To the Land of the Living (36 page)

“A very wealthy land, they tell me, with splendid green lawns and fine houses, ruled over by a committee of eighteen kings.”

“A committee of kings! Madness!”

“They say it works very well for them.”

“And this scroll – from Her Serene Greatness, the Artemis of New Crete – and this, from His Transylvanian Excellency, Vlad the Fifth – and here’s another, on vellum, no less, from – what does it say? Do you call this stuff writing? Jigme Phakpa Chenrezi the Totally Compassionate, High Lama of –” Testily Gilgamesh pushed the stack aside and said, “Who are all these kings and queens and sultans and lamas, anyway? Where do their territories lie? Does anyone who can find five fools to follow him proclaim himself a monarch nowadays? I don’t believe all these places exist! Bring me a map! Show me where these ambassadors come from!”

“Surely you haven’t forgotten, Gilgamesh, that there are certain problems inherent in the use of maps,” Herod pointed out. “They provide very untrustworthy information, to say the least.”

Color rose in the Sumerian’s face. In his fury he had forgotten just that.

“Well, yes, perhaps some maps do,” Gilgamesh growled. “But there have to be some that are more reliable. And even an untrustworthy map is better than no map at all. Find me Mercator, and have him draw me a chart.”

“Who?”

“Mercator, he was called. I knew him a hundred years ago, or two, in Persepolis Khaikosru, where he was in the service of the Shah, and spent all his days sitting in a tavern and
scrawling maps on strips of leather. Or there was another one, a Greek, Herodotus, talked from morning to night without stopping, but at least he told marvelous stories, and he had traveled in every land there is. Maybe you can find him. If not them, someone else. Send out the word through Uruk for a mapmaker.”

Mercator could not be found, nor Herodotus; but in a few days’ time Herod brought Gilgamesh a certain disreputable-looking dark little man with a lame leg and bleak, ferocious eyes, a Later Dead but dressed in an old-fashioned way for a Later Dead, very somber. He gave his name as Ferno de Magalhaes, a Portuguese, known to the Spaniards, he said, by the name of Magallanes, and he said he knew something of geography.

“Are you a mapmaker, then?” Gilgamesh asked.

Magalhaes gave him a smoldering look. “I was a user of maps, not a maker of them. A mariner, a man of the sea, a captain. I sailed around the world once, or nearly.”

“Around this world?” Gilgamesh said, eyebrows rising.

“Around this world there is no sailing, for it never ends. The one I spanned was the true one,” said Magalhaes. “Across its belly from end to end, even if God did not allow me to go the whole way, even though others finished the voyage after I was slain; but the glory was mine. The idea was mine; the plan was mine; the execution was mine; the leadership was mine. The achievement was mine.”

His eyes blazed. Perhaps he is a little unbalanced, Gilgamesh thought. But falling just short of encompassing so great a goal might unhinge anyone. To sail around the world! There was real strength in the man, no question of that. Besides, most people he had met in the Afterworld struck him as unbalanced. Gilgamesh still could not quite understand how sailing around the world might be accomplished, considering the problems that one would encounter when one came to the edge; but if this man said that he had done it, well, then very likely he had.

“Can you sketch me a map?” he asked.

“Of the true world?”

“Of this one,” said Gilgamesh.

Magalhaes scowled. “Much good it will do you. This is a damnable place where no latitude will hold, and the compass is only a toy.”

“I know that. Nevertheless, I have need of a map. To show me the general outlines of the world and the many kingdoms within it, even if the specifics are not quite right, or if they change beneath my gaze.”

“You’d do as well navigating by the lines in the palm of your hand,” said Magalhaes. “But yes, yes, I’ll sketch a map for you, if that’s what you want. Here – here, give me a pen, give me a scroll of leather –”

Muttering to himself, he set swiftly to work on a stretched hide, drawing great swirling arcs that surged boldly out to right and left. “Here,” he said, “here we have the White Sea, and this is the black one, and over here the land of Dis. This is what we call the Great Unending, down here, where you can sail forever and never see land. Many brave men have been lost there, and many fools. Of course, it is sometimes hard to tell one from the other. And this here” – a sweeping flourish of his pen – “this is the central continent, where we find ourselves now. Sometimes it has other shapes, but this is how I knew it when I went along its coast the entire length with the Norseman Harald, some many years back. Here: this is Nova Roma, here, by the far coast. And this is the Crystal Peninsula, and this, the Strait of Ghosts, as narrow and cold and evil as that strait I found in the frozen southern ocean of the other world, long ago. And here – here – here –” Magalhaes drew mountains, and rivers, and enormous lakes. He sketched in the vast dry reaches of the Outback, and the isle of Brasil, and Uruk itself, up in the top corner beyond the Outback’s western edge. He put in the names of other cities: Cambaluc, Novo Lisboa, Niemals Nunca, Tintagel, New South Brooklyn, Ciudad Meshugah, Akhetaten, Valhalla.

