After Hours: Tales From Ur-Bar Read online

  “In that moment, the wild man was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. Raw and vibrant. Alive.

  “Then he charged, plowed into me, lifted me from my feet and carried me out through the open doorway into the street beyond, into the cooling night air. We crashed into a stack of earthen pots on a cart, baked clay shattering around us, unheeded as we wrestled each other across the street, careened into walls, carts, canopies, trampled through empty stalls. Shamhat and the wedding guests trailed after us, and drunken citizens joined them as we staggered past. My muscles began to burn with exhaustion. I tasted blood, my lip split, my body bruised, and yet still we fought, clinging as we pummeled each other with weaker and weaker blows, each trying to break free, neither willing to let the other go.

  “Until, seeing the crowd we had drawn, seeing the guests of the wedding whispering to those who had joined them as we fought through the city, my rage overwhelmed my exhaustion. Grasping the wild man’s shoulders with both hands, I shoved his torso back, his arms wrapped around my chest, and then pulled him forward as I brought my head down. Our foreheads cracked together and the wild man’s grip slid away. Stunned, still I bellowed in triumph and shrugged the wild man’s body up onto my shoulder and flung him to the ground, kneeling upon his chest. I’d drawn back my fist to beat his face to bloody tatters when I saw his eyes. Dazed, they gazed up at me in wonder. All of the rage, all of the arrogance, all of the wildness had fled.

  “In a raw voice, breath shallow from my weight upon his chest, he swallowed and said, ‘I am defeated.’

  “And all of my rage vanished.”

  Kubaba let the silence that followed these words reign for a long moment—

  Then she snorted in contempt.

  The man turned a heated, narrow gaze on her. “You do not believe my story?”

  “You claim that the gods have maligned you,” Kubaba said, standing abruptly and grabbing the nearly empty pitcher of beer from the table, “and yet you tell a tale of how you bested them!”

  “No, you are wrong.”

  “You defeated the wild man! The man sent by the gods to challenge you!”

  “I did not defeat him. He defeated me. The gods won.”

  Kubaba stared as the madman took a long draught from his cup. She wanted to throttle him, but he was too calm, too collected. Most madmen, especially those who’d drunk as much as he had, grew incensed if you challenged their tales of woe and misery. This one simply watched her, his broad shoulders slumped, despair still shadowing his eyes. And there was something else, something niggling at the back of her mind. The man’s story was familiar somehow, although she couldn’t quite place it.

  The fact that she couldn’t annoyed her. “How, then?” she scoffed. “How did the wild man defeat you?”

  Something twisted inside the man, exposed in his eyes, something black and insidious. He grimaced, glanced into his empty cup, then motioned toward it as he said, “He defeated me by befriending me.”

  Kubaba frowned, confused, but poured the last of the pitcher into the man’s cup and then retreated into the back room. She heard the other two patrons stir, murmur amongst themselves, followed by the scrape of chairs. She dunked the pitcher into the urn of beer, the heady aroma assailing her nostrils as it filled. She breathed it in as she thought furiously. Could the man truly be a king? Or was this another drunken tale told by a fool? He wore no robes of state, but his clothing was of finer quality than the workers and merchants of the district. He drank without a straw like a commoner, but his physical presence commanded respect, demanded something more, even though he was disheveled. Yet she could not recall any kings of Kish or the surrounding lands who had abandoned their cities to roam the roads and frequent gods-cursed alehouses.

  If she were king, she would rather die.

  She grunted in amusement at the thought. Then, pitcher full again, she straightened—

  And caught sight of the tablet resting on the shelf of the niche behind the urns of beer. The gods had placed it there to mock her, Ninkasi herself inscribing the recipe for beer upon it before setting it upon the shelf and vanishing with a final laugh, the last lines of power—of the gods’ punishment—settling around Kubaba and the alehouse like a weighted fishing net.

  Kubaba shuddered, the mesh of that net brushing against her as if in warning. She shrugged aside the tingling sensation and returned to the outer room. She was not surprised to find that only the madman remained, the other patrons gone.

  She moved directly to the mysterious man’s table.

