The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

“No wonder then that I have not heard of it, for life has not brought me into contact with many heroes—with, of course, the obvious exception of yourself, Lord.”

  “Do you mean to mock me, Kephalos?”

  “No, Lord—of course not. How can you think it?”

  “He was an old man speaking rubbish,” I answered. “The god may have aided me—I do not deny it—but Dinanu fell before my javelin and not a bolt of lightning. And his corpse does not lie neglected on the plain. I buried it with my own hands. You saw me.”

  “Yes, that perhaps is embellishment. Perhaps no one went back to look, leaving each man free to assume what he most wishes to believe. It is what men wish to believe that matters, Lord. Those soldiers—that was why they rode away and left you unmolested. You killed Dinanu, whom none loved. It is a rare thing to cleave open a man’s breast like that, and at such a distance. They saw the hand of their god in it and, like pious men, withdrew. Who is to say they were mistaken?”

  Within a minute or two, I could hear him snoring. Yes, perhaps that had been it after all.

  And I too was free to believe the god had saved me. I did believe it. I will believe it until I die.

  The next morning, while I was building the breakfast fire and Kephalos was struggling to warm himself by the first tentative wisps of flame, Hiram strolled by and, seemingly surprised to find himself among us, stopped to exchange a word of greeting.

  Kephalos, who had not yet grown accustomed to rising early, and who was always out of sorts until he had had his breakfast, could barely manage a civil grunt but huddled closer than ever to our weak little fire, as if afraid this intruder might rob him of some of its warmth.

  The caravan leader, for his part, smiled his jolly brigand’s smile, cocking his head to one side so that he seemed to be aiming the point of his beard at Kephalos’ chest.

  “It is a fine morning, eh?” he said, in a way that suggested he himself could hardly be bothered to notice. “And, for a change, we dined well last night, although I confess I have little enough desire to linger among these dung-caked Assyrian farmers with their beer that smells like garlic and their never-ending fables about the wrath of Ashur. I put it to you—who could believe such tripe?”

  “They are a religious people,” answered Kephalos, speaking with a tone almost of rebuke. “And all the Assyrians, even the humblest villagers, are greatly enamored of their princes. I have lived among them for many years and have learned the wisdom of a respectful silence.”

  “Oh, I would not dream of interfering—and who would wish to tamper with a man who walks about cloaked in fire?”

  He glanced at me and smiled again. Then he excused himself, saying that he had business with his horses.

  “Do you think he suspects?” I asked, when Hiram was out of sight. Kephalos shrugged his shoulders.

  “It would not surprise me, but it changes nothing. He will whisper nothing of his surmises to his followers—why should he? What would he gain? So we are left where we were, a choice between the one enemy we know or the many we do not. I see no reason to alter our plans.”

  I will report only one more incident from that journey. It happened after we had broken camp, when the sun was still cool and we had mounted our horses and had found the way south. As we passed that cluster of mud huts where we had been entertained the previous night, we saw that the headman, his cousin Tudi—the old soldier who had seen me at Khalule—and all the men of the village were there lining the road, come out to watch us as we departed. They did not speak. They offered no salute. They merely stood there in the dust and kept their vigil as we passed by. Yet in its way it was an occasion as solemn as the feast of Akitu, when the god is carried from his shrine to greet the new year. I felt their eyes upon me, like the weight of a pledge, and knew that they knew, had known all along, and that this honor was intended for me.

  III

  There is an ancient proverb that the road to Babylon is paved with corpses. Even now, nearly a lifetime later, I have only to close my eyes and think of the southern lands, the most wicked place the gods made, and dread floods my soul. My nostrils fill with the odor of death. I hear the cawing of crows as, their bellies heavy with carrion, they flap their black wings above the bodies of the slain.

  In the land where I first drew breath the men of Ashur may stand at the edge of the cold, swift-flowing Tigris and see mountains in the distance. The gods, it is said, love to dwell in high places, so we felt ourselves always to be living under their gaze, as does the child under the eyes of his parents. It is not so in the Land of Sumer, where the dusty brown earth stretches flat for as far as mortal sight can reach. There no one loves the gods, though all fear them, and the minds of men grow dark with treachery.

