The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  Our meal was a leisurely affair. We ate reclining on couches, after the Greek fashion I had first learned in Kephalos’ house in Nineveh—all except Enkidu, who crouched in a corner and, when invited to join us at the table, answered our host with a mute glare, as if he hated him. Prodikos, of course, had by then grown used to the outlandish ways of my follower and merely directed one of his serving girls, a pretty, dusty-skinned little creature with fine breasts, to provide him with food and wine in proportion to his great size.

  This she did, at first with some show of reluctance, but at last, recognizing that she was in no danger and convincing herself that this great golden-haired giant was merely a man like other men, she began favoring him with becomingly timid smiles. Perhaps she took his mirthless indifference as a challenge, but in any case it was not long before Enkidu had absorbed all her attention and the rest of us were in danger of starving.

  “Iuput, you lazy slut!” Prodikos shouted at last, “shall we be left to perish of thirst while you disport yourself with the Lord Tiglath’s servant? Be about your duties, girl—I trust you can wait so long as the conclusion of our meal before you entice that great wad of muscle to your sleeping mat?”

  The girl, with many blushes and murmured apologies, hurried to us with her wine pitcher and then rushed off to the kitchen to bring more plates of meat and fruit.

  I do not believe, however, that our host could have been of a jealous temper, for that night, when I retired, I found Iuput waiting in my bed—perhaps this was her punishment, for Enkidu, as usual, slept stretched across the doorway to my room. Yet, as I had not had a woman since leaving Arabia, I did her more than justice and she seemed pleased enough with the exchange.

  The next morning, at breakfast, Kephalos announced his intention of journeying on ahead to Memphis.

  “There is much business which needs my attention,” he said, dipping a piece of flatbread in honey. “You are now, My Lord, a man of princely wealth, and the merchants to whom you have advanced gold with such generosity must be called to account—you they will cheat, but me never. Also we must purchase a house, which I prefer to do myself, since I do not share your soldierly disdain for comfort. And then, of course, there are the household slaves to be selected and various officials to be bribed and many other matters to deal with for which your upbringing has left you ill equipped. Remember, the Egyptians, like all men, judge from appearances. We must have a decent regard for your position as a man of substance and importance.”

  After Kephalos had left for Memphis, and the Greek quarter began to seem as cramped and stifling as a prison, curiosity and boredom combined to drive me out. At first cautiously, and then with the confidence of greater experience—yet always with Enkidu, like a dog that does not trust its master with his own safety, only a few paces behind—I began to venture into the Naukratis of the Egyptians, where I learned my first lessons about that land upon whose shore Shamash, Lord of Destinies, had set me down as lightly and carelessly as the sea does a piece of driftwood.

  Their writing is impossible, yet a man may learn to speak the Egyptian tongue quickly enough. Within a month I had some few hundred words, although I hardly needed them. I rarely met anyone who could not stumble through a little Greek, and this, so Prodikos led me to understand, would be the case everywhere except the dustiest village—“Here they are used to doing business with us, but even in the great cities upriver, Greek is quite the fashion. Poor simple souls, it makes them feel part of the world.”

  Yet men may dwell together in something smaller than a world and not know it for the same place. Even this little town, built upon an island in one of the lesser channels of the River Nile, the Egyptians knew by a different name, calling it Piemro, and there they lived as separate an existence as if they had raised their houses beyond the dome of heaven.

  At first I imagined I must have come among a race of women, for the men are slight and smooth-limbed and shave their faces and even their heads, preferring to wear wigs rather than their own hair. A beard, prized by all other races as the symbol of manly authority, is regarded with disgust, as both unclean in itself and a disfigurement to the beauty of the face. As a mark of rank sometimes a high official will wear a false beard, a few strands of hair glued to the chin, or perhaps only a lacquered wooden box to represent one, but even this very unwillingly. And all, men and women alike, paint around their eyes—this not only from vanity but as a sovereign protection against infections, which are common among them.