“The Perfect Aryan Republic,” Gilgamesh said. “Where is that?”

“Here, I think.”

Gilgamesh nodded. At last he was beginning to get some grasp of the shape of the other territories of this world with which he would have to deal.

“And the New Ottoman Sultanate?”

Magalhaes pointed to the southern reaches of the Outback. “Here, very likely.”

Gilgamesh consulted his stack of ambassadorial documents. “And the Rolling Acres Country Club?”

Magalhaes was silent. After a long moment’s thought he tapped the scroll and said, “Here, so I recall. Close by Adonai Elohim. But is it to the east of it? No, the west – definitely the west – let me see, I was journeying from the coast, and I came first to Adonai Elohim, and then –” He closed his eyes. “The places move about. There is no certainty.” Rage flared up suddenly in him. “This map I have drawn for you is worthless, King Gilgamesh!”

“No,” Gilgamesh said. “It may have some flaws, perhaps, but it gives me a far better idea of –”

“Worthless! Worthless!” Magalhaes was trembling. He could barely contain his wrath. “Do you know what a curse it is for a man like me, to travel back and forth upon the face of the world and never twice to know where I have been, nor where I am going? To try to set my course by the stars, and see them shaping themselves into mocking faces above me? To have the sun rise here one day, and on the other side the next? There is no sense to it! There is no honor!”

Quietly Herod said, “Would you like a little wine?”

“It would help, perhaps,” said Magalhaes.

He was calmer after drinking. His map, he said, did not look so bad to him after all. It would do. There were doubtful things in it, and things that were maddeningly imprecise, and things that he had once known to be true that he suspected were true no longer; but, all in all, he said, he had done the best he could, considering the obstacles, and he doubted that Gilgamesh would find the job done any better anywhere else.

“So I feel also,” said Gilgamesh. “It is a splendid map, my friend. Now, if you would just mark in the location of New Crete, and the Grand Dionysian Realm –”

After the rains came a long dry period of searing heat, when the sun scarcely seemed to set at all, and the fields around Uruk shriveled and turned brown. The air itself seemed to burn, and when Gilgamesh rode out beyond the walls with Enkidu to hunt they found no beasts out there except scrawny pitiful lurking things, all bones and mange. But there was wheat stored in the granaries of Uruk against such a time of hard times, and no one went hungry, though Vy-otin reported that the people were grumbling a little over the tight hand that Gilgamesh kept on the supplies of food.

“Let them grumble,” Gilgamesh said. “Those who don’t think they’re getting enough to eat can move on to greener fields, if they can find any. Let them go to the Amazons. Let them go to Rolling Acres.”

“Let them eat cake,” Herod said.

“What? But we have no cake for them! Where would we find cake, when we barely have bread?”

“Never mind,” said the Judaean. “It was only a joke.”

Gilgamesh shook his head. “A joke that makes no sense. Cake? What’s funny about cake?”

“I can explain it later,” Vy-otin offered.

“You? How would you know what he means? Is this something you two picked up from your Later Dead friends? I expect no more from Herod, but you, Vy-otin, you –!”

Herod sputtered, “By the Mass, Gilgamesh, I tell you it was only –”

Just then Enkidu entered the royal chamber. Brusquely waving Herod into silence, Gilgamesh turned to him and said, “Cake, Enkidu. Let them eat cake.”

“What?”

“It is the newest joke. It comes by way of Herod.”

Enkidu blinked. “Am I missing something? Let them eat cake? That doesn’t sound like a joke to me.”

“It is Later Dead, and too subtle for the likes of us.”

“For the love of Allah, Gilgamesh!” Herod cried. “Will you let me tell you the story, so you’ll understand? There was a queen in France – France is a Later Dead kingdom, in Europe, near what they call Germany and Spain – and things were very troubled in France in this queen’s time, most of the populace was going hungry, and –”

Enkidu said, “Tell it to us afterward, Herod. I have news for the king. There is an army just outside the city.”

“An army?” Gilgamesh asked, eyes going wide. “What kind of army?”

