Gilgamesh the King

by Robert Silverberg

  As these things became clear to me, a hot rage rose in me like fire on a summer mountain. Perhaps it was from having been awake all the night, perhaps it was the wine, perhaps it was some dark floating demon of the dawn air that entered into my spirit; or maybe it was simply that I was full of the overweening pride that came of my victory over Huwawa; but I grew intemperately fierce. I pulled my hand free of hers and loomed high above her and cried, “You are my only hope, you say? What hope do you offer me, except the hope of pain and humiliation? What could I expect, if I were so foolish as to take you in marriage? You bring only peril and torment.” The angry words poured from me. I would not and could not halt. “What are you? A brazier that goes out in the cold. A back door which keeps out neither wind nor rain. A leaky waterskin that wets its bearer. A sandal that trips its wearer?”

  She gaped at me, amazed, as I had been amazed when she had come to me with this talk of marriage.

  I went on and on. “What are you? A shoe that pinches its owner’s foot. A stone that falls from a parapet. Pitch that defiles the hand, a palace that collapses on its inhabitants, a turban that does not cover the head. Marry you? Marry you? Ah, Inanna, Inanna, what folly, what madness!”

  “Gilgamesh—”

  “Where is there any hope for a man who falls into Inanna’s snare? The gardener Ishullanu—I know that story. He came to you with baskets of dates, and you looked at him and smiled your smile, and said, ‘Ishullanu, come close to me, let me enjoy you, touch me here and touch me there.’ And he shrank back in terror of you, saying, ‘What do you want with me? I am only a gardener. You will freeze me as the frosts freeze the young rushes.’ And when you heard that you changed him into a mole and cast him down to tunnel in the earth.”

  She said, astounded, “Gilgamesh, that is only a tale of the goddess! That was not my doing, but the goddess’ long ago!”

  “It is all the same. You are the goddess, the goddess is you. Her sins are yours. Her crimes are yours. What has befallen the lovers of Inanna? The shepherd who heaped up meal-cakes for you, and slaughtered the tender kids: he wearied you and you struck him and turned him into a wolf, and now his own herd-boys drive him away, and his own dogs bite his thighs—”

  “A fable, Gilgamesh, a story!”

  “The lion you loved: seven pits you dug for him, and seven more. The bird of many colors: you broke his wing, and he sits in the grove now, crying, ‘My wing, my wing!’ The stallion so noble in battle: you ordained the whip and the spur and the thong for him, and made him gallop seven leagues, and ordered him to drink from muddied water—”

  “Are you mad? What are you saying? These are old tales the harpers tell, tales of the goddess!”

  I suppose I was in a kind of madness. But I would not relent. “Have you ever kept faith with one of your lovers? And will you not treat me as you treated them?” She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came forth, and into her silence I said, “What of Dumuzi? Tell me of him! You sent him down into hell.”

  “Why do you throw ancient fables in my face? Why do you keep reproaching me with things that have nothing to do with me?”

  I ignored her. I was in a madness. “Not Dumuzi the god,” I said. “Dumuzi the king, who ruled in this city, and died before his years. Yes, tell me of Dumuzi! Dumuzi the god, Dumuzi the king, Inanna the goddess, Inanna the priestess—it is all the same. Every child knows the tale. She snares him and uses him and has her triumph over him. You will not do that with me.” Then I caught my breath and wiped my brow and in another voice entirely said, very coldly, “This is the royal palace. You have no business being here. Go. Go!”

  She reached for words and again no words came, only little wrathful stammering sounds. She gaped and stammered and backed away, her eyes hot, her face flaming. At the door she halted a moment and gave me a long chilling look. Then she said in a quiet calm voice that seemed to rise from the depths of the nether world, “You will suffer, Gilgamesh. That I promise. You will feel pain beyond any pain you have ever imagined. So the goddess pledges.” And she was gone.

  24

  THAT YEAR AT THE TIME of the new year festival the heat of the summer did not break, the moist wind called the Cheat did not blow from the south, and there was no sign of rain in the northern sky. These things gave me great fear, but I kept my uneasiness to myself, saying nothing even to Enkidu. After all, there had been other dry autumns in the past, and the rains had always come sooner or later. If this year it was later rather than sooner, nevertheless they would come. Or so I believed: so I hoped. But my fear was great, for I knew that Inanna was my enemy.

