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To the Land of the Living

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

1 Jagged green lightning danced on the horizon and the wind came ripping like a blade out of the east, skinning the flat land bare and sending up clouds of gray-brown dust. Gilgamesh grinned broadly. By Enlil, now that was a wind! A lion-killing wind it was, a wind that turned the air dry and crackling. The beasts of the field gave you the greatest joy in their hunting when the wind was like that, hard and sharp and cruel.

He narrowed his eyes and stared into the distance, searching for this day's prey. His bow of several fine woods, the bow that no man but he was strong enough to draw — no man but he, and Enkidu his beloved thrice-lost friend — hung loosely from his hand. His body was poised and ready. Come now, you beasts! Come and be slain! It is Gilgamesh king of Uruk who would make his sport with you this day!

Other men in this strange land, when they went about their hunting, made use of guns, those foul machines that the Later Dead had brought, which hurled death from a great distance along with much noise and fire and smoke; or they employed the even deadlier laser devices from whose ugly snouts came spurts of blue-white flame. Cowardly things, all those killing-machines! Gilgamesh loathed them, as he did most instruments of the Later Dead, those slick and bustling Johnny-come-latelies of the Afterworld. He would not touch them if he could help it. In all his thousands of years in this nether world, this land of dreams and spirits, of life beyond life, he had never used any weapons but those he had known during his first lifetime: the javelin, the spear, the double-headed axe, the hunting-bow, the good bronze sword. It took some skill, hunting with such weapons as those. And there was physical effort; there was more than a little risk. Hunting was a contest, was it not? Then it must make demands. Why, if the idea was merely to slaughter one's prey in the fastest and easiest and safest way, then the sensible thing to do would be to ride high above the hunting-grounds in a weapons-platform and drop a little nuke, and lay waste five kingdoms' worth of beasts at a single stroke, he told himself. And laughed and strode onward.

"If you ever had come to Texas, H.P., this here's a lot like what you'd have seen," said the big barrel-chested man with the powerful arms and the deeply tanned skin. Gesturing sweepingly with one hand, he held the wheel of the Land Rover lightly with three fingers of the other, casually guiding the vehicle in jouncing zigs and zags over the flat trackless landscape. Gnarled gray-green shrubs matted the gritty ground. The sky was black with swirling dust. Far off in the distance barren mountains rose like darkjagged teeth. "Beautiful. Beautiful. As close to Texas in look as makes no never mind, this countryside is."

"Beautiful?" said the other man uncertainly. "The Afterworld?"

"This stretch sure is. But if you think the Afterworld's beautiful, you should have seen Texas!"

The burly man laughed and gunned the engine and the Land Rover went leaping and bouncing forward at a stupefying speed.

His travelling companion, a gaunt lantern-jawed man as pale as the other was bronzed, sat very still in the passenger seat, knees together, elbows digging in against his ribs, as if he expected a fiery crash at any moment. The two of them had journeyed across the interminable parched wastes of the Outback for many days now — how many, not even the Elder Gods could tell. They were ambassadors, these two: Their Excellencies Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft of the Kingdom of New Holy Resurrected England, envoys of His Britannic Majesty Henry VIII to the court of Prester John.

In an earlier life Lovecraft and Howard had been writers, fantasists, inventors of fables; but now they found themselves caught up in something far more fantastic than anything to be found in any of their tales, for this was no fable, this was no fantasy. This was the harsh reality of the Afterworld.

The Land Rover bounced, skidded, bounced again.

"Robert — please —" said the pale man, mildly, nervously. Gilgamesh knew that some thought him a fool for his conservative ideas. Caesar, for one. Cocksure coldblooded Julius with the row of fragmentation grenades tucked into his belt and the Uzi slung across his shoulders: Caesar, who represented all that Gilgamesh most despised. "Why don't you admit it?" Caesar had asked him some considerable time earlier, riding up in his jeep as Gilgamesh was making ready to set forth from the city of Nova Roma where he had lived too long, out toward the Afterworld's open wilderness, the godforsaken Outback. "It's a pure affectation, Gilgamesh, all this insistence on arrows and javelins and spears. This isn't old Sumer you're living in now."

Gilgamesh spat. "Hunt with 9-millimeter automatics? Hunt with grenades and cluster bombs and lasers? You call that sport, Caesar?"

"I call it acceptance of reality. Is it technology you hate? What's the difference between using a bow and arrow and using a gun? They're both technology, Gilgamesh. It isn't as though you kill the animals with your bare hands."

"I have done that too," said Gilgamesh.

"Bah! I'm on to your game. Big hulking Gilgamesh, the simple innocent oversized Bronze Age hero! That's just an affectation too, my friend! You pretend to be a stupid stubborn thick-skulled barbarian because it suits you to be left alone to your hunting and your wandering, and that's all you claim that you really want. But secretly you regard yourself as superior to anybody who lived in an era softer than your own. You mean to restore the bad old filthy ways of the ancient ancients, isn't that so? If I read you the right way you're just biding your time, skulking around with your bow and arrow in the dreary Outback until you think it's the right moment to launch the putsch that carries you to supreme power here. Isn't that it, Gilgamesh? You've got some crazy fantasy of lording it over all of us, supreme monarch and absolute dictator. And then we'll live in mud cities again and make little chicken-scratches on clay tablets, the way you think human beings were meant to do. What do you say?"

