The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  The Blood Star

  Nicholas Guild

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2011

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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  THE BLOOD STAR

  The western lands—the pale sun which warms my face, the soft blue sky, the wind and the shining water, these are the gifts of their openhanded, childlike gods. It is a place of vines and fruit trees, of stone farmhouses and earth that turns black under the plow’s iron blade. It is a place a man might love if he did not chance to dream of his distant home. If he were not a sojourner in the midst of another’s garden.

  I am such a one. As a boy I did not know the taste of olives or the murmur of the wine-dark sea. Yet, although I was not born here, it seems certain here I will finally die. And that time is not far distant, for I have grown old in this place of strangers—I, the son and grandson of kings, rulers of the wide world. Yet that grandeur is past. The story I tell is of my own life, which even now the god cradles in his hand.

  Ashur, god of my fathers, he who is called by many names, who is lord of heaven, the master of this world and the next, he whose will is fate has chosen this path for me, and I take up my pen again that his glory may be known, that his purposes may be seen and understood by men. I am Tiglath Ashur, the god’s servant, whose name was yoked with his in the hour of my birth, who survives perhaps as the last to honor him.

  Though she be but a shadow in my own brain, a poor dream of memory, once more my eyes fill with the sight of mighty Nineveh, envy of the world, queen of cities. I am five and twenty. What have I not known already of glory, wealth and power? What have I not known of emptiness, of despair, of jealousy, of the bitterness of lost love? My brother, who is king now in our father’s place, turns his face from me. Esarhaddon, who was once my friend, has pronounced my sentence of banishment, that I will be forced to wander in the distant places of the earth, forever a stranger, forbidden to return lest I die for it. Nineveh, which once held all that I loved, now I must flee from you like a slave guilty in his master’s sight.

  “Let him pass forever out of the Land of Ashur, and all the lands where the might of Ashur’s king is felt.” So spoke my brother, the mighty king, lord of the earth’s four corners. “Let him hide himself in the dark lands beyond the sun. Let him be taken from my sight!”

  The guards escorted me away. I did not resist them. They took me by the arms and led me stumbling from the king’s presence, for I hardly had wit enough left to walk by my own will. My mind was dark. It seemed to me that I had already died.

  They took me to a room in my father’s palace—my brother’s now, as now were all things under the bright sun—and servants stripped me of the silver robes which were marks of my princely rank and I was given a plain soldier’s tunic. I put it on, hardly knowing what I did. I sat down. Someone brought me a cup of wine, but I did not drink from it. Does a corpse drink the wine offerings meant to quiet his restless soul? I had no taste for wine, no more than if I were dead and the clay had stopped my mouth. At last the soldiers returned and led me away again.

  Where would they take me? I knew not. I was no longer one of the Lord Sennacherib’s royal sons—I was a stranger here now, and his heir and successor hated me. Perhaps they took me to my death. It hardly seemed to matter.

  But it was not death which awaited me. Instead, I found myself in the palace gardens, where I could hear the sound of the swift-flowing Tigris, mother of rivers, where I had so often seen my father, grown old, resting upon a stone bench as he fed bread crumbs to his birds.

  The soldiers departed, without speaking. I was alone. It did not oppress me—I had spent many days alone, in an iron cage in the dungeons of my brother’s palace. What weighed upon my heart were the memories stirred within me by the sight of this place.

  My father, the king, struck down by an assassin as he knelt to pray before the Lord Ashur. We had avenged that, my brother Esarhaddon and I, and then we had turned one against the other—or, at least, he had turned against me. And only because my father loved me and would have had me succeed him as king, even in defiance of the god’s will. Yet I would not put myself up against the god and my brother both. I made my submission to Esarhaddon—let him have the glory of a king’s crown, I thought—and for this he could not forgive me.

  For this, and for other things.

  It was the month of Nisan, when winter begins slowly to die and the world is reborn. Still, it was a bleak world. The flower petals had long since been swept away, but snow still hid in the shadow of the wall. There was no moon, no stars overhead, only the dull black of a cold, cloudy night sky. One needed only to look about to believe that the world had stopped forever.

  I sat down on the bench, merely because I had grown weary of standing. I cannot claim that I was waiting for anything—or expecting anything. The future had been annihilated for me.

  The past, however, would not allow itself to be pushed aside. It kept rising before my mind’s eye, unbidden, of its own will, or perhaps because I seemed to belong to it so completely.

  My father, sitting on this very stone, old and defeated, knowing that all his hopes for me had come to nothing. How he had hated Esarhaddon, and for no sin of his own. Old men make mischief when their hearts are dark.

  And love. Esharhamat, my brother’s wife. I could see her face, the tears in her eyes, and hear her voice. . .

  “Have you not made my heart a widow?”

  “I would be king for your sake,” I had told her once, while we still knew hope. “For your sake, and to change the world.” And she had answered, “Would you, my love? But the world will not allow itself to be changed.”

  And other voices. . .

  “You will be great in the Land of Ashur,” my mother had told me, since the first days of my youth.

