Gilgamesh shrugged. “I speak English with you because that is what is 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.”
“Uruk’s long gone to dust. This is the life after life, my friend. 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. Isn’t that a wristwatch I see on your arm, Gilgamesh? A digital watch, no less?”
“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, laughing. “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. “Damn you, don’t say it!”
“—was an honorable man,” Gilgamesh concluded, enjoying Caesar’s discomfiture.
Caesar 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—with or without a wristwatch, there was no keeping proper track of time in Hell, where the unmoving ruddy eye of Paradise never budged from the sky—and now Gilgamesh was far from Caesar and all his minions, far from the troublesome center of Hell and the tiresome squabbling of those like Caesar and Alexander and Napoleon and that sordid little Guevara man who maneuvered for power in this place.
Let them maneuver all they liked, those shoddy new men of the latter days. 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. Unlike the rest of those fallen emperors and kings and pharaohs and shahs, he felt no yearning to reshape Hell in his own image. 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 Hell, Gilgamesh hoped to find peace. That was all he wanted now: peace. He had wanted much more, once, but that had been long ago.
There was a stirring in the scraggly underbrush.
A lion, maybe?
No, Gilgamesh thought. There were no lions to be found in Hell, only the strange nether-world beasts. 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.
“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 dark jagged teeth. “Beautiful. Beautiful. As close to Texas in look as makes no never mind, this countryside is.”
“Beautiful?” said the other man uncertainly. “Hell?”
“This stretch sure is. But if you think Hell’s beautiful, you should have seen Texas!”
The burly man laughed and gunned the engine and the Land Rover went leaping and bouncing onward at a stupefying speed.
His traveling companion, a gaunt lantern-jawed man as pale as the other was bronzed, sat very still in the passenger seat, knees together and elbows digging in against his ribs, as if he expected a fiery crash at any moment. The two of them had been journeying 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 Diabolic England, envoys of His Britannic Majesty Henry VIII to the court of Prester John.
In another life they 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 reality of Hell.
“Robert—” said the pale man nervously.
“A lot like Texas, yes,” Howard went on, “only Hell’s just a faint carbon copy of the genuine item. Just a rough first draft, is all. You see that sandstorm rising out thataway? 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 go to the Undertaker again and again, 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 pale 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 Hell. 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! 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 Hell,” said Lovecraft. “Though I grant you that Hell isn’t Texas.”
“Texas!” Howard boomed. “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 salt air hovering above it—” Lovecraft shuddered fastidiously. “But this land—this bitter desert—you don’t find it somber? You don’t find it forbidding?”
“It’s the most beautiful place I’ve seen since I came to Hell.”
“Perhaps the beauty is too subtle for my eye. Perhaps it escapes me altogether. I was always a man for cities, myself.”
“What you’re trying to say, I reckon, is that all this looks real hateful to you. Is that it? As grim and ghastly as the Plateau of Leng, eh, H.P.?” Howard laughed. “‘Sterile hills of gray granite…dim wastes of rock and ice and snow…’” Hearing himself quoted, Lovecraft laughed too, though not exuberantly. Howard went on, “I look around at the Outback of Hell and I see something a whole lot like Texas, and I love it. For you it’s as sinister as dark frosty Leng, where people have horns and hooves and munch on corpses and sing hymns to Nyarlathotep. Oh, H.P., H.P., there’s no accounting for tastes, is there? Why, there’s even some people who—whoa, now! Look there!”
He braked the Land Rover suddenly and brought it to a jolting halt. A small malevolent-looking something with blazing eyes and a scaly body had broken from cover and gone scuttering across the path just in front of them. Now it faced them, glaring up out of the road, snarling and hissing flame.
“Hell-cat!” Howard cried. “Hell-coyote! Look at that critter, H.P. You ever see so much ugliness packed into such a small package? Scare the toenails off a shoggoth, that one would!”
“Can you drive past it?” Lovecraft asked, looking dismayed.
“I want a closer look, first.” Howard rummaged down by his boots and pulled a pistol from the clutter on the floor of the car. “Don’t it give you the shivers, driving around in a land full of critters that could have come right out of one of your stories, or mine? I want to look this little ghoul-cat right in the eye.”
“Robert—”
“You wait here. I’ll only be but a minute.”
Howard swung himself down from the Land Rover and marched stolidly toward the hissing little beast, which stood its ground. Lovecraft watched fretfully. At any moment the creature might leap upon Bob Howard and rip out his throat with a swipe of its horrid yellow talons, perhaps—or burrow snout-deep into his chest, seeking the Texan’s warm, throbbing heart—
They stood staring at each other, Howard and the small monster, no more than a dozen feet apart. For a long moment neither one moved. Howard, gun in hand, leaned forward to inspect the beast as one might look at a feral cat guarding the mouth of an alleyway. Did he mean to shoot it? No, Lovecraft thought: beneath his bluster the robust Howard seemed surprisingly squeamish about bloodshed and violence of any sort.
