To the Land of the Living

by Robert Silverberg

  “Ah, and is that something new?” Rummaging absentmindedly in a pile of legal documents, Picasso found one with a blank side and began quickly to draw a caricature of his friend, the high forehead, the thick glasses, the soft fleshy throat. A little to his surprise he saw that what he was drawing was the old pedantic Sabartés of the last years on Earth, not the incongruously young Bohemian Sabartés who in fact stood before him now. And then the sketch changed with half a dozen swift inadvertent strokes and became not Sabartés but a demon with fangs and a flaming snout. Picasso crumpled it and tossed it aside. To Sabartés he said, “She will be here soon. Do you have anything you must tell me?”

  “Then it is the woman, Pablo.”

  “She is splendid, is she not?”

  “They were all splendid. La Belle Chelita was splendid, the one from the strip-tease place. Fernande was splendid. Eva was splendid. Marie-Therese was splendid. Dora Maar was—”

  “Basta, Sabartés!”

  “I mean no offense, Pablo. It is only that I see now that Picasso has chosen once more a new woman, a woman who is as fine as the ones who went before her, and—”

  “You will call me Ruiz, brother.”

  “It is hard,” said Sabartés. “It is so very hard.”

  “Ruiz was my father’s name. It is an honest name for calling me.”

  “The world knew you as Picasso. All of the Afterworld will know you as Picasso too as time goes along.”

  Picasso scowled and began a new sketch of Sabartés, which began almost at once to turn without his being able to prevent it into a portrait of El Greco, elongated face and deep-set sorrowful eyes, and then, maddeningly, into the face of a goat. Again he threw the sheet aside. He would not mind these metamorphoses if they were of his own choosing. But this was intolerable, that he could not control them. Painting, he had liked to tell people in his life before this life, is stronger than I am. It makes me do what it wants. But now he realized that he must have been lying when he said that; for it was finally happening to him, just that very thing, and he did not like it at all.

  He said, “I prefer now to be known as Ruiz. That way none of my heirs will find me here. They are very angry with me, brother, for not having left a will, for having forced them to fight in the courts for year after year. I would rather not see them. Or any of the women who are looking for me. We move on, Sabartés. We must not let the past pursue us. I am Ruiz now.”

  “And you think that by calling yourself a name that is not Picasso you can hide from your past, though you look the same and you act the same and you paint day and night? Pablo, Pablo, you deceive only yourself! You could call yourself Mozart and you would still be Picasso.”

  The telephone rang.

  “Answer it,” said Picasso brusquely.

  Sabartés obeyed. After a moment he put his hand over the receiver and looked up.

  “It is your Sumerian priestess,” said Sabartés.

  Picasso leaned forward, tense, apprehensive, already furious. “She is canceling the sitting?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. She will be here in a little while. But she says King Dumuzi has asked her to attend a feast at the royal hall tonight, and that you are invited to accompany her.”

  “What do I have to do with King Dumuzi?”

  “She asks you to be her escort.”

  “I have work to do. You know I am not one to go to royal feasts.”

  “Shall I tell her that, Pablo?”

  “Tell her—wait. Wait. Let me think. Speak with her, Sabartés. Tell her—ask her—yes, tell her that the king’s feast is of no importance to me, that I want her to come here right away, that—that—”

  Sabartés held up one hand for silence. He spoke into the telephone, and listened a moment, and looked up again.

  “She says the feast is in honor of her son, who has arrived in Uruk this day.”

  “Her son? What son?” Picasso’s eyes were blazing. “She said nothing about a son! How old is he? What is this son’s name? Who is his father? Ask her, Sabartés! Ask her!”

  Sabartés spoke with her once again. “His name is Gilgamesh,” he reported after a little while. “She has not seen him since her days on Earth, which were so long ago. I think you ought not to ask her to refuse the king’s invitation, Pablo. I think you ought not to refuse it yourself.”

  “Gilgamesh?” Picasso said, wonderstruck. “Gilgamesh?”

