“I AM BUT A MAN,” HE DECLARED SIMPLY, TO SILENUS’S DISSATISFACTION. “BUT YOU ARE NOT. I BELIEVE I HAVE HEARD TELL OF BEINGS SUCH AS YOU IN MY TRAVELS.”
“YOU ERR, MY LORD,” SILENUS DECLARED, “FOR THERE IS ONLY SILENUS AND NONE OTHER THAN HE. SILENUS IS UNLIKE ANY.”
THE STRANGE MAN LAUGHED HEARTILY, BUT NOT SO BROADLY AS TO ALARM THEIR CAPTORS. “IS IT TRULY THUS? YOU SPRANG UPON THE EARTH FULLY ASSEMBLED? THAT IS NOT SO; NO BEING THAT STRIDES THE DIRT DID SO WITHOUT FIRST KNOWING THE WARMTH OF A MOTHER’S WOMB.”
“WHAT OF THE GODS?” SILENUS COUNTERED, TAKEN ABACK BY THE SHREWDNESS OF HIS COMPANION. “DO THEY NOT CREATE THEMSELVES?”
“THAT IS NOT SO; EVEN THE GODS HAVE MOTHERS. NOW WHAT IS THERE TO YOU ASIDE FROM YOUR PECULIAR EARS? DO YOU HAVE A TALENT THAT WOULD HELP RESOLVE OUR PRESENT CONCERNS?”
“I HAVE A GREAT MANY TALENTS,” SILENUS BOASTED. “I CAN TRANSFORM MYSELF INTO A GOAT AND STEP FREE OF THESE CHAINS. I CAN CALL DOWN THE WRATH OF AEOLUS HIMSELF TO VISIT A GREAT STORM UPON THIS VESSEL. I CAN SUMMON PROTEUS FROM BELOW TO VISIT WATERY VIOLENCE UPON OUR CAPTORS. THE WINGED GORGON DOES ANSWER MY . . .”
“SO YOU HAVE NO TALENTS, THEN,” THE STRANGER INTERRUPTED. “ASIDE FROM A VAST CAPACITY FOR EXAGGERATION.”
“I AM THE GREATEST STORYTELLER THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN,” SILENUS SPOKE ANGRILY. “KINGS WEEP, MAIDENS SPREAD THEIR THIGHS, AND THE GODS THEMSELVES . . .”
BUT THE STRANGER INTERRUPTED SILENUS YET AGAIN. “YOU MUST STOP,” HE DECLARED, “FOR I HAVE MET THE GREATEST STORYTELLER THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN AND YOU ARE NOT HE. WHAT I REQUIRE OF YOU IS A TALENT THAT WILL HELP US AT THIS VERY MOMENT. UNLESS YOU CAN SPIN A TALE THAT CONVINCES THESE PIRATES TO MURDER THEMSELVES, I DO NOT FIND YOUR LEGEND-MAKING PROWESS AN EFFECTIVE SURVIVAL SKILL. AND SHOULD YOU TRY, I FEAR THEY MAY SLAY US BEFORE PROCEEDING TO THEMSELVES, AS I HAVE CONSIDERED MURDERING YOU TWICE SINCE WE HAVE BEGUN SPEAKING.”
“AND WHAT TALENTS HAVE YOU, STRANGER,” SILENUS DEMANDED, “THAT WOULD BE OF USE TO ANY, ASIDE FROM YOUR SKILLFULLY INSULTING TONE?”
“FREED OF THESE SHACKLES, I CAN BEST ANY ABOARD THIS VESSEL,” THE STRANGE MAN SAID CALMLY, AND ALTHOUGH HE WAS SLIGHT OF BUILD AND THEIR CAPTORS STURDY, ROUGH AND LARGE, SILENUS DID NOT DOUBT HIM.
“WHAT OF THOSE EARS?” THE STRANGER ASKED SILENUS. “DO THEY ENABLE YOU TO HEAR BETTER THAN A MAN MIGHT?”
“I CAN HEAR THE BRISTLE OF A FLY’S WING AS HE TAKES FLIGHT A LEAGUE AWAY. I CAN OVERHEAR THE STRATAGEMS OF ENEMY ARMIES WHILE SAFELY BEHIND MY OWN FORCE. I HAVE . . .”
