Gilgamesh the King

by Robert Silverberg

  I drank wine and beer and milk and honey, and even oil, until my stomach was bloated from it. In some rites I had to sip from ewers of blood, which I never have come gladly to do. I wore heavy robes for certain rituals and in others I was altogether naked. There was never a night without some observance, and often there were some by day, as well. The gods must be fed. I began to feel like a cook and a serving-boy.

  And like a butcher also, sometimes. For one rite they brought me a sacrificial ox too fat to stand: it looked like a great tub of fat. It peered at me with great brown sad eyes as if it knew I was its death approaching, but it was too placid to protest. They held its head up and put the blade in my hand. “The gods created you for this moment,” I told it. “Now I return you to them.” I cut its throat with a single stroke. The ox, panting, sighing, sank on its forelimbs, but was a long time dying; I thought I heard it weep. I let its warm blood gush over my naked skin until I was slippery with it from head to toe. This is what it is to be a king in Uruk.

  There were restrictions and constraints upon me. On this day of the month I could not eat beef, and on that one I might not have pork, and on another I was forbidden any cooked meat at all. On a certain day it was perilous for me to eat garlic; on another day, for the sake of the security of the commonwealth, I was required to abstain from intercourse with women; on a day of setting-out of boundary-stones in the fields I must not go within sight of the river; and so forth. Many of these things seemed absurd to me, but I observed them all. Some of them I still perform. But some I have discarded with the years, and I have never seen any hardship come to me or to Uruk for my having done that.

  These obligations and burdens of kingship grew less oppressive as I became accustomed to them. Now and again I found myself yearning for the freer and more vigorous life I had led as a warrior of Kish; but such feelings passed quickly by, like the birds of winter that flash silver in the blue sky. I did what was required of me, and did it ungrudgingly. A king who grudges his own tasks is no king, but a mere imposter.

  There was one rite I would have performed not merely ungrudgingly, but altogether eagerly. But I had begun my reign at the height of summer; that one that had to wait until the new year. I speak of the Sacred Marriage, when Inanna would at last lie in my arms.

  At last the heat abated and that soft sweet wind, the Cheat, swept out of the south. The scent of the warm sea travels on that wind; I stood a long time on the terrace of the palace by myself, breathing deep, drawing it into my lungs. It is the harbinger, I thought. The season now changes; the rains return; the time arrives for tilling and sowing. And before the fields may be sown, the goddess must be. I trembled with anticipation.

  That morning the chamberlain in charge of such things told me I must cease lying with the palace concubines now, for the festival-time was nigh. The days of purification had arrived, when the seed of the king must be dedicated entirely to Inanna. I laughed and said that I would gladly make that sacrifice, though within a day or two I had other thoughts about that. I have always felt the surge of desire as the shore feels the surge of the sea, that is, something that comes steadily, insistently, unceasingly. Nothing can check the sea-surge; and when I sought to check that other surge within myself, I found it almost as difficult as it would have been to halt the waves from crashing against the beach. I had not gone without a woman’s embrace for as much as half a day since coming into manhood, I think. Now I decreed for myself a great drought of the passions, that parched my blood most amazingly. It was a very hard time for me. I withstood it, but only because I knew that my reward would be Inanna, coming to me as the cool winter rains do after the hellish summer.

  All ordinary business of the city halted. The festival preparations began, the repair and cleansing of buildings, the sacrifices, the fumigations, the parades. Exorcists were busy in every part of Uruk, driving the demons beyond the walls. Priests marched out into the dry fields and sprinkled them with holy water from golden ewers. Those who belonged to the unclean castes went to their temporary villages outside the city, and anyone who was a stranger to Uruk also was asked to leave.

