THE EPIC GILGAMEK: CHAPTER 7 - THE FIGHT BETWEEN THE ROCK AND THE EGG

FECKLES THE BRAVE - WORDS UNCONDUCIVE TO LIFE - STRANGE RECOVERIES

by the incredible Tim Fielder - check out his comic INFINITUM: AN AFROFUTURIST TALE

Begin the Epic Gilgamek here!

7

The surviving prisoners are ejected out the side entrance, but the dead ones — or near enough dead — like broken unconscious Gilgamek — are dumped down a chute at the rear of the gaol, a chute that bottoms into a lime pit where scraprats will make quick work of those victims without attentive friends or relatives. Broken unconscious Gilgamek somersaults atop three dead meks — all wearing their WE INSIST WE RESIST! t-shirts — and is quickly covered by a couple other dead meks so lashed to pieces no clothes are discernible.

And that’s where Gilgamek would have lain, gnawed on by the trashrats and sculkures had Feckles not shown her quality. Feckles, who spent all day watching for any sign of him, running between both the side entrance and the chute, who didn’t let the Orderers’ threats or the wailing of the waiting families frighten her off. Would there even be an Epic of Gilgamek had it not been for her fearful diligence?

Even I cannot say. But Feckles spots him at last, all his flesh making him easy to distinguish, and throws herself down into the pit, pushes the dead meks from him with her piper-cleaner arms and fights off the trashrats and sculkures who try to keep him in the pit. The skinniest mek in their Stack somehow finds the strength to drag Gilgamek out, and then to hoist him onto her narrow shoulders and carry him all the way back home. You want strength? This is strength. Her legs shaking with the effort, her breath cutting her throat, her eyes swimming in sweat. Balances him on low walls, on lowslung carriages when she needs to rest. Takes her nearly the entire day to reach the omnibus stop at the edge of their Stack. No one approaches her or offers to help, because they assume she’s carrying a corpse.

She talks to him — to keep him alive and to keep herself from quitting. “You remember when we made your first shoes?” she talks to him, her heart fit to burst. “You remember the kites we used to fly? You remember when you wanted to be a caravan driver and we borrowed that carriage?”

Feckles, in that corner of the Universe Gilgamek inhabits, is known as a good girl, a diligent girl. Never misses a day of work, always helps her mother with her eight siblings, dreams of passing her Imperial exam, does not consider herself couragous — and yet here she is.

Here she is.

Feckles, never strong, also never gives up.

It is only when she reaches the omnibus station one mile from their Stack that a local rickshaw girl recognizes them and takes pity, and delivers the near-death pair to Lonqo’s hovel. Feckles so exhausted and covered in Gilgamek’s life oils that it looks like two corpses land in front of that door. Later, when our tale becomes legend, the rickshaw driver will be raised up for saving Gilgamek’s life, but at the time she complained bitterly about all the mess the boy left behind.

“Look at what the Autarch did! Look at his justice!” Lonqo cries and then his neighbor, Mrs Pipes, covers his mouth. In those days, criticism against the Autarch, no matter how veiled, can be very unconducive to life. The calieses — as the Autarch’s paid informers are called — are everywhere. The old Bird soldier gets a hold of himself and with Mrs. Pipes helps tend to Gilgamek’s back with what little doctoring he recalls from his days in the Auturch’s legions.

And what exactly did they (or he) do to Gilgamek?

Forty lashes that obliterated all the flesh on his back, the deepest of them cutting through his hull straight down to his strakes. By rights Gilgamek should be dead or dying and that’s what Lonqo expects but the boy Gilgamek, the boy with no parents or much faith in the Universe, does not die.

Some will say it’s because he’s young and strong or because he’s already showing signs of his gifts. Some will say that the Orderer actually took “pity” on him and the wounds look worse than they are.

Perhaps, perhaps not.

What I know for certain is that Gilgamek never — and I mean never — stops fighting, for whatever reasons refuses to give the Universe he despises the satisfaction. Lonqo changing his bandages (and boiling the soiled ones because he can’t afford new ones) and Feckles sitting with him while she tunes the radio to his favorite adventure dramas. Gilgamek, not looking or talking to them, staring holes into the walls of the hovel.

Takes Gilgamek a month to recover — only a month! — which would have raised eyebrows and alarms had anyone known that he received forty lashes and not the ten or twelve that is generally assumed. The irony is the boy would have been back on his feet even sooner but for the fact that during his recovery slum-jumpers attack their Stack and Gilgamek has to drag himself out of bed to help with the battle — otherwise he would have finished recovering on the streets.

Gilgamek help us! The neighbors cry and despite his pain he drags himself unsteadily to his feet.

“I ain’t no egg," he says as he straps on his book armor, and says it again when he lays down after the fight.

I ain’t no egg.

At the end of that month he asks Feckles to bring over a second mirror and has her hold it for him while he studies the ruin that is his back in Lonqo’s small glass. After a long silence he puts on one of his two surviving t-shirts and never shows his naked back again if he can help it.

Important informative comparisons: there is a neighbor, two callejons over, who received seventeen lashes (the authorities subtracted three because he was a veteran) who never stood up straight again. Another neighbor, a mother of four, whose back never healed after her lashings and ended her short days trying to drink the pain away. And yet here is Gilgamek, who in spite of the terrible damage, in spite of the lack of adequate care or food, in spite of the mid-heal street fights, fully recovers.

Ends up just as strong as before.

A miracle, truly.

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Up Next: What was done to the boy - a question of tomorrows - the city on the edge of becoming.