To the Land of the Living (7 page)

“Very early, my lord.”

“Earlier than Ch’in Shih Huang Ti? Earlier than the Lords of Shang and Hsia?”

Gilgamesh turned in puzzlement toward Lovecraft, who told him in a half-whisper, “Ancient kings of China. Your time was even before theirs.”

Shrugging, Gilgamesh replied, “They are not known to me, my lord, but you hear what the Britannic ambassador says. He is a man of learning: it must be so. I will tell you that I am older than Caesar by far, older than Amenhotep, older than Belshazzar. By a great deal.”

Yeh-lu Ta-shih considered that a moment. Then he made another of his little gestures of dismissal, as though brushing aside the whole concept of relative ages in the Afterworld. With a dry laugh he said, “So you are very old, King Gilgamesh. I congratulate you. And yet the Ice-Hunter folk would tell us that you and I and your Belshazzar and your Amenhotep, whoever they may be, all arrived here only yesterday; and in the eyes of the Hairy Men, the Ice-Hunters themselves are mere newcomers. And so on and so on. There’s no beginning to it, is there? Any more than there’s an end.”

Without waiting for an answer he asked Gilgamesh, “How did you come by that gory wound, great king of Nothing-at-all?”

“A misunderstanding, my lord. It may be that your border patrol is a little over-zealous at times.”

One of the courtiers leaned toward the emperor and murmured something. Prester John’s serene brow grew furrowed. He lifted a flawlessly contoured eyebrow ever so slightly.

“Killed nine of them, did you?”

“They attacked us before we had the opportunity of showing our diplomatic credentials,” Lovecraft put in quickly. “It was entirely a matter of self-defense, my lord Prester John.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it.” The emperor seemed to contemplate for a moment, but only for a moment, the skirmish that had cost the lives of nine of his horsemen; and then quite visibly he dismissed that matter too from the center of his attention. “Well, now, my lords ambassador –”

Abruptly Gilgamesh swayed, tottered, started to fall. He checked himself just barely in time, seizing a massive porphyry column and clinging to it until he felt more steady. Beads of sweat trickled down his forehead into his eyes. He began to shiver. The huge stone column seemed to be expanding and contracting. Waves of vertigo were rippling through him and he was seeing double, suddenly. Everything was blurring and multiplying. He drew his breath in deeply, again, again, forcing himself to hold on. He wondered if Prester John was playing some kind of game with him, trying to see how long his strength could last. Well, if he had to, Gilgamesh swore, he would stand here forever in front of Prester John without showing a hint of weakness.

But now Yeh-lu Ta-shih was at last willing to extend compassion. With a glance toward one of his pages the emperor said, “Summon my physician, and tell him to bring his tools and his potions. That wound should have been dressed an hour ago.”

“Thank you, my lord,” Gilgamesh muttered, trying to keep the irony from his tone.

The doctor appeared almost at once, as though he had been waiting in an antechamber. Another of Prester John’s little games, perhaps? He was a burly, broad-shouldered, bushy-haired man of more than middle years, with a manner about him that was brisk and bustling but nevertheless warm, concerned, reassuring. Drawing Gilgamesh down beside him on a low divan covered with the gray-green hide of some scaly
hell-dragon, he peered into the wound, muttered something unintelligible under his breath in a guttural language unknown to the Sumerian, and pressed his thick fingers around the edges of the torn flesh until fresh blood flowed. Gilgamesh hissed sharply but did not flinch.

“
Ach mein lieber Freund
, I must hurt you again, but it is for your own good.
Verstehen Sie
?”

The doctor’s fingers dug in more deeply. He was spreading the wound, swabbing it, cleansing it with some clear fluid that stung like a hot iron. The pain was so intense that there was almost a kind of pleasure in it: it was a purifying kind of pain, a purging of the soul.

Prester John said, “How bad is it, Dr Schweitzer?”

“Gott sei Dank
, it is deep but clean. He will heal without damage.”

He continued to probe and cleanse, murmuring softly to Gilgamesh as he worked: “
Bitte. Bitte. Einen Augenblick, mein Freund
.” To Prester John he said, “This man is made of steel. No nerves at all, immense resistance to pain. We have one of the great heroes here,
nicht wahr
? You are Roland, are you? Achilles, perhaps?”

“Gilgamesh is his name,” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih.

