The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  But perhaps I was merely imagining it all. I raised my torch to look about me. There was nothing. Then I happened to glance down and saw a sandal print in the dust.

  It was not mine, and it was not Kephalos’, which I knew almost as well. And the Halufids did not wear sandals, not even their king. I found myself in the presence of an enemy who was as much a stranger here as I.

  And he was waiting for me inside the hut.

  Well, I would not oblige him. I would not step through that doorway, ducking down as I did so because it was built too low for me, and let this man hack through my neck like a housewife cutting her husband’s meal from a block of cheese.

  I still carried the sword Sesku had loaned me, and the torch that had lit me home still burned hotly. I threw it up on the hut’s roof, which, being nothing but dry reeds, caught fire in an instant.

  Within a quarter of a minute the roof was blazing and ready to collapse. I would not have long to wait.

  Nor did I. With a cry of panic he came rushing out, clawing aside the blanket over the entrance, no thought in his mind except escape. He ran straight into my sword, taking the point just under the navel. I drove it up and at an angle so that it pierced his heart. The dagger he had been carrying dropped harmlessly to the ground.

  A dead man lying at my feet, so astonished that it had ended thus. Who was he? I had never seen him before. His tunic could have been from anywhere, but he did not have the look of a Chaldean.

  He had died clutching at his wound so that his left arm was under his body. Thus he lay on the ground. I put my foot on his shoulder and rolled him over.

  It was then I saw that the last finger of his left hand was missing.

  VII

  “He is a stranger to me.”

  Sesku crouched down and grasped the dead man’s left arm by the wrist to examine the hand. The flames from my hut still burned bright enough that he had no difficulty seeing.

  “Yet clearly this is the one my mother beheld in her dream. You can understand now why I tolerate so much from her—it is a rare gift to read the future. We must find out what he was doing among the Sharjan.”

  “How will you do that?”

  “My boatmen captured some ten or twelve who preferred the hazards of surrender to a quick and honorable death. In the morning, after they have had a few hours to sit in the dark wearing a prisoner’s noose, we will put the question to them.”

  I saw them that night when I went to the mudhif to sleep. They were sitting in a little circle facing out, all bound together at the neck with their hands and feet tied. Captured men always look just the same—tired, dirty, and hopeless. Sesku had set a watch, but these hardly seemed worth the trouble of guarding. They knew well enough what awaited them, for the Chaldeans are a cruel race, and doubtless they had reason enough to regret that brief failure of nerve that had prevented them from forcing a quick end that would forestall all future suffering. Yet they seemed empty even of the will to save themselves. They seemed almost dead already.

  I was too weary, however, to pity them, and the memory of the assassin’s dagger was still too vivid in my mind. Let them die, I thought, in any manner which shall be pleasing to the Halufids. What should it matter to me? I slept untroubled that night.

  The next morning, when I awoke and came outside, the boats had already returned. Sesku’s men had been out catching vipers.

  “When the dawn breaks they lie on the reed banks, warming themselves in the sun. They are sluggish then, and one can pick them up easily enough with a hooked stick. They make quite a sight, do they not?”

  They did. The boatmen had carried them back in wicker baskets, which they emptied into a copper urn the size of a war drum—it could not have held less than a hundred serpents, colored dull red to muddy brown, tangled together in a grotesque, ever-changing knot. Sesku thrust his walking stick in among them, stirring them up. He did not seem satisfied with the results.

  “They are still half asleep,” he said. “When the sun has heated the sides of the urn they will grow more alert. They need the warmth before they can even move, but too much of it makes them evil-tempered.”

  He withdrew his stick and held it out to me that I might see where a few of them had left the marks of their fangs in it.

  “My Halufids have selected these with great care,” he went on. “Their bite is painful, and a man does not die of it too quickly. Yet none recover. It is not an end anyone would choose for himself.”

