“My point exactly.”
“But if you must hunt, to scorn the use of a decent hunting rifle—”
“You will never convince me.”
“No,” Caesar said with a sigh. “I suppose I won’t. I should know better than to argue with a reactionary.”
“Reactionary! In my time I was thought to be a radical,” said Gilgamesh. “When I was king in Uruk—”
“Just so,” Caesar said, laughing. “King in Uruk. Was there ever a king who wasn’t reactionary? You put a crown on your head and it addles your brains instantly. Three times Antonius offered me a crown, Gilgamesh. Three times, and—”
“—you did thrice refuse it, yes. I know all that. ‘Was this ambition?’ You thought you’d have the power without the emblem. Who were you fooling, Caesar? Not Brutus, so I hear. Brutus said you were ambitious. And Brutus—”
That stung him. “Damn you, don’t say it!”
“—was an honorable man,” Gilgamesh concluded, enjoying Caesar’s discomfiture.
Caesar groaned. “If I hear that line once more—”
“Some say this is a place of torment,” said Gilgamesh serenely. “If in truth it is, yours is to be swallowed up in another man’s poetry. Leave me to my bows and arrows, Caesar, and return to your jeep and your trivial intrigues. I am a fool and a reactionary, yes. But you know nothing of hunting. Nor do you understand anything of me.”
All that had been a year ago, or two, or maybe five—with or without a wristwatch, there was no keeping proper track of time in Hell, where the unmoving ruddy eye of the sun never budged from the sky—and now Gilgamesh was far from Caesar and all his minions, far from the troublesome center of Hell and the tiresome squabbling of those like Caesar and Alexander and Napoleon and that sordid little Guevara man who maneuvered for power in this place.
Let them maneuver all they liked, those shoddy new men of the latter days. Some day they might learn wisdom, and was not that the purpose of this place, if it had any purpose at all?
Gilgamesh preferred to withdraw. Unlike the rest of those fallen emperors and kings and pharaohs and shahs, he felt no yearning to reshape Hell in his own image. Caesar was as wrong about Gilgamesh’s ambitions as he was about the reasons for his preferences in hunting gear. Out here in the Outback, in the bleak dry chilly hinterlands of Hell, Gilgamesh hoped to find peace. That was all he wanted now: peace. He had wanted much more, once, but that had been long ago.
There was a stirring in the scraggly underbrush.
A lion, maybe?
No, Gilgamesh thought. There were no lions to be found in Hell, only the strange nether-world beasts. Ugly hairy things with flat noses and many legs and dull baleful eyes, and slick shiny things with the faces of women and the bodies of malformed dogs, and worse, much worse. Some had drooping leathery wings, and some were armed with spiked tails that rose like a scorpion’s, and some had mouths that opened wide enough to swallow an elephant at a gulp. They all were demons of one sort or another, Gilgamesh knew. No matter. Hunting was hunting; the prey was the prey; all beasts were one in the contest of the field. That fop Caesar could never begin to comprehend that.
Drawing an arrow from his quiver, Gilgamesh laid it lightly across his bow and waited.
“If you ever had come to Texas, H.P., this here’s a lot like what you’d have seen,” said the big barrel-chested man with the powerful arms and the deeply tanned skin. Gesturing sweepingly with one hand, he held the wheel of the Land Rover lightly with three fingers of the other, casually guiding the vehicle in jouncing zigs and zags over the flat trackless landscape. Gnarled gray-green shrubs matted the gritty ground. The sky was black with swirling dust. Far off in the distance barren mountains rose like dark jagged teeth. “Beautiful. Beautiful. As close to Texas in look as makes no never mind, this countryside is.”
“Beautiful?” said the other man uncertainly. “Hell?”
“This stretch sure is. But if you think Hell’s beautiful, you should have seen Texas!”
The burly man laughed and gunned the engine, and the Land Rover went leaping and bouncing onward at a stupefying speed.
His traveling companion, a gaunt, lantern-jawed man as pale as the other was bronzed, sat very still in the passenger seat, knees together and elbows digging in against his ribs, as if he expected a fiery crash at any moment. The two of them had been journeying across the interminable parched wastes of the Outback for many days now—how many, not even the Elder Gods could tell. They were ambassadors, these two: Their Excellencies Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft of the Kingdom of New Holy Diabolic England, envoys of His Britannic Majesty Henry VIII to the court of Prester John.
In another life they had been writers, fantasists, inventors of fables; but now they found themselves caught up in something far more fantastic than anything to be found in any of their tales, for this was no fable, this was no fantasy. This was the reality of Hell.
“Robert—” said the pale man nervously.
“A lot like Texas, yes,” Howard went on, “only Hell’s just a faint carbon copy of the genuine item. Just a rough first draft, is all. You see that sandstorm rising out thataway? We had sandstorms, they covered entire counties! You see that lightning? In Texas that would be just a flicker!”
“If you could drive just a little more slowly, Bob—”
“More slowly? Cthulhu’s whiskers, man, I am driving slowly!”
“Yes, I’m quite sure you believe that you are.”
“And the way I always heard it, H.P., you loved for people to drive you around at top speed. Seventy, eighty miles an hour, that was what you liked best, so the story goes.”
“In the other life one dies only once, and then all pain ceases,” Lovecraft replied. “But here, where one can go to the Undertaker again and again, and when one returns one remembers every final agony in the brightest of hues—here, dear friend Bob, death’s much more to be feared, for the pain of it stays with one forever, and one may die a thousand deaths.” Lovecraft managed a pale baleful smile. “Speak of that to some professional warrior, Bob, some Trojan or Hun or Assyrian—or one of the gladiators, maybe, someone who has died and died and died again. Ask him about it: the dying and the rebirth, and the pain, the hideous torment, reliving every detail. It is a dreadful thing to die in Hell. I fear dying here far more than I ever did in life. I will take no needless risks here.”
Howard snorted. “Gawd, try and figure you out! When you thought you lived only once, you made people go roaring along with you on the highway a mile a minute. Here where hardly anyone stays dead for very long you want me to drive like an old woman. Well, I’ll attempt it, H.P., but everything in me cries out to go like the wind. When you live in big country, you learn to cover the territory the way it has to be covered. And Texas is the biggest country there is. It isn’t just a place, it’s a state of mind.”
“As is Hell,” said Lovecraft. “Though I grant you that Hell isn’t Texas.”
“Texas!” Howard boomed. “God damn, I wish you could have seen it! By god, H.P., what a time we’d have had, you and me, if you’d come to Texas. Two gentlemen of letters like us riding together all to hell and gone from Corpus Christi to El Paso and back again, seeing it all and telling each other wondrous stories all the way! I swear, it would have enlarged your soul, H.P. Beauty such as perhaps even you couldn’t have imagined. That big sky. That blazing sun. And the open space! Whole empires could fit into Texas and never be seen again! That Rhode Island of yours, H.P.—we could drop it down just back of Cross Plains and lose it behind a medium-size prickly pear! What you see here, it just gives you the merest idea of that glorious beauty. Though I admit this is plenty beautiful itself, this here.”