Behind him he heard the booming voice of the red-faced man. “A figment, H.P.? How can you be sure of that? I thought I invented Conan, too; but what if he really lived, what if I had merely tapped into some powerful primordial archetype, what if the authentic Conan stands here before us this very moment—”
“Dear Bob, your Conan had blue eyes, did he not? And this man’s eyes are dark as night.”
“Well—” Grudgingly.
“You were so excited you failed to notice. But I did. This is some barbarian warrior, yes, some great huntsman beyond any doubt—a Nimrod, an Ajax. But not Conan, Bob! Grant him his own identity. He’s no invention of yours.” Coming up beside Gilgamesh, the long-jawed man said, speaking in a formal and courtly way, “Good sir, I am Howard Phillips Lovecraft, formerly of Providence, Rhode Island, and my companion is Robert E. Howard of Texas, whose other life was lived, as was mine, in the twentieth century after Christ. At that time we were tale-tellers by trade, and I think he confuses you with a hero of his own devising. Put his mind at ease, I pray you, and let us know your name.”
Gilgamesh looked up. He rubbed his wrist across his forehead to clear it of a smear of the monster’s gore and met the other man’s gaze evenly. This one, at least, was no madman, strange though he looked.
Quietly Gilgamesh said, “I think his mind may be beyond putting at any ease. But know you that I am called Gilgamesh, the son of Lugalbanda.”
“Gilgamesh the Sumerian?” Lovecraft whispered. “Gilgamesh who sought to live forever?”
“Gilgamesh am I, yes, who was king in Uruk when that was the greatest city of the Land of the Two Rivers, and who in his folly thought there was a way of cheating death.”
“Do you hear that, Bob?”
“Incredible. Beyond all belief!” muttered the other.
Rising until he towered above them both, Gilgamesh drew in his breath deeply and said with awesome resonance, “I am Gilgamesh to whom all things were made known, the secret things, the truths of life and death, most especially those of death. I have coupled with Inanna the goddess in the bed of the Sacred Marriage; I have slain demons and spoken with gods; I am two parts god myself, and only one part mortal.” He paused and stared at them, letting it sink in, those words that he had recited so many times in situations much like this. Then in a quieter tone he went on, “When death took me I came to this nether world they call Hell, and here I pass my time as a huntsman, and I ask you now to excuse me, for as you see I have my tasks.”
Once more he turned away.
“Gilgamesh!” said Lovecraft again in wonder. And the other said, “If I live here till the end of time, H.P., I’ll never grow used to it. This is more fantastic than running into Conan would have been! Imagine it: Gilgamesh!”
A tiresome business, Gilgamesh thought: all this awe, all this adulation.
The problem was that damned epic, of course. He could see why Caesar grew so irritable when people tried to suck up to him with quotations out of Shakespeare’s verses. “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus,” and all that: Caesar grew livid by the third syllable. Once they put you into poetry, Gilgamesh had discovered, as had Odysseus and Achilles and Caesar after him and many another, your own real self can begin to disappear and the self of the poem overwhelms you entirely and turns you into a walking cliché. Shakespeare had been particularly villainous that way, Gilgamesh thought: ask Richard III, ask Macbeth, ask Owen Glendower. You found them skulking around Hell with perpetual chips on their shoulders, because every time they opened their mouths people expected them to say something like “My kingdom for a horse!” or “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” or “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” Gilgamesh had had to live with that kind of thing almost from the time he had first come to Hell, for they had written the poems about him soon after. All that pompous brooding stuff, a whole raft of Gilgamesh tales of varying degrees of basis in reality. And then the Babylonians and the Assyrians, and even those smelly garlic-gobbling Hittites, had gone on translating and embroidering them for another thousand years so that everybody from one end of the known world to the other knew them by heart. And even after all those peoples were gone and their languages had been forgotten, there was no surcease, because these twentieth-century folk had found the whole thing and deciphered the text somehow and made it famous all over again. Over the centuries they had turned him into everybody’s favorite all-purpose hero, which was a hell of a burden to bear: there was a piece of him in the Prometheus legend, and in the Heracles stuff, and in that story of Odysseus’ wanderings, and even in the Celtic myths, which was probably why this creepy Howard fellow kept calling him Conan. At least that other Conan, that ratty little sniveling drunken one, had been a Celt. Enlil’s ears, but it was wearying to have everyone expecting you to live up to the mythic exploits of twenty or thirty very different culture-heroes! And embarrassing, too, considering that the original non-mythical Heracles and Odysseus and some of the others dwelled here too and tended to be pretty possessive about the myths that had attached to them, even when they were simply variants on his own much older ones.
There was substance to the Gilgamesh stories, of course, especially the parts about him and Enkidu. But the poet had salted the story with a lot of pretentious arty nonsense too, as poets always will, and in any case you got very tired of having everybody boil your long and complex life down into the same twelve chapters and the same little turns of phrase. It got so that Gilgamesh found himself quoting the main Gilgamesh poem too, the one about his quest for eternal life—well, that one wasn’t too far from the essence of the truth, though they had mucked up a lot of the details with precious little “imaginative” touches—by way of making introduction for himself: “I am the man to whom all things were made known, the secret things, the truths of life and death.” Straight out of the poet’s mouth, those lines. Tiresome. Tiresome. Angrily he jabbed his dagger beneath the dead monster’s hide, and set about his task of flaying, while the two little men behind him went on muttering and mumbling to one another in astonishment at having run into Gilgamesh of Uruk in this bleak and lonely corner of Hell.
There were strange emotions stirring in Robert Howard’s soul, and he did not care for them at all. He could forgive himself for believing for that one giddy moment that this Gilgamesh was his Conan. That was nothing more than the artistic temperament at work, sweeping him up in a bit of rash feverish enthusiasm. To come suddenly upon a great muscular giant of a man in a loincloth who was hacking away at some fiendish monster with a little bronze dagger, and to think that he must surely be the mighty Cimmerian—well, that was a pardonable enough thing. Here in Hell you learned very quickly that you might run into anybody at all. You could find yourself playing at dice with Lord Byron or sharing a mug of mulled wine with Menelaos or arguing with Plato about the ideas of Nietzsche, who was standing right there making faces, and after a time you came to take most such things for granted, more or less.
So why not think that this fellow was Conan? No matter that Conan’s eyes had been of a different color. That was a trifle. He looked like Conan in all the important ways. He was of Conan’s size and strength. And he was kingly in more than physique. He seemed to have Conan’s cool intelligence and complexity of soul, his regal courage and indomitable spirit.
The trouble was that Conan, the wondrous Cimmerian warrior from 19,000 B.C., had never existed except in Howard’s own imagination. And there were no fictional characters in Hell. You might meet Richard Wagner, but you weren’t likely to encounter Siegfried. Theseus was here somewhere, but not the Minotaur. William the Conqueror, yes; William Tell, no.