  “Do not think that happiness and glory await you here, Prince, for the god reserves you to another way.” The counsel of one wiser than my mother.

  Words—words that filled my mind and made it ache like a wound in cold weather. I had seen so much, heard so much, and I had been made blind and deaf.

  But perhaps not so blind at last.

  Gradually, as happens sometimes with a memory that forces its way into the center of one’s brain, I became aware that I no longer had the garden entirely to myself. I shared it with another visitor, someone as out of place there as I had become myself. I glanced about, wondering who this intruder could be—perhaps, finally, an assassin sent by my brother to ease his mind by slipping a dagger in under my rib cage?—I was almost disappointed to see merely a small boy in a soiled loincloth, his hands clasped behind his back as he watched me through large, intelligent, untrusting eyes.

  He stood beside an arbor covered with dead and withered vines—it struck me that the boy must be cold, but if he was he gave no sign of it. He was perhaps six or seven years of age, one of the army of raw little urchins who hung about the docksides and the wine shops of the city, turned loose by parents who could not afford to keep them. It was a life that doubtless taught many hard but useful lessons. I was not offended that the child regarded me with such suspicion.

  “What do you want?” I asked him—presumptuous of me perhaps, but I had difficulty believing that this ragged boy had merely blundered into the sacred precincts of the king’s palace.

  “Are you the Lord Tigl
ath Ashur?” he inquired in his turn, as if the idea seemed unlikely enough to him, “he whose palm is crossed with the blood star?”

  “I was until a few hours ago.”

  “Show me.”

  I opened my hand, holding it out to him. Even in the dim light of a moonless evening the birthmark was visible, dark red and lurid, as if it were a glowing coal—the god’s indelible brand upon me.

  “Then this is for you.”

  He stepped forward and at arm’s length held out to me a strip of leather, rolled tightly and tied with a thread. I undid it and spread the strip out across my knee, squinting at it in the darkness. I was not even surprised. The message it contained was written in hasty, slanting Greek, in a hand with which I had long since become familiar.

  “Dread Master, your guards have been bribed to bring you here. Be pleased to follow where this child leads and it is possible we may both find deliverance from the king your brother’s wrath.”

  My former slave Kephalos, a fat, luxury-loving rogue, a thief and a coward, a scoundrel upon whose word neither man nor woman could rely. And yet, for all this, my friend, the one soul in all the winding labyrinth of Nineveh in whose love I had any confidence.

  I rose from the stone bench, my knees stiff with the night cold I had not until then even noticed, and wrapped my cloak about me.

  “Then you shall be my guide, boy,” I said, attempting to smile but no doubt making a bad job of it—the little urchin stared at me with cynical astonishment, as if he thought perhaps my wits had gone rancid. “Come, let us depart. There is little enough to hold me here.”

  A door stood in the garden wall, concealed behind a vine arbor. I had never noticed it before, nor had my father ever mentioned such a contrivance, but perhaps, since even kings must have secrets to keep, it had served some purpose he did not care to have known. In any case, the boy knew of it, and now so did I.

  He pushed the door open and we entered into a tiny courtyard that had the look of having been long since forgotten. We stole across it as silently as thieves, and then through a warren of little alleyways filled with trash and broken oil jars until, quite suddenly, we were somewhere down by the water.

  The place was deserted and dark. The pale moon had drifted behind a bank of clouds. I heard no murmur of voices, only the whisper of the swift-flowing Tigris, and there were no lamps throwing pools of yellow light onto the brick street. These were the docks, at night as quiet and empty as any mountain waste.

  And then, all at once, not ten paces from where I stood, there was the scrape of flint against iron and then the crackling sound of a pitch torch coming to life. As it burned brighter it revealed the shape and at last the face of the worthy Kephalos.

  My former slave was one of those who seemed to acquire riches the way other men do bad habits. His wealth would have done credit to the king himself. He kept gold and silver with the merchants of distant cities. He probably owned the very docks upon which we stood. And yet now he was dressed in the faded, dust-stained green-and-white tunic of an Amorite caravan driver, and his great brown beard, usually combed and perfumed like a harlot’s nether hair, was a greasy tangle. His broad face was creased with dirt and worry. He had the eyes of a man who had not slept for many nights.

  He looked at me, somewhat mournfully I thought, and then turned his attention to the boy, whom he motioned toward him. The boy extended his hand and Kephalos dropped five copper shekels into it, slowly, one after the other, and then, at last, when the boy did not move but still held out his open hand to him, he grunted, as if he expected no better from the wanton world, and added a sixth. Instantly the hand closed into a fist and the boy disappeared into the darkness on naked feet.

  “Come, Master, we must leave at once,” Kephalos murmured. “There is no honor among outcasts, and that lad, if he is half as wicked and clever as he looks, is this very moment on his way to sell our lives to the king’s watch. We cannot be gone too quickly.”

  With a suddenness of which I would not have imagined him capable, he was on his feet, and before I knew what was happening he had his arm through mine and was leading me, almost dragging me, along the quay.

  “I have chosen a boat for us to steal,” he whispered tensely, almost through his teeth, as we hurried along. “It is a poor thing and thus the crime is less likely to prey upon your conscience.”

