While digging on my land, I turned up the set of clay tablets on which this story is inscribed. The script is cuneiform, and the language is Proto-Sumerian. If this seems at all unusual, remember that the Vikings were only some of the more recent explorers to get lost in these parts. There is also a local legend that the ark of Utnapishtim first fetched up on dry land in New Hampshire, most likely on the slopes of Mount Monadnock. After a quick look around, though, he made a short speech which my sources paraphrase as ‘Wow, there sure are a lot of rocks around here!’, and he and his wife refloated the ark. They wound up in the Fertile Crescent and the rest, as they say, is history.
Resisting the normal New Englander’s impulse to re-use the tablets as structural elements for a root cellar, I had them translated, and the results are below.
Remember, this is the first, the original, the oldest story, scientifically dated to the time before the Great Flood. If it reminds you of other stories, it is because those stories are retellings or out-and-out plagiarism. And lest any troublesome person pretend to be confused by what seem to be references therein to stories that happened before this story, let it be understood that these are mere anecdotes, ancestors of the tall hunting and fishing tales of later times—of which the most venerable are ‘The One Who Got Away’ and ‘The One That Got Me and It’s My Ghost Here Talking to You.’ True, they are the oldest anecdotes in the world, but they have not the epic seriousness and sweeping narrative of the true, the first, the original story.
Also, a word about labyrinths. Some believe that labyrinths and mazes are interchangeable, but they are wrong. Mazes are a light pastime for mystery-lovers and puzzle-solvers. Labyrinths represent Fate, and they are unicursal. A single path. One way to go, Joe. You can walk the winding way as slowly or quickly as you like, but in the end you find yourself at the hollow heart of all that is.
Here are the words of the story:
There was a warrior who was also a great hunter. He had slain the great Dragon in the primordial ooze. He had slain the boar in the Western Wood. He had slain the greatest warrior before him, and dragged the body nine times around the city walls. So it seemed a good idea to him that he should become king over all the lands that people knew then.
There was already a king over the people, and he had a monster he kept in a labyrinth. The king was a great sorcerer, and the labyrinth was Time itself. The monster was that Fate that men can never escape.
Just kidding! It was a real labyrinth, with dripping stone walls and bones strewn across the path, the single path. And there was a real monster waiting inside. The warrior entered and came to the center. The monster promptly tore his body asunder and threw the pieces down into a vast hole that led to the underworld.
But the king’s wife was watching from her high window, and saw all that had happened. She went down the stone steps that are easy to descend and hard to climb. She searched through the dark mists of the underworld for the scattered pieces of the warrior’s body.
Now, all women have the power of life and death—they give birth to men, and lay them out when their fate finds them. But only a few are able to reassemble a man who has been torn apart. Luckily, the king’s wife was a goddess, and all goddesses have this power.
She put the pieces of him back together and made him live again. Once more he took up his quest. His plan this time was to go around the labyrinth and approach the king’s palace from the rear, but when he tried this he found himself back at the entrance to the labyrinth.
“What part of unicursal did you not understand, O noble warrior?” the goddess asked him.
“I think it was the ‘uni’ part,” he answered.
He took the spiral path to the center of the labyrinth and fought with the monster there. This time he prevailed, and tore the monster limb from limb, and threw the pieces to the four winds.
“You are the king now,” the goddess said. “I forgot to tell you that the monster was the king himself, under an enchantment.”
It was good to be king. He had a great palace and many servants at his beck and call. He had a beautiful wife, for the goddess who was the old king’s wife became his wife in turn.
Whenever the king held court the people would cry, “O great king, may you live forever!”
“You know, that’s not a bad idea,” said the king, after he’d had some time to think about it.
“There is only one way to bring that about,” the goddess told him.
“I’m a little tired of hearing that,” said the king, “but tell me anyway.”
“There is a tree in the Mountains of Death that border this world,” the goddess said. “It bears the apples of eternal life.”
“I’ve heard rumors of this,” the king said. Not stories, of course, just rumors, since this is the first story—Ed. “I will take some of my warriors with me then, and go to claim the apples.”
“You are a great king with many at your beck and call,” the goddess reminded him. “Send one of them to do it. This is a quest for a young man, my beloved, and you have silver in your hair now.”
So the king sent one of his younger brothers to quest for the apples of eternal life. But after the young man had climbed the mountains, and fought with the guardian of the tree, the apples shone in his eyes like gold. He plucked one of them and held it in his hand. “Why should I not be the one to win eternal life?” he asked.
So he ate the apple and at that moment, the country he was in turned sideways to the sun, so that no one on Earth could see it or know how to come there. People still wandered in by chance sometimes, but none ever returned to the world we know.
They are always happy there and they live forever. But they have no souls, they are empty, like the center of the labyrinth. We call them the Other People, and envy them, and later we will tell many stories of their land.
Back at his palace the king waited, and after the moon turned he knew that his brother would not come back. The goddess saw his unhappiness and she made a new thing to show him.
“What are those pieces of dried clay?” he asked her.
“Tablets with writing on them,” the goddess said. “The writing tells a story.”
Now the goddess had just invented writing on that day, and nobody had invented reading yet. But he was the king, so he could read it. It was his own story.
After he finished, the king brooded a while and then said, “So I will grow old, and die, and never have eternal life?”
“Be comforted. You already got to come back from the dead,” the goddess told him. “And now, you will live forever in this story. Whenever someone reads it you will live again in them, in their hearts and minds.”
“Hearts and minds are all very well,” said the king. “But my brother is in the story too, and he has life itself.”
“Even though he has life itself, and he comes into your story, the story is about you and not him. Be comforted now. And be quiet!”
So he was.