  I remained secluded in the palace, fasting, bathing, eating no meat, touching no woman. All day long I breathed the fumes of sacred royal incense, burning in long-legged braziers. I slept hardly at all, but spent my nights in prayer and chanting. Gods came and went in my bedchamber, great shadowy figures who stood by my side a little while. One night I felt the presence of Enlil; on another, I woke from a light doze to see the hooded figure of Enki before me, with eyes blazing like red embers. The visits of these gods and others left me cold with dread. No one, not even a king, can go easy in such presences. If there had been some good friend by my side then whom I loved, it would have been less difficult for me to face those spirits. But in that time I was alone. They walked about my room and passed through me as though I were not there, and each time they did I felt a bleak gray wind blowing into me out of the nether world. At this season of the year, when the dry death that is summer still grips the Land, the nether world is very close: its mouth lies just below the gateway that opens into Uruk.

  Gungunum, the high priest of An, came to me on the third morning. My servants dressed me in the fullest of my royal regalia, and I went with him to the chapel of the palace. There I knelt before the Sky-father. Then Gungunum stripped me of all my ornaments of rank, and slapped my face, and pulled my ears, and otherwise humbled me before the god, and made me swear that I had nothing that was evil in the sight of the gods; and when that was finished, he lifted me and dressed me with his own hands, and gave me back my kingship.

  Afterward he handed me a bowl that contained tender slivers of the heart of the palm, the young bud of the date tree. We hold this tree to be holy, for it has as many uses as there are days in the year, and gives us food and drink, and fibres for ropes and nets, and wood for our furniture, and everything else: it is a godly tree. So I took the bowl from the priest and ate the slivers of the heart of the palm, and Dumuzi immediately entered into me.

  I mean the god Dumuzi, of course, not that silly shallow king who had taken that name upon himself. The heart of the palm is the power of the tree to produce new fruit, and when I ate it, that power, which is Dumuzi the god, passed into me. All fertility now was embodied in me. I was the rainfall; I was the rising sap; I was the flower; I was the seed. I was the force that could engender dates and barley, wheat and figs. From me would come the rivers. From me would flow wine and beer, milk and cream. The god throbbed within me, and I was bursting with the new life of the new year. When I looked down at my naked body I saw the rigid scepter of my maleness standing out far in front of me like a third arm, and there was a pulsing within it.

  But Dumuzi without Inanna is useless. It was time now for me to release the power of the god into her receptive loins.

  So, then—at last, at last—the night of the Sacred Marriage was at hand. The moon had vanished into the place of its slumber. That morning I had bathed in pure water from the font of the temple of An, and then handmaidens oiled my body, omitting no part of it, using the golden oil pressed from the richest of dates. I put on my crown and my robe, leaving the upper half of my body bare. They took me to the dark windowless Dumuzi-house at the edge of the city, where I spent half the day in silence, emptying my mind of everything but the god. I tell you that I was like a man in a dream, void of all self, possessed entirely by Dumuzi. And at nightfall I went by boat—the journey must be done by water, so that the king glides into the city as seed does into the womb—to the quay nearest the Eanna precinct, and from there on foot to the White Platform and the temple where the goddess awaited me.

  I mounted the Platform at its western end, looking neither to the left nor to the right. I led a black-fleeced sheep by a leather leash, and held a tiny kid resting on my arm, as offerings to Inanna. I suppose the air was warm or cool that night, and the stars were bright or perhaps veiled by mist, and possibly there was a breeze on which the perfume of young bloss
oms drifted, or possibly not. I could not tell you. I saw and felt nothing, except the gleaming temple before me, and the smooth brick of the Platform beneath my bare feet.

  I entered the temple and gave the kid to a priestess and the sheep to a priest, and went to the long chamber. Inanna stood there. If I live twelve thousand years I will never see a sight more glorious.

  She was as bright as a polished shield. She glistened in her splendor. They had bathed her, they had anointed her, they had draped her nakedness with ivory and gold and lapis lazuli and silver. Sheaths of alabaster surrounded her thighs and a triangle of gold lay over her loins. Clear blocks of lapis rested upon her breasts. Strands of gold braided were woven through her hair. But those were mere ornaments. I had seen them all before, worn by her on the night of her first Sacred Marriage to Dumuzi, and worn by her predecessor in the time of Lugalbanda. What awed me was not the magnificence of her jewelry but the magnificence of the goddess that shined through from beneath. Just as I had become the embodiment of the virile power—there was that insistent throbbing between my legs to remind me of that—so too was she the blazing essence of the female, now. From that golden triangle at the base of her belly came wave upon wave of intense power, like the brightness of the sun.

