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“I am GILGAMESH, King of Uruk, king of kings! Make ready the low places, fair Shamhat, prepare the House of Dust, for I come, I come to rule.”
Author:Intercedent
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FALLOUT: The United States Federal Government and the SCP Foundation go to war.
The land was fat, swollen with grain, bursting with game and fish, crashing dizzyingly against the outer edges of the furthest pastures in gentle rolling waves, caressed by the sapphire band of the Id-Ugina, that wild river, now collared and yoked with levies and aqueducts and made at last to labor. The sun slid across the sky like a droplet of goodly honey and at sunset moved in bands across the thatched roofs of the inner city and the parapets of the walls and the frescoes of the ziggurats and everywhere it touched was pressed in gold.
See it move, the eye of Shamash, so slowly and so bright across the sky. See it turn to a trail of flame, chased by the slivered moon. See the river swell and cease, see the carpet of thatch swallow the fields like blooming mushrooms, see the ziggurats grow to cradle the sky. See the years flicker past like fireflies.
See it as he saw it, standing on the highest terrace, in that blooming age of man.
Slayer of the Bull of Heaven, slayer of Humbaba, slayer of lions, the first hero, Mightiest Son, the god-man, 𒀭𒄑𒂆𒈦.
Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, king of kings.
Now he walks into the market-place without retinue, cloaked in sackcloth, and he walks as his people walk and sees the wares laid there, glittering and glistening. He holds aloft a fine bronze blade to the light, marvelling, and passes coinage through his fingers, gold and silver from a hundred corners of the earth.
More with every turning of the seasons, more hawkers in the stalls, more wonders, and here is a bolt of silver-blue cloth as fine as air, and here is a candle with a flame that burns a day and night, and here not a man realizes that the wares they haggle over day by day would’ve been the provenance of the gods, scant seventy years ago. He walks in the sun, stroking his beard, and laughs as he remembers.
My friend, did I not tell you that one day they will not need you so?
As he remembers the profit of seventy years.
Lyres sing from goat-gut strings as the poets play to a laughing crowd. He is with them, cheering when they cheer, gasping, murmuring, all as one, for the poets play the people just as well as the strings, acclamation and horror rising in the spaces between the notes like shifting tides.
Come and hear, come and see- past, present, eternity.
He is at the edge of the mass when a false note splits the sky, a dissonant sound of snapping sinew, and at once there is a great exclamation of dismay and movement, the whole crowd parting like reeds, and he turns to see a merchant’s prized wagon-ox careening up the thoroughfare towards him in a cloud of yellow dust, trailing bits of broken bridle from its frothing mouth, two-hundred stone, white tuft on its chest blazing like a star, and in a moment like quicksilver he turns, feet planted, roaring like thunder, and catches it by the horns, sackcloth fluttering from his shoulders.
He holds it there until the beast slumps into the dust, hooves digging furrows into the ground as it bucks and rears, until the merchant’s men move to bind it with loops of corded rope. The crowd is silent as he turns to them, at first. Then there is a sound, a shout, a cheer, echoing off mud-brick and terracotta, shaking the birds from their roosts, as half of Uruk kneels in the street, left hands pressed in the sign of supplication, hail, hail, hail-
Hail to the slayer of the Bull of Heaven, slayer of Humbaba, slayer of lions, hail to the first hero, Mightiest Son, the god-man, 𒀭𒄑𒂆𒈦.
Hail Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, king of kings.
At the center of sacred Uruk stands a grove of cedar trees, rising straight and fragrant between the pillars of a roofless pavilion, the temple of Enlil, open to sky and storm. Their trunks are hung with ropes of jasper stones, silver beads, devices to catch the wind, to hear the ghost-voice of Enlil as it comes, Enlil of the storm, Enlil Fateweaver.
Here the king comes, not to pray, but to listen.
He presses a mighty palm against the cool bark and feels the breeze, warm and incensed, and listens to the tinkling of the shrine-tokens as they catch the wind. He is listening for the grave-wind, the gallows-wind, the wind of the night that issues from deep caverns as a trembling of the earth.
He is listening for a voice that he yet recalls as an ache in his chest, seven decades past.
He is listening for a voice like the yearning of wolves beneath pale moonlight, wild and free.
He is listening for the second half of his soul.
He is yet to hear it.
Now the braziers blow sweet smoke through hanging tapestries, through ivy-draped arches, into the midnight sky where young nebulae eddy and swirl on honeysuckle winds. Hands like quartz cradle a face of bearded granite, caressing corded bronze muscles as a voice like lilting birdsong gives counsel.