  Motorized chariots painted in many gaudy colors conveyed them the short distance from the lodging-hall to the feasting-place of the king, on the far side of the temple plaza. The building startled Gilgamesh, for it was not remotely Sumerian in form: a great soaring thing of ash-gray stone, it was, with a pair of narrow spires rising higher than any of the fanciful baroque towers of Brasil, and pointed arches over the heavy bronze doors, and enormous windows of stained glass in every color of the rainbow and a few other hues besides. Ghastly monsters of stone were mounted all along its facade. Some of them seemed slowly to be moving. The palace was very grand and immense and massive, but somehow also it seemed oddly flimsy, and Gilgamesh wondered how it kept from falling down, until he saw the huge stone buttresses flying outward on the sides. Trust Dumuzi to build a palace for himself that needed to be propped up by such desperate improvisations, Gilgamesh thought. He loathed the look of it. It clashed miserably with the classic Uruk style of the buildings that surrounded it. If I am ever king of this city again, Gilgamesh vowed, I will rip down this dismal pile of stone as my first official act.

  Herod, though, seemed to admire it. “It’s a perfect replica of a Gothic cathedral,” he explained to Gilgamesh as they went inside. “Perhaps Notre Dame, perhaps Chartres. I’m not sure which. I’m starting to forget some of what I once learned about architecture. I had some instruction in it, you know, from a man named Speer, a German, who passed through Brasil a while back and did a little work for Simon—peculiar chap, kept asking me if I wanted him to build a synagogue for me—what use would we have for a synagogue in the Afterworld?—but he knew his stuff, he taught me all sorts of things about Later Dead architectural design—you’d be astounded, Gilgamesh, what kinds of buildings they—”

  “Can you try being quiet for a little while?” Gilgamesh asked.

  The interior of the building actually had a sort of beauty, he thought. The sun was still glowing ruddily in the sky at this hour, and its subtle light, entering through the stained-glass windows, gave the cavernous open spaces of the palace a solemn, mysterious look. And the upper reaches of the building, gallery upon gallery rising toward a dimly visible pointed-arch ceiling, were breathtaking in their loftiness. Still, there was something oppressive and sinister about it all. Gilgamesh much preferred the temple in honor of Enlil that he had built, and still well remembered, atop the White Platform in the center of the original Uruk. That had had grandeur. That had had dignity. These Later Dead understood nothing about beauty.

  Dumuzi’s servants escorted them to the other end of the palace, where the building terminated in a great rounded chamber, open on one side and walled with stained glass on the other. A feasting-table had been set up there and dozens of guests had already gathered.

  Gilgamesh saw Dumuzi at once, sumptuously robed, standing at the head of an enormous stone table.

  He had not changed at all. He carried himself well, with true kingly bearing: a vigorous-looking man, heavy-bearded, with thick flowing hair so dark it seemed almost blue. But his lips were too full, his cheeks were too soft; and his eyes were small, and seemed both crafty and dull at the same time. He looked weak, unpleasant, untrustworthy, mean-souled.

  Yet as he spied Gilgamesh he came down from his high place as though it were Gilgamesh and not he who was the king, and went to his side, and looked up at him, craning his neck in an awkward way—it was impossible for him to hide the discomfort that Gilgamesh’s great height caused him—and hailed him in ringing tones, as he might a brother newly returned after a long sojourn abroad:

  “Gilgamesh at last
! Here in our Uruk! Hail, Gilgamesh, hail!”

  “Dumuzi, hail,” said Gilgamesh with all the enthusiasm he could find, which was not a great deal, and made a sign to him that one would have made to a king in Sumer the Land. “Great king, king of kings.” He detected a quick flash of surprise in Dumuzi. But Dumuzi was king in this city, and proper courtesy was due a king, any king. Even Dumuzi.

  “Come,” Dumuzi said, “introduce me to your friends, Gilgamesh, and then you must sit beside me in the place of honor, and tell me of everything that has befallen you in the Afterworld, the cities you’ve visited, the kings you’ve known, the things you’ve done. I want to hear all the news—we are so isolated, out here between the desert and the sea—but wait, wait, there are people here you must meet—”

  Forgetting all about Simon and Herod, who were left behind gaping indignantly, Dumuzi thrust his arm through Gilgamesh’s and led him with almost hysterical eagerness toward the feasting-table. It was all Gilgamesh could do to keep from knocking him sprawling for the impertinence of this offensive overfamiliarity. He is a king, Gilgamesh reminded himself. He is a king.