“THEN, YES?”
“YOU HAVE A CAPACITY FOR INTERRUPTION THAT QUALIFIES AS A TALENT UNTO ITSELF.”
THE STRANGE MAN SMILED. “MY FORGIVENESS, STORYTELLER; I FEARED IF I DID NOT INTERCEDE WE WOULD HAVE BEEN RANSOMED BEFORE YOU HAD COMPLETED YOUR TALE-TELLING. NOW TELL ME, WITH YOUR MAGNIFICENT EARS, CAN YOU ASCERTAIN THE LOCATION OF THE KEYS TO THESE MANACLES?”
“I CAN! THE LARGE ONE CARRIES THEM,” SILENUS SAID WITH PRIDE.
“AN OVERLY GENERAL DESCRIPTION. WHICH LARGE ONE?”
“THE ONE WITH THE SCAR ABOVE HIS RIGHT EYE AND THE RINGLET CARVING ON HIS NECK, WITH HOOP RINGS IN HIS LOBE AND SHAVED HEAD. HIS GRIN’S THIRD TOOTH ON HIS EASTERN SIDE IS BLACKED. HE IS ALSO QUITE UGLY; WOULD YOU LIKE FOR ME TO QUANTIFY HIS UGLINESS IN AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT?”
LAUGHING NOW, THE STRANGE MAN SAID, “SHOULD YOU EVER FIND THE MEAN DISTANCE BETWEEN TOO MANY WORDS AND TOO FEW, YOU MIGHT JUST SUCCEED IN BEING A TOLERABLE COMPANION. WHERE ON HIS PERSON ARE THE KEYS?”
“IT IS A SMALL METAL RING TIED BY A CORD TO HIS ROPE BELT. NOW, WHAT MAGIC WILL YOU BE EMPLOYING TO OBTAIN THESE KEYS?”
“HE WILL REQUIRE A REASON TO COME TO US, AND ANOTHER REASON STILL TO USE THE KEYS,” THE STRANGE MAN SAID. “I EXPECT TO GIVE HIM REASON ENOUGH, BUT IF HE DISAGREES WITH MY LOGIC I WILL BE FORCED TO REMOVE THE KEYS MYSELF, AND SO IT IS A GREAT HELP TO KNOW EXACTLY WHERE THEY ARE. I THANK YOU.”
“AND WHAT REASON WILL YOU GIVE HIM TO USE THE KEYS?” SILENUS ASKED.
“YOU SHALL PROVIDE HIM WITH ONE YOURSELF, GREAT SILENUS.” AND WITH TREMENDOUS SWIFTNESS, THE STRANGER FLUNG SILENUS OVERBOARD.
THE MIGHTY SILENUS DID FLAIL AND FUMBLE IN THE SEA, FOR SWIMMING WAS NOT A SKILL AT WHICH HE EXCELLED. HIS WRISTS STILL CHAINED, HE COULD DO LITTLE BUT KEEP HIS FACE ABOVE WATER AS THE SLOW BOAT DRAGGED HIM ALONG.
AN ETERNITY TRANSPIRED ERE THE STRANGER APPEARED AT THE AFT OF THE BOAT AND IMPLORED SILENUS TO FLOUNDER HIMSELF TOWARD THE DECK AS HE PULLED THE CHAIN TO GUIDE SILENUS’S PASSAGE UNTIL, WITH GREAT EFFORT, HE MANAGED TO EXTRICATE HIM FROM THE DEEP.
“DO YOU KNOW HOW TO SAIL?” THE STRANGE MAN ASKED AS HE UNLATCHED THE MANACLES THAT HAD SERVED AS BOTH SILENUS’S BURDEN AND SALVATION.
SILENUS WAS STRUCK DUMB BY THE SIGHT OF A VACANT SHIP, SAVE FOR THE TWO RANSOMS AND CARGO. “HOW CAN THIS BE?” HE ASKED.
