A.M. Bowman - Gilgamesh - Babylonia, sometime around 2100-1200bc.
The Aurora Archives: Day 16
ARCHIVE ENTRY: [Estimated] 2100 BC, Winter Solstice LOCATION: The Deforested Slopes of the Amanus Mountains (Modern Turkey) SOURCE: The tablet of regret, (Apocryphal Cuneiform / Fragment C) OPERATIVE: Terra-Runner Unit (Sub-type: Sower).
TRANSCRIPT OF RECOVERED TABLET:
(Translator’s Note: This fragment breaks from the standard heroic meter of the Epic. It is quieter, introspective. It describes a King not seeking glory, but forgiveness.)
I, Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, he who saw the deep, returned to the mountain of my youth.
I walked where the shadows of the cedars used to be. Decades ago, I came here with Enkidu, my brother. We slew the guardian Humbaba. We felled the sacred trees. We floated them down the Euphrates to build my great gates and my spikes. I thought I was a god then. I thought the forest was a treasure chest to be broken open and used, that the world was mine to take.
Now, I am old. The snow bites at my beard and my bones. The mountain is silent. There is no Humbaba to roar, god only knows I wish I hadn’t slayed it so there still was. There are only stumps now, grey and rotting, like the teeth of a dead skull. Suddenly I feel like the world wants something more from me too. I took and now must give back.
I brought a jar of sweet wine to pour on the earth. I wanted to say: ‘I am sorry.’ But the wind stole my words. The wasteland did not care for my wine.
Then, I saw the movement.
I thought it was the ghost of Enkidu come to mock me. But it was a rabbit. A small, brown thing, shivering in the frost. It held a cedar cone in its paws, a seed from the last standing tree on the ridge.
It did not run from me. Instead it fought a battle with the earth.
The ground was iron-hard with ice. The rabbit could not scratch it with its soft paws. It stopped. It sat upon its hind legs and closed its eyes, as if trying to solve something the seasons would not allow.
The rabbit then carefully balanced the pinecone on its point, and using its power, it spun about its top, losing contact with the floor entirely. It drilled using the cone and its own weight. It focused the heaviness of its body into a single point. The frozen earth groaned and cracked. A perfect, hole opened in the frostbitten muck, ripped open by the creature’s strange power.
It dropped the seed. It patted the earth down.
It looked at me. It looked at the miles of devastation around us. Devestation I had caused. It looked at the single seed it had planted.
It hopped three paces to the left. It looked at the hard ground. It looked at me again and grunted.
I begrudgingly understood. Looking about for a moment, I checked for observers, but of course there were none. No one came here anymore.
The gods do not want our wine, Enkidu. I thought to myself. They do not want our golden statues, or our conquests, or our cities. They want us to fix what we broke.
I drew my sword, the blade, Might of Heroes, that had severed the Guardian’s neck.
I fell to my knees in the snow. I struck the earth. At first in anger, with myselkf more than with the situation. Slowly anger turned into service. I hacked at the ice until my arms shook and my royal robes were soaked in mud.
I made the hole. The rabbit dropped the cone.
We worked until the winter sun failed. The King and the beast. The destroyer and the healer.
We planted a row of hope in the white winter ground. Unpredictable not because they were unruly, but because the ground was unwieldy. I will never see these trees grow tall. I will be dust when they are saplings.
But as I walked back to the campfire, the rabbit thumped its foot once. A sound of approval.
I slept without dreams for the first time in years. The forest is not dead, Enkidu. It was only waiting for the sword to become a plow.
ARCHIVIST’S NOTE:
The operative, by creating a localized, rotating gravity field at the point of contact, the Rabbit was able to drill into frozen soil and find the still alive earth beneath. Gilgamesh is often credited with civilizing the world, which usually meant conquering nature. This interaction represents the first recorded instance of the realization that true civilization requires stewardship, not just extraction. This unit was likely an early example of a sower, a specialized caste of Terra-Runners dedicated to reforestation in post-conflict zones.
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This is so eloquent Graeme!