  And the desperate bluster behind Dumuzi’s effusive cordiality was easy enough for Gilgamesh to see. The man was frightened. The man was scrambling frantically to gain control of a situation that must be immensely threatening to him.

  For thousands of years Dumuzi had had the leisure in the Afterworld to reflect on the shameful truth that he had been, in his earlier life, the feckless irresolute interpolation between the two great royal heroes Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh, a mere hyphen of history. Now he was king again, having risen by some mysterious law of incompetence to his former summit. And now here was that same hulking Gilgamesh for whose sake he had been thrust aside once before, materializing like an unwelcome specter in New Uruk to claim his hospitality.

  Of course Dumuzi would be cordial, and effusively so. But all the same it was likely to be a good idea, Gilgamesh thought, to guard his back at all times while in Dumuzi’s city. Cowards are more dangerous than heroes, for they strike without fair warning; Dumuzi, tremulous and resentful, might work more harm than Achilles in all his wrath could ever manage.

  A moment later these gloomy ruminations went completely from his mind; for a voice he had not heard in more centuries than he could count, but which was so different from any other man’s that not even in the Afterworld could it ever be forgotten, came pealing across the room, calling his name.

  “Gilgamesh! Gilgamesh! By the Mother, it is truly you! By the Tusk! By the Horns of God! Gilgamesh, here!”

  Gilgamesh stared. A man seated near the head of the banquet table had risen and held his arms wide outspread in a gesture of greeting.

  Gilgamesh’s first thought was that he must be Later Dead, for alone in this great hall this man wore the strange formal costume of the most recent arrivals in the Afterworld, what they called a business suit: tight gray pantaloons that hugged his legs, and a stiff-looking wide-shouldered half-length coat, not exactly a tunic, of the same close-woven gray woolen material, with a white vestment under it, and a narrow strip of blue cloth knotted about his throat and dangling down his chest. He was tall, too, as Later Dead often were—taller by far than any of the Sumerians in the room but for Gilgamesh himself.

  Yet there could be no mistaking that voice. It was a voice that came from the dawn of time, from the lost world that had been before the Flood, and it rang through the great room like a brazen trumpet, hard and clear. No Later Dead had ever had a voice like that.

  Nor was his lean face that of a Later Dead, clean-shaven though it was. His skin had the burnished gleam of one who has faced the winds and snows of a world without warmth. His cheekbones were broad and strong, his lips were full, his nose was straight and very prominent, his mouth was extraordinarily wide. His eyes were wide-set too, far apart in his forehead, and one of them was missing from its socket: an ancient scar slashed crosswise over the left side of his face.

  This man had been king of the cave-dwelling Ice-Hunter people, in that time before time when even the gods were young; and there had been a time in the Afterworld when Gilgamesh had known him well.

  Gilgamesh felt a chill of astonishment. How long had it been, he wondered, since they had enjoyed high merriment together in the great windy hall of the Ice-Hunter folk on the northern reaches of the Afterworld—that vast cavern hung with woolly beast-skins where the huge curving tusks of the hairy elephants were scattered like straws on the floor, and the thick mead flowed in rivers, and the smoky fires burned high? A thousand Afterworldish years? Three thousand? It had been in his earliest days in the Afterworld, that simpler, easier time that now seemed forever lost.

  “Vy-otin!” Gilgamesh cried. With a whoop he rushed forward, mounting the dais on which the stone feasting-table sat, holding out his arms in a lusty embrace.

  “So you have not forgotten,” the Ice-Hunter said. “I thought for a moment you had.”

  “No, by the breasts of Inanna, how could I ever forget you! The old memories are brighter than anything after. Last year is hazy for me, but those old times, Vy-otin, you and I and Enkidu, and Minos, and Agamemnon—”

  “Ah, but you looked doubtful a moment, Gilgamesh.”

  “You confused me with these Later Dead clothes of yours,” said Gilgamesh reproachfully. “You, who lived when the world was new, when the great shaggy beasts roamed, when Sumer itself was nothing but a muddy marsh—you, decking yourself out like some tawdry twentieth-century creature, someone out of—what do they call it, A.D.?” He made it sound like an obscenity. “I remember a man in fur robes, Vy-otin, and a necklace of boar’s teeth around his throat, and armlets of shining bone, not this—this businessman costume!”

