The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  The canal was almost as dark and cold as I had hoped, and after I had bathed I climbed out onto the bank to let the lowering sun dry me, listening to the reeds creak in the faint evening wind, trying to think of nothing. Yet even the pleasant heat of the sun seemed an illusion, for as soon as I had shivered myself warm again the old dread turned the heart in my breast to ice. I had the sense of inhabiting a world of appearances, where nothing was itself but merely the symbol of something else, yet of what? Once more, it appeared, Ashur, lord of earth and sky, god of my fathers, was amusing himself at his servant’s expense, setting riddles for me to solve if I hoped to live. A hand with one finger missing—what could it mean?

  And then, of course, as if out of pity for my stupidity, the god made clear his purposes.

  It was the thing of an instant. All at once a shadow raced soundlessly over the face of the water. I glanced up and saw a great bird rising out of the lowering sun, red as blood. Its wings were set and it glided easily through the dead air. An eagle, I thought, but at that distance, there was no way to know.

  It was several seconds before I remembered.

  In the wilderness, dreaming or awake, I had seen myself as a great serpent crawling through the white salt waste. And above me had been five eagles, swooping low for the kill. They had torn my flesh.

  And each had had a talon missing from its left claw.

  I wondered how I could have missed anything so obvious, yet all becomes clear when the god wills it. And until then shrouded in impenetrable mystery. Soon one of these five eagles would dive down on me from some place of concealment—this was the warning contained in the Lady Hjadkir’s dream.

  This was quite an open threat. I was not afraid of treachery. I was not afraid that someone from among the Halufids would make an attempt against my life. Yet if there was danger there was no reason to imagine that I would be its sole and specific target. It seemed unlikely that a lone assassin would make his solitary way to this village, with no object except to cut my throat. There would be an attack, and I might die in it, but my death might be no more than incidental. It was not as if Sesku had no enemies of his own.

  Sesku would have to be told—and in such a way as to compel belief—or the Halufids might end by being butchered while they slept. These people had shown me nothing but hospitality, and I did not want their innocent blood on my conscience.

  As it happened, I found Sesku less difficult to persuade than I had imagined. He was waiting for me outside the door of my hut when I returned, carrying a lamp, since it was already dark, and, without speaking, with only a gesture of his hand, he bade me enter before him. When we were inside he sat down on the floor, drawing his legs under him and folding his hands in his lap. His manner was very formal. I had the impression he wished to be taken seriously and was not sure this wish would be gratified.

  “My mother dreams of one who has lost a finger,” he said, in a confidential voice, leaning a little toward me as if afraid of being overheard. “By itself, the dream means nothing—or, rather, its warning is too vague to profit us. I know of no man afflicted in this way. Do you?”

  “No one. And you are quite right—by itself, the dream means nothing.”

  He raised one eyebrow at my slight shift of emphasis. For a moment I could not tell if perhaps he thought I mocked him.

  And then, it seemed, the question was decided in my favor.

  “You are aware of something which might. . ?” A real urgency came into his face, and he reached across to grasp me by the wrist. “Speak, Prince. Everyone has heard the stories of your sedu, how you stand under the protection of the gods. If you know something, by the mercy of your own Holy Ashur, then I beg you not to keep it hidden from me.”

  “My Lord, I too. . . I hardly know how to say it.” I could only shrug my shoulders, since the whole business seemed as fantastic to me as, doubtless, it would to him. “I too have received certain signs. All my life—dreams, omens, things the truth of which I sometimes saw only after the event. The god’s voice speaks in whispers. Yet sometimes he makes his purposes clear. I will not tell you why—accept it, if you will, as no more than my opinion—but I believe that this village is in some danger.”

  “An attack? When, do you think?” It seemed it did not occur to him to doubt me.

  “Perhaps tonight. The god gives his warning in good time.”

  “Yes, in remarkably good time. But then of course you could not know—the Sharjan have within these last five days chosen for themselves a new chief. You may be confident I believe everything you have told me.” He released my arm and leaned back, considering the matter. “Then let it be tonight, if that be the gods’ pleasure. When the winds blow, a wise man pulls his boat up unto the shore. I will give the necessary orders.”

  After he had left I found myself wondering how he would couch those orders, what reasons he would give for throwing his village into such a state of alert that tonight men would sleep with their swords next to them instead of their wives. How would Sesku explain it to them? All men wish to believe their commanders are both fearless and full of wisdom, and the truth of this case might make a doubter of anyone. Who, after all, would wish to serve a leader who starts at shadows?

  Still, the king of the Halufids was a plausible enough rogue to think of some story that would keep him from looking foolish if all was for nothing and neither the Sharjan nor any other enemy thought to bring mischief to this collection of reed hovels. Someone else would answer for it, but not he.

  Yet I did not believe that Sesku or anyone else need worry about a quiet night. I took down my javelin and felt the point with the ball of my thumb, wondering how much blood it would spill before the sun rose tomorrow—wondering if I would be alive to know.

  I went to look for Kephalos and found him not at the mudhif, as I had expected, but sitting disconsolately down at the water’s edge, where the villagers left their boats tied up like cattle in a stall. His head almost between his knees, he was amusing himself by tracing the Greek alphabet in the dirt.