Then things began happening very quickly. Out of a thicket to the left a much larger animal abruptly emerged: a ravening Hell-creature with a crocodile head and powerful thick-thighed legs that ended in monstrous curving claws. An arrow ran through the quivering dewlaps of its heavy throat from side to side, and a hideous dark ichor streamed from the wound down the beast’s repellent blue-gray fur. The small animal, seeing the larger one wounded this way, instantly sprang upon its back and sank its fangs joyously into its shoulder. But a moment later there burst from the same thicket a man of astonishing size, a great dark-haired black-bearded man clad only in a bit of cloth about his waist. Plainly he was the huntsman who had wounded the larger monster, for there was a bow of awesome dimensions in his hand and a quiver of arrows on his back. In utter fearlessness the giant plucked the foul little creature from the wounded beast’s back and hurled it far out of sight; then, swinging around, he drew a gleaming bronze dagger and with a single fierce thrust drove it into the beast of his prey as the coup de grace that brought the animal crashing heavily down.
All this took only an instant. Lovecraft, peering through the window of the Land Rover, was dazzled by the strength and speed of the dispatch and awed by the size and agility of the half-naked huntsman. He glanced toward Howard, who stood to one side, his own considerable frame utterly dwarfed by the black-bearded man.
For a moment Howard seemed dumbstruck, paralyzed with wonder and amazement. But then he was the first to speak.
“By Crom,” he muttered, staring at the giant. “Surely this is Conan of Aquilonia and none other!” He was trembling. He took a lurching step toward the huge man, holding out both his hands in a strange gesture—submission, was it? “Lord Conan?” Howard murmured. “Great king, is it you? Conan? Conan?” And before Lovecraft’s astounded eyes Howard fell to his knees next to the dying beast, and looked up with awe and something like rapture in his eyes at the towering huntsman.
It had been a decent day’s hunting so far. Three beasts brought down after long and satisfying chase; every shaft fairly placed; each animal skillfully dressed, the meat set out as bait for other hell-beasts, the hide and head carefully put aside for proper cleaning at nightfall. There was true pleasure in work done so well.
Yet there was a hollowness at the heart of it all, Gilgamesh thought, that left him leaden and cheerless no matter how cleanly his arrows sped to their mark. He never felt that true fulfillment, that clean sense of completion, that joy of accomplishment, which was ultimately the only thing he sought.
Why was that? Was it because—as the Christian dead so drearily insisted—because this was Hell, where by definition there could be no delight?
To Gilgamesh that was foolishness. Those who came here expecting eternal punishment did indeed get eternal punishment, and it was even more horrendous than anything they had anticipated. It served them right, those true believers, those gullible New Dead, that army of credulous Christians.
He had been amazed when their kind first came flocking into Hell, Enki only knew how many thousands of years ago. The things they talked of! Rivers of boiling oil! Lakes of pitch! Demons with pitchforks! That was what they expected, and the Administration was happy to oblige them. There were Torture Towns aplenty for those who wanted them. Gilgamesh had trouble understanding why anyone would. Nobody among the Old Dead really could figure them out, those absurd New Dead with their obsession with punishment. What was it Sargon called them? Masochists, that was the word. Pathetic masochists. But then that sly little Machiavelli had begged to disagree, saying, “No, my lord, it would be a violation of the nature of Hell to send a true masochist off to the torments. The only ones who go are the strong ones, the bullies, the braggarts, the ones who are cowards at the core of their souls.” Augustus had had something to say on the matter too, and Caesar, and that Egyptian bitch Hatshepsut had butted in, she of the false beard and the startling eyes, and then all of them had jabbered at once, trying yet again to make sense of the Christian New Dead. Until finally Gilgamesh had said, before stalking out of the room, “The trouble with all of you is that you keep trying to make sense out of this place. But when you’ve been here as l
ong as I have—”
He had to admit that the reality of Hell had turned out to be nothing at all like what the priests had promised it would be. The House of Dust and Darkness, was what they had called it in Uruk long ago. A place where the dead lived in eternal night and sadness, clad like birds, with wings for garments. Where the dwellers had dust for their bread, and clay for their meat. Where the kings of the earth, the masters, the high rulers, lived humbly without their crowns, and were forced to wait on the demons like servants. Small wonder that he had dreaded death as he had, believing that that was what awaited him for all time to come!
Well, in fact all that had been mere myth and folly. Gilgamesh could still remember Hell as it had been when he first had come to it: a place much like Uruk, so it seemed, with low flat-roofed buildings of whitewashed brick, and temples rising on high platforms of many steps. And there he found all the heroes of olden days, living as they had always lived: Lugalbanda his father, and Enmerkar his father’s father, and Ziusudra who built the vessel by which mankind survived the Flood, and others on and on back to the dawn of time. At least that was what it was like where Gilgamesh first found himself; there were other districts, he discovered later, that were quite different, places where people lived in caves, or in pits in the ground, or in flimsy houses of reeds, and still other places where the Hairy Men dwelled and had no houses at all. Most of that was gone now, greatly transformed by all those who had come to Hell in the latter days, and indeed a lot of nonsensical ugliness and ideological foolishness had entered in recent centuries in the baggage of the New Dead. But still, the idea that this whole vast realm—infinitely bigger than his own beloved Land of the Two Rivers—existed merely for the sake of chastising the dead for their sins struck Gilgamesh as too silly for serious contemplation.
Why, then, was the joy of his hunting so pale and hollow? Why none of the old ecstasy when spying the prey, when drawing the great bow, when sending the arrow true to its mark?