Here is the counsel of Shamhat the jeweled, Shamhat, fairest of theharimtu, whose hair is as polished jet, whose eyes are of chalcedony, Shamhat the tamer of the wild-man Enkidu.
Here is her counsel to Gilgamesh, king of kings.
GILGAMESH: I do not yet find myself weary, not of this world. It is a good place, a good time.
SHAMHAT: You have led them well and truly. But it is not for you to deem the day nor hour when you will be brought low, into the low places, beneath the earth, in Irkalla. You learned this truth well, I recall.
GILGAMESH: Indeed there is no glory, no deed nor esteem that can keep a man from the House that is his birth-right, from the dust that was his father’s and his father’s father’s- nor secrets of the earth and sea. The quest was long and fruitless.
SHAMHAT: You fear not for yourself, then.
GILGAMESH: It is a good place, a good time. I have laid down the law, and the law is peace. By my hands, my hands that have laid low the wicked and upraised the just, I have made peace.
SHAMHAT: You fear what will come of them when you are gone.
GILGAMESH: I do.
SHAMHAT: Consider, oh king, that the world spins like a wheel: what is good must become sour, what is fruitful must wither- flowers die before they bloom and the goodly moon must wane before it waxes.
GILGAMESH: I worry nonetheless.
SHAMHAT: It is wise and just for you to fear such a thing, for your duty is ever to your people, and no king can keep the bitter away ‘ere long. But consider, oh king, of Irkalla, of the House of Dust. Could you number the denizens of that low place, even if you set every man of Uruk to count for a day and night?
GILGAMESH: Better to number the stars and the grains at harvest than to account the dead, for that figure only the gods may know, and the dead outnumber the living.
SHAMHAT: And the dead outnumber the living. So consider, oh king, the numberless dead that fill the House, whose arms are feathered as a bird is feathered, who have naught but dust to eat, and naught but dust to drink, consider, what might you be to them, once you arrive?
GILGAMESH: You mean for me to be king of the dead.
Then wise Shamhat, who is entrusted with the secret names of the wind, the black gallows-wind that blows beneath the earth into the caverns of the night and issues forth as a trembling of the land, tells him of the misery of the dead, of pale Irkalla, where the souls of men are tormented bygallas, who are neither mortal nor divine but in-between, who, in perverse wickedness, take up fistfuls of spirits as a man might pick ripe date-fruits and crushes them between basalt teeth.
SHAMHAT: And who is more worthy than you to defend them?
GILGAMESH: This I shall do! But, if as the poets say, I shall arrive in the House as a beast, blind, deaf, and dumb, like a newborn babe, with unseeing eyes, how then am I to rule them, not knowing myself, nor wisdom, nor the words of man?
Then brave Shamhat, who alone went into the wilds to tame the wild-man Enkidu, brave Shamhat, who is the bearer of the mysteries said-
“Of that, my king, you need not worry. For I feel that I shall soon leave, before you, into the House below the ground, into Irkalla, and there I will wait, and gather with me your entourage, your captains, your sergeants already gone into the ground, and wait, and I will come to you, my king, and teach you of yourself again, when the time comes.”
GILGAMESH: Like you did for Enkidu.
SHAMHAT: Like I did for Enkidu.
GILGAMESH: I miss him.
SHAMHAT: I miss him too.
Now the mourners smear sacred ash onto their forearms and daub themselves with feathers dipped in oil, now the procession makes its way lead by the lamentations of holy men whose feet never touch the ground, now all Uruk bears the corpse-palanquin of sacred Shamhat, beloved Shamhat who is lovely even unto death, to the place of honor where the poet-priests are interred, at the foot of the tomb of kings.
And Gilgamesh, king of kings, whose beard is streaked with gray, lays the first grave-goods atop the casket, and says.
“Make ready. For I am the slayer of the Bull of Heaven, slayer of Humbaba, slayer of lions, the first hero, Mightiest Son, the god-man, 𒀭𒄑𒂆𒈦.”
“I amGILGAMESH, King of Uruk, king of kings! Make ready the low places, fair Shamhat, prepare the House of Dust, for I come, I come to rule.”
You must have been told that this is what the bane of being human involves.
You must have been told that this is what the cutting of your umbilical cord involved.
The darkest day of humans awaits you now.
The solitary place of humans awaits you now.
The unstoppable flood-wave awaits you now.
The unavoidable battle awaits you now.
The unequal struggle awaits you now.
The skirmish from which there is no escape awaits you now.
But you should not go to the underworld with heart knotted in anger.
-The Death of Gilgamesh