  “The withered old hag has thrown me out,” he said, without even glancing up to see who it was. “I did not even have to feign indisposition. She chased me from her hut with no more ceremony than if I had been a limping cur nosing around after scraps. And these savages will not even allow me to enter the mudhif, such is my disgrace. They laugh and make obscene gestures, and then throw things at me. Imagine, if you can, the indignity of it.”

  “She is probably afraid. She senses that what is to come has more to do with me than with the Halufids, and you are my servant. She wishes to keep the danger at a more comfortable distance.”

  “It is not very comfortable for me, I can tell you. Lord, allow me to sleep in your hut tonight.”

  “That is the last place you should wish to be. Sleep here, among the boats, if you must, but as you value your life stay away from anywhere men might look for me.”

  For a moment his face assumed an expression of the most appalled horror, which with only the greatest difficulty he was able to quell. At last he returned to drawing letters in the dirt.

  “You must preserve yourself, Master,” he said quietly. “You must not leave me here to die alone in this desert.”

  . . . . .

  The hours of waiting are the hardest part of any battle. The enemy has no face. He is the shadow that threatens to engulf one, the dark specter of death.

  The village was held in the center of a web of waterways and tiny islands, and Sesku had his men out in their boats for two hours in any direction. As the fly cannot touch a strand of silk but the spider senses its presence, so no enemy could enter into the territory of the Halufids without their knowing it. I could hear their bird cries trembling in the night air, a call relayed from the gods knew what distance but understood and answered almost within the drawing of a breath. I stood with Sesku, my javelin in my hand and a borrowed sword thrust into the belt of my tunic. There was nothing to do except to wait.

  “It must s
eem strange,” he said, his quiet voice as startling as a handclap in that silence. “To go into battle thus, with no soldiers under your orders, with no one to answer for except yourself. I do not envy you—without the distractions of command, death seems to stare one straight in the face.”

  “Yet it is not the first time.”

  He nodded, and then turned to me and smiled. Like me, he was thinking of Khalule, where, without even knowing of one another’s existence, we two had each hoped to be the other’s end.

  At last the low, quavering birdcalls became more frequent and seemed, in some way impossible to define, to take on the urgency of men whispering in the dark. Sesku closed his eyes for a moment, as if to listen even more closely.

  “You and my lady mother were right, it appears,” he said, his eyes coming open with a snap. “They are coming, perhaps twenty boats of them. They will attack the island from two directions, side and rear, and before this hour is finished. There is no doubt they are Sharjan.”

  It was almost a relief to hear the words.

  “The main party will come from the rear. They hope to marshal there and reach the village before we even know they are upon us. Then, when we are fairly engaged, the rest will land and catch us between them like ducks in a net. This, however, is precisely the fate which we have prepared for them. They think to show us no mercy, so they can hardly expect any.”

  The idea of slaughtering his enemies gave him an obvious satisfaction, yet I could not find it in me to blame him. He was afraid. His life and the lives of his people were threatened, and pity did not live in his heart.

  “Where will you wait for them?” I asked.

  He answered by pointing back through the village to the spot where hardly six hours before I had been swimming in the cool black water.

  “Then I will wait there with you.”

  It was a simple enough plan. The Sharjan had chosen a moonless night, gambling everything on surprise. So did we. Sesku and some two hundred of his men, myself among them, would wait, sitting in long lines in the darkness, our weapons resting on our knees. The enemy would come in from the marshes, slipping through the Halufid war boats without ever even realizing that they were there, and once they had drawn their own boats up on the shore—once there was no turning back for them—we would rise up and unleash our arrows and javelins, aiming into the blank, unseeing night, with no targets but their murmuring voices. We would kill enough that way to sow confusion among them, and confusion is the mother of defeat. Then we would light our torches and butcher the rest at our leisure. The few who might survive to escape into the marshes would find that the trap had closed behind them. In their panicked flight they would run straight into Sesku’s boatmen, waiting to spear them like fish.

  The same death would await the second, smaller party. When they heard the sounds of battle they would either run their boats ashore, thinking that their strategy had prospered, or they would flee the way they had come. It did not matter if they died on the solid land or in the water. In the morning the crows and the fishes would glut themselves on their corpses.

  That was the plan—an easy victory over men who would find their surprise turned back upon them. It only had to work to be perfect. We would know before we were a quarter of an hour older.

  It began, as it always does, with sick fear lying in the belly like a lump of bronze. We could hear the enemy. We could hear their voices and the sounds of their feet splashing in the shallow water. We listened, waiting. We heard the scraping noise of boat keels being dragged up on the reed-choked bank. We heard the rasp of metal against metal. They had come, and they suspected nothing.

  “Now,” Sesku whispered, crouched beside me. And then, in his own tongue, what had to be the same word, shouted as no less than a challenge—“NOW!”

  In answer, the war cry of the Halufids, repeated from two hundred throats, then, at almost the same instant, the whisper of two hundred arrows sliding through the black, empty air. The night seemed to tremble with the sound, crashing over us in a great wave.