  Although the weather in Naukratis was not as warm as it would have been even in Nineveh, the Egyptians of the upper classes covered themselves with few garments, for both sexes are mightily proud of their dainty bodies. The men usually wear only a short skirt of thin pleated linen, and the women frequently go about with their breasts uncovered, painting their nipples a vivid red. They decorate their arms with gold and sometimes silver bracelets--the silver, which is more highly prized, is brought in by the Greeks from Thrace and Macedonia—and their wigs, which they trim with gold, are often dyed bright blue.

  Only the priests, it seemed, covered themselves from shoulder to foot, which was perhaps well done since many of them were astonishingly fat. The priests of all nations, I have observed, tend to corpulence, but nowhere more so than in Egypt. They are also arrogant and greatly hated for this and also for their greed, which is insatiable, the gods in Egypt being richer even than Pharaoh. The priests do not wear wigs, but their shaven heads glisten with oil.

  Yet the priests, though hated, are powerful, and this because no people are more in awe of their gods than the Egyptians. The gods own Egypt, Pharaoh being but one among them, and no master ever held his slave in such bondage than they do the people of that land. No farmer opens his irrigation sluices without first offering sacrifice to obtain the water god Sobk’s approval. The harlot prays to Mut, consort of Amun, before she visits her first customer, and the warrior promises to sprinkle the altar of Hathor with blood—unless his grandfather was a Libyan, in which case he is more likely to favor Neit. In the land of my birth, and even among the Greeks, the gods are imagined as having the shapes of men, but the Egyptians represent theirs with the heads of jackals, hawks and crocodiles, making them seem fearful and revolting creatures, which, far from being an insult, is taken as the special mark of their holiness. Yet for all this, the Egyptians seem to live on the best of terms with their gods and take a childish delight in honoring them. Every month has almost as many festivals as days, when shrines are carried through the streets of every city and village and their way is strewn with flowers. The gods dwell among men, making a paradise of the Land of Egypt, and for this reason the Egyptians regard themselves as blessed above all other peoples, both in this life and the next.

  And the reason for this foolish confidence is not difficult to discover, for the chief of their gods is the great river itself, which has nourished the Egyptians and framed the terms of their lives since the foundations of the world.

  The Nile is nothing like the Tigris, to whose rushing waters I had listened all my life. A man who grows up by the Tigris understands the tenuousness of his hold on existence, for the floods may come suddenly and sweep him and all he cares for into oblivion—or they may not come at all, that he dies of want. These are the facts which govern his tenure on the earth and shape his understanding of what it means to be alive. Thus in the east the river dwelling people trust neither to the future nor to the mercy of their gods.

  But the Nile is a sluggish, predictable, good-hearted river, and as a consequence the Egyptians are more cheerful and weaker than the men of Ashur. They believe that all is for their good because their river is kind to them, and thus they commit the folly of believing in the benevolence and wisdom of their gods and even of their king. Their language has no word for “fate,” as does the Akkadian of the east, and they do not understand its blind and capricious power. They are like children in a world they believe filled with their own toys. It is possible to pity them, but not very muc
h, for the gods seem to smile on their folly and have blessed them with an empty history.

  Egypt is a land famous for its magicians, many of whom practice their art for the entertainment of any who might stop in the street to watch them. Thus might a man spend many hours filling his eyes with wonders and delighting his senses. During the day there was the bazaar and at night there were the brothels where every taste could be satisfied, for the harlots of that city, both in the Greek and the Egyptian quarters, are noted for their beauty no less than for their skill.

  The country people of the Delta are usually willing enough to sell their daughters into slavery for a few pieces of silver, enough to pay their taxes to Pharaoh that year and perhaps leave them with a little with which to celebrate the Feast of Osiris, but the Greek brothels are forced to import their women. In every city in Egypt, yet nowhere more than in Naukratis, there is a brisk traffic in girls between the ages of perhaps eight or nine and fifteen years of age—a harlot has a short career, and a good one, like an acrobat or a musician, must begin her training early if her master is to have his profit out of her. Thus it was that Selana entered my life, while she was yet a child, before love and a woman’s beauty had awakened within her

  . . . . .