“THE BOLT ON THE DECK WAS LOOSE, AND WOULD HAVE SOON TORN FREE AND TAKEN ME INTO THE WATER, AND THEN WE WOULD HAVE BOTH JOINED THE EMBRACE OF YOUR FRIEND PROTEUS. WHEN YOUR DEPARTURE CAUGHT THE ATTENTION OF OUR JAILOR, I CONVINCED HIM IT WOULD BE EASIER TO UNLOCK MY CHAIN AND REMOVE THE BOLT THAN TO PULL YOU ABOARD AS CLEARLY YOU WISHED TO DROWN.”
“I DID NOT WISH TO DROWN!” SILENUS PROTESTED.
“BUT SURELY YOU MUST HAVE, AS YOU HAD LEAPT OVERBOARD SO STRIDENTLY. YOU EVEN TOLD ME BEFORE YOUR DEPARTURE HOW CONTENT YOU WERE TO DRAG THE VESSEL DOWN INTO THE DEPTHS WITH YOU.”
SILENUS CLIMBED TO HIS FEET AND REAPPRAISED THE SHIP. “BUT WHERE DID THEY ALL GO?” HE ASKED THE MAN.
THE STRANGER STRETCHED HIS HAND OVER THE WATERS. “A BEING OF SUCH VAST IMAGINATION AS YOURSELF CAN SURELY CONSPIRE AN EXPLANATION.”
AND SILENUS DID LOOK OUT UPON THE SEA. IN THE DISTANCE A FLEET OF DOLPHINS BERTHED, AND AN EXPLANATION DID COME UPON HIM.
“WHAT SHALL I CALL YOU, MY LORD?” HE ASKED THE STRANGER.
“YOU HAIL FROM THE COURT OF PERGAMON, DO YOU NOT?”
“I CALL NO KINGDOM HOME, AND ALL KINGDOMS HOME,” SILENUS SAID. “BUT THAT IS WHERE I LAST PAUSED.”
“IN THOSE PARTS, THE NAME I AM KNOWN BY IS DIONYSOS,” THE STRANGER SAID. “YOU MAY CALL ME THAT IF YOU WISH. NOW ANSWER. DO YOU SAIL? FOR I FEAR I CANNOT GUIDE THIS SHIP ALONE AND DO NOT WISH TO GUESS WHERE WE WILL SETTLE IF LEFT TO THE WHIMS OF THE OCEAN.”
SIL. I KNOW THIS TO BE TRUE AS SURELY AS THE STARS ARE FIXED, AND ALL MEN MUST EVENTUALLY PERISH UNTO HADES.
DION. THIS IS A POOR CHOICE, AS NOT ALL MEN PERISH, NOR ARE THE STARS TRULY FIXED IN THE HEAVENS.
From the dialogues of Silenus the Younger. Text corrected and translated by Ariadne
About two hours passed before I felt like it was okay to exhale. I spent that time in the back of Mike’s Chevy convertible partly covered by an afghan that smelled like someone’s basement, and working on half a bottle of scotch I found rolling along on the floor.
I was lucky the FBI only used humans when tracking me, because that casino trick would have never worked otherwise. It was modestly clever, sure, but I could think a bunch of non-human species that wouldn’t have lost me. Granted, there would have been other issues hiring, say, a demon or a vampire, and pixies and iffrits don’t have much use for steady employment (or money, or clothing). But there are plenty of species left that could have blended in, would have been happy with the job, and would never have been fooled by a clothing change.
A goblin, for instance. Most of them look nearly human, and a healthy one could keep track of a housefly in a snowstorm. They prefer swords and knives to guns, but I always thought of that as a personal preference, not a racial mandate. A goblin would have caught me.
Mike Lycos could be a goblin. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but if he had come in through the balcony of my room, he was less human than I am, and goblin was a decent enough guess. Except goblins aren’t tremendous leapers, per se. And I know enough about both the Northern and Southern breed to recognize one; he didn’t look like either type. No, he was something else.
We
hadn’t really talked much, Mike and I. He had yet to tell me where we were going, but I figured once I was out of the city I’d take my chances. I was nearly ready to trust him. It helped that if we were caught, he’d be in as much trouble as me, and probably more. Trust built on mutually assured destruction may sound risky (especially in the nuclear age) but it’s got a solid pedigree historically.
