Gate of the Gods: Book 5 of The Windows of Heaven

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  Vris reached for my hand. “It also means something else.”

  Norby and I both looked at her.

  She said, “We have to escape this place with as much data as we can take. We can’t take the Device, but we can take what we’ve learned from it.”

  “Tell the world we’re not alone?” I asked.

  She said, “Perhaps. Or at least we can know it ourselves, for when the breakdown of our world really starts to accelerate.”

  Gilgamesh spoke to the tavern-keeper, saying:

  “So now, tavern-keeper, what is the way to Utanapishtim!

  What are its markers?

  Give them to me! Give me the markers!

  If possible, I will cross the sea;

  If not, I will roam through the wilderness.”

  The tavern-keeper spoke to Gilgamesh, saying:

  “There has never been, Gilgamesh, any passage whatever,

  There has never been anyone since days of yore who crossed the sea.

  The (only) one who crosses the sea is valiant Shamash, except for him who can cross!

  The crossing is difficult, its ways are treacherous—

  And in between are the Waters of Death that bar its approaches!

  And even if, Gilgamesh, you should cross the sea,

  When you reach the Waters of Death what would you do?

  Gilgamesh, over there is Urshanabi, the ferryman of Utanapishtim.

  ‘The stone things’ are with him, he is in the woods picking mint.

  Go on; let him see your face.

  If possible, cross with him;

  if not, you should turn back.”

  —The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet X

  22

  Gilgamesh

  117

  Gilgamesh was a shadow of his former self—the female scorpion creature in the Mountains of Mashu kept telling him so.

  “No giant, you! Not anymore!” Clack-clack went her enormous lobster claws in Gilgamesh’s face. Her mandibles dripped sap-like venom. “Soon you come to us in Under-world; then we show you how you not even a man! Our titaanu will make you their woman, just like before, when…”

  Gilgamesh felt it best to ignore them. He was too exhausted to do anything else anyway. Yet the impossibility of ignoring their relentless scratchy-screechy words in his head only brought back childhood horrors: A Lugalbanda who was not Lugalbanda; a father who was not Father; the Invisible Being who became master of the Kengiru—the children of a Kengu who could not even remember his own name. The gateway to the powers of Anu was also the gateway to madness—E-Temen-an-ki—House of the Gate of the Gods, connecting Under-world, the Heavens, and Earth.

  What the Akkadians of Kish had left off building, Lugalbanda had completed on a smaller scale at Eridu—not small enough for Gilgamesh, however. In the sacred jipar bedchamber at the ziggurat’s summit, Inana had first tried to seduce him, as she had her own young son, Dumuzi of Kuara, except that Gilgamesh had spurned her. She was his mother’s age, even if, being an immortal goddess, she wore it better than most. Gilgamesh would not be her tool! He chose his own women, not the other way around!

  Thus had Gilgamesh begun his co-regency of Uruk with Lugalbanda; who had not only set up the jipar encounter, but had laughed with abandon at its outcome, when Inana had stomped back to Kuara, humiliated. The visions of power and madness had not begun there, but there they started to escalate. Things had gone well even long before that.

  Shurupak’s attempts to retake Uruk from Lugalbanda, first with Usmu’s own army, and then in league with the Akkadians, had both failed miserably, even if two-faced Usmu always evaded capture. Usmu’s first attempt came before Gilgamesh had reached full fighting age, but not the second. The Uannu fish-dragon-man who had first risen from the Absu to save Uruk during the Great Darkness, now showed his other face by turning against the city. Such was the capriciousness of En-ki’s Vizier—in mercy he brought cruelty, and in his cruelty, divine gifts. Such was life.

  Gilgamesh and Lugalbanda soon pushed back as Heaven’s Bulls, conquering the entire region—Shurupak included—as they laughed madly together over their good fortune. Impulsive En-Ki relented, and gave them Shurupak, recalling his Vizier to the Absu for another day’s madness.

  All during those years, Gilgamesh had somehow managed to sublimate his childhood fears into “rites of passage” or some other sham. Who could argue with success? Yet madness, in the end, was still madness. Deep inside, he knew the favor of the gods could not last—that the joke, in the end, would be on him.

  The two scorpion creatures laughed at him again—a wheezy, clicking sound like crabs scuttling about in a dry copper vat.