  The man who wishes to keep his illusions should stay away from the docks while the slaves are being unloaded. I had come down that day from the house of my friend Prodikos because Kephalos had written that he was expecting the arrival of several boxes of medicinal herbs from Byblos and wished me to give the galley master directions for having them sent on to him in Memphis.

  The galley arrived just as the morning wind had begun to subside. Enkidu and I met it, and I showed the master, a Corinthian named Strophios, the letter that Kephalos had written. He recognized Kephalos’ seal, but the rest was a mystery until I read it aloud to him. Strophios the Corinthian listened sullenly, nodding now and then, his eyes fixed on Enkidu as if he expected mischief from the great iron ax with which my servant was scraping a blob of pitch from the bottom of his sandal.

  “Yes, it is very well,” he said, as if indulging me in a whim. “It shall be as the Lord Kephalos wishes and he shall have his cargo as soon as we reach Memphis, four days hence.”

  Having dispatched this business, I was ready to make my way back to the Greek quarter when suddenly, with even more than the usual commotion and shouting, a ship some thirty or forty paces down the wharf began to disgorge its wretched female cargo.

  The girls were pale as ghosts and some of them raised a hand to fend off the sun, blinking with astonishment at the light—how many days, one wondered, had they been locked away below the decks of that cramped little ship? Wearing only filthy rags, their hair and skin streaked with dirt, an utter weariness in their faces that made them look like withered old women, although few of them could have been old enough to be fairly described as women at all, they were too defeated even to weep as they filed down the gangplank, bound together at the ankles by a length of hemp the burn marks from which they would probably bear on their flesh forever.

  Yet otherwise the slave traders were careful enough of their goods—scarred faces and backs only drove down a harlot’s price. In place of whips these considerate merchants used staves of polished wood, about the thickness of a man’s wrist, to urge their little girls forward with blows which no doubt were painful enough but would leave no mark more permanent than a bruise.

  There were perhaps twenty altogether, still only children but already impossible to imagine ever having known the love and safety of parents—or indeed any life but as slaves. Perhaps they had been born into bondage, but perhaps not. Had I not heard from my own mother’s lips how a child, the daughter of a family, may be sold like a jar of oil to pay her father’s debts? Slowly they assembled in a little knot on the wharf. The brothel keepers, who had been waiting since the ship’s arrival, did not linger over formalities but began at once to examine teeth and to pull aside tattered garments to see if underneath there might perhaps be hidden something a man might someday want on his sleeping mat. The slave traders, however, merely stood about, leaning on their staves, as if they had lost interest in the transaction and could think only of a few nights in the taverns and then the voyage home.

  “It is a bad business,” Strophios murmured, as if he were afraid of being overheard. “I know not why any decent man would trade in women when there is almost as much profit in wine—after a year or so you can’t clean the stink of them out of the cargo hold and the whole ship has to be burned.”

  I turned aside, disgusted and somehow faintly ashamed, wishing Kephalos might have seen to his own affairs and that I could have been somewhere else on this particular morning.

  Fear, danger, wrath—these are things we can sometimes sense in the air, even while the settled calm of the ordinary seems still undisturbed. They are like the flash of lightning caught in the corner of one’s eye just before the thunder breaks.

  Thus I knew, even before I heard the shouting, that something had happened. I looked back to see. Otherwise I might never have become involved.

  There had been an escape. Two of the slave traders, bellowing with anger, had started to chase after a half-naked little urchin like a pair of barking dogs after a rat. One of them, grunting with effort, took a swing at her with his stave and missed by no more than a handspan—he was in a rage now and the blow, had it found its mark, might have killed her.