“A very ragged and weary one, brother. Four or five hundred men, and some women, and from the looks of them they’re on their last legs. Some farmers drilling for water found them a couple of hours ago, half dead of thirst and starvation. They’re camped a couple of leagues out in the desert and they ask permission to enter.”

“This is not an army,” said Gilgamesh. “This is merely a band of harmless pitiful stragglers, I think.”

“Unless they’ve got a Trojan horse with them,” Herod said.

“A what? Is this another of your Later Dead jokes?”

“Not Later Dead, Gilgamesh,” Vy-otin said. “What Herod’s talking about is older stuff than that – one of Homer’s stories this time. When the Greeks were laying siege to the city of Troy, they realized they could enter the city only by deception, and so they built a giant horse of wood, which –”

Gilgamesh gave the one-eyed man a peculiar look. “Wait a minute. You’re supposed to be – what is the word? –
prehistoric
. You are – am I right? –
Pleistocene
. How do you know so much of Greeks and their war with Troy? All that was long after
my
time, let alone yours!”

“But this is the world I live in. The other one was only a moment very long ago, and this one is forever. Therefore this is the world that is real to me, and the other was like a dream. I’ve kept up with things. Should I not know something of the history of the people I have to deal with every day, Gilgamesh? Shouldn’t you?”

“Go easy on him,” Herod murmured. “History comes and goes in all our minds, like a fever. He’s having a forgetful time of it just now.”

“Ah,” said Vy-otin. “Yes. Of course.”

Gilgamesh said, annoyed, “Is the point of all this that we are supposed to fear treachery from this raggle-tag bunch of strangers?”

“That was Herod’s notion, not mine,” Enkidu said. “From the information I have, they’re in very bad shape and not likely to make any trouble for us.”

“Except that they come to a city that’s already in the midst of a drought and a famine,” Herod said. “Do we need to take them in? Five hundred more thirsty throats? Five hundred more empty bellies?”

“We are civilized here,” said Gilgamesh coldly. He nodded toward Enkidu. “Take a hundred border patrolmen, brother, and find out who these people are and what they want. And whether they have brought any wooden horses with them.”

“Sir Walter?” Hakluyt whispered. “D’ye be awake, Sir Walter?”

Cautiously Ralegh opened his eyes. It was a painful business: the lids were tender as a babe’s, blistered from the sun and the glare off the endless sand. His armor lay discarded beside him; he wore only a jerkin and felt-trimmed leggings. He raised his head. That was a painful business too. This whole expedition has been a painful business, he thought.

“What is it, Richard, you damnable whoreson baboon?”

The little geographer was flushed with excitement. He was bobbing and jigging giddily about, and waving something wildly. “The map, Sir Walter! It can be read again!”

“
What?
” Ralegh sat up abruptly, awake and attentive all at once. “God’s ears, Hakluyt, if you’re deceiving me –”

“Look. Here.” Hakluyt held up the thing he had been waving, a worn, tattered, all-too-familiar scroll of rolled-up leather, and undid its laces. With quivering hands he pushed it forward, practically into Ralegh’s face. “It’s being this close to Uruk that did it, I think. The map has regained its vitality from proximity to the city, perhaps owing to some spell that Dr Dee laid upon it before we left, and –”

“
Dee!
” Ralegh cried, and spat. “May his lungs turn to water! May his beard grow inward upon his lips, that dastardly sorcerer! Assuring me that this map was a perfect one, that he had witched it so that it would never lead us astray –”

“But look at it,” Hakluyt said.

Ralegh peered at the scroll, squinting and shading his eyes, straining to make out the markings it bore. He was surprised that Hakluyt had kept the villainous thing at all, after all the months – or had it been years? – since it had faded in a moment and gone perfectly blank. But in truth it did seem to be covered once again with some sort of writing now. Some new diabolical deception? Or the true map that once had been? So it seemed to be, the true original, as well as he could recall it. Yes, there it all was again, miraculously restored, pale red ink on dark brown leather: the entire track that they had followed in this foolhardy adventure, which had seen them marching in circles for year after year, more years than he had kept certain count of, searching for something that probably did not exist. There was Her Majesty’s domain proudly outlined in the north, and grim old King Henry her father’s territory not far from it, and the dread sprawl of the Outback, Prester John’s kingdom and the one of Mao Tse-tung and all the rest of the
dominions of those frantic little princelings of the desert, and at the far western edge an eerie scarlet glow emanating from the leather to mark the isle of Brasil, where the traitorous magician Dr Dee claimed it would be possible to find the route that led to the land of the living.