The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

It was the wisdom of my ancestors that a man meets his simtu, his fate, the end of his days, when and where the god wills. This he cannot evade. I got down from the gelding and allowed the reins to drop to the ground. I took a javelin from the quiver and weighed it in my hand. Let them come, I thought. Let them come.

  “They are not interested in you, Kephalos—they will not pursue if you escape alone, and it is a fool who throws away his life for nothing. Be off now.”

  “Lord, this is madness! This is. . .”

  I did not wait for him to finish, but struck the stallion on the rump with the tip of my javelin, yelling fiercely. This was enough to make it bolt forward at a gallop, with Kephalos, in terror, hanging on to its neck like a leech. They would go far together before that horse could be brought to a halt, and by then my business would be finished.

  It is astonishing how calmly a man can wait to die. I was not afraid. I was even, in a curious sense, relieved, as if some conflict within me were finally resolved and I could at last act with the perfect freedom of a mind untroubled by doubt or hope. I waited, standing well away from my horse so the inevitable shower of arrows would not kill it as well. I watched them come.

  It was not the first time I had faced mounted soldiers with a javelin in my hand. It had been just so in the first battle of my life, on the plains at Khalule, when I was but fourteen years old and first knew that ecstasy which makes a pleasure even of fear itself. Yet I did not feel ecstasy now—only a cold resolve to meet this too with honor, and to avenge my own death.

  “If you must turn your thoughts to death, Prince, let it not be your own but theirs,” his voice said—perhaps nowhere else but in my mind. “Did I not ever instruct you that a soldier’s first duty is to kill his enemies? Death comes of itself, so you need not invite it into your heart.”

  I was almost tempted to look behind me, so real did that voice seem. Tabshar Sin, who had taught me the craft of a soldier, dead these three years, killed by a Median lance and buried in the rock-filled ground of the Zagros Mountains.

  “I hear you,” I said, aloud—perhaps he only spoke to me because now I was almost a ghost myself. “I am not afraid.”

  “I believe you, yet fear does not enter into it. I speak of wrath. And of my own shame if I raised you up to forget you are a Man of Ashur.”

  The troop had seen me by then, of course. They knew they had me and were in no hurry. Perhaps it had not yet crossed their minds that I would fight back. So I waited while they made their leisurely approach. I waited for the lead rider, wearing the blue uniform of a rab abru, to come within range. I did not have to be told that he was Dinanu, whom I would kill because I would avenge Zerutu Bel, and myself, and because he was not the king my brother and could therefore be killed without impiety.

  They came, it seemed, with no suspicion in their hearts, believing that death was theirs alone to dispense, like copper coins to beggars. I would acquaint them with their folly.

  “You shall witness, Tabshar Sin, that I brought no shame upon your ghost.”

  “No, you shall witness, Prince—which is more to the point.”

  At last, when they were close enough, I swung back my arm and then let my body uncoil like an adder striking. The javelin flew from my hand—it seemed to have its own life.

  If ever the god was with me, and gave strength to my arm, it was then. I knew, even before my fingers had opened, that the dart would find its mark. It rose, arching through the air, higher and higher, and then dropped like the hunting falcon.

  Dinanu was a corpse even before he pitched backwards over his horse’s rump. My javelin had taken him square in the breast—he did not even have time to try to shield himself. It was not a man that fell to the earth, but a load of carrion.

  I took a second from my quiver and steadied myself for the throw. I had enough for a few more before they rode me down and cut me to pieces. They would charge now. . .

  But they did not charge. Dinanu’s men reined in their horses and then, after what seemed a few moments of confusion—I could see one or two of them making excited gestures in the air—they retreated the fifty or so paces that carried them out of range.

  What were they waiting for?

  Perhaps they did not know themselves. I could see them pull together into a tight little circle—it appeared they felt the need to parley concerning what they should do now. I could not hear them across the wide emptiness of the plain. I would have to wait and see what they decided about the manner of my death.

  There was no wind. There was no sound. There was only the oppressive silence.