  On the night of the ceremony of the Sacred Marriage she and I stood face to face for the first time since the visit she had paid to the palace that time at dawn. But when I came to the long chamber of the temple to greet her, her eyes were like polished stones, and she greeted me with the silence of a stone, and when I said, “Hail, Inanna,” she did not reply, as Inanna must, with the words, “Hail, royal husband, fountain of life.” I knew then that a doom had come to lie upon Uruk, a doom of her making.

  I did not know what to do. We performed the showing-forth on the temple portico, we carried out the rites of the barley and honey, we went to the bedchamber and stood before the bed of ebony inlaid with ivory and gold. All this while she said not a single word to me, but I knew from her eyes that her hatred for me was unabated. The handmaiden-priestesses took her beads and breastplates from her, and lifted the latch of her loin-covering, and left her naked before me, and uncovered my body to her, and went from the room. She was as beautiful as ever, but yet there was no glow of desire upon her: her nipples were soft, her skin did not have the sheen of fleshly fire. This was not the Inanna I had known so long, the woman of unquenchable passion. She stood beside the bed with folded arms and said, “You may stay here or not, as you wish. But you will not have me tonight.”

  “It is the night of the Sacred Marriage. I am the god. You are the goddess.”

  “I will not have the king of Uruk enter my body this night. The wrath of Enlil falls upon Uruk and its king. The Bull of Heaven will be loosed.”

  “Will you destroy your own people?”

  “I will destroy your arrogance,” she said. “I have gone to my knees before Father Enlil—I, the goddess! Father, I said, turn loose the Bull of Heaven to bring down Gilgamesh for me, for Gilgamesh has scorned me. And I said to Enlil that if he did not do this thing, I would smash the door of the nether world and shatter its bolts, I would throw open the gate of hell and raise up the dead to devour the food of the living, and the hosts of the dead in the world would be greater than the number of the living. He yielded to me: he said he would loose the Bull.”

  “Out of anger at me, you bring down years of drought upon Uruk? The people will starve!”

  “There is grain in my warehouses, Gilgamesh. The people have paid their tithes to the goddess, and I have stored grain enough to last through seven years of seedless husks. I have fodder set aside for the cattle. When the hunger strikes, Inanna will be ready to aid her people. But you will already have fallen, Gilgamesh. They will have cast you from your high place, for bringing the wrath of the gods upon them.” Her voice was very calm. She stood naked before me as if it was nothing at all to reveal her body, as if she were only a statue of herself, or I a eunuch. I looked at her and there was nothing I could say or do. If the goddess did not embrace the god in the Sacred Marriage there would be no rain; but how could I force her? It would have been worse, if I had forced her. She told me again, “You may stay or not, as you wish.” But I had no wish to spend the night shivering in the cold gale of her wrath. I gathered my splendid kingly robes and draped them about me and made my way from the temple in sorrow and in fear.

  In the palace I found Enkidu with three concubines, celebrating the night of the Sacred Marriage in his own way. Rivers of dark wine ran across the floor and half-eaten joints of roasted meat were on the table. In great surprise he said, “Why are you back so soon, Gilga
mesh?”

  “Let me be, brother. This is a sad night for Uruk.”

  He did not seem to hear me. “Are you done with your goddess so soon? Why, then, have a goddess or two of mine!” And he laughed; but his laughter died away in a moment, when he saw the wintry bleakness of my face. He shook himself free of the girls who were twined all over him, and came to me and put his hands on my shoulders, and said, “What is this, brother? Tell me what has happened!”

  I told him; and he said, “If this Bull of hers is to be set loose in the city, why, we will have to catch it and put it back in its pen, will we not? Is that not so, Gilgamesh? How can we allow a wild bull to run free in Uruk?” And he laughed again, and threw his arms around me in his great bearish embrace. For the first time that evening my heart rose, and I thought, perhaps we will withstand this: perhaps we can contend successfully with her, Enkidu and I.