  Such victories were long past, now. Cold had grown deep in the highlands during the decades—or was it centuries?—since Gilgamesh’s youth; bitter the years, since he had last ruled manfully in Uruk; taking his own version of the first night’s Privilege Right with each young man’s new bride. How he had laughed, loved, and received the fingernail scratches of outraged brides. Like battle scars, he treasured those marks—or he did. Now, not even those memories brought him any joy. Instead, they revealed just how deeply fear had always driven him.

  Only the two scorpion creatures laughed with such impunity now—laughed at him; and he did not even care anymore. Enkidu was dead, and Gilgamesh would someday die too—perhaps just as slowly and miserably. The two-thirds of his flesh that divine Lugalbanda had told him were “god” had wasted away, leaving that gaunt remnant deemed human.

  The Mountains of Mashu laughed their icy howl far above the scorpion monsters he no longer had the will to fight. He could not touch them anyway. He had tried—at first. They always moved somehow, before he could land a blow with his mace.

  Aram’s wealthy son, Mashu, who had married among the clans of Yoqtani, had also mocked him, when Gilgamesh had asked him the way to Dilmun, the home of Zuisudra. Divine Lugalbanda had vanished long ago, and neglected to tell him the way.

  “Go on, you lumbering oaf! Go on from here, you murdering beast!” Mashu had answered. “Huwawah’s curse be to you! Find Dilmun beyond my mountains, at the sun’s rising, if you can! Climb the ice cliffs until you reach its gate! Seek the Pinnacles of Ice, debased one, and rid the world of you!”

  Not many years ago, Gilgamesh would have crushed Mashu’s skull. Instead, he went on, up into the ice fields, to where the world supposedly ended, but didn’t. Now, after wintering in a glacial cave, he descended again toward the Absu, only to find these mocking scorpion monsters, one male, one female, laughing at his shame, and not even taking the time to sting him properly. They lacked even enough respect for him to consider him a threat!

  Enkidu had died long and hard. Not in battle or in torment at the hands of an enemy that one could vanquish or repay in vengeance. No; but in torment nonetheless, as the slow disease that Anu and Enlil had cursed him with sucked his vitality and sanity away, so that not even Shamhat the temple whore would care for him any longer. Even she had left Gilgamesh hovering over his wasting friend in the end, helpless and alone, just as he had been as a child, when hundreds of bodies had floated past him down the Eufratys River while he watched.

  He no longer knew how long ago that was. The Terror of the Early Years had a nightmarish quality about it that made it difficult to recollect how much or how little time had passed since.

  He remembered how Shamhat had tamed Enkidu the Wildman, the child of En-Ki, with her charms, and how Enkidu had driven her away in the end—the only woman who would bear the stench coming off his sickly, yellowed flesh like fetid swamp mist. Gilgamesh had wanted to kill him just to shut him up, and put both of them out of their miseries. After winning all those battles with Enkidu at his side, the crushing blow to the Lugal of Uruk came at seeing his friend reduced, by the humiliation of illness, to a whining shadow who reproached the only woman who had ever really loved him.

  Enkidu had cursed poor Shamhat, “Come, Whore, listen to your fate, a fate that will never come to an end for eter
nity! I curse you with a Great Curse! May my curses overwhelm you suddenly! May you not be able to make a household, and not be able to love a child of your own! May you not dwell in the house of the younger pleasure girls, and may the dregs of beer stain your lap, as drunks soil your festal robe in continual heaves of vomit! Let never the shining silver of man’s delight be cast into your house…”

  Gilgamesh had watched her begin to cry, as mad Enkidu’s snake-widened mouth heaped his abuse on her as an ape flings its own dung.

  “May an open gateway be where you rake in your pleasure, and a crossroad be your home, and a wasteland, your sleeping place! Stand in the shadows, pressed against the city wall, where thorns and briars skin your feet! Let both the drunk and the sober slap your cheeks in your city’s streets, and your filthy lap be their garbage basket! Because of me, while I blamelessly wandered the wilds of En-ki, the beasts to raise me, you lured me to city pleasures, which you used to make me your slave!”

  That was when Shamhat ran from the house, wailing, into the night. Gilgamesh had run after her, but she had vanished into Uruk’s boat town.

  When he had returned to Enkidu, he found his old friend blubbering about how sorry he was, his hairy face crusted with the drying stink of his own drool and vomit.

