THE EPIC GILGAMEK: CHAPTER 3 - LIFE AT THE VERY BOTTOM
In which we learn about slum-jumping and Gilgamek disagrees with Lonqo as to whether coin can ever change anything.
3
There was nothing for it. Gilgamek sold off his toys, books, and all their furniture, and when those few coins were spent the boy moved them to an even Rustier part of town and with no other option whatsoever descended down into the Trench to work. Down into the very labyrinths that had broken up Lonqo and swallowed hundreds of Rusties every single year.
As I said: no more sweets, no more dreams of boxes. Over the next four subterranean years the sweet shy boy Gilgamek was replaced by another, a harder scowling Gilgamek. And Gilgamek wasn’t just regular tunnel-rat hard. Something happened down in those tunnels, some secret process that left him one of the hardest young meks around. Certainly the hardest mek in his home slum — Stack Jauna 8. His hardness quite the irony, considering all the flesh that burdened him.
Gilgamek wasn’t just hard, either — the boymek was also a cold stone rumbler. By his twelfth year he’d been in a thousand plus fights — mek on mek, mob on mob, and on more than one occasion mek on mob — by which I mean he fought an entire mob by himself and lived to tell the tale. The boy might have been flesh-fold-five but his knuckles dented the hardest metal and he could take hits that would have tin-canned a grown mek and above all else: he never backed down, no matter what.
Always fighting like a madmek, a mek possessed. All that anger finally good for something. And because he is an infamous rumbler with berserker tendencies the very poor meks in Stack Jauna 8 depend quite a bit on his ferocity and madmek reputation to keep them from being overrun by the other mobs. It's not an exaggeration to say Gilgamek is the prime reason the Stack Jauna 8 mob still lives in Stack Jauna 8, and hasn’t been chased out to the Slags by a bigger mob.
Slum-jumping is a constant danger in those days, especially for the poorest Rusties. In the years before the Change, New Urk City is overcrowded, literally bursting at the seams, and yet droves of newcomers arrive every day, blown in by the four-hundred-year drought and the never-ending Wizard War. Death isn’t choosy, neither. Thousands upon thousands succumb to disease, crime, starvation, sunfire, in the arenas, serving in the Autarch’s armies, fighting the Wizard, but it still isn’t enough. The population keeps growing. Things are so bad you have six Rusties splitting a single umbrella tent in four hour rotations and you might laugh, but there are thousands who would have given a limb for such accommodations. Desperate times filled with desperate meks and of course the City makes matters worse by having a law on the books that states that as long as you battle fair and square and don’t try to steal slum patches while their tenants are at work or use forbidden weapons (such as titanium gas), the authorities would not interfere with what the law called involuntary rehousing activities.
Long story short: the city encourages the Rusties to take each other out — to war over slum patches.
And so Gilgamek finds himself fighting off slum-vasions two, three times a month. The alarm would sound, pots would clang furiously and the whole neighborhood would rush out, grabbing sticks, glass, chains, hammers, saws, dental instruments, pulling on make-shift armor, lucky bathrobes, doesn’t matter if you are sleeping or on your death bed, out you go and only Birds like Lonqo who can’t move are excused. Even bespectacled studious Feckles has to fight, though Gilgamek tries to keep an eye on Feckles, who for all her courage nevertheless seems to get hurt every clash, usually by tripping or hitting herself.
These battles are what battles between desperate people often are: they are bad and they are sad. Heads flattened, cowls gouged, limbs bent, and the cursing and wailing is awful. Battles often so desperate that parents resort to hurling their children at their opponents, turning kid-meks into siege balls.
Gilgamek, of course, takes on all comers, even meks three times his size, fighting furiously, always furiously — fighting as though these invaders are his misfortunes made mek. His young might a fearsome force to behold.
But occasionally during the peak of battle, when he is being chained across the face or someone is trying to spear him in the you-know-what, Gilgamek feels something else, gliding just beneath his rage.
A strange contrariness of — what? Of spirit? Of self?
Disbelief? Bewilderment?
Call it what you will, but sometimes when he gets smashed to the ground an uncanny calm falls over him and as he lies on his back he finds himself wondering: Why did Rusties have to be like this? Why couldn’t they just work together to figure things out?
And also: Why did he have so many questions?
“Questions are good,” Lonqo says. “It’s what separates us from them.”
The Birdman points a gnarled wing up toward the higher city, the Silver and Oro and Adamantine tiers where the Forged classes live.
“Questions,” Gilgamek says bitterly. “Even idiots have questions. It’s coin that separates us from them. A lot of coin.”
“No amount of coin can change what a person is, Gilgamek.”
“How would you know?” Gilgamek demands. “You never had anything in your life.”
“Everyone has abundance, Gilgamek.”
“Scrap!”
“It’s true. I had my share of life’s fortunes and misfortunes, and of course now I am rich.”
“Yeah, you’re rich. With hunger. With debt. With scrap.”
“I’m rich in you.”
He sucks his teeth. “I’d rather have coin. That’s what changes everything.”
“Only ever for the worse.”
After these type of disagreements, they wouldn’t talk for a day or two.
.
.
To be continued next week when we learn of Trench work and a drop in prices riles up the Stacks and Gilgamek most of all.
I'm turning the pages, loving it!
just want to find out what's next! it's fun learning the lingo of that world.