  They were big men and the wharf was narrow, but she was quick, a flash of bronze-colored hair dodging between her pursuers, cutting back and forth, staying just beyond their reach. Yet this could not go on. She was only a child, and there were two of them.

  I could hear her naked feet slapping against the planks. It seemed the only sound in the world. One of the men began to close on her, but in the last instant her hand caught the lip of an empty oil jar and she pulled it over behind her so that it fell straight across his knees. He went down flat, like a falling tree, but it was only a brief reprieve—the other man was running her down and there was nowhere else to flee. Surely in a few seconds he would have her.

  She must have known that too. A glance in my direction—our eyes met. I think I understood what she would do almost in the same moment she did herself.

  Suddenly she dived at my feet, almost knocking me over. Her arms locked around my ankles, and in her gasping voice she pleaded with me for the mercy she would surely find nowhere else.

  “Please, Lord—don’t. . .” she panted out, as if every syllable had to be squeezed out from her breast. “. . .don’t let them. . . please. . . beg you.”

  The words were in the wide, flat accent of the Peloponnese, but it was Greek. She clung to me as if she would drown, hiding her face against my leg so that I could see nothing except her hair, the color of bronze new from the forge. Something stirred within me, as if a long closed door had all at once come open.

  The slave trader, ignoring me, reached down to grab her by the neck, as he might have pulled her loose from a rock. I put my hand on his shoulder to stop him, but he knocked my arm aside.

  After that, everything happened very quickly. In a sudden flash of anger I struck him across the face with my clenched fist—I think I must have broken his nose, because almost at once there was blood on his upper lip. He was as tall as I and broader, with the coarse strength of a laborer. I had no weapon, no way to defend myself. When he realized this he raised his stave to strike me. He could not have made a worse mistake.

  The wind went out of him in a rush—Enkidu, ever watchful, had seen it all coming, and the flat side of his great ax caught the man square in the belly, taking him right off his feet, so that the next instant he was curled up on the wharf in a tight little ball of pain, trying to remember how to breathe.

  The combat was finished. Enkidu strode over and put his foot on the slave trader’s chest to force him over onto his back. He held him like that, the ax still in his hand. The man glared up at him in stark terror, but Enkidu’s eyes were on
my face

  What shall I do with him? he seemed to ask. This one, who has dared to raise his hand against you, shall I strike off his head here and now?

  “Let him live,” I said.

  It was not what he had hoped to hear. With great reluctance, Enkidu raised his foot and allowed the slave trader to crawl out from under it. At the last he could not restrain himself from driving the rogue off with a kick that would have broken most men’s ribs.

  “There is still the question of my chattel, Majesty.”

  The master of the slave ship was a squat figure and unpleasant in his aspect. Although a Greek, he shaved his head after the Egyptian fashion, and the top of his right ear was missing. His small brown eyes looked as lifeless as if they had been painted on. He stood, just beyond Enkidu’s reach, with his heavy arms folded across his chest. I hadn’t even noticed his approach.

  “The girl, Majesty. I purchased her in good faith and have an investment to protect. I am not in this trade for my amusement, Majesty.”

  The girl, whom this toadlike creature had purchased in good faith, was still huddled at my feet. I knelt down and placed my hand on her head—yes, the hair was the same color.

  “Get up,” I said, as gently as possible, for even as I spoke I felt her arms tighten around my ankles. “Do as I bid you. Get up.”

  At last she was persuaded to rise. She was trembling. She stood close enough beside me that I could feel this. She would look neither at me nor at the master, as if she trusted neither of us.

  “From whom did you purchase her?” I asked. It did not matter, and I did not really care, but I needed time to consider what must be done.

  “From her mother and father, Majesty—who could possibly have a better right? They were peasants from a village near Amyclae, and I paid for her in silver. I have also had the expense of feeding her this half month.”

  The villain was practically inviting me to buy her.