To the Land of the Living

by Robert Silverberg

  “I could, yes.”

  “But would he obey?”

  “He’d obey me, yes. If I told him that I wouldn’t go with him because of my duties here, and that I couldn’t bear his going without me. But how could I ask that of him, Herod? To give up something for which he has yearned so long, simply because I—”

  “But he asks that of you,” Herod said.

  “No. How does he do that?”

  “By putting you in a position where you have to choose between your friend on the one hand and your city, your entire world, on the other.”

  “He has done nothing of the sort,” said Gilgamesh, though without much conviction.

  “If you make the crossing into the land of the living,” Ninsun asked, “will you ever be able to return to the Afterworld again?”

  “I have no way of knowing that. Perhaps the Hairy Man can tell me. But I came here once from that place. I should be able to do it again, if I wanted to.”

  “By giving up your life again, you mean?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “But if you return a second time, will you ever be able to find Uruk, do you think?”

  “I suppose that I could. Or perhaps not. How can I say?”

  “There is no way of knowing that, is there?” Ninsun said. “If you returned, you might come into the Afterworld anywhere. You might arrive a thousand years from now, and a thousand thousand leagues from this place. Everyone you had known here before would have been scattered to the seven corners of the world. You would be alone, Gilgamesh.”

  He gave her a long sorrowful look. But when he spoke there was renewed firmness in his voice.

  “I have been alone before, and have been reunited somehow with those I love. You and I, mother, we were separated for thousands of years, and we found each other again, did we not?”

  “And now you’re proposing to head off to God knows where, even though you may never see her again!” Vy-otin cried. “Leaving your mother, leaving your friends, leaving all you’ve built here in Uruk, leaving every single thing that you know and love—no, Gilgamesh! It’s not right!”

  “Let him be, Vy-otin,” Ninsun said. “He has made up his mind, can’t you see that?”

  “The Hairy Man,” Herod murmured.

  “Peace and gladness, king of Uruk,” the ancient one said, entering the throne room. He made a quick, offhand gesture of respect. “I have fetched the materials I need from Brasil,” he said. “Have you decided?”

  “You’ve obtained everything already?”

  “Yes, all that I need.”

  Gilgamesh gaped at him. “How can you have brought anything from there so quickly? What has it been, one day, two? To get to Brasil and back takes weeks—months—”

  “Sometimes less, King Gilgamesh. I tell you, I have all that I need.”

  More witchcraft, Gilgamesh thought. This creature of time’s dawn was beyond his understanding.

  “So be it,” he said, shrugging.

  “You will make the journey?”

  “I will. And Enkidu. And the woman Helen of Troy.”

  “Helen also?”

  “Enkidu wishes it.”

  The Hairy Man was silent a moment.

  “Simon Magus is aware that she is here,” he said, after a time. “It is the wish of Simon Magus that Helen of Troy be sent to him, O king.”

  “Ah, is it?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Does Simon think that she’s mine to bestow, like a casket of rubies?”

  “They were lovers once. He wishes to see her again.”

  “If Helen had to be shipped back to everyone she’d been lovers with every time one of them snapped his fingers, she’d be whizzing around the Afterworld like a comet,” Herod said, laughing.

  Gilgamesh signaled him angrily to be quiet. To the Hairy Man he said, “I regret having to disappoint so powerful a wizard as Simon Magus.”

  “You will not send her to Simon?”

  “No,” Gilgamesh said. “She wants to go with Enkidu. Enkidu wants her to go with him. Why should I separate them? Simon’s had his jewels from me, hasn’t he? That should be enough for him.”

  The Hairy Man seemed unperturbed. “As you wish, O king. But you should know that no one goes from here to the land of the living with anyone else. Those who go, go alone.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means what it means.”

  “Only one of us can go?”

  “You all may go. But each goes separately and arrives separately. It is the only way.”

  “Enkidu and I won’t be together when we get there?”

  “You will make the journey alone and you will arrive alone.”

  “But we’ll be able to find each other once we’re there?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Gilgamesh drew a long breath. “You aren’t sure?”

