EPIC OF ENKIDU
Spirit of a Rose
Chapter One
I do not remember being born. But then, I suppose very few of the humans do.
My first memory is of the bright blue sky stretching endlessly over the earth, the sound of the wind rushing through the trees and the gentle sway of the leafy branches overhead.
My second memory is of dark shadows, and experiencing hunger and thirst. Then there was light, and warmth.
It must have been during the harvest season, because the air is warm in my memories, but there was warmth at my back, too, and I remember the feeling of silky fur curled around my bare skin, the soft snort of the wolf as she nuzzled one of the squirming, mewing pups closer to herself.
Aside from that, I do not remember much of my earlier years. Time has little meaning when days stretch on without end and the world is always the same. The wolf was my only existence, her and the wriggling, naked pups beside me. There were other things -the shadow of the rock over the den, the thick, sweet smell of the earth all around me and the light that was always followed by darkness- but they were like the sun and moon, distant and unchangeable. The wolf was my entire world. She fed me when I mewled with hunger, pressed me close to her warm sides when it grew cold, and carried me back inside the den by the scruff of her neck, as she did her pups, whenever we managed to squirm too close to the outside world.
As I grew older, things began to change. The den grew smaller as I grew taller, though admittedly not much bigger, and could move my fingers and toes -paws, as I thought of them then- more easily as I wished. The pups, too, grew bigger and stronger, but their changes were different. Their claws and teeth grew sharper than mine, and warm fur covered them. I, on the other hand, only grew fur on my head, and my claws never did grow much, although my teeth did become a little sharper. The wolf -I had no concept of 'mother', but if I had a word then for how I thought of her, that would have been it- would sometimes roll me onto my stomach and nuzzle me all over, as if trying to discover where my fur had gone. She never seemed content with what little she found, poking me with her cold wet nose until I curled into a ball and squirmed away from her restraining paws, as worried as any mother over the smallest of the litter.
I was strong for my small size, however. The pups and I spend many happy hours tussling, snarling and snapping at each other with dew claws and teeth still meant more for milk than meat, and even though my fur and teeth and claws were smallest, I could still pin down the biggest of the pups and force him to submit to me.
(Gilgamesh will sometimes trace the scars I have from those mock battles, and shake his head and tell me that it is a good thing that he tamed me before I went wild completely. And, as always, I tell him that last I recall, it was I who tamed him. But I get ahead of myself.)
Gradually, the wolf left more and more. She would let us follow her on the shorter hunting trips, and I learned how to stalk prey, how to detect the weakest of the herd and wait, hidden, for it to fall behind before attacking, circling and snapping with heavy jaws and fangs until at last, wounded and exhausted, the prey would collapse and we could feast.
Since my claws were still blunt and I had no fangs to speak of, I rarely took part in the hunt itself. I would watch, crouched in the underbrush, as the pups gleefully darted out to attack, led on by the wolf, wishing I could be one with the pack as the others were.
That growing sense of loneliness marked my earliest years. I do not remember when I finally left the pack, but it was soon after the pups were nearly full grown, when we had left the shelter of the den for the open woods. I do remember waking up alone afterwards, curled up shivering beneath a tree and missing the warmth of the pack around me. I must have been nearly five summers then, as the humans count it.
It was the smell of freshly killed meat that finally led me out from the forest. I followed the smell to the outskirts of the trees, to the river that snaked its way through the stone cliffs. There I found a grizzly bear and her two cubs feasting upon fish in the shallows.
The bear looked up as I came closer, walking unsteadily in the treacherous sand. The cubs, who had not yet learned that the world held things to fear, continued to eat. I do not doubt that I was a pitiful sight, a small, naked creature that smelled of wolves, drawn by the scent of fish, which my stomach told me loudly smelled very good. I had not eaten since I left the pack, and I was tired and hungry and lonely.
When I was only a few feet away, the bear heaved herself to her feet and ambled over. I froze, looking up wide-eyed as her shadow blocked the sun. She stretched out her thick neck and sniffed me curiously. She did not particularly seem to like the wolf stench, because she grunted and drew back her furry lips. The sight of those enormous white fangs, each as nearly as long as my face, is still clear in my mind. I stayed very still as she snuffled me all over, nearly knocking me over, and grunted again and drew back. I looked up into her deep brown eyes, unafraid. I was not afraid of other creatures then, only of being alone.
