The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  The others outstripped him, leaving him to die. He called to them, but they did not answer or even look back. His leg was stiffening now. I myself was bruised and in pain, but he would not escape.

  With hands and feet I crawled over the rocks. The more I worked my body the stronger I felt, but the other man, his wound bleeding thickly, was slowing. His friends were gone and I was behind him. In his heart he must have known he would soon feed the crows—I hope he suffered. When I was almost upon him, I could hear him whimpering with ignoble fear. A slave would have faced death with more dignity.

  Finally I had him. The distance between us closed, and at last I could reach up and grab him by the ankle. With a weak little cry of terror he tried to pull himself free, but he lost his footing and fell backwards.

  I had him. And then, all at once, I did not. He struggled, he slipped on the loose ground and fell. Suddenly he was rolling down over the rocks like a log, unable to stop himself. All I could do was to watch.

  When he reached the floor of the pass he lay still.

  “You greasy dog,” I thought, “if you have escaped from me into death. . .”

  But he was not dead, not yet. Even as I made my way down I could see him stirring. With luck, he would live long enough for my purposes.

  He lay there amidst the stones, his face and arms coated with the pale desert dust. His eyes were wide and shining with pain or fear or the gods knew what, and his mouth was open as if to speak. Yet he did not speak. As I approached he raised his left arm, perhaps in supplication.

  I saw at once that the smallest finger was missing.

  I knelt beside him. He tried to clutch at my sleeve, his hand opening and closing, but angrily I brushed his arm aside. I hated him worse than bitter death itself, for I could see he was slipping away from me.

  “Who sent you?” I shouted, grabbing the neck of his tunic and shaking him, as a dog might a rat. “Who will give you money if you bring him my hand? Who sent you?”

  “Wa—” He stopped, drew a breath, and tried again. “Water.”

  “Curse you, may the dry sand stop your mouth before I give you water! Who sent you?”

  But I was already too late. The light faded in his eyes and his life fled from him. He would tell me nothing.

  I sat there beside the dead man for a long while. My whole body seemed to ache and my mind was dark. I felt surrounded by enemies. The world was a bitter place.

  Finally I picked up his hand and looked at the stump where his finger had grown. The edges of the wound were pink, as if they had just healed—this was no old injury.

  He had been an Egyptian, this one. Light skinned, but still an Egyptian. And he had not known who I was, not really. A man who asks for water with his last breath speaks in his own tongue, not one he has borrowed. This man had never lived beside the twin rivers.

  He was not the one. Someone wished me to believe he might be—perhaps only if he failed. This was not the one who had been sent from Nineveh.

  At last I heard the sound of leather sandals climbing over stone. A shadow fell across the ground. I looked up and saw Enkidu. He was carrying his ax and there was blood drying on the blade. I did not have to ask what had happened to the two who had escaped me.

  He looked at me, and at the dead man, and I heard a low growl.

  “No,” I said. “He is not the one.”

  XIII

  With one mount between us, we rode and walked by turns, until at last I could walk no farther. I returned to Memphis clinging to the neck of Enkidu’s horse, hardly able to keep from falling off. My elbow had grown so swollen that I could no longer bend it—Kephalos said later that when he lanced the bruise nearly four kyathoi of blood drained out in a gush. I must accept his word, for by then I had already fainted.

  Kephalos insisted that I keep my bed and refrain from women for the next two days, and I felt but little inclination to disobey him. Yet I was not seriously injured and within four days was walking about out of doors, feeling sore and bad tempered but not otherwise inconvenienced. By the sixth day my chief complaint was boredom, even with my garden, and I was very glad to receive a visit there from my Lord Senefru.

  “I have been informed you suffered a hunting accident,” he said, sitting down at the opposite end of a couch on which I was sunning my various bruises. “No—you need not lie about it. When I received word that your servant had brought you back I thought to myself, what misadventure would cause the Lord Tiglath to leave both chariot and team behind when the whole world knows how fond he is of his fine horses? Thus I sent a man into the desert to discover the truth. What he found there you know.”

  He paused, waiting perhaps for an explanation. When he did not receive one, he shrugged his shoulders in resignation.

  “No doubt you were justified, My Lord. Such brigands as those you may slaughter in their hundreds and the citizen of Memphis will look upon you as a benefactor. Besides, since clearly you did not bring that rock slide down upon yourself, one can only assume you were the victim of a murderous attack—such is the conclusion I reached in the report of the incident I sent to Prince Nekau.”

  “Then your call is in the way of business, My Lord?”

  “How can you think it?” he asked, his face contracting as if from some inward pang. “The prince’s only interest in the matter is with your safety. He was concerned that in his province so honored a guest, whom he looks upon as a friend, should have been set upon in this manner. For myself, I only wanted to be satisfied that you had sustained no lasting injury—and to be able to take that assurance to my Lady Wife.”

  We exchanged a nod which, under the etiquette governing our somewhat peculiar relationship, amounted to my apology and his acceptance of it, and for several seconds we waited together in silence, as if to see if a shadow would pass.

  “I suppose they intended to rob you,” he continued at last, his face innocently blank, for he supposed nothing of the sort.

