The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  Thus we traveled, in silence, for many hours. There was no sound except that of the boat scratching its way across the blank face of the river.

  At dawn the sun rose like an old woman getting up from a nap. I cannot remember ever welcoming anything as much as those first few pale streaks across the night sky.

  Yet what they at last revealed was very far from anything we had expected or hoped.

  What had my imagination conjured up for me? A trading port perhaps, her shores as busy as an ant heap and her waters crowded with great wooden merchant vessels fresh from places I had never dreamed of. What I found was a village, the houses made of reeds, with a few reed boats pulled up on the beach, most of them smaller than the one that had carried us hither.

  The “Great Water” was no more than a lake. A vast lake, vast enough that its opposite bank was shrouded in purple mist, but a lake for all that. I scooped some up in the palm of my hand and tasted it—it was fresh. This was not the Bitter River that flowed around the girth of the world. This was not our avenue of escape.

  Our boatman looked unconcerned. He had fulfilled his commission and cared not if we were satisfied with our bargain.

  “What is this place?” I asked him.

  “It is the end of the world.”

  “Then what is there?”

  I pointed to where the lake’s other shore was hidden in mist. He followed my gesture, his eyes registering no interest.

  “Nothing—only reeds, an endless wilderness of reeds. There is nothing there.”

  “You said there were ships.”

  “Look about you.”

  Drawn up on the beach were perhaps twenty reed boats, all built after the same pattern as the one which had brought us here. A few might have been capable of carrying eight or ten men. Along the beach there were poles stuck in the sand with nets strung between them. This was a fishing village.

  It was useless to protest. In the world that this man understood, these were ships. And a village one night’s journey from his own hut was the end of the world. He had not intended to deceive us, for he had not comprehended what we required.

  “I will take breakfast with the daughter of my mother’s brother, who married a man of this village,” he said. “If your business allows you to return with me then, I will ask for only half the sum you paid to be brought here. If you are detained, then you will easily find another to row you back to Ur.”

  I said nothing.

  “By the bright gods, what doghole is this?” Kephalos asked, as he woke from what seemed a deep and tranquil sleep.

  “The end of the world, he tells me.”

  “I can well believe it.”

  I helped him out of the boat, and the boatman dragged it up onto the beach and left us to take his breakfast.

  “And where is the Bitter River?” he continued, looking about him. It was easy to see that he was beginning to grasp there would be no great merchant ships to carry us away from this place.

  “There, in the mists, beyond this frog pond and whatever lies beyond that. He says there is nothing but a wilderness of reeds, which can only mean that we have reached the Sealand.”

  “The what?”

  “The Sealand.” I made a despairing gesture, for I had grasped by then the real character of our predicament. It was something I should have seen from the first. “It is a huge area of marshland that marks the joining of the Tigris and the Euphrates. The boatman called it a wilderness, and he was right. It is a place I had only heard about—I had not realized. . .”

  “Perhaps we can hire another boatman. Surely, living so close, someone from this village will know his way.”

  Kephalos looked hopeful, but I could only shake my head.

  “It is a place of terrible danger,” I said. “More than one of the world’s great armies have gone in there to conquer it and then simply disappeared forever. It is the ancient home of a race called the Chaldeans, a savage people, as they would have to be to live in such a wretched land. I think, however, not even they love it, since for hundreds of years now bands of them have been making their way north, bit by bit subduing the towns and cities of Sumer and making themselves masters there.”

  “Yes—I have heard of the Chaldeans.”

  “Everyone has heard of the Chaldeans. They have fought against the men of Ashur since the reigns of the first kings. I do not think we would be very warmly received among them.”

  We walked up the beach, following the boatman’s footprints in the sand toward the little circle of reed huts that was almost the only sign of human presence in this lonely place. Naked children came out to stare at us, running away as we approached.

  Finally the parents of those children, first the men and then the women, came out of their dwellings to witness for themselves the remarkable sight of two visitors who had come so far to be among them. The women dressed in plain linen tunics that reached to their knees and the men wore nothing more than twisted loincloths. These were poor people to whom, even in our travel-stained clothes, we must have seemed like kings in a fable.

  They said nothing. They made no show of welcome. They only watched us with wary, measuring eyes.

  At last our boatman stepped out from among them—I had not even noticed him before that moment—and came toward us.

  “I am going now,” he said. “And I cannot take you back to Ur with me. You must stay here.”

  He loped back toward his boat, kicking up the sand with every footfall, before I had even presence of mind to ask him why.

  “Into what have we betrayed ourselves this time, I wonder,” Kephalos said, when I had made him understand the boatman’s words. “I am glad you have your sword and javelin by you, that these creatures may be made to comprehend they may not kill us at their pleasure.”

  “I think they have no such idea,” I answered, looking about at the fifty or sixty silent faces. “I think they are even more afraid of us than you are of them, my friend.”

  “I, afraid. . ? I? Ridiculous!”

