Servant of the Bones (6 page)

“Okay, so we have Gilgamesh tearing up the city of Uruk. And what do the gods do, being the Sumerian gods, being about as smart as a bunch of water buffalo—they make an equal for Gilgamesh in a wild man called Enkido, who is covered with hair, lives in the woods, and likes to drink with beasts—oh, it is so important in this world with whom one eats and drinks and what!—anyway, here we have wild Enkido coming down to the stream to drink with the beasts, and he is rendered tame by spending seven days with a temple harlot!

“Stupid, no? The beasts wouldn’t have anything to do with him once he knew the harlot. Why? Were the beasts jealous
because they didn’t get to lie with the harlot? Don’t beasts copulate with beasts? Are there no beast harlots? Why does copulating with a woman make a man less of a beast? Well, the whole story of Gilgamesh never made any sense anyway except as a bizarre code. Everything is code, is it not?”

“I think you’re right, it’s code,” I said, “but code for what? Keep telling me the story of Gilgamesh. Tell me how your version ended,” I asked. I simply couldn’t resist the question. “You know we have only fragments now, and we don’t have the old script that you had.”

“It ended the same way as your modern versions. Gilgamesh couldn’t resign himself that Enkido could die. Enkido did die, too, though I don’t remember quite why. Gilgamesh acted as if he’d never seen anybody die before, and he went to the immortal who had survived the great flood. The great flood. Your flood. Our flood. Everyone’s flood. With us it was Noah and his sons. With them it was an immortal who lived in the land of Dilmun in the sea. He was the great survivor of the flood. And off to see him, to get immortality, goes this genius Gilgamesh. And that ancient one—who would be the Hebrew Noah for our people—says what? ‘Gilgamesh, if you can stay awake for seven days and nights, you can be immortal.’

“And what happens? Gilgamesh instantly fell asleep. Instantly! He didn’t even wait a day! A night. He keeled over! Smash. Asleep. So that was the end of that plan, except that the immortal widow of the immortal man who had survived the flood took pity on him, and they told Gilgamesh that if he tied stones to his feet and sank down in the sea he could find a plant that, once eaten, gives you eternal youth. Well, I think they were trying to drown the man!

“But our version, as yours, followed Gilgamesh in this expedition. Down he went and he found the plant. Then he comes up again. He goes to sleep. His worst habit apparently, this sleeping…and a snake comes and takes the plant. Ah, what utter sadness for Gilgamesh and then comes the old advice to all:

“ ‘Enjoy your life, fill your belly with wine and food, and
accept
death. The Gods kept
immortality for themselves
,
death is the lot of man.’ You know, profound philosophical revelations!”

I laughed. “I like your telling of it. When you would stand up in the tablet house, did you read it with that same fervor?”

“Oh, always!” he said. “But even then, what did we have? Bits and pieces of something ancient. Uruk had been built thousands of years before. Maybe there was such a real king. Maybe.

“If I have a point in all this right now, let me make it. Madness in kings is common. In fact, I think sanity in kings must be rare. Gilgamesh went crazy. Nabonidus was crazy. You ask me, Pharaoh was crazy in every story I ever heard about him.

“And I understand this. I understand it because I have looked into the face of Cyrus the Persian and into the face of Nabonidus, and I know that kings are alone, utterly alone. I have looked into the face of Gregory Belkin, a king in his own right, and I saw this same isolation and terrible weakness; there is no mother, there is no father, there is no limit to power, and disaster is the portion of kings. I have looked into the face of other kings, but that we will pass over quickly later on, because what I did as the evil Servant of the Bones does not matter now, except that every time I killed a human life, I destroyed a universe, did I not?”

“Perhaps, or you sent the evil flame home to be cleansed in the great fire of God.”

“Ah, that is beautiful,” he said to me.

I was complimented. But did I believe this?

“So, let’s go on with my life,” he said. “I worked at the Court as soon as I left the tablet house, and then my writing and reading were of the utmost importance. I knew all languages. I saw many strange documents and old letters in Sumerian and was useful to the King’s regent, Belshazzar. No one much cared for Belshazzar, as I said. He couldn’t hold the New Year’s Festival, or the priests didn’t want him, or Marduk wouldn’t do it, who knows, but he wasn’t destined to be loved.