Something seemed to pass between her and I, a kind of understanding. Animals do not have a single spoken language, as humans do. Their language consists of a thousand different sounds and gestures, and it is as simple as that of the smallest human child's and more complex than any language spoken by humans. I knew that she sensed my loneliness and hunger, and something about me seemed to waken a sort of dormant emotion in her, as she did in me. With a snort, she gave me a nudge that sent me sprawling flat on my face in the mud of the riverbank. The cubs paused in their meal to sniff me curiously, their black button eyes wide with surprise, but I now smelled distinctly of bear saliva and was so covered in mud that I was almost as dark as they were. They blinked at me, and I sniffed them back, and together we devoured what was left of the fish while the bear watched over us warily.
(Gilgamesh says that it was the mark that the gods had put on me when they created me that made all the creatures I encountered mistake me for one of their own. He says it so certainly that I do not argue, since he, too, knows what it is like to be under the gods' protection. But in my heart I cannot help but feel that the gods did not have much hand in my childhood. There was someone in the wolf's dark eyes, and in the bear's as she accepted me as one of her own cubs, that makes me believe it was more than a simple mark. Both the wolf and the bear saw clearly that I was not the same as them, and they still accepted me. That is not something that the gods, or even humans for that matter, have ever been very good at.)
I lived with the bear and her cubs for three summers. There were no hunts to watch alone from the shadows now, no mock fights that left me curled up in the corner of the den, licking my new cuts and scrapes. The bear and her cubs lived in a shallow cave at the foot of the cliffs, and at night I would happily snuggle against her furry side. During the day I learned how to fish, how to root out grubs and squirming ants from the deep crevices of rotting stumps. When the day grew hot I would splash about in the shallows with the cubs, leaping over each other and wrestling, sheathed paws against fingers and toes and furry limbs against thin, naked ones. I still won most of the fights, but every so often I would roll onto my back and let them tackle me and knock the air from my lungs, just for the pleasure of watching them strut around proudly before they fell to fighting again.
After that, when the cubs were grown, I lived with the gazelles. There I learned how to fly across the grassy plains faster than the wind himself, where to find the best watering-holes and how to spot a predator in the tall grass. I watched the males rut in the spring, clashing fiercely and stamping and swinging their horns while a female watched nearby, and looked after the littlest ones as they took their first trembling steps. I guarded the herd at watering-holes, and used the knowledge of how the pack hunts to shield my new family from predators. I bore the hunter no more ill will than I did the hunted, and harmed nothing when it was within my power to keep from doing so. I was very strong by then, so I could usually overpower whatever I encountered.
It was around then that I first began to put into words, or at least what passed for words in the strange, rambling language I used for myself, what I had always unconsciously recognized. I had known that I was different even when I lived with the wolves -how could I not, when I changed even as they did, and yet always remained different? But now for the first time I began to wonder what I was, if I was like nothing I had ever met before.
I was still too young to wish for a mate -that aspect of my existence would not come for years, even when I eventually lived among humans- but it seemed that every other creature under the sun or moon had others of its kind, and I did not. I gradually became aware of a new kind of loneliness, for even though I was surrounded by creatures of every kind and shake and happier than I had ever been, I still felt more alone than ever.
(Gilgamesh wishes for me to add that the concept of a mate was alien to me until I met him. I would also add that when I first met him, nothing was farther from my mind. It was only when the loneliness was replaced with -but no, for even then I never once that thought of myself in that way. It was only when he -but again I get ahead of myself. Telling this clearly is more difficult than I thought.
Gilgamesh says that I should skip to the interesting parts, by which he means the parts that have him as well. I tell him that in that case I should never bother with putting all of this down at all, and that if he wants to hear my story he must listen to all of it, not just the parts with him in it.
He says that I should at least finish my sentence from before. I tell him that he was the one who asked me to do this in the first place, and that I cannot write with him interrupting constantly, and if he wishes for me to stop then I am more than happy to do so.
