Hellenic Immortal

by Gene Doucette

  “Why do you suppose you have?” I asked, showing him in.

  I lived alone in an extremely modest dwelling. The Epic of Gilgamesh had me ensconced with a bevy of nubile women, but consider the source. Whereas the great men of the Old Testament were recognized as great by their uncommonly long life spans, the Sumerians equated greatness with sexual prowess. Both were meant to be taken metaphorically. Well, except in the case of Gilgamesh the Virile.

  “You did not see the heavens fall?” he asked. “You did not hear their displeasure?”

  “I did,” I admitted. “But perhaps you are being hasty. Come sit.”

  We sat on the floor, atop some animal hides I used for just such a purpose. We wouldn’t get around to inventing decent furniture for a while. “Tell me, what do the people think?”

  “They only know fear now,” he stated. “But this will change. For if I have insulted a god, they will do me harm to save themselves. Already the muttering has begun.”

  This is something that’s never really changed, by the way. Look at how random fluctuations in economic indicators affect a U.S. presidential election.

  “The crops?”

  “Robust. The cattle as well. It cannot last. Ut-Naphishtim, you must help me.”

  “I do not know how.”

  “Can you not speak to the gods? Discover how I have stirred them?”

  I think of this conversation whenever I encounter a priest or, well, any holy man. (Like popes. I’ve met a couple.) Gilgamesh—and everyone else in the land of Sumer—just assumed I had a direct line to the gods, and I never did anything to disabuse them of the notion because it was one of the things that kept me alive. But I didn’t have a direct line; sometimes pretending you do can put you in uncomfortable situations like this one. This is ten times worse when people think you are a god, incidentally. I’ve had a little experience with that too.

  “I fear my pleas will be met with silence as I have been seeking audience with the gods since the night in which their ire was demonstrated.” Which was sort of true, if you can call sleeping a bunch and basically pretending nothing happened seeking audience.

  “And?”

  “I have no answer for you. I am sorry.”

  His face fell. “Then I am lost,” he cried.

  I pondered his dilemma. “Perhaps you are thinking of this incorrectly.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Consider that it was not displeasure at all, but a gift.” In today’s lingo this is called spin.

  “A gift?” he asked.

  “Something fell from the heavens to the earth.”

  “T’was a thunderbolt out of the clear night sky!”

  “It did arrive as if borne on lightning,” I agreed. “But something struck the land that night. I heard it. It was an object, a solid thing. Possibly a godly object presented in a spectacular way? A thing that the gods wish upon you?”

  He ruminated on this line of reasoning for a few minutes. Although barbaric and quick to violence, rapacious and voracious, Gilgamesh was not stupid. He actually had a keen political mind when one got right down to it. Not quite Solomonic, but good enough to out-maneuver lesser tacticians in most fields of life. One might think a lengthy pause like this meant he couldn’t figure something out, when in fact he was running through a decent number of implications.

  Finally, he nodded. “Then we must go.”

  “I am coming?” I asked.

  He looked surprised, as if we’d already had this part of the conversation. “Of course you are.” It wasn’t a question.

  * * *

  Traveling the Fertile Crescent in those days was often a treacherous endeavor, but one could hardly ask for a better companion than the mightiest warrior in all the land. Gilgamesh strode the earth like the king he was, and sometimes it seemed as if even the animals acknowledged his sovereignty, practically volunteering their lives for the honor of being eaten by him. Or maybe it just seemed that way when he casually walked up behind a stag and crushed its head with a large rock.

  “How did you do that?” I asked him later, as we sat beside a fire on the first night of our journey, feasting on the stag’s meaty remains. “You are hardly a difficult man to notice.”

  “You know how to hunt.”

  “I do,” I agreed. “But I might spend days hunting. You appear to hunt almost by accident.”

  He grinned, his bloody teeth dripping with his conquest. (We didn’t cook the stag; the fire was for warmth.) “Then you are doing it wrong. Approach silently from behind the beast’s head and downwind, and you will be close enough to braid its tail hair before it notices you.”

  “I suppose it depends on what it is you are hunting.”

  “That it does.”

  “You know, there was a time when we worshipped the stag and the hart as gods themselves.”

  He laughed. “Nonsense. They are but creatures.”

  I leaned back, forsaking the remainder of the leg I’d been gnawing on. Raw meat always fills me up more quickly for some reason. “True. And yet, if these creatures had not presented themselves to us, we would have died. Is it so strange to pray to a stag in the hopes that it would arrive and rescue us from our hunger?”

  He tossed aside the shoulder he’d managed to denude and moved on to another body part. “The creatures of this wood are plentiful. You saw yourself how we chanced upon this one.”

  “It was not always so. In another time and place, beasts such as this were rare and wondrous. Do you not offer appeasement to the gods for plentiful crops? It is the same thing.”

  “No,” he disagreed. “It is different. The gods control the rains, and the rains feed the plants. One does not pray to a god that the animals will fuck more often so as to provide man with a larger supply of meat. And prayer to the animal itself? Madness. It is but a thing.”

  “Perhaps. And perhaps in a land where the rain is more frequent and the crops grow with unchecked regularity, a man there might think it madness to ask the gods for help growing things.”

