Hellenic Immortal by Gene Doucette

One might think a lengthy pause like this meant he couldn’t figure something out, when in fact he was running through a decent number of implications.
    Finally, he nodded. “Then we must go.”  
    “I am coming?” I asked.
    He looked surprised, as if we’d already had this part of the conversation. “Of course you are.” It wasn’t a question.
    *   *   *
    Traveling the Fertile Crescent in those days was often a treacherous endeavor, but one could hardly ask for a better companion than the mightiest warrior in all the land. Gilgamesh strode the earth like the king he was, and sometimes it seemed as if even the animals acknowledged his sovereignty, practically volunteering their lives for the honor of being eaten by him. Or maybe it just seemed that way when he casually walked up behind a stag and crushed its head with a large rock.
    “How did you do that?” I asked him later, as we sat beside a fire on the first night of our journey, feasting on the stag’s meaty remains. “You are hardly a difficult man to notice.”
    “You know how to hunt.”  
    “I do,” I agreed. “But I might spend days hunting. You appear to hunt almost by accident.”
    He grinned, his bloody teeth dripping with his conquest. (We didn’t cook the stag; the fire was for warmth.) “Then you are doing it wrong. Approach silently from behind the beast’s head and downwind, and you will be close enough to braid its tail hair before it notices you.”
    “I suppose it depends on what it is you are hunting.”  
    “That it does.”
    “You know, there was a time when we worshipped the stag and the hart as gods themselves.”
    He laughed. “Nonsense. They are but creatures.”
    I leaned back, forsaking the remainder of the leg I’d been gnawing on. Raw meat always fills me up more quickly for some reason. “True. And yet, if these creatures had not presented themselves to us, we would have died. Is it so strange to pray to a stag in the hopes that it would arrive and rescue us from our hunger?”
    He tossed aside the shoulder he’d managed to denude and moved on to another body part. “The creatures of this wood are plentiful. You saw yourself how we chanced upon this one.”
    “It was not always so. In another time and place, beasts such as this were rare and wondrous. Do you not offer appeasement to the gods for plentiful crops? It is the same thing.”
    “No,” he disagreed. “It is different. The gods control the rains, and the rains feed the plants. One does not pray to a god that the animals will fuck more often so as to provide man with a larger supply of meat. And prayer to the animal itself? Madness. It is but a thing.”
    “Perhaps. And perhaps in a land where the rain is more frequent and the crops grow with unchecked regularity, a man there might think it madness to ask the gods for help growing things.”
    He nodded. “I accept that you have great wisdom in these matters. But I ask that you step away from me a few paces. When the gods strike you down, they might hit me as well.”
    *   *   *
    Searching for the landfall of an unknown object that struck the earth at an undetermined distance away isn’t an easy thing. When we initially set out, we made a beeline for where I had heard the strange impact, which presupposed I wasn’t hearing an echo of a sound made from a different location. We assumed it had landed somewhere within the cup of the valley, as it seemed improbable the sound would travel over a steep hill, which did put an outside limit on our search parameters, but we were still talking about a vast terrain. And from a geometric standpoint, if the initial path we had set off on was incorrect by even a half a degree, by the time we reached a parallel with the impact crater we could have been—depending on how long we’d walked to get to that point—a league or two off.
    The details of this semi-mathematical analysis (it could hardly be called math when math beyond very basic arithmetic hadn’t