The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  The expression on Hiram of Latakia’s face as he listened to all this was not one to inspire much trust. He seemed very pleased with us, the way a cat is pleased with the bird under its paw.

  “As you say,” he began, “two men alone—”

  The words caught in his throat when he saw that I had drawn one of the javelins from their quiver and was balancing it in my hand in a way that suggested it might not stay there forever. It was a moment in which no man’s intentions were clear, which was perhaps just as well, since caution has saved more lives than strength and daring put together. After a while he switched his glance to Kephalos, who merely smiled a trifle broader.

  “Yes—my servant.” The daring and formidable Hugieia of Naxos—just then I could almost myself believe there was such a person—shrugged his heavy shoulders, as if at the intricacies of life. “He speaks no language except his own, which makes him suspicious in foreign lands. And, it must be granted, recent experience has confirmed him in his distrust. As a friend I would advise you to tell your men that they had best tread carefully around him.”

  Suddenly the crisis, if such it had been, was passed. There would be no blood spilled this day. The rule of civilization, that delicate counterbalancing of fear against violence and avarice, that web of tenuous, insinuated threats had once more, if only this once more, prevailed. We were safe enough in the camp of Hiram of Latakia. He had seen the wisdom of not attempting to cut our throats.

  He uncrossed his arms and made a wide gesture of welcome, as if to acknowledge the fact.

  “You may travel with us as far as Babylon,” he said.

  “And, of course, you will gratify me by accepting my contribution toward the expenses of the journey.” Kephalos reached inside his tunic and produced a small leather pouch. “Shall we say—some twenty shekels of silver? Ten now, and ten when we reach Babylon. I trust that seems reasonable to you?”

  . . . . .

  All men despise a foreigner. If his habits are dissimilar he is without manners, unclean, uncouth and savagely indifferent to the feelings of others. If he cannot speak their tongue it is because he is as mindless as a beast. To be unlike others is to be less than human. Such is the prejudice of every nation, which men carry with them even into lands where they themselves are the foreigner.

  That day, traveling with the caravan, we set our faces to the south. There was no risk of our losing our way. We would follow the Tartar River and then, when it disappeared into the spring mud, ride on until we reached the Euphrates, where it forms a great eastward loop into which we could not help but be drawn. That night, when we camped, Kephalos dined with Hiram, and I, the slave, was suffered to eat out of the common pot of horse drivers who scorned me as their inferior because they were free men and had been born in the Land of Hatti and could not begin to comprehend my Ionian gibberish.

  Yet I was tolerated around their fire, if only grudgingly and in silence. No one mocked at me or tried to strike the food bowl from my lips, for I carried a sword. Their contempt, like their master’s, was tempered by a reasonable fear.

  It is instructive to listen to the conversations of men who imagine they speak among themselves without being understood. I sat next to them on the bare ground, and they talked, in Aramaic, of me and of my good master, as if I were as insensible as a log.

  “This Hugieia of Naxos, the fat rogue; I, for one, have never heard of a place called ‘Naxos’ and do not believe it exists.”

  “This one—by Mother Kamrusepa, how he stinks! Tomorrow we must remember to sit downwind of him,” murmured a great oaf with one eyelid stitched shut over an empty socket. “I will be just as glad when Hiram catches him asleep in his tent and puts a knife under his ribs.”

  He glanced at me furtively from time to time, peering around the bridge of his nose as if he were concealed behind the corner of a building, but could not be brought to look me straight in the face.

  “I cannot imagine why he hesitates, since we are many and one man with a sword and a few rabbit-stickers is yet but one man.”

  “A scorpion, even when you crush it under your heel, still has a sting. Hiram knows his business.”

  There was a general hum of agreement around the campfire.

  “Doubtless he wishes to discover where the Ionian conceals his money,” the man went on, licking the grease from his fingers as he finished eating. He had the longest arms I think I have ever seen on a man, and the muscles in them wobbled loosely. “It would be a nuisance for him if he killed the great sow and then couldn’t find it, eh?”