He is quiet now, though not for long, I have no doubt. To continue where I left off-)
It was a different kind of loneliness than I was used to. Before, a part of me had always believed that even if I never found anything like myself -and I always knew, deep in my bones, that I was strange and different, and I never truly believed that I would find someone like that- I still thought that I would someday meet something that fitted where I was lacking, like a piece I had not known was missing. But as time went on, and I travelled the great plains and forest and never met any such thing, that fragile hope I had cherished slowly flickered and died.
(Don't look so offended, Gilgamesh. This was before I met you, remember?)
There are two things I forgot to mention, however. The first is that I have always known my name to be Enkidu, though whether that was the name the gods pressed into my mind when they created me, and is as much a part of me as the bones inside my flesh or the heart beating inside my chest, or simply the first string of sounds that seemed to have meaning when I began to use the strange, nonsensical language I created for myself, I do not know. Enkidu was who I was, the pattern of sounds that summed up my entire existence.
The second is the dreams. I have always had them, or at least for as long as I can remember. Sometimes it is only a meaningless babble of voices, like the crashing of a waterfall, loud and chaotic and beautiful and terrible at the same time. Other times, it is only one voice, a woman's, though she speaks the same garbled language as I once did, and I could never tell whether she and I were one and the same or not. More dreams, different ones, came later, but during those days when I knew nothing of humans it was that woman's voice that came to me over and over again, singing of Enkidu, created by the gods from clay to avenge against evil and to protect the weak, to find her destiny with the one who lives in the stone.
I didn't know what gods were then, of course. I simply knew that I had been created by someone for something, and that meant I was different. It meant I was alone.
Around the same time as I was living with the gazelles, I began to notice changes in my appearance. The herd would gather at a watering-hole, and I would linger behind to peer at my reflection in the murky water after they had gone and the ripples had stilled. I would compare what I saw to the creatures I knew, searching for some feature, some visible mark connecting me to one of them.
I saw none. The reflection I saw, when the water was clearest, resembled no creature I had ever seen. My face had somewhat of a faint resemblance to the high, curved cheekbones of the antelope, but even to my hopeful imagination the similarity ended there. My skin was the color of the sand in the plains, a few shades darker than ivory. What fur I had called scarcely be called such, for it did little to keep me warm and even less to protect me from the changing weather, other than that between my legs and on my head, but even that was like no fur I'd ever seen. The fur that grew on my head was long and pale like the sky at moonset, and thick like a bear's fur, but with a sort of ripple or wave in it, and the tips curled when they were damp. My muzzle and my mouth were separate, something that I remember puzzled me greatly, and my muzzle was very small. I had lips like a bear, but mine were thicker and the reddish color of wild grapes, which made no sense at all. My eyes were the pale bronze of the glittering flecks of gold that glinted in the rocks of the riverbed, and large, but lacking the roundness of the other creatures', and arched wisps of pale fur grew over them.
I could move about on all fours like the wolves, but my movements were more cumbersome than when I stood on my hind legs like a bear, so generally I preferred the latter. I was a little larger than a wolf, but my head and shoulders were far thinner, and my torso did not grow steadily narrower as theirs did, but thinned in the middle before widening again at the hips. My arms and legs were thicker than a gazelle's, but not as big as a bear's, and yet I was still stronger than the largest bear. I was also developing strange lumps on my chest at the time, which seemed to have no purpose whatsoever and puzzled me to no end.
(Stop laughing, Gilgamesh! How was I supposed to know what a human female looked like?)
I do not know my exact age at this point, but I would guess it to be around fifteen summers, perhaps a little more. I no longer lived with any one kind of creature, but spent those long years -though looking back, how fleeting they seem now! - traversing what I thought as my domain. Some nights I would spend with the pack, tending the pups while the adults hunted, or roam with the jackals though the underbrush in the never-ending search for a meal. Other days I would grub for insects with the bears, or fly across the open plains with the antelopes and gazelles, relishing the wind in my fur and the feel of the ground vanishing beneath my feet. The loneliness remained, a dull ache in my chest at times, but for the most part I was happy, and I was content.
I did not know it then, but those peaceful days would soon be over, and a new chapter in my life would begin.
But that is a story for later, when I have rested and eaten and eased the cramps out of my writing hand.