  “No! No! I’m sorry! I din’t mean it! Come back, Shamhat, I will call a better fate for you. I beg you, come back! Let my mouth, which cursed you, now turn to bless you! May governors and nobles love you and the soldier not refuse you, but undo his buckle for you, and give you rock crystal, sky-stone, and gold for your services. May the wife, the mother of seven sons, be abandoned because of you!”

  Gilgamesh could hear Enkidu’s innards churning, the worms eating his intestines. The old fur-ball lay utterly alone in his final agonies.

  Enkidu spoke everything he felt, like a braying ass, in his tears: “Listen, my friend, to the dream that I had last night.” His breathing grew labored again, stopping every few words, and then starting again with a gasp. “The Heavens cried out, and the Earth replied, and I stood between them. There appeared a man of dark face—it resembled the Anzu demon…”

  Gilgamesh could see it all again, more fearsome than the scorpion monsters’ laughter, as Enkidu’s eyes bulged from his face like great yellow sores; “Save me, Gilgamesh! He’s here again, waiting to snatch me from above! His hands are the paws of a lion, his nails the talons of an eagle—he’ll seize me by my hair and take me! And, like in the dream, he’ll encircle my whole body as a crushing serpent. I cried, ‘Help me, my friend,’ but you din’t rescue me, you were afraid, and you din’t… din’t rescue…” Enkidu shrieked, “Help me, Gilgamesh! By the gods, help me! He takes me now, and I can’t stop him! He pulls me downward…”

  Before Gilgamesh had even crouched to clasp his friend’s shoulder to console him, Enkidu was gone; his enormous dead eyes, gray, accusing pustules that would burst if Gilgamesh tried to close their lids with his fingers. The dead man’s twisted jaws, dislocated in their final screaming spasms, hung open, chin flopping down onto ape-like pectorals, while a huge tongue stuck out, erect in its final horror, like some spotted pink and yellow mushroom, growing from the broken ruins of his mouth.

  Gilgamesh now clutched at his own thinning curls, and screeched like a dying asag dragon, while the scorpion monsters laughed at him some more, clacking their enormous lobsterish claws in anticipation.

  “Go on! Go on,” they giggled, “No Dilmun here!”

  The scorpion fiends melted into evil-shaped rocks. Gilgamesh ran, screaming, down the wooded hills toward the Absu Sea.

  He ran for days on end; how many, he did not know, until he saw a tiny fishing village of the Elammi, beckoning to him on the shore of the endless lakes and mires.

  118

  Siduri the Brew-Mistress, with her husband and his brothers, had built the tiny fishing village just after the Misty Times. Men everywhere still roamed like beasts, mostly avoiding, yet a few haunting, the mysterious ruined places. The fishing village resembled the ruined places, only without the brooding demons and screeching lilu owls. Here Siduri made the Beer of Life.

  Her husband, his three brothers, and she had taken a magic boat to escape the roving demons from the Night of Unknown Childhood. Perhaps the gods had made Siduri and her men, and put them by that boat. Who knew? All Siduri knew was that she had a copper vat, and that in it she could brew beer. That skill seemed to have been part of her from the Beginning. Her husband called her Ninkashi, “beer goddess,” so maybe she was. The setline fishermen, who had wandered in later, seemed to think so.

  Siduri did not care, as long as they bartered fairly, fish for beer and a meal. If her young tavern-girls offered a little more than that to keep them coming back, well, what was it to her? Her husband had twice built her a small tavern of wood from the mountain forest, and roofed it in reeds from the Absu’s edge. The first tavern, the Absu had risen up to consume as a sacrifice to En-Ki, but the second, En-Ki seemed content to let stay. The skeleton of her first tavern still stood about a hundred spans off shore. The fishermen these days all used setlines. None of them dared venture out in boats, lest the Absu rise again and swallow them, too.

  Siduri prepared the baked-clay beer bowls for when her husband and the other men came in from fishing amid the reeds. The tavern-girls had yet to show up—they always waited until just before the fishermen returned, to avoid soiling their pretty hands with too much work.

  Although the fishermen feared using boats, an occasional trade ship from Uruk ventured out as far as Siduri’s Tavern, running grain for beer. Some of the other wives had small plots near the Tavern, but the grain of the Kengiru from Uruk made better bread, and better beer.