"I say this is great nonsense, Caesar."

"Is it? This place is rotten to bursting with kings and emperors and sultans and pharaohs and shahs and presidents and dictators, and every single one of them wants to be Number One again. My guess is that you're no exception."

"In this you are very wrong. It is well known to all that I have no lust to rule over men a second time."

"I doubt that. I suspect you believe you're the noblest of us all: you, the sturdy warrior, the great hunter, the maker of bricks, the builder of vast temples and lofty walls, the shining beacon of ancient heroism." Caesar laughed. "Before Rome ever was, you and your dismal sun-baked little land of Mesopotamia were really big news, and you can't ever let us forget that, can you? You think we're all decadent rascally degenerates and that you're the one true virtuous man. But you're as proud and ambitious as any of us. Isn't that how it is? This shunning of power for which you're so famous: it's only a pose. You're a fraud, Gilgamesh, a huge muscle-bound fraud!"

"At least I am no slippery tricky serpent like you, Caesar, who buys and sells his friends at the best prices."

Caesar looked untroubled by the thrust. "And so you pass three quarters of your time killing slow-witted lumpish monsters in the Outback and you make sure everyone knows that you're too pious to have anything to do with modern weapons while you do it. You don't fool me. It isn't virtue that keeps you from doing your killing with a decent double-barreled .470 Springfield. It's intellectual pride, or maybe simple laziness. The bow just happens to be the weapon you grew up with, who knows how many thousands of years ago. You like it because it's familiar. But what language are you speaking now, eh? Is it your thick-tongued Euphrates gibberish? No, it seems to be English, doesn't it? Did you grow up speaking English too, Gilgamesh? Did you grow up riding around in jeeps and choppers? Apparently some of the modern conveniences are acceptable to you."

Gilgamesh shrugged. "I speak English with you because that is what is mainly spoken now in this place. In my heart I speak the old tongue, Caesar. In my heart I am still Gilgamesh of Uruk, and I will hunt as I hunt."

"Your Uruk's long gone to dust. This is the life after life, my friend, the little joke that the gods have played on us all. We've been here a long time. We'll be here for all time to come, unless I miss my guess. New people constantly bring new ideas to this place, and it's impossible to ignore them. Even you can't do it. The new ways sink in and change you, however much you try to pretend that they can't."

"I will hunt as I hunt," said Gilgamesh. "There is no sport in it, when you do it with guns. There is no grace in it."

Caesar shook his head. "I never could understand hunting for sport, anyway. Killing a few stags, yes, or a boar or two, when you're bivouacked in some dismal Gaulish forest and your men want meat. But hunting? Slaughtering hideous animals that aren't even edible? By Apollo, it's all nonsense to me!"

"My point exactly."

"But if you must hunt, to scorn the use of a decent hunting rifle —"

"You will never convince me."

"No," Caesar said with a sigh. "I suppose I won't. I should know better than to argue with a reactionary."

"Reactionary! In my time I was thought to be a radical," said Gilgamesh. "When I was king in Uruk —"

"Just so," Caesar said, grinning. "King in Uruk. Was there ever a king who wasn't reactionary? You put a crown on your head and it addles your brains instantly. Three times Antonius offered me a crown, Gilgamesh, three times, and —"

" — you did thrice refuse it, yes. I know all that. 'Was this ambition?' You thought you'd have the power without the emblem. Who were you fooling, Caesar? Not Brutus, so I hear. Brutus said you were ambitious. And Brutus —"

That stung him where nothing else had. Caesar brandished a fist. "Damn you, don't say it!"

" — was an honourable man," Gilgamesh concluded all the same, greatly enjoying Caesar's discomfiture.

The Roman groaned. "If I hear that line once more —"

"Some say this is a place of torment," said Gilgamesh serenely. "If in truth it is, yours is to be swallowed up in another man's poetry. Leave me to my bows and arrows, Caesar, and return to your jeep and your trivial intrigues. I am a fool and a reactionary, yes. But you know nothing of hunting. Nor do you understand anything of me."

All that had been a year ago, or two, or maybe five — even for those who affected clocks and wristwatches, there was no keeping proper track of time in the Afterworld, where the ruddy unsleeping eye of the sun moved in perverse random circles across the sky — and now Gilgamesh was far from Caesar and all his minions, far from Nova Roma, that troublesome capital city of the Afterworld, and the trivial squabbling of those like Caesar and Bismarck and Cromwell and that sordid little man Lenin who maneuvered for power in this place. He had found himself thrown in among them because — he barely remembered why — because he had met one, or Enkidu had, and almost without realizing what was happening they had been drawn in, had become entangled in their plots and counterplots, their dreams of empire, their hope of revolution and upheaval and transformation. Until finally, growing bored with their folly, he had walked out, never to return. How long ago had that been? A year? A century? He had no idea.

