The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  “You are to send this slave to her tomorrow night,” he told me finally, when his laughter would allow it. “She says, as she is a woman, he will never again leave this place of his own will. For all that he is only a slave, I pity him—and yet, what would I not give to witness that evening’s entertainment. Oh, it will be a delicious thing, hah, hah, hah!”

  Thus began our sojourn among the Chaldeans.

  . . . . .

  “You cannot reach the Bitter River while the season of flooding is upon us,” Sesku told me. “There is so much water that even parts of the desert are covered. And there are storms that appear without warning—it is a bad time. Besides, I must make arrangements with the kings of other tribes that they grant you safe passage through their lands. Be patient, and when the floods subside I will send guides with you all the way to the Arab trading ports, if that is your wish. But no one would be so foolish as to guide you now, and alone you would die among the reeds.”

  But in the meantime we were accepted quite as if we had lived among these tribesmen all our lives. I was honored as their king’s friend, and no restraints were placed on our movements.

  Unlike the Aryan of the Zagros Mountains, the Chaldeans hardly yet thought of themselves as one people. So far they had not found a king like Daiaukka, a man to tell them it was their destiny to rule the wide earth, and they still worshiped the humble gods of their ancestors, praying to these for luck in battle or for a good rice harvest. So when they cast their eyes north to the Land of Sumer—and this they had done for hundreds of years—they saw not the empires they might build there one day but only such plunder as a man might carry home with him after a raid, to be a rich man all his days.

  Not yet, for the armies of Ashur were still too strong, but one day, when we seemed to falter, this savage people would find its will in the voice of some great leader and they would pour out of their marshes like a plague of locusts, devouring all before them.

  But for the time that I was with them their world was the Sealand, that vast tract of marsh formed by the conjunction of the Tigris and Euphrates, a wilderness of reeds and water, of huge lakes and twisting, narrow channels and floating islands, as changeful and capricious as a woman, a landscape with no fixed points, where a summer storm might so alter the face of things that a man could lose his way and perish within a two hours’ boat ride of the village where he had been born.

  And if the legends speak true that the god Ashur, like a potter laboring at his wheel, shaped men from the river mud, then the Chaldeans were molded from that of the Sealand, for only such a place could have made a people so full of extremities and contradictions as they. Cruel and arrogant, yet generous, bravely contemptuous of death and yet, in the face of the first reverse, quick to lose heart and slink away, sudden in anger and yet in friendship steadfast even to their dying breath, virtuous and cunning by turns, they seemed to know no law but the word of their chiefs and the impulses of their own giddy natures. If the Chaldeans should ever rule in the lands between the rivers, the children of the gods will crack their breasts in lamentation.

  Sesku called himself king of the Halufids, yet he was not this—at least, not as my brother Esarhaddon was king in the Land of Ashur. Esarhaddon was king by the god’s will, but Sesku, though he claimed descent from a long line of rulers, was master only so long as his people would obey him. He had not been the first-born of his father’s sons, but the Halufids had chosen him because he was noble and brave and strong and his elder brother was a weakling. If he faltered, and the tribe lost faith in him, they would choose another to put in his place. It was entirely a question of personal prestige.

  It was thus with everything that was thought and acted in the marshes, where hatred and love governed all of life. Men embraced when they met and sometimes wept for joy, but they carried on mortal feuds that often lasted for generations, not only between rival clans but even within the same family. These not the chiefs themselves could settle, for hatred was stronger than loyalty or even the fear of death, and the raids and counter-raids, the ambushes and treachery would continue until at last one side begged for peace, offering cattle and gold and women as payment of the blood price, or until all were dead.