  “A poor thing” hardly described it. It was barely even a boat at all but that flimsiest of all river craft, known as a gufa. Kephalos and I—and he the size of two—were to make our escape on a circular platform of bundled reeds held together with twine and bitumen and supported around the sides by some ten or twelve inflated goatskins. I was reasonably certain the currents would tear it to pieces before we were out of sight of the city walls.

  Yet what was that to me? If I drowned, and my corpse were carried downstream by the tumbling water until, bloated and unrecognizable, it came to rest in some tangle of riverbank reeds, why should I care? Yes, I would as soon meet death this way as any other.

  I shook off Kephalos’ grip on my arm and stood there on the pier, looking about me, trying through the darkness to fill my eyes with the sight of all that I must now leave behind forever.

  “We have until sunrise,” I said—my voice sounded hollow, even to myself, like the murmur of an intriguer overheard at a distance. “My brother says I have until then to be gone from the city. How many hours has the night left to it?”

  But he did not answer. He only watched me, as if waiting to have his worst fears confirmed.

  At last he shrugged his shoulders and allowed his hands to drop to his sides in a gesture of resignation.

  “My young fool of a master, have you not yet learned from life the folly of expecting all men to be all that they seem and to act in conformity with their words?”

  “My brother would not. . .”

  “No—but it would be greatly to the Lord Esarhaddon’s interest if you could be prevailed upon to disappear forever from the world of men, and you will recall that the king has a mother. And the Lady Naq’ia has pledged her word to nothing and, as you have reason to know, fears neither god nor man. My Lord, let us be gone from this place!”

  Esarhaddon, Naq’ia—they were merely names belonging to some life I had left far behind me. They could do me no harm, even if they took my life, so I had nothing to fear from them. I was too caught within myself even to understand what fear meant.

  Yet it was easier to yield than to resist. To resist meant to make choices, to act, to behave as if life somehow mattered, and I was still too hidden inside my own mind for any of that. So I allowed Kephalos once more to take my arm and lead me down the stone steps of the quay to where our little boat was bobbing in the water like a piece of tethered cork. I sat down in the front, facing away from the river, and watched as my former slave, now my accomplice in flight, untied the rope. The current took us at once and we began drifting away, out onto the bosom of Mother Tigris as we left the shore.

  An hour later, in the first pale gray light of dawn, I could just distinguish the outlines of the watchtowers. My last glimpse of Nineveh, I thought. It had actually happened. I had fled the city and was now an exile, a man whom no land welcomed, who must learn to forget that he had ever belonged to one place.

  For three days we let the river carry us. On the first day, late in the afternoon, we passed under the walls of Calah, where my brother had lived as marsarru, as the king’s first son and heir, his mind slowly poisoning with distrust and fear, and on the second we saw holy Ashur herself, city of the god, mother of the race.

  “You will speak ‘farewell’ until your tongue sickens of the sound.” Such had been the maxxu’s warning, and it had all come true. It had come true long since.

  And at night, since Kephalos was in mortal terror of capsizing in the dark, to be swept away by the black water, we would drag our gufa up onto the shore and build a small fire. Then Kephalos would bury himself under a pile of reeds and fall asleep, snoring like
a water ox, while I sat by the red embers of the fire, tormented by dreams that held sleep at bay like prophecies of death.

  Dreams? Worse than dreams. One wakes from dreams. Memory is not so easily dismissed. A dream is a phantom—or, perhaps, at best, a warning from the gods. It can be turned aside. But prayers cannot prevail against what has been done and seen and heard and is therefore fixed and solid as the earth itself. The past is unalterable and memory, its image, will not yield even to our most pious supplications. Memory catches us in its net like fish.

  At night I could not sleep. Only in the daylight, with the shoreline floating by and the sun shining in my face, could I close my eyes and, as I listened to the lapping water, sink into the arms of weariness. And while I slept my soul was at rest, for I did not dream.

  Thus we lived for three days, drinking the cold swift water of the Tigris and eating out of a bag of dates Kephalos had been wise enough to buy in the bazaar. It was left to him to do everything—I merely slept and ate and stared back toward Nineveh, as if I still hoped to catch one last glimpse of her. I hardly spoke during that time—except to curse Esarhaddon, and myself, and the malevolence of the god who, it seemed, had abandoned me. These were the themes around which my every thought seemed to revolve, like a kite circling in the air above a wounded animal, waiting for it to die.

  Above all, hating the god for having shown me favor only to render my exile the darker. I had been called “he whom the god loves,” and I had struggled, even against myself, to be his servant. Yet he had made a joke of my devotion. It seemed to me sometimes that I could hear his laughter.

  Kephalos, who feared that my brain might have been curdled by misfortune, attempted from time to time to draw me forth, to distract me from these bitter reflections, but his words were no more than the buzzing of flies in my ears. I hardly even heard them. At last he gave up and left me in silence, since I seemed to have decided to bury myself alive—if ever in my life I have been mad, deserted by reason and lost to the world and myself, it was then.