“Ah. Ah. Indeed. Nicely put. You are Old Dead, are you?”
“Very old, my lord.”
“Older than Ch’in Shih Huang Ti? Older than the Lords of Shang and Hsia?”
Gilgamesh turned in puzzlement toward Lovecraft, who told him in a half-whisper, “Ancient kings of China. Your time was even earlier.”
Shrugging, Gilgamesh replied, “They are not known to me, my lord, but you hear what the Britannic ambassador says. He is a man of learning: it must be so. I will tell you that I am older than Caesar by far, older than Agamemnon and the Supreme Commander Rameses, older even than Sargon. By a great deal.”
Yeh-lu Ta-shih considered that a moment. Then he made another of his little gestures of dismissal, as though brushing aside the whole concept of relative ages in Hell. With a dry laugh he said, “So you are very old, King Gilgamesh. I congratulate you. And yet the Ice-Hunter folk would tell us that you and I and Rameses and Sargon all arrived here only yesterday; and to the Hairy Men, the Ice-Hunters themselves are mere newcomers. And so on and so on. There’s no beginning to it, is there? Any more than there’s an end.”
Without waiting for an answer he asked Gilgamesh, “How did you come by that gory wound, great king of Nothing-at-all?”
At least he’s noticed it, Gilgamesh thought.
“A misunderstanding, my lord. It may be that your border patrol is a little overzealous at times.”
One of the courtiers leaned toward the emperor and murmured something. Prester John’s serene brow grew furrowed. He lifted a flawlessly contoured eyebrow ever so slightly.
“Killed nine of them, did you?”
“They attacked us before we had the opportunity of showing our diplomatic credentials,” Lovecraft put in quickly. “It was entirely a matter of self-defense, my lord Prester John.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it.” The emperor seemed to contemplate for a moment, but only for a moment, the skirmish that had cost the lives of nine of his horsemen; and then quite visibly he dismissed that matter too from the center of his attention. “Well, now, my lords ambassador—”
Abruptly Gilgamesh swayed, tottered, started to fall. He checked himself just barely in time, seizing a massive porphyry column and clinging to it until he felt more steady. Beads of sweat trickled down his forehead into his eyes. He began to shiver. The huge stone column seemed to be expanding and contracting. Waves of vertigo were rippling through him and he was seeing double, suddenly. Everything was blurring and multiplying. He drew his breath in deeply, again, again, forcing himself to hold on. He wondered if Prester John was playing some kind of game with him, trying to see how long his strength could last. Well, if he had to, Gilgamesh swore, he would stand here forever in front of Prester John without showing a hint of weakness.
But now Yeh-lu Ta-shih was at last willing to extend compassion. With a glance toward one of his pages the emperor said, “Summon my physician, and tell him to bring his tools and his potions. That wound should have been dressed an hour ago.”
“Thank you, my lord,” Gilgamesh muttered, trying to keep the irony from his tone.
The doctor appeared almost at once, as though he had been waiting in an antechamber. Another of Prester John’s little games, perhaps? He was a burly, broad-shouldered, bushy-haired man of more than middle years, with a manner about him that was brisk and bustling but nevertheless warm, concerned, reassuring. Drawing Gilgamesh down beside him on a low divan covered with the gray-green hide of some scaly Hell-dragon, he peered into the wound, muttered something unintelligible to himself in a guttural language unknown to the Sumerian, and pressed his thick fingers around the edges of the torn flesh until fresh blood flowed. Gilgamesh hissed sharply but did not flinch.
“Ach, mein lieber Freund, I must hurt you again, but it is for your own good. Verstehen sie?”
The doctor’s fingers dug in more deeply. He was spreading the wound, swabbing it, cleansing it with some clear fluid that stung like a hot iron. The pain was so intense that there was almost a kind of pleasure in it: it was a purifying kind of pain, a purging of the soul.
Prester John said, “How bad is it, Dr. Schweitzer?”
“Gott sei dank, it is deep but clean. He will heal without damage.”
He continued to probe and cleanse; murmuring softly to Gilgamesh as he worked: “Bitte. Bitte. Einen Augenblick, mein Freund.” To Prester John he said, “This man is made of steel. No nerves at all, immense resistance to pain. We have one of the great heroes here, nicht wahr? You are Roland, are you? Achilles, perhaps?”
“Gilgamesh is his name,” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih.
The doctor’s eyes grew bright. “Gilgamesh! Gilgamesh of Sumer? Wunderbar! Wunderbar! The very man. The seeker after life. Ach, we must talk, my friend, you and I, when you are feeling better.” From his medical kit he now produced a frightful-looking hypodermic syringe. Gilgamesh watched as though from a vast distance, as though that throbbing swollen arm belonged to someone else. “Ja, ja, certainly we must talk, of life, of death, or philosophy, mein Freund, of philosophy! There is so very much for us to discuss!” He slipped the needle beneath Gilgamesh’s skin. “There. Genug. Sit. Rest. The healing now begins.”
Robert Howard had never seen anything like it. It could have been something straight from the pages of one of his Conan stories. The big ox had taken an arrow right through the fat part of his arm, and he had simply yanked it out and gone right on fighting. Then, afterward, he had behaved as if the wound were nothing more than a scratch, all that time while they were driving hour after hour toward Prester John’s city and then undergoing lengthy interrogation by the court officials and then standing through this whole endless ceremony at court—God almighty, what a display of endurance! True, Gilgamesh had finally gone a little wobbly and had actually seemed on the verge of passing out. But any ordinary mortal would have conked out long ago. Heroes really were different. They were another breed altogether. Look at him now, sitting there casually while that old German medic swabs him out and stitches him up in that slapdash cavalier way, and not a whimper out of him. Not a whimper!
Suddenly Howard found himself wanting to go over there to Gilgamesh, to comfort him, to let him lean his head back against him while the doctor worked him over, to wipe the sweat from his brow—
Yes, to comfort him in an open, rugged, manly way—
No. No. No. No.
There it was again, the horror, the unspeakable thing, the hideous crawling Hell-borne impulse rising out of the cesspools of his soul—
Howard fought it back. Blotted it out, hid it from view. Denied that it had ever entered his mind.
To Lovecraft he said, “That’s some doctor! Took his medical degree at the Chicago slaughterhouses, I reckon!”
“Don’t you know who he is, Bob?”
“Some old Dutchman who wandered in here during a sandstorm and never bothered to leave.”
“Does the name Dr. Schweitzer mean nothing to you?”
Howard gave Lovecraft a blank look. “Guess I never heard it much in Texas.”
“Oh, Bob, Bob, why must you always pretend to be such a cowboy? Can you tell me you’ve never heard of Schweitzer? Albert Schweitzer? The great philosopher, theologian, musician—there never was a greater interpreter of Bach, and don’t tell me you don’t know Bach either—”
“She-it, H.P., you talking about that old country doctor there?”