Hellenic Immortal by Gene Doucette Page A

been invented yet) was an ongoing concern in my discussions with Gilgamesh over the following month. He thought the object must be massive and therefore not difficult to locate. So when we didn’t come upon it immediately, he became quite frustrated.
    “You have made me a fool, Ut-Naphishtim,” he growled after another day passed without success.
    “Oh, I have not, you big baby,” I argued. We’d become familiar enough with one another that our discourses had begun to resemble the bickering of an old married couple.
    “A full cycle!” he blasted. He was referring to the fact that a couple of days ago we’d seen the coming of a new moon, meaning it had been a complete lunar cycle since the sky fell. “Soon the harvest will be upon us, and if I am not present . . .”
    Well, we didn’t know what would happen then. The king is supposed to be present for the Day of Harvest because technically, without the gods smiling favor upon the king there is no harvest. So he kind of had to be there. (Not surprisingly in a drought the first head on the chopping block is invariably the king’s. It’s a perilous existence.) From a scientific standpoint, I was curious to see if his not being there really resulted in a bad harvest, but Gilgamesh would have none of it. If he wasn’t there, his people would starve, period. For him, there really wasn’t any other way to see things, and I didn’t blame him.
    Meanwhile, neither of us knew how his prolonged absence was playing back at home. It would have been easy, in light of the circumstances of his disappearance, to postulate that he’d slinked away in fear. So the political damage our journey was taking could not be calculated, but the odds were it wasn’t good.
    All this put him in a consistently foul mood.
    “Foolishness!” he said, continuing his rant. “I should never have listened to you!”  
    It was getting dark and we were, again, wandering about at random through the deep woods. Needless to say, we wouldn’t be sneaking up on any food on this night.
    “Nobody told you to seek me out,” I countered. “So don’t blame me for this.”
    “Ahhh! I do not think anything landed on that night. Why did the gods see fit to grant you immortality when you are clearly too much of an idiot to warrant such grace!” He bulled his way through a heavy set of branches and stormed temporarily out of sight, which was not a terribly challenging thing to do even when you were the size of Gilgamesh—not in these woods.
    “You’re just envious,” I declared, following after him. And he was. One of our recurring conversations revolved around his interest in becoming an immortal and my inability to provide him with a successful formula to do so.
    I pushed past the trees and promptly fell about five feet into a small crater, landing next to an astonished Gilgamesh, he having already fallen himself and not thought to warn me.
    “Hey!” I exclaimed, pulling myself off him. By the gods, he smelled bad.
    He looked bewildered. “Is this the thing?” he asked quietly.
    I climbed to my feet and took in the view in the gentle moonlight. To my left, a straight line had been drawn in the forest floor at an upward slant pointing to the heavens. Several trees along the path showed signs of recent wounding, and one tree that fell dead center had been nearly halved. This, I reflected, was the sound I had heard.
    To my right, the piece of the sky had burrowed a wide swath into the ground. And resting at the bottom was . . . a rock.
    Gilgamesh knelt before the rock with a sense of reverence that priests would later reserve for a chalice of Christ’s transubstantiated blood.  
    I stood next to him. “Well?”  
    “It is beautiful,” he whispered.
    “It is a rock,” I informed him. “We already have plenty of those. I was expecting something more from the gods.”
    “You blaspheme,” he said, almost as an afterthought because he wasn’t really listening to me. He reached down and