  He smiled, revealing teeth as rotten as year-old tree stumps.

  I said nothing. Whoever spoke I did not look at him, but maintained an appearance of uncomprehending indifference. When it was time to sleep and I went to the tent Hiram had loaned us, I told Kephalos everything I had heard.

  “I am not surprised,” he answered. “Having had dinner with him, I would not be surprised to hear that as a child he had sold his mother into a brothel. I would not be surprised to hear that he never had a mother.

  “What of the others—do you think we have anything to fear from them?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Hiram of Latakia keeps none but toothless dogs. He is the only one here with the courage to knife a man in his sleep—if it were otherwise he would be dead already himself.”

  We lay there in the darkness, neither of us speaking, the leather walls of the tent enclosing us like a grave vault.

  “He will wait a while,” Kephalos murmured at last, almost as if he were speaking to himself. “I told him I have money with the merchants of Borsippa, implying that the sums ran to many hundreds of shekels of silver—I was far gone in drink, you understand, and inclined to brag, yet I am convinced he believed me. A sum like that would set up such a man for his lifetime, so he wants to believe me. He will ponder for a few days how best to rob me of it.”

  “Nevertheless, one of us had best keep awake through the night.”

  “As you will, Lord.” Kephalos yawned violently, for, indeed, he had drunk a good deal that night. “An attitude of caution is perhaps the wisest thing. Let us do nothing rashly.”

  “In that case, if you think it best, I will delay killing him until tomorrow.”

  My former slave laughed softly, perhaps imagining that I was in jest.

  “I am glad you agree,” I said, keeping my voice cold that he might understand I took the matter seriously. “In the morning, then—as soon as he is up. I will make a public act of it, that his men may understand we are not to be picked over like a corpse.”

  “By the gods, Master. . .” He sat up and leaned toward me in the darkness, his head almost touching the peak of the tent. “What has become of you that you show so little pity and so little sense? Would you really kill him, just like that, between rising and breakfast? No, Lord, it would never serve.”

  “What would you suggest? The man plans to. . .”

  “What the man plans is beside the point! It is better to have one enemy at our throats than many. I can control Hiram of Latakia, and, should it prove necessary, you can always kill him later. The fact remains that we are safer traveling in a large party than we would be on our own.”

  He took a deep breath—I could hear it in the darkness, like the wind over ice.

  “My Lord,” he went on at last, and in a calmer voice, “I submit to you that if we leave this caravan, there is no shortage of brigands between here and the borders of your brother’s realm, most of them worse than Hiram because they have not heard my tales of the wealth I have waiting in Borsippa. We are better as we are, with a known evil. Leave this rapacious villain to me, for I understand the baser passions better than a noble soul like yourself. It will be well—after all, even a viper is harmless enough if you know to stay away from the sharp end.”

  I had long since learned the wisdom of submitting of Kephalos’ judgment in these matters, so I rolled over and closed my eyes, pretending to sleep. In fact, I did not sleep. I stayed awake
all the night, listening to the worthy physician’s contented snoring and waiting for the sound of the footfall in the darkness that would mean Hiram’s greed had overcome his patience.

  But it never came. The camp was quiet until dawn. It seemed that Kephalos, once more, had seen more clearly than I and that we were safe enough, for the moment.

  For three days we followed the wanderings of the Tartar River until at last it disappeared into a tangle of irrigation canals in which the slow water glistened heavily under the pale spring sunlight. We were traveling through farmland now, and almost every hour we met some peasant on his way to the fields, his naked legs covered to the knees with mud.

  On the evening of the fourth day we camped near a village, a circle of mud huts some distance from the closest water—these were folk who spent their whole lives within sight of a single river and knew better than to trust it in the season of flooding—and Kephalos and I, as it had been some time since we had tasted any meat but the stringy flesh of game animals, walked over to buy a goat.

