To the Land of the Living (41 page)

“So it is a drug that sends us there, then?” Gilgamesh asked. “The same one by which Calandola opened us to the Knowing?”

“It is nothing like that,” said the Hairy Man.

He set three white porcelain pots out before them. They were in one of the loftiest rooms of the palace, a bare stark room with mere slits for windows, through which only the faintest trickle of light could enter, and a wisp of hot wind. Gilgamesh glanced at Enkidu, who already held his pot in his hand and was vigorously rubbing the stuff on his face. Helen, too, was beginning to bedeck herself with it. Yet he himself held back from taking up the salve. It surprised him, that at this late moment he would find himself holding back. That he still hesitated, Gilgamesh knew, was a measure of the changes that had come over his spirit in this latest life of his: he who once had hesitated at nothing now stared at the little white porcelain pot as if it held some dire poison that would burn the flesh from his bones.

To the Hairy Man he said, “Tell me only –”

“Tell me, tell me, always tell me! No more questions, King Gilgamesh. Just go. Go!”

“Yes, brother!” Enkidu called. “We must all depart together!”

“Yes,” said Gilgamesh. “So we must.”

He picked up the pot. It was warm, and a powerful fragrance came from it, which was like honey and wine and the oil of roses, but which had in it also some sharp fierce spice that stung his nostrils, and something else, a troublesome heavy aroma, dark and musty and strange. The other two were nearly done with their anointing now. Gilgamesh scooped some of the salve on to his fingers and brought it to his face. He thought for a moment of that time when Calandola had anointed him with a strange oil, and given him a stranger wine to drink, and then a frightful meat to eat, and he remembered all that had come from that ominous rite. Well, so be it: come now what may, he was bound on this adventure, he would not hold back from it any longer. He smeared the ointment on his cheeks, and felt it sting, but not painfully, and rubbed it on his throat, and on his forehead,
until the pot was empty, and the fragrance of the stuff was rising to his nose and traveling deep down into his lungs.

Almost immediately he felt a dizziness, and a constriction of the throat. He swayed and steadied himself, and swayed again. There was a great stillness in the room. He had expected rustlings and hissings and dronings, dream-sounds, witch-sounds, some sinister music in the air, the beating of batwings, the cries and howls of monsters. But there was nothing. Nothing. Only a weird clarity of perception, and a mighty silence that might have been the silence of the moon.

He looked across to Enkidu and Helen. They stood apart from one another, staring as though gazing into an endless nothingness. Of the Hairy Man there was no sign.

“Brother?” Gilgamesh called. “I feel myself leaving, brother. Will you follow me?”

But he could not hear the sound even of his own voice, nor did Enkidu respond.

Now he no longer saw the others at all. He was alone on some barren plain under an empty sky. To his back was a single enormous rock, mountain-high. Before him yawned the abyss, the fissure that lies between the worlds. And on the rim of the abyss rose a tree of incomprehensible height that had no leaves, only bare rigid branches that were themselves each the thickness of a tremendous tree, jutting from it like the rungs of a ladder.

He knew what this tree was. It was the
axis mundi,
the world pole, the Tree of Life about which all else revolves, with its roots at the core of creation and its branches rising beyond the roof of the sky. And he must climb it to reach the land of the living.

Seizing the lowest branch, he swung himself upward.

It was easy enough at first. Reach up, catch the branch just above, pull yourself to it, pause a moment with both arms hooked over it, then a stretch and a heave and one leg up, and then the other, and halt a moment and go on, up and up and up. Climb and climb and climb, until you have climbed beyond this world into the one that adjoins it.

Up. Up. Up.

But as he rose he found himself also descending. The tree seemed to go in both directions at once, so that each upward move – and now he saw the North Star shining with a cold
savage light far overhead – carried him downward as well, into the dark airless abyss, into the great mother-vault of the cosmos. He did not try to comprehend it. At the axis of the world who could understand anything? If the way out was also the way in, so be it. So be it. He continued to climb, rung after rung after rung. The wood was smooth and cold against his hands. Now he could no longer tell in which direction he was going; he was in a cleft of the earth, a twisted subterranean passage, and at the same time he was far above the ground, high overhead in a star-seared region of chill winds and eternal night.