  “I have not been to the land of the living myself, King Gilgamesh, in more years than there are hairs on your head. How can I say what will happen there? But come: come, now. Everything is ready for the journey.”

  “Wait a little,” Gilgamesh said. He glanced around the great dark hall. “Where’s Enkidu?”

  “I’ll get him,” Herod said, and went from the room.

  He returned after a while, with Enkidu behind him like a walking boulder, and Helen radiant at Enkidu’s side. Gilgamesh said at once, “The Hairy Man’s been to Brasil and back already, don’t ask me how. He has the things he needs to open the way to the land of the living.”

  Enkidu grinned; but quickly his face grew solemn. “And will you be joining us in the crossing, brother?”

  The room was very still.

  “I will,” said Gilgamesh quietly.

  “By Enlil! By Sky-father An! I knew you would! I always knew—”

  “Wait,” said Gilgamesh. “There are other things you need to know. He says that Simon wants Helen sent to him as a gift.”

  “He says what?” Enkidu roared. A menacing rumbling sound came from him and he started toward the Hairy Man.

  But Helen, stilling him at once with no more than a touch of her hand to his wrist, said lightly, “Rest easy. It will not be.”

  “It had better not be,” said Enkidu.

  She smiled. “Simon’s a sweet man, in his way. But if he wanted his chance with me, he should have taken it when we met long ago at the Abbey of Theleme.” To the Hairy Man she said, “Tell him he’s a thousand years too late. I’m going wherever Enkidu goes.”

  Gilgamesh said, “The Hairy Man informs me also that we’ll be separated when we make the crossing, and we won’t necessarily be able to find each other afterward.”

  Enkidu’s eyes blazed. “What is this?” he boomed. “Are you sure you heard him right?”

  “There is no doubt that that is what he said.”

  Enkidu wheeled around to confront the Hairy Man, who crossed his wrists in a strange gesture that might have been one of indifference, and looked off into the distance.

  Helen said, turning to Enkidu, “Is it true? That we will lose each other in the crossing?”

  “Do you mean to change your minds about making the attempt?” the Hairy Man asked placidly. “If that is so, let me know now, so that I may halt the preparations before—”

  “No!” Enkidu cried. “This is some trick, that’s all. Something that Simon told him to say, to discourage us if Helen refused to go to him. He was Simon’s man before he was yours, brother. He’s still Simon’s man now.”

  “What do you say to this?” Gilgamesh demanded.

  With unruffled calmness the Hairy Man said, “The journey will be the way the journey must be. The terms are the terms. I have no power to alter them.”

  “That is no answer at all,” said Gilgamesh.

  Helen said, trembling and looking suddenly very small, “This frightens me. To go off into the unknown not knowing whether or not we’ll find each other on the other side—”

  “We will find each other!” shouted Enkidu
defiantly. “Somehow we will, that I know! You must believe that!” He looked down at her. “We found each other once, and we will do it again. You must believe it. You must.” And pulled her close against him. “What do you say?”

  “Yes,” Helen murmured. Her eyes brightened, color came to her face. “Yes, I think we will. Yes. I have no doubt of it, Enkidu.”

  “And you, brother? What do you think? Are you still with us?”

  Gilgamesh looked about. Enkidu, Helen, the Hairy Man. Behind them Herod. Farther away, Vy-otin, Ninsun. They all were silent. That silence crashed upon him like the waves of a furious sea. A strange indecision gripped him: he felt immobilized by it, as though he were frozen.

  He had decided to undertake this journey, perilous and mystifying though it was, only for the sake of remaining by Enkidu’s side. The Hairy Man offered no guarantee of that. And if what Enkidu said was true, that the Hairy Man meant to work some vengeance on them in Simon’s name, to show Simon’s displeasure over the withholding of Helen—but no, that would not be like Simon, nor had the Hairy Man ever showed treachery before—

  “Well, brother?” Enkidu asked.

  Gilgamesh stared at the Hairy Man. But that grizzled shaggy face was inscrutable. He looked toward Herod, but Herod only shrugged and looked away. He looked to Vy-otin, and found no answer in the Ice-Hunter’s single fiery eye. To Ninsun, then—

  She was smiling. She was nodding.