  Sesku’s own family had become involved in such a feud. A cousin, the son of his mother’s sister, a man named Kaliphad, had married a woman from another tribe and, displeased with her, had sent her back to her father’s house. This, of course, was his privilege, but he was a man noted for miserliness and had neglected to return the woman’s household goods, purchased by her father out of the bride price, which, in any case, Kaliphad had had no right to expect returned. The insult was strongly felt, and within a month, having disappeared two days before, when he told a brother that he was setting out to net ducks, Kaliphad was found dead in his boat, the water at the bottom stained red with blood. His throat had been slit and his manhood cut off and stuffed into the money pouch he always carried on a leather thong about his neck.

  This put Sesku in a difficult position. Like everyone else, he had disliked his cousin and felt that he had been in the wrong in the matter of the household goods—the woman’s relations could hardly be expected to ignore such a thing—yet Sesku had his own position to think of and could not simply pass over the murder of a kinsman in silence. He offered a compromise: he would accept a blood price of five women and a like number of oxen, along with two talents of copper, from which he would subtract the value of the household goods belonging to the bride whom Kaliphad had rejected and return it to her father. It was a reasonable, even a generous offer, and perhaps for that very reason, because it was interpreted as a sign of weakness in the king of the Halufids, the woman’s family rejected it. In the three years since, there had been seven more murders among Sesku’s kinsmen, one of them his only son, a boy of thirteen, and I know not how many among the kinsmen of his enemies. Had the two tribes not been separated by a four days’ journey over the water, doubtless there would have been many more deaths. How it would all end none but the gods knew.

  The night after our arrival among the Chaldeans, Kephalos did indeed visit the Lady Hjadkir in her hut—we hardly found ourselves in a position to refuse our hosts anything—and when he returned the next morning to the mudhif where, as Sesku’s guests, we were being quartered, he lay down on the sleeping mat next to mine, dragged his cloak over him, even covering his face, and drew his legs up to his chest, as if he wished to occupy as little space as possible.

  “That woman is worse than a demon,” he said finally, in a voice that sounded ragged and hoarse. He said no more for several hours, until, when the sun had already declined an hour past noon, he woke again and sat up to take the bowls of rice and buttermilk I brought him. Even then his face was lined and haggard, and there were dark pouches under his eyes.

  “Was it as bad as all that?” I asked. He scowled, as if it was in his mind that I mocked him.

  “Yes—it was as bad as all that.”

  “Eat then, for you will have need of your strength.”

  Taking my advice to heart, he began scooping up the rice with his fingers. When he was finished he took a sip of the buttermilk and contemptuously dashed the bowl to the floor.

  “Have these people never heard of wine?” he asked, scandalized. “What do they bring back with them when they plunder the villages of Sumer, jars of muddy water? How can they bear to be so uncouth? My Lord, we find ourselves among savages.”

  “Perhaps, but at least our corpses are not stretched out over an ant hill somewhere. We are alive.”

  “You are alive—I am dead.” His arms lying along his thighs, he sagged under the weight of so much misery. “I am dead. That dreadful old hyena bitch has killed me already. Like an olive press, she squeezes the seed from my loins so that I ache there as if I had been kicked. She says that, having found me, she will never let me go, but I will die in her arms, her kisses taking the breath from my body. May the gods know I curse them that they made me a snare for all the lustful
weaknesses of women!”

  . . . . .

  “You are perhaps not aware, My Lord, that the king in Nineveh has dispatched assassins after you?”

  “He has put a price on my head, if that is what you mean.”

  “No, that is not what I mean.”

  Sesku, king of the Halufids, fell silent for a moment. He was sitting in front of me in his war boat as we were rowed back to his village, so I could not see his face.

  “I mean that he has sent men to all the distant corners of the earth and that these men will be your death anywhere they find you, even beyond the distant seas where no man knows the name of Esarhaddon, king in the Land of Ashur. Of this my spies in the great city of Ur send me reports.”

  “Well, if it is only rumors. . .” I could allow myself to laugh, although I felt little enough like jesting. “Many among the common people dislike Esarhaddon and are willing enough to believe anything against him. Stories circulate, even in Ur.”