  Someone lit a torch. Then another, and another. The grass was set afire, and in the lurid yellow flames we could see the enemy, not a hundred paces away. The corpses of their dead lay on the ground, and we would hear the cries of the wounded. Those still on their feet seemed paralyzed with astonishment. They did not awaken from their trance until the second volley.

  Not desiring to squander my opportunity, I had held my hand until then. I chose a mark, a man standing in the midst of the Sharjan—a good, brave, soldierly sort of man, I thought, one who seemed little disposed to turn and flee—and my javelin made a clean arc through the air and caught him full in the chest. The blow seemed to carry him back with it, and his lifeless body pitched over onto the ground.

  He was not alone in finding death. Some twenty or thirty more fell with him, and it was only then that the Sharjan, the hundred and fifty or so who were left alive, remembered that they had not come to this place to be cut down like barley. First one, and then another, and then all of them together, took up their war cry, shaking their weapons at us in defiance, and charged us straight on.

  The collision was like the shock of hammer against anvil. It was a brave contest there in the flickering light of the grass fires, but it was short and, for the Sharjan, hopeless. They were in confusion and disarray. They never recovered from that first surprise and thus had no plan except what was in each man’s heart—to do battle and, if need be, to die a brave death. The Halufid, keeping their lines formed and fighting with discipline, hacked them to pieces. We suffered few losses. For us it was what every boy, who has never seen one, dreams that war will be like—quick, unequal, and glorious.

  I received but a single wound, and that a trivial business. The point of a Sharjan dagger opened the skin over my shoulder muscle and spilled enough blood to stain my arm red, but it was no more than a gaudy-looking inconvenience.

  Afterwards I was very glad, because the dagger had been meant for Sesku’s back. We were standing only a few paces from each other, just as the Sharjan were beginning to break and run. I had only that minute slain one of the last with the courage to stand against us, and I glanced over toward Sesku and saw that another, not caring if he lived or died, had managed to come in behind him.

  His hand was filled and he was ready to strike—Sesku did not even know he was there. I shouted a warning and charged the attacker, catching him just under the rib cage with my sword.

  I shall never forget the expression on his face. He seemed to snarl like an animal, hating me for having ruined his last chance at revenge. With his dying strength he swung his dagger toward me, cutting my shoulder open just before the weapon fell from his lifeless hand. Even as he lay dead, he seemed to stare at me with hatred.

  It was only then, it seemed, that Sesku became aware of his danger. He turned and looked down at the dead man, and then up at me. It was the blood on my arm that made him grasp what had happened.

  “I had no idea Khalule weighed so heavily upon your conscience,” he said.

  “It was a point of honor—if I cannot have your life, then I would prefer you to be immortal. I will concede the honor of killing you to no one else.”

  He laughed, and then pointed to my wound, as if he had just remembered some trivial detail.

  “You will live, I trust?”

  “A small thing, of no consequence. I doubt, in six months’ time, I will even have a pretty scar to show for it.”

  We could stand there, speaking thus, because the battle was over. The Sharjan had fled to their boats, leaving only the dead behind them, and already I could see the distant shimmer of torchlight upon the water and hear the screams of men who knew they had forfeited their last hope of escape. The Halufid boatmen had been waiting for them.

  But for us the fighting was done. Some of Sesku’s men were looting the corpses of their enemies, cutting the throats of any survivors, but the rest simply milled about, still too excited to stand quietly.

 
; “We have conquered, my people!” the king of the Halufids shouted, as if the fact had just occurred to him. From one instant to the next, he seemed beside himself with exultation.

  “The heavens make manifest their favor. They fortify our hearts with omens; they deliver the enemy into our hands—“

  Sesku’s last words were almost drowned out by the shouting of the victorious Halufids, who crowded about us, raising their weapons over their heads in triumph.

  Then he touched my arm and held up his hand to show off the fresh blood of my wound dripping from his fingers. The Halufids, mad with joy, shouted their approval, although I think, in that moment, they would have applauded anything.

  We walked back to the village together, where I went in search of Kephalos that he too might rejoice in our deliverance. I found him asleep aboard a reed raft that had been dragged up onto the shore, his arms wrapped protectively around his medicine box.

  “You look as if you need the services of a physician,” he said when he saw my arm. “By the wisdom of Apollo, what a lot of blood! But it is just as well, for blood is purifying.”

  When he was finished with everything else, Kephalos stitched my wound closed with a thread drawn from the entrails of a rabbit. I did not find that part of the operation very amusing.

  “Will you come then and share my hut?” I asked. “I hate to think of you lying out here in the mud.”

  “No, Lord—you gave me good advice before, and I will follow it. A cautious man lives long enough to enjoy the memory of his follies.”

  “As you will.”

  There would be singing and celebration all night tonight in the mudhif of my Lord Sesku, but I was weary and, besides, it was not my victory. I would be glad to close my eyes against the morning. I would sleep like a corpse in the earth.

  I was perhaps fifteen paces away when I thought I saw the blanket covering my doorway move.

  Of course. In the excitement I had nearly forgotten. The god had sent his warning not to Sesku, but to me.