  “Of what?”

  He raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

  “Of what would they have thought to rob me?” I asked, as if the simple amplification would make everything plain. “I was out hunting. I had nothing with me of any value except a chariot, a pair of fine Arab horses, and my life. They wrecked the chariot and killed the horses. It was my life they wanted, and that is not robbery but murder.”

  Senefru’s eyebrows dropped suddenly. He was less than pleased.

  “You astonish me, My Lord,” he said, not at all astonished. “It seems a grotesquely cumbersome way to murder someone—an avalanche. In Memphis, people are murdered every day with much less fuss.”

  “Perhaps it was intended to seem an accident.”

  Of course, had the assassins succeeded in their intentions, no one would have been deluded into imagining my death an accident—the missing hand would have been too difficult to explain. I saw fit, however, not to mention this detail to My Lord.

  “Yet why should anyone go to the trouble?” he asked, answering my answer with a question. “Unless you have offended someone here in Memphis, who wishes to avoid a scandal.” He smiled thinly, in silent acknowledgment of my right to suspect him.

  “There is no one in Memphis so foolish or so base as to hire men such as those to roll stones down upon me from the top of a desert bluff. And no, My Lord—the man who did hire them wishes me dead not for any wickedness I have done. I offend him merely by living.”

  It seemed to gratify Senefru that I did not think to lay this deed at his feet, for such a mode of revenging himself would certainly have struck him as, at the very least, somewhat undignified. Perhaps that was what gratified him, for he gave the impression of being satisfied. Thus, at any rate, the reckoning between us drew a little closer to even.

  “Then you must learn to be careful,” he said, “for someone has a long reach.”

  . . . . .

  Flesh heals faster than most things. Within half a month of the attack I had nothing by which to remember it except a few yell
owing bruises. It was not much longer before I did not even have those.

  I followed the Lord Senefru’s advice and learned to be careful, yet after a while it began to seem that my caution was unnecessary—a month passed, and then two, and then several, and still no further attempt was made against me. With time the danger began to seem a trifle unreal, and gradually, if I did not quite dismiss it from my mind, it became like the stories of the gods which in childhood once made such a vivid impression, still believed but later without much conviction. This is the work of time.

  It is of time, whom the Greeks recognize as one of the oldest of the gods, that I must now speak. Yet if he is a god he is also a magician, not very different from those one saw every day in the streets of Memphis, for his power lies chiefly in the creating of illusions, making what is false seem true, what is wicked pure. This is the magic which time worked on me in Egypt, for I lived there three years and learned to think I was happy and beyond the reach of evil.

  Certainly I was fortunate. One of Senefru’s neighbors died, so I bought the house and moved into it. It was smaller, so Kephalos almost choked on a fury of injured pride, but the garden adjoined Nodjmanefer’s—now nothing separated us but a wooden gate in the wall.

  Senefru made no objection. Indeed, he declared himself pleased that we should all thus see so much more of each other. The three of us were now so much in and out of each other’s houses and company that we seemed almost to be living together. For practical purposes, Nodjmanefer and I almost were.

  Yet if I imagined myself content, if I thought myself prosperous and happy, Egypt was not similarly deceived. For the common people those were hard years. The Nile flooded less and the barley withered in the fields. The ground cracked and turned to dust, and in the countryside men and women slaughtered their oxen and then their girl babies because there was nothing for any of them to eat. The cities became crowded with those who fled the land, but the price of food had risen until ordinary working people could hardly afford to buy it—once I saw pressed dates being sold for equal weights of silver—and those without employment could afford nothing, not the poorest broken millet.

  Sometimes riots broke out, and these were truly dreadful: they begin with some trivial disturbance when, for instance, a peddler, selling vegetables beneath a canvas awning, at last is made impatient by the heat and worry and weariness, and perhaps by a pity he cannot afford to indulge, and too roughly turns away a beggar, of which there are always too many.

  The beggar objects, and onlookers take sides. Some say the beggar is a thief, but most the peddler, who is resented for being rich enough to have something to sell. Soon a mob forms. The peddler’s stall is torn down and looted. Perhaps the peddler is even killed—surely he is killed.

  All at once people who for as long as they can recall have known nothing but misery now know power and the thirst for revenge and blind rage. The mob is like a mad animal—it plunders and destroys. To be outside is to invite death. No one’s life is safe. There is blood on the cobblestones and the white sand in the streets drinks it up.

  Then, suddenly, things have gone too far. The rich, behind the stone walls of their houses, feel threatened—someone might presume to plunder not a vegetable peddler’s stall, but them. The soldiers are called out. There is a massacre as innocent and guilty alike fall before the swords and the chariot wheels. Screams rend the air into tatters. By sundown the river is filled with bloated corpses and the crocodiles gorge themselves. For days the vultures walk along the muddy banks, too heavy with carrion even to fly.

  Thus was Egypt in the time I lived there, and each year it grew worse.