  “Mother?” he said.

  “When did you ever turn away from risk before, my son?”

  “You want me to go?”

  “You want to go,” Ninsun said. “Why, then, do you hesitate?”

  “But you said—”

  “Of course I want you to stay. I would speak a lie if I told you anything else. But I see you are bound on this course, and no one could or should stop you. You are Gilgamesh: you do as Gilgamesh will do. Besides, Enkidu is right. You will find each other, somehow.”

  “Yes,” Gilgamesh said, and it was like the breaking of a dam within him. “You have never spoken other than the truth, mother. How can I doubt you now?”

  The Hairy Man said, “This is the salve. Rub it on your cheeks, and on your throats, and above your eyes. Then make your minds calm, and wait.”

  “So it is a drug that sends us there, then?” Gilgamesh asked. “The same one by which Calandola opened us to the Knowing?”

  “It is nothing like that,” said the Hairy Man.

  He set three white porcelain pots out before them. They were in one of the loftiest rooms of the palace, a bare stark room with mere slits for windows, through which only the faintest trickle of light could enter, and a wisp of hot wind. Gilgamesh glanced at Enkidu, who already held his pot in his hand and was vigorously rubbing the stuff on his face. Helen, too, was beginning to bedeck herself with it. Yet he himself held back from taking up the salve. It surprised him, that at this late moment he would find himself holding back. That he still hesitated, Gilgamesh knew, was a measure of the changes that had come over his spirit in this latest life of his: he who once had hesitated at nothing now stared at the little white porcelain pot as if it held some dire poison that would burn the flesh from his bones.

  To the Hairy Man he said, “Tell me only—”

  “Tell me, tell me, always tell me! No more questions, King Gilgamesh. Just go. Go!”

  “Yes, brother!” Enkidu called. “We must all depart together!”

  “Yes,” said Gilgamesh. “So we must.”

  He picked up the pot. It was warm, and a powerful fragrance came from it, which was like honey and wine and the oil of roses, but which had in it also some sharp fierce spice that stung his nostrils, and something else, a troublesome heavy aroma, dark and musty and strange. The other two were nearly done with their anointing now. Gilgamesh scooped some of the salve on to his fingers and brought it to his face. He thought for a moment of that time when Calandola had anointed him with a strange oil, and given him a stranger wine to drink, and then a frightful meat to eat, and he remembered all that had come from that ominous rite. Well, so be it: come now what may, he was bound on this adventure, he would not hold back from it any longer. He smeared the ointment on his cheeks, and felt it sting, but not painfully, and rubbed it on his throat, and on his forehead, until the pot was empty, and the fragrance of the stuff was rising to his nose and traveling deep down into his lungs.

  Almost immediately he felt a dizziness, and a constriction of the throat. He swayed and steadied himself, and swayed again. There was a great stillness in the room. He had expected rustlings and hissings and dronings, dream-sounds, witch-sounds, some sinister music in the air, the beating of bat-wings, the cries and howls of monsters. But there was nothing. Nothing. Only a weird clarity of perception, and a mighty silence that might have been the silence of the moon.

  He looked across to Enkidu and Helen. They stood apart from one another, staring as though gazing into an endless nothingness. Of the Hairy Man there was no sign.

  “Brother?” Gilgamesh called. “I feel myself leaving, brother. Will you follow me?”

  But he could not hear the sound even of his own voice, nor did Enkidu respond.

  Now he no longer saw the others at all. He was alone on some barren plain under an empty sky. To his back was a single enormous rock, mountain-high. Before him yawned the abyss, the fissure that lies between the worlds. And on the rim of the abyss rose a tree of incomprehensible height that had no leaves, only bare rigid branches that were themselves each the thickness of a tremendous tree, jutting from it like the rungs of a ladder.

  He knew what this tree was. It was the axis mundi, the world pole, the Tree of Life about which all else revolves, with its roots at the core of creation and its branches rising beyond the roof of the sky. And he must climb it to reach the land of the living.

  Seizing the lowest branch, he swung himself upward.