The doctor’s eyes grew bright. “Gilgamesh! Gilgamesh of Sumer?
Wunderbar! Wunderbar
! The very man. The seeker after everlasting life.
Ach
, we must talk, my friend, you and I, when you are feeling better.” From his medical kit he now produced a frightful-looking hypodermic syringe. Gilgamesh watched as though from a vast distance, as though that throbbing swollen arm belonged to someone else. “
Ja, ja
, certainly we must talk, of life, of death, of philosophy,
mein Freund
, of
philosophy
! There is so very much for us to discuss!” He slipped the needle beneath Gilgamesh’s skin. “There.
Genug
. Sit. Rest. The healing now begins.”

Robert Howard had never seen anything like it. It could have been something straight from the pages of one of his Conan stories. The big ox had taken an arrow right through the fat part of his arm, and he had simply yanked it out and gone right on fighting. Then, afterward, he had behaved as if the wound were nothing more than a scratch, all that time while they were driving hour after hour toward Prester John’s city and
then undergoing lengthy interrogation by the court officials and then standing through this whole endless ceremony at court – God almighty, what a display of endurance! True, Gilgamesh had finally gone a little wobbly and had actually seemed on the verge of passing out. But any ordinary mortal would have conked out long ago. Heroes really
were
different. They were another breed altogether. Look at him now, sitting there casually while that old German medic swabs him out and stitches him up in that slapdash cavalier way, and not a whimper out of him. Not a whimper!

Suddenly Howard found himself wanting to go over there to Gilgamesh, to comfort him, to let him lean his head back against him while the doctor worked him over, to wipe the sweat from his brow –

Yes, to comfort him in an open, rugged, manly way –

No. No. No. No.

There it was again, the horror, the unspeakable thing, the hideous crawling, the hell-born impulse rising out of the cesspools of his soul –

Howard fought it back. Blotted it out, hid it from view. Denied that it had ever entered his mind.

To Lovecraft he said, “That’s some doctor! Took his medical degree at the Chicago slaughterhouses, I reckon!”

“Don’t you know who he is, Bob?”

“Some old Dutchman who wandered in here during a sandstorm and never bothered to leave.”

“Does the name of Dr Schweitzer mean nothing to you?”

Howard gave Lovecraft a blank look. “Guess I never heard it much in Texas.”

“Oh, Bob, Bob, why must you always pretend to be such a cowboy? Can you tell me you’ve never heard of Schweitzer?
Albert
Schweitzer? The great philosopher, theologian, musician – there never was a greater interpreter of Bach, and don’t tell me you don’t know Bach either –”

“She-it, H.P. Philosopher? Musician? You talking about that old country doctor there?”

“Who founded the leprosy clinic in Africa, at Lambarene, yes. Who devoted his life to helping the sick, under the most primitive conditions, in the most remote forests of –

“Hold on, H.P. That can’t be so.”

“That one man could achieve so much? I assure you, Bob,
he was quite well known in our time – perhaps not in Texas, I suppose, but nevertheless –”

“No. Not that he could do all that. But that he’s here. In the Afterworld. If that old geezer’s everything you say, then he’s a goddamned
saint
. Unless he beat his wife when no one was looking, or something like that. What’s a saint doing in the Afterworld, H.P.?”

“What are
we
doing in the Afterworld?” Lovecraft asked.

Howard reddened and looked away. “Well – I suppose, there were things in our lives – things that might be considered sins, in the strictest sense –”

“What does sin have to do with anything?” Lovecraft asked.

“Well, isn’t this place Hell?”

“Is it?”

“It sure ain’t Heaven, H. P. Even if it does look a whole lot like Texas.”

Lovecraft shook his head. “Heaven. Hell. Who knows? There are those who think that this place where we have found ourselves is Hell, I agree. But I’m not one of them. All we know is that it’s the Afterworld, a life after life. Do you see a Devil with scaly wings and a long tail presiding over the place? Do we live in constant torment?”