  I had first come to this place as part of the army the Lord Sennacherib, my king and father, had raised to punish the Elamites for murdering his son, Ashurnadinshum, whom he had made king of Babylon, and for stirring the southern lands to rebellion. We stood against our enemy at a place called Khalule—may its name disappear forever and the very ground perish. It was a terrible battle, where countless good men died, where for me the illusion of glory perished with them, but it was only the first of many horrors I saw in that long war.

  We sacked many cities, leveling their walls and the houses of their great men, burning their grain stores that the survivors might perish of want before the next harvest. We laid siege to Babylon herself for over a year, drying up the river that watered her, starving her people so that few were left to die by the sword. And at last, when we took her, for five long days we murdered and pillaged, for pity had died in our hearts.

  Thus, had I no other reason, I could have hated the Land of Sumer and all who dwelled in her, for what my sojourn there had forced me to see within my own breast.

  Not that these thoughts alone occupied my mind, for I studied my part as the Lord Hugieia’s surly, brutish servant with great care, encouraging Hiram’s men to shun me, closing my mind to everything spoken in my presence, speaking myself to no one except Kephalos. And I felt the strain of it, as one must who cannot permit himself even to relax the muscles of his face without hazarding his life. Yet the mask must slip now and then, even if I was never aware of it. As the days wore on, Hiram seemed to find me an increasingly interesting object of scrutiny.

  His men, however, paid us no heed but went about their business and saw to their own comforts as if Kephalos and I did not exist. We welcomed their indifference. It was a measure of our comparative safety.

  Although I can think of no reason why it should be so, it has always been my experience that a caravan makes slower progress even than an army on campaign. These Hittite barbarians could be expected to take no notice of the month’s five evil days, during which men who fear the gods dress in rags, abstain from their wives, and neither work nor travel nor eat any food cooked in a pot, yet a commander serving Ashur’s king would have flogged to death any soldier who dragged along as they did. Hiram made no complaint, however; he seemed to accept the slack pace of his drivers as normal. It was eight full days before we watered our horses in the Euphrates, and still, I heard the drivers say, we would not reach Babylon before a month had closed its door behind us.

  The evening we made our first camp on the bluffs overlooking the Euphrates, I took a leather bucket and went down to the river to fetch water for our cooking pot. There were ducks among the reeds and I thought, If I but had a net. . .

  But I did not have a net. I sat on the bank for a long while, merely watching them, pleased with the bright green feathers along their backs and the way their yellow feet kicked in the air as they struggled to dive for roots from the muddy bottom. Finally I was glad I did not have a net. I filled my bucket—carefully, lest I frighten them—and made ready to go.

  Just as I stood up, a stone struck the water and the ducks scattered, their wings thrashing at the river’s surface as they called out their alarm. I turned and saw Hiram standing on the bluff above me. He was grinning, as i
f he had achieved some victory.

  “You are annoyed? I have disturbed your little reverie?” he asked, precisely as if he expected me to understand his words. “You are an odd one. If you were my property, I would have you whipped for loafing about like this. A slave with a taste for private reflection is a nuisance. And perhaps a danger as well.

  “The burn—it heals slowly, does it?” He pointed to my right hand, which was still wrapped in a strip of soiled bandage. “Does it not give you pain to carry such a heavy bucket?”

  He was right, of course. I resisted the temptation to switch the bucket to my other hand. He spoke in Aramaic; I was supposed to be ignorant of that tongue. I would not betray myself any more than I had already.

  Without a word, I climbed up the bluff and pushed past him as if he were merely an object in the way. As I walked back to camp, I could hear his laughter behind me.

  . . . . .

  I was finding that it is a vexatious thing to be a servant. Kephalos always insisted, and with some justice, that the water of the Euphrates is not fit to wash one’s face in until it has been strained several times through a wool cloak. Yet no matter how many times I performed this operation, inevitably he would wrinkle his nose at the first sip and comment that the foul stuff was still so thick with mud that a man might be tempted to make bricks with it.