  Smiling, she extended her hands toward me, fingertips outstretched. Her eyes met mine. I leaped back across the chasm of years to that moment, in this very temple, when the girl Inanna had found me wandering, and stroked me and spoke my name, and looked into my eyes and told me that I would be king, and that she would lie in my arms one day: my cheek against the little buds of her breasts, her perfume pungent in my nostrils. Now indeed everything that she had prophesied had befallen, and we stood face to face in the temple on the night of the Sacred Marriage, and her dark eyes, gleaming like onyx by torchlight, were ablaze with goddess-fire.

  “Hail, Inanna!” I whispered.

  “Hail, royal husband, fountain of life.”

  “My holy jewel.”

  “My husband. My true destined love.”

  Then she laughed a very human laugh. “See? It has all come to pass. Has it not? Has it not?”

  I heard the music of the showing-forth. My fingers touched hers—just the tips, but it was fire! fire!—and together we walked down the corridor and out upon the porch of the temple. The door swung open before us. The bright crescent of the new moon rose above the temple. A thousand pairs of eyes stared back at me out of the night.

  We spoke the words of the rites. We sipped from the flask of honey, and poured the vessel of barley out on the ground. We stood with joined hands during the singing of the hymn of the showing-forth. Three naked priests pronounced blessings. The blood of the kid, my gift, was daubed on my forearm and on her cheek. The seared meat of my other gift, the sheep, was offered to us on plates of gold, and we took one mouthful each. It took me twelve hundred years to swallow that little morsel of meat.

  Once again we entered the temple, preceded and surrounded by priestesses and priests, musicians, dancers, all leaping and chanting about us as we made our way to the bedchamber of the goddess. It was a small high-vaulted room, strewn with soft green rushes made sweet-smelling with oil of cedar. The bed that was at its center was of the blackest ebony, inlaid with ivory and gold. A sheet of the finest linen covered it, bearing the emblem of Inanna. All about the bed lay heaps of freshly harvested dates, still clustered as they had come from the tree: the true treasure of the Land, more precious than any gem. She broke one date from a cluster and put it tenderly in my mouth, and then I made the same offering to her.

  You may think that at this point I was maddened with desire and impatience. But no, no, the god was in me and I had a god’s divine calmness. How many years in the making had this Marriage been? What did a few minutes more matter, now? I remained tranquil while the priestesses of Inanna removed the jewels from her, the beads, the alabaster sheaths, the rings, the ornaments of her ears, her eyes, her hips, her navel. They took from her the beads that covered her bosom, and laid bare her breasts, which were high and round and stood forth like those of a girl, although she was past twenty. They lifted the latch of her golden loin-covering and revealed to me the inner zone of her womanhood, dark and deeply thatched and richly perfumed. And then the same women undid my robe and uncovered my body; and when we were both naked they went from the room and left us with each other.

  I went close to her. I stood before her. I watched the rising and falling of her breasts. She drew her tongue across her lips, slowly, making them gleam. Her eyes traveled shamelessly over my body; and mine made the journey over hers, lingering at fullness of breast, breadth of thigh, the dense rich nether beard that concealed the well of womanhood. I took her lightly by the hand and led her toward the couch.

  For a moment, as my body hovered above hers, my god-self flickered and went from me and my mortal self returned. And I thought of all the intricacies of my dealings with this woman, how she had baffled and bewildered me. I thought of her wantonness, her dark playfulness, her mystery, her power. I thought also of that other Dumuzi, the mortal one, whom she had embraced year after year in this same rite, and then, when he was of no further use to her, had casually slain. Then the god reasserted himself in me and all these thoughts went from me, and I said, as the god must say to the goddess in this moment, “I am the shepherd, I am the ploughman, I am the king: I am the bridegroom. Let the goddess rejoice!”