  Yes, of course it was ridiculous. In the lands between the rivers, village people respect the rights of strangers and the laws of common hospitality. As a rule we would have been greeted with bread and beer and the headman would have asked us to unroll our sleeping mats in his own hut—a man is not to be turned away like a cur with the mange. Nothing but fear could have robbed these fisherfolk of their manners.

  I motioned to Kephalos to stop and we waited there until it should please the inhabitants of this village to explain themselves. We had time enough. We had nowhere else to go.

  At last a man well past the middle of life, with shocks of gray mixed into his black beard, separated himself from the crowd and came toward us with all the dignity of bearing one who is near naked can manage. He presented himself and bowed—something for which I was not prepared. Something which, under ordinary circumstances, even the headman of such a paltry village as this would have felt to be beneath his dignity.

  It was to me that he bowed. He seemed to ignore Kephalos’ very existence. It crossed my mind that, once more, my identity had somehow been revealed, but this turned out to be but halfway to the truth.

  “My people are not much used to visitors,” he headman said, for that was who he was. “Your Honor must excuse them. The first frightened them with his words, and now you have come—as he said you would.”

  “Then you have had another visitor?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “And he spoke of me?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. He said you would come among us five days after he had left us, and today is the fifth day.”

  “Your visitor was a diviner then?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. He wore the yellow robes of a priest, but he was not a priest. He was an old man, Your Honor. A holy man. A maxxu.”

  I cannot possibly describe the sensation that ran through me at the sound of that word. A maxxu. In all my life I had only met one, and he had. . .

  “And this holy old man—was he
blind?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “And yet he seemed to see, as if the world were but a shadow?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. He said you would know him. He said you would come on the fifth day, and you would know him.”

  “Yes, I know him.”

  A man may feel the god’s fingers closing around his heart. His chest seems ready to burst open, and he cannot breathe for the pounding of blood in his ears. He knows he is not his own anymore, that his path has been chosen for him. He is not free. I felt all of this.

  And more. For I knew now that I was not deserted, that the Lord Ashur, the god of my fathers, still held me in the hollow of his hand.

  “And he left no message for me?”

  “No, Your Honor.”

  No—his presence here he would have understood to be message enough.

  It was a cold morning. The women of the village built a fire on the beach and brought us food and drink, but no one offered to take us within their walls and no one, saving only the headman, spoke to us. This was the maxxu’s doing—such was the awe he had inspired in these simple souls that I, the stranger whose coming he had foretold, was to them like the image of the bright god himself, the evidence of his presence among them, to which no man may dare to raise his eyes.

  I had been set apart, yet once more. For what purpose, I could only guess.

  “When will Your Honor go from amongst us?” the headman asked, squatting on the sand some four or five cubits away from me, as if apprehensive lest I suddenly burst into flame and he be consumed with me. “Without disrespect, my people do not understand the god’s purpose in this matter, and they are filled with dread. When will Your Honor go?”

  “I too do not understand the god’s purpose. When I do, I will know how to answer your question. Tell me—are there any among you who can take me through the Sealand to the Bitter River, which lies beyond?”

  I pointed to the other shore of the lake, that he might understand my meaning.

  He shook his head.

  “No, Your Honor. There are none who can find their way through the reed wilderness except such as were born there—and to such you would not wish to entrust your life.”

  “You mean, the Chaldeans?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. They come sometimes to pillage and to carry off our women—not often, for we are poor. They are a cruel people. They respect not the gods.”

  “We will speak again when Ashur has revealed himself to me.”

  He nodded—he understood that my words concealed no boast, merely the acknowledgment of a mystery which involved us both. He left to rejoin his people, and to explain it all to them as best he could.

  “We should go back to Ur,” Kephalos announced, as soon as we were alone. He had eaten most of the millet and cooked fish that was our breakfast and was now at liberty to consider other matters. “We can join a caravan. . .”

  “And put ourselves into the hands of another Hiram of Latakia?” I shook my head.

  “We could find one heading west. We could be gone from your brother’s kingdoms in a few days.”

  “Kephalos, there is nothing west of here except desert. The caravans follow the Euphrates north and then west to the Lebanon.”

  “There is nothing south of here except reeds.”

  “There is the Bitter River—somewhere.”

  “Then what are we to do?”

  What could I say? What answer was there?

  “I must pray to the god,” I said at last. “I must pray he reveals his will for both of us.”

  “And I will pray as well—that your god is wiser than you are, my foolish young prince.”

  We both laughed. There are times when it is better to laugh than to speak.

  . . . . .

  There was no sweating house in the village, so at dawn the next morning I bathed in the cold waters of the lake, purifying myself as best I could with the soft, tallowy roots of the hyacinths that grew all around the shore. I had no holy mountain nearby this time—the southern lands are not plentiful of mountains—but I felt sure the Lord Ashur would guide my steps to some spot pleasing in his sight. I set out as soon as the sun had dried my body. I took no food. I wore nothing but a loincloth and carried nothing except a sword.