  “Nevertheless, a man speaking in the accents of the north made inquiries there after a Greek physician and his slave. He got as far as the fishing settlement by the Great Fresh Water, where, it is said, the villagers slit his throat and rowed across to our side with the body that they might hide it under one of the floating islands. You are safe enough from him, but I doubt he was the only one whom your brother sent this way.”

  “Esarhaddon is not a man to send assassins. Besides, if he so much wanted me dead, he had his chance in Nineveh.”

  “Really? Perhaps he has come to regret his mercy. Moreover, do not imagine that you understand him so well, even though everyone says you and your brother once loved each other well. Power coarsens a man, making him capable of anything.”

  . . . . .

  The next month passed away in a kind of unfocused suspense as we watched the flood waters slowly recede and the summer sun grew merciless to man and animal alike—even the fish, floating in the tepid water of the canals, even when they saw the shadow of the fisherman with his spear, could hardly summon the energy to move.

  I had almost given up thinking about the future. I had become quite skilled in the management of boats, and I spent much time away from the village, exploring among the reed islands. I snared ducks in my net. I fished and sometimes hunted for wild pigs, which the Chaldeans hate almost as enemies in a blood feud because they trample down their crops.

  So matters stood on a hot, sultry afternoon of a day in which all anger was forgotten and no man raised his voice, when the village dozed in a sluggish quiet, when even the children had crawled into the shade of their mothers’ huts and waited for the first stirrings of the evening breeze. The cooking fires were still and nothing moved in air so stagnant that it was almost too much trouble to breathe. I lay on my sleeping mat with a damp cloth spread out over my face, feeling myself ill-used because the cloth was rapidly drying out and soon I would have to go to the trouble of wetting it again. There was no sound save the croaking of the frogs along the reed banks. Why then, I wondered, was I listening for something?

  And then I heard it—the slap, slap, slap of sandaled feet on the bare earth. Someone was running, and in this heat. It seemed almost unimaginable.

  The curtain over my hut’s door lifted, admitting an unpleasant shaft of coarse white sunlight. It was blocked out again almost at once by the broad shape of my former slave.

  “Kephalos!” I announced with surprise. “You are the last person I would have expected to see violating the calm of this grisly heat. I hope you have remembered to steal some wine.”

  “No wine, My Lord, for which I entreat your pardon. I come bearing news—or, if you will, prophecy.”

  He crouched down on the ground beside me, his face and arms streaming with sweat.

  “Yes?—what?”

  “A moment, My Lord. . .” He held up his hand as a sign that I must first allow him to catch his breath, for indeed his chest was working like a bellows. But at last he was calmer.

  “It is no more than this, Lord: it seems that the drunken old vulture on whom I am condemned to waste the vigor of my manhood has been visited with a dream.”

  He had a sudden fit of high-pitched, almost hysterical-sounding laughter, as if the idea had all at once struck him as a rare jest. It was possible for an instant to believe that the sun must have touched his mind.

  “The Lady Hjadkir?” I asked, hoping to pull him back to the point.

  “Yes—the Lady Hjadkir. That lecherous, wheezing old hag, with her slack breasts and her wrinkled belly, she awoke, not half an hour ago, starting out of her wine-fogged slumbers with a shriek like a demon frightened of the dark. How she trembled—and in this heat!—her flesh as gray and lumpy as that of a plucked goose. She screamed and screamed, still lost in her phantom world for all that her eyes were wide open. A dream, I thought—yes, merely a bad dream. A thing born of too much wine and a lifetime of wickedness. Only that.”

  “And now you think perhaps it was something else?”

  The worthy physician shrugged his shoulders, as if in the face of the unknowable.

  “Who can say? She has a great reputation among her own people as a seer, yet I would not have troubled either of us, except for. . .”

  “Except for what?”