  Enough, I thought. Finish this. Let us have our fight and make an end of it.

  They forced me to wait. That was the hardest thing, the waiting.

  Let me embrace my death, I thought.

  But they did not take up the challenge. In the end they rode away, without hurry, as if nothing had happened, leaving their commander’s body where it had fallen in the dust.

  II

  Death seems to take all men by surprise. The expression on Dinanu’s face, as he lay sprawled on the plain, the wind quietly covering him with dust, suggested that it was the last thing he had expected. His eyes, already clouding over, were filled with outrage, as if he felt himself insulted to have met his simtu thus. His mouth was open and his teeth bared, implying that he had died preparing to tell me so.

  His horse stood with my gelding not far away, picking the leaves from a bush with a deliberate, self-absorbed delicacy, seeming to ignore the corpse of its master as one might a drunkard’s tasteless jest at dinner. In a leather bag strapped to its withers I found a mattock, no doubt the one with which the rab abru had expected to chop off my head, and with it I began to dig up the soft, stoneless earth for a grave. I would not leave Dinanu to the birds, as he had Zerutu Bel; I would not for mere spite abandon any man’s ghost, not even such a man as he, to wander eternally on the comfortless winds.

  “A mere three handfuls of earth,” came a sudden voice—I turned and saw my former slave, covered with dust and sweat, leading the black stallion by the reins—“enough to hide him from the sight of the eternal gods, Lord. Nothing more is required.”

  “Doubtless the rab abru would not have agreed. He was not a Greek, and neither am I.”

  “I think, by now, you had best think of becoming one, my witless young master, since it seems you are no longer welcome in the world as an Assyrian. I am pleased, by the way, to discover you are still alive—how did such a thing come to pass?”

  I made a gesture toward the corpse. “In this case, all the venom was in the snake’s head. The others lost interest as soon as their commander fell.”

  Kephalos grunted approvingly, as if he imagined I had planned that outcome from the beginning, and then sat down on the bare earth, watching with interest while I dug. The stallion, by now placid as a dairy cow, wandered off to join the two other horses.

  When I had hacked out a suitable hole I threw the mattock to one side, placed one foot on Dinanu’s chest, and pulled my javelin loose. It came away with a sickening sound.

  “Give me a hand with him.”

  We picked up the rab abru by the arms and legs and dropped him into his final resting place. In Birtu, Kephalos had purchased a wineskin, which he carried slung from his shoulder; I took it from him, poured some of the wine out into my hand, and scattered it over the dead man’s face and chest to calm his ghost. Then we covered the corpse with enough dirt to keep the jackals from digging it up again.

  “I think we would do well to be gone from here now,” I said, wiping my hands on my tunic, glad to be done with this piece of work. “Whatever made them quit so suddenly, there is nothing to guarantee that the rab abru’s men will not find their hearts again and renew the chase. Let us fetch our horses and be away from this place.”

  “Good—it is almost nightfall, and I have little enough desire to sleep beside a grave.”

  We rode far into the black night, until the moon had risen to the top of th
e sky’s vault. Then we tethered the horses, gathered brushwood for a fire, and tried to forget that only one day had passed since we had slept on clean reed mats, our bellies full and our hands closed over the breasts of soft-bodied women. With the cold wind blowing at our backs, we would not sleep so well tonight. It seemed almost pointless to try.

  “There is one consolation at least,” Kephalos said, as he tried to stir the embers of our fire into some kind of life. “I do not imagine we will have much to fear from pursuers.”

  “Oh? Why is that? Is Birtu such a pleasure garden that the soldiers of the garrison will not be able to tear themselves away?”

  He stared at me in reproving silence for a moment, as if, under present circumstances, he had little taste for hearing the comforts of that place disparaged.

