What Has Come Before
While scavenging in the caverns beneath his city, young Gilgamek stumbles upon a being not seen in millennia: a dragon. In that brief encounter Gilgamek acquires mysterious strengths that he cannot easily control. He also becomes haunted by a disturbing dream of a pitiful mek held captive in a dark place, a dream that he realizes is more real than he imagined. As Gilgamek struggles with the changes that have befallen him, forces beyond his understanding gather: vaporous searchers arrive in the city; an elegant stranger named Lady Fray takes up residence across the street from his hovel, and the Autarch announces the next Mortality Games. Always one for a come-up and encouraged by his fickle new powers, Gilgamek decides that the Games might be his chance to escape his poverty (and after no small trouble finds a conflict tutor in the enigmatic Lady Fray). Despite the bloody chaos of the first contests, despite the fact that the competitions favor the wealthy fighters, Gilgamek advances, butting heads with the Autarch’s designated heir, Prince Taramfis, and laying eyes on his bewitching sister, Princess Glamarys, for the first fateful time...
39
Extract XXXII from the Lost Archive: Silent Interviews
Interlocutor One: In your own words, what happened that night?
First Equal: (Long pause). We fought. I should have been elated to see her, but I was young and a fool. I felt that she was my old life trying to stop my new life from being born, and my mind of course was elsewhere.
Interlocutor One: the Princess?
First Equal: (Nods.)
Interlocutor One: Did you have a presentiment that this evening would be the last time —
First Equal: I did not.
Interlocutor Two: Do you wish you acted differently?
First Equal: Of course. You’re here for the truth, so let me share this truth with you. I doubt a year has gone by where I’ve not dreamed of our last days together — our last normal days together — and not felt regret.
Interlocutor One: You are brave to share that with us, First Equal.
First Equal: Dique brave. (Laughs).
Interlocutor One: the First Equal claims you fought that night — is this true?
Honored Prime: He fought. I knew him well enough to wait him out.
Interlocutor One: Why do you supposed he was upset?
Honored Prime: At the time I did not know about the princess. I assumed it was because of everything that happened in the arena. And because he wanted me to support his decision to keep fighting, without reservation, and I was never going to do that. I loved him — this much is true and my love did not play like that. He was winning and was proud of himself, but he was not seeing what I was seeing on the screens. All the fighters being taken out on stretchers. The fighters who lost their limbs and the fifteen who had lost their lives.
Interlocutor Two: Forty-three died, by our records.
Honored Prime: How come I am not surprised? They always hid the number of casualties. That was the way of things back then, they hid everything. In that sense he was a child of his era.
Interlocutor One: And you, Honored Prime, do you consider yourself a child of that era?
Honored Prime: Of course I am. All of us who lived through those days cannot be otherwise, no matter what any of us may say. But unlike Gilgamek, I hid it better.
Interlocutor Two: Hid the hiding?
Honored Prime: (Nods.)
Interlocutor Two: As the First Equal was to discover.
Honored Prime: Painfully.
The hyperbards tell us that Gilgamek reached the final day of the Games and fought in the champion’s final — a triumphant tale that is not remotely true. The physical evidence alone contradicts this preposterous claim.
But when have fools ever let the truth undermine their certainties?
We walk another path, a harder path, and this is why I insist in accordance with the evidence that Day Four is the end for Gilgamek.
And his beginning, as well.
Day Four is Double Deadly Weapon Day and no one is more excited than Zatuzan Atomic who upon hearing the announcement bellows excitedly, “No might but what you wield!”
His house motto, and one that appears anywhere Wastelanders gather, spray-painted onto their shacks, tattooed in slither-type down their limbs. Zatuzan unlocks a ceramic weapons case and reverently removes the partner to his main warhammer. Holds the pair like long lost family, goes as far as kissing their starforged heads.
“What Brother Fell once starts,” he explains to Gilgamek, whirling his hammers about in a brutal Moebius loop. “Sister Twain twice finishes.”
“Whoever ends up pulling that lunatic today is dayyyd,” the fourteenth ranked Desloq says and no one disagrees with her. Desloq is head of one the Autarch’s sworn houses, a Bird mace-fighter with a tectonic might that allows her to blow the ground up under a fighter’s feet.
Gilgamek ain’t really listening, too busy watching Prince Taramfis’s servants present him with two perfect tulwars, stellar-era artifacts each worth more than the entire Coliseum. Taramfis flying-guillotines them about with tornadic force, a look of perverse satisfaction on his princely-planed face.
Gilgamek ain’t got much of a choice, sticks to his factory sword and his iron fist. Hopes that will be enough. (Before he left the tavern that morning Lady Fray handed him a new carbon blade. “Caseforged carbon might be heavier than stellar materials but it’s almost impossible to break, which means you can depend on it to parry.”)
When the Prince of the Onyx sees Gilgamek preparing with a single blade he offers Gilgamek anything from his arsenal, but Gilgamek declines. “I ain’t trained with two.”