  A scuffle came from out back, followed by a man’s cursing.

  The village husbands were not due back for hours, and the only other man in the vicinity, Siduri had never heard curse.

  She scurried back into the scullery, barred the rear door, and then ran to the drinking hall and dropped the large oak lever into its slot across the tied-log front gateway. She had reached the first window to shut and bolt its rough wood shutter, when she saw the enormous wild man outside. He wore nothing but tattered remnants of an animal fur over a gaunt body with yellowed skin that had once doubtless been rich and dark. Thinning, gray-streaked curls covered his head, and a black beard tinged with silver grew full and long enough to touch his chest. Siduri slammed the shutter, and raced for the remaining one on the other side of the tiny hall.

  “He’s a murderous beast-man!” she hissed to herself.

  Half-formed memories of piled bodies, and of blood-smeared animal-men feasting on the dead, filled her mind’s eye. She knew she had seen such a thing once, but could not place where or when, except that it had been in the Dreaming Time, before she had found her vat, the magic boat, and her men—before the world had completely formed out of the watery mists that had always been. The beast-men had somehow been with her then. Perhaps she had been one of them; but if so, her magic vat and boat later blessed her with full humanity. Only beast-men ate the dead.

  Whoever was outside yelled in at her, “Tavern-wench, what have you seen to make you bolt your windows and bar your doors! Open up or I’ll smash them down!”

  That he spoke at all cast doubt on him being a beast-man, for they only grunted and brayed. But he could still be a murdering brigand. “Who are you, and what do you want?”

  The man stopped his cursing, and spoke more reasonably. “I am Gilgamesh, Lugal of Uruk, who killed the Absu’s Guardian Monster, and destroyed Huwawah, driving his slaves into hiding in the Cedar Forest of the West! I’ve slain lions in the mountains above Elammi, and killed the Bull of Heaven, dumping its guts all over the goddess Inana, to spurn her sexual advances. She thought to rule Uruk in my father’s place, through her son!”

  Siduri had heard of the whore-goddess Inana, who gave tavern women everywhere such a bad name, and made it so that her husband had to carry a club. Any man with sense enough
to spurn Inana, and publically humiliate her in such an amusing way, could not be all bad. But that didn’t make this fellow who he claimed to be, either. Even if he was, Inana’s cult had a long reach, with many supporters, both great and small—some even in Siduri’s tiny village.

  Siduri called back to him through the shutter, “Why does your face look so haggard, and your limbs so gaunt? If you rule Uruk, which has the magic of scrawl, wedge-runes, and great carts of wheels, where is your ship? If you came the long way, over land, where is your honor guard and onager? Why do you look like one who has wandered great distances in heat and ice?”

  The stranger answered, “Why shouldn’t I be so wretched! Why shouldn’t I look like I’ve wandered the wilderness? I am in mourning for my friend, the only honor guard I ever needed; Enkidu, the Panther of the Wilderness, who helped me in all my labors, is dead.” He began to weep like a pathetic boy. “I would not allow him to be buried. I sat, and held him to my chest for seven days. Then a maggot crawled out from his nose, and I released him to burial! Death has haunted me ever since, and I, who braved monsters, and rebel lugals, have become frightened that I too will die of a wasting illness as Enkidu did!”

  Siduri peered out between the slats of her window shutters again. Gilgamesh had collapsed into a heap on the landing, utterly undone in his grief. His story seemed too bizarre not to be true—a robber would have made up something far less elaborate. Still, she could not be certain.

  The broken giant looked up and yelled, “So now, tavern-keeper, what is the way to Dilmun? What are its way-markers? Give them to me! Give me the way-markers! I just want directions! Is it across this sea? If so, I’ll leave you, and if possible, cross the sea. If not, I will roam through the wilderness again. What else is left for me?”

  Siduri pitied him. “Gilgamesh, there have never been way-markers across the Absu since the Before-Days, when the world was mist; and then only the gods had ships able to cross easily. The only one who crosses the Absu now is Ursunabi, and he says that the passage is treacherous since the sea rose and swallowed more land. The deadly waters are before you, Gilgamesh; you can see the bones of my old tavern they ate, off shore. If the deadly waters swallow you, what will you do—yell at the wind like it’s a tavern woman, and command it to stop?”