Let them maneuver all they liked, those tiresome new men of the tawdry latter days. All their maneuvers were hollow ones, though they lacked the wit to see that. But some day they might learn wisdom, and was not that the purpose of this place, if it had any purpose at all?

Gilgamesh preferred to withdraw from the center of the arena. The quest for power bored him. He had left it behind, left it in that other world where his first flesh had been conceived and gone to dust. Unlike the rest of those fallen emperors and kings and pharaohs and shahs, he felt no yearning to reshape the Afterworld in his own image, or to regain in it the pomp and splendor that had once been his. Caesar was as wrong about Gilgamesh's ambitions as he was about the reasons for his preferences in hunting gear. Out here in the Outback, in the bleak dry chilly hinterlands of the Afterworld, Gilgamesh hoped to find peace. That was all he wanted now: peace. He had wanted much more, once, but that had been long ago, and in another place.

There was a stirring in the scraggly underbush.

A lion, maybe?

No, Gilgamesh told himself. There were no lions to be found in the Afterworld, only the strange nether-world beasts, demon-spawn, nightmare-spawn, that lurked in the dead zones between the cities — ugly hairy things with flat noses and many legs and dull baleful eyes, and slick shiny things with the faces of women and the bodies of malformed dogs, and worse, much worse. Some had drooping leathery wings and some were armed with spiked tails that rose like a scorpion's and some had mouths that opened wide enough to swallow an elephant at a gulp. They all were demons of one sort or another, Gilgamesh knew. No matter. Hunting was hunting; the prey was the prey; all beasts were one in the contest of the field. That fop Caesar could never begin to comprehend that.

Drawing an arrow from his quiver, Gilgamesh laid it lightly across his bow and waited.

"A lot like Texas, yes," Howard went on, "only the Afterworld's just a faint carbon copy of the genuine item. Just a rough first draft, is all. You see that sandstorm rising out that away? We had sandstorms, they covered entire counties! You see that lightning? In Texas that would be just a flicker!"

"If you could drive just a little more slowly, Bob —"

"More slowly? Chthulu's whiskers, man, I am driving slowly!"

"Yes, I'm quite sure you believe that you are."

"And the way I always heard it, H.P., you loved for people to drive you around at top speed. Seventy, eighty miles an hour, that was what you liked best, so the story goes."

"In the other life one dies only once, and then all pain ceases," Lovecraft replied. "But here, where one can lose one's life again and again, and each time return from the darkness, and when one returns one remembers every final agony in the brightest of hues — here, dear friend Bob, death's much more to be feared, for the pain of it stays with one forever, and one may die a thousand deaths." Lovecraft managed a pallid baleful smile. "Speak of that to some professional warrior, Bob, some Trojan or Hun or Assyrian — or one of the gladiators, maybe, someone who has died and died and died again. Ask him about it: the dying and the rebirth, and the pain, the hideous torment, reliving every detail. It is a dreadful thing to die in the Afterworld. I fear dying here far more than I ever did in life. I will take no needless risks here."

Howard snorted. "Gawd, try and figure you out! In the days when you thought you lived only once, you made people go roaring along with you on the highway a mile a minute. Here where no one stays dead for very long you want me to drive like an old woman. Well, I'll attempt it, H.P., but everything in me cries out to go like the wind. When you live in big country, you learn to cover the territory the way it has to be covered. And Texas is the biggest country there is. It isn't just a place, it's a state of mind."

"As is the Afterworld," said Lovecraft. "Though I grant you that the Afterworld isn't Texas."

"Texas!" Howard boomed. "Now, there was a place! God damn, I wish you could have seen it! By God, H.P., what a time we'd have had, you and me, if you'd come to Texas. Two gentlemen of letters like us riding together all to hell and gone from Corpus Christi to El Paso and back again, seeing it all and telling each other wondrous stories all the way! I swear, it would have enlarged your soul, H. P. Beauty such as perhaps even you couldn't have imagined. That big sky. That blazing sun. And the open space! Whole empires could fit into Texas and never be seen again! That Rhode Island of yours, H.P. — we could drop it down just back of Cross Plains and lose it behind a medium-size prickly pear! What you see here, it just gives you the merest idea of that glorious beauty. Though I admit this is plenty beautiful itself, this here."

"I wish I could share your joy in this landscape, Robert," Lovecraft said quietly, when it seemed that Howard had said all he meant to say.

"You don't care for it?" Howard asked, sounding surprised and a little wounded.

"I can say one good thing for it: at least it's far from the sea."

"You'll give it that much, will you?"

"You know how I hate the sea and all that the sea contains! Its odious creatures — that hideous reek of

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Excerpted from To the Land of the Living by Robert Silverberg. Copyright © 1989 Robert Silverberg. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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