  “Soon they really will begin murdering respectable people in their beds,” Prince Nekau complained to me while sitting at his dinner table, peeling the skin from an apple with a silver knife. “This quarter alone I have had to spend seven hundred thousand emmer from the public treasury, and it has hardly bought half as many bushels of wheat, for some of it must be brought from as far away as Judah. Soon I shall be obliged to impose new taxes, which the rich shall have to pay because the poor are already squeezed nearly lifeless. Of course they will all write to Pharaoh in Tanis, complaining that I rob them. As if I were responsible for the famine. They would do better to ask Pharaoh’s aid in petitioning his fellow gods for a high flood next season.”

  “And will he not petition the gods without their asking?”

  The prince laughed a short, bitter laugh and shook his head.

  “No, My Lord, he will not. Pharaoh is a god and therefore, of course, pure, but the men who have his ear are neither. They welcome these hard times, as they would welcome anything that brings discredit upon me. They want only an excuse to hang me by my heels from the city wall that Pharaoh might rule in Memphis directly. They wish the old days of Egypt’s glory brought back.”

  “And you do not?”

  “They will not come back, My Lord—they are gone.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, as if so easily the weight of these troubles could slide from his back, and went on with his dinner. Afterwards he spoke of his scarab collection, justly famous among connoisseurs of such things, and of his delight in a slave girl he had recently acquired from Nubia.

  But if Prince Nekau saw only dimly, and through the window of his own interests, his subjects among the noble houses of Memphis saw not at all. The famine was merely a nuisance, a temporary constraint upon their incomes, something which would pass soon enough and leave their lives and fortunes restored to what they had always been. They closed their eyes to the suffering around them, and to what it might finally come to mean.

  “I hardly ever go into the city anymore,” I once heard a woman lamenting. “There is hardly anything amusing to be found in the marketplace these days, and the smell. . ! Of course trade is bad, but who wants to take the trouble to visit the bazaars when things are so unpleasant? All I have to say is that if people are hungry then the prince should put them to work clearing away the corpses.”

  No one even laughed. It was as if they hadn’t heard.

  And no man embraces suffering willingly. So my fashionable friends drew the curtains of their carrying chairs as they passed through the city—what they did not see did not exist. Thus it was still possible to be happy and to sleep soundly at night.

  The vogue for river parties had been forgotten, perhaps because these days there were too many corpses in the water, and thus for two winters in a row the desert was in high favor. Fowling became something of a craze and expeditions would be organized so that men and women could cast nets for birds brought specially for the purpose, quail and partridge carried out from the city in wooden cages, their wing feathers clipped so as not to place too severe a strain upon anyone’s abilities—after all, whatever would be the point of sport if it had to be taken seriously?

  This would all happen in the late afternoon, when the sun was no longer so oppressively hot, and then, after we had all chased around like children—and full half the birds had escaped into the wilderness—our cooks would roast those even less agile than their pursuers and we would lie about on carpets spread over the sand and enjoy a lovely banquet by the light of huge, picturesque bonfires. Usually we would even spend the night in linen tents, and ladies would conveniently manage to lose their way.

  As he had told me more than once, Senefru was not a man of the desert, so he rarely joined these entertainments. I shared his distaste, for the hunting was poor stuff, but I never failed to attend. I could put up with an afternoon of foolishness if at the end of it I was sure of sleeping the night through with Nodjmanefer in my arms.

  “I do not like the desert,” she told me once, while we took a walk through its long twilight. “It frightens me. It is full of silence, like death.”

  “Yet its silence allows us to be alone together,” I said, smiling, trying to make her forget her mood. I put my arm around her shoulders and drew her close.

  “Yes, that is something. But it makes me think of all the vast
time when we will be alone separately.” Her tiny hand pressed against my ribs. “I wish we were back in Memphis, Tiglath—I do not desire to think of anything except the few hours we can be together.”

  “There is nothing in Memphis except Senefru.”

  I knew, even as I said it, that I had made a mistake. I could feel her grow rigid within the circle of my arm, as if she had suddenly felt a chill.

  “Yes—death is everywhere, not simply here. I have been talking like a simpleton. Forgive me.”

  We lay together that night. Her thighs opened to receive me and her mouth pressed against mine. The commerce of the flesh happened as it always did, but only the flesh found any happiness. She seemed to be there for me only as flesh, as if somehow I had lost her. We seemed divided from one another, as if I had been blinded and only she had eyes.

  “There is nothing in Memphis except Senefru.”

  There he was, sitting behind the long table in his study, reading over the papyrus scrolls that appeared to cover it. He was always there, and when he was not he was in Saïs or Tanis, about some secret business which he never mentioned. The years had make Senefru an important and powerful man.

  Nodjmanefer was his wife, and he called me his friend. When we returned he would rise from his chair and greet us, and we would all three dine together, and he would listen in an absent-minded way to whatever the news might be. He did not seem to care. He seemed to have dismissed us from existence—or perhaps merely to have forgotten that we were in the world.

  It is difficult with such a man to remember that you are wronging his bed. There were long periods when I did not remember it, when the unnatural character of our relationship did not appear to me. Yet I do not believe that Senefru ever lost sight of it. Nor did Nodjmanefer. It was this knowledge, perhaps as much as anything, which united husband and wife.