  “No, Lord. Yet I believe that the patrol you encountered this afternoon, whatever their reasons may have been for abandoning the chase once you had killed their commander, will have little enough reason to brag about the exploit. Dinanu, if he was a cautious man—and all those who curried favor with your brother during his years as marsarru would have learned to be cautious men—kept his intentions to himself when he set out after you, and doubtless his soldiers will wish to preserve the secret. They must assume by now that you have eluded them, and they will not be eager to report a failure of this kind to Nineveh. They will concoct some lie to explain the rab abru’s death, and they will keep silent about you. Thus we will be left in peace. They will not care to risk the king’s wrath.”

  Not many minutes later I heard him snoring peacefully, his dreams undisturbed, it seemed, by any suspicion of danger, and it occurred to me that, as usual, Kephalos had spoken as a good physician and diagnosed our condition correctly. Esarhaddon’s temper was as uncertain as a bull’s in springtime, and no one would be eager to tell him that I had been seen at Birtu and then allowed to escape.

  . . . . .

  Still, as a precaution, for the next several weeks we kept to the wilderness, away from the paths of men, living off the land, always watchful for the cloud of dust that would signal to us our pursuers. They never came, and gradually we began to imagine ourselves forgotten.

  Our wine ran out after three days—a grief to Kephalos, who grew fond of saying that a life barren of luxury was hardly worth the inconvenience of living—but otherwise we were well provided for. There was fresh water and good hunting, and this far south the date palms grew wild. For myself I was perfectly content. Like every soldier, I had only to compare this with the rigors of campaign to feel myself in a paradise of ease and comfort, and, provided I could forget that there was a world beyond—a world where my brother was king and I an outcast and a fugitive—I was quiet in my mind. I felt as if I would have no cause to consider myself ill-used by fate if I should continue thus forever.

  Yet, as the man who dreams he is a soaring bird must finally awake and find himself tethered to the earth, so at last the world forced me to remember it and I was drawn back into the life of men.

  It happened on a day when we made our camp beside the source waters of the Tartar River, where it flows from a lake I have never heard given a name. It happened when, during the night, we discovered that we had a caravan for neighbors.

  “Master, I am weary of this savage existence,” whispered Kephalos. We sat on a bluff, watching the light from their campfires reflected in the black water. “I sicken at the smell of wild game cooked without spices, and I know not what crime I would commit for a mouthful of beer—even beer, Lord! For to such I am reduced by privation. And, most of all, I long for the sound of an unfamiliar voice. I want to hear the gossip from distant cities and be reassured that the world has not been redeemed from its wickedness. Most Merciful Lord, say that we might break off this pastoral idyll, this living as if we were the first men the bright gods made—say that we may rejoin the living.”

  And truly, I must own, I felt the force of everything he said, for I too, almost from that moment, had grown tired of pretending to be one among the beasts of the wilderness. Everything Kephalos said of himself applied to me as well, for men were made to live among men.

  “We will go down among them at first light,” I said. “Let us catch them when they are still half asleep and less likely to be treacherous.”

  “Good—men will believe anything at that hour. And let us do something about the mark on your palm, lest it betray you again as it did at Birtu.”

  In the morning, before we set off to try our luck among the caravan drivers, Kephalos wrapped my right hand in a long linen bandage, so that I seemed to be wearing a glove with the fingers missing.

  “Should anyone inquire, you burned yourself.” He smiled at his own cunning as he tied the final knot, just at my wrist. “You are a clumsy, stupid sort of servant and only yesterday morning had an accident while trying to bake the last of our flour into bread. You ruined the bread, which caused me, your master, far more anguish than the ugly blister you raised across the palm of your hand. I called you many terrible names and threatened to sell you if ever we reached a town big enough to have a slave market. I said you would end your days making mud bricks with your own urine. That, I think, is a nice touch to the story, the sort of detail that makes men believe all the rest, since every slave reproaches his master with such lack of feeling. Repeat it often.”

  “And, for your part, let us settle on a name and a history, since it would be embarrassing were we to be caught in a disagreement on this point. In Birtu I styled you “Hugieia of Sardes” to Dinanu—will you agree to that, since it seems to have been a lucky choice?”

