Hellenic Immortal (10 page)

“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.’ ”

“He said ‘I see?’ ”

“Do you know what this might mean?” The messenger looked eager, as I’m sure he’d spent the last three days puzzling it over.

“It is private,” I replied, and his face fell with disappointment. So I decided to throw him something. “Gilgamesh the mighty wished to become immortal, as I am. I told him he should spend less time worrying about death and more time living his life. His final words tell me he understood this lesson.”

He nodded slowly and bowed deeply. “I thank you, great Ut-Naphishtim.”
 

Since my words to the messenger appear more or less exactly as I spoke them in
The Epic of Gilgamesh
, I imagine he repeated it a few dozen times when he got back.

SILENUS:

YOU HAVE HANDED OUT PIECES OF YOUR LIFE TO ME, AND I AM THEIR KEEPER.

BUT THE ANSWER YOU SEEK IS NOT AMONG THEM.

From the Tragedy of Silenus, text corrected and translated by Ariadne

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” I asked Mike as we watched the sunrise from a truck stop somewhere along Interstate 58. We’d driven straight through the evening in a non-direct path that had us leaving the highway several times to meander along random tributaries that appeared to serve no purpose other than to confuse me as to our eventual destination. Mike claimed these side jaunts were to make sure we weren’t being followed, which seemed a mildly paranoid thing for an FBI agent to worry about, except that this agent was transporting a fugitive. Now we were somewhere in Northern California enjoying the Northern California sunrise.

   
Mike sipped his coffee and failed to respond, or at least not to the question I asked. “So where’d your money come from?” he asked instead.

“Smart investing.” I drank my own cup of coffee with earnest. I’ve had worse coffee, about three hundred years ago. But it served the minimum requirement of being black in color and caffeinated in substance, and that’s all I really ask of my coffee.

Mike gave me the evil eye. “You’re what? Thirty-two? C’mon. I put money away in my 401K every month and net fifteen percent in a really good year, and I’ll be lucky if I can buy a decent condo when I retire. You bought an island. What’s the real story, hombre?”

“Maybe I’m older than I look,” I offered. Neither of us was feeling particularly chipper. Morning conversations should be between very close friends or lovers, and otherwise avoided entirely, I’ve learned.

He leaned back and stole a glance at the waitress, who was busy smoking a Pall Mall all the way down to the filter and most definitely not bringing us our food. “You’re a tough nut,” Mike commented.

“Is that a compliment?”
 

“Take it however you want to.” Mike grunted as he lit up his own cigarette and went back to staring at me.

I wasn’t about to confide in him about anything. I’d learned the hard way somewhat recently that it was no longer safe to tell anybody about my curiously long life, and that meant anybody. Plus there was the whole problem of him having ulterior motives in this extracurricular trip of ours.

“All right.” I sighed. “Take your best shot. I’ll tell you if you get close.”

He took a couple of puffs of the cigarette and then started spit-balling. “You’re American by birth. You were an athlete when you were younger and you still keep in shape. You . . . jog. Maybe yoga, or some other Vedic shit. I know you’re not a vegetarian.”

“I ordered bacon,” I confirmed.

“You like the outdoors. You’d probably be pretty good in a fight.”

“Did you want to fight me?”

“I’m just saying what comes to mind. You may be an alcoholic.”

“That’s a little judgmental.”

He continued, “There are people who like to drink and people who have to drink. You’ve been slipping scotch into your coffee since we sat down.”

“It’s your bottle.”

“Yeah, it’s been under the seat of my car for a year or two. And it was left there by a friend who has bad taste in scotch.”

“I’ve had better,” I agreed.

“Yet you’re still drinking it.”

“I’m still on vacation.”

He grabbed my hand and flipped it palm-up. “Soft hands; you don’t do a lot of hard labor.” He sniffed. “And you washed them when you went to the john a few minutes back.”

“Good sense of smell,” I noted.

“I have an above-average nose. All your clothing is new, right? But you never changed your socks.”

“A surprising observation.”

“Am I right?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “That’s pretty good; you could do parties with that nose.”