“Who founded the leprosy clinic in Africa, at Lambarene, yes. Who devoted his life to helping the sick, under the most primitive conditions, in the most remote forests of—”
“Hold on, H.P. That can’t be so.”
“That one man could achieve so much? I assure you, Bob, he was quite well known in our time—perhaps not in Texas, I suppose, but nevertheless—”
“No. Not that he could do all that. But that he’s here. In Hell. If that old geezer’s everything you say, then he’s a goddamned saint. Unless he beat his wife when no one was looking, or something like that. What’s a saint doing in Hell, H.P.?”
“What are we doing in Hell?” Lovecraft asked.
Howard reddened and looked away. “Well, I suppose, there were things in our lives—things that might be considered sins, in the strictest sense—”
“No one understands the rules of Hell, Bob,” said Lovecraft gently. “Sin may have nothing to do with it. Gandhi is here, do you realize that? Confucius. Were they sinners? Was Moses? Abraham? We’ve tried to impose our own pitiful shallow beliefs, our pathetic grade-school notions of punishment for bad behavior, on this incredibly bizarre place where we find ourselves. By what right? We don’t begin to comprehend what Hell really is. All we know is that it’s full of heroic villains and villainous heroes—and people like you and me—and it seems that Albert Schweitzer is here, too. A great mystery. But perhaps someday—”
“Shh,” Howard said. “Prester John’s talking to us.”
“My lords ambassador—”
Hastily they turned toward him. “Your Majesty?” Howard said.
“This mission that has brought you here: your king wants an alliance, I suppose? What for? Against whom? Quarreling with some pope again, is he?”
“With his daughter, I’m afraid,” said Howard.
Prester John looked bored. He toyed with his emerald scepter. “Mary, you mean?”
“Elizabeth, your Majesty,” Lovecraft said.
“Your king’s a most quarrelsome man. I’d have thought there were enough popes in Hell to keep him busy, though, and no need to contend with his daughters.”
“They are the most contentious women in Hell,” Lovecraft said. “Blood of his blood, after all, and each of them a queen with a noisy, brawling kingdom of her own. Elizabeth, my lord, is sending a pack of her explorers to the Outback, and King Henry doesn’t like the idea.”
“Indeed,” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih, suddenly interested again. “And neither do I. She has no business in the Outback. It’s not her territory. The rest of Hell should be big enough for Elizabeth. What is she looking for here?”
“The sorcerer John Dee has told her that the way out of Hell is to be found in these parts.”
“There is no way out of Hell.”
Lovecraft smiled. “I’m not any judge of that, Your Majesty. Queen Elizabeth, in any event, has given credence to the notion. Her Walter Raleigh directs the expedition, and the geographer Hakluyt is with him, and a force of five hundred soldiers. They move diagonally across the Outback just to the south of your domain, following some chart that Dr. Dee had obtained for them. He had it from Cagliostro, they say, who bought it from Hadrian when Hadrian was still supreme commander of Hell’s legions. It is allegedly an official Satanic document.”
Prester John did not appear to be impressed. “Let us say, for argument’s sake, that there is an exit from Hell. Why would Queen Elizabeth desire to leave? Hell’s not so bad. It has its minor discomforts, yes, but one learns to cope with them. Does she think she’d be able to reign in Heaven as she does here—assuming there’s a Heaven at all, which is distinctly not proven?”
“Elizabeth has no real interest in leaving Hell herself, Majesty,” Howard said. “What King Henry fears is that if she does find the way out, she’ll claim it for her own and set up a colony around it, and charge a fee for passing through the gate. No matter where it takes you, the king reckons there’ll be millions of people willing to risk it, and Elizabeth will wind up cornering all the money in Hell. He can’t abide that notion, d’ye see? He thinks she’s already too smart and aggressive by half, and he hates the idea that she might get even more powerful. There’s something mixed into it having to do with Queen Elizabeth’s mother, too—that was Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife. She was a wild and wanton one, and he cut her head off for adultery, and now he thinks that Anne’s behind Elizabeth’s maneuvers, trying to get even with him by—”
“Spare me these details,” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih with some irritation. “What does Henry expect me to do?”
“Send troops to turn the Raleigh expedition back before it can find anything useful to Elizabeth.”
“And in what way do I gain from this?”
“If the exit from Hell’s on your frontier, Your Majesty, do you really want a bunch of Elizabethan Englishmen setting up a colony next door to you?”
“There is no exit from Hell,” Prester John said complacently once again.
“But if they set up a colony anyway?”
Prester John was silent a moment. “I see,” he said finally.
“In return for your aid,” Howard said, “we’re empowered to offer you a trade treaty on highly favorable terms.”
“Ah.”
“And a guarantee of military protection in the event of the invasion of your realm by a hostile power.”
“If King Henry’s armies are so mighty, why does he not deal with the Raleigh expedition himself?”
“There was no time to outfit and dispatch an army across such a great distance,” said Lovecraft. “Elizabeth’s people had already set out before anything was known of the scheme.”
“Ah,” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih.
“Of course,” Lovecraft went on, “there were other princes of the Outback that King Henry might have approached. Moammar Khadafy’s name came up, and one of the Assyrians—Assurnasirpal, I think—and someone mentioned Mao Tse-tung. No, King Henry said, let us ask the aid of Prester John, for he is a monarch of great puissance and grandeur, whose writ is supreme throughout the far reaches of Hell. Prester John, indeed, that is the one whose aid we must seek!”
A strange new sparkle had come into Yeh-lu Ta-shih’s eyes. “You were considering an alliance with Mao Tse-tung?”
“It was merely a suggestion, Your Majesty.”
“Ah. I see.” The emperor rose from his throne. “Well, we must consider these matters more carefully, eh? We must not come hastily to a decision.” He looked across the great vaulted throne room to the divan where Dr. Schweitzer still labored over Gilgamesh’s wound. “Your patient, doctor—what’s the report?”
“A man of steel, Majesty, a man of steel! Gott sei dank, he heals before my eyes!”
“Indeed. Come, then. You will all want to rest, I think; and then you shall know the full hospitality of Prester John.”
The full hospitality of Prester John, Gilgamesh soon discovered, was no trifling affair.
He was led off to a private chamber with walls lined with black felt—a kind of indoor tent—where three serving-girls who stood barely hip-high to him surrounded him, giggling, and took his clothing from him. Gently they pushed him into a huge marble cistern full of warm milk, where they bathed him lovingly and massaged his aching body in the most intimate manner. Afterward they robed him in intricate vestments of yellow silk.
Then they conveyed him to the emperor’s great hall, where the whole court was gathered, a glittering and resplendent multitude. Some sort of concert was under way, seven solemn musicians playing harsh screeching twanging music. Gongs crashed, a trumpet blared, pipes uttered eerie piercing sounds. Servants showed Gilgamesh to a place of honor atop a pile of furry blankets heaped high with velvet cushions.