  He nodded. “I accept that you have great wisdom in these matters. But I ask that you step away from me a few paces. When the gods strike you down, they might hit me as well.”

  * * *

  Searching for the landfall of an unknown object that struck the earth at an undetermined distance away isn’t an easy thing. When we initially set out, we made a beeline for where I had heard the strange impact, which presupposed I wasn’t hearing an echo of a sound made from a different location. We assumed it had landed somewhere within the cup of the valley, as it seemed improbable the sound would travel over a steep hill, which did put an outside limit on our search parameters, but we were still talking about a vast terrain. And from a geometric standpoint, if the initial path we had set off on was incorrect by even a half a degree, by the time we reached a parallel with the impact crater we could have been—depending on how long we’d walked to get to that point—a league or two off.

  The details of this semi-mathematical analysis (it could hardly be called math when math beyond very basic arithmetic hadn’t been invented yet) was an ongoing concern in my discussions with Gilgamesh over the following month. He thought the object must be massive and therefore not difficult to locate. So when we didn’t come upon it immediately, he became quite frustrated.

  “You have made me a fool, Ut-Naphishtim,” he growled after another day passed without success.

  “Oh, I have not, you big baby,” I argued. We’d become familiar enough with one another that our discourses had begun to resemble the bickering of an old married couple.

  “A full cycle!” he blasted. He was referring to the fact that a couple of days ago we’d seen the coming of a new moon, meaning it had been a complete lunar cycle since the sky fell. “Soon the harvest will be upon us, and if I am not present . . .”

  Well, we didn’t know what would happen then. The king is supposed to be present for the Day of Harvest because technically, without the gods smiling favor upon the kin
g there is no harvest. So he kind of had to be there. (Not surprisingly in a drought the first head on the chopping block is invariably the king’s. It’s a perilous existence.) From a scientific standpoint, I was curious to see if his not being there really resulted in a bad harvest, but Gilgamesh would have none of it. If he wasn’t there, his people would starve, period. For him, there really wasn’t any other way to see things, and I didn’t blame him.

  Meanwhile, neither of us knew how his prolonged absence was playing back at home. It would have been easy, in light of the circumstances of his disappearance, to postulate that he’d slinked away in fear. So the political damage our journey was taking could not be calculated, but the odds were it wasn’t good.

  All this put him in a consistently foul mood.

  “Foolishness!” he said, continuing his rant. “I should never have listened to you!”

  It was getting dark and we were, again, wandering about at random through the deep woods. Needless to say, we wouldn’t be sneaking up on any food on this night.

  “Nobody told you to seek me out,” I countered. “So don’t blame me for this.”

  “Ahhh! I do not think anything landed on that night. Why did the gods see fit to grant you immortality when you are clearly too much of an idiot to warrant such grace!” He bulled his way through a heavy set of branches and stormed temporarily out of sight, which was not a terribly challenging thing to do even when you were the size of Gilgamesh—not in these woods.

  “You’re just envious,” I declared, following after him. And he was. One of our recurring conversations revolved around his interest in becoming an immortal and my inability to provide him with a successful formula to do so.

  I pushed past the trees and promptly fell about five feet into a small crater, landing next to an astonished Gilgamesh, he having already fallen himself and not thought to warn me.

  “Hey!” I exclaimed, pulling myself off him. By the gods, he smelled bad.

  He looked bewildered. “Is this the thing?” he asked quietly.

  I climbed to my feet and took in the view in the gentle moonlight. To my left, a straight line had been drawn in the forest floor at an upward slant pointing to the heavens. Several trees along the path showed signs of recent wounding, and one tree that fell dead center had been nearly halved. This, I reflected, was the sound I had heard.

  To my right, the piece of the sky had burrowed a wide swath into the ground. And resting at the bottom was . . . a rock.

  Gilgamesh knelt before the rock with a sense of reverence that priests would later reserve for a chalice of Christ’s transubstantiated blood.

  I stood next to him. “Well?”

  “It is beautiful,” he whispered.

  “It is a rock,” I informed him. “We already have plenty of those. I was expecting something more from the gods.”

  “You blaspheme,” he said, almost as an afterthought because he wasn’t really listening to me. He reached down and picked it up. “It is cool to the touch,” he noted. “And heavy.”

  Reluctantly, he handed it over so I could examine it for myself. It was a bit bigger than my hand, and was very dense and much heavier than it looked. A better examination would have to come in the daylight, but it seemed to be composed of a mixture of metal and stone. Appearance-wise, it looked somewhat like a pineapple (which I had not ever seen up to that time) or a large pinecone (which I had), encircled with an irregular series of jagged protrusions. It was also riddled with smallish holes, and one larger one at the base. Had I not seen for myself that it had once been a portion of the sky, I would have inferred a volcanic origin.

  The most remarkable thing about it was that it was not at all remarkable. Although opinions differed.

  “It is beautiful,” Gilgamesh repeated.

  I handed his rock back to him and held my tongue, as he was clearly having a religious moment that my sarcasm wouldn’t have helped. “But what is it, do you suppose?”

  “I do not know,” he said. “I will think on it.”