  I will not tell you what further words passed between us on that night. The things that the goddess must say to the god, and the god to the goddess, you already know, for those words are the same every year; and the things that the priestess said to the king, and the king to the priestess, can easily be guessed, and are of no interest. Besides god and goddess and king and priestess, there were also a man and a woman in that room; and as to the words that were said by the woman to the man and by the man to the woman, why, I think they are the secrets of that woman and that man, and I will not tell them, though I have told so much else. Let those words remain our mystery. The greater mystery that we performed that night, you can imagine. You know what rites of lips and nipples, of buttocks and hands, of mouths and loins, must be acted out by the sacred couple. Her skin was hot, burning like the ice of the northern mountains. Her nipples were hard as alabaster in my hands. We did all that must be done, before the final thing, and when it was the moment for that, we knew it without saying it. To enter her was to glide in honey. As we joined, she laughed, and I knew it to be as much the laughter of the girl of the corridor as the goddess on high. I also laughed, to be having the fulfillment of my desire after so long a waiting; and then our laughter was lost in a deeper, heavier sound. When we moved together, she spoke in babbling phrases that I did not know; the woman-language, the goddess-language of the Old Way. Her eyes rolled upward so that I saw only the whites. Then my own eyes closed, and I gripped her tightly with both my arms. The god-power, flowing from me like liquid fire, brought the goddess-power within her to its fruition. In the outpouring of my seed the new year was born. A cry of rejoicing burst from my lips, and from hers, and we heard the answering melodies of the musicians who waited outside the bedchamber. It was then that we spoke with each other, first with our eyes and our smiles, then with words. In a little while we began the rite anew, and then again, and again and again, until the dawn brought the new year’s blessing to us, and we went quietly from the temple to stand naked in the gentle rain that our coupling had summoned into the Land.

  14

  SO, THEN, PASSED THE NIGHT of the Sacred Marriage, when Inanna and I were united at last. But it was the goddess and the god who had been married, not the priestess and the king; and once the festival was over, we went on in our separate lives, she in the isolation of her temple, I amidst my concubines in the palace. I did not so much as set eyes on her again for some weeks. When I did, at the rite of casting wheat-seed, she treated me in a cool and formal way. That was right and proper: but I hated it. The taste of her was still on my t
ongue. Yet I knew I would not embrace her a second time until the season of the new year had come round again, twelve months hence. I ached from that knowledge.

  Ties of ritual and responsibility kept us in constant communication, all the same. In Uruk the king is the right arm of the goddess, and her sword; and she is the holy staff on which he leans. Without the goddess, there would be no king; without the king, the goddess could not touch the souls of the people. So they are forever joined, twin centers of the city, one revolving about the other and all else revolving about both of them.

  The gentle rain of Tashritu gave way, early in the month Arah-samna, to rains that were not gentle at all: torrential downpours that came sweeping out of the north nearly every day. The dry soil drank greedily at first, but soon its thirst was slaked, and still the storms roared across the Land. In this time I began to give close thought to the condition of the canals. They had not been kept in proper repair during the last year of the reign of Dumuzi. If the rains continued with such force and the silt were not cleared from the canals we might very well suffer from flooding by early spring.

  I was deep in the midst of these matters, conferring with my water-chamberlain and my overseer of canals and three or four other high officials, when my viceroy of the palace entered the royal chamber. A priest of the temple of Enmerkar, he said, had come with a message from Inanna. She had urgent need of me. A demon, it seemed, had taken up residence in her huluppu-tree, and I must drive it away.

  My mind was full of the needs of the canals, and I made no attempt, I suppose, to veil my impatience. I looked at the viceroy in amazement and said bluntly, “Can she find no other exorcist?”

  There was some muttering from the officials who sat at the table with me. I heard their disapproving tone, and thought at first that they were as annoyed as I was by this interruption of our work; but no, what troubled them was my surly refusal, not Inanna’s ill-timed request. They peered at me uneasily. For a moment no one would speak.