  “I do not understand. How did the wild man defeat you by befriending you?”

  The man’s glare made Kubaba fidget where she stood, until she could take it no longer and sat. He nodded and poured himself another beer, although he did not immediately take a drink. Instead, he stared into the far distance, cup held in one hand.

  “He befriended me, and together we became the terror of the surrounding lands. Nothing could stop us, no one could control us, not even the councilors of the city. We converged on the alehouses of Uruk and drank heavily. We staggered through the streets beneath the white moon, held upright by each other’s arms. We challenged every strong man and defeated them, fought lions with our bare hands and killed them, and when those challenges became paltry and trivial, we sought out greater challenges. The elders begged us to stop, but we thought the gods had brought us together for a reason, that they had set these trials before us to test us.”

  The man’s voice had grown rough with memory, the skin around his eyes taut. He paused, drank from his cup and set it aside, and then met Kubaba’s gaze. She could see the pain there, and a sudden suspicion lanced through her and clutched at her gut. He’d mentioned Uruk. Her mind turned to the great southern city on the edge of the Euphrates, to the city’s great kings—

  To one king in particular.

  But this man could not be that king. He’d ruled Uruk over a hundred years ago. And yet the story he told, the emotion that throbbed in his voice, the anguish she could see in the tension around his reddened eyes....

  “We should have listened to the elders,” he continued, and Kubaba found herself leaning forward, eyes narrowed in doubt, searching his face for the truth. “But we were young, and powerful, and we thought we could not be defeated, not together. And so we accepted the challenges we thought had been set before us. And in all of this we offended the gods, although we did not realize it. So the gods exacted a punishment.”

  The man’s voice had grown cracked with anguish, his face drawn and bleak, his bloodshot eyes haunted. He drank from his cup, coughed harshly. Kubaba watched him silently, doubt roiling inside her, even as her chest constricted with echoes of the man’s pain . . . with Gilgamesh’s pain. She could not believe it, dared not believe it, and yet this man related the tale as if he had lived it. And more. She had heard Gilgamesh’s story, but there were subtle differences between those and the story this man told. Yet these differences made it harder to discredit the man before her, not easier.

  She leaned forward and in a hoarse voice asked, “What punishment?” Even though she knew the tale of Gilgamesh and the wild man, Enkidu, and how their friendship ended. She needed him to say it, to confirm it.

  The man looked up from his cup. “The gods killed Enkidu,” he said savagely, face contorted with pain and grief. “They sent him a terrible sickness. It ravaged his body, so that he wasted away. I thought I had met the gods’ challenge, there at the wedding. I thought I had won. But the challenge was not to defeat the wild man. It was to resist Enkidu, his friendship, his ... companionship. We were more than brothers, more than friends. We were. . . .”

  But words failed him, choked off by emotions that Kubaba could see warring in the muscles of his face, in the grip of his hand on the cup.

  Then, in a voice thick with the lie, he said, “I should have killed him when we met.”

  With that, all doubt within Kubaba fled. This man—covered in dirt from his travels, disheveled and drunk on b
arley beer—this man was Gilgamesh, once-king of Uruk, slayer of Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven.

  And if the tales told of him were true....

  Hope swelled up from deep inside Kubaba’s chest. She fought it back, even as she felt it tingling along her arms. It exacerbated the prickling sensation of the gods’ net that enfolded her and the bar, raising the fine hairs along her arm. The urge to scratch made her fingers twitch, but she stilled, eyes narrowed at Gilgamesh. She had met many would-be heroes since the gods had laid down their punishment. None of them had agreed to help her escape.

  She had to tread carefully.

  “But if you had killed the wild man then, you would never have enjoyed those battles, never have experienced as deep a bond as you did with Enkidu.”

  Gilgamesh slammed his wooden cup onto the table, beer sloshing out from its sides, the cup itself cracking. Kubaba flinched as he roared, “I would never have experienced the pain of losing him! I would never have felt the fear of death that has consumed me since!”