It was a time outside a time, a space outside of space. He was deep in the womb of the world. He was close to the roof of the sky.

He knew that he was making the crossing now from one world to another.

There was brightness ahead. The tree was no longer bare here: it was blossoming wildly, a burst of blood-red blooms, and when he looked down Gilgamesh saw the ground beneath the tree carpeted in red by the fallen petals, as though a blood-sacrifice had taken place there. He moved more swiftly in this zone of the tree, where the branches were not as thick and he could grasp one entirely in his hand. Scarlet petals fluttered all about him, clinging to his hair, his face, his shoulders, cloaking him.

He could climb no higher now. He could delve no deeper.

For an instant that stretched until it encompassed all of eternity, the world was still with a stasis that went beyond that of death itself.

Then the silence suddenly broke, and about him all was a storm of noise and light and motion and vibration. So stunned was he by the fury of it all, coming as he had from that eerie realm of stillness, that his first impulse was to crouch down and cover himself and wait for the onslaught of sensation to sweep over him and go past. But he forced himself to stand and stare and gape.

He thought in that first dazzled moment that he had emerged somehow in Nova Roma, that bustling lunatic city which had embodied for him all the worst that the Later Dead had brought with them to the Afterworld. But no, no, this place was far more dreadful even than Nova Roma. Nova
Roma was an isle of tranquility next to this. He was in some nightmare land. He had passed through the portal of worlds only to come forth into some place of terrible frenzy and turmoil, hideous beyond belief, a hellish realm that looked like no city he had ever seen.

All about him were colossal jutting buildings, no two alike, that swept upward into the sky like mighty palisades. They were so tall that Gilgamesh could not understand how they could stand without toppling, and as he stared in disbelief toward their distant summits it seemed to him that in another moment they must come thundering down.

The air was thin and harsh, with a knife-like edge to it, and the first few breaths he took were nauseating before he grew accustomed to its flavor. The sky was a pale murky iron-gray, what little could be seen of it between the lofty building-tops. He was on some broad, straight boulevard, choked with swiftly moving traffic. To his right and left he saw lesser streets, crossing the main one at right angles in a constricted, obsessively rigid way, as though they had been put there by some maniacal mathematician. The ground shook, perhaps under the impact of the astounding phalanxes of loud smoky vehicles that went roaring by without a halt. He seemed to be wearing some sort of Later Dead garb, close and chafing and awkward.

Swarms of people clad in grotesque Later Dead costumes similar to his rushed past him like desperate soldiers late for battle, shouting in ragged voices, gesturing furiously, jostling him, pushing their way around him as he stood frozen in the midst of the flow.

He looked about. The building just behind him, one of the tallest, appeared to be made of plates of some sheenless white metal, rising in stepped stages, tower growing out of tower. That was strange in itself, a metal building. The dull pallid
plates that formed the hide of the thing, which seemed so flimsy that he could put his finger right through them, were stamped all over with repetitive ornamentation in low relief, not in any way pleasing – tawdry, in fact. There was no true gateway, only a cavernous opening that led to a wide hall. Angry hordes of hard-eyed people were rushing through it toward smaller entrances within, or into glass-walled shops at ground level that displayed sleek, incomprehensible Later Dead merchandise.

Beyond this building were others, of metal of every color, of stone, of glass. He saw one a few streets away, broad and not so tall as the others, that might have been a temple or a palace: it was of pale gray stone, and not too different in design from the structure that Dumuzi had erected for himself in Afterworld-Uruk, with great arched doorways and twin spires rising above its intricate facade. Beyond that was another tower of shimmering burnished bronze, or so it seemed, so massive that surely the gods themselves would be angered by its size. And beyond that, another, almost as huge, and another, and another–

There was a fierce roaring in his head.

Why did they have to build everything so close, and so high? He could never have imagined a city landscape of such brutal intensity. Not a bit of grass in sight, not a tree. And the noise, the frenzied pace, the bleak harried faces he saw all about him –

Could this place truly be the land of the living? Or had he been deceived, and was this the Pit, the Depths, the Ultimate Abyss, that he had landed in?

