Hellenic Immortal (9 page)

As with most stories retold successively for hundreds of years before being recorded for posterity, much of the epic is just flat-out bunk, with gods coming down and exacting their wrath directly—rather than through a nice, indirect pestilence—and heroes who are capable of unfathomable physical acts. My favorite part of the story is when the wild, god-created animal-man, Enkidu, is tamed by a prostitute. As soon as he has sex with her, all his body hair falls off, making the creatures of the forest fear him because suddenly he looks more human than animal. Whenever I think about the Enkidu story, I think Kipling really missed out on a much better ending for
The Jungle Book
.

Nobody who looks closely at
The Epic of Gilgamesh
could mistake it for a historical text, but in a way it is. It’s a collection of several tales told about different people—all exaggerated beyond recognition—throughout early Sumerian history, most predating Gilgamesh.

And there really was a Gilgamesh. He was a king in pre-Akkadian Sumeria. (The Akkadians, a Semitic people, conquered the Sumerians—who were more white-skinned and from the North—and took over their empire in such a way that many consider Sumerian and Akkadian to be synonymous. I never stopped calling them Sumerians because truthfully, they didn’t act all that different.) And Gilgamesh really did come to seek out my advice one day.

The event that set things in motion was something we would now consider mundane, or failing that, something we would have a ready explanation for. It happened while I was sitting alone outside the small shelter I’d made for myself in a stretch of woods I had called home for roughly a century. I was in one of my back-to-nature phases. Not in the man-animal sense of the warrior Enkidu, more in a crazy hermit on the hill way. With a civilization only few days’ walk, I could have been more sociable, but as I said the Sumerians were quite nuts. I did stop by for the fertility rites in springtime, but that was just to enjoy (and participate in) the spectacle of a thousand temple prostitutes copulating in the name of the gods. Great fun, that.

It was a clear, warm evening during a new moon, and I had decided to forego a fire in order to spend the night studying the stars, something I did a lot. (And which came in handy later when I became a vizier in Egypt. The Egyptian kings were crazy for astronomy.) At sometime well past the point when the moon had reached its zenith, an amazing thing happened. A part of the sky fell.

I first spotted it low on the horizon—a flash of something I didn’t think had been there a second before. It flared brighter and brighter, this point in the sky. It appeared to grow larger, but in fact it was simply getting closer. And then it disappeared from view. About ten fairly rapid heartbeats later, a tremendous bang rang out, similar to the sound of a thousand whips cracked against a thousand backs at the same time.

I had already been on the planet for a good long while by then, and had of course heard stories about parts of the sky falling. But this was the first time I’d seen it with my own eyes. I had no idea what it meant. For me, and everybody else in this time, the sky simply was. It didn’t change. Sure, over the course of a year—and even a night—elements of the sky moved in a predictable pattern, but pieces of it weren’t supposed to just drop off like that. I re-examined the portion of the firmament the piece hailed from, but it didn’t look as if any of the stars were missing. It was as if it hadn’t happened at all.

By morning, I decided I had imagined it. This seemed like a much safer conclusion than any other option such as, say, one of the gods had slipped on something. A day later, I’d forgotten the whole event.

But I wasn’t the only one who’d seen it, as I discovered when Gilgamesh arrived at my door three days later, looking very scared.

All legendary exaggeration aside, Gilgamesh really was a pretty huge guy, a full head and shoulders taller than me. He was also profoundly hairy, more than a little ugly, and fond of going about without clothes on. This last part was just to make things easier on him when it came to passing on his seed, something he did at least three or four times daily because basically the guy always had an erection and always knew what to do with it; clothes just slowed him down. Seeing him afraid was quite a surprise.

“Ut-Naphishtim,” he boomed, “you must tell me what I have done to anger the gods!”

This may have sounded like an order, but it really wasn’t. More like a plea. I got some decent respect from Gilgamesh, who believed that my apparently eternal good health meant the very gods that suddenly had it out for him, had smiled on me for some reason. (It should be said that even though I’d never conversed with any god at anytime, I assumed much the same.)

“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 king 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.