  In the end—such being the generosity of my countrymen—the headman invited us to feast with him and his sons, with which, it seemed, since they appeared to occupy nearly every hut in the village, the god had graced him almost beyond counting. He would roast the goat we had purchased from him, along with two more of his own, and he would acquaint us with the many excellences of his wife’s beer. The invitation was extended to Hiram and his men and accepted by them with almost indecent haste.

  Nor, it seemed, was our presence the only cause for celebration among the villagers, nor we the only recent arrivals. The headman had a cousin, the son of the son of his father’s elder brother, a man who had been a soldier for many years and at last had retired on his share of the booty from Esarhaddon’s sack of the city of Tishkhan, which had sided with the rebels in the late civil war.

  This cousin, whose name was Tudi, was now almost an old man. His beard was full of gray, and he was glad to be out of the king’s army and still in full use of all his limbs. He was now rich, being possessed of some fifty shekels of silver, disposed to take a wife young enough to bear him children, and to live out the rest of his life on the earth that held the sacred bones of his fathers. Yet for all this, for all that Esarhaddon’s fury against the rebels had brought him wealth and ease, he was not comfortable in his mind about the new king, who he said lived under the god’s curse.

  I sat leaning my back against the wall of the headman’s hut, whither Kephalos and Hiram had been invited to shelter themselves from the night cold. I was a foreign slave, to whom the Akkadian of these farmers was as the chirping of crickets, so no one would have thought it impolite of me to fall asleep. Yet I did not sleep. Instead, with my eyes half closed, I listened to Tudi telling his cousin and his cousin’s guests the story of my own life.

  “The king walks in wickedness,” he said, wiping his beard to clean the goat grease from his fingers. “He offers sacrifice at the idol of Marduk, which his father carried in chains from its temple in Babylon. He claims for Marduk the lordship of the gods, when all pious men know that it is Ashur who reigns in heaven.”

  “A man may choose to honor what gods he will—is this not so?” Hiram of Latakia shrugged his shoulders, like one to whom all gods were but a childish illusion. “Is not a king as free as other men? And if the Lord Esarhaddon is pleased with Marduk, what is that to anyone else?”

  “In this land, Ashur is king,” said the headman, and the eldest among his sons, some five of them, who had been invited to dine with his guests, nodded their heads, muttering in agreement.

  “The king affirms no less when he is crowned,” he went on. “The fruits of the land, the land itself, the men on it, all belong to the god—the king more than any. When the king is impious, he involves us all in his sin. Already there are stories of the births of monsters, and other omens yet more terrible. It is the cry of heaven against the king’s wickedness. Ashur will not long allow himself to be thus slighted, and he will make known his wrath.”

  “They say the mud walls of Babylon rise higher every day. They say the king’s desire is that it shall be a mighty city yet again, and thus shall Marduk’s anger be turned aside.” Once more it was Tudi, the old soldier, who spoke. He spat into the fire. “No more than that have I regard for the anger of Marduk!”

  Hiram laughed, as if he were politely acknowledging a joke.

  “You are a brave man then,” he said. “Braver, it seems, than your king. Yet the rebuilding of a city is a thing not to be despised, since there will be money to be made from it.”

  “Money—yes, money for foreigners. Power for the Babylonians, the black-headed folk, and those who love them. Misery and disgrace for the men of Ashur.”

  There was silence for a moment. The headman looked embarrassed, as if afraid his cousin’s words had offered an insult to his guests.

  “And that it not all,” Tudi went on, looking only at the fire, speaking as if with some inner voice. “The king has set his heart against his brother, the Lord Tiglath Ashur, whose name all men know, who is a brave and blameless man and much loved by the gods. I say it is an evil thing when brother turns against brother and the king in Nineveh is unrighteous to one whom the gods favor.”

  “Men have heard of this—even here,” said the headman, clucking in disapproval. “Then has the king slain his brother?”

