First draft of part of the prologue. Posting it for general perusal.
I find that as I type these words into the computer that my mind is finally after all this time only now accepting what has happened to me. In fact, were it not so completely entrenched in memory I would surely think myself mad as you no doubt will. Your modern eyes and ears hearing the words and safely filing them away in some corner of your mind where all nonsense is stored, a tale to pass the time enjoyably, and perhaps not even that. I have done many things in my life, but the mantle of the writer I have never worn. But as my hands type quickly over the plastic keys I feel the story bubbling to the surface, and I hope that it at least gives me some semblence of peace.
Let us begin with the ending as it were. I live now in a comfortable retirement home in the United States of America. The "U.S." A fascinating country where everything and nothing is possible all at the same time. Where a more than simple man can rise to the ultimate position of power only to dance to the strings of the system that put him there. I'm happy now. I know that I am dying and were it not for the reason that I simply do not know why I'm dying I believe I could accept it. Do you believe me when I say this? I will ask you to believe much more before my tale is complete. Outside the rain strikes the ground softly and the breeze is gentle and warm, much the same as it was more than fifty centuries ago when I was born.
I was thrust into the world a little over 5000 years ago. Yes, the very number seems to leap off the page does it not? This is the point where I imagine the suspension of belief comes in and of this I am perfectly accepting. I am only too keenly aware that I will not be believed as the one person i confided my story to dismissed me angrily, but more of that in time. I was born with eyes tightly clenched, and with my voice unleashed I welcomed myself to the world. We were not divided nicely into neat patriotic slices of the map in my time, we were nomads, my parents moving quickly with their own soon after my birth. This land was hard and the people therefore were hard, this mountainous desert that would later be Babylon, and later still Iraq. Perhaps if I wanted to "prove" to you my story I could write in the early Sumerian language that I spoke, but in this age of the internet you could no doubt decipher it and reply with an equally obscure script. I jest now, it has been long since those old words have passed my lips. It was a clever language and simpler than the shades and countless meanings of every word that infect this English, but it's time has passed. Let me say here that life itself was simpler then, we moved as need dictated, we hunted and we traded with those we met and by the age of 10 I was running along with my father as he hunted for the animals that we ate. But I have not given my name have I? Dotamas was the name that my father gave to me, though it was too soon before I was baptized into another.
It has been so long since I have spoken of my Father that I am amazed at the feelings that his blurry memory awaken. He was a great man, patient and kind, and knowledge was never held back by him but flowed through him easily and with joy. My days were filled with the teachings of becoming a man, and the nights with the stories of our past, Of Gilgamesh and the flood and songs and stories that even your learned men have never found. He did not deserve what happened to him later by the man that was to replace his tutoring with one of his own. It was my hope that my Father never really knew what was happening to him though by indirect experience I knew it was not so. Who knows what kind of a man I would have become had my life not been so diverted, most likely a simple and unimportant existence followed by an equally unobserved death. I have pondered many times in teh past on whether I would have chosen that fate for my own, even knowing now what the alternative would demand of me. I never did discover the answer.
In truth I could fill many pages with revelations about my people that would intrigue and excite scholars but that is not the story I choose to tell. I was a man of 18 years when this tale truly begins, the day that I met HIM, and for all intents and purposes, he remained my companion for the next 4000 years. I remember returning from a small village, the name of which escapes me. I had been trading some of the surplus food and skins that we had acquired and returning with some items that we needed for the coming weeks. He was talking to father quietly, his gaze fixed on me as I walked towards them, his eyes never leaving mine even as Father raised his arms angrily and made to turn away. Only then did he turn away and place his hand gently on my Fathers shoulder. I remember his face vividly as he stopped and began to turn towards the strange visitor. Utter resignation. He had been defeated somehow in this short exchange, he had fought and he had argued but he had lost.