  But there was no rain. Day upon day the sky was a sheet of brilliant blue in which Utu’s great eye stared remorselessly down on us. The scorching wind was a knife slicing into the earth, hurling aloft the dry mud of the riverbanks and the sand of the gray and yellow desert beyond. Suffocating dust-clouds fell upon us like shrouds. The barley withered in the fields. The fronds of the palms grew black with dust, and drooped like the wings of crippled birds. Thunder came, and lightning, and dreadful flares of light covered the land like a cloth; but the storms were dry storms, and still there was no rain. Enlil was our enemy. Inanna was our enemy. An ignored us. Utu would not hear us. The people gathered in the streets and cried out, “Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, where is the rain?” and what could I tell them, what could I tell them?

  Then far to the east the earth shook and the hills roared and there came such a belching of flame and foul gas as to make the outpouring of Huwawa seem like a sweet gentle breeze. I had an army of a thousand men in that territory, searching out the places where the Elamites were descending to our domain, and of those thousand men scarce half returned to Uruk. “It was the Bull of Heaven breaking loose,” they told me. “The sky grew dark and black smoke arose, and there was a landslide that roared, and we saw the Bull in the air over our heads. Three times he snorted; and with his first snort he slew a hundred men, and a hundred more with the second, and with the third snort two hundred more. The earth shook, the hills roared, the Bull of Heaven breathed foulness upon us. The smell of it is in our nostrils still. And now the Bull marches upon Uruk.”

  What was I to do? Where could I turn?

  “It is the Bull,” the people cried. “The Bull is upon us!”

  “The Bull still grazes in the temple pasture,” I said. “All will be well. These tribulations soon shall end.”

  And I looked toward the blazing sky, and said inwardly to Lugalbanda, Father, father, go to Enlil, ask him for rain. But there was no rain.

  Inanna kept to her temple. She accepted no petitions, she performed no rites. When the people gathered before the White Platform and begged for mercy, she sent her maidens out with word that they had come to the wrong place, that they should go to Gilgamesh for mercy, for it was Gilgamesh who had brought this evil upon the land. Again, they came to me. But what could I tell them? What could I do?

  The wind grew more fierce. A story arose in the town that this wind that blew was the wind of the nether world, a demon-wind that carried the seeds of death and decay up to us out of the House of Dust and Darkness. I said it was not. It was whispered in the town that there was a curse upon the wells, and they soon would fill with blood, so that the vineyards and palm groves would run red with it. I told them it would not happen. The rumor spread in the town that an army of locusts was flying toward us out of the north, and soon the sky would darken under their wings. They will not come, I said.

  I gave the people grain from my storehouses. I provided fodder for the cattle. But there was not enough, not nearly enough. It is not the province of the king to provide the grain in time of drought and famine; it is the province of Inanna. And Inanna withheld herself from the people, and withheld her grain. Nor did the people hate her for it: she let it be known in the town that Uruk must first be purified, and then she would open her granaries to the needy. They understood. I understood. She meant to bring me down.

  And at the last she loosed the Bull within the confines of the city. I mean the bull that grazed in the temple pasture, the one that embodied in himself the might and majesty of the gods. For twenty thousand years, or twice twenty, there have been bulls in the pasture of Inanna’s temple, great bulls, mighty bulls, giant bulls without equal in the Land; they grow fat and huge on the grain of the temple offerings, and wear garlands of fresh flowers in every season of the land, and heifers are brought to them daily for their pleasure, and when they die—for they do die, even they, these bulls who play the part of the Bull of Heaven—they are buried in the temple grounds with rites worthy of a god. I cannot tell you how many bulls have been buried there in the years of Uruk, but I think that if that pasture were to be ploughed, the ploughman would turn up a sea of horns.

  Never once does the bull leave the pasture of the temple, once he has taken up residence there. Guards are posted night and day to see that that does not happen; and though he snort like Enlil himself, and paw the ground and crash with all his force against the gate, he cannot go free. But on the holy midwinter day, when the drought stood at its worst and the sky was gray with swirling dust and those of us whose senses were most keen could smell the reek of the deadly black outpourings that were rushing into the air from the vents of the Rebel Lands far to the east—on that day when calamity was already rife in Uruk, Inanna turned loose the Bull of Heaven into the streets of the city.

  The outcry of grief and terror that arose was like nothing that had ever been heard in Uruk before. I think that cry must have resounded in Kish; I think they must have heard it in Nippur; perhaps even in the Elamite lands they looked up and said, “What is that awful cry out of the west?”