– “Jesus, will you look at the
size
of him!”

– “You got the time, mister? Hey, mister? You there, mister?”

– “For Christ’s sake, don’t just
stand
there blocking the whole fucking street –”

– “You want Walkmans, half price? Brand new, still in the original package. We got wristwatches, genuine Rolex, you wouldn’t believe the price, right here – maybe a portable TV, Sony 2-inch screen –”

– “Mommy? Mommy?”

– “A little spare change to help the homeless?”

– “Excuse me”

– “Excuse me –”

– “Hey, you big bozo, get outa the fucking
way!
”

– “Kosher dog? Polish sausage? Falafel?”

– “Please take one. All the news of the coming Messiah, and may God bless you –”

– “Mommy?”

– “All I need is half a buck for a subway token, maybe you could help out a little –”

– “Christ, don’t just
stand
there –”

If he could, he would have sought out the tree that grows between the worlds, and clambered back down into the familiar realm he had so rashly left behind. But there was no sign of that tree here, nor of any other. Whatever this place might be, Gilgamesh saw no immediate way of escaping from it. Nor either of the companions with whom he had made the crossing.

He stared into the swarming throngs all about him.

“Enkidu?”

Nothing.

“Enkidu? Can you hear me? Enkidu? Enkidu?”

That it was another world he had no doubt. Very likely it was indeed the land of the living, transformed beyond all recognition by the passing of the thousands of years since last he had walked it, and not merely some nightmare vision brought on by the Hairy Man’s salve. The sun was yellow, as he remembered it to have been in the other world of his first birth, and not reddish. The vehicles in the street were much like those he knew from the cities of the Later Dead in the Afterworld, although subtly different in style, which was only to be expected. Everyone here was dressed in the same way, more or less: there was none of the wide range of costume and appearance and manner, that random mixture of every era and every nation, that one saw everywhere in the cities of the Afterworld. Above all, everything that was not in motion seemed solid, leaden, fixed securely in its place. The facades of the buildings did not shift about with that dreamlike mutability that he associated with the Afterworld, the streets did not seem likely to alter their paths, everything was firm, rigid, steady.

Nor did he see any of the demon-creatures, great and small, that flew and slithered and crawled and leaped and danced all through the Afterworld, both in the cities and the countryside. The only animals here seemed to be dogs – dogs of strange breed, nothing much like those he knew from the Afterworld – which, tethered on leashes, accompanied some of the passers-by in the streets. One of them, a great dark hound with stiff upturned ears, paused to growl at Gilgamesh and paw the pavement in sudden motiveless rage, and it was all Gilgamesh could do to keep himself from springing at the beast and slashing its throat with his knife.

But he had no knife. Nor did he have his bow. He was altogether unarmed, he realized; and it made him feel worse than naked.

The great strange tree had been easier to climb than Helen had expected. Looking up at it, she had thought it would be beyond her strength to clamber from one immense branch to the next, but once she began the ascent she found it almost like floating.

Very odd, to be floating higher and higher, and yet to seem at the same time to be going down and down some immense staircase–

Well, it was done. And here she was. No Enkidu, no Gilgamesh – just throngs of ugly little Later Dead people, rushing about in the busy street like madmen. And the air was chilly, with a biting wind blowing. It was windier here even than in Troy, and the air was filthy, too, carrying with it a burden of dust and dirt that she feared would scour and score her skin if she stayed out in it much longer. But the huge buildings were impressive, at any rate, vast shining towers that looked like the dwellings of gods. And she liked the excitement of the place, the tempo, the hard throbbing beat of it. She knew she would be all right here.

But first she had to find Enkidu, somehow–

The building nearest her looked like a government house of some kind, or perhaps a holy building. It was a wide low structure of grey stone, rising at the corner of two large avenues on a high plaza-like pedestal set with broad steps. Despite the cold, people were sitting on the steps, reading or talking or simply staring at the passing crowds in the street
below. At either side of the plaza she saw stone statues of two idols, lion-gods, mounted on low pedestals of their own.