  The earth, stoneless and flat, was soft beneath my unsandaled feet. The direction I had picked, away from both the river and the lake, was as blank and featureless as the sky above me, empty of clouds. I walked until the sun was within an hour of setting. When I turned about to look, the lake at my back was no more than a faint smudge on the horizon, as if the god were an artist who had seen fit to mar the symmetry of his creation by drawing his thumb across that one part of it.

  When it became dark, and at last the stars were visible, I found I had been walking in the direction of Ashur’s star, which sat low on the horizon, as if waiting for me. I took this for a propitious sign.

  The cold oppressed me. My joints seemed as rusty as old hinges. I was faint from lack of food, and thirst shriveled my belly.

  The first light of morning found me walking still. How far had I come? Eight beru? Ten? How far can a man walk in the space of one day and night? I knew not.

  I walked on through the next day, through the still, quiet morning, through the afternoon, when the wind choked me with dust and I could hardly bear to open my eyes. My steps slowed to hardly more than a clumsy shuffle. With the coming of night I saw, still ahead of me, Ashur’s star.

  I do not remember stopping. I do not remember sitting down upon the cold ground, my arms resting on my knees, my head a weight I could no longer support, yet it must have been so. At last I became conscious that my journey had reached its end, if only because it was not in my power to go on.

  I took my sword and buried its point in the soft earth. The sword is Ashur’s sacred symbol, and this one, purchased from a stall in the marketplace at Birtu, would serve me as his altar.

  Sick with hunger and thirst, tormented by the cold, my legs numb with weariness, I did not think I could sleep yet knew not how to keep awake. Did I sleep? Or did my giddy mind simply go blind to the world that Ashur, Lord of Heaven, Master of Destiny, might fill my sight with his wonders? I know not.

  I remember the night wind, cold and harsh, heavy with sharp sand, whispering through me as if my body offered it no resistance. It was like being scourged with a bronze whip. It was agony, and most because my whole self was laid bare to it—the pain entered and left me as I might walk through a shadow.

  The god requires this of me, I thought. This penance belongs to him. I must humble my pride before him that I may become his instrument.

  Did the wind blow? Did it happen thus, or was this too part of the vision the god sent me?

  I know not.

  Would that the life might escape my body, I thought. Would that I were free of this suffering.

  But there was no escape. Perhaps that was the lesson the Lord Ashur required me to learn—that there was no escape. Not from him, not from myself.

  My eyes burned in their sockets until I believed they would melt. The black night became red as fire. My brain ached.

  I think that I wept for the pain, but I cannot know for certain.

  And then, slowly, I did not so much cease to suffer as to lose all sense of myself as one to whom such things, either of pain or pleasure, might belong. I was not of this world. I could almost witness the agony of Tiglath Ashur as if of someone else. I felt not even pity for him.

  I became pure as the hottest fire. I burned white-hot yet felt nothing. Was this what the god knew? Was this what it meant to be he, passionless and empty, able to see into any mystery, all wisdom and knowledge, and yet touched by nothing? Free, even of death? Had he made me like him, if only for a moment, that I might understand?

  Some questions do not have answers.

  And then I was a man again, and he opened my brain to dreams. Or to visions. It did not matter which.

  A flock of white doves covers the ground. The
y pace about in that preoccupied way peculiar to birds, picking over the earth with their beaks. Suddenly, with a great throbbing sound, they burst into flight. The very air turns white with their beating wings—what has alarmed them?

  And then I see. It is a serpent, a creature of black and red and gold, with a red mark, like a burst of flame, on his black head. He coils and uncoils, seemingly to no purpose. He is not interested in the birds. They do not exist for him.

  And then, slowly, he finds his path. The ground the birds have left behind is as white as they. It is a harsh place. It is a field of salt. And above swarm five eagles, circling overhead, swooping down one at a time to torment the serpent. I notice a strange thing: each of the five eagles is missing a talon from its left foot. There is only the stump, dripping blood.

  Each of the five falls through the air, shattering the silence with its screams, trying to catch the serpent in its claws. One after the other, they tear at his poor flesh. Yet at last they are gone—they simply vanish—and the serpent makes his way across this waste. His body leaves a slithering track behind as he crosses the salt-covered earth. He seems almost to swim through it, and behind him the wind fills in the marks of his progress.

  At last he is free. He has left the white salt behind him. He rests, curling himself about the base of a tree. It is a strange tree, with green boughs that mass themselves in great horizontal planes. And on a branch of this tree, falling heavily through the air, lands an owl. The branch sways under its weight, and as it comes to rest it looks about and blinks, as if the light hurts its great yellow eyes.

  The tree, the owl, the serpent—all dissolve into the gray light of morning. The dream has ended. I am awake. My body aches. I am cold and hungry and my throat is parched, yet I am awake and alive in the bright world.