  Vy-otin said, laughing, “It’s a long story, Gilgamesh. And I go by the name of Smith now, not Vy-otin. In this hall you can call me by my true name. But in the streets of Uruk my name is Smith.”

  “Smith?”

  “Henry Smith, yes.”

  “Is that a Later Dead name? How ugly it is!”

  “It is a name that no one can remember as long as five minutes, not even me. Henry Smith. Sit with me, and we’ll share a flask or two of this wine of Dumuzi’s, and I’ll tell you why I dress this way, and why my name is Smith now.”

  “I pray you, Vy-otin, let your story wait a while,” said Dumuzi, who had been standing to one side. “There is someone else to whom Gilgamesh owes greetings, first—”

  He touched Gilgamesh by the elbow, and nodded toward the other side of the table. A woman had risen there, a magnificent dark-haired woman of splendid stature and regal bearing, who stood calmly smiling at him.

  She was a wondrous creature, radiant, beautiful, with shining eyes and the poise of a goddess. It was as if light emanated from her. Plainly, by the look of her and by her dress, she was Sumerian. She wore the robe of a priestess of An the Sky-father. She was within a year or two of Gilgamesh’s age, so it seemed, or perhaps a little younger than that. Her face was familiar, though he could not place it. From her size and majesty she seemed surely to be of royal stock, and her features led him to think she might even be his own kinswoman. Some daughter of his, perhaps? He had had so many, though. Or the daughter of his daughter’s daughter to the tenth generation, for here in Uruk as everywhere else in the Afterworld there were folk of every era living jumbled all together, and one might meet one’s own remote kin at every turning, distant ancestors who seemed to be mere boys, and one’s children’s children who looked to be in their dotage—

  Dumuzi said, “Will you not go to her and show your respect, Gilgamesh?”

  “Of course I will. But—”

  “You hesitate?”

  “I almost know her, Dumuzi. But the name slips from my tongue, and it shames me not to recall it.”

  “Well it should shame you, Gilgamesh, to forget your own mother!”

  “My mother?” said Gilgamesh, with a gasp.

  “The great queen Ninsun, and none other. Are you ad
dled, man? Go to her! Go to her!”

  Gilgamesh looked toward her in wonder and awe. Of course it was plain now. Of course. The years fell away as though they had never been, and he saw his mother’s face—the unmistakable features of the goddesslike wife of Lugalbanda, king of Uruk—he face of that great woman who had brought the hero Gilgamesh into the world.

  But yet—yet—

  What tricks the Afterworld plays on us, he thought. Never once had her path crossed his in the hundred lifetimes of his second life. So far as he could recall, he had not seen his mother since the days of that other world long gone; and he remembered her as she had been in her latter years, still majestic, still regal, but her hair white as the sands, her face lined and seamed; and now here she was in full robust beauty again, not youthful but far from old, a woman in glorious prime. He had been only a child when last she had looked like that. No wonder he had not recognized her.

  He hastened to her now, and dropped down on his knees before her, caring nothing for what the others might see or think. He took the hem of her robe and put it to his lips. The thousands of years of his wanderings in this vile harsh land became as nothing; he was a boy again, in his first life, and the goddess his mother was restored to him and stood before him, agleam with warmth and love.

  Softly she said his secret name, his birth-name, that no one but she was permitted to utter. Then she told him to rise, and he came to his full height, folding her against his bosom: for, tall as she was, she was like a child beside him. After a time he released her and she stepped back to look at him.

  “I despaired of ever seeing you again,” she said. “In all the places I have lived in the Afterworld I have heard tales of great Gilgamesh, and never once, never ever, have I been where you have been, unless my mind was tricking me, and in this instance I did not think that it was. I saw Enkidu once, from a distance, in a great noisy mob: that was in New Albion, I think, or the Realm of Logres, or perhaps the place they call Phlegethon, I think. I forget, now. But we were swept apart before I could call to him. And when I asked of Gilgamesh in that place, no one there knew anything of him.”