I lost time there, in the black heart of the mountain.
I thought about my father, who I had let down so badly. I thought about my wife, Della, who deserved better. I thought about Enkidu, and how he had looked at me.
Once so long ago I had said to him, “I am not sure you know who I am.”
And he had said to me: “I know well enough.”
I thought about the black eyes of the goddess on me, as she looked up at me from the White Quay at Uruk.
At some point I stood, and kept on walking through the mountain.
When I had been in there perhaps a week, perhaps a month, perhaps a year, or perhaps only a few hours, when I had fainted against the wall so many times, but each time come to, and walked on, only terrified above all things that I had started going the wrong way, finally, I saw light in the distance.
I walked on, the light growing brighter, my forehead crinkling up at the harshness of it.
I emerged, blinking, into a heaven. A green forest, mossy-floored, with a stream cascading through it. It was like a garden, a perfect garden.
I drank from the stream, scooping it up in my hands, and it was the sweetest water, as sweet as the water in the cedar forest.
Then I stood in the stream to wash the mud, and sweat, and blood off me. I could not tell what was my blood, and what was Uptu’s. There was nothing I could do about my twisted and filthy lion-skin loincloth, but the rest of me I could scrub new. Last of all I dipped in my shorn head, and rubbed it clean with sand from the bottom of the stream.
Behind me up high I could see rocky grey crags, eagles soaring. Far below, I could see what looked like a river plain and a strip of seashore. And… was that a building? Where there was a building, there might be food.
I set off at once, still wet from the stream.
As I dropped down through the woods towards the sea, I saw that the building was fashioned from stone, and looked much like a tavern, with a high stone wall around it, and smoke coming from its chimney. It stood with its foundations on the rocks at the back of a long, wave-battered pebbled beach. Might there be food cooking beneath that chimney? I sped up.
When I was close enough to make out the seabirds perched along the stone roof, I saw movement: someone disappearing inside the gate. A woman? She looked as if she was wearing a long cloak, and perhaps a veil.
By the time I got there, the large wooden gate was bolted against me. I looked around; would I have to climb up and over to get in? The drystone wall was about a cord and a half high and it looked solid; I wasn’t sure I could get much of a hold on it if I tried to climb.
“Mistress of the house,” I called. “Will you open up? I am only looking to get food.”
“Go away!” She sounded Sumerian.
I looked down, remembering afresh my disgraceful lion skin, and that I was otherwise naked.
“My lady, I may look strange, but I am less mad than I look. I’ve come through the mountain from Sumer. Will you let me in? I have no weapons, and mean no one any harm.”
“Just go away!”
“If you will not open up and feed me, will you at least tell me where to find Uta-napishti? He was a Sumerian man, and he came through this way with many others, sometime after the Great Flood. I’m told he came through the mountain, but I know no more than that. My father-in-law, Enlil, and my patron, the god An, they have sent me here to find him.”
I looked up to find a head staring down at me, over the top of the wall. It belonged to an old woman, wearing an ancient, embroidered veil. “Come in, then,” she said.
* * *
It was indeed a tavern, if not a busy one. The woman fed me yellow cheese and bread with dried fruit in it, and watched me eat it in the smoky gloom.
“My name is Shiduri,” she said.
“And mine is Gilgamesh.”
“I am going to guess you are the famous Gilgamesh. You know we hear of you even here, at the far edge of the world. Boats come in, and I feed them in return for news. Is it true you are friends with a wild man named Enkidu?”
I ate for a while. “He’s dead,” I said.
“I am sorry, Gilgamesh, because I do know about grief,” she said. “So, what do you want with Uta-napishti?”
“Have you heard of melam?”
“I may look old to you, but I am even older than I look. Yes, I know what melam is. I was married to the man you seek, and when he found melam, he gave me some.”
“Do you know where he found it?”
She shook her head. “Uta found it out in the ocean. I wasn’t with him when they found it. So you will need to go and find him on his island, if you want to look for it.”
She helped me to more food, and poured me more wine. “I cannot take you to the island. Only the stone men can go back and forth across the Waters of Death.”
“How far is it?”
“A few leagues out to sea. You can see it on a sunny day, when the sky is completely clear. They say it has fine forests, fine pastures, clean water, and the seas around it boil with fish. But first you need to cross the Waters of Death.”
“But the stone men are happy to cross these waters?”
“If you give them gold, yes. Do you have gold?”
I shrugged at that. “Why aren’t you with them on the island, Shiduri? If they are your people.”
She gave me a sort of smile. “Uta and I lost our children, in the Great Flood. And our marriage did not survive it. So in the end he went over to the island, and I chose to stay here, and be mostly alone.”
* * *
I lived in the inn for the next few days, and the old woman pointed out to me the comings and the goings of the stone men. They wore their wild curls long down their backs, although their faces were shaved, and they wore close-fitting leather trousers and caps made of sealskin. They looked like serious men who would not run from bad weather or a fight.
