Robert Silverberg - Gilgamesh the King

It was the strangeness that first had assailed me on the day of my father's funeral rite, and had touched me in a lighter way two or three times in the years since: a sense of pressure against my brow, the feeling of great invisible wings beating against my soul. But this time it was far more powerful than ever before. There was no withstanding its force. I felt a tingling in my skin, a numbness everywhere. I heard a faint buzzing sound, such as one hears when a distant swarm of locusts rises in the afternoon sky and comes across the plain. And then the buzzing grew louder, as though the locusts now were close at hand and thick black clouds of them were darkening the face of the sun. I smelled the pungent smell of burning candles, though there were no candles anywhere about. Out of the streets and buildings near me rose a cold blue fire that swept over me in fiat surging sheets, enveloping me without burning me.

I rose, or, rather, I floated to my feet. I saw before me a tunnel, perfectly round, with smooth shining walls from which a bright blue glow radiated. It drew me toward it. I yielded to its pull. I heard the slow, steady throbbing of a drum, growing louder and louder with each beat. I was without will, utterly in the thrall of the godpower, and that frightened me as deeply as I have ever been frightened in my life. For I felt myself lost, I felt myself drawn down into a place of destruction where all identities 'are merged in the blue fire that consumes everything.

A quiet voice that arose behind my right ear said, "Fear nothing. Lugalbanda is with you. There is a covenant between us for all time to come."

With those words all dread and sorrow and pain lifted from me, and I knew boundless joy, an unending rapture, a sensation of deep ecstasy.

There was no danger. A god was with me, and I was safe. I resisted nothing now. A god was with me. With every breath I took I breathed in divinity. I made the great surrender. At last I allowed the god to flow through the walls of my soul and enter me and possess me to the fullest.

Fear nothing. Lugalbanda is with you.

I danced a wild dance, roaring and stamping my feet against the ground. Lugalbanda placed in my hands a drum, and I beat upon it and sang a canticle in his praise. Power ran through me, and a great heat. Fearless, I ran forward into the blue tunnel, following a swirling, bobbing globe of brilliant purple light that blazed like a little sun just ahead of me. All night I ran without tiring, through every district of the city, across the Lion and the Reed and the Hive, through Kullab and Eanna, past the royal palace, up the steps of the White Platform and down them again, in and out of this temple and that, past the breweries, the taverns, the whorehouses, the spice market, the river quays, the cattle pens, the slaughterhouses and tanneries, the street of the scribes and the street of the diviners. I looked down into the heart of the earth and saw demons and ghosts toiling in fiery caverns. I perched myself on the right arm of Lugalbanda and flew through the heavens, and beheld the great gods far away in their spheres of crystal, and gave them my salute. I came down to the world again and journeyed from land to land, and sojourned in Dilmun the blessed, and Meluhha and Makan, and the devil-guarded Cedar Mountains, and many another distant place, full of wonders and miracles that I would not have believed, had I been in my ordinary mind.

What happened after that I do not recall. But then it was morning and I found myself lying sprawled on my back in the street in front of the shrine of Lugalbanda.

I felt as stiff and sore as though monsters had been bending each of my limbs the wrong way. I had no idea how I had come to be where I was, nor what had taken place the evening before. But clearly I had spent the night sleeping in the open, and I knew I must have been doing strange things. My jaw ached miserably and my tongue seemed swollen and painful-perhaps I had bitten it once or twice-and there was dried spittle on my chin and robe. Two puzzledlooking young soldiers were bending over me. "He is alive, I think," one of them said.

"Is he? His eyes are like glass. Hey, are you alive? You!"

"Speak more gently. He is the son of Lugalbanda."

"Makes no difference, if he's dead."

"But he is alive. See, he is breathing. His eyes move."

"So they do." And to me: "Are you indeed the son of Lugalbanda? Ah, I think you are. You wear a prince's ring. Here, then. Here, let us help you."

I shook away his hand. "I can manage," I said in a voice like rusted copper. "Stand back, stand back!"

Somehow I got myself upright, not without much awkward lurching and staggering. The soldiers stood ready to catch me, looking a little apprehensive, I suppose, on account of my size. But I held my footing. One of them winked and said, "Been celebrating the Marriage a little too hard, is that it, your lordship? Well, it's no sin. Joy to you, lordship! Joy of the new year!"

The Marriage. The Marriage! Recollection came flooding back, and with it pain. Inanna, Dumuzi, Dumuzi, Inanna.

I turned away, wincing, remembering everything now. And that terrible sense of solitude, of knowing that I stood alone under the uncaring stars, returned to me. Through me once again ran a torment of the spirit that made the aches and bruises of my weary body seem like nothing.

They frowned. "Will you be all right? Is there anything we can do for you?"

"Just let me be," I said bleakly.

"As you wish, li~rdship." They shrugged and began to move along down the street. "The sweetness of Inanna be upon you, lordship!" one of them called back to me. And the other laughed and said to him, "What a very sweet sweetness it must be, this year. Did you see her? The new young one?"

"Ah, did I! What joy the king must have had of her!"

"Enough? I growled.

And back from them, out of the distance: "The goddess is dead! Long live the goddess!"

Then they were gone, and I was alone with my pain and my sorrow and my aching and my bewilderment. But I was not altogether alone. I still felt the divine presence, warm and glowing, far back in that place behind my right ear, saying: Fear nothing. Fear nothing. For now Lugalbanda was with me, within me, and always would be.

EARLY IN the new year, when the festival of the Sacred Marriage was over at last and the funeral rites for the former high priestess had taken place, I was summoned into the presence of She-Who-Is Now-Inanna. It was a summons that I could hardly reject. Yet I was reluctant to see her, now that the shadow of Dumuzi had fallen between us like a sword.

Three little temple slaves, looking upon me with rounded eyes as though I were some sort of giant demon, led me to the chamber of the goddess in the most holy sector of the Eanna district. No longer would she and I have to meet in obscure chapels along the haunted tunnels beneath the temple. The room in which she received me was a majestic hall of whitewashed brick, with pierced walls through which came fiery spears of sunlight. Along the line where the walls met the ceiling ran a curious row of strange decorations, swelling scarlet globes that looked very much like breasts. Perhaps they were intended to be. The goddess in one of her attributes is the great harlot, the queen of desire.

I waited there a!ong while, pacing, before she arrived. She swept grandly into the room accompanied by four pages who carried the huge loop-topped bundles of reeds, half again as high as a man, that go wherever Inanna goes. With a quick gesture she sent the pages from us and we were alone.

She held herself tall before me. She looked splendid and triumphant and terrifying. I could see that there was still some girlishness about her, but not very much. Since I last had spoken with her she had been transformed into something beyond my reach and beyond my comprehension.