  * * *

  The next morning, Gilgamesh awoke me with a triumphant declaration. “It is a weapon!”

  “What is?” I yawned, not quite awake.

  “This gift from Enlil himself!” He held the rock up over his head, as if a higher elevation would somehow transform it into something more extraordinary.

  “So, you have decided which god shows you favor. That is good. Have we any food?”

  “You should rejoice with me, Ut-Naphishtim! This is a great day!”

  “I would, but I cannot rejoice properly on an empty stomach.”

  “When we return triumphant, I will treat you to the finest banquet man has ever seen! For the gods have indeed shown favor.”

  “Super,” I muttered. We were at least five days from any banquets. “So how do you see this . . . rock . . . as a weapon? It appears no less rock-like in the sun than it did by moonlight. Will you be sneaking up behind your foes and caving in their heads as you did the stag?”

  “Aha!” He dropped his god-given rock on the ground and produced a staff. I gathered—insofar as staffs do not transform themselves whole from the trees—that he spent much of the evening finding and crafting it for just this moment.

  “A stick?” I offered.

  He reared back, and with a precisely aimed strike, thrust the tip of the staff into the opening at the base of the rock. When he pulled the staff up again, it had the rock stuck on the end of it. “Behold the Hammer of Gilgamesh!”

  “Um, okay.” I probably should have applauded, but I was too busy trying not to laugh.

  He looked disappointed. “It is temporary. I will make a finer staff of bronze once I return. It will be the greatest weapon ever wielded!”

  “A rock stuck on the end of a stick?”

  “A heavenly gift bestowed upon the mightiest of warriors!” he countered. I admit his angle was better than mine.

  “I don’t mean to be negative,” I began, running right past several danger signs in my head, “but have you considered the possibility that sometimes a rock is just a rock?”

  He looked perplexed. “I am not sure I understand.”

  I sat up and tried to organize the thoughts that had been buzzing around in my head since we’d discovered the object. “The heavens are unchanging, are they not?”

  “Of course,” he agreed. “A child knows this.”

  “Did I ever tell you of a time, very long ago, when I witnessed the death of a star?” We didn’t call them stars, but there’s no exact modern version for the word we did use. It was a little more than “star” and a little less than “god”.

  “Blasphemy!” he declared angrily.

  “No. I wasn’t the only witness, either. It flared very brightly for six days and then disappeared. I can show you where it used to reside in the night sky if you wish.”

  “Then it was a war! A war in the heavens!”

  “But if we presuppose the heavens are unchanging, this would contradict such a thing. And I have seen other oddities as well, such as bright streaks of light across the sky, one every hundred or so years. These are things that most mortal men would never live long enough to see repeated, but which I have witnessed many times over.”

  “I see.” He sat at the edge of the crater, not much looking like someone who believed what he was hearing. “And what did you make of these strange events?”

  “I did not know what to conclude. The people of those times took them to be portents of doom, just as you and your people took this heavenly rock to mean the displeasure of the gods. As did I.” I stood and picked up his makeshift hammer. The rock was heavy and cold, and no more remarkable than it had been the night before. “Then came this thing. You call it a weapon. I say it is just a rock. And by that I mean it is not a gift from the gods, or a punishment, or a message. A rock fell from the sky and that is all that has happened. Do you understand?”

  “You mean it fell to earth by accident?” he asked. He was trying.

 
“No. I mean that in the sky there are rocks. The rocks float and glow and sometimes, one of them falls. And that is all that is up there.”

  “Then where are the gods if not in the sky?” he asked.

  “Exactly.”

  He stared at me, as only a man who thinks himself a god on earth can stare at a man who just wondered aloud if there might not be any gods. Not to say I’d come to any conclusions one way or another; it was just something that had been gestating for a while and would continue to gestate for a while longer. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t a notion I should have shared with Gilgamesh. But I was hungry, and people sometimes make bad decisions when they’re hungry.

  “I should strike you dead right now,” he said, snatching the Hammer of Gilgamesh out of my hands. “But I expect mighty Enlil will do that himself. Leave me, Ut-Naphishtim. Go home, and do not speak of this again.”

  * * *

  It was the last time I saw Gilgamesh, but that was as much a result of circumstance as anything. He was dead barely a year later. From what I was able to gather, he spent much of the last few months of his life making a series of wild, reputedly prophetic statements that he claimed were given to him directly from Enlil. This did not sit well with the general population—the prophesies were almost never good—and eventually someone decided to challenge him in combat, possibly just to shut him the hell up. Unfortunately, Gilgamesh had been fasting a lot, and wasn’t up to strength. He didn’t do so well.

  I received this news by messenger, who also carried with him a gift from the legendary king.

  “He commanded that you have this.” The messenger unwrapped the cloth package he carried over his shoulder and revealed the Hammer of Gilgamesh. As he’d promised, it had been fixed upon a bronze haft. It also had dried blood on it, indicating he had indeed tried using it as a weapon, probably in his final battle.

  “I thank you,” I said to the messenger.

  “There is more, great Ut-Naphishtim.”

  “Yes?”

  “His final words. He asked that I tell you ‘I see.’ ”