  We waited another hour, and the twisting mass inside the urn grew more and more agitated. Sesku stirred them again with his walking stick, and this time I could hear the series of angry snaps, like stones falling to a cobbled floor, as they struck out at it.

  “Now they are ready,” he said, and then turned to one of his retainers to give an order.

  The prisoners had of course been watching with great attention, their eyes large and grown yellow with fear—as he waits for death, a man’s faces takes on a peculiar grayish cast, as if he were already becoming part of the lifeless earth.

  The Halufids selected one among them, took the noose from his neck, and cut the bit of hemp that bound his ankles. They had to help him to his feet, for his hands remained tied behind his back. I think they would have had to help him up in any case.

  He began to scream uncontrollably as soon as he saw what was about to happen to him.

  Two men held him by the arms while another used a hooked stick to reach into the urn and, one at a time, lift out some ten of the vipers and drop them into a leather bag a little larger than a water bucket. Then the two men holding the prisoner forced him to bend over at the waist and the bag was slipped over his head, the drawstrings at the top pulled tight and knotted. Even as this was done he stamped his bare feet on the ground, seeming to dance in an agony of terror.

  When his arms were released he straightened up at once, and the bag over his head did nothing to silence his cries. He limped about, hopping from one foot to the other, blind and helpless, his shoulders hunched as if he entertained some hope of thus drawing his head out of that mortal darkness. After a time he went down to his knees, his loincloth by this time soaked with urine, and at last toppled over onto his face. He lay there, still twitching in the dust, for several minutes. It was impossible to say whether he was still alive or not.

  They removed the bag from his head—with all possible care, as the vipers had by no means exhausted their poison—and the sight he made was not one I am likely to forget. His face was covered with tears, each the center of a dark bruise, and his tongue, which protruded from his mouth like something on which he might have choked, was black and swollen. The vipers had bitten it as well, and had punctured one of his eyes so that a thick, bloody syrup ran down his cheek. Sesku used his foot to turn the corpse over, and it had already gone quite rigid.

  I have seen many men executed by torture, and I know that one can die more slowly and in greater pain, yet there is something in the mind itself that revolts against such a death as this, making it terrible out of all proportion to the agony of mere flesh. Sesku was right—it was not an end anyone would choose for himself.

  “Now they have all seen how we can treat an enemy,” he said to me, as the dead prisoner was hauled away by a rope around the foot. “I will now inquire of these Sharjan if they know anything of the man with a finger missing. We have no shortage of vipers, nor of captives, so I think we will find one among so many who will prefer a sword under the ribs to putting his head into that bag. Go and enjoy your breakfast in peace. When I see you again I will have something to tell you.”

  I went away gladly enough. At least in that I followed Sesku’s advice. My appetite had failed me, although I am not cursed with a delicate stomach. I wanted only to sit quietly somewhere and wait for the impression of what I had just seen to wear off a little.

  Such scenes are best not witnessed sober. Once, during the second year of his campaigns in Sumer, I sat beside my royal father as he presided over the flaying aliv
e of a king who had rebelled against him. To watch a man’s skin stripped from his body, to smell the blood, to hear the screams of agony was not pleasant, yet my father, the Lord Sennacherib, sat with his hands on his knees through the whole of it, never turning his eyes away and betraying no emotion. I did the same. My father, who understood all the arts of kingship, had first seen to it that we were both so besotted with date wine that very likely the executioners could have gone to work on either of us without our being greatly inconvenienced, or perhaps even noticing. I would have given much, crouched alone by the water’s edge, to be as drunk as I had been that day in Sumer.

  “Have you seen, Lord, how these savages amuse themselves?”

  It was Kephalos, looking white and shaky, as if he had just emptied his belly into the canal. He sat down beside me, holding one hand inside the other in his lap.

  “How many have they killed so far?” I asked.

  “Four—five perhaps, by now. I saw only four corpses. They are taking their time. They will be at it all morning.”

  “I think not. When they have what they want, I expect they will gut the rest like fish.”

