To the Land of the Living

by Robert Silverberg

  He named his old Ice-Hunter friend Vy-otin his chief minister. Herod was another useful source of advice. He had preferred to remain behind in Uruk with Gilgamesh when Simon Magus, glutted with the jewels of Uruk’s royal treasury, returned to Brasil. Ninsun too, prudent and loving, was a valuable counsellor. There was always Enkidu for diversion and close companionship and earthy, heartfelt wisdom. And after he had been in office some time Gilgamesh acquired another adviser, a strange and unexpected one, none other than the Hairy Man out of deepest prehistoric antiquity who had been Simon’s chief mage in Brasil.

  He arrived without warning, appearing on foot outside Uruk one day during a season of hard black weather, of apocalyptic bellowing storms and torrential floods. Gilgamesh was toiling along the walls of the city when he came, struggling under a merciless iron sky to prop sandbags against the ramparts of baked brick, which were threatened with undermining in half a dozen places. Just about anyone who could carry a load was out there working that day, with the king himself setting the example. Mocking demon-creatures with long scaly yellow necks and bright green wings wheeled and screeched overhead. In the upper sky were flickering lightnings, bloody streamers, fiery comets. The rain was inexorable, an ocean falling upon the city in strands thick as cables. The king was standing thigh-deep in mud, or nearly, catching the sandbags that Enkidu threw him from above and propping them with furious haste against the base of the wall, when a strangely familiar harsh voice came to him out of the storm, speaking in thick frost-edged phrases that were all but impossible to comprehend.

  “What?” Gilgamesh roared. “Who’s there? What’d you say?”

  “That perhaps this is the great Flood, of which you make so much, returning to drown your land again,” said the other, speaking more slowly now and with an effort at precision.

  Gilgamesh glanced behind him. By thundercrack and demon-light he saw the Hairy Man, short and stocky and bestial of face, as casual in the storm as though it were nothing but a gentle spring zephyr. He wore a Roman toga, white edged with crimson, through which his heavy reddish pelt was visible, made dense and matted by the rain. Beneath his massive brows his dark eyes gleamed with a strange primordial fire. This was a creature, Gilgamesh knew, who had lived in the world when the gods were young.

  “The Flood, you say?” Gilgamesh grunted.

  “The Flood, yes, that came after my time and before yours, or so you told me, King Gilgamesh. Coming again, to end this world and begin a newer one. Here. Let me assist you.” He strode forward into the flowing mud, and, picking up a sandbag that Enkidu had tossed from the rim of the wall to a point beyond the reach of Gilgamesh, pushed it carefully into place.

  Gilgamesh stared. “Who are you?”

  “Why, you knew me in Brasil.”

  “Simon’s high wizard?”

  “The same. Peace and gladness, king of Uruk.”

  Far above them, Enkidu peered down, frowning. He called something that was lost in the howl of the wind, and tossed another sandbag, which strayed too far to the side. The Hairy Man reached forward to catch it and deflect it into its proper place, and beckoned for another. Gilgamesh eyed him. Well, he supposed, it probably was the same one as before. They all looked alike, the Hairy Men. No wonder none of them had any names. Like shaggy wraiths they wandered their own paths through the Afterworld, these mysterious creatures from the dawn of time, and one was so much like another that they might just as well all be the same one. But as Gilgamesh stared closely at the Hairy Man he decided that something about him seemed familiar, though he did not know what it could be. This must indeed be the one he had known before in Brasil, the one who had guided him through the diabolical streets of that city, the one who had led him to Calandola.

  “And what are you doing here?” Gilgamesh asked.

  “Simon sent me. I am a gift, to live at your court and be of service to you.”

  “A gift, did you say?”

  “To be your chief sorcerer. Simon thought you might need one.”

  Gilgamesh felt a momentary stab of suspicion. Had Simon sent the mage as a spy, perhaps? No, no, he decided. That was too blatant, that was too obvious.

  Enkidu yelled again, and another sandbag fell from above. This time Gilgamesh caught it and heaved it into its place.

  The Hairy Man went on, “I am sent also as a reward to you for your generosity. Simon felt that he should do something for you in return for the jewels of Uruk, so great was his gratitude for the great treasures which you gave him. When last I saw him he was bathing in them: lying in an alabaster tub, and having the emeralds and rubies poured over him in a great cascade.”