“Yet I can’t say this made for a bad atmosphere in the
palace. It was fairly congenial and of course the correspondence was endless. Letters were pouring in from the outlying territories complaining about the Persians being on the march, or about the Egyptians being on the march, or about the stars as seen by various astrologists predicting very bad or good things for the King.

“I became acquainted in the palace with the wise men who advised the King on everything, and liked listening to them, and realized that when Marduk spoke to me, sometimes the wise men could hear it. And I also came to know that the story of the smile had never been forgotten. Marduk had smiled on Azriel.

“Well, what secrets I had.

“So look. I am walking home. I am nineteen. I have very little time left to live and I don’t know it. I said to Marduk, How could the wise men hear it when you talk to me? He said that these men, these wise men, were seers and sorcerers just as were some of our Hebrews, our prophets, our wise men, though nobody wanted much to admit it, and they had the power as I did to hear a spirit.

“He sighed and he said to me in Sumerian that I must take the utmost care. ‘These men know your powers.’

“I’d never heard Marduk sound dejected. We had long ago passed the foolish point of me asking him for favors or to play tricks on people, and now we talked more about things all the time, and he frequently said that he could see more clearly through my eyes. I didn’t know what this meant, but on this day when he seemed dejected I was worried.

“ ‘My powers!’ I said sarcastically. ‘What powers! You smiled. You are the god!’

“Silence, but I knew he was still there. I could always feel him, like heat; I heard him like breath. You know, the way a blind person knows that someone is there.

“I got to my front door and was ready to go in, and I turned around and for the first time I actually laid eyes on him. I saw Marduk. Not the gold statuette in my room. Not the big statues in the temple. But Marduk, himself.

“He was standing against the far wall, arms folded, one
knee bent, just looking at me. It was Marduk. He was completely covered in gold as he was at the shrine but he was alive and his curly hair and beard seemed not made of solid gold as they were on the statue but living gold. His eyes were browner than mine, that is, paler, with more yellow in the irises. He smiled at me.

“ ‘Ah, Azriel,’ he said. ‘I knew it would happen. I knew it.’ And then he came forward and he kissed me on both cheeks. His hands were so smooth. He was my height, and I was right, there was a great resemblance between us, though his eyebrows were set just a bit higher than mine and his forehead was smoother, so he didn’t look so mischievous or ferocious by nature as I did.

“I wanted to throw my arms around him. He didn’t wait for me to say it. He said, ‘Do it, but for that moment maybe others will see me too.’

“I hugged him as my oldest friend, as the dearest to me in the world next to my father, and it was that night I made the mistake of telling my father that I talked with my god all the time. I should never have done it. I wonder now what would have happened if I had not done that.”

I interrupted. “Did anyone else see him, to the best of your knowledge?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, they did. The doorkeeper of our house saw him and all but fainted dead away to see a man all covered in gold paint, and one of my sisters looking down from the lattice above saw him too, and an elder of the Hebrews got a glimpse of him for a moment and came flying at me later that night with his staff, claiming he had seen me with a devil or an angel, and he did not know which.

“That’s when my father, my beloved, sweet, good-hearted father said, ‘It was Marduk, Babylon’s god, whom you saw.’ And maybe that is why…that is why, we are here now. My father never meant to hurt me. Never. He never meant to do a cruel thing to anyone in his life! He never meant it! He was…he was my little brother.

“Let me explain. I have figured it out. I was the eldest son, born when my father was young, because the deportation from
Jerusalem had been hard on our people and they married quickly to have sons.

“But my father was the baby of his family, the little Benjamin beloved by everyone, and somehow or other in our family I fell into being his elder brother, and treating him as such. As eldest son I bossed him about a bit. Or rather, we became…we became as friends.

“My father worked hard. But we were close. We drank together. We went to the taverns together. We shared women together. And I told him, drunk that night, how Marduk had talked to me for years, and how now I had seen him, and my personal god was the great god of Babylon himself.