  He glanced at me with an expression of the most profound distaste.

  “And for what, then, are they looking?”

  “Information.” I shrugged my shoulders, like a man forced to admit something shameful. “About the man who tried to assassinate me last night. A courtesy, if you will—although I expect Sesku has his own reasons for wishing to find it out.”

  Suddenly, and for no obvious reason, I was overcome with a most dreadful grief. Life seemed a misery beyond bearing. I felt ashamed for the breath under my ribs. I could only hide my face in my hands and weep, for I was helpless against the force of this terrible affliction into which the gods had turned my existence.

  “Dread Lord, I. . .”

  Poor Kephalos, what must he have thought as his voice trailed away in perplexed embarrassment? At last, as my fit of despair began to pass, I became conscious that he was standing some way off. I looked behind me and saw he had his back turned, and then I heard him make a sound as if to clear his throat—a signal perhaps that my solitude was about to be broken in upon. I reached into the canal, took a double handful of water, and threw it in my face. At almost the same instant I heard Sesku’s voice behind me.

  “Our inquiries have met with some small success,” he announced—there was nothing in his tone to indicate he had witnessed any part of my lapse. “It seems our friend with the missing finger entered the marshes from the direction of Lagash, on the Tigris, and bore an offer of ‘tribute’ from the king your brother if the Sharjan would help him in relieving you of your head so that he could carry it back to Nineveh—imagine it, the Ruler of the Earth’s Four Corners demeaning himself to offer ‘tribute’ to a race of brigands; I am ashamed for him. The precise amount seems a trifle vague, which is not to be wondered at considering that the Sharjan are all beggars and can hardly imagine sums greater than a handful of copper shekels, but I gather it was enough make some impression. The villain’s name, by the way, was Mushussu.”

  I threw back my head and laughed. I laughed until the tears flooded my eyes and I could hardly breathe. No doubt I was still a trifle hysterical, for Sesku stared at me in the most shocked manner.

  “Are you quite well, my friend?” he asked, crouching beside me on the canal bank. He even put his hand upon my shoulder, as if to steady me. “Did you know him then?”

  “No, I did not know him, and now neither will anyone else.” I washed my face yet again and was at last able to see the joke without losing control of myself. “‘Mushussu’ is not a name—or at least not one that any mother would choose for her son. It is the word for a kind of demon, an avenger, sacred to the god Marduk and made by him from equal parts of lion, snake and eagle.”

  My bowels went suddenly cold as I remembered the eagles of my dream. It was as if the earth had suddenly collapsed beneath my feet.

  Yet it did not collapse, and Sesku remained there next to me, one hand on my shoulder, the fingers of the other thoughtfully rubbing the lump over his eye, as if the answer he sought were to be squeezed out of it. Finally he shook his head, frowning with perplexity.

  “I do not understand the blasphemies in which you northern races indulge yourselves,” he said as he rose to his feet. “I am at a loss to comprehend how you can mock at your gods thus—and why they do not burn you to ashes for your impudence. It is a wonder that you have reigned so long over the nations of the world. I had always heard that the Lord Esarhaddon was a man most scrupulous in his piety.”

  “So he is. No man ever feared the gods more than my brother. And Marduk is his particular devotion.”

  “Then it is most wonderful.”

  “Yes.”

  Sesku did not linger, but returned to direct the execution of the remaining prisoners, who, as he had promised them, would die by the sword, and that quickly. I was not sorry to be parted from him, for at bottom he was still only a tribesman, delighting in savagery, and I began to find his company an oppression of the soul.

  “We must leave this place,” I said to Kephalos as we walked back toward the village. We had allowed a suitable interval to pass, hoping, at least for the rest of this day, to avoid the sight of blood. “We must depart from the Sealand and enter into the nations that lie beyond the Bitter River. We must not rest until we find a place where my brother will never find us—where the god himself cannot reach. Yes, I would flee from Ashur. I would forget him and the dreams he sends. Always in my mind I hear the words of the Lady Esharhamat: ‘Your god, he plays with us. A child pitching stones at a bird’s nest could not have less pity.’”