  “He is a man of simple pleasures,” said Gilgamesh drily. Thunder resounded again, sharp and fierce, like the crack of the last trump. It was a sound potent enough to bring forth monsters in the air, a swarm of things with many heads, and grasshopper wings, and the yellow eyes of toads. Perhaps the Hairy Man was right, that this was the Flood all over again, in which case he might be wiser hastening to build a new Ark than wasting time striving to bolster this doomed wall. But no one had prophesied a Flood for the Afterworld, not ever. To the Hairy Man Gilgamesh called, “And are you serious? Do you think this is a new Deluge?”

  The Hairy Man uttered a sound that seemed to be a laugh, and shook his heavy thick-necked head, and spoke furry words that were swept away by the wind. Gilgamesh hoped that what he had said was that he was only jesting, that this was no Flood, but only some new Afterworldish prank, a storm that before long would pass without destroying all that lay before it.

  They worked on in silence, stolidly placing the sandbags. Hundreds were toiling nearby along this section of the wall, a host of able-bodied men and more than a few women also. The rain seemed to abate a little now. But still came the fierce awesome thundercracks, the showers of streaming lightning, the buzzing thrumming swarms of airborne monsters. The plain surrounding the city was a desert no longer, but now a shining sea. Far off it appeared that a great dazzling blue-white glacier floated in the sky, its jagged edges shining with an inner light, and on its flanks danced stags with human faces, bull-headed men, and strange and frightening behemoths of uncertain shape. The little man Picasso should see these things, Gilgamesh thought, and set them down in drawings. Picasso, though, was safe indoors just now: he did not have much love for this sort of stormy toil, he had said, and would not come out. Well, Picasso could call forth monsters enough from his own teeming brain, Gilgamesh told himself. He had no need to see these.

  “If you are a true wizard,” said Gilgamesh to the Hairy Man, “don’t you know some way to bring a halt to this miserable downpour?”

  “Wizards far greater than I have sent it, king. There are no spells that will halt it.”

  “And will we all drown? Tell me, will we?”

  “We will live to die another day, I think,” said the Hairy Man.

  Indeed the rain subsided a few hours later, for which the Hairy Man took no credit, and the walls of the city were spared. When the sun returned Gilgamesh walked the rampart with Enkidu and Vy-otin, looking out in wonder at the flooded plain, the tangle of great trees lying up-ended, the debris of scattered villages and drowned beasts that had washed up out of the lowlands. But Uruk itself was intact, if somewhat waterlogged. There was not to be a second Deluge this time. Perhaps it had been only some war of demons, far overhead, Gilgamesh thought, that had brought this devilish cataclysmic rain upon the city.

  It pleased and surprised him that Simon had sent the Hairy Man. There was great wisdom in those ancient beings who had lived before mankind was, and their aid was something much to be prized. Surely Simon had had the short end of the transaction, giving up this age-old sorcerer, this worthy mage, in return for nothing but a few sacks of colored stones. But it had been a truly kingly gesture, showing that there was more to Simon than mere debauchery and greed. Or maybe the wily old wine-soaked tyrant had not cared; maybe he saw his next death already looking him in the eye, and no longer was con
cerned with anything but to surround himself with the shining pretties he so deeply loved. Whatever the reason—and Gilgamesh doubted that there was anything sinister at the bottom of it—he was glad to have the strange being at his court.

  Gilgamesh provided the Hairy Man with a suite of choice rooms in the royal palace, by a cloistered courtyard where he could sleep out of doors if he chose: creatures of his sort preferred no roofs over their heads by night. In the daily workings of the court Gilgamesh kept him close at hand, both for conjuring and wizardry and for plain consultation in matters of diplomacy and statecraft, for he was a very useful counsellor.

  The pace of court life was unrelenting. Every day new envoys arrived from other principalities of the Afterworld, now that word was beginning to get around that the puissant hero Gilgamesh had come to power again in Uruk, and state receptions had to be held for them. They came stumbling in, often frayed and shaken by the random intricacies of their journeys across the vastness of the Afterworld, bearing gifts and praises, and other oily suasions. They all wanted the same thing: alliance with the Sumerian against some actual or potential enemy, or else Gilgamesh’s cooperation in some elaborate and costly scheme designed to aggrandize themselves at the expense of their neighbors.

  The stacks of ambassadorial accreditations grew like dunes driven before the wind. Gilgamesh shook his head in irritation over the unruly mounds of them heaped high in his throne chamber. “The Perfect Aryan Republic—the New Ottoman Sultanate—the Glorious Proletarian Kingdom—the Realm of Free Spirits—the Invincible Amazon Empire—the Grand Dionysian Realm—the Rolling Acres Country Club—” He looked up at Vy-otin. “Is that supposed to be a nation too? The Rolling Acres Country Club?”

  “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 Fernão 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.”