“T’is a pity,” Zatuzan says. Like it is indeed a terrible fate not to have too many weapons. “After these silly Games, Gilgamek, you must come to the Onyx. Join us in our raid tents and my sisters will train you with two weapons like they trained me.”
Gilgamek smiles at the invitation. “If I live.”
Zatuzan recoils, his jowls and beard shaking. “Real warriors never die in Games. Tain’t possible.”
A distracted Gilgamek nods, unaware of the significance of the gesture, unaware that the Onyx never offer their nomadic war camps or their sisters’ skills to stranger. For the rest of the Games he notices that the Onyx entourage scowl at him at every opportunity but he’s too preoccupied make much of it.
Gilgamek fights twice Day on Four, both contests before the noon gong.
His first match goes surprisingly well. His opponent, Red Dorrigan, makes the fatal mistake of rolling with Gilgamek — and it takes Gilgamek about five seconds to slap an awkward side choke on him and withstands all the kicks and elbows and headbutts until he feels Dorrigan-6 slacken and then go night-night.
The Boy With the Iron Fists is making it look easy! Listen to that appreciative crowd! Though looking at who’s left on the card I’ll bet ten thousand coin that this will be last time he’ll be able to cruise…
His second match is against Desloq and within a second of the Start Horn sounding the Bird explodes the ground under his feet and as he’s sailing in the air she nearly catches him full in the face with her mace. Would have been the end of him, but his left fist, displaying a mind of its own, leaps up, interposes itself between her mace and the blow. A peal like a cracked bell, and he loses all feeling from wrist to elbow but saves himself from a crushed skull. The look of disappointment on Desloq’s face is equal to the elated relief on Gilgamek’s face. They smash each other up for four rounds and when she tries her tectonic attack a second time he’s ready and jumps clear, chased by hot stinging pebbles —
It doesn’t look good for the Trench Wonder, Desloq hasn’t been allowing him any open shots and her defense is incredible. Gilgamek needs to start creating more openings if he intends to turn this one around…
— and only beats her because she finally slips up, over-lunges and gives him an open shot on her exposed her back. Gilgamek doesn’t hesitate. Chops his blade down so hard on her shoulder he would have split her down to her waist had she not been a Forged warrior. As it is he simply knocks her into next Tuesday and lowers her shoulder permanently.
Now that’s what I’m talking about. The Autarch, who’s only flaw is that he lacks a flaw, must be pleased by how this is going. There’s not a soft hand in any of these finalists. They are metal to the core.
Day Four the vibe in the Coliseum continues to shift in Gilgamek’s favor — there is more applause and it spreads beyond the cheap seats, even some higher metals, younger ones, wearing knockoffs of his lightning t-shirt and waving black foam fists in the air, are rooting for him.
They love a winner, Prince Radmek notes during Gilgamek’s second laureling.
They love what they’re told to love, Princess Glamarys say, her hair done up tall, like a heavy smoke plume over a burning city.
You mean like our father?
Careful, brother. That way ends in trouble.
More trouble than this I find it hard to imagine.
Saying nothing, Gilgamek bows awkwardly and Glamarys ignores him with such divine effortlessness that another person might have been offended, but Gilgamek can only laugh.
“Better to save your laughter for battle,” Zatuzan advises. “Just in case you fall. Tain’t right to die without laughter.”
“Why’s it matter?” Gilgamek says. “Dead is scrapping dead.”
“Death tain’t the end,” Zatuzan says, eyeing his hammers as though he’s afraid they might have overheard and taken offense. “The Ancient Books of War tell us we all go into the Long Dark and our last cries follow us there, ringing in our ears for all time.”
“So if at all possible try not to die like a punk,” his older cousin, Rubiqua, says. “And do not cry for your mother.”
Time for today’s half-time show, sponsored by Zex Dex Spirits, the Quicker People Upper. The Autarch, who is carnival himself, has lined up some great performances but first we’ve got a couple juicy executions. A coin clipper and a rice-thief. Got to hate a rice thief. These death sentences are fixing to be bloody ones—
Those are the kind I love best!
Day Four, something shifts within Gilgamek as well. That morning, fighting his two battles, he never felt so clear, so certain, so pulled together, as if all the pieces in him have finally found their place and order. Something deep within him, it seems, has cohered. The Ancient Scrolls tell us: Sometimes in the dance one is lifted beyond oneself, and cannot fail. It is like this with Gilgamek. He has found his dance at last and it has lifted him and he feels like he cannot fail.
While he thrills to the extra applause, the crowd does not matter. His past does not matter. His future does not matter. Lonqo, Feckles, Lady Fray do not matter. The Dangling Mek does not matter.
The boy who went alone down to the Trench does not matter.
He cannot fail.
Next: Your Kind Never Wins
Production Diary. The line "Sometimes in the dance one is lifted beyond oneself, and cannot fail" comes from Mary Renault's The Persian Boy, about the life and loves of Alexander the Great, a novel I adore and which had an outsized impact on my failed Martian novel. Even when our talents are not equal to the inspiration we must still credit the inspiration.
Only five more chapters remain before we our first 'book' of Gilgamek concludes.