I could have probably climbed into the front seat if I wanted, but I was actually pretty comfortable lying there and looking up at the stars. It had been a while.
* * *
Looking at the night sky is one of the first things I can remember doing, and I used to do it a lot. We all did. Granted, before television and books it was all we had to do, but the sky is sometimes more interesting than television or books.
For a fair number of early cultures, the night sky was more real than anything that was happening beneath it. That might be a perspective that’s difficult to get your mind around, but look at it this way—on earth things are born, live, and die in a state of pretty constant change. But the heavens are static and evidently eternal. It’s why so many cultures thought the stars were gods. I’d felt that way myself for a time, although I was careful about attaching names to any of them since culturally, the gods were different depending on whom I hung out with. So I adhered to a sort of amorphous polytheism that worked pretty well.
I don’t know when I decided there were no gods, but I can definitely identify the moment when the concept first occurred to me. It followed a somewhat extraordinary event.
This was during the ascendancy of the Sumerian empire, which is to say very long ago, even by my somewhat unique standards.
The Sumerians have been lauded in recent history books as the earliest culture worthy of the term empire, which is just flat-out untrue. I will grant they are the oldest civilization to leave behind a decent historical record that doesn’t also involve cave drawings, but there were others who came before them. Also, it’s a stretch to call what the Sumerians slapped together an empire or even a civilization with a culture. What they did have was a talent for building things out of stone, a basic written language, and a sincere interest in eradicating all evidence of every other culture they came into contact with. The reason archaeologists haven’t discovered earlier mid-East examples of civilized man—yet—has more to do with Sumerian vindictiveness than that no such prior cultures existed.
Actually, calling them vindictive isn’t entirely fair, because in most ways they were typical for the time. The Sumerian religion was extremely rudimentary, and followed a common assumption that their lives were manipulated by fickle and ill-tempered gods whose displeasure could be determined through any post hoc analysis of major and minor natural disasters. To ward off these disasters, they spent a whole lot of time trying to keep their gods happy via a number of complex rituals, many involving copious amounts of sex (“the gods wish us to have sex” is the oldest pickup line in the world) and human sacrifice. And whoever happened to be their king was also a god, which simplified the political process quite a lot.
This wasn’t an unusual way of seeing things. Most of the above also works for the Egyptians, the early Greeks, the Hindus, the African Bushmen tribes and the descendant cultures of the Sumerians, i.e., the Akkadians and the pre-Mosaic Jews, and also probably the American Indian cultures and, for all I know, the prehistoric Chinese and the Australian Aborigines. It is, in short, a nearly universal perspective. Why? I don’t know, but I bet all of it started when somebody looked up.
A couple of things did set the Sumerians apart. For some reason they looked at the tribes that came before them as an affront to their gods and felt morally justified in eliminating all evidence of them. Also, they retained much of the warrior past that predated their comparatively civilized present, specifically the manner in which a king was declared. They had no kings by birthright, or not at first; instead, the biggest, baddest, most fertile and strongest son of a bitch around was their king, an honor bestowed partly because he could kill anybody who suggested otherwise. The Alpha Male, in other words.
I did not ingratiate myself into the Sumerian society, for the simple and obvious reason that I’d get my head handed to me if I tried. Admittedly, I was at one time the Alpha Male in my own tribe, but we were starving African hunters. In contrast, the lands of Sumer were agriculturally rich and well farmed, and a steady supply of food will always result in a bigger and stronger warrior class, or at least bigger and stronger than me.
But I did interact with them from time to time.
* * *
Very occasionally, I will pop up in the historical record. Most of the time I’m not at all easy to spot, because most of the time I’m just a guy who does a thing and then disappears again into the background behind someone-or-other who’s busy doing something much more important. But there are a couple of rare occasions when I get a starring role. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of those occasions.
Don’t go pulling out a copy of it to see if you can spot me because for one thing, it’s a really dull read. It made for a fantastic tale in spoken form—provided one knew the language—but whoever chiseled it down for posterity on those clay tablets they found in Nineveh was a bit of a hack. For another thing, it’s pretty obvious who I am if you can stay awake to the end, so I’ll just tell you. In the story, King Gilgamesh decided upon discovering he was a mortal man and was going to die someday, to go on a great quest to seek out the legendary Ut-Naphishtim, the immortal man. Hello, me.