They came in their boats most days, pulled them up high on the sand, and went up in groups to the garden in the foothills below the mountain. There they gathered fruits and pinecones, or sometimes they would fell a tree, and bring the wood down as planks. Sometimes they fished in the lagoon behind the beach, or stood in the shallows as the surf came in, spearing stray turtles or rays if they came too close.
I stood on the old woman’s spying stone, which let you peep over the wall, to watch their movements.
“You keep your head low, Gilgamesh,” she called from inside the hut. “If they decide to come up here, I cannot turn them away. And they will very likely kill you, just for being here.”
“But they allow you to live here?”
“They tried to kill me, but I came back to life. Now sometimes one of them will hurt me, but most of them are wary of me.”
“Why are they called the stone men?”
“That’s how they kill. Those bags on their hips are full of the smoothest, roundest beach stones. They fire them out of slingshots, and I assure you, they are deadly. It’s how they bring down deer, as well as their enemies.”
“I’ll keep my head down,” I said.
* * *
Shiduri had no weapons of war, but she had an axe. A good stone axe, of good flint, glued with black pitch into good oak, and then bound with gut.
I said: “Will you give me this axe?”
“You have no way of paying me for the food and wine and beer you have already drunk. Never mind the bed you sleep in. How are you going to pay me for this axe?”
“Loan me the axe, then. And you know what your payment is. Your payment is my company.”
I tried to give her my old smile, but it felt strange upon my face.
“If you ever do learn to smile again, and put some flesh on those bones. And if the scars of frostbite, and too much sun too, ever heal upon you. If all that happens, then no doubt old women will feed you and host you for free and shower axes upon you.”
I laughed. “Do I look so terrible?”
“Your face is sunken, your cheeks are hollow, your mood is wretched, your heart is full of nothing but sorrow. Yes, you look terrible, Gilgamesh. You look terrible, you sound terrible. You are terrible. But I do see that there was great beauty in you. That there was once.”
I laughed again.
“It is good to hear you laugh,” she said. “I will lend you my axe.”
* * *
The stone men came the next day.
“They are walking this way,” Shiduri said, standing on her spy stone. “They are quick to violence. They may kill you.”
“How many?” I said. I was standing behind the gate, with the shaft of Shiduri’s axe gripped tightly between my hands.
“Six are walking this way. But I think the boy they had with them is missing. And maybe another. What is your plan now, Gilgamesh?”
“Let me get up and look.”
I peeked out over the wall and saw a group of stone men making their way along the path at the back of the beach. The leader of the group was a boulder of a man, and he wore a dappled black and white sealskin. In one hand he carried a sling, and in the other a bag of what must be pebbles. I ducked down behind the wall again, and Shiduri took back her place.
“Yes, I think there are two missing,” I said. “When they get close, close enough for the slingshot, you make sure you get down.”
She rolled her eyes at me. “I know about slingshots. I know that the hard way. Tell me, what is your plan?”
“My plan is to get over to the island in their boat.”
“You will need them to cooperate with you, then, because it’s a big boat, and it’s the kind of sea you need to know very well, and even then, you will no doubt drown.”
“All of that I got from ‘the Waters of Death’,” I said.
She got down off her stone. “If I stay up there, they will see me looking, and become suspicious.”
For some moments we stood and looked at each other in silence, but soon enough a stone man began bellowing through the gate at us.
“Shiduri, we know you have a man in there. My people are not blind. They see him creeping around in your yard, back and forth to the wash house.”
She stood up on the stone again. “I can have a man here if I want to. I can have anyone I like here. Who are you to tell me who I can give a bed to in my tavern?”
“You can have stone men in here. Or traders who visit with our permission. That we agreed to. But not strangers from the mountain. And we can tell you what to do now that you have built your house on our land.”
Another voice: “Open up the gates, old woman.”
“Get down,” I whispered, and pulled at her skirts. She got down quickly.
Then I raised my voice, for the men over the wall. “Can we negotiate?”
“What do you want?” the first stone man shouted back.
“I want to go over the Waters of Death, to the island, to see Uta-napishti, my forebear. I would like you to take me there in your boat, since I am told you are expert mariners, and you are my best chance of getting there. What would be your price for taking me there?”
They conferred quietly.
“We’ll do it,” the voice said. “For two small pieces of silver.”
“That’s a good price,” I said.
“They are trying to trick you,” the old woman whispered. “They intend to rob you and perhaps kill you.”
“Oh really?” I whispered back. “Are you saying these men of violence may be untrustworthy? Thank the gods you are here to warn me.”
“So come out and talk,” a stone man called. “We could take you over to the island now, if you wanted.”
“We would like you to back well off first,” I called. “Just while we get to know each other.”
