To the Land of the Living by Robert Silverberg Read Free Book Online Page B

like a good idea to have it looked after by a surgeon. The flesh all around it was badly swollen and bruised. That arrow had pierced him through and through. He would have the wound cleaned and dressed; and then he would move along.
    Well, then, so he was going to the court of Prester John. Here he was, sitting back silent and somber in the rear of this musty mildew-flecked car, riding with these two very odd Later Dead types, these scribes or tale-tellers or whatever it was they claimed to be, as the horsemen of Prester John led them to the encampment of their monarch.
    The one who called himself Howard, the one who could not help stealing sly little glances at him like an infatuated schoolgirl, was at the wheel. Glancing back at his passenger now, he said, “Tell me, Gilgamesh: have you had dealings with Prester John before?”
    “I have heard the name, that much I know,” replied the Sumerian. “But it means very little to me.”
    “The legendary Christian emperor,” said the other, the thin one, Lovecraft. “He who was said to rule a secret kingdom somewhere in the misty hinterlands of Central Asia – although it was in Africa, according to some –”
    Asia – Africa – names, only names, Gilgamesh thought bleakly. They were places somewhere in the other world, that world of shadows from which he was so long gone. He had no idea where they might be.
    Such a multitude of places, so many names! It was impossible to keep it all straight. There was no sense to any of it. The world – his first world – the Land – had been bordered by the Two Rivers, the Idigna and the Buranunu, which the Greeks had preferred to call the Tigris and the Euphrates. Who were the Greeks, and by what right had they renamed the rivers? Everyone used those names now, even Gilgamesh himself, except in the inwardness of his soul.
    And beyond the Two Rivers? Why, there was the vassal state of Aratta far to the east, he remembered, and in that direction also lay the Land of Cedars where the fire-breathingdemon Huwawa roared and bellowed, and in the eastern mountains lay the kingdom of the barbaric Elamites. To the north was the land called Uri, and in the deserts of the west the wild Martu people dwelled, and in the south was the blessed isle Dilmun, which was like a paradise. Had there been anything more to the world than that? Why, there was Meluhha far away beyond Elam, where the people had black skins and fine features, and there was Punt in the south where they were black also with flat noses and thick lips, and there was another land even beyond Meluhha, with folk of yellow skins who mined a precious green stone. And that was the world he had known when he lived in the world, that other world, the world through which he had so briefly passed before coming to this world of eternal life. But evidently there had been other places in that world, places of which he had had no inkling, or places that had come into being after his time there. Where could all these other latter-day places of the other world be, this Africa and this Asia and Europe and the rest, Rome, Greece, England? Perhaps some of them were mere new names for old places. The Land itself had had a host of names since his own time – Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Iraq, and more. Why had it needed all those names? He had no idea. New men made up new names: that seemed to be the way of the world. This Africa, this Asia – America, China, Russia – a little man named Herodotus, a Greek, had tried to explain it all to him once, the shape of the world and the names of the places in it, sketching a map for him on an old bit of parchment, and much later a stolid fellow named Mercator had done the same, and once after that he had spoken of such matters with an Englishman called Cook; but the things they told him all conflicted with one another and he could make no sense out of any of it. It was too much to ask, making sense of these things. Those myriad nations that had arisen after his