As with most stories retold successively for hundreds of years before being recorded for posterity, much of the epic is just flat-out bunk, with gods coming down and exacting their wrath directly—rather than through a nice, indirect pestilence—and heroes who are capable of unfathomable physical acts. My favorite part of the story is when the wild, god-created animal-man, Enkidu, is tamed by a prostitute. As soon as he has sex with her, all his body hair falls off, making the creatures of the forest fear him because suddenly he looks more human than animal. Whenever I think about the Enkidu story, I think Kipling really missed out on a much better ending for The Jungle Book.
Nobody who looks closely at The Epic of Gilgamesh could mistake it for a historical text, but in a way it is. It’s a collection of several tales told about different people—all exaggerated beyond recognition—throughout early Sumerian history, most predating Gilgamesh.
And there really was a Gilgamesh. He was a king in pre-Akkadian Sumeria. (The Akkadians, a Semitic people, conquered the Sumerians—who were more white-skinned and from the North—and took over their empire in such a way that many consider Sumerian and Akkadian to be synonymous. I never stopped calling them Sumerians because truthfully, they didn’t act all that different.) And Gilgamesh really did come to seek out my advice one day.
The event that set things in motion was something we would now consider mundane, or failing that, something we would have a ready explanation for. It happened while I was sitting alone outside the small shelter I’d made for myself in a stretch of woods I had called home for roughly a century. I was in one of my back-to-nature phases. Not in the man-animal sense of the warrior Enkidu, more in a crazy hermit on the hill way. With a civilization only few days’ walk, I could have been more sociable, but as I said the Sumerians were quite nuts. I did stop by for the fertility rites in springtime, but that was just to enjoy (and participate in) the spectacle of a thousand temple prostitutes copulating in the name of the gods. Great fun, that.
It was a clear, warm evening during a new moon, and I had decided to forego a fire in order to spend the night studying the stars, something I did a lot. (And which came in handy later when I became a vizier in Egypt. The Egyptian kings were crazy for astronomy.) At sometime well past the point when the moon had reached its zenith, an amazing thing happened. A part of the sky fell.
I first spotted it low on the horizon—a flash of something I didn’t think had been there a second before. It flared brighter and brighter, this point in th
e sky. It appeared to grow larger, but in fact it was simply getting closer. And then it disappeared from view. About ten fairly rapid heartbeats later, a tremendous bang rang out, similar to the sound of a thousand whips cracked against a thousand backs at the same time.
I had already been on the planet for a good long while by then, and had of course heard stories about parts of the sky falling. But this was the first time I’d seen it with my own eyes. I had no idea what it meant. For me, and everybody else in this time, the sky simply was. It didn’t change. Sure, over the course of a year—and even a night—elements of the sky moved in a predictable pattern, but pieces of it weren’t supposed to just drop off like that. I re-examined the portion of the firmament the piece hailed from, but it didn’t look as if any of the stars were missing. It was as if it hadn’t happened at all.
By morning, I decided I had imagined it. This seemed like a much safer conclusion than any other option such as, say, one of the gods had slipped on something. A day later, I’d forgotten the whole event.
But I wasn’t the only one who’d seen it, as I discovered when Gilgamesh arrived at my door three days later, looking very scared.
All legendary exaggeration aside, Gilgamesh really was a pretty huge guy, a full head and shoulders taller than me. He was also profoundly hairy, more than a little ugly, and fond of going about without clothes on. This last part was just to make things easier on him when it came to passing on his seed, something he did at least three or four times daily because basically the guy always had an erection and always knew what to do with it; clothes just slowed him down. Seeing him afraid was quite a surprise.
“Ut-Naphishtim,” he boomed, “you must tell me what I have done to anger the gods!”
This may have sounded like an order, but it really wasn’t. More like a plea. I got some decent respect from Gilgamesh, who believed that my apparently eternal good health meant the very gods that suddenly had it out for him, had smiled on me for some reason. (It should be said that even though I’d never conversed with any god at anytime, I assumed much the same.)
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