  “Hugieia?” Kephalos considered the matter, stroking the month-old growth of beard that now adorned his chin. “Yes—well enough. At least it will be easy to remember, since health is all that a physician can claim as the end of his skills. Yet I am not as happy with Sardes, since I have never been there and, in any case, have no great admiration for the Lydians. Let us compromise a little with the truth that I may be Hugieia of Naxos, since every man should honor his birthplace if he can. Hugieia, yes. It was clever of you—almost clever enough to convince me that you might make a Greek yet. And what of a name for yourself, Lord?”

  “I am Lathikados from nowhere in particular, as befits a slave. That too is a compromise with the truth.”

  Kephalos nodded in silence, understanding the bitterness of my jest, and thus I took the name by which my Greek mother had known me in the king’s house of women. “He who banishes grief,” she had called me—and now I was banished myself, and the name had been turned upon its head.

  And before the sun had well and truly risen, while the sky was still pale gray, we mounted our horses and rode from our own encampment to that of the caravan drivers. It was no very great distance, no more than a man might walk in a quarter of an hour, but it marked the longest journey we had traveled since leaving Birtu, since it carried us back across the frontier of the race of men.

  We entered their circle of tents even while the breakfast fires were still cold, and the few who were already awake stared at us in silence, blinking as if they could hardly believe their eyes.

  On the other side, there was little enough for us to marvel at. Perhaps twenty men, allowing a tent for every two of them, with perhaps twice that number of pack horses, their trade goods bundled up in stout leather pouches that lay in a heap in the center of the camp. The horses, tethered in a line beside the lake’s edge, looked half starved and as if their ribs were made of rotten wood, the men as if they might have found a life of brigandage more to their taste. Doubtless, of course, we appeared no better to them. A month of sleeping on the hard ground will rub the respectability off any man.

  No one welcomed us—no one even spoke—but neither did any among them hint at offering to attack us. None of them, it appeared, wished to take the responsibility for attempting either. They seemed merely perplexed to find us among them. We stayed on our horses while the impasse dragged on, waiting through several heavy moments of s
ilence.

  And then, at last, a tent flap opened and another of them stepped out into the cold morning sunlight. It was easy to see, from the manner in which the others glanced at him, with that mingling of relief and dread I had seen so often in the eyes of my own officers and men, that this one was the leader here.

  I could well believe it. He was not a tall man, but he had a way of carrying himself that made him seem as wide and solid as a wall. His narrow, smiling eyes and pointed beard suggested that this was one for whom life held no more unpleasant surprises. He stood with his head cocked a little to one side, seeming to mock at all the world

  “Whose camp is this?” shouted Kephalos, wisely seizing the initiative. “What route do you follow, and to what destination?”

  “The camp and all within it are mine—Hiram of Latakia,” the caravan leader answered, in the most villainous Akkadian I had ever heard. He crossed his arms over his chest in a way that implied the mere sound of his name should strike terror into our hearts. “We carry metal to Babylon, which the new king of these lands, who does not care how much treasure he spends, is rebuilding to appease the Lord Marduk. I expect to make good profit out of the god’s wrath. I have finished ingots of copper and iron. And now, what of you?”

  “I. . ?”

  Kephalos, that master of self-presentation, dismounted his horse with all the dignity of a great general taking possession of a conquered city. He looked about him, surveying the tents and the wretched, slat-sided pack horses and the men themselves as if he had been offered the whole lot in payment of a debt and was sure he was being swindled. At last he fixed his gaze on Hiram of Latakia and smiled a tight, not-quite-disdainful smile.

  “I am Hugieia of Naxos—physician and adventurer, scholar and man of affairs, counselor to the great of many nations, sometime trader, sometime shareholder in the trading schemes of others, presently the victim of a cowardly attack by bandits that has left me. . . as you see. I would be grateful for the opportunity of traveling with you some distance along your way, since two men alone are seen as all the world’s natural prey, and I am not without means of manifesting my gratitude.”