  . . . . .

  But before Kephalos and I could leave the marshes, there must be an end to the blood feud between the Halufids and the Sharjan. And this Sesku determined he would purchase not with cattle and gold and women, but with the sword.

  All that day and the next there was a brisk traffic in war craft at the village dock, and on the third morning after the raid we set out with perhaps seven hundred warriors and perhaps a hundred boats of every size. We traveled fast, sacrificing stealth to speed, since it was obvious our enemies would begin to expect an attack as soon as their own men failed to return after their time. The journey to the territory of the Sharjan took four days, and there were more than a few great battles, bloody, cruel and one-sided, before we ever came within sight of their main settlements, and many a bloated, water-logged corpse was carried along on the slow currents of the canals, for a whole people does not easily resign itself to death.

  Yet the Sharjan were a doomed nation—even they seemed to sense it. The best of their warriors had already been killed, and the rest fought with the courage of hopelessness. The Halufids simply crushed them, almost thoughtlessly, like a boulder rolling down a mountain.

  What happened when we reached their villages cannot be fairly described as war. War, even such war as I have seen, does not admit of such horrors. The young men were gone, either killed or fled, leaving behind only the defenseless. Most of these were slaughtered. I saw children hacked open before their mothers’ eyes, and old men, white-haired and trembling, had their feet and hands chopped off and were forced to creep about on their bellies, begging their tormentors for death. Over and over it happened—within an hour of our landing the air was rank with the smell of blood, and only a few among the women, the virgins and the young wives whose breasts had never been swelled with milk, were left alive. These would be roughly divided into two categories and either roped together by the neck to live as chattel or to be raped repeatedly, and with such brutal violence that some even died of it, and then stripped naked to be driven into the water, where the Halufid boatmen bludgeoned them to death with their oars, a traditional punishment for unchastity.

  Nothing was spared. Animals were slaughtered and the village was put to the torch. The dead were thrown into the water and the living led away. Sesku put no limit on his vengean
ce.

  “I will leave the Sharjan nothing, not even their lives,” he said. “I will hunt them down until I have butchered the last one—no man’s son will survive to carry on this feud. I will see that their very name dies from men’s lips.”

  He was as good as his word. In a month of campaigning he made the marshes into a grave.

  And then we returned. The women, some three or four hundred of them, were divided among his followers. Sesku, although not a lecherous man, kept some twelve of the best for himself, as he still lived in hopes of a son, and I was offered my pick, but I did not expect to stay much longer among the Halufids and therefore declined.

  After Sesku had secured safe passage for me from the chiefs of all the tribes along my way, and after a great banquet during which he called me his friend and brother, he loaned me his own war boat, four of his best paddlers, and his nephew Kelshahir to act as my guide and interpreter and sent us on our way. I will always remember the sight of him, standing on his pier, waving us off. We had not even disappeared from sight before he let his arm drop and began walking back to his mudhif, as if dismissing us from existence.

  . . . . .

  Our journey occupied more than a month. It was late summer and still very hot during the days, although night provided some relief. The sun’s light glared off the water, which made it wearisome to the eyes. Both Kephalos and I experienced leg cramps from sitting in a boat for so many hours together, although I do not believe Kelshahir and his oarsmen were so affected.

  Yet I have always found pleasure in traveling, and even in the marshlands, as monotonous a place as it is possible to imagine, all reeds and heavy, stagnant water, each day had its rewards. Sometimes we would stop to hunt for wild pigs or to net ducks, or simply for the happiness of a few hours on solid ground. Once we watched a great male lion swimming from one island to another—he looked very comic and uncomfortable with his huge mane, and when at last he climbed up onto the bank he roared loudly at nothing in particular, out of sheer vexation it seemed.