way.”

  “We could find it together, Enkidu.”

  “What? How?”

  “Do you know where Brasil is? The magic isle?”

  He nodded uncertainly. “Down the coast some considerable way, I think.”

  “You’ve not been there?”

  “Not I, though I was near it once. But Gilgamesh has.”

  “The way to the land of the living is in Brasil.”

  Enkidu stared. “Do you know that?”

  “So Ralegh was told, in good faith, by one who seemed to know. I have seen it marked on his map, with a mark like a flame. He was heading that way when our provisions ran out. Well, he has lost the desire to go that way, now. But I have not. You and I, Enkidu, you and I—we could find Brasil, we could penetrate its mysteries, we could enter that gateway—”

  “You think so?”

  “I know it,” she said. She leaned upward toward him, and slyly ran her tongue over her lips, and laughed, not a lioness-growl this time, but something more like a purr. “We could find it, you and I. That I know.” He felt the heat of her again, now. She had turned the furnace back on. “Well, Enkidu?”

  This time he did not hesitate. His hands went to her breasts. She covered them with her own. The purring grew in his ears until it was a roaring; and she swept upon him like an avalanche of fire.

  No one remained with Gilgamesh in the audience chamber but Vy-otin and Herod, and a couple of guards. He would have kept Enkidu with him also, but Enkidu had gone sweeping out at Helen’s side before Gilgamesh could catch his notice, and he had not had the heart to summon him back. But he did send for Magalhaes, and the Hairy Man.

  “Well?” he said, while waiting for them to arrive. “What do you think of this Ralegh?”

  “An unusual man,” said Herod. “Intelligent and deceitful. A great leader and a great liar, is what I believe.”

  “No greater a liar than he needs to be,” Vy-otin said. “I spoke with him before he came in here. It was the nature of his country that great men ran great risks, unless they had nimble tongues. This Elizabeth he seems to worship was a dangerous woman in the first life, forever cutting off the heads of her favorite courtiers, though Ralegh managed to keep his. But the king who followed Elizabeth to her throne put him in prison for a dozen years or so, and finally did have him slain.”

  Gilgamesh frowned. “Why do that? It seems an enormous waste.”

  “The reason was something about an expedition that miscarried at heavy expense to the nation, and talk of conspiracy with some other country’s king, which this Ralegh denied to me with very strong oaths. But in truth it seems the king slew him out of general resentment, I think, of his brilliance and cockiness.”

  “But to kill a man of his quality for that—they must have been a barbarian tribe, those English,” Gilgamesh said.

  “We Pleistocene folk,” said Vy-otin, with a wicked grin, “were the last true civilized folk. We Aurignacians, we archetypes. There’s something about living in an ice age among the glaciers and the woolly mammoths that makes you humane and decent. It’s all been downhill for the human race ever since. The species began to spoil like rotten fruit when things started getting too warm, do you see?”

  Herod laughed. “How can we argue with you?” he asked. “You have the perspective of twenty thousand years. But perhaps our friend the Hairy Man would say that his people were the pinnacle of creation, and yours just a bunch of fur-wearing hatchet-wielders with runny noses. What do you say to that, Henry Smith? What do you say?”

  With a pleasant nod Vy-otin said, “Of course they were civilized, the Hairies. And so were we. By the Tusk and the Horns of God, it’s all you latecomers, you Sumerians and Babylonians and Greeks and Romans, who don’t deserve to be called—”

  “And Jews,” Herod said. “Don’t forget about the Jews. We’re the worst villains of all. We’re such barbarians that you wouldn’t ever have been able to get us to eat mammoth meat.”

  “Why not? Have you ever tried it?”

  “Buddha forbid!” Herod cried, and crossed himself. “Mammoth meat? That’s not kosher! Our god commands us never to touch such stuff!”

  “Why, then that explains why I encountered no Jews in the Pleistocene,” said Vy-otin. “You all must have starved to death in a condition of great sanctity. There was nothing else to eat then, you know. The occasional saber-tooth, and maybe the odd rhinoceros, but mammoth was the thing, lad, the fine old rumbling fellows with the red woolly hides—” He laughed and looked toward Gilgamesh. “What are you planning to do with this Ralegh? Keep him around?”

  “For a little while. For Enkidu’s sake.”

  “Enkidu’s?”

  “The gateway to the land of the living, that supposedly Ralegh was searching for: it fascinates Enkidu greatly, that gateway. Perhaps Ralegh can tell us something about it.”

  “Is there such a thing?” Vy-otin asked. “For a hundred centuries have I heard tales of it. But nobody has ever seemed to find it, nor have I ever encountered anyone who even had a clear idea of where it might be.”

&nbs
p; “Nor have I,” said Gilgamesh. “But I want at least to try to learn whatever Ralegh may know of it. Although getting anything out of him isn’t going to be easy.”

  “Is that really Helen of Troy he’s traveling with, do you think?” Vy-otin said.

  “She claims she is. I’m willing to believe her.”

  “She’s impossibly beautiful,” Herod said. “Doesn’t look real.”

  Vy-otin laughed. “Enkidu seems to think she’s real enough.”

  “He is possessed by her, yes,” said Gilgamesh. “Not in thousands of years have I seen him like this over a woman. But it will do him good. He has always been restless when he is without a woman, and when Enkidu is restless trouble often follows. This Helen may be able to calm him for a little while.”

  “Just the opposite, I’d think,” said Herod. “But you know him better.”

  The door at the far end of the hall opened. “Magalhaes is here,” said Vy-otin.

  The mariner came limping in, and stood before the throne. “You asked for me, majesty?”

  “Yes,” said Gilgamesh. “I did. You know all the venturers and seafarers, Magalhaes. What can you tell me of this Walter Ralegh who has come among us now? Did you have dealings with him, ever, in the other world?”

  “After my time, he was. Fifty years or more.”

  Gilgamesh laughed. “Fifty years? What’s that?”

  “In the other world, majesty, it is everything. I was long gone before he was born. But I have heard of him here. Draco has told me tales of him.”

  “Draco?”

  “Francisco Draco the pirate,” said Magalhaes. “Another English, well known to Ralegh in the other world.”

  “Sir Francis Drake, he means,” Vy-otin explained.