  “A doubt, My Lord,” he answered, smiling out of one side of his mouth, like one who knows he speaks folly. “And the natural caution of one who has lived long in the shadow of Prince Tiglath Ashur and therefore knows that the gods speak in strange voices. Why else would that old bag of carrion, who hardly remembers the faces of her grandchildren, have sent me to you?”

  “You are sure it was me to whom she sent you, and not her son?”

  “Yes, Lord—it was you she meant. The Lady Hjadkir is not of a conversational bent and, beyond a few which delicacy forbids me to name, I have learned hardly any words of her strange speech. Yet she is not without resources for making herself understood. When she dismissed me with her message she pointed first to her own eye and then to mine, then to hers again and then back to mine, repeating this until she was sure I had grasped the distinction she intended. Then she motioned me away, pronouncing the word ‘shikan’ many times. Is is not clear enough? She calls her son ‘shikan’, so I must conclude it is some title of respect. And you, My Lord, are surely the only person in this village, of whatever rank, who shares with me the distinction of having blue eyes.”

  “Yes, it seems clear enough.” I nodded, wondering to myself if anything would ever seem clear again. “What is this ‘message’ of which you spoke?”

  “This,” Kephalos answered, holding up his left hand, the fingers splayed wide apart, and then pressing it into the earth in front of where he was sitting. When he pulled it away there was a clear impression in the dust. “And then, using her thumb, she erased the fourth finger—as I do now.”

  When he was finished the handprint showed only a stump where the smallest finger had been, as if it had been taken off at the joint.

  “And you are quite sure it was the left hand?”

  “Yes, Lord. The left. Do you know what it means, or was it only too much wine?”

  “No, I do not know what it means, but it was not the wine.”

  His eyes narrowed for an instant, almost as if he expected that I might be concealing something from him, and then he shook this perplexity from him with a shrug of his shoulders. It was all the same to him if the Lady Hjadkir and I shared secrets, he seemed to imply.

  “Really, Kephalos, I cannot guess what is intended. I know no one who is missing his fourth finger. There was nothing else? Only the maimed hand?”

  “Nothing, Lord. Except that the lady seemed no more pleased with her vision than if she had seen the face of death itself.”

  “Then it is a mystery. I can only pray the god sees fit to enlighten me before it is too late.”

  “Pray well then, for the gods are capricious creatures.”

  He got up to leave, rubbing the dust from his knees, no more satisfied with me
than before, it appeared.

  “Kephalos. . .”

  “Yes, Lord?”

  “Where do you sleep in the Lady Hjadkir’s hut?”

  “In her arms generally—what makes you ask such a question?”

  “Offer some excuse why you must leave her alone tonight, and make your bed somewhere away from the royal compound. Sleep in the mudhif, among the travelers who shelter there. The safety of a guest is respected by everyone among the Chaldeans. You will be better off there for one night.”

  “I will take something to give myself the wind,” he said, grinning. “You will scarcely credit it, but the old hag has a sensitive nose.”

  He left me then and I sat in my hut alone, studying the handprint in the dust.

  . . . . .

  In the evening, when the sun smoldered on the horizon like a live coal, I went down to the river to wash the sweat from my body. I felt rimy with salt, and it burned in my eyes and in every crevice of my face. I would take a swim and then I would feel better. The enigma of the old woman’s dream remained intact.

  The village was beginning to come awake again. I heard the laughter of children and there was the smell of smoke in the air as women kindled their cooking fires. I had been among the Halufids for nearly two months now, and no one paid the slightest attention to me as I walked behind the line of huts to the eastern and less populated side of the island, whither I went because there would be more shade and the water would be colder—I wanted to submerge myself up to the chin in the dark canal and float quietly while I felt my legs turn numb. It would not happen that way, not in the midst of summer, but it was a happy idea.

  As I approached the bank I met a group of young boys who must have had the same thought, for their hair was still wet and shining as they raised their arms to me and shouted “Shala!” “Shala!” I said, returning their greeting—it was the one indispensable word among the Chaldeans, for it meant “peace.”