Free To the Land of the Living by Robert Silverberg

hospitality of Prester John, Gilgamesh soon discovered, was no trifling affair.
    He was led off to a private chamber with walls lined with black felt – a kind of indoor tent – where three serving-girls who stood barely hip-high to him surrounded him, giggling, and took his clothing from him. Gently they pushed him into a huge marble cistern full of warm milk, where they bathed him lovingly and massaged his aching body in the most intimate manner. Afterward they robed him in intricate vestments of yellow silk.
    Then they conveyed him to the emperor’s great hall, where the whole court was gathered, a glittering and resplendentmultitude. Some sort of concert was under way, seven solemn musicians playing harsh screeching twanging music. Gongs crashed, a trumpet blared, pipes uttered eerie piercing sounds. Servants showed Gilgamesh to a place of honor atop a pile of furry blankets heaped high with velvet cushions.
    Lovecraft and Howard were already there, garbed like Gilgamesh in magnificent silks. Both of them looked somewhat unsettled – unhinged, even. Howard, flushed and boisterous, could barely sit still: he laughed and waved his arms around and kicked his heels against the furs, like a small boy who has done something very naughty and is trying to conceal it by being overexuberant. Lovecraft, on the other hand, seemed dazed and dislocated, with the glassy-eyed look of someone who has recently been clubbed.
    These are two very odd men indeed, Gilgamesh thought.
    One works hard at being loud and lusty, and now and then gives you a glimpse of a soul boiling with wild fantasies of swinging swords and rivers of blood. But in reality he seems terrified of everything. The other, though he is weirdly remote and austere, is apparently not quite as crazy, but he too gives the impression of being at war with himself, in terror of allowing any sort of real human feeling to break through the elaborate facade of his mannerisms. The poor fools must have been scared silly when the serving-girls started stripping them and pouring warm milk over them and stroking their bodies. No doubt they haven’t recovered yet from all that nasty pleasure, Gilgamesh thought. He could imagine their cries of horror as the little Mongol girls started going to work on them.
What are you
doing?
Leave my trousers alone! Don’t touch me there! Please – no – ooh – ah
– ooh!
Oooh
!
    Yeh-lu Ta-shih, seated upon a high throne of ivory and onyx, waved grandly to him, one great king to another. Gilgamesh gave him an almost imperceptible nod by way of acknowledgement. All this pomp and formality bored him hideously. He had endured so much of it in his former life, after all. Back then
he
had been the one on the high throne, but even then it had been nothing but a bore. And now –
    But this was no more boring than anything else. Gilgamesh had long ago decided that that was the true curse of the Afterworld: all striving was meaningless here, mere thunder without the lightning. It was impossible to build anything thatwould last. It was all castles in the sand here, with oblivion rolling in on the tides no matter how hard you struggled against it. You never could bring forth sons to extol your name and strengthen the walls of your city; your friends and allies appeared and vanished again like phantoms in a dream; you yourself lived half the time in some fevered dream yourself, uncertain of your own intentions. And there was no end to it. You might die again now and then if you were careless or unlucky, but back you came for another turn, sooner or later. There was no release from the everlastingness of it all. Once he had yearned desperately for eternal life, and he had learned to his pain that he could not have such a thing, at least not in the world of mortal men. But now indeed he had come to a place where he would live forever, so it seemed, and yet there was no joy in it. His fondest dream now was simply to serve his time in this Afterworld and be