“Well –”

“No,” Lovecraft said. “There’s no reason to think of this place as Hell, though some people do. There’s no reason to think of it as anything but the Afterworld. And no one understands the rules of the Afterworld, Bob,” said Lovecraft gently. “Everything’s random here, completely unpredictable. Sin may have nothing to do with it. Gandhi is here, do you realize that? Confucius. Were
they
sinners? Was Moses? Abraham? Those who call it Hell have tried to impose their own pitiful shallow beliefs, their pathetic grade-school notions of punishment for bad behaviour, on this incredibly bizarre place where we find ourselves. By what right? We don’t begin to comprehend what the Afterworld really is. All we know is that it’s full of heroic villains and villainous heroes – and people like you and me – and it seems that Albert Schweitzer is here, too. A great mystery. But perhaps someday –”

“Ssh,” Howard said. “Prester John’s talking to us.”

“My lords ambassador –”

Hastily they turned toward him. “Your majesty?” Howard said.

“This mission that has brought you here: your king wants an alliance, I suppose? What for? Against whom? Quarreling with some pope again, is he?”

“With his daughter, I’m afraid,” said Howard.

Prester John looked bored. He toyed with his emerald scepter. “Mary, you mean?”

“Elizabeth, your majesty,” Lovecraft said.

“Your king’s a most quarrelsome man. I’d have thought there were enough popes in the Afterworld to keep him busy, though, and no need to contend with his daughters.”

“They are the most contentious women in all the After-world,” Lovecraft said. “Blood of his blood, after all, and each of them a queen with a noisy, brawling kingdom of her own. Elizabeth, my lord, is sending a pack of her explorers to the Outback, and King Henry doesn’t like the idea.”

“Indeed,” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih, suddenly interested again. “And neither do I. She has no business in the Outback. It’s not her territory. The rest of the Afterworld should be big enough for Elizabeth. What is she looking for here?”

“The sorcerer John Dee has told her that the way out of the Afterworld is to be found in these parts,” said Lovecraft.

“There is no way out of the Afterworld,” Yeh-lu Ta-shih said quietly.

Lovecraft smiled. “I’m not any judge of that, your majesty. Queen Elizabeth, in any event, has given credence to the notion. Her Walter Ralegh directs the expedition, and the geographer Hakluyt is with him, and a force of five hundred soldiers. They move diagonally across the Outback just to the south of your domain, following some chart that Dr Dee has obtained for them. He had it from Cagliostro, they say, who bought it from one of the Medici, to whom Nero had pawned it.”

Prester John did not appear to be impressed. “Let us say, for argument’s sake, that there
is
an exit from the Afterworld. Why would Queen Elizabeth desire to leave? The After-world’s not so bad. It has its minor discomforts, yes, but one learns to cope with them. Does she think she’d be able to return to the land of the living and reclaim her throne? She’s dead, my friend. We are all dead here, though we have the
semblance of life. There is no other place for us to go. There is no throne waiting for her in another sphere.”

Howard stepped forward. “Elizabeth has no real interest in leaving the Afterworld herself, majesty. What King Henry fears is that if she does find a way out, she’ll claim it for her own and set up a colony around it, and charge a fee for passing through the gate. No matter where it takes you, the king reckons there’ll be millions of people willing to risk it, and Elizabeth will wind up cornering all the money in the Afterworld. He can’t abide that notion, d’ye see? He thinks she’s already too smart and aggressive by half, and he hates the idea that she might get even more powerful. There’s something mixed into it having to do with Queen Elizabeth’s mother, too – that was Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife – she was a wild and wanton one, and he cut her head off for adultery, and now he thinks that Anne’s behind Elizabeth’s maneuvers, trying to get even with him by –”

“Spare me these details,” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih with some irritation. “What does Henry expect me to do?”

“Send troops to turn the Ralegh expedition back before it can find anything useful to Elizabeth.”

“And in what way do I gain from this?”

“If the exit from the Afterworld’s on your frontier, your majesty, do you really want a bunch of Elizabethan Englishmen setting up a colony next door to you?”

“There is no exit from the Afterworld,” Prester John said complacently once again.

“But if they set up a colony anyway?”

Prester John was silent a moment. “I see,” he said finally.

“In return for your aid,” Howard said, “we’re empowered to offer you a trade treaty on highly favorable terms.”

“Ah.”

“And a guarantee of military protection in the event of the invasion of your realm by a hostile power.”

“If King Henry’s armies are so mighty, why does he not deal with the Ralegh expedition himself?”

“There was no time to outfit and dispatch an army across such a great distance,” said Lovecraft. “Elizabeth’s people had already set out before anything was known of the scheme.”