  He lurched to his feet, chair scraping across the floor before tilting and clattering to the ground behind him. He planted both of his huge hands onto the table, the wood creaking beneath his weight, and leaned toward Kubaba, so close she could smell the beer on his breath. “Do you know what I’ve done since his death?” he growled. “I’ve traveled to the underworld to speak to Utnapishtim, blessed by the gods with eternal life. I’ve swum the Great Deep and found the spiny plant that grants those who eat it youth. I’ve climbed the highest peaks of Zagros so that I could breathe the air of the gods. And at every turn, at the height of every triumph, the gods mock me and snatch immortality from my grasp.”

  He thrust back from the table, arms raised to heaven. “I have traveled the length of the Great Valley, to the edges of the world, to its greatest heights and fathomless depths, and at every step I can hear the gods’ laughter.” He crossed his arms over his chest and glared downwards. “Now, alewife, tell me that you know of the gods and their vengeance. Tell me that you have suffered as much as I have. How do the gods punish you?”

  Kubaba stared up at the king of Uruk for a long moment, then slowly rose. “You fear death, and so the gods punish you by keeping you from immortality. I. . . .” She paused, clamped her jaw together, then grudgingly continued. “I wanted more than the gods thought I deserved. I wanted to become a god myself.” She snatched up the pitcher of beer and Gilgamesh’s cracked cup and filled it, thrusting it into his hands. “For that presumption, they thought it fitting that I be forced to endure life as I began, as an alewife, catering to the workers and the merchants I sought to leave behind, serving them for all eternity.” She nearly spat in disgust, but caught herself.

  Gilgamesh grunted, then laughed. “That’s it? That’s how the gods have punished you?”

  Kubaba spun and the sharp look she gave him cut his laughter short. “You don’t understand,” she hissed. “I’ll be an alewife forever. At this alehouse for a while, because it is the best in this district, because it is the essence of the life I led before. But when the city of Kish begins its decline—as all cities do, even your great Uruk—when this district begins to fall into ruins, then this alehouse and I along with it will shift. It will appear in another city, in another district like this, and there I will serve the workers and the merchants yet again, until time passes, until the essence of the alehouse shifts yet again, and again, and again.” She moved a step closer to Gilgamesh, satisfaction snaking down into her gut when he flinched back. “The alehouse can never be destroyed. Never. It will simply move to another place. So the gods have decreed. And I will move with it. I will be an alewife forever. What the gods have refused to give you—immortality—they have given me.”

  Then she stepped away, pitcher still in hand. He stood stunned, tall, muscular body unmoving, rigid with shock and pain.

  Then he exhaled. “And the gods mock me still, even here.”

  She sneered. “Did you not feel their presence in this room? Do you not feel their mantle spread over this building? Over me? Is that not why you came here?”

  “No. I came because I had nowhere else to look, nowhere else to search.”

  Kubaba nodded. Her arms prickled and itched as she said, “Perhaps the gods do not mock you. Perhaps I can help.”

  It took a moment for her words to sink in, but when they did, Gilgamesh’s eyes flared with hope. “What do you mean?”

  The gods’ net blazed across her arms and her fingers clamped down so hard on the handle of the pitcher of beer that her knuckles turned white. But when she spoke, her voice was deceptively calm. None of the eagerness and hope and desperation bled through at all.

  “Come now. You’ve dealt with the gods before. You know they play games.” As she spoke, she shifted forward and lowered her voice. Gilgamesh watched her, eyes narrowed skeptically now, mouth a tight frown. She halted a step away, pitcher of beer lowered to her side. “They gave me a way to escape. All I need to do is find someone who will willingly take my place.”

  Gilgamesh’s frown deepened. “I would think that task easy.”

  “Ha!” Kubaba scowled. “Do you think I haven’t tried? But while most men claim they want immortality, few really mean it. Fewer still will accept it at nearly any cost.” She stared up into Gilgamesh’s eyes. “So what of you? How badly do you want your immortality? Have you searched long enough that you would willingly take my place here, in this alehouse, serving the men and women you ruled over for years?” Then, in a soft voice, with a subtle shift closer to his dust- and sweat-smeared body: “How much do you fear death, Gilgamesh?”