“So foolish to have done it! What good could have come of it! At first he laughed, then he worried, then he became engrossed. Oh, I never should have done it. And Marduk knew this. He was in the tavern but so far from me that he had no visibility, he was vaporous and golden like light, and only I could see him, and he shook his head ‘no,’ and turned his back when I told my father. But you know, I loved my father, and I was so happy! And I wanted him to know. I wanted him to know how I had put my arms around the god!

“Stupid!

“Let me return to the background. The foreground is suddenly too hot for me and it hurts me and stings my eyes.

“The family. I was telling you what we were. We were rich merchants and we were scribes of our Sacred Books. All of the Hebrew tribes in Babylon were in one way or another scribes of the Sacred Books and busy making copies for their own families at all times, but with us it was a very large business because we were known for the rapid and accurate copy. And we had a huge library of old texts. I think I told you, we had maybe, I don’t know, twenty-five different stories about Joseph and Egypt and Moses and so forth, and it was always a matter of dispute what to include and what not to. We had so many stories of Joseph in Egypt that we decided not to give all of them credit. I wonder what became of all those tablets, all those scrolls. We just didn’t think all those stories were true. But maybe we were wrong. Oh, who knows?

“But to return to the fabric of my life. Whenever I left the court of the palace, or the tablet house, or the marketplace, I came right home to work all evening on the Holy Scriptures, with my sisters and my cousins and uncles in the scriptoria of our houses, which were big rooms.

“As I told you, I was never very quiet, and I would sing the psalms out loud as I wrote them, and this irritated my deaf uncle more than anyone. I don’t know why. He was deaf! And besides, I have a good voice.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Why should a deaf uncle get so upset? But he knew I was singing the psalms not as I just sang that one for you, but as one would sing, with cymbals, dancing, you know, with a little bit of added dash, shall we say, and he wasn’t so happy about it.

“He said that we were to write when we were to write and to sing the Lord’s songs at the appropriate time. I shrugged and gave in but I was one for cutting up all the time. But I’m giving the wrong impression. I wasn’t really bad…”

“I know what kind of man you are, and were then…”

“Yes, I think by now you do, and maybe if you thought me bad you would have thrown me out in the snow.”

He looked at me. His eyes weren’t ferocious. The brows were low and thick, but the eyes were plenty big enough beneath them to give him a pretty look. And, it seemed to me that he was warmer and more relaxed now than earlier, and I felt drawn to him and wanting to hear everything he said.

But I wondered: Could I throw him out in the snow?

“I’ve taken many lives,” he said, plucking the thought right from me, “but I would not hurt you, Jonathan Ben Isaac, you know that. I wouldn’t hurt such a man as you. I killed assassins. At least when I came to myself that was my code of honor. That is my code now.

“In my early days as the Servant of the Bones, as the bitter, angry ghost for the powerful sorcerer, I killed the innocent because it was my Master’s will and I thought I had to do it, I thought that the man who had called me up could control me, and I did his bidding, until the moment came when I suddenly
realized that I did not have to be a slave forever, that maybe though my soul had been taken from my spirit, and my spirit and soul from my flesh, that perhaps I could still be pleasing to God. That somehow all could come and be united once more in one figure! Ah!”

He shook his head.

“But Azriel, maybe it’s happened!”

“Oh, Lord God, Jonathan, don’t give me consolation. I cannot bear it. Just hear me out. Make sure your tapes record my words. Remember me. Remember what I say…”

His confidence broke suddenly. He looked at the fire again.

“My family, my father,” he said. “My father! How it hurt him what he finally did, and how he looked at me. Do you know what he said about hurting me? He said, ‘Azriel, who of all my sons loves me as you do? No one else could ever forgive me for this but you!’ And he meant it. He meant it, my father, my little brother, looking at me full of tears and sincerity and absolute conviction!

“I’m sorry. I jump ahead. I’ll die soon enough. It won’t take too many more pages, I don’t think.” He shuddered all over. And again the tears stood in his eyes. “Forgive me, and recall again that for those thousands of years, I didn’t remember these things. I was the bitter ghost without memory. And now it has all come back to me and I pour it out to you. I pour it out to you in tears.”

“Continue. Give me your tears, your trust, and your hurt. I won’t fail you.”