  “No. This he feared to do, lest he be consumed by the god’s wrath. He banished him. He made him to wander, a nameless man among strangers. Yet all may know him from the sign of the blood star upon his hand, token of Ashur’s special favor.”

  I cannot hope to describe the sensation these words produced in me. The mark with which I was born seemed to burn on my palm. I did not dare to look at anyone out of fear that I would find them staring at me.

  Yet I could not stifle the flush of pride that welled up in me like new blood. To these people I was a figure of myth—beyond death and weakness and the corruption of time. And as such I might live forever, forever the god’s favorite, forever the shadow in which the king my brother must live his life.

  “I saw the Lord Tiglath at Khalule,” Tudi said, sitting up a trifle straighter, as if he had uttered a boast. “It was his first battle, and he no more than a boy, yet he killed great numbers among the enemy and received many great wounds. There was a soldier!”

  His eyes fell on me as he spoke these words—whether because he noticed some resemblance or because a man must look at something while he speaks, I could not have said. Not then, at any rate. I merely glanced away, wishing I were back in my tent, asleep and dreaming of the dead past.

  “Many say it was the god’s will that the Lord Tiglath be king, that there was treachery,” said another finally, breaking a silence that threatened to grow awkward. “Yet Lord Tiglath honored his brother’s claim and stood aside, though he loved his brother’s wife, the Lady Esharhamat, beautiful as the dawn.”

  So they knew all this—all that Esharhamat and I had struggled to keep hidden in our own hearts. What fools we had been, when all our secrets were known even here, in a cluster of mud huts at the edge of the empty earth!

  “Yes—he stood aside. He paid public homage to his brother on the steps of the king’s own palace. And what was his reward?” Tudi looked about him, as if daring anyone to be impertinent enough to answer. “Banishment. His brother cast him out of the land like an unclean leper. The prince was set to wander, every man’s hand turned against him for the price in silver shekels the king has put upon his head.”

  “Yet few, I think, will hazard the attempt to collect it.”

  The headman reached out his hands to take the beer pot from one of his sons. He stirred its contents with the reed straw and then took a long pull while everyone waited respectfully for him to have done.

  “You think, then, this Lord Tiglath has gone where none will find him?” Kephalos asked at last. It was the first time that evening I had heard him speak.

  “It does not matter w
here he goes,” the headman answered, looking from one to another as if to have his opinion confirmed by everyone present. “He lives under the protection of the god, who has given him a mighty sedu—as the impious Dinanu learned to his sorrow.”

  “Dinanu? You mean the garrison commander at Birtu?” Hiram of Latakia appeared suddenly to come awake. His eyes brightened as he seemed to wait to hear something amusing. “I know him—he is a thief and scoundrel but not bad company when he is drinking. Has something happened to him?”

  “Yes—has something happened to him?”

  Kephalos glanced about, his expression all innocence, for the subject was not to his taste and fear made him uncautious.

  But the headman did not regard him. His mind was elsewhere as he considered the might of his god.

  “It is said that the Lord Tiglath was seen in Birtu,” he said, “and that Dinanu, his heart blinded by greed, pursued him into the wilderness. He would have stripped the prince of his life, such was the wickedness he had learned from our king, but that Ashur, in his wrath, surrounded his favored one with a melammu of divine fire so that none might harm him. A wise man would have taken this warning and departed with his life, but the rab abru was not wise. Ashur, who is mighty and just and suffers no man to trifle with him, struck the fool dead, shattered the heavens with his war cry and pierced Dinanu’s breast with a bolt of lightning. To this hour his corpse lies unregarded on the ground, and not even the crows will touch it.”

  . . . . .

  “What is a melammu?” Kephalos asked me later, when we were alone together in our tent. “I have lived fifteen years among the Assyrians and have never heard that word. What does it mean?”

  “It is an aura such as surrounds the bright gods, and sometimes the heroes they most favor—the thing the Greeks call a ‘nimbus’.”