  “The next time you can fetch the water, and strain it through your own cloak—which, by the way, is no cleaner than my own.”

  “And I put it to you, Lord, how would that seem to our friends?” He sat back, bracing his hands against the bulging waist of his tunic as if I had profaned myself before the bright gods. “I, Hugieia of Naxos, doing a slave’s work for him? Have some respect for appearances, and let us not bring scandal among these honest thieves by outraging the usages of the world. There is a distance between master and servant which must be respected—did you hear me complaining when, as a boy in the house of war, you set me to clean the dust from your sandals?”

  “Yes, and bitterly.”

  “And what of it? Even a slave has a right to grumble.”

  “Grumble was all you did—grumble and play at dice with the soldiers. I never had a decent day’s work out of you.”

  “And did I not always give you your fair share of my winnings? Did I not through my labors make you a rich man in the Land of Ashur? Are we not this moment making our escape with the treasure that I and I alone was wise enough to lay aside for such an emergency? And have I not, in my wisdom and care for you, deposited great wealth with the merchants of Egypt, that your life in exile will be such that even a prince would not disdain? Have I not done all this? Besides, a slave’s life was not to my taste. I was not born to it.”

  “Neither was I, so you need not upset yourself thus. And cease complaining about the water.”

  “Oh, very well.”

  He sat watching me for a moment, like a physician at the bedside of a child, stroking his beard as if it were a cat’s back. Then he nodded, apparently satisfied with the results of his meditations.

  “You are annoyed with more than my poor self,” he said at last. “Has something happened this morning about which I remain uninformed? You are the prey perhaps of unpleasant reflections?”

  “I had an encounter with the worthy Hiram, not an hour ago, down at the river. He knows all about us. He seems almost to make a joke of it.”

  “He may guess much, but he knows nothing.”

  “In the end he will sell us to Esarhaddon.”

  “In the end, yes—if any of us are privileged to reach the end. But first he will try to squeeze what he can from me, and that gives us more than enough time to safeguard ourselves against future troubles. Be at peace, Lord. Do not be apprehensive over distant evils.”

  “I still believe it would be wisest to kill him now.”

  “Would you so willingly pollute your soul with murder?” He raised his eyebrows in astonishment. “Besides, as I have pointed out before, at present the caravan master serves our purposes as well as his own. We have nothing to fear from him until we reach Babylon.”

  Babylon. We could see her walls, still broken in places, even after all that time, three days before we reached her gates, but distance lent no charm. She rose up from the flat brown earth like a ruined mountain, the stronghold of some god long since cast down from heaven. My guts clenched at the sight of her.

  At night, the priests of Marduk were busy. In the center of the city the fires atop the great ziggurat burned with black-red flames, offering sacrifice of blood and fearful pain. We saw them, camped three days’ ride away. Anyone with eyes could see them.

  I could remember other flames. I had seen the whole city burning. I had helped to set the fire in Marduk’s temple and, not many months after, I had watched Mushezib-Marduk, once lord of Babylon, a wicked king indeed and the author of much suffering, boiled alive in a bronze jug, over a fire fueled by the corpses of his queen and children. These things were done in time of war, the works of war’s cruel passions, but those passions still heated the blood, even after years of peace. The Babylonians had not forgotten, and neither had I.

  Long after the cooking stones had grown cold I sat wrapped in my cloak, watching the distant, pulsing glow of that sacrificial fire, knowing the priests did their work at Esarhaddon’s command, wondering what ghost within himself he hoped to quiet with all this spectacle of pious terror.

  Esarhaddon was a born soldier. The man had not yet opened his eyes who could frighten him. Cheerfully he would pitch himself into the worst of the fighting, heedless of death, but as soon as he lay down his sword demons began flapping their silent wings over his head. He feared the gods, naming each of them in turn as he quaked with horror. He feared the omens of their wrath and saw them everywhere. He feared the ghosts of the unquiet dead. He feared the spirits without number that claim to dwell in every corner of the wide earth.