“All right, we are all backing off,” the voice shouted. “We are backing off,” he said again, obviously further away.
“They will have left someone behind to kill us with his stones,” Shiduri whispered.
“Woman, how stupid do you think I am? I am not a newborn puppy, with my eyes still shut. Of course they have left someone behind.”
“Gilgamesh, I am trying to help you, a total stranger who I owe nothing to. There is no need to take a tone with me.”
We both stood there for a while, listening.
“How are you with weapons?” I said.
“What does it matter?”
“I’m trying to think of a way out of here that doesn’t end up with that boy dead.”
A boy’s voice: “I can hear you! I can hear what you’re saying!”
“Can you?” I called back.
“I don’t want to die either. But my father said to get you.”
For a while we two stayed quiet inside, and he stayed quiet outside.
“I wonder if this counts as a siege,” I said, remembering a different time.
The old woman only frowned at me.
“It’s a siege,” the boy shouted. “You are inside something, and I’m the enemy forces outside, trying to get in. And there’s a wall.”
I had a flash of sadness for this squalid situation, for this boy now assuredly going to die too. And for Enkidu, standing on the wall at Marad, such a short time ago, in his terrible saucepan-helmet.
“Boy! This is going to end badly for you. Can I persuade you to accept a trade? My life, for a trade? There is honour in a trade, surely?”
“I don’t think there’s honour in a trade. My father said to get you; that’s where the honour lies.”
“But that was when it was a trick,” I said. “When I wasn’t meant to know you were there. But now I do know. So, your plan has gone wrong.”
There was a short silence.
“True enough,” he said.
“Why don’t you run over and get them, and tell them I’m on to you all, and bring them back. Then if anyone is going to get killed, it’ll be one of the adults. I hate killing children; I always have.”
“I’ll run off, then, and get them.”
There was a clattering sound from about where he had been talking from.
“Is he just pretending?” the woman said.
“I think so.” I sighed deeply.
“I think this is more like a stand-off than a siege,” I called to the boy.
He was quiet for a while. Finally, he said: “Did you know I was still here?”
“Yes,” I said.
I heard the unmistakable sound of the adults returning: voices, their feet, rocks tumbling down the path behind them.
“They knew I was out here,” the boy said. Then there was a pwaf sound and an “Ugh!”, as if someone had been hit around the head.
“We saw the boy when you were coming up here,” I called. “It was a terrible trick.”
As I said this, a new and worrisome thought came to me. Could someone climb into the yard from the other side of the hut, out of my sightline? Was this all a ruse? I couldn’t remember now the lay of the land there. I lifted my eyebrows at the old woman, and gestured back towards the hut with my head. She nodded, picked up a rock from the ground and began creeping away towards the door. She pointed at her right ear and then the door, and nodded.
What? I mouthed.
There’s someone inside! she mouthed back.
I lifted my axe, and nodded.
“What’s with the stones?” I called out, in what I hoped sounded a cheerful manner. “Are you cavemen? Why not arrows?”
“Stones are better,” came back a voice I had not heard before.
“They’re not better,” I said. “The range is so short! If I had arrows now, I would not have let you get this near the hut, and things would be very different. I could have come out and picked you all off before you even knew I was here.”
“But you run out of the arrows!” It was the boy, sounding perky enough. “There are always more stones, especially if you’re always looking out for them.”
I heard a scuffling noise inside the hut, as if someone had tripped on something.
I called out: “Well, I do know a man who likes stones and a slingshot: a nasty piece of work called Harga. But he always carries a bow and an arrow too, because he is not entirely stupid.”
The scuffling noise inside the hut stopped.
The crowd outside fell silent for some long moments.
“Is he a big man?” one of them called over the wall.
“Who?” I said. My mind was whirring. Were they talking about the man in the hut?
“This Harga you speak of. What does he look like?”
I stood up straighter, raising my eyebrows at the old woman. She shrugged back at me.
I shouted out: “The Harga I know looks like a piece of leather. But uglier. Black curls. A sly man, always plotting. If you put him alone in a cupboard, he would plot against the cupboard. That is the Harga that I know.”
“Is he still alive, this Harga you speak of?”
“He was when I last saw him. In Sumer. Which was not long ago.”
“How do you know this Harga?”
“He serves the god Enlil,” I said. “That’s how I met him.”
At this the men on the far side of the wall all burst into laughter. A moment later, a happy face appeared from inside the doorway of the old woman’s hut. “Can you really know Harga?” the man said, putting away his weapons. “I cannot believe it!”
I noticed for the first time that the black curls these stone men sported were not so different from the curls that Harga was so proud of.
The man from the hut pulled open the gate and peered out. “Lads, down weapons!” he called. He looked around at the woman, nodded to her, turned back to me, all warmth and humour. “Any enemy of Harga is a friend to the stone men,” he said. “You are welcome in our land!”