  Their tableau held, the only sounds their breaths, the clang of a bell, and the muted bleat of a goat from outside.

  And then, finally, Gilgamesh muttered, “Enough.”

  Kubaba nearly leapt for joy, managed to contain it enough to step backwards and motion toward the table where Gilgamesh had been seated before. “Then sit. I will make the appropriate preparations.”

  He stared at her a long moment, doubt that she was telling the truth still lining the edges of his eyes, but then he turned. She waited until he was settled, then grabbed the cracked cup he’d drunk from earlier, tossed the dregs of the beer still left to one side, and retreated into the back room.

  Muttering to herself—prayers to the gods, prayers to herself—she set the empty pitcher to one side along with the cracked cup, then scrambled through the urns into the back corner where her pallet lay, along with all of her worldly possessions. She drew a leather satchel from beneath the pallet, dug through it until she found the vial Ninkasi had left with the stone tablet. She held it up to the shadowy light, read the inscriptions on its sides, noticed that her hands were shaking. Gripping the stone vial tight, she shoved everything she owned into the satchel, then climbed to her feet and tossed it to one side near the door to the small room.

  Then she turned to the stone tablet in its niche against one wall.

  “Ninkasi, I pray you spoke the truth that day or I shall curse you until the day I kill you myself.”

  She reached up into the niche and grabbed both sides of the stone tablet. She swore as she lifted it—it weighed more than it should—then staggered into the outer room. Gilgamesh did not move to help her as she crossed to his table and set it down. He frowned down at the inscription, reached out to touch it, but she caught his forearm.

  “Don’t touch it,” she said. “Not yet.”

  She returned to the back room, grabbed her satchel, Gilgamesh’s cracked cup, and the vial, but left the pitcher. If this worked, she wouldn’t need it any more.

  Trying to control a wild grin, she crossed the outer room and set the cracked cup onto the center of the tablet. Arms prickling with the sensation of the net and her own excitement, she pulled the stopper from the vial and poured the liquid within into the cup. It came out clear, like water, but smelled of cedar and mint, and continued to pour forth even when it became clear that the tiny vial could not possibly cont
ain the amount of liquid already in the cup. But Kubaba did not hesitate, pouring until the cracked cup was full, then sealing the vial once again. She set it down on the tablet as well. It was still full.

  “Now drink,” she said.

  Gilgamesh reached for the cup, then hesitated, his hand held still in mid-air. Kubaba’s breath caught in her throat, a fist-sized lump of despair lodging in her chest.

  “That’s it?” he asked, his voice a low rumble.

  Trying not to show her tension, knowing that she failed, she nodded. “That’s it. Drink, and the alehouse ... and immortality . . . are yours.”

  He grunted, lowered his head as if in deep thought, then picked up the cracked cup.

  He held it before him, long enough she wanted to strangle him. The lump in Kubaba’s chest tightened, so hard she thought her heart would burst.

  And then he drank, tipped his head back, throat working as he downed the entire draught, not stopping for breath.

  When he finished, he sat forward, breath coming in a harsh gasp as he set the cracked cup back onto the tablet. For a long moment, his face was flushed. He coughed once, twice. “It burns,” he said, voice hoarse. “Burns in my throat. I can feel it inside, in my gut.”

  Kubaba said nothing. The net still prickled against her skin. The despair lodged in her chest began to seep outwards into her shoulders, down into her gut, followed closely by seething anger. Ninkasi had lied to her! She’d told her she could escape! She’d told her—

  But then, without warning, the prickling sensation began to fade. A weight she hadn’t realized had covered her sloughed off her shoulders, like cloth pulled from a statue’s head. She straightened, and the despair that tightened her chest lifted.

  Snatching up her satchel, she moved toward the alehouse’s door.

  “Wait!” Gilgamesh growled, and shoved up from the table. “Wait! Did it work? I feel nothing! Even the burn has faded.”

  Kubaba didn’t stop, didn’t turn. “Let’s see.”

  She stepped out of the shadows of the alehouse and into the glare of the sunlight slanting down into the street. Her foot landed in the dirt, solidly, without hesitation—