  It was easy enough at first. Reach up, catch the branch just above, pull yourself to it, pause a moment with both arms hooked over it, then a stretch and a heave and one leg up, and then the other, and halt a moment and go on, up and up and up. Climb and climb and climb, until you have climbed beyond this world into the one that adjoins it.

  Up. Up. Up.

  But as he rose he found himself also descending. The tree seemed to go in both directions at once, so that each upward move—and now he saw the North Star shining with a cold savage light far overhead—carried him downward as well, into the dark airless abyss, into the great mother-vault of the cosmos. He did not try to comprehend it. At the axis of the world who could understand anything? If the way out was also the way in, so be it. So be it. He continued to climb, rung after rung after rung. The wood was smooth and cold against his hands. Now he could no longer tell in which direction he was going; he was in a cleft of the earth, a twisted subterranean passage, and at the same time he was far above the ground, high overhead in a star-seared region of chill winds and eternal night.

  It was a time outside a time, a space outside of space. He was deep in the womb of the world. He was close to the roof of the sky.

  He knew that he was making the crossing now from one world to another.

  There was brightness ahead. The tree was no longer bare here: it was blossoming wildly, a burst of blood-red blooms, and when he looked down Gilgamesh saw the ground beneath the tree carpeted in red by the fallen petals, as though a blood-sacrifice had taken place there. He moved more swiftly in this zone of the tree, where the branches were not as thick and he could grasp one entirely in his hand. Scarlet petals fluttered all about him, clinging to his hair, his face, his shoulders, cloaking him.

  He could climb no higher now. He could delve no deeper.

  For an instant that stretched until it encompassed all of eternity, the world was still with a stasis that went beyond that of death itself.

  Then the silence suddenly broke, and about him all was a storm of noise and light and motion and vibration. So stunned was he by the fury of it all, coming
as he had from that eerie realm of stillness, that his first impulse was to crouch down and cover himself and wait for the onslaught of sensation to sweep over him and go past. But he forced himself to stand and stare and gape.

  He thought in that first dazzled moment that he had emerged somehow in Nova Roma, that bustling lunatic city which had embodied for him all the worst that the Later Dead had brought with them to the Afterworld. But no, no, this place was far more dreadful even than Nova Roma. Nova Roma was an isle of tranquility next to this. He was in some nightmare land. He had passed through the portal of worlds only to come forth into some place of terrible frenzy and turmoil, hideous beyond belief, a hellish realm that looked like no city he had ever seen.

  * * *

  TWENTY-ONE

  ALL about him were colossal jutting buildings, no two alike, that swept upward into the sky like mighty palisades. They were so tall that Gilgamesh could not understand how they could stand without toppling, and as he stared in disbelief toward their distant summits it seemed to him that in another moment they must come thundering down.

  The air was thin and harsh, with a knifelike edge to it, and the first few breaths he took were nauseating before he grew accustomed to its flavor. The sky was a pale murky iron-gray, what little could be seen of it between the lofty building-tops. He was on some broad, straight boulevard, choked with swiftly moving traffic. To his right and left he saw lesser streets, crossing the main one at right angles in a constricted, obsessively rigid way, as though they had been put there by some maniacal mathematician. The ground shook, perhaps under the impact of the astounding phalanxes of loud smoky vehicles that went roaring by without a halt. He seemed to be wearing some sort of Later Dead garb, close and chafing and awkward.

  Swarms of people clad in grotesque Later Dead costumes similar to his rushed past him like desperate soldiers late for battle, shouting in ragged voices, gesturing furiously, jostling him, pushing their way around him as he stood frozen in the midst of the flow.

  He looked about. The building just behind him, one of the tallest, appeared to be made of plates of some sheenless white metal, rising in stepped stages, tower growing out of tower. That was strange in itself, a metal building. The dull pallid plates that formed the hide of the thing, which seemed so flimsy that he could put his finger right through them, were stamped all over with repetitive ornamentation in low relief, not in any way pleasing—tawdry, in fact. There was no true gateway, only a cavernous opening that led to a wide hall. Angry hordes of hard-eyed people were rushing through it toward smaller entrances within, or into glass-walled shops at ground level that displayed sleek, incomprehensible Later Dead merchandise.