  And as king he had too much time to listen to the mutterings of priests. Since the voice of Shamash, Lord of Decision, had named him to succeed our father, he had not had a quiet hour. I could have pitied him had he not turned his hand against me. It was not in me to pity one who would have hunted me to my death, yet I could have pitied him, for the gods had played him an evil trick to make him king.

  For he was the king, and it was at his word that the priests were busy and the sacrificial fires lit the night skies.

  Babylon, city of wickedness, city of turning minds, glory and curse of men.

  On the day we came under the shadow of the Ishtar Gate, in the first hour before noon, slaves past counting, their legs caked with mud, their knobby backs bent beneath the weight of bricks hardened almost to stone in the pale winter sun, were trudging up the long, ragged stairway of a wall shattered by the king my father and the will of Ashur, rising now once again to please the king my brother, that the will of Marduk might be done. Slaves as gaunt as corpses, hardly bleeding from the great gashes on knees which a hundred times had buckled under their burdens—theirs was a living death; a few months, a year perhaps of toil and suffering before they starved, or their lungs burst, and their souls left their unburied bodies to flutter off into the barren night. No bread or wine would comfort these ghosts. Forever would they whirl about the wall they had built with their misery, cursing all those who dwelt within.

  “It rises—you see? In two years it will be as it was in the days of the great kings. Hah, hah, hah!”

  Hiram of Latakia laughed like a jackal, as if this city, where he had not been born, which could be nothing to him, constituted some personal triumph.

  “Yes,” Kephalos answered, drawing in the reins a little to trim his horse’s pace. “So it is feared in the north.”

  “Let them fear what they like in their mud villages. I will retire to raise grapes in the Lebanon, a rich man thanks to Marduk’s anger. Then let them wash the ground with their blood for all I care. Hah, hah, hah!”

  I rode just behind, my hand closed around the shaft of my javelin, wi
shing I could bury its point under Hiram’s ribs.

  Half an hour later we were in the central market and Hiram was sitting on a carpet, drinking date wine with a short, wide-eyed little man much given to sudden movements, who was one of the overseer’s supply agents. They were haggling over the load of iron and copper ingots the caravan had fetched from the lands by the Northern Sea—the price of four months’ labor was settled in a few moments’ hard bargaining.

  The thing was done. The pack horses were unloaded and Hiram’s men were paid off from a bag of silver shekels, money that would be spent in the wineshops and brothels even before Hiram had bought the bales of embroidered wool cloth, the arsenic and spices, the tin and pressed dates he would sell in the west to buy more iron and copper for the rebuilding of Babylon. Kephalos and I watched for a time and then led our horses to the stable of an inn hard by the temple district, where a man could be sure of every luxury.

  “I have invited that thief with a pointed beard to dinner,” he told me. “Amuse yourself in the city until then. Buy clean clothes and drink wine. Spend your seed in a woman. Stay quiet and draw no attention to yourself, and be back by the first hour of darkness.”

  “You wish me out of the way then?”

  “Yes.” Kephalos nodded, as if admitting to a fault. “Hiram will not let me far out of his sight today, and I do not wish you to tempt him into any rash act against his own best interests.”

  So he counted out money into my hand, over a hundred shekels of silver—“Remember,” he said, “without money even a prince is a beggar. Beguile the time with wanton pleasure, as befits a wise man who stares at the future with blind eyes”—and I found myself dismissed. Lathikados, the slave from nowhere, off on a holiday.

  The last time I had walked the streets of Babylon they had been carpeted with the slain. I had seen the corpses of young girls, hardly more than children, lying in doorways with their throats cut, their thighs covered in blood from the attentions of our warriors of Ashur. Old men had their heads beaten to pulp before the eyes of their wives and daughters. Buildings were burned with their occupants locked inside. In places the narrow alleyways were clogged with bodies, such had been our pitiless wrath. It did not end for five days.