  In my palace I trembled with dismay and woe. It seemed to me now that I must go to Inanna, and kneel to her, and yield to her, and deliver up the city to her; for otherwise the people all would perish, or else I would be cast down from my high place. It had begun to seem to me that I must after all be responsible for this ruin that had come upon Uruk, that it was I and not Inanna who had brought these evils to the city, even as she was saying. Perhaps the gods were indeed taking their vengeance for the death of Huwawa. Perhaps I had erred in refusing to make the priestess my queen. Perhaps—perhaps—perhaps—

  I had never known such despair as on that day when Inanna’s bull pranced and snorted in the streets of Uruk. It was Enkidu who lifted me from it. He found me grieving in the palace, and drew me up and embraced me and said, “Come, brother, why do you weep? Deliverance is at hand!”

  “Do you not know that the Bull of Heaven is loose in the city?” I asked him.

  “Yes, Gilgamesh, yes, the bull is loose! And this is our moment. Can we turn back the dry winds? Can we call rain from the heavens? Can we turn sand into water? No, no, no, none of those things can we do: but we can kill a bull, brother. We can surely kill a bull. Now at last Inanna has poured all of her fury into a single vessel. Let us go out there, Gilgamesh: let us break that vessel.” His eyes were glittering with excitement. His body throbbed with strength. I took heart from his vigor. I smiled for the first time in I cannot tell you how many days, and I embraced him until he grunted with the force of my embrace. “Come, brother,” he said, and we went out into the dry and dusty streets to seek the Bull of Heaven.

  It was the noon hour. The streets were empty in that terrible heat. But I did not need to ask the way to the bull. Its presence announced itself in the city like the heat of a heated anvil: I felt the red glow of it hot against my cheeks. As did Enkidu, in whom the wisdom of the wilderness still lived. He held his face to the wind, he flared his nostrils wide, he turned his head so that his ears gathered in all sounds; and he pointed, and we went forward. In the district known as the Lion we
saw the dung of the bull fresh in the streets, with a golden aura about it, and blue-headed flies buzzing above it but not daring to touch it. In the district known as the Reed we found the carts of the merchants overturned, and their merchandise strewn in the path, for the bull had come this way. And in the district known as the Hive, where the streets press close upon one another and there is scarcely room to walk, we saw bricks ripped loose from the buildings where the bull had run between them.

  A little while on, we came upon something worse: the cobblestones stained bright with blood, the sounds of bitter sobbing and wailing, and a man and a woman standing like statues, blank-eyed. The man held a child’s broken body in his arms. A boy, I think, four or five years old, who must have darted into the bull’s path. I prayed that Enlil had granted the child a swift death; but what mercy would the god grant the mother and the father? As we ran past, the woman recognized us. Without saying a word she held her hand out toward me, as though to beg me, O king, give me back my son. I could not do that for her. I could give her nothing to ease her sorrow but the blood of the bull, and I did not think that would be enough.

  This little death, I thought, must be tallied to Inanna’s account. Is that how she serves her people, by killing their innocent children with her furious vengeful beast?

  Enkidu and I sped onward, grim-faced, intent. A few moments more and we turned into the great open space known as the Place of Ningal: and there we came upon the bull himself, prancing wildly like a playful calf.

  He was white—all the bulls of the temple are white—and he was huge, and his eyes were rimmed with red, and his horns were long and sharp as spears, but they curved in a strange wicked way almost like the frame of a lyre. I saw splashes of the child’s blood on the hooves of his forelegs, and on his pastern. When we came upon him he smelled our sweat, and halted and turned and glared at us out of eyes that blazed like coals; and he snorted, he stamped, he lowered his head, he seemed to be making ready to charge. Enkidu looked at me, and I at Enkidu. Together we had slain elephants and we had slain lions and we had slain wolves. We had even slain a demon that came belching out of the ground like a column of fire. But we had never slain a bull, and this was a bull enjoying the first heady measure of freedom after too long a captivity. He was full of his own power, and the power of Father Enlil was in him besides; for I did not doubt that this bull was the Bull of Heaven today, just as at certain times Inanna the priestess is Inanna the goddess, and the king of Uruk is Dumuzi the god of the fields. So we caught our breaths and we made ready to meet his thrust, knowing it would not be an easy combat.