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Gilgamesh wakes up.
His hair is damp, a bit moist only, but it feels like a flood of sweat has swallowed him.
He has dreamt, once again, of Enkidu dying.
The night is cool and he breathes in, deep, trying to fill his chest with the night, with its coolness. With its calm.
He is exhausted from his dreams, and they press on him, heavy, immovable as a mountain, as a great stone statue. But there is no peace in returning to slumber, he knows, and he tries to stay alert. He builds a mental wall between himself and the burnt out forests and jagged landscapes of his dreams.
He remembers Enkidu's dreams, the ones Enkidu would wake him up to tell him, ignoring his tired groans and grouchy protests. At first, Enkidu's dreams were about finding food and chasing off larger beasts that would hurt his creature friends. Then, later, he would dream of other things, things he never would have imagined before his life in the city. He dreamt of falling off a tower. Of being squeezed to death by the city gate. Every time, Gilgamesh would tell him that a dream is nothing, a dream only exists in the moment; when it is over, it dissolves into nothing, and so it is nothing to be afraid of, nothing to put store in.
Now Gilgamesh wonders sometimes about the life of those dreams, the ones where Enkidu was happy in the wilderness. Gilgamesh wonders sometimes if those dreams went somewhere when Enkidu lost them. He wonders, even as he knows it's a child's wish, if he could find where there were hidden. If he could hold them in his hands and refuse to let them go.
When Enkidu left, Gilgamesh also mourned for himself, raged against his own death while still living and healthy. But he had to accept that there were some things he would never have victory over. He encountered Enkidu and met a man he could not best, and then with Enkidu he encountered death and met the thing he could not best.
Now he takes consolation in other things, lesser things, than the hope of forever.
He is resigned to this. But somehow, even when he has finished mourning his own mortality, he has not yet finished mourning for his love.
Enkidu would sing, sometimes, to Gilgamesh. A song that Shamhat had taught him, a song about beer and golden plates of fruit. A seduction song.
He would sing it very, very badly.
Gilgamesh would laugh and laugh, but not unkindly, and Enkidu knew it was awful, knew it and sang it louder, loud enough to scare the scribes in the next building. Enkidu would silence his laughter with a kiss, or occasionally with an especially forceful wrestling move. But it would always make Gilgamesh suspect that Enkidu was telling him something, that it was more than a self-mocking statement of his intentions to seduce (which of course was a feat that Enkidu had already acheived). So even though Gilgamesh would laugh, it always had a slightly bitter taste, a slight resentment of what he knew was Enkidu's message: Enkidu was going to change him the way Shamhat changed Enkidu. Enkidu had plans for Gilgamesh to become a different type of man.
Of course, he was right. Gilgamesh had become a different man. Especially after.
Now, however, he does not laugh when he thinks of those songs. He thinks of them often, just as he thinks of those dreams Enkidu once had.
He thinks of the gleam of a drop of sweat in the moonlight, like an orb of lapis lazuli, trailing from Enkidu's brow to his cheek to his lip, and pausing there before falling. He thinks of all the things that Enkidu gave him that were there for only a moment, that couldn't be grasped in his hands or known for any breadth of time.
There are things that should last forever, Gilgamesh thinks as he lies awake. He knows that they don't, but he still struggles with the fact that they should.
Gilgamesh rolls over, wipes the moisture off his brow and cheek, and sings the song softly. He pays attention, gets every word right, not wanting to change a thing.
When he gets to the part about the petals falling out of the lover's hair, he remembers Enkidu's wild gesticulations, his exaggerated dance done to amuse Gilgamesh.
He lets out a breath, almost like relief, and then a moment later realizes what this breath nearly was: a laugh.
The laugh was still there, inside of him; Enkidu had left it, and it was his to keep.
This should not mean so much to a great king, to a legendary man. But somehow, it makes him smile a thanks to a man who wasn't there.
It makes him feel, for the first time in a very long time, that pain, as well as love, can be lost, even if by bits. He thinks that maybe - possibly - it can fade.
He closes his eyes and tries to think of other moments, other ephemeral joys, that he could try to grab onto, could try to hold firm in his hands as they wriggled out of his grasp. He thinks that maybe those moments, those flickers of memory, could stand forever.
Maybe those moments could make it safe to sleep.